I had a productivity insight recently. Namely, that if my natural state is peace, and I’m the one whose thinking messes with that peace, then my natural state is focus and the only way I lose focus is when my thoughts distract me from it.
So I don’t need 12 steps to a distraction-free environment or the key understanding to controlling my attention. Instead, I just notice when my thoughts start to insist that I need a break. The insistence feels uncomfortable and that’s the cue to stand, stretch, breathe, make a cup of tea. Clear my head, in other words, rather than continue cluttering it with web-surfing or YouTube.
I’ve noticed my Self over the last few weeks unsubscribing from newsletters and podcasts, being more intentional about how I spend my attention energy, and deliberately opening up spaces in the evening where I don’t do anything, just sit, without consuming this intellectual snack food.
Purchased from The Odd Book, a really terrific used bookstore two streets back off the main drag of Wolfville, NS. I spent a delightful couple of hours browsing the small but packed alleys of shelves. Fantastic collection of Nova Scotian history and literature. 📚
Collier’s Popular Press: David Collier’s 30 Years on the Newsstand by David Collier (2011)
A generously sized collection of the Canadian alternative cartoonist’s fugitive journalism, comics, single-panel cartoons, and sketches for all manner of Canadian newspapers. The comics journalist Jeet Heer’s introduction praises Collier’s craft and his love of homey detail, which are evident in his wonderful landscape drawings that lead off the book, his comics-based diaries, and his own written reminiscences, including a pilgrimage with Pat Moriarty to the house George Herriman lived in.
Collier’s self-portraits, line detail and cross-hatching, and stories where he casts himself as an overly self-conscious overthinking nebbish struck me as very Robert Crumb-y, but without that artist’s graphic skill, emotional intensity, and attention-grabbing sense of danger. I mean, Collier is Canadian, after all. So the collection as a whole is gentle, low-wattage, takes its time. I found his comics documentation of the passing scene, and his personal essays, to be particularly affecting.
My Real Name is Charley: Memoirs of a Grocer’s Clerk by Glen Hancock
Hancock’s book is a gentle, readable memoir of growing up in Wolfville, NS, and of his life and the town’s life in the years between the world wars. He remembers the town as an enchanting place:
Wolfville is both commonplace and exclusive. It was, in common with other small Canadian municipalities, a heritage of empire, of small beginnings, of ups and downs. But as it is with people, towns have a personality of their own, a heritage that dwells in the heart, and in that way each is different.
The book follows the ups and downs also of his family, with parents who separated (he never discovers why) yet never divorced, the failure of his father’s fortunes during the Depression, and the eventual build-up to WWII. I loved reading his reminiscences of the life of Wolfville when that area of Nova Scotia was a vacation spot with twice-a-day trains, the smallest registered harbor in the world, and yet – like most of NS that time – still a largely rural, farming lifestyle.
Rockbound by Frank Parker Day
I’ve used the word “gentle” for the first two books of this post, but that adjective definitely does not apply to Day’s novel, first published in 1928 and not reissued till 1973.
Blurbed as “The Classic Novel of NOVA SCOTIA’S SOUTH SHORE”, the novel follows the struggles of young, orphaned David Jung as he returns to the island of Rockbound to build a life for himself. To do that, though, he needs to work for his great-uncle, the tyrannical “king of Rockbound” Uriah Jung. The novel’s picture of the hard, primitive life of a small fishing community in the early 1900s is rich in detail; I could feel the cold, the greed, the back-breaking, skin-cracking toil needed to scratch out a bare existence from both the island and the sea.
The at times melodramatic story provides spaces where Day folds in absorbing scenes, such as a Saturday night fish-cleaning, a hurricane at sea that destroys large fishing schooners, and the protagonists’ race to get a dark lighthouse up and running to prevent disaster. It also has a day-to-day texture that, while no doubt heightened, feels plausible. According to the book’s afterward by scholar Gwendolyn Davies, Day was vilified by the inhabitants of an island called Ironbound who said he had befriended them only to gather scurrilous details for his novel that painted an untrue picture of their communities.
Rockbound’s canvas is large enough to take on one character’s possible madness and a deal with the Devil that breaks open the story to take it places it could not go by staying solely with the more naive and sensible David. The novel loses its balance occasionally; while I appreciate the maritime detail about fisherman gear and boats, I honestly understood very little of it. And in the book’s latter third, David’s friend Gershom Born pretty much takes over the narrative. The book’s voice is somewhat antique today, and others may be put off by the island dialect, though I found that to not be a problem.
