Jay Peters, The Verge:

Apple’s next big fall event will take place on Tuesday, September 14th at 1PM ET, the company announced. The event, which carries the tagline “California streaming,” will be another virtual event broadcast from Apple Park.

[…]

New 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros equipped with the company’s custom-designed chips and an SD card slot are also rumored to be on the way.

The one device I’ve been craving for the past year or so has been a new 16-inch MacBook Pro. I’ve outgrown my 11-inch iPad Pro from 2018, a device I thought would be my primary device for years to come. I’ve edited and managed all the photos I’ve posted to this blog on it and written every entry on it, but I’ve run Hugo and written the code for this site on my Mac mini that’s sitting on my desk at home. I want something powerful and portable to do all my work on, including things I only dabble on at the moment, like filmmaking and web design, and a new MacBook Pro would do it.

If Apple announces this device, then you best believe they’re getting all my money, and I can’t wait to give it to them.

Over the past week or so, I’ve been redesiging my school’s website from scratch. I’m using Hugo to build it because that’s what I’m most comfortable with (as dense as it can be sometimes), and even though I’m weeks and weeks away from finishing it, I’ve been enjoying the shit out of the whole experience.

I love design. I love building things. I love trying to solve problems and trying to design something that will be critically important for so many people (parents, students, and staff). The whole experience has been incredibly fun, and it inspired me to make some changes to my personal site. So I cleaned some things up:

• I cleaned up both my header and footer and am mostly showing my About and Archive pages in my header and a simple copyright in my footer
• I updated my homepage to show a list of all my posts instead of breaking them up into sections
• I merged my Colophon page into my About page
• I removed the related sections from the end of my posts
• And I cleaned up a lot of code

I want to redesign the whole thing after I’m done with my school’s website, and I want to clean up the content folder in my Hugo project, as well as the code in my layout folder. I haven’t blogged as much as I’ve wanted to because of how I split my posts into two sections (journal and stream). Sometimes I would want to write a journal-type post but I didn’t have a photo to attach to it, and I didn’t feel like it should go in my stream. I don’t think that split works for me anymore, so I want to merge that and not think about it anymore.

I’m also thinking of removing my Typekit fonts and instead going with something more simple. I’ve been using Public Sans on my school redesign, and I’ve been really enjoying the look and feel of it. I don’t know what font or fonts I would use instead, but I find the search for them super exciting.

Finally, I bought Nova yesterday, and holy shit it’s amazing. What a beautiful and well-made app. I had been using BBEdit for the longest time but Nova is definitely my preferred code editor for now. It makes coding so much fun. And coding is so much fun.

And I’m exhausted.

Last spring, the school board voted to approve a 4-day school week from the usual 5-day week, and that meant adding an extra 50 minutes or so to each day, and boy did I feel those extra minutes today. My feet are throbbing, and the bags under my eyes feel that much heavier.

But one thing I didn’t realize (but that is super obvious in hindsight) is that I got to spend even more time with the kids, and I think that’s totally worth the longer days. I’m eager to return tomorrow, and I’m ready to do what I can to make this next year a great one.

Also, about two weeks ago, the exchange student from Germany flew into Missoula and met her host family, and today was her first day of school, too. I wrote about this back in April, and let me just say, she is simply awesome. Funny story: she had a nightmare the other night where she was at school but she kept entering the wrong classrooms. She somehow ended up in the elementary school and was with the little kids, and she was just worried that she would get lost on her first day because our little school is bigger than her school in Germany. But after today, it looked like her worries were just that, worries. I haven’t talked to her about her first day yet, but I’m hoping it was okay.

Sometimes my job can be stressful, and I’ve thought about quitting a few times in the past year, but it is moments like these that remind me how cool my job can be. Here’s to a great year for everyone!

Today, I completed my Move ring for the one thousandth time in the last one thousand days. The funny thing is that I feel like I’m just getting started. So let’s keep going.

To one thousand more.

This news breaks my heart:

Three members of Chromatics have announced the end of the electro-pop band. Ruth Radelet, Adam Miller, and Nat Walker signed a statement that was shared on Radalet and Miller’s Instagram accounts. “After a long period of reflection, the three of us have made the difficult decision to end Chromatics,” the statement reads. “We would like to thank all of our fans and the friends we have made along the way—we are eternally grateful for your love and support.”

I first heard of Chromatics when After Dark was released back in 2007. I was in college then, and I spent much of my free time downloading and listening to all the music I could get my hands on. Since then, I’ve purchased more of their albums, with Closer to Grey (embedded above) a particular favorite.

