As my daughter (who I’ll refer to as W) has grown up over the past (nearly) three years, there have been a lot of moments for nostalgia for my wife. She grew up with a much younger sibling, so she watched and read a lot of things targeted to younger kids. Movies, books, songs and more.

But I, on the other hand, am the youngest. What I remember from childhood starts once I was old enough to form more solid memories. I have vague hints of places we went or things I did when I was truly little in the back of my mind. A family trip to Yosemite, where I was afraid of a steep cliff. Or riding an innertube on Lake Tahoe. But as far as media goes, my memories tend to start later, in elementary school. I know I watched Barnie, for example, but I have no nostalgia for it because I can’t remember it. That, in turn, has limited the amount of little-kid oriented media I feel nostalgia for.

Well everything changed this month, because W’s been getting into dragons. It all started with Dragons Love Tacos – maybe the strangest kids book we’ve read to her so far. But she loves it, and reads it every night. Which ignited deep within me a remembrance of watching PBS as a kid, and loving – what else? – Dragon Tales.

Dragon Tales is a classic. It sat amongst shows like Between the Lions, Zoboomafoo, and... (shudder) Caillou. It followed the classic trope of kids running off to a fantasy land to learn how to deal with their real-world problems. I have fond memories of watching it in my parent’s bedroom on their CRT on a rainy Saturday morning.

Thing is: it’s impossible to find now... except through the Internet Archive, where all the episodes are downloadable. I feel kind of bad for accessing it this way, but when there’s literally no other way to buy or stream it, what is a parent of a dragon-loving toddler to do?

Suffice to say, W is obsessed. Obsessed to the point of shouting “DRAGON SONG” at us until we play the theme song for her. On repeat. For hours.¹

I remember as a kid, my dad would show us cartoons from his childhood. I grew up on Johnny Quest, The Jetsons, Wacky Races, and Underdog. I have nostalgia now for the things my dad had nostalgia for as a young parent. And as I share things from my childhood with my own daughter, someday she too will have nostalgia for the things I did. It’s a big ol’ chain of nostalgia all the way down.

Feels nice. Probably will bump down significantly as the day goes on. That being said, some of the times on here are ridiculous:

In January I made a list of goals for this year. Now that we’re in May, it’s a good time to check up on them:

Downsize ✅

We moved (ironically into a larger place) and in the process found a boatload of stuff to get rid of. Having a garage sale later this month so I’m considering this checked!

Read a book each month ❌

Failed. Missed February and April. But I’m not going to let that stop me from reading the rest of this year. That’s kind of the benefit of an early streak-breaker. It means you no longer have the pressure to uphold the streak, and you can focus on the enjoyment of it instead! The next book I’m starting is Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson. Finding it hard to break into the worldbuilding of it. Sometimes it’s tough to hold it all in my brain.

Brush up on a language ❌

No way. I have not touched a single language learning thing this year. Not happening, sorry past me. Maybe next year.

Establish a workout rhythm ✅(?)

Yes kinda, I’m biking to work maybe half the time so I guess that’s something of a rhythm. Would love to do something for my upper body cause I’m a puny weakling. We’ll see. It’s hard to fit gyms into my life right now, so I guess I need to figure out at-home workouts. Tips recommended.

Use public transit ✅(?)

On rainy or exceptionally windy days when I have the time I’ll take the bus. It’s about twice as long as on bike, but it’s not so bad. Gives me more opportunity to read. Santa Cruz is putting in a bus priority lane on the highway so there’s a good chance my bus ride frequency will increase.

Unlock the power of Costco ❌

Not yet. Still studying the ancient texts.

Well I guess a 50% success rate is alright. It’s ok to make goals and then later realize they aren’t priorities anymore. That’s part of life!

Yesterday, Scott Wiener announced a bill that would see speed governors installed in all vehicles sold in California starting in 2027. I think this is fantastic. And not just the term “speed governor” which evokes the image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Mach 5.

I am so sorry.

