Lit City Blues

Ah, the annual exercise in futility has arrived! I posted a success rate of 27.5% last year, which isn't bad and better than I usually do, so for this year I really tried to focus down and hone in on things that I think I could actually get done, one way or the other. So, without further ado, here's 10 For 2022: 1. End the year under 200 lbs 2. Get another tattoo. 3. Complete a 200 day Duolingo streak 4. Goodreads Goal for 2022: 25 books! (I've got an official TBR List for 2022 , but looking at many other lists I've got kicking around I've got Federalist Papers , The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Das Kapital by Karl Marx, The Road to Serfdom by Freidrich Hayek, Capital by Thomas Piketty, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and Ulysses by James Joyce are also books I've wanted to read.) 5. Get back to Intermittent Fasting and do it consistently and correctly for the year! 6. Purge and De-Clutter: With four kids, we're accumulating stuff faster than we probably

The second book of the Mistborn trilogy opens with a Final Empire in chaos. Anarchy reigns across the regions as the Lord Ruler's Steel Ministry has vanished with his death. Elend and company have control of Luthadel and are attempting to restore order, but are confronted by three armies that come to lay siege to the capital after it's alleged hidden stash of atium and the political influence that comes with controlling the Lord Ruler's former seat of power. The first army belongs to Elend's father, Straff. The second belongs to Ashweather Cett, the self-declared king of the Western Dominance. The third- and perhaps the most dangerous army consists of Koloss- massive, blue brutish creatures once controlled by the Lord Ruler, but now under the very tenuous control of Elend's former friend Jastes who is buying their obedience with fake coins. With the storm clouds gathering, Vin and Elend discover a set of bones in their keep and realize with the help of the Kondra,

Given the times we live in, the idea of New Year's Resolutions seems idiotic, but I'm doing it anyway because lists are easy to make and strangely satisfying to cross things off of. But before I launch on yet another exercise in mild futility (I do usually get some of these things accomplished), it's time to look back on 2021 and see how I did. 1. End the year under 200 lbs Nope, but it's coming with me for 2022. 2. Get another tattoo (I've known what I want to get for a while, I just need to do it.) Nope. Not yet- but it's coming along for 2022. 3. I want to complete a 200 day Duolingo Streak  I got to 141 days before I fell off the wagon, but I've picked it back up again and I'm pushing 50 days as of this writing. 4. New deck! We got rid of (most of) the old deck this year, but in 2021 I want to finish out the project and get a shiny new one. Success! We did get a new deck done. 5. My Goodreads goal for 2020 was 40 books and I came up short by just a

So, I have three seasons of Babylon Five and a collection of the movies on DVD. It used to be on Netflix for a long time and I kept desperately hoping that it would show up on streaming somewhere else, but it never did until HBO Max came along. Naturally, once we hopped on that train and I found out that they had not only all five seasons but a remastered version of all five seasons I had to hop on that binge-train and check it out. First of all: massive props to HBO Max and WB for cleaning this up. It looks awesome... it even starts with 'The Gathering' (the backdoor pilot/movie that preceded the show by about a year or so, I think) before plunging into the first season and going from there.  Second: it would have been nice to have some of the movies included on streaming too- but given the transition to TNT after the end of the fourth season, there might be some rights issues there as well. (I have no idea how any of that works and maybe that's the reason, maybe it'

A lot of very rich, allegedly smart people entrenched in our elite classes like to make grand pronouncements about how they "understand" the country. Too many of them treat anything outside of Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles as some kind of exotic, dystopian, a foreign country. A lot of them churn out the typical pieces about "working-class voters in the Rust Belt" every four years and leave it at that. The number of writers or journalists that actually attempt to understand what's going on in those parts of the country is vanishingly small. Salena Zito is one . Chris Arnade and his book Dignity: Seeking Respect In Back Row America is another. Arnade left his Wall Street job and ventured into the neighborhood of Hunt's Point in the Bronx and began documenting what he saw there and learning about the lives of the people who lived there. He then headed out across the country- to places like Selma, Alabama, and Cairo, Illinois, Portsmouth, Ohio- al

Netflix & Chill: The Complete Archive (So Far) Editor's Note: Please note that the count is slightly off in a few places because I'm bad at math and I can't count. #1: Filth #2: Save The Date #3: Notting Hill #4: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot #5: Mr. Holmes #6: Moonrise Kingdom #7: Spectre #8: Table 19 #9: The Big Short #10: Doctor Strange #11: What Happened, Miss Simone? #12: Kubo and The Two Strings #13: The BFG #14: Gimme Danger #15: The Secret Life of Pets #16: The Bonds of Roger Moore, Part 1  #17: War Machine #18: Cars 3 #19: The Bonds of Roger Moore, Part 2 #20: Beauty and the Beast #21: Jodorowsky's Dune #22: Rogue One #23: Cake #24: For The Love of Spock #25: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 #26: Burnt #27: No Reservations #28: Wonder Woman #29: The Big Sick #30: The Hunt for Red October #31: The Right Stuff #32: Arrival #33: Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull #34: The Bonds of Timothy Dalton #35: Silence #36: Bright #37: A Futile and Stupid Gesture