GRIZZLY PEAR

written snapshots

Category: Notes

  • Sunchips, 1991-present & Popchips, 2007-present

    In a recent Costco purchase, we got boxes of sunchips and popchips packaged into little snack bags.

    Both of these products fall into the category of crispy premasticated snack. This fine lineage starts with the the old mexican tortilla chip, leading to Pringles, and then to these fellows.

    The texture of Sunchips harkens to the tortilla, with a whole-grain texture to signal their (questionable) healthiness. Meanwhile, Popchips follow in the footsteps of Pringles, reveling in their artificiality in their pockmarked crunchy puffed texture.

    The corrugated square pattern of the Sunchips reminds one of an old country shack with metal siding. The perfect circles in Popchips stand as a platonic ideal.

    The flavors of the Sunchips are your classic “french onion” and “salsa”, while Popchips hit ya’ with bold flavors like “buffalo ranch sauce”.

    Ultimately, I imagine one would be better served slicing up a couple potatoes on a mandolin, coating them in olive oil and salt in a stainless steel bowl, and then blasting the chips in the air fryer.

    Such an process feels more natural than these two modern offerings, but only by degree.

    At least you don’t waste a little plastic bag each time.

  • ME minus 19

    A few mornings ago, I weighed myself found myself at 155.2, exactly 19 pounds lower than my recorded high of 174.2 from November 8, 2019. My highest weight was almost certainly during the holiday season, but I had stopped recording my weight over that time.

    My standard weight during my twenties and early thirties had hovered around 155, climbing into the 160’s with extended forays into the 170’s over the last couple years. Over the past half year I worked my way back down to 155 is due to the simple principle of “a little more exercise and a little less calories over a long period of time”, both greatly aided by the pandemic shut down.

    Exercise is the easiest to explain. Working from home saves me an hour of commute every day. Twenty of those minutes were purposely turned into a walk. The other forty minutes have been spent chasing the children around. Playing with kids and a leisurely walk (my pace hovers around a 23 minute mile) is not much, but still a massive improvement over operating a vehicle and an otherwise sedentary life.

    As for calories, the change was facilitated by cutting out restaurants beginning in late January and an improvement in snack options after we stopped leaving the house. We live with my in-laws, whose age makes us a high risk household so we’ve been particularly withdrawn from society after the pandemic spread to America.

    I’m an inveterate snacks, which hasn’t changed, but staying at home has morphed my goodies into nuts and fruit. I suspect it is due the psychology of online purchase instead of shopping in person. It was no big deal to pick up a bag of chips at the supermarket, but it feels very different to make the same decision via your web browser, especially knowing that everything will have to go through a decontamination process after its delivered. Just this little extra friction has made a big difference … and missing out on four months of donuts at the office.

    As for cutting out restaurants, there were three types of benefits — less food, healthier courses, and lighter ingredients.

    In normal times, I’ll eat out about five times a week. Even though I won’t gratuitously stuff myself, I am a dude who clears the plate. If a restaurant gives me a significant overage, I get a doggy bag, but it feels odd to ask for a container for one last bite. At home, minimal leftovers are split between multiple people or becoming an appetizer for the next meal. At work, every little extra was ending up in my gut.

    Helping the quantity improvements is are the reduced options for high calorie dishes when you’re making it yourself. We just made hamburgers for the first time in a week ago. I’ve had one can of sweetened soda once this entire lock down. I love fried food, but like snacks, I’m not addicted enough to deep fry my own fare. So I haven’t eaten french fries in four months.

    Finally, each of our meals are just inherently more healthy. To satisfy their patrons, a restaurant needs to hedge their flavor with salt and fat. I’ll do the same when I’m cooking, but I am also much more cognizant of the long term consequences to me when I add each “extra”. Also, due to news of meat shortages, we ate way less meat during the first couple months for a couple months. I don’t have a stance in the carbs versus proteins debate, but we substituted the decreased proteins with increased vegetables instead of starches, which I presume it was an absolute win all around.

    In all, I’m pretty pleased that I’ve been able to get back into my size 32 pants. Assuming that I lost these 19 pounds since the end of January, that calculates to just two ounces a day, which seems to be a pretty moderate pace.

    Hopefully this new lifestyle will stay steady when things start to crawl back to normal.

  • Pinball, 1973, Haruki Murakami, 1980

    I made two mistakes in reading this book. I read the blurb in the back which colored my expectations of what was to come, and then I read a couple reviews which tinted my perception of what I just read.

