SCRAPS!

And with that, another July has come and gone. Maybe it’s because my birthday falls somewhere towards the front half, but it always feels like a special month. Everyone is out enjoying summer and doing what they can to form some new memories. For me personally, I have launched SCRAPS! with the intention of making a more thorough personal diary. There may not have been a lot of articles written so far, but I feel an invigoration in the short window that makes me hopeful that this will replace my former operation of The Private Life. It was a sturdy placeholder, but I needed to have a shake-up to really get ideas flowing again. More than anything, I think I needed that motivation to try and write one of these on a weekly basis, and the checklist nature was not doing it for me. On weeks like this, where there’s not a lot to account for, I don’t want to dedicate a lot of empty space to saying how it’s mostly me beating the heat and attempting to understand how serious that supposed west co...

A few nights ago, I was winding down by doing what I usually did. I opened YouTube and scrolled through the many subscribed accounts to find a tone setter. Somewhere in the mix was a new video by Brad Taste in Music. I was compelled for a few reasons, but most notably because he didn’t post much anymore. Despite once being among the most prolific music reviewers on the site, he had been stepping back (I presume) to attend rehab and address his personal issues. Part of me had assumed he was one of those modern creators, not dissimilar from the Nebula crowd, who was starting to do work exclusively behind a paywall. In an age where a handful of accounts stop by only to post their return address, that was what I had assumed Brad was going to do. Another detail that caught me off guard was the title. I interpreted the initials “S.I.” to stand for suicidal ideation, which convinced me that something was up. For as much as Brad was not my personal friend, nor would I call myself a regular wat...

The summer keeps on rolling. For whatever reason, there seems to be this switch that flips sometimes around May, usually by June, where all of a sudden you go from having one or two highlights per week to having the entire world demand your attention. Of course, I am talking solely about myself, but it feels like we’re just struggling to focus on one thing right now. Two weeks ago was Superman . Last week was Eddington . Next week we have Fantastic 4 , and I’m hoping for the best. We’ve hit a great little period for summer blockbusters (if you can call Ari Aster that), and I’m hoping it can make up for how miserable my movie watching habits have been. My one comment is that I am leery about them updating The Silver Surfer. Not because of any disagreement in the characterization, but because I met the actor who played the 2000s version. For what it’s worth, those movies mean nothing to me, but knowing that Doug Jones is one of the nicest celebrities that I have met in my adult life is a...

As of this moment, SCRAPS! as a larger concept is a blank slate. Although it's based on a previous website, I'm trying to make it easier for me to update. That is why I have released sporadic opinion pieces that I think are interesting enough to publish but not thorough enough to create a constructed essay out of. With this segment, The Rundown will attempt to strip that even further to its core by reflecting whatever period I deem worthy of consideration. It won’t be where I document everything, but there will be enough substance here to give you an idea of where my week has been. To start with, last Tuesday was my 36th birthday. Usually, I am more self-reflective during that time and tend to ruminate on details that are often trivial. I think 35 was harder just because that was the acknowledged halfway point of this decade, and one that really made me have to grasp what the pandemic took from me. Even as I reached creative peaks and achieved things I never thought I could, th...

In an effort to continue having a productive mindset, I am going to try and make a new tradition. Ever since I was in my 20s, I would write eulogies summarizing the prior year of my life on the eve of my birthday. It was my form of closure that kept me at peace and allowed me to start thinking forward.  But even if I have been able to look forward, a lot of my writing tended to emphasize a backward momentum. That is why I want to try and start a series I am calling “The First Thing,” in which I will attempt to write with the clarity of a new leaf turning over the hopes and dreams for the year ahead, along with whatever insight I want to provide about the greater picture. On the surface, I have not hit a lot of the benchmarks that people in their Mid-30s should’ve achieved by now. While that hasn’t been a source of complaint, there are times where you can’t help but compare yourself to the larger system and feel like you’ve been cast aside, doomed to live out the rest of your life i...

