LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 8 No. 1
Nick’s LIFESTYLE Newsletter Vol. 8 No. 1
THIS IS AN INTRODUCTION
Hello again everyone. It's been a few weeks. Weeks of enduring THE COLD. Weeks of enduring Melonie’s THE COLD. Weeks of dreaming about living in a country that is not rapidly turning into a burning hellscape literally (and socially and politically). Days of prepping for that traditional right of passage when you turn 45. Hours of seeing those minutes were billed to my insurance at $5,000.
In order to avoid vaguemailing, the above is reference to my colonoscopy. I will spare you the details, but am happy to share my experience. I will say in the time old debate of what is better - Working at my job or getting a colonoscopy. COLONOSCOPY WINS.
COFFEE UPDATE: We went to the Great Northern Roaster Showcase at SK Coffee and I bought the weirdest coffee ever. Standard Ethiopia bean, medium roast, but it was aged in Tattersall Rum Barrels. Fucking amazing. It has this intense smell and this weirdo hint of booze. I love it. Give it a try, or better yet come over here and have a cup at Melonie’s Cafe.
COFFEE UPDATE 2: On the heels of having coffee I love, I thought, “I should try what the regular people might consider good” and bought a bag of Starbucks Verona Dark Roast at Costco. Holy shit. Just terrible, oily as hell and tons of chaff. I was able to cold press (Toddy method) to make it almost drinkable with cream.
COFFEE UPDATE 3: Because Private Equity makes everything better, a PE firm has been buying up a bunch of local coffee shops and roasters. It’s quite sad. Folly and Up are two of our favorites and they are ON THE LIST. Check here if you have a favorite and want to check…
COFFEE UPDATE 4: Just wanted to publicly recognize Melonie and the amazing coffee she makes and her skill doing V60 pour overs. She’s incredible. She will not agree with that, but she is wrong.
I thought this was an amazing article - Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? I definitely see this in my workplace. It is majority female and has been for years. I think it is going to be a tough time for men in the future since women won’t need to put up with their dumb asses.
Dropout continues to be amazing and I just about died watching Wayne Brady improvise this song in the style of Harry Styles about pegging. Sadly this is just a clip of the whole thing, but: “It’s Not My Thing.” Just a reminder if you love improve or laughing, I still have two one-month long trials to give to FRIENDS OF THE LIFESTYLE.
Sad that Jimmy Carter passed. Maybe not the best president, but I’ve always admired all the service he has done for the world and the humility he almost always showed. I had a good friend that worked at the Carter Center and it was incredible hearing all the work they did. I think it will be a long time before we have a president like that again.
I’ve been enjoying the crap out of Infinity Nikki. It’s like a cozy Breath of the Wild. I’m learning all about how women can run governments, law enforcement and do anything. Important lessons included about how women don’t owe men time or attention and that looks do not equate to self-worth. Oh, and I have some amazing outfits I’ve crafted. Look at me!
Me (as Nikki) being fabulous overlooking Florawish AI is CRAZY (pt. 1,023). Hey, you like the Beatles? How about Revolver? Here is Revolver but with the Beatles being a Motown band. Like that? Here is Rubber Soul done in the same style. These were created using Suno and are just amazing.
COFFEE UPDATE 5. Just kidding, four was enough. Bullet time is over.
ITEM THE FIRST:
GAMEMAKER: Ran into this article a few weeks ago and it hit like a ton of bricks: ‘Playing games turns me into a person who makes sense.’ Melonie and I have been playing games since 30 October 2011, when we played our first of eventually 41 games of Pandemic. Yes, I track that because this is a hobby that embraces neurodivergent people and our love of numbers, patterns and tracking things.
I think this part really put into words what I get out of gaming:
“For me, games function as an accessibility tool that enable me to connect with people. I crave company and strong, meaningful social bonds like anyone else, it’s just that the everyday hurly-burly of conversation feels like trying to cross a room strewn with Lego barefoot in the dark.
Games offer structure, shared goals and an alibi if conversation dwindles to silence.”
