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What a year it has been. Personally, 2016 was pretty good. Our child is now walking and talking constantly, mostly about Thomas the Tank Engine1. Some of my brothers got married (one literal, two figurative). I developed a fairly consistent note-taking habit, first with Workflowy and then with some Field Notes. Probably worth its own post at a later date.

Having a toddler means I don’t get out as much as I used to, so my Official Dad Best-Of–2016 awards go to Deadpool, the new Ghostbusters, and the newest season of The Venture Brothers. Rogue One was also pretty good.

The Rest Of The World

Professionally, and for the world in general, it has been a goddamn nightmare.

Here’s my list of (mostly terrible) things that happened, month by month, with some good tweets for flavor. I’ll try to avoid the elephant in the room.2

And I’m pretty sure nothing else happened. May we all take these lessons into the next year, lest history repeats.


  1. There is no fairer tyrannical ruler than Sir Topham Hatt. Also, how is the Man In The Yellow Hat not broke? Ten seasons and 4 movies later, Curious George should have put him in the poor house.  ↩

  2. via GIPHY ↩

Congratulations, President-Elect, and best of luck in your two (2) court dates before your inauguration.

Congratulations to white people. You have proven your point, and we must all live with the consequences. I believe it was Maya Angelou that said “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Condolences to Secretary Clinton on a hard fought campaign. I have never respected the cost of wanting to use a single phone for personal and work emails until now.

Shout out to the electoral college for exposing our expertly rigged system, identified by the GOP president-elect. I bet this is one of the first things he addresses when taking office.

Shout out to Antonin Scalia for gutting the Voting Rights Act and then dying, steering the boat towards and then tripling the size of the iceberg. I’m sure the Honorable Peter Thiel will keep your legacy alive for the next 275 years before dying of vampire-related causes.

(Related: Shout out to the 46.9% of the electorate that could not find a way to show up to the polls.)

Congratulations to our future presidential cabinet. Chris “Bridges” Christie. Newt “Moon Base” Gingrich. Rudy “I forgot 9/11 even though it’s kind of my thing” Guiliani. I am sure you all will have our best interests in mind.

Apologies to folks who are not straight white men, whom this will affect disproportionately, as it always has. I will try to be here for you, but if it is too much, I hear Vancouver is lovely.

Shout out to the Chicago Cubs, for siphoning off the extremely limited supply of karma for the year 2016, and taking an advance on the next 4 years.

As always, all glory to Mother Russia.

Let the self-fulfilling prophecy be fulfilled. America has signaled to itself and the entire world that we are not exceptional, and are no longer great. Time to get to work.

successfully migrated to fresh server. hello digital ocean
been a quiet month. time to do some bloggin’

I am a dad and have no time for non-dad-related things anymore. So my year in review, which I produce purely for my own leisure and amusement, is several weeks later than usual (see previous years). As such, it includes one week from 2016, which will then be excluded from next year’s review, if I remember.1

From what I heard of the outside world, 2015 was mostly a shitshow. But Dad Land has been good to me. So in the spirit of Chris Lacy’s …Of The Year posts, I present 2015 Of The Year.

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Ten years, three degrees, three part time jobs, one internship, one full time job, and a rental property later, it is time for us to move on.

I have been trying to not write about our house while it is on the market1, but I need to record this for posterity.

We have an old house, and last night, for the second time this year, a bat has made its way in while the house is locked up at night. Play-by-play:

Jessie (hereafter referred to as “My Wife“, in a Borat voice) goes to the kitchen for a glass of water around 2:30am, and sees a bat (hereafter referred to as Benoit) hanging on a window shade. I prepare for bat battle, and Benoit flies up and down our staircase for a bit. Benoit returns to the bathroom where we believe he entered, where he is promptly shut in, and My Wife and I return to our bedroom to regroup. Animal control is called, but “they don’t deal with that kind of thing2.” They end up getting a police man dispatched to our house (Officer Tinslow, who was really cool about it all). Benoit is now nowhere to be found (obvs), and we assume it has gone back into the wall or wherever. Flash forward to morning diaper change for Jack, when Benoit is found hanging on the drapes right next to the changing table in the nursery. He is not-very-quickly dispatched out that window, and is terrible at gaining altitude when flying in circles.

Some stray observations:

  • Bats are ten million percent easier to deal with in daylight. They do pretty much the same things, but you can see it. They seem smaller.
  • As I said, this is the second time this happened. The first time, My Wife was pregnant, and this time is right before trying to sell/rent out our house.
  • I kept thinking about the Louis CK bit from his last special about calling animal control, where they say they have a guy for that but they go to extraordinary lengths not to call him “the bat man.”

#goddamnitbrian


  1. If you are interested, it has new windows and one less bat.
  2. This is the second time I have heard this from them. The last time was in college, and I was in a dilapidated rental house that had a racoon the size of a labrador retriever living in the ceiling. They had a guy for that too, and when he caught him in a trap and we asked what he was going to do with it, he said he “was not at liberty to discuss it.” Conspiracy theories included moving the racoon to another of our terrible landlord’s properties, or the bad Chinese restaurant down the street (which was shut down later that year).

you guys missed some good deals on shoes today

by my wife

Weather is dumb. Not a fan.

“Weather is dumb. Not a fan.” – my wife