    Normally that’s not a big deal, but I don’t think either those are good dynamics when I’m going to publish my own book report. However, lesson learned, so here are a few thoughts of that may be more or less original.

    Pinball, 1973 and Hear the Wind Sing are ultimately forgettable novels. After completing this one, I’m quite certain I’ve read these two books in the past. I just can’t remember when or where.

    That sounds like an vicious indictment, but I don’t mean it that way. reading Murakami is like floating down a lazy river on a moderately warm afternoon.

    In that goal he succeeds thoroughly, even for his freshman and sophomore attempts. By the time you’ve completed each book you feel as if you are the protagonist who just recounted a tale from your own distant past, hazy muted memories of an incredibly strange and ordinary event.

    However, I understand why Murakami was hesitant to re-publish these books in English. I would not recommend this pair as an introduction to his works, but I am grateful that he allowed them to be issued again. Everything that is special about his later works is embedded in these stories, just not as much.

    I also see why these two novellas were published combined in a single volume. I don’t think Pinball, 1973 would make any sense on its own. It relies so heavily on the first book that I would say it this second novel is an extended coda. The two boys in the first book have moved on to their separate lives, and their stories are entwined only because of what you learned in the first book.

    Beyond such dry analysis, it is worth mentioning that this book still tinkles the little bells buried in the depths of your soul. However it will resonate differently depending upon your age.

    Murakami wrote this work in his early thirties, dead center between my college years and my current comfortable government life in the burbs. Twenty years ago, I would have identified strongly (too strongly) with the protagonists as they were navigating the moment. Now, I sit with the narrator as he relives his memories of a bittersweet past.

  • Deep Questions Podcast, Cal Newport, 2020-present

    I’ve been a big fan of Cal Newport ever since my initial introduction to him via CGP Grey and CJ Chilvers.

    The first book I read was So Good They Can’t Ignore You. I was completely smitten by his “career capital” model. He argues that constantly refining and honing the your skills is a better route than “following your passion” for getting the things you want out of a good job (autonomy, flexibility, pay, etc).

    I quickly followed up with his more recent books Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. I quite agree with his concerns about constant distractions in our modern hyper connected age. It’s one thing for children to flit about from one thing to another all day, but damn, we be grown ups.

    This podcast cements a trend that I noticed a couple weeks ago. I’m now listening to younger folks. I’m pretty sure Jordan Harbinger and Hank Green are both a year younger than me and Cal Newport mentioned he’s only 37, so he’s three or four years younger than I am.

    Being in your early forties is an interesting place. I’m still the young guy in my office and most principals at the firms who work for me are also a bit older. However I also have developed a cadre with younger professionals that I’ve come to know over the past few years.

    Just the other day, I called one of my former interns for some advice about walking jobsites. The dude is sharp and works hard, so I respect his opinion, especially since he’s completed construction administration on a couple large projects, something I’ve never done.

    This an interesting place. The torch hasn’t yet been handed to me, and I’m already handing it off to the next generation.

    I believe they call this middle age.

    But hey, enough about me. This podcast is a nice weekly question and answer show that discusses technology, work, and the deep life (without going woo woo).

    It’s only a few episodes in, so Cal is still finding his grounding, but it’s a very promising podcast and I hope he sticks around for a while, even though I’m a little bit jealous of his hard earned success.

  • Mottainai, Carl Chudyk, 2015

    Carl Chudyk is a minor deity in game design. I absolutely love his chaotic, tactical games.

    However, my wife doesn’t like games with lots of words, and the kids are still too young for such insanity. So that has left me to play against myself in this time of fatherhood and COVID-19.

    I first started playing his games against myself with his second classic Innovation, but a couple weeks into quarantine I received my copy of Mottainai and I’ve played it about fifty hands. Over the past few months, I’ve played it it slightly more often than Innovation, partly because Mottainai new to me, and partly because of its easy setup and quick play.

    In my solo games, I play the rules as written, dealing out two hands and just dueling each other. I tried a 3 handed game once, but that was too much chaos for my single brain to handle. (Along with Innovation, this solo-play method also works well for Chudyk’s Impulse.)

    After these plays, I feel like I’m finally starting to grok Mottainai and accept the game on its own terms. And I think the most important word is “quickness”. This game is similar to Race for the Galaxy. At first it seems like this game is all about building up a powerful engine, but it is actually about ending the damn game as fast as possible in your favor. It also has a bit of a Donald X Vaccarino (Dominion, Nefarious) feel to it – set your strategy in the first few turns and push that selected strategy as hard as possible. If you try to branch out you’ll be a muddling mess of mediocrity.

