10.1.25
I wrote a bunch of entries about going to concert in September, but I still didn't have enough space in that month to cover all of them. So we'll start October off with two more concert write-ups that both happened in September, starting with a reunited Rilo Kiley playing the Eastern last Friday night, with the Faint opening.

I've seen the Faint once before, headlining at Center Stage several years back, and despite the relatively sparse crowd, that show blew me away. Musically this performance was just as strong, but since they had to use generic house lighting, they were able to amp up the visuals like the did when I saw them as headliners (that show had some of the best light programming I've ever seen).

Their 80s synth/industrial callback sound (which they revived in the early 2000s but which has seen yet another revival with crop of young artists over the past few years) might seem an odd match for the more traditional indie rock sounds of Rilo Kiley, but Rilo Kiley made their second album (the recently reissued The Execution of All Things) after briefly moving to Omaha and signing to that city's Saddle Creek label, which is where the Faint are from and the label that released four of their albums (including their masterwork Danse Macabre, which was released a few months before The Execution of All Things).

I'd never seen Rilo Kiley live before (although I did see frontwoman Jenny Lewis play with the Postal Service last year), and they were fantastic, especially considering that it had been 17 years since they were last on the road together. It helped that the majority of the songs were from the two albums I'm most familiar with, The Execution of All Things and More Adventurous, but I really enjoyed the songs I didn't know as well.

As with many of the bands I've seen this year who have come out of a long hibernation for a tour, it might be too much to hope that this will lead to new music. But I'm kind of okay with that in this case—it was just really nice to hear these songs breathe in the live context.

10.2.25
I usually try to recover on the weekends, especially if I've been to a concert or some other event during the week, but this past weekend was busy every day. After going to the Rilo Kiley/Faint show on Friday night, I bought last-minute tickets to go see the Braves in their final homestand of the season (there will be no postseason for the team this year).

We just went to see them for the first time this season a couple of weeks ago with our friends Jeff and Connie when they had a midweek special on tickets and concessions, but we usually go to at least one game each season where we have tickets for the Xfinity Club section. I had tried to get those for all three of us a couple of months ago, but Stubhub (which used to be reliable but which has recently turned into a festering swamp of scammers and terrible customer support), after sending me the tickets (including barcodes), retracted the tickets at the last minute and offered far worse tickets than the ones I had paid for, so we didn't end up going to that game.

I took a chance with Seatgeek this time, hoping for a better outcome because they are the official resale partner for all MLB stadiums, but since Julie already had plans that evening, I just got Xfinity tickets for Will and me. They worked as expected, and we had a great time even if the game was pretty meaningless. Despite having a close friend who plays baseball on both his high school team and on a travel team, Will doesn't really care about the nuances of the game, so outings to sporting events are more about the experience than watching the game.

On Sunday, Julie and I capped off the weekend by going to see Lyle Lovett at the Atlanta Symphony Hall. We've seen him five times since moving to Atlanta, with four of those shows at the Atlanta Symphony Hall, and three of them coming since 2022 (including this one). The last time we saw him, in 2023, he just seemed off his game, and the performance dragged a bit. But he seemed much more energetic this time, and although he still clearly struggles with a vocal issue (which has been going on for the past few years, and is noticed by many fans, but which remains unexplained by Lovett himself), it seems like he's learning better techniques to work around whatever's affecting him.

My calendar is relatively empty this week, both at work and during the evenings, so hopefully I'll get a chance to chill out and recover from the full weekend. It was all very fun, but I have a definite limit to how many out-of-the-house activities I can handle in a short span.

10.7.25
I finished watching the Alien: Earth streaming series recently, and despite a promising premise, very high production values, and some very strong early episodes, I'm very disappointed and kind of baffled with where this first season ended up. I don't want to reveal any spoilers, but both the plot and the characters really went off the rails, and by the end it felt like the entire series was just a prologue to the second season (which, by the way, has not been officially greenlit by FX/Disney yet).

One of the main problems, which many, many prestige shows suffer from these days, is that they didn't really give us anyone to root for. Even characters who initially looked like the protagonists who viewers could root for, started making decisions that alienated (pun intended) the audience. By the end, I was far less invested in the show because everyone is looking pretty evil and unredeemable, and you don't really care who comes out on top because none of them are very decent or likable people (or robots, or creatures, or whatever).

