5.1.24
I just finished watching the first season of the Apple TV+ series Silo, which was based on a trilogy of books from author Hugh Howey (the first season covers events in the first book of the series, Wool, but does not complete cover everything that happens by the end of that book). As someone who is a fan of the books (I read them several years ago), I enjoyed it pretty well, but I don't know how the pacing and slow reveals will play to people who aren't already familiar with the world and the deeper level of detail you get from the books.

The set design is pretty solid, and the casting is also mostly done well, although I might have wanted a different actor for the main protagonist, Juliette Nichols—she's played by Rebecca Ferguson, an actor who I generally like (you will probably know her from the most recent Mission Impossible movies and from the recent Dune films), but who plays Juliette with very little nuance and an intensity that can be off-putting and out of place at times.

My main complaint about the show, which I think newcomers to the IP will feel even more acutely than I did, was that they don't do as much explanation of the world as they could, not only the physical structure of the Silo, but also the different departments and their responsibilities and interactions. You can eventually infer a lot of it, but there are still gaps that are important to the plot, and sometimes it feels like they're holding back simply because the most efficient way to explain it would be dialogue exposition or a narrator, both of which the showrunners seem to avoid.

I was happy to hear that the show was renewed for a second season last year, although it's not likely to be released until next year. Hopefully the slow burn will pick up the pace a little bit and find a way to re-engage people who watched the first season and grab some new viewers as well—I'd love to see this show get picked up for another season or two so they can finish out the arc of the entire trilogy.

5.2.24
Last night I went to see a band who I got kind of obsessed with a couple of years ago, an emo band called Spanish Love Songs (their album Brave Faces Everyone found me at a time when I was really struggling with a lot of anxiety and depression, and it resonated with me pretty strongly). I've gotten to an age where it starts to get physically uncomfortable for me to stand for three or four hours for a concert, so more often than not I don't show up for the opening band, but the third band in the four band bill (with Spanish Love Songs headlining) was a group called Oso Oso, whose two most recent albums I own. So I showed up in time to see their set as well.

Spanish Love Songs put out their fourth album last year, No Joy, which is fine but which I didn't connect with nearly as much as Brave Faces. So even though this tour was ostensibly to support that record, the setlist actually featured more songs from Brave Faces than it did from No Joy (and interestingly, they played the first four songs from No Joy—not in order and not consecutively, but an interesting choice).

That was fine with me, as the Brave Faces songs were the ones I really wanted to hear (and out of the five songs they played from that record, they included my two favorites, album opener "Routine Pain" and "Self-Destruction (As a Sensible Career Choice)"), but I was a little disappointed at the length of the set overall—only 11 songs, just about the same length as Oso Oso.

They also didn't seem to have a bassist on stage (even though bassist Trevor Dietrich has been with the band since 2017) and were playing a recording for the bass parts. I think he does a lot of engineering/studio work for other bands for his day job, so it's possible he could have been committed to the recording studio for other projects when they scheduled this tour, but not having him there and having someone playing those parts live was a little bit odd.

I'm glad I finally got to see them in concert—over the past couple of years they have come through the Atlanta area two or three times, but I haven't been able to catch them until now—and I hope they come back again as headliners before too long. But I also hope they'll have the full band with them next time, and that they'll play a set that's a little longer and in line with what you would expect from the main act.

5.7.24
I haven't been to a music festival since the 2007 Virgin Festival in Baltimore, and it's a frustration for me every year that Atlanta's Shaky Knees Festival (typically held in early May) is often the only annual visit that many of the bands I follow will make to Atlanta. Sometimes I'll actually travel to other cities to see these acts either before or after their Shaky Knees appearances, like when I went to Chapel Hill a couple of years ago to see Destroyer, Nilfuer Yanya, and Guided By Voices play separate headlining shows at the Cat's Cradle either before or after their Shaky Knees sets.

But in recent years, some of the bigger acts at Shaky Knees have done supplemental headlining shows at local venues the night before their festival appearances, often playing at midnight as the only act. My first experience with this was seeing Modest Mouse play the Masquerade at midnight in 2021, and I also saw Destroyer play a solo acoustic show at the Earl in 2023, followed two nights later by a midnight show at Terminal West by the Walkmen.

