Writer Emily Todd VanDerWerff and designer Amanda Northrop, in Vox, have put together a fantastic overview of the episodes that pushed the envelope of television. It’s a fantastically designed and written piece and exactly what how a good listicle webpage should be created.

In many ways, right here is where I write daily. Sometimes it’s just a quick snippet or commentary on someone else’s piece of writing that I’ve shared. I’ve never ever been good at keeping a diary. I’m more of a “commonplace book” guy than writing down what I did that day or how I’m feeling.

Thinking about all of this reminded me of a post by Derek Silvers about the benefits of daily writing. He had a paragraph that resonated with me.

If you’re feeling you don’t have the time or it’s not interesting enough, remember: You’re doing this for your future self. Future you will want to look back at this time in your life, and find out what you were actually doing, day-to-day, and how you really felt back then. It will help you make better decisions.

Writing every day in a journal/diary made a huge difference for him. I wonder if it will make a difference for me? Maybe it might for you too?

Here’s video of Paul DeJong warming up with a young #Cubs fan, wearing a Rizzo shirt, before Sunday’s game. #Cardinals #MLB https://t.co/y3mWNuobTj

— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) June 10, 2019

This is how you make a baseball fan for life.

Warren Ellis, writing in his newsletter Orbital Operations, commented on what he wants to talk about.

Here’s a thing that came up in an email conversation the other week, that I don’t think I’ve ever made explicit to you: herein, I only talk about the things I like.

This was an important decision for me, made some years ago. It is great fun to annihilate something in a storm of arch Menckenesque hail, and I’ve done it in the past. But I came to the place where I questioned its utility here. If I’m spending time and space on something that is bad, then that is time and space not be used to boost the awareness of something good. And that is a poor trade-off, these days.

This is the basic equation, even ignoring the reflex of “I might think it’s bad but you might think it’s good” and “anywhere between one and ten thousand people laboured to bring this thing into the world and they did not intend to make something bad” and all the other shades of grey that generally get lost in the mix.

I’ll only ever tell you about things I think are good. Because, really, that’s all we should be spending our time on, and all we should be raising up into the conversation. Save your badness hot takes for Twitter or some other place where people prefer misery to joy. Start another petition about how the end of AVENGERS: ENDGAME made you sad and so should not be allowed.

Here, we only do the good shit. Okay? Okay.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

Actor Paul Darrow died at age 78. I remember him as one of my favorite characters, Kerr Avon in Blake’s 7. If you’ve never seen the show, it was a science fiction show about freedom fighters against a malevolent empire. Firefly and Andromeda are direct descendants.

Finding this show during my freshman year in college was one of my favorite memories. I had never heard of it, but once I caught an early episode, I was hooked. Avon was obviously one of the standout characters and actually became the lead later.

The best part of learning about the passing of Darrow was learning all of Blake’s 7 is now on YouTube.

Andrew Sullivan, in his weekly column for New York Magazine, had an awesome section on sleep. His whole column is great, but this part made a lot of sense.

Can’t we just accept sleep for what it is — not a means for more productivity, but an integral, simple, enriching part of a natural human life? A means for the body and brain to rest and integrate and heal, as it is for so many creatures on a planet that orbits a sun. Why does it have to be for anything else?

My current regimen is an Ambien, half a joint, “sleep music” on Pandora, and a stupid but charming game, Angry Birds, which I play for a while to keep my mind focused on something that won’t set my imagination off, until the chemical elephant dart I’ve lodged in my brain begins to work, and my Angry Birds skills rapidly decline. Then a ritual of putting on my super-sexy CPAP mask, which inflates my asthmatic lungs and blocked sinuses with a constant stream of filtered air, until a welcome oblivion arrives.

Since quitting the blog, I almost never set an alarm, and wake up when I wake up. This is an extraordinary luxury, I fully understand. But life is short. And this luxury costs nothing.

Not sure I can get away with an Ambien and a joint.

Writing for The Concourse, David Roth is killing it these days. His diatribes against President Trump have been nothing but glorious take-downs. His latest regarding the recent UK state visit sheds a white-hot spotlight on the psyche of Trump.

It’s unquestionably true that Trump wants things. He wants to be noticed, on television if possible, and he wants to appear impressive when he is noticed. He does not want anyone to seem to have more money than he does. He wants a big beautiful piece of the most amazing chocolate cake you ever saw. All of these things he wants very much. But he is accustomed to demanding these things and then either receiving them (the biggest slice of cake, the television appearances) or believing that he has (the respect of other people). All of this goonish entitlement would be kind of darkly funny if Trump were not also president, but that is not the world we live in. It is not clear even today how much Trump wanted to be president, although he also clearly did not want to lose the election he somehow wound up in. It’s always seemed more accurate to say that he’d prefer to be a king, or some other less readily beheadable royal.

This paragraph is delicious.

This is true when he’s in the United States, too; he is happy, if he’s ever happy, when there are other rich people around to give him compliments and tell him how rich he looks and how well he’s doing. This is his class, but they are not really his people. Even with the servile dermatologists and thrice-divorced yacht ghouls and buttery finance lordlings that crowd his social orbit and pay to belong to Trump’s clubs, there are still some latent traces of dirt under their fingernails-these people have to work to make the money to pay those dues, even if that work amounts to a few moments of strained patter during a Botox injection or taking long lunch meetings while underlings hide other rich people’s money from taxation. They’re rich, in many cases entirely richer than any ethical society would permit, but they’re not where Trump imagines himself to be. They’re not where he sees the Next Generation of his legacy.

