Can I be annoying about this bike I built for a second?

 I've been biking for a while now. I started up at some point in College when my chronic foot tendonitis developed into a dysfunction and ensured running would never be an option for me again. At that point I was a broke student who "borrowed" her dad's old road bike to stay in shape. But when COVID hit, it kind of turned into an obsession.

An old Peugot bike I restored and used as a commuter in college

  Over the years I've developed a solid base of mechanic skills, both out of necessity (bike shops charge insane prices for stuff you can do yourself in ten minutes) and out of curiosity. All through this time I've had the little thought in my head of building my own bike. Like a good bike. A carbon fiber bike. 

 So, around spring last year, I started looking for frames online and was instantly disappointed. The big name retailers nearly never sell the frameset (bike frame + fork) alone for the kind of bike I was looking to build. Typically the frames they provide are for extremely premium aero bikes or high performance racing builds. Neither of which I was trying to make. 

 Eventually I found the ICAN A9. 

 

 Pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Lightweight, carbon fiber, inexpensive, works with mechanical groupsets, but has plenty of room for upgrades down the line when I can afford them. On top of all that, it came in this gorgeous white, yellow, and blue paint scheme that I loved.

completed frameset, fresh coat of paint :)

 Frame in hand, I was ready to build! I sourced a groupset from my old bike, a complete Shimano 105 R7000, cranks and brakes included. I set up a workspace in an unused corner of my apartment building's basement and got to work tearing down my old bike for parts. 

my old bike, stripped bare

 

A box of parts to be reused

 With the easy part down, it was time to get everything onto the new frame. The big issue was that this new bike had cables that were completely internally routed, meaning the only time a cable ever saw the light of day was when it had to connect to a derailleur. That, unfortunately, also includes the handlebars. 

4-5 hours later, cables routed.

 If you've never worked on a bike, connecting the cables to the shifters is usually pretty easy. You pretty much just plug them in and then tape the cables to the handlebars to be wrapped with bar tape later. It's maybe a 20 minute job. This bike came with a special kind of handlebar that worked with the bike's internal cable routing to keep the cables inside the handlebars until they poke out at specific spots to be connected to the shifters. Routing the cables through this handlebar is a nightmare. It took me five hours over two days to get the cables routed properly. If I ever have to replace a cable in this I might just swap handlebars to a traditional stem/bar combo instead of the integrated one here. I will say it looks sick though, so maybe it was worth it. 

Honestly after that struggle, everything else came together pretty quickly. Bikes are actually not that complicated and not that difficult to work on so once the hard part of cable routing was done everything else kind of snapped together.

  

nasty ass basement

my assistant

 I got the bike to the point that all I needed to do was attach the chain and tune the derailleurs and my motivation dried up. At this point winter had started in earnest and I wouldn't be out riding on the roads with this bike anyways, so I wasn't in any rush to finish the thing. But as spring crept in and work got stressful, I finally had some time off to finish it up and take it for a ride. 

finished!

 This is the first bike I've ever built completely from scratch! It's also the first time I've owned a carbon fiber bike. I totally get why cyclists get weird about making everything carbon fiber now, the weight difference between this one and my aluminum bike is gigantic. It feels light and snappy to ride, and the material difference means the roads feel a little less rough. 

 I'm super proud that I finished the project too! I have way too many half finished projects laying around my house and sitting in Github repos so dragging this one across the finish line feels really good. There are already several upgrades that I'd like (electronic shifting, carbon wheels...) but those will have to wait a while since everything bike related is expensive at this point. 

 That's it! Thanks for reading, thanks for letting me be annoying for a little bit. I promise this isn't a bike blog, I just do a lot of biking and love talking about it! I have been listening to Gretel's new album Squish recently, I really like it. I think my Gretel album ratings are:

1. Slugeye
2. Squish
3. Head of the Love Club

 The Boston Marathon is on Monday, it's going to be a rainy weekend, and I have a little "staycation" to enjoy. Have a nice day!

 

 

Saw some gooses

 Or maybe it's geese, I don't know, don't make me look it up. They're all starting to show up again in Boston, leaving poop all over any pedestrian path even remotely close to a body of water. My heart goes out to anyone trying to have a picnic on the esplanade, it will be entirely goose poop by mid-April.

  Last night a friend and I watched Colleen Hoover's It Ends With Us (dir Justin Baldoni). It was unbelievably bad. I don't really have a lot to say about it other than it was bad and Blake Lively had some all time terrible outfits. I drank a lot of wine and felt very hungover in the morning so I'd say it was an ideal Saturday night. 