Kill for Love is another favorite:

I give all the members of Chromatics my best.

Tatsuki Fujimoto, the creator of Chainsaw Man, a manga I read earlier this year and really enjoyed, released a new one-shot called Look Back, a beautiful story about two middle schoolers who aspire to become manga artists.

Needless to say, I really enjoyed it. It has the same beautiful art style that I was fond of in Chainsaw Man, and the story was just beautifully told and tragic. It also has this little scene that I completely related to:

“Just draw, stupid!” is great advice, regardless of your artistic ability. It’s fun, it pulls you out of the world for a bit, and you have something to show once you’re all done. I highly recommend both.

That’s the current air quality index in my part of Montana. The air quality here has been unhealthy for weeks, but I’ve never seen the index so high. I can taste the air; it’s gross. There have been a few times in the last week where I felt lightheaded and where my throat hurt, almost like I had a sore throat but didn’t. A new fire flared up near me a few days ago, prompting evacuations. Some homes burned down. A week before, this same city started enforcing water restrictions on their residents. Our water reserves are at record low levels, and so many ponds I used to see around town have now dried up.

What is this world? Is this how’s it going to be from now on? And what gets me is how powerless I feel. I do not know what to do to stop this, or to at least mitigate it, even if just a little bit. I guess all I can do is just hope it gets better, if it will.

I didn’t really get into comics under after college. It was one of those things I always wanted to get into but for one reason or another (money, mostly), I didn’t get into as a kid. One of the first series I remember reading and loving was the first few volumes of Gotham Central by Ed Brubaker. It told the story of the police officers working in the Gotham Police Department in a world where Batman exists. It was amazing. I loved the noir aspects mixed with superheroes, and it kickstarted my love of Ed Brubaker.

I devoured his Captain America run, read through Incognito and Sleeper, and absolutely ravaged his Criminal series. Over the past year or two, Ed, along with his longtime collaborator Sean Phillips, has released original graphic novels outside of the monthly comic release cycle. These are full-length, 140 or so page stories that are simply incredible.

Over the last few days, I found myself with time to finally get through these stories. It started with Pulp, a magnificent and tragic story of a 1930s crime writer with not much life to live. I followed it with the first volume of his new Reckless series, Reckless, a noir novel set in the 80s that just reeks of 80s nostalgia and horror. And today I read through Friend of the Devil, the latest Reckless novel that takes the horror of cults and hippies to a new level.

Ed and Sean are two incredible artists that have created a world I absolutely love. These are stories I needed to read and experience. I’m continuously amazed at how art can pull me out of my own life and into a world I simply adore. It reminds me that I’m not alone, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

I finally made time to watch Demon Slayer: Mugen Train this evening, and I absolutely loved it. I’ve been without Demon Slayer for almost five months, and I remembered why I loved this series so much the moment I watched the first frame flash on my screen. This arc in the manga was one of my absolute favorites, and I felt like it translated wonderfully on the big screen. Everything was top notch, from the animation to the music to the acting. The studios added some 3D elements that I felt were a bit off, but thankfully, it wasn’t a distraction.

I had to renew my Funimation subscription to watch this, so I guess I’ll try to take advantage and see what new anime I can start. I hear both Fruits Basket and Kaguya-sama: Love Is War are pretty good…

Over the past several weeks, I’ve spent some of my free time going through Essential Craftsman’s series on how to build a house on YouTube, and I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it. For a long time, I’ve had it in mind that someday I wanted to build my own house, and even though it feels like a crazy and far off idea now, I’m hoping that one day I will have a hand in building a home that will last generations. Granted, I don’t know how to use any construction tool outside of a hammer, so this might be something that will take a lifetime to pursue. But hey, nothing worth doing is easy. I am very grateful, though, to know more about drainage and surveying and plumbing and electrical and everything else that comes with building a home. That knowledge feels empowering in the best sense of the word.

I started to spend my time on this because I’ve been at something of a midlife crisis this summer. I’m afraid of tomorrow, of next week, of next year, because I feel like time is moving way too fast and I still don’t know how I want to spend it, and every minute lost scares the shit out of me. I’m slowly (very very slowly) building myself back up, and I’m hoping I come out of this stronger. I just don’t know what I want to do with my life anymore, so I’m pursuing every little interest I’ve ever had in my life, from these crazy ideas to the impossible ones. I want to find that thing or things that say, Yes, this is what Mario was born to do or whatever, because right now I feel lost.