Anyways I think it’s ridiculous that we just sell cars that can go 100+ mph and think humans can resist the temptation. But some of the biggest benefits might come at lower speeds.

If you get hit by a car traveling about 25 mph, there’s about a 10% chance of you dying, and a 25% chance of you getting severely injured. That’s the standard speed limit for most neighborhoods (but frankly depending on the neighborhood that can feel too fast).

Say someone’s late for work and trying to shave off a minute of their drive, and they hit you at a speed of about 40 mph. Your chances of death just jumped to 50% and your chance of severe injury is 75%. Basically it’s a small miracle if you’re at all ok after that. 35 mph is a standard for busier city streets and arteries, and I’d wager most people go at least 40 in a 35 zone.

I greatly dislike the culture around speeding. Especially people bragging about how much time they shaved off their 30 minute commute. The fact is speeding often doesn’t get you places noticeably quicker – the risk:reward ratio is terrible. Maybe you save 5 minutes: what are you going to do with all that time on your hands?

That being said, it’s not uncommon for me to realize I’m speeding because I got distracted by something and wasn’t paying close attention. I think it’s a shame we built our country’s transportation infrastructure around a system where people die if a human gets too distracted, and then built our economy around things that distract humans.

Regardless of the reason for speeding, we don’t need it. If we can save lives by limiting the speed of cars, then we needed it to happen yesterday.

This is a non-comprehensive list of some things I want to achieve in the new year. Maybe I’ll set reminders to check in on this as the year goes on.

Downsize

I want less stuff. Every time we move there’s a box or two full of random stuff that just sits in another box or drawer until we move again. Not great! But also so tedious to go through! I’d love to take a week and just really decide what things I need, and what things are weighing me down. And also figure out eBay.

Read a book each month

I read my first full books since high school this year, and I enjoyed it a lot. I always envy readers and bookworms. I have a lot of other media I like that can eat away at my free time (games, shows, films). Zelda especially has just torpedoed my free time. I’ve loved every second of it, but wow is there a lot to do in that game.

Getting off topic. Point is: time short, want read book. I got a couple for Christmas so I’ll start there! To make it more of a tangible goal, I’ll try to read one book each month. I can already tell you I’ll fail but at least it gives me a framework.

Brush up on a language

I took three different languages in school: Spanish in junior high, Latin in high school, and German in college. I’d like to brush up on either Spanish or German in the new year.

Spanish is vastly more practical for me because of where I live, and would be used weekly if not daily.

German is of interest to me because my family is from Switzerland. Ideally I’d love to learn the Swiss-German my extended family speaks, but learning resources are scarce. And nearly all of them are fluent in English so it’s not a pressing matter. Just would feel nice to connect more with that family history.

Then there’s an entirely impractical side of me that wants to learn Japanese. Japan is the Switzerland of Asia in a lot of ways and visiting this past summer made me want to go back so badly. Probably has the most uphill battle to learn though, so maybe I’ll leave that for another year.

My tentative plan is to put on some videos and such while I do dishes or other chores, when my ears and brain are a captive audience!

Establish a workout rhythm

This is such the stereotypical New Year’s resolution, but yeah, I’d like to get fit. Specifically, I want to know what it’s like to feel “in shape”. Especially since becoming a father, there are so many things in my daily life that I think would be so much easier if my muscles were just a bit stronger or my heart and lungs a little more efficient.

How am I going to do this? Not sure yet. There’s a gym club near us that offers childcare so I might try that for a bit. I’ve tried running before and I liked it when I could find the time for it. And Fitness+ gets flack but I’ve done quite a few exercises through it and it’s honestly quite enjoyable.

I’ll end up doing a combo. Or nothing at all. But maybe me saying this into the internet will provide some sense of accountability. Ideally I just want to get into a sustainable rhythm. Doesn’t have to be much, just something.

Use public transit?