 Then this morning I had to drag whatever remained of my body and soul out onto my bike for a long ride. It was miserably cold and rainy the whole ride, with the rain occasionally intensifying from a heavy mist to a full downpour at random intervals. I literally cannot wait for the summer, or just a season that isn't rainy. I did to see those Canada Gooses though, that made it all worth it. Have a nice rest of the weekend :)

The Big 4

 I finished Agatha Christie's The Big 4. It was not good. I was devastated. Hercule Poirot stories are usually cozy little mysteries (can you describe murder as cozy?) in a remote village with a bunch of cooky characters, but this book was a globe trotting adventure where Poirot faced off against an organization of criminals around the world. The titular crime syndicate, The Big 4, features a person from America, China, France, and England. Yes nearly every section even remotely touching on China has aged poorly. 

 Agatha Christie's books usually have a large number of characters with complex motivations or ideas that make it difficult to track who's doing what or why. The resulting story then has a lot of fun texture, with all these clashing personalities and motivations building a nice mysterious atmosphere. In this book the large number of characters ends up feeling both confusing and limiting. Since the book is so short it can't dwell on a setting for a long period of time, meaning there aren't a lot of red-herring characters to create mystery around who might be a member of the Big 4. For instance there are only 2 named French characters in the entire book. It was not difficult to guess the French member of the Big 4. One of the members does not even appear in the book, they just get passing mentions about how evil they are.

 The structure of the book is also weirdly bad? It's divided into several chapters where there's a short mystery that on it's own seems like it has nothing to do with the ongoing Big 4 plot, but some mentions are sprinkled in to make it all fit somehow. It all made me wish I was reading a mystery with a more focused plot. I had no real Idea what the Big 4's plan even was beyond some nebulous idea of 'world domination'. At some point a mountain exploded, I do not know why.

 Can I say also that "The Big 4" is a stupid name for a crime syndicate? It makes me think of digestive supplements for some reason.

 If you want a non-Poirot mystery to read, the Seven Dials is great! It's in the public domain so an ebook is easy to find. I found out that it's actually a mini series on Netflix too! 

 Ok, another long day of turning this blog into a goodreads account. I hope you had a nice April Fools, I got stuck in the rain on my walk home from the train and my landlord gave us two days to decide if we wanted to renew our lease. I'm not sure if those count as April Fools pranks or not. 

 That's it for me, I've been loving the Tomodatchi Life demo, I can't wait for the full game! 

another beautiful day in the bike lanes

 The worst time to ride a bike is right after the rain stops. When it's raining you still get all the mud and crap flung up at you but the rain washes it right off. If it isn't raining? It all sticks to you like it did to me today. 

Luckily road crap has amazing exfoliating properties. My skin is about to look amazing 💁‍♀️. 

I've been trying to sketch a little bit more, I love a portrait so I focus on those a lot. I will eventually learn about the rest of the body, but that's really difficult, so later. The cheap blue bic pens are some of my favorite pens to just scribble something down with. They flow so well and have an amazing range of values for such a cheap roller ball pen. 

I've found I enjoy drawing faces with more unconventional features, wide noses, droopy chins, big eyes, etc. It can be boring to draw people who are perfectly proportioned all the time. 

It forces you to think a lot more about the placement of the facial features, especially if they're not in a location you're used to. 

 

 

 

 

shaved my legs im ready for anything

 I keep getting frozen up on making a new blog entry thinking about if something is "worth posting" as if this isn't literally my blog. I can post whatever I want and it would be worth it because I am the target audience.

how i feel after shaving my legs

 I finished this book Boy Parts by Eliza Clark on a friend's recommendation. I thought it was pretty good. I kept seeing comparisons between it and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation online but the two books have little in common. The main character of Boy Parts, Irina, is straight up a psychopath having a self-destructive episode driven by some kind of dissociative disorder and/or psychotic break with reality. 

 Where Rest and Relaxation felt like it had a lot to say about isolation, grief, depression, and offered an incredible portrait of that pre-9/11 consciousness, Boy Parts felt a little one note. It hinged a lot of it's shock value around the fact that a woman was exploiting men. There's a scene in a gallery where a male artist is upset that Irina has a larger display than his. The male artist has largely the same work thematically as Irina, but has opted for photos exploiting women, thus rendering his work more mundane in the public eye.

 In the end, Boy Parts felt like spectacle, where you gasp and point at what the insane woman is doing in the book. Which isn't necessarily bad, but going in expecting something akin to My Year of Rest and Relaxation did this book no favors. Irina does do some truly fucked up stuff, maybe I'm telling on myself, but none of it disturbed me the way I felt it was meant to. However at no point did I dislike reading the book, so I would settle on pretty good. Read it if you can find it at the library. 

 Beyond Boy Parts, I have been spinning up some spring cleaning. The weather is getting warmer and I feel weighed down by possessions. I'll spread it out between 4-5 weeks just because sorting through everything is exhausting, but donating/selling unused stuff is such a great feeling. I feel lighter, freer. 

