Whatever thing you’re into right now. Music, games, movies, a new hobby, space, life, bees, yoyo’s. We’re all here to learn about something new and interesting. I’ll grab fun ones from here to send out in the weekly newsletter every Friday.
Dove Ellis - Blizzard
Music genres come in and out of style in pretty regular 15-20 year cycles. It’s 2026, and right on time we’re getting Dove Ellis, an Irish singer/songwriter reviving the indie/chamber/folk sounds of 2010ish. His gorgeous debut LP Blizzard borrows sonically from Beirut, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, Glen Hansard, Destroyer etc etc, but it’s bursting with so many original ideas that his exploration of the genre feels less like poking around a dusty old attic and more like discovering new rooms in a house you’d moved away from. If you want to dip your toe in without committing to the whole album, check out “Pale Song”.
This analog MIDI of Get Lucky by Daft Punk just popped up and it’s great.
I had this fixation in one of the previous newsletters and I wanted to share the update about me finally getting the Manga I’ve been searching for. It was so hard to get some of these and I had to grab a used copy of “Furari” from a University Bookstore in Indiana. I am very excited to go meander with Jiro.
I got really hungry reading the first chapter of “The Solitary Gourmet”.
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I’m worried that my current fixation is too out-of-date, but if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that fans of A Song of Ice and Fire love nothing more than shitting on the last seasons of GOT, and I’m sure there are at least a couple of you reading this, so I’m gonna let it rip. My current fixation is that I’m doing a rewatch of GOT while reading the books for the first time. And boy oh boy do I understand the hatred now. When the show first aired, I hadn’t read the books, and while I did feel the dropoff in quality in the post-book seasons, I was still entertained. Sure, the end of season 7 was egregiously bad, but seasons 5 and 6 were a lot of fun, and even more cinematic than the previous ones, so I wasn’t arming myself with torch and pitchfork and googling DB Weiss’ address. But now that I’m reading the books, I can see exactly how the show has taken the novels’ 4D chessplay of storytelling and compressed it into a two-dimensional game of tic tac toe, and wow is it disappointing. It’s been so dumbed down that, at times, it feels like books four and five didn’t even get adapted. So, yes, I’m a decade late, but I’m here now with my torch and pitchfork. Someone give me the address.
Tom was visiting last weekend for HiFiCon and while dropping him off at the airport I realized that it was a gorgeous day out. With such beautiful days in San Francisco and no cafe with a great view, I have been running mobile offices in the car at Land’s End with hotspot. I am here again today helping with the newsletter and watching a bunch or surfers.
Found a Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas. If your high watermark for bad B-movies is still stuck in the 00s with The Room or Birdemic, let me put you onto the new reigning champ of hilariously awful cinema. FAHBHFC is a “shortform” or “vertical” movie made exclusively for social media apps like Reels and TikTok.
As a “TikTok” movie, it carries a number of characteristics that are completely bizarre.
- It’s shot in a vertical aspect.
- It’s cut up into about 70 Tiktok-length “scenes”.
- Due to the fact that there’s no way to control how any one of these scenes will perform on TikTok, each scene has to both advance the plot of the movie and advertise the central conceit of the movie, in hopes of getting people curious enough to go back and watch the film from the beginning. This explains why every single scene reiterates that the husband is a billionaire and is homeless and that it is Christmas.
When you do go back and watch the whole thing (as I did), you’re constantly feeling the bizarre tug of war between the plot advancing TikTok by TikTok, while also having the concept of the movie explained to you roughly 70 times.
It made my head spin. It’s the best thing I’ve seen in awhile.
The gist of the movie is that Victoria, scorned by her fiancé, impulsively marries Simon, a mysterious homeless man who is actually a billionaire in disguise.
Pulling on any of these strings reveals some of the most insane leaps in logic, plot holes, and bad writing I’ve ever seen.
Why did the billionaire pretend to be homeless? He was “undercover” to investigate his uncle’s crimes. The uncle never makes an appearance, his crimes are never revealed to us, and how panhandling outside a coffee shop is “investigating crimes” is never explained.
Doesn’t matter. The movie isn’t concerned with making sense. It’s only concerned with supplying enough drama and plot twists within each of its bite-sized scenes to keep your eyes glued to the screen.
My eyes were glued.
It’s a jaw-dropping mess of wooden acting, how-did-this-get-made production, and deeply stupid writing.