This is a tough one for me. Right now I live in the mountains on a somewhat steep, busy, and narrow road with a lot of blind turns. This makes riding a bike a bit treacherous from my home, especially after dark. When the days start to get longer, I’d like to try riding my bike to the bus station and ride the bus to work more often. It tags on quite a bit of extra time in my commute, but I’ve just grown to really resent driving recently. Tough in a car-dependent area of a car-dependent nation.

Unlock the power of Costco

At the end of this year we went to Costco a few times and I forgot how much is there in terms of building blocks for easy meals. I want to come up with some meal plans using Costco stuff to cut down on grocery costs and also make dinner a bit easier at the end of the day.

Well that’s about it. I have some other vague goals of journaling or meditating but I can’t really put it into words yet.

See you in a few months, wall of text.

Earlier this month, I went up the mountain through Boulder Creek to Camp Hammer, a 99 acre parcel of land that is surrounded by Big Basin State Park, the oldest State Park in California. Camp Hammer is full of redwoods, oaks, madrones, newts and squirrels, butterflies and bees. There are hills and gulches, fields and thickets. When the warm sunlight hits the redwood duff that covers its floors, a sweet and dusty smell fills up the space between trees. For 50+ years, Camp Hammer was the home of a joyful retreat every summer, where kids from the surrounding area could step away from the world and seek spiritual rejuvenation. Countless memories and friendships and a whole culture were formed around this place. Its buildings were old, but the woods were older. It was a place where you could drop the personality-masks you had to put on the rest of the year and be your own goofy, vulnerable, true self.

Three years ago, in August of 2020, a freak lightning storm set off the biggest fire in the county’s recorded history, burning over 86,000 acres. 99 of which belonged to Camp Hammer. The fire burnt down nearly every structure in the camp. Only one of its nine cabins is still standing today, along with a couple of sheds, a patio with a fire pit, and a stage nestled in a fairy ring of redwoods. Lost was the dining hall (which produced the most legendary cookies), the fellowship hall, five residences, the pool, and a couple of facilities.

I lived and worked in Camp Hammer for three summers and one offseason, and attended every summer since I was old enough to. It holds immense meaning for me. It was my highlight of my year, every year. I became familiar with the shape of its woods, its shortcuts, secret groves where one could seek quiet. I was devastated by the news of its destruction. The whole community was. The sky was red for days. All of Santa Cruz was blanketed with ash.

I hadn’t visited it since until this month. What I saw and felt was a land that seemed completely re-molded to almost a pre-development state. The curves of the road to Camp become increasingly disorienting as you travel up Big Basin Way . The milestones and guideposts are gone. It’s like a motion sickness, or like you’ve woken up in an unfamiliar home. Since the fire, massive efforts have been taken to cull the trees that were damaged beyond safety. The shape of the woods itself has changed. The redwoods that lost their limbs but still stand are growing back millions of new branches from their trunk, looking like towering topiaries.

Arriving, we drive past the houses my family and friends had lived, now just subtle clearings in the forest. Pulling down the drive into the camp there’s a moment where it feels almost the same. Signs greet you as you travel down the driveway, past the now-drained pond. We pass the community house that I had lived in for a year, now a pile of ground-up foundation. Continuing on, we pass the last cabin standing, and pull in facing the field where the redwood stage is. A fence lines the field, where cabin leaders stood every Sunday to greet their campers. I exit the car and walk onto the field towards the stage. It’s exactly how I remember it. The last time I was there was a month before the fires, sitting on this field for a socially-distanced movie night (My Neighbor Totoro)

Then I turn my back on the stage and look up the hill. For a moment my brain fills the gaps. I can see the dining hall and DK Hall, the staff rooms I slept in, and continuing up to the boys' cabins where I spent my every summer since 2007, all the way up, Redwood 1 & 2, Pine, Maple, Oak, and up the grueling final steps to Manzanita.