 I started reading The Big Four by Agatha Christie on the train, and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger at home. I adore Agatha Christie novels but I haven't read Catcher in the Rye since middle school(?) so we will see how I enjoy that. I am listening to Squish by Gretel (her new album comes out next friday!!!!!). Here's a picture of my cat to close it out. 

 

 

The Lord of the Rings Extended Editions Marathon

 Recently, a local theater held a true marathon watch party for the Lord of the Rings. Three movies, 656 minutes of Middle Earth all in (mostly) one day. A friend and I bought tickets in January of this year. As the day crept closer I began to have some reservations about sitting down for 11 hours of my day, but I was mostly excited. I own the extended editions on dvd but I have never seen them in a theater before. The opportunity to not just see them in a real theater, but to see them with a crowd of enthusiastic fans seemed exciting!

 My day began at 5am when I rolled out of bed for a bike ride. Given how long we were planning to be sitting down I felt like getting a reasonable amount of exercise and stretching into my day would be important to not feeling like garbage when the marathon wrapped up at it's planned time of 12:30am the next day. It was a dismal March morning, cold and overcast. The thick cloud cover stretched the night long into the morning. The sun was only just peeking through the clouds when I returned home from my bike ride.

 I met my friend for a quick breakfast and we went over to the theater together before the scheduled start time. The day had gone from a dismal March morning to a dismal March afternoon. A cold rain that would last the day (and turn into snow the next morning) had just begun as we got to the theater. It could not have been more perfect of a day to be cooped up in a movie theater. 

 The preshow energy was fun! Gaggles of people in various states of costume lingered around the theater talking about plans for the breaks between movies, trivia, or their favorite scenes from the movies. I saw someone wearing an Aragorn varsity jacket that I adored. My friend and I found seats near the middle of the room and settled in for the first movie, fresh and eager to see the full extended editions on the silver screen. 

The Fellowship of the Ring

 Transparently this is my favorite of the three movies. I like that it has a much slower, more methodical focus on the characters and motivations that will come to define the next two movies. I also love Peter Jackson's use of the camera. He's never afraid to pick that thing up and spin it around. There's a specific shot near the end where the camera flies through the woods past legions of Orcs to see Sean Bean's manic fighting that blows my mind every time. 

 That isn't to say everything in this movie works for me, I feel like, especially in the extended version, the time the Fellowship spends with the Wood Elves slows the pace of the movie too much. I earnestly would have liked to trade a little time with them for more time in Bag End with Bilbo and Frodo before the quest begins in earnest. 

 In the real world, we came out of this one still feeling good. The theater offered a 30 minute reprieve between movies and we used that to go to a local Asian supermarket for snacks. I tried onigiri for the first time! It was delicious! Mine was kelp flavored. I especially liked that it was not a greasy snack, in these kinds of marathons it's always better to eat healthy. The rain was still coming down, albeit not heavily at that point. We found a bench in the theater lobby to eat our snacks and got back to our seats with 5 minutes to spare. 

The Two Towers

 To this day I earnestly do not know which towers the title refers to. I assume it's Mordor and Isengard, but Minas Tirith is also a tower, also Helm's Deep has a tower. I don't understand it. 

 I do understand that this movie kicks. I think it's a little more more plot focused than the previous one, which I'm not as big a fan of, but god how can you not love Helm's Deep?  It's one of, if not the most impressive battle scene put to film. The sheer number of extras and costumes needed to make this all go smoothly is staggering to think about, and that it's not just followable, but enjoyable to watch??? I mean holy shit. I think Theoden is kind of boring. He gives a bunch of cool speeches but that's it? He barely even fights in Helms Deep, instead he mostly watches his army of geriatrics and children get slaughtered by Orcs. Sick dude.

 I have to mention the Ents too, love those guys. They show up in this movie, chat for a bit, and then kick in Isengard. Cool as hell. 

 I was actually feeling tired at the end of this one. My legs felt pretty stiff, and my knees were a little sore. Old lady problems I guess. We had an hour this time to find dinner. Since like 150 other people were leaving at the same time as us, we ended up going to a Taco Bell cantina, where I learned that you can get alcohol at a Taco Bell! We had two Truly's and quesadillas and re-entered the theater for the final movie with a little bit of a buzz. It was 8pm at that point. 

 The Return of the King

 It's basically perfect but also my least favorite of the three. I think of the three movies, this does the best with the additions, to the point that I feel like you're actively missing out by not seeing the extended version. However a lot of the scenes in this are a little too early-cgi-goopy, and I really do not like how the ghost army looks. The green is very ugly. Also this is the one with the spider. I cannot do spiders they are like the one thing that paralyzes me with fear. 