Just reflecting on the past 13 years of gaming it is amazing to see how much it has changed my life and how much my life has changed because of it. I’ve always been intensely proud of being in my mid-40’s and still being close to people I have known literally since elementary school. In the past few years as COVID changes relationships and events splinter some of those relationships, I look at the newsletter and see that it’s almost a 50/50 split of gaming and non-gaming friends. We’ve found some of our closest friends in those years. We’ve gone on vacations, gotten jobs, rekindled old friendships, mourned together and made life long connections due to the hobby.
If you are reading this because of games, what a treat it has been to become part of your story. Thank you.
Also, FRIEND OF THE LIFESTYLE Seppy’s latest Kickstarter goes live soon and I would appreciate it if you check it out. Seppy has changed our lives so much over the years and is such an amazing, creative person to be around. He is vital to the local game community and I hope he knows how much he is loved. His last game shipped a few months ago, Conquest Princess, and it is the most unabashedly celebration of queerness and friendship in a game. It PROVES LOVE in a way we will desperately need in the next four years.
One thing that is perhaps unique with this hobby and my tracking of my plays is remembering some of the people we’ve lost. Lance Day, Nick McLane and Kristi Lawless. I open up my board game tracking app (yes, that is a thing, non-gamers) and I still see that Lance is the 5th most person I played games with (and the next person is 200 plays away). I occasionally open up my app and scroll through those plays and I can remember some of them like it was yesterday.
ITEM THE SECOND:
TRUMP MADE ME DO IT: I don’t know that the word “need” is accurate, but it was getting to be time to get a new laptop. My old one, a MacBook Air M1, was the best laptop I ever owned. Just amazing performance and battery life, but it was limited with only 8GB of RAM and I was constantly in swap and running high memory pressure. When the M4 MacBook Pros were announced, I figured I would wait for the Air version because I do not need all the bells of the Pro. Then the election happened…
I figured I better get in before tariffs and all the uncertainties, so when Costco had the M4 on sale over the holidays I jumped.
I will not bore you with a tech review for this thing, but it is incredible, amazing and I’m glad I upgraded. I think my M1 Air was a bit better. It was smaller and lighter, but I think this one will stay with me for longer since it has more memory. I do a lot of things on my server, so I don’t need too much local compute, but when I do, things go FAST.
HOWEVER, there is one game changer. The M4 has an HDR screen. Now, I have a iPhone and iPad, TV and they have HDR, but seeing my laptop screen go into HDR mode to show the HDR photos I took with my phone is incredible. Seeing the color difference between my photos and the ones Melonie took with her DSLR is jaw dropping. I AM A CONVERT. (On a separate note, I’m looking to buy a mirrorless camera because iPhone photos look like ass with all the compute that is happening to make up for the small sensors, BUT IT WILL BE AN HDR CAMERA.)
ITEM THE THIRD:
THIS IS MY JAM (2024 edition): Around August I was looking at the music of the year and was thinking it may be a disappointing year, but I was WRONG. It took a fair amount of time to cut down to my 30 favorite tracks down from a pool of around 80. I think WILLOW had a complete breakthrough year and Charli XCX finally graduated from being your favorite pop singer’s favorite pop singer and holy shit did Chappell Roan pop out of nowhere (for me). Kana Nishino [西野カナ] made her return after a 5 year hiatus and, of course, played live shows in Tokyo about a week before we were there.
Here is the official list. THE BEST SONGS OF 2024:
WILLOW - symptom of life
Chappell Roan - Good Luck, Babe!
The Cure - And Nothing Is Forever
Teddy Swims - Funeral
Charli XCX - The Girl, so confusing version with lorde
Clairo - Thank You
Ginger Root - No Problems
J Mascis - Can't Believe We're Here
Sunmi [선미] - Balloon in Love
Seori [서리] - Kill the day
WILLOW - b i g f e e l i n g s
Kana Nishino [西野カナ] - EYES ON YOU
Allie X - Black Eye
Tuxedo - Back 4 More
HYOYEON [효연] - Retro Romance
Ben Kweller - Optimystic
Jessie Ware & Romy - Lift You Up [Extended Mix]
Ai Tomioka [冨岡 愛] - I Wanna [アイワナ]
ROSÉ - Number One Girl
Purple Disco Machine & Roosevelt - Higher Ground
Charli XCX - 360
Jane Remover - Magic I Want U
Maggie Rogers - Never Going Home
HAYLA - Visions of You
TWICE [트와이스] - One Spark
L'Impératrice - Me Da Igual
Blusher - Rave Angel
The Linda Lindas - All in My Head
Roosevelt - In The Dark
HiTech/Zelooperz - SPANK!