    In my initial games, grabbing monks as helpers was a dominant strategy. However, I would attribute it to “groupthink”, especially since I have a natural tendency to prefer strategies that revolve around “slow and steady, engine building”. After my first twenty plays, I learned to effectively implement the quick-build strategy to end the game by constructing five works. However, I still need to thoroughly explore a sales strategy, which I suspect will be quite powerful, but will take some practice to master, especially since multi-step processes don’t align well with in my personal playing tendencies.

    To be honest, “strategy” is seems overwrought for this game. For a game this short, even the grandest strategy is really just a tactic. With the swingyness of the cards, it really is a tactical game made up of even smaller choices. You can afford a couple half hearted feints, but if you try any more than that, you’re toast.

    One key in playing this game well is to be be thoughtful before playing a Task, just pulling a Prayer is often the best choice. It seems paradoxical in a game this short that “passing” may be regularly be the better move, however, it is the only action you can take without sharing it with your opponent, grabbing you a card without feeding their engine. In other games such a dynamic might be a design flaw, but Chudyk has been designing for a while and it is genius.

    I should mention that the first couple times I tried Mottainai were an utter disaster. This game is obviously a descendent of Chudyk’s first classic Glory to Rome, but to appreciate Mottainai you need to completely erase its father out of your mind. The even though the mechanics are similar, the dynamics are so different you will be unable to grok Mottainai as long as you have Glory to Rome bouncing around the back of your head.

    Even though Mottainai is noticeably shorter, the more apt experiential comparison is to Innovation. Like Innovation, several opportunities for nifty cardplay will spring up in front of you during the course of the game that will give you an undue advantage. However, when such an opportunity arises in Mottainai, it is critical that you take that advantage and immediately end the game in your favor.

    Even though Mottainai is a short game, it is much too complex to be called a filler. For something that can be played in 7 minutes this is a meaty little card game which has not yet gotten stale after fifty plays (or more than a hundred since I’ve always been my own oppopnent).

    Not that my faith has ever waivered, but I am happy to attest that my devotion to Carl Chudyk has been renewed afresh. I strongly recommend this game, which is available with free shipping on the publisher’s website.

  • Hear the Wind Sing, Haruki Murakami, 1979

    This book was published the year I was born.

    I have an odd thing with numbers, so I suspect this is played a part in starting this new project to read through Murakami’s ouvre.

    Like any other freshman work, you see both the talent and a lack of polish. This contrast is particularly highlighted when you compare it against the silky smooth introduction written in 2014, thirty five years into his career.

    The book is quirky novella, where the protagonist does stuff and ends up more or less where he was, except he isn’t exactly the same. Which vaguely aligns with my memory of the other Murakami novels that I read a decade ago.

    While reading the book, I got the sensation I may have read it before. I know that I downloaded a PDF of an english translation during my first Murakami kick, but I generally hate reading books online. I remember borrowing it from the library a couple years ago – though I don’t actually remember reading the book.

    Then again, I can’t tell you anything about his other novels that I’ve read, aside from the covers of the five novels we transported from Houston to Las Vegas.

    Hell, it’s only been a week since I finished this novel and I honestly can’t tell you what is the plot of this one either.

    But goddamn. His writing, even as a freshman.

    It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams.

    But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place.

    p. 89

  • Jordan Harbinger Show, 2018-present

    This show has been in my overast feed for so long I can’t remember how I first came across the podcast.

    I bet I heard an interview on some other podcast, enjoyed the interviewee, searched for that person in Overcast, and came across this show. I suspect this happened a few times, because the name, show cover, and his 6-minute networking course was already familiar to me when I came across Jordan as an interviewee on another podcast. 

    To be perfectly honest, I listened to that episode as an “audition” for both podcasts. In this world of podcast overload, this was a perfect chance to delete two shows from my feed.

    Before listening to the interview, I had a hazy notion that Jordan was yet another of those brash-hustle-network-productivity podcast bros, so I was not primed to dig his personality.  However, I pleasantly surprised by his demeanor and his mental approach.

    So I followed that interview with one of his Feedback Friday episodes, and I was totally hooked. These episodes have unique questions and Jordan’s responses are excellent. Hopefully my enjoyment isn’t just an exercise in confirmation bias, but I find myself wishing that was as sharp as he is.

