Anyway...

Oh hey 👋

Before we get to the goods, a primer. If you know me, you know at least two things:

1. I run a creative agency that specializes in movie trailers and entertainment marketing, a.k.a. AV. I am deeply in love with this work (and sometimes I'm a little too passionate about it).
2. I’m over-flowing with other, completely unrelated ideas, interests, and curiosities (and sometimes I can’t shut up about them).

This, and whatever this is, will be mostly focused more on the latter. And it will more than likely evolve. It most definitely won’t be intentionally self-promotional or geared towards cultivating a (pauses to swallow vomit) Personal Brand™. If you want to take a peek at the work that I do with the help of an incredibly talented team... well, there you have it. Glad we got that out of the way, yeah?

Okay, there will be some stuff about trailers, marketing, etc. etc. (duh, it’s what I do). But my efforts here have an entirely different purpose.

One more thing to get out of the way: you might also know that I lost my home in the LA fires early last year. I'm writing this about 18 or so months removed from those events; on the cusp of reconstruction, and running my agency in the heart of the rebuilding going on in Altadena. It will inevitably inform my POV. And this little exploration is born out of the seasonal change that those events brought about in my life. But that's a talk for another time.

For now: you can think of this as opening up the canister of my skull and digging into the stew of my mind. I’ve had more than enough people ask me over the years to “pick my brain” and so this feels like one way of allowing folks to do just that. What I’m reading, what I’m thinking, what I'm tinkering with, what's piquing my curiosity, or just whatever is bringing me joy and meaning amid the clusterf*ck of our modern world. Part antidote, part salve, part sweetener.

For now, pardon my dust. It’ll be messy. Inconsistent. And a little all over the place. But hey, isn’t that half the fun?

Without further ado, here are some things to read, watch, play, listen to, and think about. Some useful, some personal. You get the idea.

1. I spent time this weekend wandering around some Pasadena music and media shops. As someone who recently lost an extensive media library and priceless record collection (see above), you may not expect that I'd be doubling down on owning physical media. But here we are, rebuilding a collection from scratch. To that end: shoutout to Brandon Jay, all-around cool dude and someone who's helping people recover in one of the most meaningful of ways.
2. Related: Physical media is having a moment. I’m loving this guide by K.D. Kemp.
3. Somewhat Related: for creating that vintage VHS-feel for your videos: a free, open source VHS filter. Also: with YouTube and everyone and everything reverting to becoming more and more like cable TV, why not just watch YouTube like cable TV? If you want to go deeper/dorkier¹ then there's FieldStation42, an open-source² project that allows you to turn your computer into a vintage cable-TV-like system with channels, bumps, commercials, and so on.
4. Love what Universal did with The Odyssey trailer to visually demonstrate the different exhibition formats. Notch it up as another post-Coogler move to embrace film nerdery. And I'm very here for it. Cinema!!!
5. “As much as 41 percent of long-form written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.” Surprise! (or not?) A “shocking” amount of what you read on these platforms isn’t written/created by humans. Personally, I’m losing patience with the hordes of Content Creators and industry folk who are clearly leveraging LLMs to generate writing and media to promote their causes. Here’s me hoping, wishing, and praying (lol) that people will do better and, oh I dunno, show some backbone? A shred of pride and conscientiousness, maybe? But hey, they likely won’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (via 404 Media)
6. LA Books curated by Greg Ruben. Next up on my own list: Anthony Fontenot's Notes from Another Los Angeles on Gregory Ain, the architect whose block of Park Planned Homes is directly north of one of our properties in Altadena; only a few survived, but most are being rebuilt with Ain's design ethos in mind, and it's wild/inspiring/mind-blowing to be up there and see the rapid pace of building progress.
7. delphitools, a "collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools" like a QR code generator, simple image cropper and converter, zine imposer, and on and on and on. All thanks to a single developer: "No logins, no registration, no data collection. I can't believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web." Amen.
8. One of the many things I've gotten into in the past year or so: Raspberry Pi computing, which has led to retro gaming emulators, home automation, media servers, and soon (er, maybe?) self-hosted databases. It's one of the many reasons I have a complex relationship with AI-enabled tooling (ahem, see above). While I'm certainly no fan of it as a crutch for creativity and critical thinking (among other things), the way in which it's enabled me – a somewhat technically-minded individual, but by no means a developer or engineer – to dabble in all sorts of new things, extending all the way to industrial design and basic electrical engineering (!!!), is astounding and awesome. And apparently I'm not the only one. See: cyberdecks.
9. Take a moment to chill out in the lounge.
10. Count me as excited for Over The Hill, which looks to be a tranquil off-road exploration game: “to do something dangerous slowly is an adventure.” Hell yes.

That's it for this time, folks. Let me know if anything grabbed your interest, made you think, or tickled your fancy ✌️

¹ might become a recurring theme here

² all about open-source over here, folks