But none of that is there. It’s just green. Dense shrubs fill the hill now, covering most of the remaining rubble. It’s like I traveled 60 years into the past, or maybe 1000 years into the far future. There is no bell ready to call for dinner. There is no posse setting off to paddle funoes around the pond. There are no campers sitting on Hamburger Hill making lanyards in the shade of the maple tree. Words leave me.

There are places that we hold so dear. These places, like everything in our lives, are so impermanent. Everything is transient. What remains are the memories and images that fill the gaps. When I think about my Oma, I see a woman so strong in her faith and her love for her family, cutting me bite sized pieces of butter and jelly toast, calling me her schunka bolle. She’s gone now. But my mind fills the gap she left with those memories, and those memories will stay with me forever and inform the choices I make if I have grandchildren of my own.

The memories that fill the gaps of Camp Hammer are many. The buildings are gone but its woods and its people remain, for a moment. And those memories and people will inform the next chapter of camp, whatever it ends up being.

I’m unreasonably excited for Tears of the Kingdom, so I’ve naturally been talking everyone’s ear off about it, including Anna (my wife! ❤️). I was talking at her about the series and why it means so much to me and so many others, and the music came up. I played some songs for her and she recognized a lot of them from TikTok and such.

Then I decided to pack my bags and go full nostalgia trip by listening to a bunch of Zelda music on YouTube. It happens.

I ended up going way back to the start. And something really caught my ear about this music from the first Zelda game.

I’ve been listening to the Apple Music Classical series The Story of Classical, which I highly recommend. In the episode on the Baroque period, Guy Jones (the host of the series and head of curation for the app) plays back Bach’s Partita No. 2 for D Minor. He calls out Bach’s use of double and triple stopping, the technique of playing two or more notes at once across multiple strings, and how it implies chords and accompaniment beyond what a solo violin was typically capable of.

The NES was also limited in the sounds it could output. It could play two melody lines at once, with a few different wave types and varying volumes. It could play a bass line at one volume and only in a triangle wave. It had a noise channel that could be used for drums or perhaps some odd melodies. It also had a channel that could play very compressed samples. The video below has a good overview.

You can guess where I’m going with this. The original Zelda theme does so much with so little. The high melody sticks to the main notes while the harmony line has a bit more fun with it, echoing and iterating on the theme. The bass keeps everything steady and the drums just tap along. But it implies so much beyond those four channels. You can just feel the whole orchestra playing the theme, starting low and swelling to meet those early high notes. Compare it to the 25th anniversary album that fills in the gaps for the theme:

Excellent as well. But there’s something about the necessary minimalism of the original soundtrack that just hits right. I think something about its implied orchestration ties into that sense of wonder and exploration that has so perfectly been captured in Breath of the Wild. What’s behind that mountain? What’s peeking out from around this hill? Who knows, there could be a full orchestra around any corner!

Well I’m heading home! Our last two days in Thailand were very low key. Less bussing around and more walking through neighborhoods.

Went back to The Loft Cafe and had an orange iced coffee which was lovely. The shop seems like it’s run by true coffee aficionados. Framed coffee tasting wheels, Thai coffee magazines, a siphon brewer. Even a roaster in the back but I don’t know if they actively roast their beans. I should have grabbed an espresso in retrospect. The coffee scene in Chiang Mai in general has been top notch. Would really love to come back and seek out the best cafés. 😛

Even the coffee shop attached to the hotel, 49 Coffee, was pretty decent. Lovely setting and design at least. I had an espresso this morning that was pretty good, at least on par with most neighborhood shops in the states.

And two days ago I had an iced latte that took an approach I’d heard of but never tried, at Cup Fine Day: frozen coffee cubes in milk. Scrumptious until you’re left with the cubes. Then it’s a bitter crunch to finish it off.

Suffice to say: good coffee here. Aside from that, great food as well. Had tom kha and phanaeng and both were spicy and scrumptious.

One of the more surprising things I’ve found on this trip is that my hotel WiFi has symmetrical up/down internet speeds of around 100 mbps. In fact, according to Speetest.net, Thailand as a country has a median upload speed of 172.95 mbps. There are probably flaws in this dataset, but that’s still shocking. The USA in comparison has a measly 22.78 mbps average upload speed.

