After years away I feel an itch to blog more. I want to get back to writing that feels less polished and more personal. My goal is to write something at least a couple times a month. Let’s go.
Backpacking in Yosemite was the highlight of my summer. We started at Tenaya Lake and worked our way back to the valley. Clouds Rest wasn’t in the cards (thunderstorms and 9,000+ foot exposed ridge lines don’t mix…), but we did climb Half Dome. It was my second time up and both times have meant hiking overnight to be on top for sunrise (worth it).
A perk of hiking Half Dome this way is that there’s basically no one else on the trail. We hit the summit about 30 minutes before sunrise (5:15am-ish) and there was 1 other person up top. After making breakfast and relaxing there were maybe 3 or 4 people by the time we headed down. That meant all of the gnarly bits of the trail and cables were empty and free for us to move at our own pace.
As we went down the cables one of the few other people up at that hour paraglided off the top and (presumably?) all the way down to the valley floor. We heard a big yell and looked up to see him gliding around the backside of the dome. Definitely not NPS-approved, but it looked like a blast.
I’ve played less golf this summer than I’d hoped, but it’s been fun to reach milestones and see my game nonetheless improve. I’m on the cusp of breaking 80 for the first time (last 3 rounds have been 80, 84, and 81). The trick is to keep up this consistency as the Portland weather gets soggy. I head down to Bandon again for a week in late November so that’ll be a real test of where I’m at.
I switched back to Instapaper and the simplicity of it leads me to spend more time reading articles. A few recent favorites:
- Matthew Ball breaks down why Roblox can’t make a profit despite being the biggest game in the world. Fascinating in-depth data throughout.
- She Said I Want Something That I Want. What happens when people are not only lonely, but lose what it’s like to desire something, anything?
- Variations on the Theme of Silence. Observations on a sense of quiet and finding oneself.
- Rat Cruise is a fun, quirky newsletter from Vera Brosgol, who is the artist-in-residence aboard the Tiĝlax̂ as it spends 20 days looking for invasive species throughout the Aleutian Islands.
- Tablet Magazine has a thorough profile of Palmer Lucky that’s well worth a read.
Attack on Titan is a fantastic anime series, though also dark in a particularly dystopian way. I deeply enjoyed it and it’s in the category of shows I expect to watch all the way through again.
In a very different vein, The Alpinist is one of the best documentaries I’ve seen in recent memory. It’s a beautiful film, in both story and cinematography. Highly recommended.
