I’m going to try make a bit of a regular feature, covering the media I heard, read or watched during the week. This first release will be a bit longer as there’s a few things I’ve recently wrapped up and wanted to cover.

Read

Books

Ender’s Game / Speaker for the Dead

Somehow I hadn’t touched this series before, while catching parts of the movie. I quite enjoyed them both, with a slight preference for Ender's Game. I think the tighter focus and scope made it overall a more coherent narrative. Hard to follow up, certainly.

Normal People

I churned through this one pretty quickly, it’s easy reading though somewhat painful. Consider it a masterclass in how to fail at communication and hurt the people you care most about. I guess I found it engaging because like a train wreck in slow-motion, I couldn’t quite look away.

Atomic Habits

Like most self-improvement books, it’s generally things you already inherently know but either haven’t thought about or haven’t built a framework around to actually implement. This book provides the latter with some explanation around why it should work. As usual, ain’t nothing to it but to do it.

Heard

Podcasts

Ship It #11: Honeycomb’s secret to high-performing teams

Charity Majors seems to strike the right balance of take-no-prisoners confidence while welcoming alternative opinions. Bring them if you’ve got them, but I know what I’m talking about so you better have a good argument, that kind of jazz. Anyway, if you have any interest in monitoring or observability I think she’s someone you should listen to.

ABC Conversations

Both interesting and worth listening to, for quite different reasons. The former I found interesting as someone who has experienced burnout in the past, the latter because Caroline de Costa just got up to so much! I learned a few things too.

Did you know that rabbits were used in human pregnancy tests? I didn’t!

Music

Bill Laurance

The first track I heard was The Good Things and I think I proceeded to listen to about three albums immediately thereafter. The transition at around 4:25 on that track is a killer. Jazzy, interesting, funky, exciting, background/focus/study music? Some of those words don’t work together but this music sure does for me.

Watched

TV

Olympic Sport Climbing

Bouldering about three times a week with a bit of lead climbing makes up the bulk of the exercise I get, and I love it. I’ve never really been a sporting person though I’ve gone through phases of weight-lifting, but rock climbing works really well for me. The physical and the mental/problem-solving challenge is just 👌.

Anyway, watching some of the best climbers in the world do their thing? Heck yes.

Movies

Booksmart

It’s a smarter, better Superbad, basically. Shout out to this Superbad scene though, while the rest of it has probably aged poorly this still gets chuckles from me. 🤷‍♂️

That’s a wrap, it was worthwhile. 😅