In the reviews I read of the novel, no one mentioned a foreshadowing technique Day deploys a few times in the book that got my attention.
But it’s not quite foreshadowing. Three or four times in the book, Day focuses a paragraph or two on a specific minor character, and then jumps ahead a year or 30 years to show that character’s fate. Then the story steps back into the flow of the main narrative and this short interlude is never referred to again. It’s an odd device that poked my imagination somehow and extended the story in a direction that Day could not have done otherwise. (Come to think of it, the movie Y Tu Mama Tambien uses that device also.)
For example: the female characters are generally two-dimensional (as are many of the men in the large cast of characters) and Day rarely gets inside their heads. But there’s a passage in Chapter 3 that really shifted me.
The scene is the Saturday-night fish cleaning, where the day’s catchings are gutted, cleaned, and salted in preparation to sell on the mainland. It’s hard, painful, mechanical work, and all hands are expected to be in the barn to help out. Here’s where Day spends some time on Fanny:
Fanny was certainly a fine creature, but her morals were those of the birds. She came from Big Outpost to hoe Uriah's cabbages and potatoes, since the men had no time to work about gardens. Moreover, gardening was distinctly woman's work. All day long she hoed and weeded and gave a hand at night in the fish house, as did all the island women when a run of fish came. She trudged home from the fields in the late afternoon, hoe over her shoulder, whistling blithely. Before supper she always went to the beach, stripped and washed herself--little cared she if the men peeked--and put on a clean shirt and a fresh dress of blue and white in tiny checks. Her dresses, scrupulously washed and ironed, were kept in her father's sea chest in the loft by her bed. In the midst of all the dirt, stench, and disorder, she had an instinct, well-nigh a passion, for tidiness. In another setting she might have borne herself with the greatest lady in the land. She was great-hearted and could never refuse a strong fisherman half-crazed with lonely passion. When the women talked to her and said: "A little of dat's all right maybe when you'se young, but if you keeps on you'se'll never git a man," she used to reply, "We was made for de good of mens, an' mens is going to have me." If Uriah and his wife, she thought, cared so much for morals, why had they put her and Leah Levy to sleep in the loft with the sharesmen?
Sure enough, she never got a man, but she bore three daughters that grew into stout lasses, knowing no more than Fanny who were their fathers. In after years Gershom used to say, “I t’ink de pretty one wid de yaller hair mus’ be mine, but de dark ugly one favours Noble Morash.” Fanny saved her pennies and looked after herself, and when she was too old to work bought a little white cottage in Liscomb. When she was very old and felt herself at the point of death, she sent for her three daughters, but they refused to come. They had all married and were ashamed of their mother. One morning the neighbours found her dead on her clean-valanced couch, even in death smiling bravely upon a world that had taken her all and paid nothing in return.
But that is going far ahead of this story, for the Fanny who bickered with Gershom Born that night in the fish house was only a wild, gay girl of eighteen. She wore, like the others, oilskins spattered with herring blood, and a sou’wester to protect her yellow hair.
The juxtaposition of those images – of Fanny dying alone, abandoned by her daughters, against the fresh and energetic spitfire of 18 with her two little girls in tow – and that heartbreaking “a world that had taken her all and paid nothing in return” – really got to me. In some ways it got to me more than David’s story did. Whenever Fanny appeared afterward in the book, I could not shake that picture of her dying alone on her couch.
Finished reading: The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi 📚 on Derek Sivers recommendation. Good intro to Adlerian psychology, which doubles as a sensible philosophy of life.
Key takeaways:
Your happiness is based on the quality of your interpersonal relationships. We live in a society, and to be of service without expecting recognition is key to finding one’s “place” and therefore purpose.
Be clear about the boundary line between what is your task and what is someone else’s task. If the task I am engaged in makes me disliked by someone, that dislike is their task. It is not my task to make them feel better or to somehow make their dislike go away. My task can be to ask how I can help or to sit with them, but my task is not to make them feel better about me.
There are nuances to this standpoint, of course, but that’s enough to get started on.
I recently skimmed two five-line-a-day diaries I kept; one spanned the years 2002-2012 and the other 2019-2023.
Because I love reading diaries and journals, and I have an obsesso need to document my life for some reason, I tried to make a go of them. Certainly, if I were to find someone else’s diary at a yard sale, I’d snatch it up and read every word. The thrill of eavesdropping on someone else’s life events, and thoughts, just tickles me.
