I think this short video could actually be titled “How movies used miniatures before CGI.” (including Star Wars!) The scale of some of this stuff is hardly “miniature,” except when compared to what they’re actually representing. (video)
I don’t know what it is about these unreleased Mac Miller tracks someone keeps posting to YouTube (probably illegally), especially the ones that are tinged with maybe a little sadness, sort of how I assume he was feeling near the end of his life, but this one makes me feel something. I don’t know if this one will be taken down before this newsletter goes out, but I hope not.
I signed up last week for Nathan Barry’s newsletter, “How to earn $10K from your first book,” because it looked like the most interesting newsletter in a new referral program I’m checking out. I have been pleasantly surprised by the content in the emails I’ve received so far, which are concise, thoughtful, and seemed to be more about “how you can write a book too” than “get rich quick.” I love thinking about this kind of stuff, especially when it’s about how to make books instead of how to convince someone else that your book idea is worth publishing.
This Mike Curiak essay about stale five-cent Red Vines saving him from a bonk takes me back to a time my friend Brody and I were trying to bicycle from Moab to Boulder, Utah on dirt, and we raided the only snack purveyor in a 20-mile radius, the Rodeway Inn in Caineville, Utah, and the clerk was trying to ring up one of our bags of chips and said, “Oh, these expired last year, I’ll just give them to you for free.” And we took down probably 800 calories’ worth of candy bars and potato chips each in about three minutes.
Not to take anything away from this heartwarming story about Daisy the yellow lab finding and retrieving 155 lost disc golf discs from the park where she walks, but the photo of Daisy with the discs is really worth the click here.
I started a club on Strava this week—still working on a better logo, but the gist is: I’m trying to log a bunch of elevation gain this year, by any human-powered means, and I started a club for anyone else who wants to join. It’s called 100 Grand, and if you get 100,000 feet (that’s 30,480 meters) of ascent this year, I’ll send you a custom sticker at the end of the year.
This article about trying to cut small talk from your life didn’t quite go where I thought it would, but I do think it reinforces my love for small talk, as a way of easing into the bigger topics—as opposed to trying to dive in the deep end immediately, which, as the author discovers, can be a bit awkward. (via Kottke.org)
The New York Times is celebrating hip hop’s 50th birthday by: Asking you what your favorite lesser-known rap lyrics are. And a couple other questions, like the oldest lyric you remember, and the lyric that you think encapsulates New York the best, et cetera. I got really excited when my friend Syd sent me this, and then I immediately froze up trying to think of answers. But maybe you won’t?