 A scene that always gets me is Sam pleading with Frodo to reach up and grab his hand as Frodo hangs onto the edge of Mount Doom and you can just see it in his eyes that he wants so badly to let go, to let everything come to an end and Sam wont let him give up. It's so beautiful and to see it on the big screen was amazing.  

 This is also where I started feeling tired. My early morning was catching up with me. While I think that exercising did help to make me feel fresh for longer, the lack of sleep eventually took over, and when Sam was carrying Frodo to the mouth of Mount Doom I was simply exhausted. "You bow to no one" still got a tear out of me, that scene is so beautiful. 

 The various endings of the movie came and went. Suddenly, Frodo was on the ship to Valinor, and the credits were rolling and I was on my way home. The rain that had been a drizzle earlier had intensified to a downpour and the temperature had continued to decline to an uncomfortably biting thirty three. My friend and I said our goodbyes and I wandered to an overhang at the train station to await the next arrival. After a lonely and thankfully dry wait the next train arrived to deliver me to a lonely and unfortunately wet walk home where I walked in the front door at 1:10am Monday morning, there and back again. 

Baseless Dune Part 3 Speculation

 The Dune Part 3 trailer was released today!! Let's be normal about it, together. If you are reading this I'm going to assume you've read both Dune and Dune: Messiah as well as watched the previous two Denis Villeneuve movies. I'm spoiling everything.

The first thing that I immediately noticed was Chani! 

My first thought was that this is a continuation of the ending of Part 2, but Chani has a new scar on her face in this shot. Meaning Chani might have agency in the story!!! She might do something!! A lot of her role in the book is her trying to conceive and then giving birth and then dying. It would be strange for her to participate in the Jihad given her feelings in the second movie, but this seems to imply that she is still active in some way as a military leader or Fremen warrior.

Also interesting is Paul speaking with Lady Jessica in this scene from the trailer. 

Paul is wearing his Atreides dress outfit and his mother is.. present in the story? A change from Messiah, where Lady Jessica is all but entirely absent. Since lady Jessica is here, I would bet this is a new scene on Caladan, after it's reclaimed by the Jihad? Especially relevant as, in the book, it's mentioned that Lady Jessica spends nearly all of her time on Caladan, and the conversation in the trailer is focused on the former Duke Leto.

There are some scenes of a battle on a distant, rainy planet, with a shot of Stilgar killing an enemy combatant.

I think this is most likely in the beginning setup/visions. Where you learn of the destructive path of the Jihad, the billions killed, the planets cleansed. A nice mood setter before the real movie begins. BUT it could also be from my absolute favorite scene in the book, when Scytale meets Farok. 

Farok describes seeing a real Sea for the first time. 

"There was a sunset," Farok said presently. "One of the elder artists might have painted such a sunset. It had red in it the color of the glass in my bottle. There was gold... blue. It was on the world they call Enfeil, the one where I led my legion to victory. We came out of a mountain pass where the air was sick with water. I could scarcely breathe it. And there below me was the thing my friends had told me about: water as far as I could see and farther. We marched down to it. I waded out into it and drank. It was bitter and made me ill. But the wonder of it has never left me."

The entire scene is phenomenal and sets up a lot of the book's ideas around natural and unnatural sight, but that passage always stuck with me as having an ethereal beauty to it. 

Messiah is my favorite book in the series. I believe that if you liked Dune you are doing yourself a disservice by not reading Messiah. Thus far I have loved how Villeneuve's changes to the books have allowed the movies to establish a distinct identity while maintaining the themes of the original books. I literally can't wait for December 18th. If you know me in real life I'm super sorry in advance for how annoying I'm going to be. 

Short planner tour

 Since graduating college I've been using a planner to organize my life. Days, weeks, months, years, etc. Everything from Vet trips to Vacations. Usually I get a planner from the CVS aisle with notebooks and index cards. They're never any good. The layout is always too "day focused", with the entire 2 page spread divided up for the 7 days in a week. No room for notes, todo lists, doodles. Black covers, no fun. This year I decided to do something different and got a Hobonichi Techno weekly horizontal planner. I have been using it since December last year and it is my beloved child. 

This year's planner!

Small enough to fit in any of my purses but with plenty of room to write any upcoming activity, it's amazing. The layout of the week on the left and notes on the right is perfect. I have so much space to add a weekly todo list, addresses, bus routes, chores, doodles, whatever, without feeling like I'm running out of space to add activities or appointments to a certain day. (respectfully to you I don't feel comfortable sharing an entire week, but I will share snippets!)

Blank layout its perfect :)

There are quotes at the bottom of each week from authors, inventors, even Shigeru Miyamoto!

