“Nikon’s new ZF is a retro-styled full-frame camera aimed right at our nostalgic hearts”

Antonio G. Di Benedetto, at The Verge:

“After nine years of occasionally chasing the retro-camera-with-modern-features unicorn, Nikon may have finally gotten the formula right.”

Wow, that looks pretty amazing. While I was a long-time Nikon shooter, I came after the FM2, so this nostalgia doesn’t hit me as squarely as it does some. I wish the lens lineup that matched the camera was a little more robust, but this is pretty awesome.

“This Is a Reminder That You’re Probably Oversharing on Venmo”

Brian X. Chen, at the New York Times:

“Venmo has made the contacts list, which can be generated from your smartphone’s address book or your Facebook friends list, viewable to any other user on the app.

"That can make a lot of information public. In 2021, my colleague Ryan Mac, who was then at BuzzFeed News, used Venmo to discover President Biden’s account and personal contacts list. Mr. Biden later deleted his Venmo account.”

I really have never understood why anyone would want information about their payments made public. I resisted even signing up for Venmo for a long time, but acquiesced to friends and acquaintances who were using it. I immediately set my payment history to private, but the quote above led me to look at the “Privacy” section again. There are separate items in there about your Venmo contact list and its visibility that is separate from your transaction visibility. Take a minute to go make sure that all of it is set to private.

Whirlwind Travel Ratings, Part Two

Whew! I spent a month traveling in Europe, flying every weekend, with two long international flights of more than sixteen hours each, so I watched a lot of the shows and movies on my backlog. I covered some of them earlier, so here are the rest:

Secret Invasion ★☆☆☆☆

This is the weakest Marvel show yet. It spends the whole season developing a story that just isn’t very interesting, and the pacing is all wrong—it is slow going until the last episode, which seems to hurry to wrap things up, which it ultimately fails to do; it just ends with everything up in the air. I guess it was setting up the upcoming Captain America and The Marvels? Really not good. Marvel has truly lost their way with this phase.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 ★★★★☆

There’s still one episode to go, but I’m ready to call it a success. It’s really been riffing in a way that could come across as incoherent, but it makes it all work. There’s a comedy-ish crossover with Lower Decks, followed by an exciting, dark episode about the Klingon war started in Discovery, and then back to a more lighthearted musical episode. The cast is great, and the chemistry between the characters gelled very quickly, making this my favorite Trek in a long time.

The Diplomat Season 1 ★★★☆☆

The acting and core characters are great in this opening season. It can veer a little too close to soap opera in moments, but stays shy of getting cringy. Mostly, it’s well-written and well-acted, and the relationships really develop well over the course of this season. I’m looking forward to season two.

Silo Season 1 ★★★☆☆

This is on the verge of being a ★★★★☆ series for me, but it ends with a little too much of the core story unresolved. It’s ultimately a mystery/detective show set in a (possibly?) post-apocalyptic setting. It manages to do quite a lot of world building and establishes a lot of strong characters and mysteries in a relatively short time, but it just doesn’t bring closure to enough of them before the season ends, making it feel like it just stops. Still, I’ll definitely be back for season two.

Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers ★★★★★

I’ve seen these multiple times before, although it’s been many years now. My daughter is now old enough to appreciate them, I think, and she was with me on one of the long flights, so we watched two of them. They both hold up well, although I’m reminded that they are both long movies that seem to go slow and fast at the same time: there’s so much condensed into a movie format, yet so much left unexplored. Now that we’ve seen Middle Earth in a premium streaming format (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Amazon ★★★☆☆), I wish we had a version of these stories in the longer format, with more room to breathe. Still, Peter Jackson managed to do an overall amazing job making movies out of hard-to-translate source material, and I’m happy that my daughter has a good intro to Lord of the Rings.

“The excellent Arc browser is now available for anyone to download”

I’ve been using Arc as my daily browser for a few months now, and have been happy with it. It took some effort to get used to, but it has some nice concepts in it, and it’s fun to see some creative thought going into browser design. I still have some gripes, mostly around how it doesn’t sync some things between browser installations on different computers—I want all my installations to automatically sync and be the same everywhere, and some things don’t sync in Arc—but overall, I’ve really enjoyed my time with Arc.

Recent Movies, July 2023

While I’m on the kick of rating recent media consumption, here are some quick ratings for new movies I’ve seen this year, from best to worst:

Whirlwind Travel Ratings, Part One

As I mentioned earlier, I’m traveling a lot this month, and that means I’ve been making my way through my backlog of things to watch. In no particular order, here are my thoughts about each:

Still on the list:

  • The Boys Seasons 3-4
  • Peacemaker
  • The Witcher
  • Dune
  • Shazam: Fury of the Gods
  • Black Mirror Season 6
  • The Diplomat
  • Foundation
  • Silo

I’ve still got more than 20 hours of travel ahead, so I’ll certainly knock some of those out before I get back home. I’m also keeping up with Secret Invasion and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 2 as they come out, so I’ll add them to the list once they’re done.

The Patriarch

I’m flying a lot this month, and have been taking the opportunity to watch Succession (★☆☆☆☆) and see what the fuss is all about. I’m generally pretty forgiving of rough starts—it can take time for a show to find its footing and set things up. I’m now in the second season, and this is not HBO-worthy in my opinion, and I’m not seeing what the big deal is. It’s an expensive soap opera with two-dimensional characters, and it’s not particularly well-acted.

I thought the same about Yellowstone (★★☆☆☆)—it’s essentially the same show, but set in the West instead of New York. They’re both about a rich, powerful family patriarch who is getting old and is worried about his legacy. He dominates everything he touches, tortures his (mostly terrible) children, and generally chews up the scenery. I got to the second season of both before deciding that they just didn’t have much more up their sleeve and bailed out. They’re both missable, but I’d give the nod to Yellowstone between the two—its characters are better.

“Electric Bike, Stupid Love of my Life”

Craig Mod:

“I’ve long since posited world peace could be achieved if you bought everyone in the world a bike, but now I want those bikes to be electric. I want everyone to feel this silliness, this punch-drunk stupidity of pure love, this sense of cheating the rules, the norms, this sense of ever-present delight. At our worst, humans mindlessly consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our bodies with poisons. At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have gotten more efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will only double down on these gains. Electric bike numbers are up, year over year over year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We can’t help it. The charm is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more people who know, the better the world. It’s a wild notion, this sense of goodness to be had if you just reach out for it. Goodness with no real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines, electric bikes are machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.”

This is a really great essay, and I recommend heading to the link and reading the whole thing.

I’m in Tallinn, Estonia, today. I walked a few miles from my hotel to see the Tallinn Maritime Days, a festival at the marina and harbor on the Tallinn Bay, in the Gulf of Finland. It was a great day, and this essay was timely, as Tallinn is notable for how it is so common to ride bikes and scooters here. Most are electric, and it is wonderful how embraced they are. People of all ages ride them, and there are wide lanes for them—nearly the size of the roads for cars in the main arteries. I hope, as the essay suggest, more people at home get the bug, and we start to demand more infrastructure change, so we can more fully embrace two-wheeled travel.