17SEP2023
Sweet mana from heaven, it is finally cooling down! We got some rain at long last, and the temperatures started hinting that they may have some greater awareness that Fall is, in fact ,nigh. We had one day this last week where the high was under 90ºF and I went a little crazy and bought myself a nice, preppy fall jacket.
Let's get to this week's picks featuring everything from a must have iPad accessory, a great music app, a comic book adaption on Netflix that I'm loving, a crazy bit of cinema history, and more!
Here we go:
- 🏳️🌈 Heartstopper: As we glide in to Fall, this show has been a great, cozy heartwarming watch that just dropped its second season. It's a screen adaption of a wonderful indie comic about a nerdy boy who develops a monster crush on the rugby captain at his school. It's just an overall feel good show, any drama is quickly resolved, and is a really sweet portrayal of high school LGBT love.
- ✏️ Rock Paper Pencil: As I've been getting back in to drawing on the iPad and playing around with making pixel art, I stumbled across the Rock Paper Pencil from Astropad-- It's a game changer! I've tried a bunch of different screen protectors and iPad pencil tips to better simulate writing and drawing on paper. This one takes the cake, and by doing it in a clever way: It's a custom pen tip for the iPad pencil AND a magnetically attached screen protector (so no unseemly bubbles). If you use an iPad and Pencil for either writing or drawing, I highly recommend this.
- 💾 Obsidian Field Guide - The inimitable MacSparky has just come out with a new Field Guide. Over the years, I have gotten a few of his Field Guides to really learn the advanced features of various apps that I like. He's a great teacher and brings a unique perspective as not only a Mac power user (he hosts Mac Power Users podcast after all), but also a lawyer, and serious meditation practitioner. His latest Field Guide covers Obsidian, a powerful personal knowledge management (PKM) app that I've dabbled with but have long wanted to know more about.
- 🛕 The Origin of the PG-13 Rating: We rewatched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom over the weekend, which was so fun. I've not seen it in a few decades, and was thinking while I watched it that it was kind of crazy that my parents let me watch it when I was a kid-- It's got some gruesome scenes! For those who haven't seen it: Think chilled monkey brains served in severed monkey heads for dinner, a Thugee cult's ritual murder ceremony, etc... After the movie, I looked up the rating and saw that my parents had a good case for letting us watch it-- It's rated PG! Upon further investigation, I found that the uproar from surprised parents upon the release of the movie, combined with prompting from Steven Spielberg himself, led the MPAA to create the PG-13 rating just two months after the movie's release. Collider has the full story. || Bonus fun fact: I did not piece together until this watch through that Temple of Doom is actually a prequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark...? I tend to think of prequels as a more recent cinematic trend.
- 🎧 Longplay for iOS: I regret that I can't remember how I found this app, but it's been a lot of fun for exploring my Apple Music collection-- It presents your music as a wall of album art that's sortable by all kinds of fun filters like "Addiction" (Total time you've spent listening to the album -- Mine was Allo Darling's premier album), Negligence (How long it's been since you've listened to it weighed by how much you like it overall -- Mine was Yeasayer's Oddblood), etc. It's great for discovering lost gems in your music collection, and goes some small but meaningful way to replicating the joy of flipping through your CD or Record collection.
That's it for this week. Thanks for taking a look, have a great week!