If they do get a second season, I'll likely still watch, but if they don't some serious course correction, I can't imagine caring enough to watch an eventual third season if that ever happens. Which touches on another issue with many of these prestige series: the release schedule. Let's assume that Disney gives the go-ahead for season 2 sometime in 2025. That means it won't start production until 2026, and it won't be released until sometime in mid-to-late 2027. And then we go through the same cycle for a theoretical season 3: production in 2028 with a release in 2029.

If that happens, that means we'll end up getting somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 episodes across five years, with a long enough gap between each season for many viewers to forget what happened in the last one or just decide to tune out altogether. If networks are going to continue to invest in shows like this with incredibly high production values that are going to need several seasons to fully tell their stories, they should not only approve at least 3 seasons from the beginning, but also mandate a production schedule that requires a new season each year.

10.8.25
I just finished reading The Devil's Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance by Dan Egan. It's a pop science book that tells about the history of humanity's use of phosophorus, especially for boosting agricultural yields and, for a while, dramatically improving laundry outcomes with its addition to many detergents.

The main thrust of the book is detailing the ecological crisis we've creating with our over-reliance on phosophorus in agriculture, both by depleting this limited natural resource in a fairly wasteful way with no current long-term solution on how to replenish or replace it, and by putting concentrated amounts back into freshwater systems, where it promotes the growth of algae that chokes out native life in those ecosystems.

It was an engaging and education read, and I would recommend it if you're generally interested in science. But although there are still issues to solve regarding more efficiently recapturing agricultural phosophorus (which would also theoretically solve the runoff problems that impact local freswater systems), this problem seems more solvable than some of the many other ecological disasters the human race is causing, most notably climate change.

10.9.25
I didn't see James Gunn's Superman movie (simply titled Superman) in the theaters, but it recently debuted on one of the streaming services we subscribe to, so I watched it last weekend. I'm mostly a fan of Gunn's work (the first season of Peacemaker is amazing, his take on The Suicide Squad was way better than the Will Smith version, and while the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise had diminishing returns, the first film is pretty great), but I was not a fan of the promos I saw that prominently featured Krypto the Superdog, which felt really gimmicky to me.

But I went into the film with an open mind, and I enjoyed it pretty well. The casting of David Corenswet as Clark Kent/Superman is perfect for Gunn's tone—he has a great blend of humility, confidence, humor, and empathy that updates Christopher Reeves' Superman for a modern sensibility and moves away from the dark gravitas that has taken over Superman films (and DC Comics films in general) in the 21st century.

The story was fine as comic book stories go, and I actually ended up really liking the use of Krypto (and the brief glimpse we got of Supergirl (who is getting her own movie next year). I don't know how many times I'll rewatch it, but it has significantly raised the possibility that I'll see the inevitable sequel in the theater next time.

10.15.25
We couldn't take a full week off for Will's fall break this year, but we did manage to take a long weekend away so he at least got a mini-vacation. His previous schools only gave him a couple of days off for fall break, but since he's now in a DeKalb public school, he'll get a lot more time off during the year, because they do a full week off in both October and February instead of the couple of days that he's gotten around those times in the private schools he's attended for the past few years.

We went to Summerville, which is a couple of hours northwest of Atlanta, to visit folk artist Howard Finster's Paradise Garden. They have an Airbnb on the property that you can rent and have free reign of the place after it closes for the day, and since they're closed on Monday, that means if you're staying there that day, you have the entire garden to yourself for the whole day. We've stayed here a couple of times before, and we chose to stay Sunday night through Tuesday morning so we'd have Monday for just us.

We got there on Sunday a couple of hours before they closed, and during our initial walk around the property, we noticed that they had reopened the Folk Art Church building, which has been closed since 1999 due to structural safety concerns. They reinforced and refurbished it, adding new rooms on the main floor that included videos about Finster, installations of a couple of his larger indoor sculptures, and a preserved workshop where he used to paint and make his art.

I was really excited to go upstairs, but there was a sign saying it was temporarily closed, which was a bummer. We asked the gift shop person about it, and she told us it was only closed because they like to have a person standing by to monitor visitors, and she was the only employee working that day. Knowing that, and also knowing that the building would be locked on Monday when we had the place to ourselves, I made the call to go up there anyway. It was about half an hour until closing time, and there was no one else in the building, so I stood watch while Julie and Will went up, and then Julie stood watch so I could go up for a couple of minutes. It was a very cool experience, and I'm hoping the next time we go, they'll be properly staffed so I can explore it at my leisure.

