Welcome to five things this week featuring things online and offline I’ve been enjoying…

1 Shot and Forgot

This is such a fun TikTok channel, animated by an enthusiastic host, Dan Rodo, who, by using the visual media of pictures, compressing hours of historical sleuthing into a fast-paced trail of crumbs, one-clue to the next, puts the excitement of research on display. Kudos to him!

2 About writing

Perhaps it is true for most writers, that seeing someone else braving the usual impediments to writing inspires their own writing... A post on Marginal Revolution lead to Jake Seliger's blog and then to Bess Stillman's substack which is the kind of thing that can happen now in this online world. (I remember once visiting a local cemetery where a woman's gravestone had a Youtube link. It was an oddly satisfying way of scratching the itch of a "who was this person?" question, even if only superficially.) I particularly appreciated Bess Stillman's three-part series on writing, the first of which is here.

3 Halfways (Bubble tea places list)

Before summer had even started and the kids had come out of a place with a disappointing experience of bubble tea, my daughter declared that we had to have an "authentic" bubble tea experience. I embraced this project idea, made a list of 20 bubble-tea-offering businesses in Winnipeg, put them on a map, and made a booklet for evaluations. We are halfway through, and even though the summer is winding down, we'll likely continue these random visits. I feel as though the focus on a single experience is both unexpectedly fun and surprisingly educational. Our stops are included among other summer activities and memorialized on the fridge, we've learned a lot about bubble tea, tracked down addresses in the city in areas we wouldn't normally visit, and discussed drink quality and tea place ambiances we wouldn't otherwise, were it not for this mini-project.

A list of places we've tried so far: On Tap Frozen Dessert Bar, Xing Fu Tang, Panda Crepe, The Alley, Icey Snow, Khab Tapioca, Boba Paw, Chatime, Happy Lemon, Dynasty Café.

Christian and I have been to KHAB Tapioca on Pembina three more times, just by ourselves and even invited visiting family members to try out bubble tea there. A close second, ambiance and taste-wise, is the nearby Panda Crepe. The kids were unanimous in liking the drinks from Dynasty Café which offers a small menu of basics. And Xing Fu Tang had a cool fortune-telling cabinet that entertained us as we waited for our orders.

4 Double Fine PsychodYssEy

My siblings turned me on to this Youtube series which Tom Faber describes in the Financial Times this way:

You might expect a documentary of this length to be exhausting or indulgent, particularly when it’s about something so technical, but it is a riveting watch. [...] Here are the mechanics of human creativity, the brutal realities of the gaming industry and the passion and heart of the people who choose to do it anyway.

Recently, watching episodes 12 and 13, I especially liked Tim Schafer's thoughts on how creativity is about momentum (around the 4 minute mark on episode 13). It's not that it's especially insightful but that you get to see what it looks like to put an idea like "creativity is an endless process you should do everyday of your life" into an exercise called "Amnesia Fortnight".

5 Summer’s progress here

There’s this particular tangle of thistles that I like to photograph against the sun after supper and they’ve been a steady marker of the season’s progress… (taken July 26th, August 2nd, August 16th)

The plants going to seed, and those seedheads emptying and turning brown are the visual aid helping me along this ever-forward thrust of time. Summer’s early exuberance gives way now to days gathered like last-minute berries plucked and put into over-full baskets as we leave the field behind, taking a store of fine memories.

Happy Friday!

1. Having a routine just to take a break

Today, I give you no weighty thoughts, no facts or quotes, just this leftover feeling... Yesterday, I broke my self-imposed week-time routine to take the day and celebrate my brother-in-law's birthday. We packed a picnic and spent all afternoon at Assiniboine Park, visiting the Leaf, getting ice cream across the bridge at Sargent Sundae, and touring the English Garden and Leo Mol's sculpture garden. Besides the fact that the outing was itself really nice, that it pleased the generational span of our family and that everything went smoothly, it was also the momentary release of choosing to take the day off without setting any expectation on it that brought a "relaxing into the moment" kind of happiness I wasn't expecting. But I think that contrary to the impulse of wanting to chase that "relief from routine" feeling, it only reinforces (for me) the benefit of having a discipline to help me with this isolated - and isolating - kind of pursuit. I'm happier when I consciously dedicate time to both.

3. Eating

The beginning of the week, and most of the month of July so far, has been unusually cold. After a decadent supper with relatives, we had Christian's brother and mother over for Fish Stew on Sunday. Fish stew doesn't sound appetizing, but I can always trust Nigella Lawson to win me over to something over the course of one lengthy recipe introduction or another... This one, she promised, would resolve my "fissues", and just being provoked to lol, I decided to take on almost two pounds of cod.

Sometimes, I think, it's not about the recipe itself that I want to devote all my enthusiastic writing... sometimes it's better to just appreciate the "a-propos"-ness of food. The supper felt like a healthy pause in the midst of going-out extravagance and it felt warm against the chill. I appreciated it for that.

Yesterday, it was warm, and sunny, and after a day of walking around gardens and plants, we had salade nicoise, just to catch up on all the wax beans our garden has been producing. The day before, I'd said to Christian "maybe plant fewer beans next year?" A second and third serving of the salad and my mind thinks maybe I should hit "backspace" on the comment. Before assembling the salad, I made a riff on this Antipasti by Grossy Pelosi. (What? A salad before a salad? Ah! It's summer dear!)

4. A podcast I like

I'm new to listening to Hard Fork, and press play whether or not I understand the episode titles, only to feel like I'm always learning something new about AI and feeling a little smarter for it. There's a gap between appreciating new ideas and actually being able to explain them to someone else, but still, hosts that help pierce the nebulous nature of this technology are to be commended! (And hey! I learned about the Effort Heuristic!)