Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 14

Sketches

I’ve been thinking of doing a sketch series. Once a day, draw something and post it, with a number. It’s an old idea but I’ve heard it works. But I reserve the right to put them all in a neat folder in my Dropbox so that I can very easily delete them all at a moments notice. I’ll probably start in the new year.

Peloton after 6 months

Look man, I don’t own the bike. I just give them some money every month for the videos. The videos are good. They make me feel like I’ve worked out, and that I belong to a weird cult. Sometimes it’s nice to belong to the weird cult, okay? I just don’t see how you improve your health without at least some cult behavior, is what I’m saying.

Last time, I said I was pretty happy with the investment. Since then, Peloton’s dropped their monthly membership for my tier (the non-bike, non-treadmill, just the vids tier) to $13 a month, which means I have to be happier about it.

I’ve been dreading doing this post, though, because I fear that I’ve dropped the habit a little. It’s December though. If you’re going to drop a fitness habit, it’s Christmastime.

This is the data just for the last three months.

Number of types of workout



Fitness Discipline
Count




Cardio
4


Meditation
30


Strength
42


Yoga
13


Grand Total
89



Calories Burned (this would be massively approximate)



Fitness Discipline
Calories Burned




Cardio
142


Meditation



Strength
2310


Yoga
523


Grand Total
2975



Time Spent in minutes



Fitness Discipline
Minutes




Cardio
40


Meditation
240


Strength
695


Yoga
275


Grand Total
1250



Instructor Frequency



Instructor
Number of classes




Aditi Shah
17


Ally Love
2


Andy Speer
5


Anna Greenberg
9


Becs Gentry
1


Chase Tucker
5


Emma Lovewell
1


Jenn Sherman
1


Jess King
2


Jess Sims
5


Kristin McGee
8


Leanne Hainsby
1


Matty Maggiacomo
4


Oliver Lee
2


Olivia Amato
10


Rebecca Kennedy
3


Robin Arzon
4


Ross Rayburn
9


Grand Total
89



Live vs On Demand



Class Type
Count




Live
0


On Demand
89


Grand Total
89

So! Some notes.

I completely dropped doing any live classes. I’m sure this puts me way out of the majority of a Peloton subscriber. One of the big sells is the live classes, where they might say your name and other people can cheer you on. That’s the cult part, which is probably addictive!

I did 89 classes compared to 101 in the first three months. I burned 600 fewer calories. But I spent almost the same amount of time using the app, at around 1250 minutes.

It’s not as bad of a drop as I thought, although I feel like if I actually looked at it on a month-by-month scale, December would be the weakest. That seems completely normal though, and I’m still motivated to use the app going into 2020.

2019 Year in Review - My Blog

In 2019, I blogged 138 times. So, roughly, I put something here every two and a half days.

I used this blog mostly as a logbook of things I was listening to, reading, and watching. I’ve been doing logbook-style posts for years, usually in the form of a linked list. I’ve been doing this on and off for the decade, with the first one appearing in 2011. I always liked a linked list, and still follow lots of personal blogs that do little but this.

In 2019, I learned a few new tricks that helped keep this blog going. I put together some new IFTTT scripts, began using dropbox and shortcuts more, and I learned how to use Airtable. My About page is airtable-heavy now, and those widgets update frequently.

You can break down this blog into a few major categories:

Logbook. I published 56 posts under this category. That’s more than once a week, but I only settled on weekly in the fall. While I was still experimenting with the format, I put these out everyday, like an animal.
Music & Mixtapes. I made 21 ten-song mixtapes on Spotify this year. Not exactly weekly, but not bad. Making playlists is my preferred way of keeping up with the endless wave of new music.
Podcasts. I published 12 new episodes of Fran’s Not Here, a live show I do with my buddy Robert Pilgrim. I’m still working on getting my International Object archive back up on the site. That’s a project I’d like to complete in 2020. That show goes back to 2010. A fucking eternity.
Technology. Some of these are tagged as Shortcuts and Airtable, but I’ve got about 20 posts on technology altogether. Mostly, it’s a little table or script or dingus that I tried. Some of them are still in play, and quite a few help keep this blog going.
Photos. I keep all my photos on Onedrive. I’m not sure when they enabled this, but you can embed any Onedrive photo onto a blog, and I began using this feature a lot this year. It’s helped me keep my photo “months” better organized, and I’ve begun thinking of “top tens” of the month for posts. I also got a DSLR for the first time in 2019, and that’s helped inspire me to take more (and hopefully better) photos.
Video games. I finished seven video games in the tail end of 2019. Video games are so easy to begin, and even easier to collect. But finishing them? Hard, man.

I’m not too surprised that my writing tag is a bit empty this year. I largely gave up on writing my novel in 2019, though it’s still not exactly dead and buried. I’ve been working on this one since (checks blog archive) late 2017. The bones of it are still there, still ready for me to fill it in with some life. Maybe that’s 2020.

