I got older. The pop-punk universe blessed me. This week’s supporter Q&A post can be found here.
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Read More “Liner Notes (March 23rd, 2025)”This week’s wall picks is me begging for the sun to come out. Please. Let me blast that Relient K album to a sunny with a high of 75 this week.
Hannah made me whoopie pies for my birthday. I’ll be over here in a sugar coma if anyone needs me.
This morning, I tried listening to the re-record of one of Anberlin’s classic albums, Never Take Friendship Personal, and I do not have positive thoughts:
This sounds like the YouTube covers of songs that I find pretty obnoxious. Like the cover of this album should just be a dude with a beard making a weird face with a yellow font saying “what if Matty Mullins sang for Anberlin?!!”
All the life has been stripped out of these and replaced with vocals that have had every inch of personality mechanically pulled from them. Anberlin’s a top 20 most played band for me and I’m glad they can continue making money I guess, but I really kinda just hate everything about this one? Like … stand on your new music? Between this and the deleting or replying to fans with rude comments on Instagram has really soured me on this era of the band.
However, this whole re-record thing did lead to something positive. I’ve been complaining for years about the online master of the original album on all streaming services. It’s extremely low volume and washed out. Today I saw a comment that the weird three-album-compilation thing Tooth and Nail put on streaming services actually has the better, proper, master. I went to Apple Music to check it out, and holy hell, they’re right! And because Apple Music still lets you change metadata on the Mac app (please never take this away Apple), this means it was very easy to swap this version out in my library. Finally.
Highly recommend. This is the definitive version of this album to me.
I realized that I hadn’t updated my “recommended blogs” page in a while and as I (try to) move away from social media that means I’ve been adding even more to my RSS reader on a regular basis. Since these days more and more people are writing newsletters instead of blogs (bring back the blogs!), Jason Snell has a good reminder on the various ways you can pipe these newsletters directly into your RSS reader. I use NewsBlur as the backend for RSS (which also has an email address you can signup for newsletters with) and then for most of these I need to use ReadKit’s “reader” mode and the result is a newsletter perfectly rendered in the app.
Note: No need to be fancy, you can subscribe to my newsletter directly with RSS. (And this blog too.)
I found this article by Sally Rooney at the New York Review (archive) fascinating:
The last remaining red ball is stranded up by the cushion on the right-hand side, and the cue ball rolls to a halt just left of the middle right-hand pocket. The angle is tight, awkward, both white and red lined up inches away from the cushion. O’Sullivan surveys the position, nonchalantly switches hands, and pots the red ball left-handed. The cue ball hits the top cushion, rolls back down over the table, and comes to a stop, as if on command, to line up the next shot on the black. O’Sullivan could scarcely have chosen a better spot if he had picked the cue ball up in his hand and put it there. The crowd erupts: elation mingled with disbelief. At the end of the frame, when only the black remains on the table, he switches hands again, seemingly just for fun, and makes the final shot with his left. The black drops down into the pocket, completing what is known in snooker as a maximum break: the feat of potting every ball on the table in perfect order to attain the highest possible total of 147 points.
Watch a little of this sort of thing and it’s hugely entertaining. Watch a lot and you might start to ask yourself strange questions. For instance: In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O’Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time. O’Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years.
What then? If he’s not calculating, and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie O’Sullivan doing? Why does the question seem so strange? And why doesn’t anybody know the answer?
And, after reading the article, watch the match described. I’ve been playing pool since I was a teenager; I’m decent at best. This makes me never want to pick up a pool cue again.
This one fires me up. Listen: https://chorus.fm/share/son...
Obsessed with that Always Sunny-182 shirt. And I’ve been eyeing adding a Yellowcard hoodie to the collection for a while. Hannah crushed it as always.
You gotta stick together
MxPx - "Doing Time"
With who you are and who you know
You gotta remember
Where you've been and where you wanna go
Listen: https://chorus.fm/share/son...
David Smith, writing about Apple/iOS development, with a line that really resonated with me:
Something I’ve learned as I’ve aged is that pessimism feels better in the moment, but then slowly rots you over time. Whereas optimism feels foolish in the moment, but sustains you over time.
I’m sitting here on the edge of 42.
And, you know what’s really fucking with me?
It’s that I’m about to be two people that can drink. I’m about to be two twenty-one-year-olds. That feels, and oh, some days I can feel it, like two lifetimes. I look back at that first twenty-one-year-old and barely recognize him. I see the outline of me. But it’s a faint dotted outline I can only make out if I squint. I was rash, cocky, impetuous, often cruel to others, and, I can now admit, cruel to myself. I had a chip on my shoulder, and I felt I needed to prove everyone who doubted me wrong. I craved external validation. I craved attention. I craved love but didn’t know how to ask for it. Didn’t know how to give it. And for all my teenage talk of wanting to live without regrets, I have a lot.
As I look at the second twenty-one year old I see progress. I see where I’ve learned to slow down — where I’ve tried to live with more intention and thoughtfulness and have tried to learn from my past mistakes. In a weird way, I think about how I’m best known for what I did before I turned thirty, and yet I don’t feel like I became me until the last ten years. And I hope I’m still changing. Still growing. Still putting in the work to try and be someone that I, fate willing, can look back on in another twenty-one years with admiration. If I do this journey again, I’ll be 63. I’ll be, maybe, close to retirement. Looking at time in chunks like this is freaking me out a little.
I reminisce on everything I went through to get to that first twenty-first birthday. All of school. Heartbreak. Bad decisions. A few good decisions. And this second fragment feels like a blur. More heartbreak. More bad decisions. More good decisions. Weddings. Funerals. Life.
But through it all, I do think I discovered myself. Or, maybe better put, I found who I am today, and I know how to be happy with that person. And each day, I wake up, and I accept the change, seek the growth, and … try to move forward with a little more grace than the day before.
Becoming two twenty-one-year-olds means I know now that I don’t have it all figured out. Hell, I don’t think I ever will. But I’m okay with that. I’ve made peace with the fact that life is a constant draft—an endless rewrite where I’ll never get every sentence perfect, but I can at least try to make the next one a little better than the last.
And maybe that’s the best we can do.
Maybe that’s the secret to all of it.
Not to chase some perfect version of ourselves, but to keep evolving, to keep showing up, and to keep writing the story as best we can.
While going through the process of moving away from social media and using my blog more, I realized there was a lot of me on Instagram that I wanted to make sure I archived. Specifically I’ve been really enjoying my “monthly memory” posts each month as sort of a visual “diary” of my month. And there are hundreds of posts about my vinyl collection and memories of my almost 13-year long relationship with Hannah. I didn’t want to just abandon those. So I’ve brought them over to my blog.
I used Instagram’s export feature to get the files. Then wrote a script to convert their weird export to something I could easily import, and back date, all of the posts. I had to first put everything in the same year/month/date folder structure I use for my photo blog and then convert the post to the right format so it would display here just like all the others. Even after extensive testing there was a bit of nerves running it on the live site as it ingested over 1,000 Instagram posts going back over a decade. But, it worked. And now my photo blog has all my history. I also grabbed all of my weekly wall “story” posts going back to when I started doing them from my new office. I will continue to cross post some stuff to Instagram, but, most of my writing/photos/status updates will be here, on my blog.
