Top 10 - Sept 2020
- “Get Duked” – The stoner-horror-comedy by my dude of dudes and founding Team Eagle vs Mancrush member Ninian Doff is out on Amazon Prime NOW! That is right, I’m friends with someone who not only sometimes returns messages despite his fame and glory and his best efforts to forget we ever spent years skating the mean streets of London together, has a feature film out. Watch now.
- “Run the Jewels – Love again” video – again by Ninian Doff who is as aforementioned killing it and yes, that’s right, totally my friend. BFF’s forever. Oh and Run the Jewels are saving hip hop so there. It’s all revenge porn innit.
- “I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son” by Kent Russell – This is the first book I’ve read twice in my life. It is that good. It’s a mind-storm of encounters and misgivings with his nutty veteran dad and life on the fringes of Florida to Juggalos and tracking down hockey’s finest brawlers throughout Canada. It’s such a gem I want to read it again.
- The Amish – I spent roughly 35 drunk minutes at a first communion party trying to explain them and the various intricacies and misconceptions about these fine folk and I still don’t know much about them despite growing up an hour away from their world. Yet I can say this much about how rad they are, and that is they actually sit down and think and talk amongst their community about whether they should adopt a technology or will it be harmful to their lives. If only we had their bravery.
- Making pictures again for the first time in almost three decades – I was this close (picture my thumb and index finger super close together) to being an illustrator and chickened out to be a designer. So no life of making skateboard graphics or animating bears or whatever, but you know, being a designer or something and still can’t give it up.
- The YouTube recommendation blocker – You know a thing is evil when you need a Firefox/Chrome/etc. plugin to remove one of it’s biggest money making features. Well maybe if they tried removing nazis instead I wouldn’t have to.
- Markdown – I spend a lot of time typing as a designer. I’ve spent centuries of man hours pounding out documentation as if my life depends on it and there’s one thing I know, you think that doc will be readable in 10 years? Good luck. Plain text that is portable, transferrable and can be reformatted or parsed to look nice I think saved my life. Somehow.
- A-Frame – Yes the houses look damn cool, we can all agree on that, but the open source web based mixed reality framework is almost just as cool. Hopefully it will continue it’s life somehow in open source land, but I’ve been goofing around in it, and it’s oddly satisfying. More than anything though it addresses the one damn problem with VR, which is it should be accessible.
- NAG – Hailing and howling from the bleak shores of Stavanger, Norway and out on the indomitable Fysisk Format label, these ragers range from blackened hardcore to crust core ripping your day to shreds.
- The Bronx – This is a hard-hitting yet melodic LA punk band that also doubles as a mariachi band. I think that should say enough. Sing alongs all day long.