Shawn Blanc on creating habits.

When you begin a new habit and you’ve started taking action, only commit to it for 30 days or so. And then commit for another 30 days. Then commit for 90 days. Then commit for 6 months.

At first it’ll be fun. But then it will be hard and mundane.

If you start out by committing to do something for the rest of your life you’ll never make it. And how many people can say they woke up at 5:00 am every day for their entire life? Seasons change, needs change, things change, you change. So your daily habits will change, too, and that’s okay.

Start with something you know you can do. And then do it again. And again. Not only is this more realistic, it also is a way to build up trust with yourself. You will feel confident deciding to get up early every day for the next six months because you already did it for 30-days in a row.

I wrote this for Horizon Hobby, and I can be seen in a couple of shots.

Here’s the teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure about this movie and now color me excited. My humble prediction… looks like they might be going after the Nazi Bell.

Still, Harrison Ford is 20 years older than Sean Connery, when he played Indy’s dad in The Last Crusade.

I’m taking a sabbatical from posting on Twitter for December. I still like using and reading Twitter, but I’m not sure I want to remain there. On January 1, I’ll evaluate how I feel and what Twitter looks like in the new year.

In 2023, I’m rethinking my social media presence. I barely use Facebook and Instagram anymore. I looked at other microblogging sites, but no. Twitter is curated to work how I want it to work, but things are changing rapidly in a direction I can’t really support.

I’m not looking to replace Twitter with another microblogging platform. I honestly don’t need to do so. I have this blog where I should post my “microblogging” thoughts, photos, and other things I want to share. It just makes more sense.

So, 2023 might be the year I put my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts into cold storage. I would not delete the accounts; I’d simply delete everything on them and lock them down.

Now I have a month to decide.

Christine McVie has sadly passed away.

She leaves a legacy of amazing songs. I love so much of her writing, but “Songbird” is my favorite Fleetwood Mac song of all time.

Jamie Lauren Keiles, writing for The New York Times, has a piece on Avatar.

A franchise is an ecosystem oriented toward an infinite horizon, in which a common set of characters and stories are constantly refreshed and reworked across platforms.

The whole piece is filled with interesting ideas. The concept of franchise IP is fascinating.

I was not very enamored with Avatar when it came out, and I don’t really care about the sequels. I’m sure they will not be flops, but are people really excited to revisit Pocahontas with giant-size Smurf people?

Metallica’s official music video for “Lux Æterna,” from the album 72 Seasons available April 14th, 2023.

I’m not a massive Metallica fan, but the fact that they just dropped this out of nowhere makes it that much sweeter. It’s the Best Christmas carol I’ve heard this season.

For my money, when a new song drops and immediately there are reaction videos (Justin Harkness Rides Again and Rick Beato), you have absolutely made it.

I love this marketing masterclass video that CNBC has put together.

Liquid Death founder and CEO Mike Cessario spent years figuring out how to make water cool. Now his brand is valued at $700 million. After attending the 2009 Warped Tour, Cessario realized bottled water lacked irreverent marketing like that of energy drinks. With about $1,500, he created a commercial before he had an actual can of water. It went viral and investors saw the potential. Liquid Death has raised $195 million and is on track to reach $130 million in sales by the end of 2022.

I never knew any of this.

I was never on MySpace. I barely use Facebook. I was on Tumblr, but deleted before the takeover. My Instagram has eight posts. I am never going to have a TikTok or a Mastodon account. I have curated Twitter to be absolutely perfect for me. If it dies, I will be sad.

In all likelihood, Twitter will “Fail Whale” soon. Once it goes down, I’ll wait until Automattic, Substack, or someone else decides to take it over. I would rejoin a reconstituted Twitter with better, wiser leadership. I won’t go and “learn” a new social media service.

If Twitter never comes back, I will be sad. However, it’s not like I don’t have other things I should be doing instead.

PS If Twitter kills @TweetDeck and @tweetbot, I will be out. Using anything else is not worth the trouble.

Anne Victoria Clark, writing for Vulture, has a great profile of AEW wrestler, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF).

In the world of professional wrestling, shoot is a term for a performer going off script — usually in a very bad way. When CM Punk, star of three-year-old wrestling promotion AEW, decided to start hurling insults at AEW management during a press conference in September and followed it up with a very real locker-room altercation, it was a shoot — one that would get Punk indefinitely suspended and his AEW World Championship title vacated. This kicked off a tournament to crown a new face of the promotion, during which one of the company’s biggest villains, Maxwell Jacob Friedman (a.k.a. MJF) has emerged as its biggest hero.

Friedman’s persona in the ring is, to put it bluntly, that of an asshole. He wears a Burberry scarf all the time. His tag line is “I’m better than you, and you know it.” He calls people “poors.” He constantly refers to himself as a “generational talent” and “the devil” (his fans are “devil worshippers”). And perhaps worst of all, he’s proudly from Long Island. Parents bring their children to gleefully be insulted by him, fans wait in line for him to scowl in photos and call them names, and people deliberately troll him and bring him homemade gifts to ruin. (In one video, after he drops a fan’s autograph sheet and storms off, the fan yells out, “That’s better than an autograph, bro. You’re the man!”)

