Jacob All Trades #325
Park City, Ricotta Cheese, Stargazing, Losing Snow, AI Sports Columnists, Diego Rivera Murals, Processed Food, Crossword Puzzles, Co-Working and More!
I spent a chunk of last week up at Slamdance and Sundance in Park City, Utah, and… I get it! I get why people go up there. I didn’t have a project at either festival this year, but I was a programmer for Slamdance and ended up with a housing offer very last minute so I took it. It was so much fun to watch films and hang out with people during the festival, but the highlight for me was stopping at Zion National Park on my road trip home.
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Here’s the newsletter for this week (month?). Enjoy!
Jacob
HERE’S AN IDEA: THE PROTEIN CANNOLI
I’ve been eating a lot of Ricotta cheese lately. I have it on toast with berries. I put it on pizza. I forgot how good it is. And, half a cup of ricotta is 14 g of protein. Now, I’m the heaviest I’ve ever been (and it ain’t muscle weight 🫠) so maybe I’m the wrong person to suggest this…. but isn’t ricotta also the filling in a cannoli?
IS THERE SUCH THING AS A PROTEIN CANNOLI?
Okay, I know cannolis are wildly unhealthy. The fried dough, sugar, chocolate chips… but is there a decent version of it that would be healthy? Swap out the sugar for some monk fruit something or other? I am not the guy to make this happen…. but if someone made a protein cannoli, I’d sure as heck eat it. What do you think?
CONSUMPTION JUNCTION
What We Lose When We Can’t Stargaze, an essay by Astrostatistician Roberto Trotta puts into words a lot of my feelings about the nature around us disappearing. From the piece: “The night sky is humankind's only truly global common, shared by all of us across civilizations and millennia. Yet, today a majority of us lives in cities, where increasing light pollution compromises our view of the stars. Even worse, a new kind of threat is rapidly encroaching: thousands of low-earth orbit satellites have been launched in the last five years to deliver global internet connection, and appear as fast-moving dots across the starry sky. According to current trends, by 2030, artificial satellites will outnumber real stars, and no corner of the planet will be spared: the starry messengers shoved aside by instant messaging.”
In this piece, The Feeling of Losing Snow (sensing a pattern here?), two Atlantic writers break down a new study that shows the ripple effects — both environmentally and emotionally — of less snow during winter. “Snow is a reminder that, actually, a lot of the changes we’re dealing with aren’t that incremental. We may not be able to see rising temperatures in quite the same way. But in many cases, those changes are just as sudden and dramatic and are happening faster than people thought they were. The wildfires we saw last year, for example, were wildly out of proportion from anything we’ve seen before. Records aren’t getting broken by small degrees now. They’re getting broken by leaps and bounds.”
“Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers. We asked them about it — and they deleted everything.” That’s a helluva title, isn’t it? The article is even weirder. “It wasn't just author profiles that the magazine repeatedly replaced. Each time an author was switched out, the posts they supposedly penned would be reattributed to the new persona, with no editor's note explaining the change in byline.”
More of the enshittification of everything, led by corporate greed and unregulated capitalism.
WORK I’M JEALOUS OF
I love this title sequence by Imaginary Forces (creative directed by Karin Fong and Tosh Kodama) for the new Percy Jackson series. It’s inspired by art deco murals including the work of Diego Rivera and it’s gorgeous. I often fantasize about what a career in title design might have looked like for me and this makes me very jealous. I also got to interview Karin for an upcoming documentary project and her work and career are quite impressive. Take a look.
SWAP IT!
Usually, the ‘swap it’ section is about a product that’s more environmentally friendly, but today I’m featuring this cool website my wife showed me: TrueFood. On it, you can see how processed a food item is as well as find alternatives that are less processed.
Even though ingredients are posted on food items, there’s something about seeing them as an ‘ingredient tree’ that helps you understand how much stuff is in your food:
RIDDLE ME THIS
I’ve solved the New York Times crossword puzzle with increasing regularity since college. I remember the feeling of achievement when, sometime around senior year, I worked my way up to being able to solve Mondays and Tuesdays more often than not. A decade or so later, I was doing the puzzle daily. I’ve always wanted to construct a puzzle — which would make me a cruciverbalist — but it’s felt daunting. Over the last five years, I’ve started and abandoned half a dozen attempts.
But, somehow in the last two weeks of 2023, I finished my first puzzle and, after that, the dam broke. I’ve made seven so far and submitted three to the puzzle master himself, Will Shortz, and the team at NYT.
Here’s my third, which I made in honor of my dad’s book, Uphill and Into the Wind. Click here, or on the image, to play online.
Anyway, I’m working on a new puzzle in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Frasier series finale in May, and I’d like to present you with this challenge:
What do these words/phrases have in common with “Tossed salads and scrambled eggs”?
LEWD GESTURE
SCHOOL TEACHER
POLIO SCIENTIST
BOSTON TERRIER
SPACE RESORT
TRIDENTS
TIGHTWAD FLORIST
SHOUT AFTER
ATM RECEIPT
“STAR TREK” REGULAR
STUDY HALL RETURNS
Toward the end of last year, I hosted two co-working events and they were super fun and productive. I’m going to start doing them the first Wednesday of every month — so the next one is Feb 7th. Get in where you fit in!
Alrighty, that’s it for this issue. Feel free to leave a comment or share the newsletter using the links below.
Party on,
Jacob
Thanks for the true food article.