Miscellaneous

The Oscars set me back on my Last of Us viewing, but I finished the first season last night and wanted to take a minute to talk about how good it was. Note, I haven’t played the video game, though I was familiar with the general gist of it. So this isn’t a “compare it to the original” post. It’s a “how good was it by itself” post. And the answer is “very very good.” (That’s right. I broke out two very’s. Things just got real, folks.) More than anything else, I was happy to see them treat a video

Sometimes it feels like there’s always something going on with a family that takes some effort to fix. (Relationships are like that. If you don’t pay attention to them, then they go downhill.) Lately, something that’s been on my mind is trying to encourage more family unity. Not that my kids have been turning into hellions or anything, or that we’ve had non-stop squabbling, but there’s been more attention being paid to what people are doing individually in the family than I’d like. What I mean is that for a family to work well, it’s got to be a team

To start the year off, I decided to reread the Mistborn series, but as I headed into the first trilogy, I realized that I’ve never actually read the final version of them. I read them chapter by chapter as we workshopped them in writing group over several years. And in my head since then, they never changed, so there are things that Brandon edited before publication that I never realized got edited. This has led to a very interesting experience. I think it’s the first set of books that I’ve read in print where I can point to different sections

Farmington, Maine has a yearly festival in honor of Chester Greenwood, inventor of the ear muff and native Farmingtonian. There’s a parade (with everyone and everything wearing ear muffs, of course), contests, and general festivities. Back in the days of yore (pre-COVID times), there was also a “Taste of Farmington” activity, where you’d buy a ticket that would get you a sample of food at all participating restaurants in town. The ticket was $5, and the samples varied in size, but it ended up being a really good deal for $5, and a fun way to pass a few hours.

I know there are a lot of different streaming platforms out there. Too many, I’d say. And I also know that of all the platforms out there, Apple TV+ is bad on many different levels. Their app is infuriatingly awful. When I’m watching a show on the platform, unless I’m bingeing it, it’s inordinately difficult for me to find the next episode. They don’t have much in the way of a back catalog. Almost everything on there is stuff that they made specifically for the platform. And so for the first while, there just wasn’t that much. But lately? It