What this means for me practically is I’ve been able to back up my footage every night to multiple cloud services, and it’s finished before I go out in the morning. How lovely! 🥰 I can only imagine how wonderful life would be if these kinds of upload speeds were available everywhere in the states. (Insert futuristic society meme.)

Also - realized today I totally should have watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which is a Thai film. I’ll watch it on the flight back!

In terms of food (the most important terms), today I ate eggs benedict for breakfast, with an iced coffee and some muesli. In the middle of the day, we went up to the mountains, met some elephants and stopped for khao soi for lunch (delicious!) with an iced latte (yes, I needed it) and mango with sticky rice as a dessert. Later, we walked through the night market on the outside of the old city. We went for Greek food at a place that you had to know was there, otherwise you wouldn’t find it. Down this alley and that. I had a falafel “sandwich” (and the falafels were sooo good, not too dry) and a Singha.

It’s my first morning in Thailand. Yesterday we got some coffee (I got lychee iced coffee - so good) and for dinner ate crispy pork belly which was transcendent.

On the flight I ended up watching A Brighter Summer Day and Beau travail. Two very different films. Both good. I feel like maybe I wasn’t quite in the right headspace for Beau travail after A Brighter Summer Day, which is so much more rooted in reality.

Last night I offloaded the b-roll and a few interviews I shot and added metadata in Resolve, renaming the clips using Resolve’s smart renaming using the metadata I inputted. Feels good to finally use that organizational method!

Over the next six days, I’ll be traveling to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to interview some missionaries that the church supports. I thought I’d keep a small travel log here for the heck of it. I don’t know if I’ll keep up with it but at least I’ve started.

Currently, I’m sitting in the international terminal at SFO waiting to board our flight. We have a 14 hr flight to Taipei and then a 4 hr connecting flight to Chiang Mai, Thailand. I’ve downloaded multiple movies that I’ve been wanting to watch but haven’t because they’re either too long to watch after a workday or too heavy. The films I’ve downloaded are:

• Yi Yi
• A Brighter Summer Day (The longest film on the list, clocking in at just under four hours.)
• A Touch of Zen
• Seven Samurai
• Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
• Drive My Car
• Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
• Andrei Rublev
• Stalker
• Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
• Beau travail
• Cléo from 5 to 7 (The shortest film, at an hour and a half.)
• Metropolis

We’ll see how many of these I’ll actually get around to watching. I know I need to sleep but the idea of 14 uninterrupted hours of movie watching time is a delightful prospect.

I’m traveling with some borrowed gear from the church, courtesy of Jamie Rom. I have the Canon R5 shooting in 4K with CLog3 and two lenses: the Canon RF 15-35mm f/2.8 which will be my primary lens, and a 24-105mm for any time I might need a telephoto. The goal is to get tons of b-roll in addition to a solid interview. I’m shooting in 4K in the IPB Light codec flavor, mostly so as to optimize card space as I’d like to avoid formatting cards while I’m on the trip. We’ll see how that goes and if I have to pivot midway.

I was born too late to know the height of blogs in the mid-00s. However I have seen Julie & Julia and I do have delusions of grandeur. So here I am. Where once I simply tweeted my thoughts into the abyss, I shall now blog them furiously into an even abyssier abyss. I’ll probably regret it 👍

Hoping to blog about all sorts of things. Whatever’s interesting to me, I guess. I imagine it’ll mostly revolve around video editing, which I do for a living. I also enjoy taking photos for fun, but I wouldn’t say I’m a photographer. Similarly, I’ve recently been making a simple app for the Playdate called The Drawing Board, but I’m definitely not a developer. I love hearing developers talk tho, and love using beautiful apps. Currently, I’m typing this in Ulysses, which I haven’t cracked open since college. It’s refreshing. :)

See ya ✌️