10.16.25
We spent Monday morning enjoying the Paradise Garden campus by ourselves, where we were accompanied by one of the two resident cats. They're a pair of brothers named Calvin and Hobbes, but Hobbes is much more outgoing, and we saw him pretty often and he would sometimes walk with us. There was also a third unofficial cat who seems to have taken up residence, as we saw her every day during our stay.

On Monday afternoon, however, we took a little day trip up to Chattanooga, specifically to the Rock City attraction at the top of Lookout Mountain. The attraction is technically in Georgia, but I don't know if there's any way to get up there without driving into Tennessee on the outskirts of Chattanooga. We'd never been there before, but it was in line with a lot of folk art/obsessive person attractions that I love, like the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama; the Coral Castle in south Florida; and, of course, Howard Finster's Paradise Garden.

The place was HUGE, with four separate trails that you could do individually or in sequence. The trails took you up and down the side of the mountain, through chasms and cave and across bridges with several scenic spots for looking out across the valley below. The paths and especially the caves were decorated with folk art pieces, from mosaic inlays to tableaus featuring recreations of scenes from fairy tales, and they also had several places where you could stop to get a drink or a bite to eat. It was much bigger than I expected, and we ended up spending several hours there.

We went in late afternoon so we could see it in the daytime and also stick around for their special evening hours where you could see the special decorations and lights they had put up for Halloween (one of the workers told us that this was the first year they'd ever done that). It was cool to see the place in a different light, and I'd say that all told, we probably walked the entirety of all four trails about five times each. It was a pretty fun experience, and we definitely want to return sometime soon.

10.17.25
25 years ago today...

10.21.25
Atlanta United played their final home game over the weekend, but I didn't make it. I wasn't super-motivated because this has become yet another lost season for the team, but I also wasn't feeling well, so I just stayed home.

There were some glimmers of hope last season—they finished 9th in the conference in the regular season, and squeaked into the playoffs by beating Montreal in a shootout in the wild card round, and even made it past the official first round of the playoffs by beating Miami 2 games to 1 in a three game series (two of which took place in Miami) before losing in the next round to Orlando (who they had beaten in the final regular season game just a few weeks earlier).

But this year has been a total disaster—they finished second to last in their conference, and only won 4 home games all season (and only 5 games total, with a single road win). They fired their newest coach after only one season (they've had four official head coaches since Tata Martinez left after the 2018 championship season, plus one interim who has held the job twice to finish out seasons where the head coach was fired midway through a season), and while I have no idea who they might hire next, it seems like the issues go beyond just the head coach at this point.

10.22.25
Even though the fire that destroyed our house happened over four years ago, and even though we had all our receipts submitted well before the two year claim window ended, and even though we notified them of intent to sue and then promptly filed a lawsuit when they did not reimburse us for actual expenses covered by our policy, we still don't have resolution on the insurance claims with our carrier.

They used every delaying tactic possible—waiting until the very end of the 90 day window to request a transfer of the case to a different court, delaying the deposition and discovery phases multiple times (adding at least four months to the timeline), and then filing a motion with the judge that took her nearly a year to rule on—but we're finally at a point where they are running out of ways to actually go to trial. So they've reached out to us about going to mediation in an attempt to avoid trial, and because we'd rather avoid a trial as well, we're planning to do that.

I don't have any real hope that this will actually resolve things for us, because again, we're asking for covered costs that we have actual receipts for, and our carrier has had those receipts for over two and a half years at this point. But I'm hoping maybe under the influence of the mediator, they can at least recognize how much good evidence we have on our side and will see the wisdom in finding a number that works for us instead of going to trial where they risk a substantially higher award from a jury.

However, it's likely that this is one of the final delaying tactics before actually going to trial—if we refused mediation, the judge would schedule a trial date now and we'd probably go to trial in March or April. If we do this mediation (which is scheduled for November) and we don't reach a resolution, then the trial will likely be pushed back several months until sometime in the summer.

10.23.25
Today was the start of our multiday office retreat (most of which is virtual) to do training for the upcoming reading cycle. This is sort of the unofficial start day of the new cycle, and although many teams (including all of mine) have been working towards this for months already, once we finish the training next week and the readers actually start reading files, we'll be fully immersed in this year's admission cycle for the next several months.