“Thrice-divorced yacht ghouls” is amazing.

I’m generally okay with giving away a bit of privacy to use tools that treat me as the product. Google and Facebook are pretty notorious for gathering a ton of data on individuals who use their services. I like Gmail and Google Drive, and sometimes Facebook is ok, but I probably should worry more about my digital privacy.

Recently, Curtis McHale pointed me to an old article on The Next Web about privacy with four smart arguments. The fourth one, for me, is the killer.

If someone says they have nothing to hide, ask them to unlock their phone and give it to you for ten minutes. If they hesitate they will have realized it’s nice to keep some things to yourself.

The whole article will make you think twice about privacy. McHale says, “Many of us (including myself) have been far too permissive in the value we give away with our personal data.”

He’s right. Not sure what that means for my workflow, though.

Today is the 75^th anniversary of D-Day.

Dan Lewis, in his Now I Know newsletter, re-shares a story written in 2012 about the failed D-Day dry run. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of this before.

Not enough people are talking about the fact that 2019 is the 50 year anniversary of the moon landing and it makes me sad.

Over the last few weeks, Jupiter and Saturn were in the night sky bright and beautiful. It puts things in perspective. We are small. Fifty years ago we leaped out into the bigness and we should be celebrating… not just on July 20, but all year long.

Every few months, I start having passionate debates with myself about what I want to do creatively. A newsletter may inspire me to restart my newsletter operation. Someone on Medium tells the story of how she made loads of money using the platform, and I want to do the same thing. I think to myself that having a blog is a waste of time and that I should go back to a single-page site and forgo writing online and curating altogether.

I start making lists with scenarios and pro and con columns. I go back and forth arguing with myself about what is the best way forward.

What do I want most? What would make me the most fulfilled creatively?

It’s hard to pin down.

In anticipation of the latest Netflix episodes, The Ringer staff has made a ranking of the first 20 installments of Black Mirror.

I’d flip “USS Callister” and “Hang the DJ,” but the rest is pretty spot on.

I came across this old post from Warren Ellis on his (I think) defunct site, Longwave.

You don’t have to live in public on the internet if you don’t want to. Even if you’re a public figure, or micro-famous like me. I don’t follow anyone on my public Instagram account. No shade on those who follow me there, I’m glad you give me your time — but I need to be in my own space to get my shit done. You want a “hack” for handling the internet? Create private social media accounts, follow who you want and sit back and let your bespoke media channels flow to you.

These are tools, not requirements. Don’t let them make you miserable. Tune them until they bring you pleasure.

That’s the trick — “Tune them until they bring you pleasure.” The caveat to that is if they aren’t bringing you pleasure, then perhaps you should just delete them.

Currently, you’re wasting your time.

Michael Wade with a whole bunch of questions managers ought to be asking themselves. As someone who is terrible at this, I find this list totally refreshing.

What is their baggage? How do they learn? Can they explain it? Do they think they’ve completed their education? Do they know the boundaries? Are they game-players? Can they be trusted? How do they treat others? Are they mindful? Are they impatient? Do they value time? Where are they likely to err? Do they have courage? Do they keep promises? Can they be coached? Do they read? Do they listen?  Do they admit mistakes? What do they fear? What do they want? Do they laugh at themselves? Can they ask for help? Do they think ahead? Would you hire them? Would you re-hire them? Will you dance if they leave?

Praying for something implies that, despite My omniscience, I don't already know what you want.

Prayer insults Me.

— God (Not a Parody, Actually God) (@TheTweetOfGod) June 2, 2019

While I was not disappointed with the last season of Game of Thrones, there was something just a bit off. I said to my friends that I think they needed more episodes to make the twists and the turns feel more real and not rushed.

YouTuber Just Write had that same thought, but explained it way better than I could in a great deep dive into the narrative of Season 8 and the problems the writers/producers created for themselves.

Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean, writing in The New York Times, has a story regarding several Navy pilots encountering unidentified flying objects

What was strange, the pilots said, was that the video showed objects accelerating to hypersonic speed, making sudden stops and instantaneous turns — something beyond the physical limits of a human crew.

“Speed doesn’t kill you,” Lieutenant Graves said. “Stopping does. Or acceleration.”

I dismissed this story initially when it came out and I just read the headline. It came up again in my list of things I should read and I decided to check it out. It certainly has an air of The X-Files all over it. Seriously, these are Navy pilots speaking on the record about these unidentified aircraft.

Still, I bet these sightings are easily explained away by some sort of real world explanation. But what if it’s something else.

As we fast approach the middle of the year, I’ve been working on tweaking my focus for my creative output. I’m reminded of a quote from writer Brian K Vaughan.

Write more, do other stuff less.That’s it. Everything else is meaningless. You can take all the classes in the world and read every book on the craft out there, but at the end of the day, writing is sorta like dieting. There are plenty of stupid fads out there and charlatans promising quick fixes, but if you want to lose weight, you have to exercise more and eat less. Period. Every writer has 10,000 pages of shit in them, and the only way your writing is going to be any good at all is to work hard and hit 10,001.

Basically, I’m going to write more. Where that writing resides is a subject for the future. Right now, look for me here as always.