Ten Things, 2023-06

BICEPS

Here are ten things.

  1. Happy Super Bowl Sunday to those who celebrate. Every championship season, I'm reminded of the modding communities that keep old sports games alive, updating the rosters and jerseys season after season. So shout out to the modding teams responsible for Tecmo Bowl 2023 and NFL Blitz 2023.
  2. I am totally in the tank for whatever the Shutdown Fullcast crew does, and this includes Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson's newsletter, Channel 6. This week's free missive included a link to the 2008 Roofball World Championships. What is roofball? Why are all the participants in this supposed world championship seemingly all from Oregon? Fair questions both, but I invite you to just wade in the waters of adults putting a lot of time and effort into a backyard game (complete with score bugs and multiple camera angles, shades of classic Major League Wiffleball), all the while decked out in the finest fashions of the day. Says Hall in this very newsletter: “This is what the sports internet should have been, what it is at its best, and what it still could be.”
  3. A new one for your rotation of morning puzzles: Cine2Nerdle, one part tile puzzle, one part Wordle.
  4. My friend John Hex finally released his long-threatened defence of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie.
  5. I didn't catch up on 2022 movies much this week, but I did finally watch a movie with one of the greatest tiles of all time: 1967's Nikkatsu noir A Colt Is My Passport. And it rips!
  6. What is the smokiest movie? (via Todd Vaziri)
  7. Catching up on some tunes: New York City, the new album by the Men, is a continuation of their Neil Young-via-Replacements-via-Sonics brand of guitar fury. It is also a colossal SEO nightmare.
  8. RIP Burt Bacharach. Hiring he and Elvis Costello to play “I'll Never Fall in Love Again” in the second Austin Powers movie is one of the top 5 things Mike Myers has ever done.
  9. Here's a weird one: I sunk over 1,000 words into Obsidian building a wiki for a grip of fictional characters that have been living in my head for years. I have no plans to make this into anything else, but it is nice to have this information somewhere that isn't my brain. I really like the idea of a wiki being not just a way of building a fictional universe, but telling a story by itself, as a kind of hypertext fiction.
  10. Here's a peek at my current poetry project, a sci-fi/romance novella in verse: 
    Nor physicist nor engineer nor botanist nor cook;
I was just born here and got as comfortable as I could,
    
a ghost in the fuselage, a small spectral heart
in the outland folds of an infinite atlas,
    
longing for the margins, the coffee table,
the choppy waters at the edges of the page.
    
The whir of the engines gets the best of me,
and the brass tumblers in my brain slide into place
    
and I sink into the plush sleep of those on solid ground

#tenthings