But in skimming these two books, all I wanted to do was throw them away and not see them again. And to ask myself: why on earth would I want to keep them?
When I started keeping these five-liner diaries, I remember wanting to emulate the style of Pepys’ diary: did this, saw that, talked to so-and-so, thought this singer was great, and that play was rubbish.
One thing that worked against me was inconsistency: I started the new year strong, recording a few lines daily, then faded out, coming back for a week or two more, then fading out. A radio signal cresting and dying.
My first thought when I brought these diaries over from the old house was that I’d digitize the pages and keep them in Evernote or on my MacBook, so that I had a record of all those times.
As I thumbed through them, a few passages caught my attention: the days leading up to the passing of Liz’s mother, our growing embrace of the people who joined the Bull City Commons cohousing community, records of the many BCC meetings and decisions, stray things friends said.
This passage from May 8, 2021, a year and a half into the pandemic: “Our first ‘day out’ in over a year. To Beer Durham and sat outside on a beautiful, sunny, breezy day and enjoyed our beer and cider. ‘We must always remember this day!’ Liz said, several times. So good to see her happy, Great sandwiches from the food court. Watched ‘In and Of Itself’ on Hulu.” (I kept a running list of all the movies we saw in both books.)
This one from January 30, 2019: “Tom said that in graduate school, he accepted that he was not in control of his schedule and that’s ruled his life ever since. I’m believing it myself this week.”
A few times, the real world broke in: big snow or hurricane events, Trump’s election, the January 6 insurrection.
But the majority of the passages were of the bland and samey “Went to work, wrote report, met with X to plan video” or “Slept late” or whining about the hours of yard work I did (I hate doing yard work) and my losing battles with the bamboo and carpenter bees.
Then there were lots of depressing passages that droned on for weeks or months: my retinal detachment and the long recovery, the year I was out of work and my fruitless rounds of interviews, the hell-year of my Ph.D. and its long aftermath. Tell me again why I wanted to re-read this stuff? Why was I putting myself through this??
It did not take long for me to realize: I don’t want to spend any time at all digitizing or saving these handwritten logs. I don’t want to relive those days. Leave that baggage behind. Don’t carry it into the future.
So, no more keeping a daily log – at least in that fashion. For the past year or so, I have kept a daily note in Evernote that records my work activities for reporting purposes, personal events, phone calls, and also serves as a scratch pad for whatever is on my mind. I find I get along with this quite well. And when the time comes, no one has to worry about re-reading any of it or even throwing it in the trash. Just shut off the account and all the bits will go away.
Addendum: 2023-03-26: For the positive aspects of keeping a daily handwritten record, see Austin Kleon.
Here’s why: I am all caught up on my $DAYJOB work, one of those bliss states I’ve always imagined: no deadlines, no backlogs, time to work on projects of interest only to myself. And I’m totally at loose ends. I’m a tech writer (started as a reporter), so deadlines have long been a feature of my professional life. With that guardrail gone, I am feeling kind of freaked-out at the wide-open field of possible choices for spending my time, energy, and attention.
And as I’m 62 (nearing retirement age), I’m wondering: is this how I will feel when the $DAYJOB is gone?
In reading Burkeman’s work, and others’ as well, what I’m doing about this feeling is nothing. Just sitting with the feeling, detecting where it is in my body, and not trying to make myself “feel better.”
Instead of seeking short-term mood repair (the predominant cause of procrastination, according to the research), I will see what non-dayjob things need to be done. I live in a cohousing condo, so there’s always some task to be done. And after those tasks, maybe just…enjoy myself?
I’m one of those people who is baffled by the word “fun”, so enjoying myself feels like giving myself another task to stress about. But perhaps just giving myself permission (a technique I practice for others but not for myself) to feel both giddy and at loose ends is all that’s needed right now.
Burkeman is a recovering productivity geek who nevertheless still is looking for ways to live the good life without causing overmuch internal tension and strife. His fortnightly newsletter. The Imperfectionist, is the bee’s knees.
Rediscovered this article in Evernote during my daily notes-weeding practice. I’m sure I must have implemented it at one time, and did so again yesterday. It does make sorting my inbox much faster, though as usual, I find I overload myself with too many items to be done in one day.
It resembles Carl Pullein’s Time Sector System, which uses an algorithm of when will you do something, rather than prioritizing based on what you are doing.
