Movies & TV
- The Grudge (2004) — hadn’t seen this for many years, still pretty chilling.
- The Jinx: Season 2 — hard to top the shocking finale of season 1. This wasn’t quite as gripping, but still compelling to learn about how Durst’s story played out because for me it got lost during COVID.
- Sting — kind of a cute horror movie, with a happy ending that was on point for Fathers Day.
- Late Night with the Devil — a bit drawn out, but once it gets going some of the effects are truly horrifying, especially the ending.
- The Ritual — another rewatch, this is a solid, even-paced horror movie that’s worth it just to see the creature at the end.
- The Ruins — kind of a schlocky horror movie, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn to it.
Reading
Hit a lull with reading this month, but there was one thing I noted that resonated with me. Sidebar is taking a break by Sacha Greif is a heartfelt account of what it feels like to step away from a personal project. It also serves as a snapshot of the current landscape of design content on the web. As Sacha notes, “design content seems to have either dried up, or else been driven to platforms like Medium and Substack”.
Music
Nothing new this month, but I rediscovered Muzz and listened to the hell out of their self-titled and only album.
Games
I added yet another daily game to my list — Quartiles (subscription required) is a new game on Apple News+ and it’s fantastic. Piecing together 5 words, each one composed of 4 fragments of words, is the first layer of each puzzle which usually goes pretty quickly. But the long tail of each game is in continuing to built out as many shorter words as you can.
Miscellaneous
The highlight of the month was our summer vacation, a long-awaited trip to London and Paris. It was the first time in both cities for all of us, so we went wild and did it all. In London, we did the hop on / hop off bus tour, the Eye, Taylor Swift at Wembley, the Natural History Museum, Buckingham Palace, a proper English breakfast, Picadilly Circus, the Sky Garden, the Tower of London, and Camden & Borough Markets.
In Paris, we did Versailles, the Louvre (just the outside), the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, the Musee de Orsay (just the outside), a boat tour on the Seine, the Eiffel Tower (halfway up via the stairs), the Catacombs, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees, Montmartre / Sacre Coeur Basilica, Moulin Rouge, and Disneyland.