As a result, the planner has a very playful, cheery vibe that encourages you to do whatever you want with it. Here I got really excited for Valentines Day :) 

And here are some absent minded doodles I made on the train. Please ignore the chores table I'm usually better I promise...

Each week takes on it's own character with the length of my todo list, little reminders I leave (below!) about upcoming events, one-off lists of things I need at a store, a specific bus route I need to remember, doodles of cats or trees or whatever I see while I'm bored on the train. It all comes together to make every week feel distinct and memorable.

big week for birthdays

This is the first time I've bought a planner not from CVS. I don't think I'm ever going back. I have too much fun just planning my week! Unless I find something truly radical in the future, I'm 100% going to stick with this style of planner for the rest of my life.

 

Happy St Paddy's Day :)

 Did you know St. Paddy's day was first created by those guys with the bar in Philadelphia? A little history for you today. I have never seen a person pass out from being drunk at 8:45am but today I did. I also saw a man try to fight a metal fence at 9:30am. That was a first as well. 

 

 It was a little chilly so in the afternoon I went for a nice bike ride up to a lake north of Boston. They were very much not thawed and were swarmed with birdwatchers. Two women jumped off the dock and did a mini polar plunge. It did not look like they enjoyed it as much as they maybe thought they would.

 

 

 My favorite part of these lakes is a huge map of the surrounding area painted on the ground. It has a lot of hand painted images of local birds that I love very much. 

 

what appears to be a grey heron?

 

 My core temperature dropped a lot while I was riding so I am now warming up, huddled in a blanket with my cat snoozing next to me. St. Patty's day is fun but I don't drink much any more so I don't feel like there's a lot there for me. The real St. Patty's is this Tuesday and I think my plans involve going to bed before 10pm. 

 

That's it for me, I hope you have a nice day!

In Cold Blood and changing perspectives on art

I read Tuman Capote's In Cold Blood for AP English in High School. The only thing I can remember from reading it at that time is the description of the killers, Dick and Perry, violently murdering the Clutter family. A depiction of graphic, unimaginable, violence that makes up very little of the book all things considered. For years it was simply the book "with those murders". I remember being bored for a lot of it, finding the pages upon pages of letters, descriptions, stories, and scene setting to be "quite dull". I finished reading the book because it was an assignment in class, but at the time I think I would have put it down maybe half way though if it wasn't compulsory.

One of my favorite things in life is returning to art and media that I bounced off when I was younger. It's tough to understand how your life experiences compound to make you a different person, but I've found that revisiting books and movies that I didn't like in the past is a great way to see how my perspective has changed over time. So, roughly ten years later, I've come back to In Cold Blood. 

Instead of it being "the murder book", I've found a compassionate story that has endless time for the actual people directly and indirectly affected by the vicious murders. Letters from one of the killer's family members are published in their entirety, people with no direct connection to the murder, or indeed, no real stake in the story are given a page or more of backstory, the two killers are painted on the page with such empathy and depth that in certain sections of the book they come across as down-on-their-luck drifters and not violent criminals. It's a book that understands how complicated humans and the systems we live in are without losing sight of the shocking brutality of the actual crime. To cut this down to "True Crime" feels like an injustice.

Finding all this from a book I reluctantly finished reading for a High School class is why I love revisiting art! There's a wonderful sense of growth and discovery that makes me feel almost vindicated in my life. I frequently wonder about the experiences I've had, whether they've been "enough", whether I've actually changed, whether I can change at all. But coming back to art like in this case with In Cold Blood and finding so much more than I initially did, finding new ways to appreciate not just the writing, but the people in the story, well it makes everything feel worth it again. 

Short films on youtube I think you should watch

 I love a short film. They're usually free and frequently have weird, experimental aspects to them that wouldn't work in a feature length movie. For my purposes, a "short" film is anything under an hour, but none of the ones I'm recommending here are longer than 35 minutes. In fact most are less than 10 minutes. 

 I don't want to overwhelm you or make a massive list so I've put together five short films of varying backgrounds, styles, and lengths that I think you would like! I noted why I liked a film and the runtime, as well as provided a Youtube link you you can enjoy each short yourself. Enjoy!

The Old Man and the Sea (Aleksandr Petrov, 1999)

Runtime: 19m 55s Youtube Link

Probably the most beautiful animation I've ever seen. It reminds me a lot of impressionist art and it gives the short a very dreamy feel. It's an adaptation of Earnest Hemmingway's novel, which I have not read, so I can't comment on the accuracy. It's a gorgeous film though. Watch it for that.