I remember way back in the ’90s, meeting with a great nutritionist who was also a great therapist. At the time I listened to lots of Audible.com books and shows. She advised me at the time to reduce that input. “You like to mull things over,” she said. [1]
When podcasts came along, I gorged myself and have done for many years. I listened to them doing the dishes, working outside, walking, puttering around the house, etc. The margins of my day needed to be filled with something, put to use, and listening to podcasts helped me feel I was doing something productive with that otherwise unused time.
However, I have more than once over the past years heard a whisper underneath all the noise: Get rid of them. Go quiet.
This usually led to me pruning my feeds, reducing the number of podcasts in my queue, and so on. But, like stubborn belly fat, the episodes continued to accumulate over time and never went away.
But I heard that whisper more frequently of late. I decided my word of the year would be SPACE: more spaciousness in my schedule and more spaciousness in my head. So I decided to take more drastic action on my aural inputs.
In Castro, I deleted all the podcasts in my “later” queue and reduced the number of active podcasts in my current queue to about 25. I’m in no hurry to work through them.
I unsubscribed from many podcasts; I still keep a few that I really like because I do enjoy listening to something while I wash the dishes or vacuum. I select not just what I listen to, but when and where I listen. [2]
If I really want to hear something, it’s easy to find that specific episode and download it. And Castro makes it easy for me to upload audio files and listen to them easily.
I am finding myself in the quiet a little more, and I don’t miss the chatter. I have also not been plagued with the FOMO, a devil imp if ever there was one.
[1] The irony of my overconsuming junk food for the body and junk food for the mind is not lost on me.
During the planning, someone suggested having a slideshow play in kiosk mode on the TV in the multipurpose room while the party went on in the adjacent Common Dining Room.
And of course, all heads turned to me since I’m the de facto publicity guy who drafts the BCC blog and the (now quarterly) newsletter.
My Approach
When given this task about a month and a half before, I of course procrastinated. Well, not all the time; I was quite busy at the $DAYJOB and with other BCC and personal assignments that creating this show was not priority. I also trusted my inner guidance to let me know what to do and when I needed to do it.
But one still needs to make decisions early on, don’t one? They help to give one a place to start and to set up some useful constraints. Starting with the end in mind, I decided on the following:
Keep the show to about 20-30 minutes.
No music or other soundtrack, because there would be so much talking and other music playing in the other room.
The show would be a blend of still photos and drone footage taken of the construction in progress.
It seemed to me the simplest way to compile the photos would be to put them in chronological order; therefore, every photo needed to be accompanied by the month and year the picture was taken. I thought people looking at the pictures would want to know when they were taken.
The show (either a movie or a PowerPoint slideshow or some other mechanism) had to play on my MacBook connected via HDMI to the TV.
The show would be broken into three main pieces: pre-construction, construction, and then move-in on up to the present day. Even during construction we were having events—such as the beam-signing—so I thought those pictures could be interleaved with the constructions at the appropriate moments in the timeline.
What I Actually Created
An iMovie video slideshow that lasted almost 40 minutes. All photos were watermarked with the image’s creation month and year. The video got good reviews from the folks who saw it, and it brought back some good memories. But it was way too long.
Processing the Images
Did I say I started too late? I started too late.
We had two large stores of image files on our shared Google Drive: one set devoted to construction, one to community events. Fortunately, they were arranged in folders—and sometimes sub-sub-folders—by date. Google Drive is too slow to click and move through, so I tried downloading the folders via my browser, but there were inevitable hiccups with some corrupted files, internet burps, and whatnot.
At that point, I searched out and found Cyberduck, which offered a fast and simple way to download those folders to my MacBook.
Now I had lots of folders and subfolders of images. I did not want to have to traverse all those folders; instead, I wanted a single folder with all the pre-construction images, a single folder with all the construction images, and a single folder with all the post-construction images.
I searched around and—I still can’t believe this—found exactly what I needed: a MacWorld article from 2011 defining an Automator workflow that moved files out of subfolders to a parent folder, and then deleted the empty subfolders.
I selectively used that Automator workflow to pull all those nested files up into a single directory for each category of images I had defined.
Now to process those images: sort them by name? By creation date? How to ensure I’m seeing all the files in the right order?
I prefer sorting by name; it just makes things easier all around, especially if I was going to do more post-processing of the files later. Or inserting other images I might find later so they fitted into their chronologically right place.
Much searching and trying out of programs led me to PhotoMill, which performed brilliantly.
The key first step after ingesting the photos, was to select them all and then select File > File Attributes > Set Creation/Modification Date from Capture Date… This added the necessary metadata to the images for the next step.