I began talking about wellness more on this blog. It’s pretty basic stuff: using an analogue journal for bujo, therapy, and writing. Trying to sleep better. Working out. Using toxic sites less. I want to keep that stuff grounded and easy.

So just to finish this off, I love this blog. I love how it works. I love that it’s just text files that I can fill in with scripts or quick thoughts on my phone. I love how simple it is to go in and mess with any of my old posts. And I love that I have this place that isn’t social media, where there’s likely no audience, and it’s pretty much just for me to show myself how I’m doing, even if that me is pretty far in the future.

Logbook, December 16-22, 2019

My Stuff

Affinity Designer first sketches
Handy Spotify Automations
Fran’s Not Here 45 - Same, but Higher

Articles

4 Rules for Intuitive UX.
I Took Two Kids to The Radio City Christmas Spectacular. They Noticed Things That I Didn’t..
Why Fire Emblem: Three Houses is my game of the year.
Movies Should Be 97 Minutes Long.
Sounding it out: ‘Listening to white noise put my life back on track’.
10 Things You Won’t See in The Witcher.
The False Promise of Morning Routines.

Podcasts

The Critical Path 238: You Can’t Close Your Ears: Horace muses upon Air Pods Pro, Aramco and HomeKit.

Movies

Long Day’s Journey Into Night, 2018 - ★★½. Lonely, heartbroken, aimless, beautiful, but very long and in no way interested in explaining itself. I dig this sort of thing but nobody else I know seems to, and I think they’re getting annoyed I keep clicking on stuff like this on Kanopy.
WarGames, 1983 - ★★. I think I might not like the 80s.

TV Shows

Caught up on Letterkenny. I want to make a few videos about that one. Began watching Oresuki. Not sure about that one.

Video Games

Finished Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I’ll definitely have a blog post later on that one. Going to take January and maybe February off of video games. I really overdid it with Game Finishing Season.

Youtube

The Impact of Final Fantasy 7: The Game that Changed Everything.
Letterkenny: Roald Saying STERRT Compilation.
The secret to desire in a long-term relationship | Esther Perel.

Good Tweets

I’m basically never more a Karen than when I just grab a bag of grapes and then later I’m like, oh, seeds.
The update is a few months old now but I love the subtle UI updates to Kobo. Bold headers and bigger buttons are https://t.co/3IP2D8S1Mb
I’m all over the place with music, but I always tend to come back to The Soft Bulletin. It’s like, my home album. It re-centers me, and reminds me what I love about music. https://t.co/9QT3VX2dkl
I want Fire Emblem Three Houses’ UI as an app. Tell me how much energy I have, what quests need to get done, my friend score with everyone I know and how best to level that shit up.
The good Twitter https://t.co/xTspbLXrWe
Choose, choose the form of the Destructor #unionstation #toronto https://t.co/0qZ4bBAPcH
There’s only the Star Wars I like that you don’t, and the Star Wars you like that I don’t.
One of these years Fran’s Not Here will get on @nowtoronto’s best podcast list [image error]

Fran’s Not Here 45 - Same, but Higher

Listen to or download episode 45

Recorded live at the Free Times Cafe on November 6, 2019.

Sustainable drag queens fights or whatever.

Fran’s Not Here is a show about Toronto, co-hosted by Sawyer Paul and Robert Pilgrim. Read blog posts about each episode. Subscribe via

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Apple Podcasts
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Pocketcasts

Handy Spotify Automations

Spotify is my music subscription of choice (RIP Rdio, still miss ya bud). A good bit of that are the generated playlists like Discover Weekly, which is generally pretty great at what it does: deliver 30 songs a week based on your listening habits. But I don’t get to it every week, and this is apparently pretty common. One of IFTTT’s more popular scripts is its Discover Weekly Archiver, which moves those 30 songs to a private playlist so you can always go back and find them.

To do this, first open an IFTTT account. Then, click here for the automation. Let IFTTT have access to your Spotify account, point it towards your Discover Weekly playlist (this actually works with any generated playlist, like Release Radar) and name your Discover Weekly Archive playlist. Then hit save and forget it.

The other one I have set up is to save any song I “heart” to a playlist. IFTTT doesn’t have a built-in one for this, so Create a New IFTTT, click “This” and choose “Spotify”. Click “New Saved Track”, then click “That.” Choose “Spotify” again, and click “Add track to a playlist.” Name the playlist, and then hit “create action.” Set it and forget it.

Logbook, December 9-15, 2019

My Stuff

Cura, December 9, 2019
I invited people to a party. I didn’t use Facebook

Articles

The Year in Video Gaming.
The lonesome Irishman.
Happy Birthday to Evangelion’s Misato Katsuragi, Anime’s First Millennial.
The Life and Death of Hollerado, a Fun Band Who Spent It All.