This year there were a bunch of great late night shows associated with the festival, and I managed to get tickets to two of them: Interpol (who I had seen once previously, coincidentally at that same 2007 Virgin Festival that I mentioned earlier) and Arcade Fire, who I've never gotten to see live.

The Interpol show was last Thursday night, and even though it was billed as a late night show, it started at a normal time for those kinds of shows, with the band hitting the stage a little after 9:00. I went to that show with my friend Steve, who is a bigger fan of the band than I am and who has seen them several times before. It was a really great show, and one where they not surprisingly stuck to their first three albums (Turn on the Bright Lights, Antics, and Our Love to Admire).

Arcade Fire was on Saturday night, and it truly was a late show, with the doors opening at 11:00 and the band not taking the stage until after midnight. I went to this one by myself, but I ended up on one of the upstairs balcony railings next to a couple—Jyothi and Dustin—who I had a lot in common with and who I had a nice chat with in the 45 minutes we waited for Arcade Fire to take the stage.

The Arcade Fire show was also amazing, as they played the entirety of their first (and best-loved) album, Funeral (although curiously not in album order). The second half of the set was from across the rest of their catalogue, although it drew most heavily from their 2017 album Everything Now, which might be my second favorite release from them. It was very cool to finally get to see them, and it was also nice to meet Jyothi and Dustin—those interactions with other music fans have become a nice bonus for going out to shows, especially when I go to shows by myself.

5.8.24
I got home late on Saturday night after the midnight Arcade Fire concert, so I slept in a little bit before we walked to the final day of the Decatur Arts Festival. They keep moving this one around, and whoever planned it this year apparently didn't check the calendar to see that they scheduled it for the same weekend as the massive Shaky Knees Music Festival, whose audience has significant overlap with the kind of people who would show up for the Decatur Arts Festival.

So despite some beautiful weather on Sunday, the crowds were relatively light, and one of the vendors that I frequently buy from confirmed that the crowds had been light all weekend. Which is a shame, because there are always some great artists at this one—we've probably bought pieces from at least a dozen of the participants over the years.

This year I got a print of a new work from an Atlanta artist called Keith Two who I've bought several prints from in the past, and a little owl made of old silverware and pewter cups from a guy from Florida. There wasn't as much that I wanted to buy this year as I have in the past, partly because I still have unframed/unhung works from many of the artists whose work I like. But I always enjoy going and walking around.

5.9.24
In the past couple of weeks, I've been to five concerts and seen eight different bands—Belle and Sebastian, Slow Pulp, Death Cab for Cutie, the Postal Service, Oso Oso, Spanish Love Songs, Interpol, and Arcade Fire—and I had planned to cap this off with a trip to Birmingham to see Waxahatchee on Monday evening. I got gotten a front row ticket, and I was excited to see her play with her current touring band, which includes Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman and drummer Spencer Tweedy, the son of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy.

But I didn't get much sleep on Sunday night, and I also wasn't feeling well on Monday, but I was still planning to go, hoping I could tough it out long enough to see the show and drive back home. But as I was making my final decision about whether or not to go, I remembered that Birmingham is in a different time zone, so instead of getting back home before 2:00 a.m., I wouldn't be getting home until nearly 3:00, and that was just enough to keep me from being able to go.

If it had been on weekend night, or if I had realized the time difference and planned to stay in Birmingham for a night after the show, I could have made it work, but there were just too many things that converged to make a go of it this time. I'm still bummed about it—I've seen her nearly every time she's come through Atlanta since 2014, and it would have been cool to see her play in front of her hometown audience, especially from the front row.

5.14.24
The weekend was all about Mother's Day—in addition to celebrating Julie, my mom and Julie's mom live nearby, and we typically do things with each of them. We were supposed to start things off with lunch with my mom on Saturday where we would meet her and my sister at a restaurant that we've taken her to a couple of times before. But my mom reached out to us on Saturday morning to let us know she wasn't feeling well, so we had to scrap that plan (although Will did talk to her for quite a while on FaceTime).

On Sunday we picked up Julie's mom for brunch and took her to a French restaurant called Petite Violette, where they were doing a prix fixe menu where you got to pick one of three or four options for each course. All my elements were subpar, but Julie and her mom both enjoyed their selections, and that was what really mattered. We had a nice table under an umbrella out on the patio, so the overall experience was fine, but I just wish the food had been a little bit better.