I created a preset workflow within PhotoMill that changed all the formats—a mix of JPG, PNG, and HEIC—to JPG, renamed all the files to start with each image’s creation date and time in the format YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM, followed by the original filename, and then added the creation Month and Year in a 50% opaque white font in the lower right corner of each image, as shown here.
With a folder of images renamed, sorted, and formatted the way I wanted, all that was left was to … sift.
Because I did not have a detailed outline in mind, and because I wanted to let the materials lead me to where they wanted to go, I felt the only thing to do was to sift through all those images to make a first cut.
So for about an hour or so every day, I sorted through about 3,800 image files. Most were quickly consigned to the Trash.
I totaled the numbers of files I had. If each image lasted 4 seconds on screen, then 4 times the number of files and divided by 60 would tell me how many minutes the show would last. That first cut got me to about 60 minutes, so I knew I had lots more cutting to do.
Creating the Video Slideshow
As I sifted through the files again, I hit on the idea of calling the video “Timelines.” I decided to keep the construction images and event images separate, but staying with the pre-construction and post-construction eras. So there would be smaller timelines playing within the larger timeline narrative. I also decided to stop the show after our celebratory gala in May, after the move-ins had finished and we were ready to enjoy our accomplishment.
During that second round of culling, I created new subfolders for the images and began investigating how to present them. After looking at PowerPoint and other kiosk/slideshow programs, the simplest and most powerful tool to use was iMovie.
I consulted a MacMost video course on iMovie I’d bought a while back to educate myself for another project. Gary very helpfully had several videos dealing with my specific use case, and he refreshed my memory on applying transitions, titles, and other niceties. Using iMovie also let me easily drop in some MP4 and MOV drone videos captured during some of our events and during construction.
We were now at, oh, a day before the event? I reported that I’d have a really good first draft, and figured I’d have most of Saturday to get it mostly good.
Renaming the files as I had done meant that, as I dropped in batches of files, they sorted into the sequence I wanted. Adding the drone videos was also dead easy. And iMovie let me know how long the video was, so I could do more drastic cutting as needed. I had iMovie render low quality videos I used to review what would be the final product.
The MacBook Pro’s M1 processor made very short work of the video creation; on my old iMac, it would have taken maybe 90 minutes. I was so happy I got the Pro.
The video wound up at about 40 minutes, still about 20 minutes too long. I did some cutting and moving chunks around, but did not have a better creative idea to support such a drastic cut. Had I arrived at this point a week earlier, a better idea would have appeared.
What I Would Have Done Differently
I could have eschewed watermarking all the photos in favor of using titles or other iMovie captioning. But then, I’d have still had to reference each image’s creation date to get that info correct. So, six of one…
I would have foregone sifting through 3,800 images. My process, for better or worse, is to sort through everything. I did find a few great shots that way, but that effort was over the top. As Liz noted, whenever people were not in the pictures, the air went out of the show.
In the next draft of this video, I will trim the 15-20 minutes of boring construction photos. Since I named the video “Timelines”, I will instead create more mini-narratives showing the progress, say, of the hallways and the lobby from studs to sheet rock to paint. Those will tell more meaningful stories within the larger construction narrative, and the impact will be greater to see 2 years’ progress on a defined space within the span of a few photos.
Firefox remains my browser of choice on my MacBook mainly because of Library Extension, which does not work in Safari. With this extension, I can go to a book page on Amazon or Audible and see whether the book is available either physically or digitally via the Durham NC public library
Books, Ebooks, Audiobooks
Both ebooks and audiobooks are available via my library credentials from the library’s own site, Overdrive/Libby (via the Libby app), and Hoopladigital (via the Hoopla app). Checking out an ebook from the library itself delivers it to my Kindle Oasis or Kindle app.
One of the great bonuses of Overdrive/Libby is its access to magazines; Liz loves reading The New Yorker this way on her iPad mini.
Hoopla delivers not only ebooks, but audiobooks, music, and a limited selection of movies/TV series. What continues to astonish me with Hoopla is its deep selection of comics and graphic novels; before buying a graphic novel from Amazon/Comixology, I check Hoopla first and am usually pleasantly surprised. Its comics reader is not as good as Comixology’s, but it’s decent.
I’m an Audible guy, and have been since the late ‘90s; it’s mostly reliable and offers lots of stuff. I’ve used Apple’s Books app now and then, but did not care for the experience. I have an app on my iPhone called Bound Audiobook Player that is useful for playing audiobook files I’ve ripped or created from other sources. And I’ve written before about using Audiobook Builder for “binding” separate MP3 files into consolidated audiobook files.