My teams remain extremely engaged with this process throughout the cycle but the next week or so is also a time for them to take a breath and have a little break before we go back into daily support for any issues that come up and also prepping and executing things like the decision release process and processing application data and documents.

There's a nice cadence to all this up until late February—there will be the two day break for Thanksgiving followed by two quick decision releases in early December, then the winter break for Christmas and New Years, then a few weeks of intense work with a long weekend for MLK, and then two more decision releases in February before we hit the final stretch for our biggest decision release at the end of March.

There's a long stretch between late February and late May where there aren't any holidays on the calendar and there's a ton of work to do, but once we push through that period, then the summer is much more relaxed (although for my team, April is kind of our slow month and summer is when we do all the big projects that we can't do when the cycle is active.

But anyway. We're in the tunnel now, and even with the breaks, work is pretty intense until we come out the other side in June.

10.28.25
Last Friday night my wife and I went to see They Might Be Giants, a band whose first few albums I enjoyed but who I haven't bought a new release from since 1994's John Henry. But they were one of my wife's favorite bands back when we were in college, and my relateively recent vinyl hobby has had me revisiting those early albums, so we decided to get a couple of tickets when we saw they were coming to Atlanta.

The setlist was scattered across their entire discography, but I did get to hear many of my favorite songs, including "She's an Angel", "Ana Ng", and "Birdhouse in Your Soul", along with about half the full songs from their fourth album Apollo 18 (that album actually has 38 tracks, but 21 of them are "Fingertips 1", "Fingertips 2", etc., most of which are only 4-10 seconds long). It was a fun night, and we'll definitely go out to see them again next time they come through.

We had only seen them live once before, way back in 1990 when we were in college. They played a now-defunct club in Charlotte NC, and I remember being disappointed because it was just the two Johns with no backing band. At that time in my life I thought using drum machines was cheating, especially in a live setting, so I had a hard time enjoying the performance for what it was. I'm much less judgy about that these days, which is ironic, because the show we just saw did feature and expansive backing band (including a horn section).

That means there were 35 years between our two TMBG concerts, which is a record for my wife but not for me. That honor goes to Love and Rockets, who I saw for the first time in 1987 and then again in 2023, a 36 year gap that just barely edges out the 25 year gap between TMBG shows.

10.29.25
On Saturday night, the night after the They Might Be Giants show, I went to a show on my own, this time for 80s-leaning contemporary synthpop band Nation of Language. They just released their excellent third album last month, and I'd never seen them live even though I've been listening since they put out their sophomore album back in 2021.

It was a good show, but I was pretty exhausted and it was harder to engage than I'd hoped. But I'm always impressed when electronic-centric bands are able to reproduce their studio recordings in a live setting, and they did that expertly while still bringing a strong emotional component. It probably didn't help that I don't know their new album as well as their older ones yet (there have been a lot of great new releases in the past couple of months), nor do I have their debut album yet, but well over half the songs were from those two releases.

10.30.25
Like all other Ravens fans, I was extremely worried about our schedule for the first six weeks of the season, which had multiple games against teams that are expected to be in the playoff hunt, including two away games against our biggest AFC rival, the Chiefs and the Bills. Even with Lamar Jackson at full strength, that was going to be a tough stretch where optimistically I was hoping we might go 3-3 before hitting our very early bye week in week 7.

But it turned out almost as bad as it possibly could have—we went into the bye with a 1-5 record, with our only win coming from a home game against division foes Cleveland, who almost don't count because they're such an awful team (despite an incredible defense). Lamar also got hurt during the Chiefs game (although he was also probably partially injured during the team's first game of the season against the Bills), and he missed the next three games (and would have also missed a fourth if not for the bye).

I usually don't like having a bye week so early in the season, but in this case the team really needed it. It gave us one more week where the absence of Lamar didn't hurt us, it gave some time for our uncharacteristically awful defense to pull itself together, and it served as a mental break after the tough first six games before heading into an easier stretch after the bye.

Since that week off, the team has won a game with a backup quarterback, and Lamar is back on the field for tonight's game against Miami. But even if we win tonight, we'll still only have a 3-5 record and have a big hill to climb to get back in contention for a playoff spot, and I'm just not sure if this team can pull it off despite playing a division where all of the teams have serious problems and it's entirely possible that the division winner won't reach double digit wins.