Weeknote for 4/7/2019

Site update

🙂

Last Sunday I found out there’s a term for these updates I’ve been posting for the past couple of years. They’re called weeknotes (H/T Baldur Bjarnason). They’ve been around for a while, but apparently they’ve become more popular lately, and there’s a little community of people who post them. So I’ve decided to rebrand these updates so I can join them.

Comics

😐

I didn’t finish my comic reading order by the end of the week, so I decided to take a day or two more and then make myself post whatever I had. I’ll write about it in my next weeknote.

Experimental literature

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The rest of this project month I’m going back to last month’s project and adding the rest of the entries to my bibliography of experimental works. In a future phase I’ll add remarks to give people an idea of why they’d want to read them.

Spirituality

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I didn’t get around to posting about the audio Bible, but I still plan to. Hopefully that’ll happen this week or next week.

TV

🙂

People in my online circles have been excited about Jordan Peele’s revival of The Twilight Zone. It started last week, so I watched the two episodes they’ve released. They’re on CBS All Access, but they’ve put the first on YouTube so you can watch it for free.

I thought the stories had interesting premises and were fairly clever. But after the mind-bending stuff I normally consume, I ended up disappointed that the concepts and twists didn’t go further. I’m hoping I missed some layers of meaning that online commentators can reveal to me. Still, I’ll keep watching.

This is the first Jordan Peele product I’ve seen. I keep hearing good things about him, so I’m thinking of watching his films, even though, believe it or not, I’m very hesitant about watching horror.

Livestreams

😎

Friday I found myself unexpectedly captivated by a livestream of a bald eagle nest that was in my YouTube recommendations. Usually I find wildlife streams kind of boring because either it’s outside but there are no animals around or it’s a cage and the animals are doing nothing. This camera is outside with a clear, close-up view of a family of eagles–two adults and three babies. We get to see them live their normal lives in their natural environment.

And their environment is impressive. I put on the Lord of the Rings soundtrack as a backdrop, and it was very fitting. It’s especially impressive when you see a bird swooping across the peaks in the background and you realize it’s one of the parents coming home from their hunt.

But what really struck me was how ordinary these animals are and how different their lives are from mine. Sure, they look stern and fierce, but it didn’t take long to realize these are just birds doing birdy things. At times they reminded me of chickens. And their calls are a lot squeakier than I expected, like seagulls.

They spend a lot of their time just standing around. Probably keeping watch, guarding the nation. Or their own little nest, I suppose. (How can they live out in the open like that, I wondered, and in such a small home?) They don’t have Netflix to pass the time, but they also don’t have meetings to get to or playdates for the kids. They’re just living, being animals.

Doing my own hunting online I found some more information. The nest is a lot older than I thought. It’s housed several generations and has seen some drama.

• Info on the nest: West End Bald Eagle Cam – Hancock Wildlife Foundation
• More info: West End, Catalina Island, CA – JudyB-Eagles.com
• Updates on nest happenings: West End – Santa Catalina Island – 2018/2019 – Hancock Wildlife Foundation Forum