 

 

Winnie the Pooh (Fyodo Khitruk, 1969)

Runtime: 39m 21s Youtube Link

Holy shit this is adorable, if you watch any of the shorts on here watch this!! It's a Soviet adaptation of Winnie the Pooh. The backgrounds are drawn with crayon or colored pencil and everything has this wonderful warm texture to it. The humor kind of lands for me too? You will need to turn on auto translate in order to get English subtitles but I'm telling you it's worth it, just look at him.

 

A Bird Hit My Window and Now I'm a Lesbian (AJ Dubler and Carmela Murphy, 2025)

Runtime: 7m 54s Youtube Link

I love claymation and this is lesbian claymation. It's a lovely little story about self discovery and saying goodbye. It also features the most heartfelt eulogy for a dead bird since The Office. This is a little heavier than the other shorts I'm recommending so maybe save it for a rainy day?

 

 

Wow! A Talking Fish! (Robert Sahakyants, 1983) 

Runtime: 7m 30s Youtube Link 

Lovely old Soviet animation about how kindness will always be repaid to you. It features a monster named 'Ekh' with some of the most insane animation I've ever seen. I kind of don't want to spoil anything because it's best experienced blind. The version I've linked has English subtitles embedded so you won't have to fuss with autotranslate. Enjoy :)

 

 

'The Real You' (Ameya, 2026)

Runtime: 2m 31s Youtube Link 

Super cute short about a cat going on a little journey of self discovery. I adore the hand drawn animation and paper backgrounds so much. This is what I like to imagine my cat is going through when she sees herself in my mirror. 

 

That's it for now! I might make another list of these shorts sometime in the future, I'm constantly finding new ones on Youtube or Vimeo that I love. I hope you enjoyed these as much as I do, have a nice day!

 

Peaceful Day

 Today is beautiful! The past 2 days have been sunny and in the 50s and 60s. I have been lucky to get the past 2 days off of work, the result of a cancelled trip to New York City, so I have been able to enjoy these days to the fullest. 

 A friend and I went to a retro video games store and I found Brain Age 2 on the DS for $3! Can you believe that? What a steal. Unfortunately my brain seems to be a little slow.

I am quite stupid

 That's ok! In retaliation I found a peer reviewed article claiming that these kinds of brain games actually have no greater effect on your brain than doing a crossword in the morning.

 At the same shop I also saw this Pikachu Pokemon card where he's surfing on this adorable surfboard.

 I think the price is a little outlandish but it is a really cute card so maybe it's me who's out of touch.

 I also went for a few bike rides outside! It's beautiful. The first few rides after being cooped up indoors all winter are actual magic. I felt like I could breathe again. The roads are still messy and there are still a lot of spots where melting snow keeps the road perpetually wet and gross but it doesn't matter because it's sunny and warm and I can comfortably be outside again. 

 Finally, after months of nothing, I found the last fossil I needed for Blathers. 

happiest_moment_of_my_life.jpg

 Thank you Blathers.

 I hope you are having a nice day, I will leave you with a photo of my cat helping me with the Bell Tree post from a few days ago.

 

Joshua and the Promised Land (2004)

 I'm not going to sugarcoat this, Joshua and the Promised Land is extremely bad. It's ugly, it's grating, and the narrative framing makes little sense. And yet, for the duration of it's 54 minute run time,  I could not look away. If you have time to kill you can watch it for free on Youtube here. I'm warning you now, the ad breaks will feel like reprieves.

Moses speaking to god

 Written, directed, and animated by Jim Lion, Joshua and the Promised Land was released to the world in 2003 according to IMDB and 2004 according to Letterboxd. For context, the Incredibles came out in 2004. 

The Incredibles (2004)

 Also for context, Joshua and the Promised Land was mostly animated by Jim Lion alone over a 4 year span (source). 3D modeling was not nearly as accessible as it is today, nor were computers powerful enough to render complex 3D scenes. With that in mind, Joshua and the Promised Land becomes even more amazing and rare, a messy solo passion project!

Joshua witnessing Egyptians drowning

And what  a mess. I adore when artists take huge swings like this and fall so so short of the grand vision they clearly had in their heads, lacking in the technical skills or raw creativity needed communicate with their target audience. 

It's that lack of technical ability that makes these cases so compelling to me, as someone who also lacks technical ability. You don't labor for 4 years on a passion project about a story in the Bible that Veggie Tales covered in 1997 (in better detail), you do it because you're passionate. You do it because you believe, in yourself, in your vision, in your abilities. Millions of people have grand visions for movies, books, paintings, etc, but so few of those people even attempt to convey those visions, and even fewer complete them. Its a spectacle in and of itself that this was released to the world.

On a level other than the artistic failings, I'm fascinated by this as it's a telling of the myth that the Zionist project uses to lay claim to the West Bank. In the movie Joshua walks the streets of Jericho and leaves ready to condemn every man, woman, and child within the walls to death. The movie is literally unable to render violence in a shocking way, but it depicted this decision to kill so many people in such a matter-of-fact manner as to be shocking.