    When a podcast does occasional q&a sessions, the questions tend to be generic inquiries of the host’s philosophy, which can get a bit dull since it rehashes the content of the “normal” episodes. However, a weekly q&a show creates a dynamic where you start to get personal, specific questions. By showing up every week, Jordan challenges the listeners with a wide variety conundrums to ponder.

    It’s really good mental exercise to think about how you would handle such strange situations. During my career, whenever I’ve had a problem that needed help from my supervisors, I often extended the conversation to discuss “what if” scenarios about more extreme versions of the situation. This has turned out to be good preparation, both for the possibility for the the current issue going sideways, as well as training my instincts for dealing with a seperate future incident. Such mental “gameplanning” has served me well, and listening to Jordan and his co-hosts address all kinds of unique personal issues has been a similar exercise.

    Don’t get me wrong, his long form interviews are also quite good, but I don’t know of any other podcasts that pair their great interviews with a regular q&a show. Like many things in life, a big part of being special comes from showing up consistently.

    For what it’s worth, I’ve also signed up for Jordan’s 6-minute networking program which is totally free, and so far it hasn’t led to a string of shills for paid classes.  I’m totally cool with regular paid advertising in my podcasts, I just get wary of shows that are constantly selling a menagerie of costly programs owned by the host. As far as I can tell, Jordan is clean. Don’t worry about it, just do it.

    Yeah count me in as a fan.

  • Henri Matisse Cut-outs, text by Gilles Neret, published by Taschen, 1994

    I took an art criticism class in my first semester in college that introduced me to John Berger and Matisse’s Woman with a Hat. I don’t remember anything from my essay, aside spending a considerable amount of time at the gallery at the SF MOMA and noticing the color imperfections on different reproductions of this image.

    Those afternoons at the gallery are among the few warm memories of a tumultuous year.

    As for this little book, I vaguely recollect picking it up in Houston, without actually reading it. So about almost-quarter century after my introduction to Matisse, I finally read something about the man.

    The book is fine, maybe a little small, but a succinct overview of the final period in his life. The writing is straightforward, but not simplistic. Now that I live in Vegas, the home of zero institutions of high art, I can’t be picky about reproduction colors, but I’ll attest that the printing is bright and vibrant.

    It was a strange experience to read the last chapter of an artist’s life with no knowledge of him outside of staring at a single piece that he painted at the start of his career.

    If I were to pursue it further, I’d need to pick up a good biography (which I most likely won’t do), but I almost certainly will purchase his own monograph Jazz which collected many of his cutouts.

    I generally prefer artist monographs over publisher collections, since those books are usually a journey, not merely a collection of highlights.

    However, highlights are famous for a reason, and I will be ever grateful for this little collection because it showed me this melancholy masterpiece. The Sorrow of the King.

  • Taking Things Seriously, Joshua Glenn & Carol Hayes, 2007

    This book is a cute collection of 75 nano-nonfictions. Little windows into the lives of the contributors, revealing a larger window in to the authors’ realities.

    I have a standard critique of NPR radio programming that gets overless precious, and many essays comes close to crossing the line, but the photographs ground the collection.

    Whatever the text may emote, the image of a “thing” to keeps the pairings from falling into pure sentimentality.

    It’s a fun quick read, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to find it.

    I have a note in the front cover that I got it from Half Price books on 28 November 2008. So I suspect this was pick up on one of the two Black Friday’s where I ended up winning a $200 gift cards from that store.

    Was it worth lugging around between two cities and four houses over twelve years before finally getting read while in exile in the midst of a pandemic?

    Doubtful, but it does got a nice backstory.

  • Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green, 2018-present

    I stumbled across this podcast via this excellent animation of his review of the Lascaux Caves.

    The concept of the podcast is very neat. Every month he writes two short essays about life in the human world and rates them on a five star rating. He slips in a well written commercial between the essay (not the usual canned stuff, these are actually worth listening) and ends with one random fact that didn’t fit in one of the main essays, along with a small audio bonus.

    It is a joyful little podcast. The two subjects allow for delightful juxtapositions, with a smattering of trivial knowledge keeps the podcast light even when it veers into some heavy territory.

    Like all NPR offerings, it comes very close to being unbearably precious, but he’s managed to avoid crossing that line in the episodes I’ve heard so far.

    I would say this is one of my favorite podcast finds of the year. I give it four and a half stars.