I’m really liking the new show Poker Face, and I adored this quote from an interview Natasha Lyonne did to promote it:

(She’s the star of the show, but the question was about directing; she directed one episode of the show, and several other episodes of other shows)

I’ve been obsessed with movies, like — OK, this is weird, but if you actually, for reasons unknown to me, slowly took all the skin off my body, and you’re curious what I was made of on the inside, you’d just see a bunch of images, clung together from all these classic films. And that’s actually how I’m still walking, despite all those cigarettes, is that the images, they don’t experience the downside of nicotine. And so the tar keeps them glued together. That’s what celluloid means. And I love problem-solving. And I love improvising. And despite my seemingly maybe wacky nature, I’m a deeply obsessive workaholic, who’s a very precise perfectionist. So I love heavy preparation and exactitude. I like very clear parameters, and then filling the frame within it with as much information as possible. But I don’t actually like lawless chaos. If you’ve been to my house, my bed is always made. I don’t know how to describe it. I just have big hair — that’s the best way I can put it. And I think it’s potentially misleading to people. But I really, really love directing. All my heroes are really, directors. I love acting. The thing that I love with acting, though, is, it’s almost like being a musician. I like the idea that Rian’s a composer, and he’s letting me know what part of the song I can play in service to his album. And I want to do it as best I can for him, and it makes me happy to do it. But with writing and producing and the way it all kind of comes together with directing now, it’s very fun to have pages on set and be correcting them in real time with the actors, as things are adjusting. I also love looking at the schedule obsessively and figuring it out. I love being in the edit, and the feeling of when a song or score lands correctly over a sequence to tie it together is such a joyful experience. I feel very alive when it’s all happening. And I like to not feel dead inside.

Read the rest here: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/natasha-lyonne-poker-face-accent-tripping-acid-new-york-city-rian-johnson-1234659240/

Here’s a video of Raul Esparza performing Being Alive from Company.

One of those interpretations that really wrings the meaning from every word.

Via the replies to this tweet from TV critic Emily Nussbaum on twitter.

Check out this experimental John Cage performance from 1960:

This is some wackadoo shit, and I had a great time watching it.

Via this cool Kyle Chayka thread about minimalism (not sure how minimalist this thing is tbh).

This isn’t officially a Derry Girls parody but it gets at the same joy. Aubrey Plaza is so great.

I feel like this is a weird time of life to become an SNL fan but why shouldn’t I be? Not to damn it with faint praise, but some of it’s funny.

I recently learned about Homebrew Bundle, which seems to come installed when you install Homebrew, the unofficial package manager for macOS.

I had seen a Brewfile occasionally, while lurking on people’s dotfiles repos, but I didn’t quite know what it was, and assumed it was some janky third party thing.

But no, it’s an official part of homebrew¹, and it’s actually quite nice and easy to use. Here’s how I set it up in my dotfiles repo.

First, I added a file called Brewfile in the root of my dotfiles which looks like this:

brew "bat" # cat but with syntax highlighting
brew "cloc" # count lines of code
brew "emacs" # text editor that I have always meant to learn but never actually got around to
brew "fd" # find replacement

There’s more in there, but you get the gist.

I use rcm to manage my dotfiles, so I can trust that when I run rcup, it will create a symlink at ~/.Brewfile which points to this file.

Then, all I need to do is run brew bundle --no-lock --global and Homebrew Bundle will look in exactly that location (~/.Brewfile) and install the packages listed there.

Additionally, rcm has a great feature called hooks, where it will invoke some custom scripts before or after linking all your dotfiles. I decided to add a hook that will automatically run that command after it links the files. It’s pretty easy, I just created a file called hooks/post-up/brew-bundle that looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

set -ex

brew bundle --no-lock --global

Now I can trust that every time I run rcup, I’ll install all of the packages listed in that file. I sync these dotfiles to two macOS computers (a desktop and a laptop) and so it’s very likely that I’ll add a package on one machine and then auto-install it on another.

Nice!

Shout out to Noah Portes Chaikin, whose dotfiles I was lurking on which inspired me to try this.

God bless the YouTube algorithm for surfacing this video to me because I’ve been wondering how the hell they do this for years.

For me, the more interesting question isn’t “how” do they do this (although I am very interested in that!) but also… why?

I can see an argument that it’s more immersive, but for me it’s a common uncanny valley, where I just find myself struck by the clever artifice of how it was constructed instead of paying attention to the characters or story.

I’m going to have this song stuck in my head all week.

Pumpkin cowboy!

I so love to read Giri Nathan’s tennis columns over at Defector, and his post today about Andy Murray is typically excellent: https://defector.com/andy-murray-sacrifices-his-body-and-sleep-to-deliver-another-classic-win

It’s captivating to watch this man spit, scrape, and grimace his way through these victories, as if he’d laid out in advance the most miserable possible task for himself and then slogged through it as punishment.

The first clip embedded in that post had my jaw on the floor.

I slept through more than five hours of this match but was glad to catch the end of it.

It could be that it’s 5:35 and I’m up late watching tennis and half asleep but I adore this performance of “We’re Alright” by Joseph Anthony Camerlengo from 2012:

It’s jolted me back awake.

The album version of the track is way, way shorter and comparatively restrained.

But lyrics like these (“I’m afraid I haven’t sang it enough, but I love you”) deserve to be repeated and screamed until the sound gives out.

One of the most gorgeous, magical scenes I’ve ever seen is footage that accidentally got captured and miraculously recovered of some dolphins swimming.