miso says free palestine
e told me she's coming back to visit portland in the fall, the best local news of 2024 so far. on saturday we went to din tai fung for lunch with k, t, ec, and v after t got laid off (shittiest local news of 2024 so far), it's so loud and i'll forever bear a grudge against their siu mai but it's always good (one example: near the top of my list of Things Reasonable People Love That I Hate is mochi (don't even get me started on mochi "donuts"—they are an insult to the very concept!) and yet the warm chocolate-filled mochi pillow dessert there always fucking hits and this time they gave us a new salted whipped cream accompaniment).
at lunch discussion of the group's favorite musicals (top three: chicago, the phantom of the opera, wicked) to which my answer was of course "none" but also there was a hilarious moment where deborah was sure that we had watched sweeney todd, a movie i have definitely not seen, together, and i figured out eventually that it was just that we had just watched that episode of the office where andy is in sweeney todd so many times (for transparency, i will note that recently i was wrong and deborah was correct about us having watched the movie burning and about last night's episode of true detective being the finale, which i didn't think it was supposed to be but it was (and it was truly truly ridiculous the spooky version of the song "twist and shout" and the part where they quote the line "time is a flat circle" are the shark hitting the moon from jumping so fucking hard)).
after lunch, t and i walked around the art supply store for several laps looking for this one particular set of pastels she wanted but couldn't find them but then after we met back up with deborah and k we went back again and deborah immediately was able to locate them. deborah's love of her nakiri knife, which she cares for lovingly and stores in a sheath and which always reminds me of the bit in the "benihana christmas" episode of the office where michael, dwight, and jim go to benihana and dwight is well actually-ing the chef about whether the knife he's using is a nakiri (my more useless version of the geoguessr game is being able to rapidly connect any moment in life to a bit from the office)
deborah and i went to h-mart to buy ingredients to make poke for dinners this week, which we'd never done and which it turns out is so good and easy. as previously mentioned multiple times perpetually thankful for the availability of deeply discounted very fresh salmon belly scraps at h-mart which makes this a quite affordable option. i'm thankful that we bought more lap cheong for the rice cooker after having been out for a while and for the parody of "we didn't start the fire" that i was playing in my head that began "lap cheong, king kong..." (office reference: the "ryan started the fire" episode)
for valentine's day, i rented us a swimming pool heated to 90 degrees and the day we were supposed to go i briefly got into my head about it and was like "is 90 degrees going to be warm enough, it's less warm than body temperature and thus will we perceive it as cold" but in case you need to know for future reference 90 degree water is quite lovely to swim around in from 8 to 10 PM in some stranger's house in the depths of winter. we played with inflatables and floated and listened to a new-to-me seventies soul/funk radio show on KMHD and it was lovely. (office reference: the episode where michael falls into an indoor koi pond)
it's now february and i've caught myself continuing to play my top songs 2023 playlist a disturbing amount so i'm going to try making a weekly playlist to send to you (and to send to myself) this one is called daydream repeat which is the name of a good new four tet song that was originally what i was building it around but which as new songs entered the mix and the aesthetic shifted no longer fit sonically but i kept the title because (to overexplain) it functions as a reference to daydream nation and the concept of repetition (of the daydream) as an aesthetic (/listener) ages and loops. (didn't fit the playlist but also there is a new vampire weekend single i listened to a lot) (office reference: when dwight has a concussion and teaches pam to download songs from a russian website to her off-brand MP3 player)
was quoted in my friend m's newsletter about not understanding or thinking i understand git (love to be quoted; related saw this today)—idk how many people there are who read this work or play in tech but if you do or are just interested in how software is built, m is such a great writer and i always look forward to reading his things. in other software news, this weekend i've been trialing loopy pro on my ipad and it's a high learning curve compared to a hardware loop pedal but i think i've got the basics now and it's so much more powerful and a pretty incredible piece of software that i think i'll buy once the trial ends (office reference: the episode where andy records himself doing a choral acapella version of "rockin' robin" and makes it his ringtone and then jim hides his phone in the ceiling)
my character named deborah who is styled after deborah still hasn't had sex in baldur's gate 3 (and ec read that if you don't have sex with shadowheart, the character deborah/i have been trying to get with, before a certain point the door is closed)(i also strongly considered having sex with a squid-face mind flayer who has a pretty good personality all things considered but didn't commit (yet)) but they put out a patch with new kissing animations (lol best use of a patch ever) and my character named deborah who is styled after deborah had some really good makeout seshes that give me hope there's still a chance she'll pull (office reference: the episode where dwight is depressed and lives only in the game second life and jim makes a character to observe him but then pam starts making fun of the amount of energy he has invested in the character; the related episode (maybe the same one?) where andy tells dwight he's been necking with angela, but not kissing, just...necking).