Podcasts

The Ezra Klein Show: The moral philosophy of The Good Place with Mike Schur and Pamela Hieronymi

Movies

The Irishman, 2019 - ★★★★½. I’ll be curious to see if Netflix’s affinity for AB testing things will seduce them into turning it into an 8-episode miniseries. That’s what I thought we might do, you know? Watch 30-40 minutes of it, do something else, sleep, whatever. We’d get back to it. 240 minutes later I’m writing this wondering at what point, exactly, I could have cut it. This one made me think about my grandpa a lot. Good long stories. He’s in Florida right now. Escaping the Canadian cold. Probably causing trouble.
Gambit, 1966 - ★★★. I loved the setup but hated the ending. Still, an effortless application of charm keeps it glued together.
The Biggest Bundle of Them All, 1968 - ★. It’s a bad movie, but 2am TCM picks can’t all be winners.

TV Shows

Almost caught up on Letterkenny. I might write up some thoughts on the show since it seems not many people are actually doing that? Speaking of having to write about a show, I finished Watchmen along with everyone else Sunday night. Holy hell, TV, stop being so good.

Video Games

I went a week without buying a video game on sale. Clap for that! I’ve been playing Fire Emblem Three Houses. I’m past the time skip, and I think I’m maybe the baddies? There’s a skull guy in the party.

Youtube

A Guide to The Last Jedi (for the Star Wars Fan Base).
Too Many Thoughts About Star Wars
Panic Attacks
How Baba Is You Works | GMTK Most Innovative 2019

Good Tweets

#affinitydesigner https://t.co/ctMYw6Gep8
I’ll take a Clue remake every two years and a Spider-Man every twenty instead of the other way around please
It’s like my prof’s always told me: if you never ask for 12 million dollars for AI tools for journalism, you’ll never get 12 million dollars for AI tools for journalism https://t.co/KV10sbWKXQ
I’m so mad about the thing only I understand and love.
My new standard of cool: I have no idea how you feel about Star Wars.
I’m getting big “windows phone 7 series phones” energy from the new Xbox name. #XboxSeriesX
I liked Marriage Story a lot more when it was just a silly western in space with laser swords and not this whole thing.
You guys ever have a cutting board just go uhhhhhhh missing?
There’s probably not a better hangover show than Nailed It
#Watchmen https://t.co/n1dpH98jT7

Affinity Designer first sketches

2019 was the year of buying all three Affinity apps. Each has settled into their own space in my life. Affinity Photo has become my RAW editing workspace, and it’s great for quick touchups. I’ve never been a big photoshop user so it was fairly quick to replace it. Affinity Publisher is still years behind of InDesign and may never replace it for me, but who knows? I’m keeping an eye on it. Publisher is fun for single-page layout work.

Affinity Designer is the one I didn’t think I needed and had no real plan for purchasing. Even with an Adobe subscription, I rarely installed Illustrator. But after watching a few really fun tutorials, I picked up Designer and I’ve been playing around with it. Part of that is reading good stuff about it on my favorite blogs, like this one from Julia Evans.

Here’s the first few things I’ve made. They’re loose sketches that are really just me playing with the feature set. Sometimes an app just feels right, and Designer has that over Illustrator. I never truly “got” Illustrator, and Designer seems like a much easier thing to pick up.

I invited people to a party. I didn’t use Facebook

It took more time. I have friends across four different chat apps, and remembering where each conversation lived was difficult. I don’t normally think about this when just talking regularly throughout the day. Remember when there was just one thing? No?

But mostly it took more time because I sent out twenty individual invitations instead of one. Inviting people to a party on Facebook has its conveniences. The site makes a nice temporary page. It even adds the event to your calendar of choice if you set that up.

But it has two major downsides. For one, it’s 2019 and thankfully fewer people are using the service. The other downside is you have to make a spreadsheet.

I made a little table in OneNote. Who was coming. Who was a maybe. Who to send a message to a few days before. Who to send the address to. I could have made a little .ics file too but I doubt people use that feature in FB events anyway. That felt like one coddling step too many. Everyone I know is an adult.

Some people couldn’t come but wanted to, and some people are coming but probably would rather not. I think I got a better sense of that from actually chatting than making a Facebook event. I kind of know the tenor of the room now. I didn’t the last few times because I used FB events.

Facebook is still excellent at obfuscating this process. You see their name and your brain assumes you’ve made a connection. It’s a cheat and they’ve stolen from you. It feels good to ignore its existence.

Cura, December 9, 2019

Note: The playlist embedded above will always be the most recent playlist and might not match the list below.

Cura is my Spotify mixtape. You can listen to it and subscribe here. I keep it as one playlist so it’s easy to subscribe to. I update it fairly frequently, but I also keep an archive playlist so you don’t have to miss a thing.

I hope you like it. I made it for you.

Here’s the track listing for this week:

Northsiders By Christian Lee Hutson

Two Hands By Big Thief

Love’s Will By Bruno Capinan, Rubel, Basia Bulat

Know You Better By Black Pumas

the bottle’s my lover, she’s just my friend By Field Medic

Dylan Thomas By Better Oblivion Community Center, Phoebe Bridgers, Conor Oberst

Bad Luck By Neko Case

In a River By Rostam

Night Shift By Lucy Dacus

Your Girl By Basia Bulat