The citizens of Jericho are depicted as devilish red bulls

Given the generations of violence and ongoing genocide that have spawned from this claim to the land in Palestine and the Zionist project, the crude animation and childish framing of the story carries a tone of almost mockery, as if it was aware of how insane it is that this is the story used to lay claim to land and slaughter its native inhabitants en masse.

But I think I'm over intellectualizing this movie. At the end of the day it's a painfully bad animated movie on youtube that most people will never see. If you have an edible and an hour to kill I say go for it, it's more entertaining than another hour long video essay. I give it one star, but like it's a very glittery star.

War as Content

 As of today, talk of War in Iran domestically is limited to Midterm voting implications and "Americans are tired of middle east wars" as if "Middle East wars" are an overused trope in a tv show that long since jumped the shark. The horror of "War" is an alien concept to us. War is something on the Screen, akin to a True Crime podcast.

 War-As-Television came into being with around the clock coverage of the Persian Gulf war. At any time you could turn on the television and watch the night sky over a country you likely could not point at on a map light up with missiles. Dead bodies and flattened city blocks were images you could conjure on command. As Jean Baudrillard puts it in his essay The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (link): 

"War stripped of its passions, its phantasms, its finery, its veils, its violence, its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics, as though with a second skin. But these too are a kind of decoy that technology sets up before itself. Saddam Hussein's decoys still aim to deceive the enemy, whereas the American technological decoy only aims to deceive itself."

Spectacle then. War as a TV show. the Siege of Fallujah as an end-of-season climax (later rendered into a literal game to enjoy on your computer). Baudrillard talks of War as a decoy constructed to deceive ourselves that we were waging a War and not committing an atrocity. It's a facade that was never discarded. 

Today official Government sources still seek to deceive. But no longer is War a TV show, it's a TikTok, a Tweet, an Instagram Reel. Content for followers. A now famous quote from an Iranian Cleric, Shahab Moradi, made in the wake of the USA's assassination of Qassem Soleimani in 2020 bluntly understands our cultural absorbtion into the Screen (link to article): 

"Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn't have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters — they're all fictional." 

And now, as the United States enters a new conflict against Iran, a conflict with no goal beyond general destruction, the White House gleefully posts combat footage cut to SpongeBob memes.

 

 

 

Sleeping With Other People (2015)

I'm still watching Rom Coms! This time, on a co-worker's recommendation, I watched Sleeping With Other People, a 2015 movie starring Alison Brie and Jason Sudeikis. It's on Netflix right now, go watch this and come back ok? Thanks <3

 

I thought the movie was very cute overall. It's shockingly close to being a more modern adaptation of When Harry Met Sally, from the "men an women can't be friends" comments, to the ex that ruins one of the lead's days just to see. When Harry Met Sally definitely didn't invent either of those things but it did them so well that any follow up act is forced into comparison in my eyes. 

What makes it stand out is that the leads are both serial cheaters. Both are coming off relationships that ended because of their own infidelity and both struggle to start new relationships during the course of the film. I felt that the premise wasn't used to great extent and the fact that both are horrible at committing and have a rich history of cheating isn't much of a focus. Only Alison Brie's character, "Lainey" has any relationship troubles to overcome, having trouble ending an affair with a Gynecologist (played by a mustachioed Adam Scott!). Nothing is as airtight as When Harry Met Sally, I think I need to accept this. 

To fill the gap of the often loose plotting are a series of extremely cute scenes across Manhattan and Long Island. Sudeikis and Brie had a fun, bouncy chemistry that made every scene they shared feel impactful. In one scene both leads drop molly and attend an 8 year olds birthday party. In another Jason Sudeikis explains, in excruciating detail, how to finger a pussy (demonstrating on an empty juice jar). There's like, a lot more sex in this than any Rom Com I've seen in a while, which I found to be refreshing from the doll house quality that a lot of modern romances have.

Delightfully, this is also a movie that was slightly too early for the bland green screen sets shot with a shallow depth of field! This has scenes on actual New York streets! In actual Central Park! That's the actual New York skyline in the background! It gives the movie a LOT more character and as a result is much more memorable to me 3 days after I watched it, unlike People we meet on Vacation. 

 This movie also had what I guess is my second favorite use of David Bowie's Modern Love, second to my favorite movie ever, Frances Ha, and second because I only know 2 movies that use the song. 

I liked it a lot, I think I almost talked myself into loving it while writing this. I give it four stars, and it goes in my dvd wishlist. 

Addendum and Dunkin Donuts and Life

 I need to add a few things to yesterday's post that are obviously missing. It's been bothering me all day please just bear with me.