One of my worst traits is that I tend to romanticize aging. More specifically, I place everything into boxes. Depending on how I wish to reference things, a “chapter” will be four weeks or 12 months. Either way, I tend to use that time frame to adjust my expectations into something miniscule and see what my life has ultimately become. Ideally, this helps me put to rest conflicts of my past and start to focus on new adventures, though it becomes more complex as I run into fateful nostalgia and realize that a lot of turning 35 was centered around realizing, nay… accepting, that you’re not hip anymore. The culture doesn’t always make sense, and it’s not always the “kids” who I’m pointing at. To start at the beginning, turning 35 came with a lot of inner turmoil for a few reasons. The most notable was that of chapters, it was THE chapter that I tend to place a denouement inside to reflect a longer arc. It’s the one where the lengthy projects have to start amounting to something because, in...

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve tried to find pleasures outside of my central interests. This has largely come in the way of yard work and maintenance, which finds me looking at small problems around the house and trying to fix them. Even if I wouldn’t call myself an expert on anything, there is still that drive to find a new way to see the world and appreciate what makes the larger infrastructure operate. That is why the greatest gift I got for Christmas in 2024 was a hobby kit. Consider this a shill for the company, This Month’s Craft, which has really delivered on things outside my comfort zone. Even as I ask how long they can ship out hobbies before we repeat, they have delivered something that, at worst, piques my interest and forces me to ask what I will do to make the most of things. Ironically, everything started off on a somewhat horrible note. Month 1 (January) was wood caving for a bird. As the joke in The Simpsons would suggest, “That’s a fine looking barbecue pit… WH...

If I could get hold of Christopher Nolan, there is one story that I would like to pitch to him. As the modern progenitor of films that play with the concept of time, I think that he hasn’t tackled the ultimate struggle. Sure, Memento and Tenet go far in making us recontextualize our relationship, but that’s nothing compared to reality. I’m talking about a very specific experience that would be right up his alley, allowing for a more human drama that captures the anxieties of man’s decisions right down to the minutiae. I’m cool with him adapting Homer, but maybe next time I want him to consider… jury duty. Is Pauly Shore to blame for the shortage of stories centering around the time-honored tradition? I know that Nolan is British, but that hasn’t stopped him from hopping shores elsewhere. As I’m sure he’s getting into old age and feeling required to do his courtroom drama, he must consider a premise that is more than a conventional murder plot. There is a need to play with time, and n...

If I have one question coming out of How to Train Your Dragon ’25, it’s asking what we expect from art. I recognize that DreamWorks, as a studio brand, doesn’t necessarily promise creative abstraction, even as Puss in Boots: The Last Wish found them turning the Shrek franchise into an effective commentary on our mortality. On some level, there is value in just sitting down and appreciating a story that’s ephemeral and gives you what you expect.  After all, we go to live theater solely to see performers “play the hits.” Unless it’s advertised as such, nobody goes to a local theater to see a production of George Bernard Shaw that goes against the norm. Give us Eliza Doolittle selling flowers. Lose those slippers! There is something comforting in seeing people tell that story. We don’t want them to make it their own, at least on a core level. Maybe they can edit around costumes or actors’ limitations, but for the most part, you get the same thing you got from the last production. Pa...

Sometime around my teenage years, I started writing regular diaries detailing whatever was on my mind. While this stemmed into a more conventional writing career, it was also a chance to process my life on a weekly basis and determine what I felt mattered to me. This evolved from a short-lived Myspace column to its own platform called The Private Life. As the title suggests, it was intended to be a record of where I was at any given time and, for most of that time, I wrote candidly about who I was then with a modicum of success. I say modicum because any documentation will provide a gateway into the past. However, as that column quickly approaches over 15 years in existence, I have found that my goals with it haven’t been that satisfying. The past few years have found me skipping weeks (sometimes months) in order to save fodder for my flagship website The Memory Tourist: itself a mix of personal anecdotes and media criticism that has become one of the most elaborate projects I’ve worke...