A book to remind you how amazing it is today
I’m continuing reading Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew. It’s written as a date stamped journal and the combination of casualness and specificity makes me think it really was pretty much his journal with some very editing. It’s great in that it really captures the other work involved in making a film. There’s things like casting tiny roles and getting in touch with musicians for background music. But he goes even more into the details of the work with explaining the plan he has to make it easier to sync the separate audio and video tracks with lower end equipment that doesn’t do it automatically.
Adam Carolla was on Bill Simmons’s podcast recently (today, actually, as I write this) and they talked about Carolla’s rich man, poor man bit. The first example being, “Building a podcast studio.”
Anyway, I’m enjoying parts of Rebel Without a Crew the way that I enjoyed reading in-depth posts about how people set up their podcast studios.
Oh yeah, and on it being amazing today—I mean just the fact that you can record video (with audio synced automatically), slap a filter and some animated text on it, and broadcast it to the world in less than a minute. It’s amazing. Especially contrasted against all the hoops Robert Rodriguez describes in this book.
A book about building one technology crucial to the amazing things described above
If only there was some place online where I could share my status with other people. Close friends. Actually, maybe I’d broadcast it to the world. I’d let them know I went for a run this morning. Actually at this point (3 days of running in a row), I’d update my profile to add that I’m a runner now. If I could tag it with a location, I’d add Central Park in there. And if I could add a photo, I might throw this in there:
Depending on how many characters I had left, I’d mention that I finished Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter this morning.
Instead I’ll just blog about it.
(Great book that I’ll “definitely” write a separate post about. Meaning hopefully I’ll write a separate post about it, because there really is so much in here to talk about. But I want to do more posts that are a bit more about getting my thoughts down, throwing some links together, and <navel-gazing/>)
A podcast about movement and happiness
Oh yeah I forgot I have these cards for things like this. Here’s what I listened to this morning:
I read her book The Joy of Movement to start the year. Actually, I updated my 2020 Reading List last night so I’m just going to go ahead and block quote myself.
… Anyway, The Joy of Movement convinced me to do more cardio this year. (As I’m writing this, I’m 2 days into running the reservoir at Central Park in the morning. Let’s call that a streak.) I even tried a spin class for the first time this year. I see why she says that group cardio classes are one of the things she finds the most joy in.
It appears I already made the bad joke about being overly proud of my running streak. Anyway.
Toward the end, she mentions her book tour. A pattern she noticed is that people have this relationship with exercise where the ultimate goal is finding out how little you can do of it. I’m all for the minimum effective dose, but that’s better for something like changing your body composition. If it’s for joy, you might want the maximum effective time without diminishing returns. (Or something.)
My example is always basketball. I always look forward to basketball. It’s not going to help me build muscle or anything. I’m not very good, either. Still, I find so much joy playing it.
It’s worth finding out what type of movement brings you joy.
(And this reminds me of David Epstein’s Range, which is about generalism and one of the strategies for a career is to sample and then specialize. For joy in movement, the sampling tactic seems like a good one to apply.)
Now I’m forgetting where I heard this, but someone said we shouldn’t invent a pill that captures the end result of exercise. We should invent a pill that makes you want to exercise in the first place. Because the joy of it can really be in the activity itself.