As a fun diversion, I surprised Will and Julie with a quick afternoon trip to see the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile, which was visiting a grocery store in Decatur about 15 minutes from our house. We went to see it last year, and although it was a different Weinermobile and a different crew manning it, it was still fun to see it again.

The big event of the day, however, was taking Julie to see the Decemberists at the Eastern. That's her favorite band, and it was a very nice coincidence that they happened to be playing Atlanta on Mother's Day. That was our 11th time seeing them together (and that doesn't include a solo show from frontman Colin Meloy that we saw in a coffee shop back in 2005), which is far and away the band we've seen the most (and also the band I've seen most often with or without Julie).

They aren't that far into this tour—it continues through early August—but they already seemed tired. Maybe it was just a bit of an off night, but Colin wasn't as chatty as usual, and the rest of the band was mostly silent for the entire set (which is unusual for them). They also played four songs from their soon-to-be-released new album, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, and only two songs from the early part of their career (which remains my favorite era).

It also didn't help that they closed the show with one of the new songs, "Joan in the Garden), a nearly 20 minute epic in several movements, including one four or five minute section that was just discordant noise. Maybe a band like Radiohead or Sonic Youth could get away with that kind of passage, but it's very atypical of the Decemberists, and the audience wasn't really primed for it. I can tell that's going to be one of their most divisive tracks—people either seem to love it or hate it—and based on that first exposure to it, we both fall into the latter camp.

It was still a fun night out, but that show probably ranks in the bottom third of the shows we've seen, possibly only better than a show we saw in Baltimore where the sound was terrible, the lighting was terrible, and the band was in a bad mood. We've seen so many good shows from the over the years, so this will likely remain an aberration and we won't hesitate to see them again next time they tour, but it was a little disappointing.

5.15.24
The night after we went to see the Decemberists, we went out to another concert, this time to see Echo and the Bunnymen at the Tabernacle. I saw them back in 1988 at Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham, which was one of the very earliest concerts I attended and also the last US tour with the original lineup before lead singer Ian McCulloch embarked on a several-year solo career and original drummer Pete de Freitas died in a motorcycle accident.

I didn't see the band play live again until 2011, but with their regular touring, the show on Monday marked the fifth time I've seen them overall and the fourth time in the last 15 years. The only remaining original band members are guitarist Will Sergeant and McCulloch—the two reconciled in the mid 90s after McCulloch released two solo albums and Sergeant released an album using the Echo and the Bunnymen name with a new singer—but they've got a backing band that convincing recreates the sound of those early recordings (because no matter what the tour, nearly the entirety of the setlist comes from their classic 1980s albums).

Julie went with me the last time I saw them back in 2022, also at the Tabernacle. Atlanta was their first show on that tour, and McCulloch struggled to get through the set. Whether it was jet lag, illness, being too drunk, or the heat in the building that night (it was in August, and the air conditioning was barely functioning), he had to leave the stage several times for extended periods, and from our vantage point in the balcony, we could see that he immediately threw up once he was offstage on one of those hasty exits.

They played the full set on Monday (minus an aborted attempt at a newer song, "Brussels Is Haunted", which McCulloch called off after the band got a couple of bars into it), but McCulloch was still off, likely due solely to intoxication this time. He actually talked to the audience in between songs more than usual, but he was mumbling and slurring and virtually impossible to understand. And although he still has one of the most unique voices in rock, through age and neglect it's just not what it used to be—he has trouble with the higher notes, and he also can't sustain notes for very long.

But hey, he's 65 and has lived a rock and roll lifestyle for the majority of those years, so it's pretty impressive that he's still able to perform at all. I always enjoy seeing them—the songs from those first four albums are still touchstones in the development of my musical taste—but it's sad to see McCulloch's Shane McGowan-like decline due to alcohol.

5.16.24
The lawsuit against State Farm for underpaying on our insurance claim for the house fire is proceeding very slowly (which is kind of expected given their behavior when the claim was still active during the two years after the fire), but it is moving forward. We finally gave our depositions on Tuesday, going back to back over Zoom with our lawyer and the counsel representing State Farm.