For the love of God, watch it. The whole thing is available in one go on Youtube: 
Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas | Christmas Series [2025 New version]
Oh man, I’m kinda bad at this type of stuff but here is my shot lol
There’s a pair of bonded red shouldered hawks that’s been considering settling down in the giant oak tree behind my home. I imagine all the research they’ve done on the walkability of the neighborhood and all the food places that are within a stone’s throw. The tree is tall and should afford them a good view of the surroundings. There is a creek nearby, though in California it’s more dry than not. I do hope they put in their offer for this spot! It’s always a great morning when I hear them chirp (is that the right word?) at each other on one of the tree branches. Or when one calls out to the other circling in the air. Of course this is all conjuncture from my end, I have no idea if they are actually a bonded pair considering setting down - maybe they are just bros hanging out every morning. One last thought, I’m not entirely sure the squirrels in the neighborhood are happy about these two neighbors
Photo of the hawk in question, can’t get good ones when they are super high up in the tree but I did get one when one came down onto a power pole for a bit. The high-voltage sign I thought was cool
Squirrel from my neighborhood
Let’s talk about butts. Specifically, bidets. More specifically, the travel bidet by Tushy. This is not an ad. I’m just a guy who likes his butt clean. Like many, I hopped on the bidet bandwagon during one of those now-embarrassing toilet paper scarcity scares during Covid. Ever since, I’ve been living life cleaner and more chafelessly than I could imagine. The only downside of bidet life to speak of is traveling in the wider world outside my bathroom. A barbaric world where humans mutilate themselves with tree fibers. A week of travel feels like stepping back in time. Using the bathroom in a gas station with single ply? I might as well be a caveman wiping myself with thorns. If this feels like an overreaction, that’s probably because you haven’t transitioned to bidet life yet. You simply haven’t experienced this better way. Because everyone who has transitioned knows exactly what I mean. In hopes of expanding my home bathroom experience, right before traveling to CanJam, I bought the travel bidet by Tushy. It’s a collapsible rubber bottle with an angled spigot that delivers the bidet experience on the go. It’s an A+ product, and it means I’ll never have to use cheek rags again. It’s discreet—it looks like a little water bottle—but screw that. I’m not a coward. I’m a bidet evangelist. I use the included carabiner to attach it to the outside of my backpack so bidet nation can spot me. Rise up, clean butts! Let’s show this dirty world what they’re missing. (Okay, maybe don’t SHOW them….)
I wrote this on the toilet
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I read this on the toilet
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My only addition to bidets is this - if you got poop anywhere else on your body, would you be ok with wiping it off with a piece of paper only and continuing with your day?
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I think I’m the only baseball guy here, but the world baseball classic has been a banger. “Pure cinema” as the folks say.
I need to check that out. Good recommendation.
Final was last night. Venezuela vs USA
A lot of great games though.
This is an update of a previous fixation in which I was rewatching GOT in light of reading the books for the first time. I’ve reached the final season*,* and my emotional state is fragile. I swing between giddy hate and actual disdain. I love a hate watch–and a cringe watch–and this is really scratching that itch. Every scene is dumber than the last, and the showrunners’ attempts to shoehorn comedic moments has resulted in me experiencing such violent full-body cringes that I fear I’ll be sore for weeks.
Unfortunately, I care so much about the books (and those characters) that I can’t just sit back and naively enjoy this show anymore. I mean, What is the showrunners’ problem? How did they fumble such rich source material so badly? It really does seem that their goal was to anger fans of the books as much as they possibly could.
Mission accomplished, boys.
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Lately, I’ve been a bit fixated on starting a small pond in my garden. It all began with an old galvanized stock tank I originally bought as a cold plunge, but I wasn’t using it much. Rather than let it sit, I decided to repurpose it.
After watching a few DIY videos and reading up on small pond care, I collected some native plants—two buckeye trees and a few ferns, all in plastic containers—to get things started. I also visited a local aquatic plant nursery, where I picked up some oxygenating plants and water-growing reeds.
Once the plants had time to settle in, I added 10 mosquito fish to help control larvae and other bugs. My most recent addition has been a DIY bog filter to keep the water clean. It uses a small pump to move water from the pond into a container filled with layers of rock and sand, topped with plants. As the water rises through the layers, it gets filtered before flowing back into the pond.
So far, it’s working really well—the water is crystal clear. Next up, I’m planning to add floating plants like water lettuce and lilies to create more shade and help trap sediment.
It’s also been fun watching the ecosystem come to life—frogs and all kinds of bugs have already started showing up as the pond gets established.
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Guy uploaded a great summary about the tournament and some of the drama
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I’m pretty obsessed with Slay the Spire 2 and Pokopia right now. Very different games, but one makes me rage at the universe and the other brings me back down. It’s all about the balance in life.