I’ve been meaning to use one of the million maple seeds that sprout in my yard every Spring as a bonsai starter, and this year I finally did it.
In classic Mike Mode, I planted it and then did some reading on the process. Turns out that the silver maple is a very challenging tree to bonsai, and it 100% shouldn’t be out in direct diligent all day, even in the mild Spring we’ve been having.
So tonight I’ll move the little fella into a shadier spot and then maybe find a thick-trunked azalea to hack down for bonsai-ing this weekend.
It’s been a tough season for the Mets, so far. Last night’s walk-off win over the best team in the league, after being behind three different times in the game, was a taste of the good things that could be around the corner.
The Mets still need better pitching, but it was nice to go to bed happy.
I’ve been playing the daily word game waffle for months (and months and months) and I finally got 100 wins in a row.
While this is a minor achievement in the grand scheme, the game is a way for me to keep in touch with some friends I don’t see as often as I’d like, so I’ll keep playing.
It’s been a long, long time since I had to stand in line to get into a venue a half-hour after the doors opened, but I guess that is what happens when a show sells out weeks early and the crowd is an odd mix of Youngs and Olds.
Widowspeak opened and they were fantastic. I missed them when they came through town last year (thanks, covid). They’re a great live band and I’m looking forward to seeing them again. It was neat, because they’re definitely a guitar band, and the lead player was ripping sick riffs, but they weren’t blowing out the room. It was dialed in so you could appreciate the shredding and the chill vibe of their music. 5 stars.
Duster has been riding their Numero-fueled resurgence hard the last couple of years. The success of the reissue campaign has led to a couple of really good new albums and some touring. It’s still wild to me that a band like this, definitively cool, is playing a club date in Richmond, Va. They were also great. I’m not as familiar with their whole catalog, but it was easy to enjoy. The overall set was louder than Widowspeak, but the chill groove of the songs was still easy to get into. Also surprising was the number of under-21 kids that came out. I don’t think Duster is featured in any weird social media phenomena, it might really just be the kids discovering a band that came and went before they were born. You love to see it.
I’ll also include a picture of Widowspeak featuring the goddamn Broadberry pole that is right in front of the stage(!) and a wider shot of Duster featuring the most phones I’ve ever seen at a club show. It was wild.
I joined twitter in May of 2007. I was in a fun internet beard-growing community at the time, and Twitter was a cool and new tool to help me keep up with my online friends.
I was a staunch “only follow people I know” advocate for a while, but I eventually cracked to follow accounts for sports and sports teams that I follow. My follow list grew from there to include internet people whose work I enjoyed, as well as an occasional author or artist. These days I really enjoy the baseball stats bots and the sneaker drop notices.
I never got into the politics pool, and I think that’s what kept me a happy user for so many years. I didn’t have any interest in the shared outrage community that blew up there.
Twitter was never a perfect place, but I worked hard to keep my corner of it small-stakes and pleasant. I had a nice setup of third-party apps that I had tuned to make Twitter a pleasant experience.
Obviously, that all got fucked up when Musk bought the damn thing and started tearing it down in the name of…what, free speech? The dude is a rich clown and he ruined it. I haven’t deleted my account, but Twitter is off my phone for the first time in a loooong time.
I’m not so old that I can’t find a new way to follow my friends online, but I haven’t made the Mastodon move and I’m not sure I will. I’ve never given up on blogging (despite the occasional time away) and I’ve been glad to see some friends hopping on that train (Adam, Mike, Daniel).
Look at that big beautiful face. That’s my original profile photo, too. There used to be a lot of pepper in this beard.