I've never given a deposition or testified at a trial before, but this was relatively easy in terms of answer the questions and telling our story. We have tons of documentation to back up all our claims, and we have nothing to hide about our version of events. I focused more on the emotional side of our story, while Julie focused more on the numbers, and overall I hope we came off as honest people with lots of evidence that State Farm will not want to see in front of a jury.

Psychologically, it really messed me up though. For months after the fire, I had tons of intrusive thoughts where I would replay the events of that day, wondering if there was anything I could have done differently to stop the fire, or at least save the cats. Waking, dreaming, it didn't matter—my mind was consumed. It took me a long, long time to be able to go through the day without thinking of it every five minutes, and I've worked really hard making sure that it doesn't take over my thoughts constantly.

But a big part of my testimony was telling that story, so I had to go through those events again in detail. It's a story I haven't told to anyone in a long time, and after the depositions were over, those intrusive thoughts returned and still haven't really gone away. I've had a lot of trouble sleeping since the deposition, and even during the day those memories have been flooding my brain almost no matter what I'm doing.

I really want this thing to be over as soon as possible for both financial and mental health reasons, but at this point, two and a half years removed from the fire and still owed a significant amount of money by the insurance company, we're will to see this through to the end, even if that means being patient for another year and eventually having to go to trial in front of a jury.

5.21.24
Will's graduation from middle school was last Friday morning, and in addition to Julie's mom, my mom and sister also came in from outside the Perimeter to attend the ceremony. His school is very small, and so was his graduating class—I think there were only six or seven people in his class total. This school ends at 8th grade, but as good as it has been for him the last year and a half, I don't know that we'd keep him there if they had a high school program—the academics are fine, but not outstanding, and our time with them has been more about getting Will the support and attention he needs after a dreadful year and a half at his assigned public school.

He'll go to a high school that is similarly small and focused on students with learning disabilities, but one that is much more rigorous academically, and even though none of his current classmates will be attending with him, we hope it will give him the same type of social experience that this school did while also challenging him more academically and preparing him for some sort of college experience.

Will went out to lunch with his friends and with a former teacher who flew back from the West Coast to attend her students' graduation, and so the family was all supposed to go out to lunch together afterwards. I decided to head home though—I'm still not sleeping well after dragging up all the memories of the fire for the deposition last week, and I was barely able to make it through the graduation ceremony.

5.22.24
On Sunday night, we went to see the live show of a magician named Michael Carbonaro at the Eastern, a relatively new venue where I've seen a ton of concerts over the past couple of years. He used to have a tv show that filmed its first couple of seasons in Atlanta, and we also saw him perform live several years ago at the Tabernacle, so Will was really excited to see him again.

I logged on to get tickets as soon as they went on sale, and I managed to get three tickets in the front row, hoping that this might give Will a chance to get called up on stage to participate in a trick. That planned turned out way better than I would have ever anticipated—our seats happened to be right in front of the stairs where he would come down into the audience, so we were really in prime position.

For the first crowd interaction trick, he approached our seats, and as cool as it would be for me to be part of the show, I was really hoping he'd choose Will because I knew it would mean so much more to him. But he made a beeline for me, and I picked a random sock out of a bag before he chose another audience member to select a different sock. That sock didn't match the one I picked, but that wasn't the trick—Carbonaro then went back on stage and pulled his pants legs up to reveal that he was already wearing the same mismatched pair of socks that me and the other audience member had chosen from the bag.

But we were doubly blessed that night—for a later trick, Carbonaro did select Will, and he got a much longer and more involved interaction with Carbonaro (who made gentle fun of his deep voice and long hair). It really made my night to see Will have that experience especially after I thought there was no way he'd pick another one of our group after he chose me for the first trick. Will and I got gifts for our participation—a signed poster and a skeleton cat pin—which are nice mementos of the experience.

5.23.24
I recently finished Simon Winchester's most recent book, Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic, which, as is the case with most of his works, is well worth reading. It's a typical meandering exploration of all the ways humans have gained and stored knowledge, how that knowledge has been transformed into wisdom, and what the information overload of the past 30 or so years means for how we process, propagate, and understand information going forward, all mixed with personal anecdotes.

I enjoyed this one more than his last one, Land, but not as much as my favorite books from him (The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary and The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, both of which detail important landmarks in our species' collection and organization of knowledge). It was about on par with the book he wrote before Land, The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.