Devices & Apps for Reading
I have a Kindle Oasis that I am finding myself using less and less. I appreciate that its lighting is probably better on my eyes than the iPad’s, and that it offers only reading with no other app or online distractions, but it feels increasingly clunky to use.
On my iPad, I configure the Kindle app so that I can scroll through a book like a web page (when that is supported) rather than tapping on the side of the screen to advance to the next page. I like to read with my glasses off in the evening, so I can make the font size quite large on the display while still displaying a lot of text.
This article led me to seriously consider reading Kindle books on my iPhone. And it’s actually a pretty good experience, once I’ve adjusted the font and scrolling. I find myself now opening the Kindle rather than a browser when I am fiddling with the phone.
I rarely use Apple’s Books app for anything beyond PDFs, though I have bought a few items from its store that were not available via Amazon. I always forget about the Books app. The ability to organize and manage my collection is limited, though the Kindle’s is really not that much better.
Lately, for “classic” books, I’ve been using the Serial Reader app and am loving it without really knowing why. It delivers chunks of a book daily that can be read in 10-15 minutes; sipping a book rather than gulping it, as it were. I paid for the app so I could load an EPUB book from Gutenberg, and it handled the ebook flawlessly. Right now, I’m reading a book of Wodehouse short stories.
One problem with so many apps and devices is: read the same book on multiple devices? Read different books on different devices? What type of reading works best with each device? How many books can I read at a time without overwhelming myself? I’m still working that out.
Comics Sites & Apps
Comixology remains my favorite comics reader, despite how Amazon has wrenched its UI into a confusing mess to match the Kindle app’s equally frustrating UI. The Comixology reader can only read comics purchased or borrowed from Comixology. Many pixels have been spilled on how Amazon has ruined the Comixology web and digital experience, and the criticism is justified; attempting to discover new work on Amazon’s Comixology sub-site is next to impossible; still, the Comixology app's comics-reading engine is the best and easiest to use.
Again, check out Hoopla’s deep catalog of comics, including many recent releases. Don’t buy from Comixology if you can borrow from Hoopla.
I check the Humble Bundle site once a month for its book bundles; the bundles are priced so that portions of what you pay go to both charity and the publisher. Most of the book bundles typically deal with programming or gaming, though they sometimes have fiction themes or instructional themes (how-to-write books during NaNoWriMo, for example). They also usually have at least one comics bundle. For a relatively small price, you can sometimes get a couple of dozen (or more) comics/graphic novels in a themed bundle. Some of the themed collections I’ve bought include a Keiron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie Showcase, Ed Brubaker’s Image Comics work (his incredible Criminal series), and titles from One Press and Top Shelf; these bundles helped me catch up on lots of titles I had missed.
The Humble Bundle comics can be downloaded in multiple formats (PDF, CBZ, CBR) though that isn’t consistent; occasionally only one or two formats are offered. I prefer to read these on my iPad. There are many many comics readers out there; I’ve used Chunky Comics Reader for so long on my iPad that I can’t get used to other readers. Chunky is still available and works great, but the last update was 2 years ago, so it’s probably abandonware, alas. A good second choice to try is the Panels comic reader, which is being actively developed.
I’ve tried both the Marvel and DC comics readers; Marvel’s reader is better, but neither are all that great. The main advantage of these services is getting access to nearly the complete catalog offered by each publisher (new issues are delayed by six months, typically). Both services offer monthly and yearly subscriptions; I like paying for one on a monthly basis till I finish reading through whatever is interesting to me, then stopping that subscription and moving to the other.
Good Lord
Until I wrote this post, I had no idea how convoluted my reading life had become! But it’s not that hard in practice, I think. I use my iPad for most reading: comics, Kindle app, and Serial Reader. On my iPhone, I also have Serial Reader (it syncs progress across all devices, or at least is supposed to), and Kindle (for light non-fiction that is skimmed more than read).
And yes, I have a chair and lamp reserved for reading good old-fashioned papery codex books. Books are a proven technology that never go out of style.
I’ve never been able to stand the smell and taste of beer, so I could never see the appeal of it to people. Ciders, though, are really fun. I heard cider described as the alcoholic beverage for people who like soda pop, and that’s not far wrong for me. Berry and citrus ciders are my favorites. I currentlly have two crowlers in the fridge from Bull City Ciderworks: Upcide Down (pineapple cider) and Early Bird (a blend of BCC’s cranberry and ginger ciders).