Here is your YouTube playlist, in REVERSE ORDER.
Last year we inadvertently started a tradition where I unveil this list to Melonie and she pretends to care and we watch the videos for all the songs. This year, I upped the game and we went out for dinner at Terzo and then walked the cream carpet at home with this fancy backdrop I made.
Ai Tomioka [冨岡 愛] was my artist of the year. Every song she put out was a banger and it was hard to cut them.
I’ve been following WILLOW for a few albums now and she is crushing it. “symptom of life” is ridiculous jazzy pop which alternates between a 7/4 verse and a 4/4 chorus. Watching her band play this life on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert is one of the most incredible musical things I’ve seen, especially by such a young band. Watch it.
Inversely, watching Charli XCX live is just trash. She is singing over her vocals, no band on stage, may as well just stream her album. I was also disappointed seeing Chappell live. (As discussed in Vol. 7 No. 5). I just can’t imagine spending the truck of money to see this live. I’ll go back to yelling at clouds now.
Otherwise, some other notes:
OBVIOUSLY The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World was my album of the year, but with songs averaging over 5 minutes and 41% of the album is pre-vocal intro(!), it makes it hard to pull out a single track and put it into this list. It’s something to be experienced as an album and has no pop songs or choruses, really. I picked “And Nothing is Forever” if nothing else because it stuck out a lot to me when I saw them live in 2022. It is one of my top songs, but the 10+ minute “Endsong” is probably my favorite.
Ginger Root’s album SHINBANGUMI was incredible (mentioned in Vol. 7 No. 5). It was super cool seeing his album all over in Japan. A Chinese kid, raised in the US, making waves in Japan. This is the world I want to live in. Also, the world he created for the album, which you can enjoy with this playlist.
I was beyond excited to see Kana Nishino [西野カナ] return. I figured after she was married and had a kid I would never hear from her again, as that is not unusual in Japanese music.
Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT was disappointing. Not sure if I’ll keep it.
Clario is definitely on my watch list. She’s been grinding hard for years on Soundcloud and her new album is so good. We heard it playing in Terzo even 😆
Common / Pete Rock put out The Auditorium, Vol. 1, which was a super fun album if you like that mid-2000’s Chicago Yeezy sound, without Yeezy.
J Mascis always puts out solid albums and the new one, What Do We Do Now continues the tradition. I’ll put Underworld in the same bucket and their new one Strawberry Hotel is great. Non-album single “Fen Violet” just missed the list this year.
Other notables, Itzy GOLD, The Linda Lindas No Obligation, Maggie Rogers Don't Forget Me, Pearl Jam Dark Matter, ROSÉ rosie.
There, now you have no excuse to keep listening to that dumb Spotify algorithm feeding you the same 20 songs from when you were in your late teens.
Normally I task Melonie with making me a playlist cover that encapsulates the year in design, but this one has a website that can generate them, so here we are.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR (please mark "ok to print"):
None. I miss your correspondence.
MANDATORY FUN BUCKS MANDATORY UPDATE:
After IMPORTANT MONEY DISCUSSIONS, we’ve decided to terminate the MANDATORY FUN BUCKS program at the Lavely Estates. It’s hard to continually spend money and sometimes at a lower amount. We both feel we have learned the lessons that forcing us to spend the money were meant to provide so we can remove some of the structure around it. Don’t worry, I’m still buying DUMB THINGS that make me happy, but I’ll share them a little less frequently. But I’ve got one for next issue already.
Thank you for your time on this journey over the past two-ish years.
THE HOPE SPOT:
Are you fucking kidding me right now?
FAVORITE THING TO GO IN MY EARHOLES THIS WEEK:
See above.
THIS IS THE END OF THE NEWSLETTER
THE WHIPLASH AND SPEED OF CAPITULATION HAS BEEN PROFOUND.
53 DAYS IS THE CURRENT RECORD.
THAT IS ALL.