His personal anecdotes can sometimes impose on the larger narrative in distracting ways, and his penchant for long lists enumerating examples can sometimes be tedious, but he's a great writer, and his body of work has remarkable consistency and overlap. It not only documents the growth of humanity's knowledge, but also asks a lot of good questions about where we're going next, and what kind of history we're writing today that will determine our futures. Knowing What We Know isn't necessarily where I'd recommend that people start with this author, but it's not a terrible entry point either, and you should definitely be engaged with his work.

5.28.24
I was supposed to go to the Atlanta United game on Saturday night, but like so many games in this young season, I decided not to go and gave my ticket away to my season ticket holder seatmates. I've had a ton of concerts and other events this season, but even without the direct schedule conflicts, I'm often burned out from so many evenings out, and with this team playing as terribly as they have been so far this season, it's been hard to get motivated to go out to the games.

There are rumors swirling that the coach will be fired during the international break in June, and while that probably couldn't hurt, it's also not guaranteed that the people who run the team will make a better choice with his eventual replacement. Since Tata Martinez left the club after winning the MLS Cup in 2018 (only our second season), we've had three permanent coaches and two interims who took over halfway through the season when two of the permanent coaches were fired (a pattern that seems likely to repeat itself this summer).

2019 is our only decent season since Tata left—we were second in the regular season in our conference, made it to the third round of the MLS playoffs, and we also won the Campeones Cup and the U.S. Open Cup—but much of that was coasting on the momentum and talent from the Tata years. Since then, we've had two seasons where we didn't make the playoffs (and we look to be headed for a third this year), and in the other two seasons we were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs.

For me, going to the games has always been as much about the experience of being in a stadium full of enthusiastic fans as much as it has been about the play on the field, and that part of gameday has deteriorated in tandem with the losing or break-even seasons. On the few occasions when I have gone to games this year, the supporters sections have been at most 2/3 capacity, and I don't recall them ever opening the upper level of the stadium, even for the opening home match. It's still a great crowd, and I do enjoy going with my friends, but I'm hoping we can find a way to make the second half more compelling even if we can salvage this season with a playoff run.

5.29.24
Last night we took Will to the Balloon Museum, a traveling pop-up experience that has been in Atlanta since February or so but which is leaving in a couple of weeks. Portions of the exhibit are outside, and so we've seen them while riding the MARTA, and we've also had several friends go and give good reviews.

I didn't research it too much before going, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but it was pretty cool. You move through a series of rooms, all of which use inflatable objects in some unique and generally interactive way. One of my favorite exhibits (which I guess is what you should call them since they are technically in a self-styled museum) were the giant black balloon in a huge white room that you could push hard enough to smack into one of the walls, leaving a residue from the impact that turned the room into an art collaboration between all the people who had visited.

Two other memorable experiences: a big room that held a giant ball pit (as big as a large residential swimming pool) that you could jump in and wade through while a light and music show were playing, and a room with multiple fog and bubble machines that were lit by strobe lights that immersed you in a surreal rainstorm. Will had a great time—he loves anything weird and interactive, and this experience fit the bill on both counts. But almost every room was fun and worth experiencing, and I was pleasantly surprised overall. I would definitely return if they ever bring it back to Atlanta.

5.30.24
I haven't gotten a new salary line for my team since we were given permission to hire a second data analyst in 2017, but last year I finally got approved to hire a new mid-level systems guy to support the main piece of software that we use to support our office's work.

The process had many of the normal issues when trying to hire here—lack of quality applications, lack of engagement from the HR staff (my main person went on undisclosed leave about three weeks after the position was posted, and he didn't return until December and no one was reassigned to the posting during his absence), and long timelines during the interview and hiring process—but we finally came to terms with one of the finalists, and he starts next Monday. It will be my first time onboarding someone post-pandemic when those of us who are local work a hybrid schedule and I have two out-of-state employees who work completely remotely.

I'm going to try to have the new hire's schedule overlap with me and the systems admin who he'll report directly to, but the new guy actually lives quite a way away, and once we've got him going on projects, I'm hoping that he'll be able to function essentially as a full-time remote employee unless or until he moves closer to the city (his drive is about 90 minutes each way even if he alters his arrival and departure times to miss the worst of rush hour).