First, I never even calculated the expected value of the random binomial method. That can be defined as: 

    np = 100 * (0.3) = 30 * 60k Bell Profit = 1,800,000 Bells

 Just from that, its clear this method isn't expected to profit as much as our linear method.  

 Second, one simulation?? I have let you, the reader, down. Let's see 1,000 simulations. 

 

  

 Mmmm a nice sweet normal(ish) curve. The mean of our simulations was a little greater than the expected value, coming in at 1,811,8200 Bells. Still worse than burying 10k Bells, the conclusion stands!

 

Ok thank you for bearing with me, it was really bothering me that I left those out. 

 

I got dunkin donuts again this morning. I really think it's the best commuter coffee you can get. It's just the perfect level of tolerable to wake me up on the train and not good enough to make me feel like I'm wasting a good cup of coffee on a boring work commute.  

  

I've been listening to To Love Somebody by Holly Humberstone on repeat. I can't wait for her new album, I'm sure I'll be normal about it. 

Optimizing New Horizons Money Trees

The money trees in Animal Crossing New Horizons are a great way to continuously gain bells with pretty much no effort. Just bury 10K Bells in the glowing spot each day and reap 30k Bells from the spot when the tree fully grows in 3 days. 

But according to the Animal Crossing Wiki, there's actually a 30% chance that, upon burying more than 10K Bells, your money will be tripled when the tree eventually grows. 

Nookpedia.com chart of money tree return rates in acnh

 So would the optimal method for planting money trees actually be to plant 30k each day? You wouldn't make a profit every time a tree grows, but when you do make a profit it would be 40k Bells greater. I wanted to quickly explore this thought. 

The Methods

Let's quickly define our 2 methods of Bell yield mathematically. 

 

Guaranteed (Linear) Yield Method

 This is a linear function where, each day a tree grows, the player is able to gain 20k Bells. 

   y = 20x 

(we can multiply the result by 1000, I do not want to keep typing out that many zeros.)

 

Random (30k) method

This is a cumulative binomial function!  The player plants 30k Bells each day and has a 30% chance to profit 60K Bells or a 70% chance to make nothing (never losing any Bells). 

 

To clarify, 30k bells is the minimum number of bells that can be returned if a player plants 10k or more bells (see chart above). If a player buried more than 30k bells each day they would incur losses each day they did not succeed in getting the 3x return on buried bells.

 

For this experiment let's initially look at a window of 100 days. We can define our function then as

    X ~ Bin(100, 0.3)
 

Outcomes!  

I threw a simple simulation together in R and plotted the cumulative profits of both methods over the 100 days in our experiment. 

 

...and yeah it doesn't look great for the random method. 

bell yield over 100 simulated days

After simulating 100 days of both discussed methods, the first linear method ends squarely at 2,000,000 bells. The Random Method reaches 100 days with 1,560,000 bells. 440,000 Bells short! 

 

With this simulation it's pretty easy to recommend burying 10k Bells each day and not worrying about anything else. 

 

Finally I will leave you with a simulation of 15k, 20k, and 25k bells compared to the linear method just to see how much worse they are than even the 30k method.

 

all much worse! yikes!

 

I Like Recipe Stories

 I like it when I find a recipe online and there's a story at the beginning of it. There I said it. Cooking is a social task! Learning about the recipes that bring people comfort in bad times or remind someone of an exciting moment in their life feels really special, even intimate. For that reason I find it really beautiful when I find a recipe online with a cute story at the start. 

It's one of the reasons I love getting the Cook's Illustrated magazine. There's always a spread with a nice recipe and the author's experiences with the recipe! Here's a page from the most recent issue with a crab rangoon recipe. 

Along with a straightforward recipe, there's a whole article on the history of the dish and the author's personal connection with it. I love it! Cooking is a social activity and it feels so cold and wrong to simply pull a recipe online. It's lovely to hear why the author liked it, or their experiences in cooking it.

That isn't to say its always good. Many times the sections preceding a recipe are SEO slop, with headers like "easy [recipe name]" immediately followed by a header like "[recipe name] for dinner" with essentially the same information under it. I'm not a fan of those, it makes the recipe feel robotic and alien. It's the same with AI generated recipes, but respectfully if you are asking a chatbot for a recipe it may be too late for you.

Completely aside I was looking at my camera roll for photos of food and I realized I have a truly insane number of photos of dunkin cups.

  

dunking donuts 

It's snowing a little today, I watched the Smosh reddit stories and traveled far away to get my cat a very specific flavor of food because she will not eat anything else. I love her. Thank you for reading, I think this is a week of blog posts. Wherever you are reading from I hope you are having a lovely day!