I was lucky enough to have met MJF when he was out of character and I found him to be a delightful, smart, and charismatic individual. He was very high on AEW and what the company could create.

Ian Douglass, writing for The Ringer, has a great profile on Tony Khan and AEW.

I was lucky enough to interview Mr. Khan several years ago, right when AEW was just getting started. He was as enthusiastic and excited then as he is now.

Writing for The Atlantic, Marina Koren wonders where the fanfare has gone for the first uncrewed trip to the moon.

She has a point, but I’m happy we are returning to the moon. I think it’s all pretty exciting and I’m really looking forward to the crewed missions.

Maybe I’ll get that For All Mankind moonbase in my lifetime.

Shawn Blanc on action:

Clarity comes through action and experience. Thus, you should focus on getting started and taking action more than you focus on the perfect end result. Optimize for the starting line instead of the finish line.

Instead of committing to a giant, year-long undertaking. Commit to something small and simple so you can get started and get some experience. Then, when you have more clarity about what you are doing and working on, you can continue to mature and build upon that idea, or you can pivot.

British department store John Lewis, known for its wonderfully creative annual Christmas advertisements, shared their heartwarming video for Christmas 2022. It shows a man clumsily but unashamedly learning how to skateboard with the encouragement of his wife, and for a very good reason.

Puddles Pity Party and Postmodern Jukebox provided the soundtrack with a melancholy rendition of the Blink-182 song “All the Small Things."

A tiny bit of wonderfulness is a good thing.

Kevin Conroy, known for his iconic performance as the Caped Crusader over a range of media starting with Batman: The Animated Series, has passed away at the age of 66.

I love this…

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Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer, writing on Platformer:

Musk’s whim-based approach to product development, his rapidly depleting executive ranks, and the very real likelihood of hundreds or even thousands of additional departures at the company in coming weeks threaten to leave Twitter a shadow of its former self. And much of the reason for that is Musk himself: the way he treated his employees and the product they built; the sage advice he ignored; the business fundamentals that he misunderstood.

Musk’s takeover of the company had been so brutish and poorly planned that, we’re told, there was not even a proper handover of the company’s social accounts. As a result, having spent $44 billion to acquire Twitter, for his first week-plus of owning the company, Musk and his team were unable even to tweet from the @twitter account.

Bill Wyman (not the one from The Rolling Stones) has ranked all 240 artists in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for Vulture.

He’s wrong, of course.

First, far too many of the artists included aren’t even rock and roll musicians. Eliminating the country, blues, and hip-hop artists would greatly lessen the load. For example, James Brown is listed as the fifth-best inductee. I would say James Brown never played a lick of rock and roll in his entire career and is flat-out a funk artist. However, Prince is most definitely a funk artist, too. He just played a lot of rock, too.

I could go on, but it isn’t worth it. These kinds of lists are designed to illicit debate and arguments.

Sigh.

Writing for New York Magazine Intelligencer, Jonathan Chiat has a few thoughts on the midterm elections.

Republicans have been trying to create an environment that would allow them to enjoy all the benefits of Trump’s hallucinatory grievance narrative without any of the costs. But the midterms may instead suggest they must choose between mobilizing every last one of his cult followers and maintaining sane, or sane-ish, ancestral Republican voters.

Voters liked that Trump talked like them even though he wasn’t like them in the least. He spoke plainly in a way that resonated with a lot of people. Clinton tried to paint Trump as a serial adulterer and someone not worthy of the presidency. It backfired because the Clintons attended Trump’s wedding and Bill Clinton’s affairs. She could not embody the person who negates Trump’s strengths. People liked Trump and disliked Clinton. And she still destroyed him in the popular vote, and he had to basically land an inside straight to win the Electoral College. Trump is still overwhelmingly an unlikeable character, and the plain way he spoke gave way to his unfitness for office. Voters saw through that and nominated the guy who can negate Trump’s strengths: Joe Biden.

Biden is far from perfect. As a side note, the closest perfect future presidential candidate would be Barack Obama, who I am pretty sure does not want to run again. He would, however, wipe the floor with whomever the Republicans nominate.

As for the 2022 midterms, we still don’t know the ultimate outcome. The House might narrowly flip to Republicans or maybe not. The Senate looks like it will stay with the Democrats. The red wave was really a trickle and really the best midterm for an incumbent president in fifty years. Without the dust completely settled, I’d still say what voters wanted was a return to normalcy.

Nicholas Bate has a thought about writing that I love:

Write, write, write.

Then edit, edit, edit.

Out of quantity you can produce quality.

I have always found Jony Ive among the more exciting creatives working today. It is his vision that catapulted Apple to the level it enjoys. This Wall Street Journal profile by Elisa Lipsky-Karasz is wonderful, but I was struck by this bit about his most current company, LoveFrom.

One of the first employees hired by Ive was a full-time writer. (There are now more than 30 employees, many of whom worked with him at Apple.) Ive says LoveFrom is the only creative practice he knows of to have an on-staff scribe whose job is, in part, to help conjure into words the ideas that his team of graphic designers, architects, sound engineers and industrial designers come up with for its collaborations with Airbnb, Ferrari and others.

I’ve never heard of this practice. More companies should do this.