Ross Catrow

  • Wait. Why does messenger have an N in it?

  • Someone should deepfake replace Harrison Ford with Joe Biden in the new Indiana Jones movie. They’re the same age and both look good in a leather jacket.

  • Need to get a few of these printed for my house.

    A sign that shows a volley ball with a red line through it, and below it says “NO BALL PLAY IN THIS AREA”

  • Two smart people asking the same sort of questions around generative AI.

    Here’s John Siracusa:

    This leads me back to the same question. Where is the act of creation?…I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I think I’m getting closer to the right question. It’s a question I think we’re all going to encounter a lot more frequently in the future: Who made this?

    And here’s Hank Green on recent social media post from Magic: The Gathering.

  • Remember when all the gums had bangers for jingles?

  • Does anyone have any food recomendations in…Atlantic City? 😬

  • Finished reading: A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute 📚

    The structure of this book is maybe more interesting than the plot (which is still pretty interesting!).

  • Why does my bike’s chain lube smell like blue cheese?

  • Why does Henry James do this to us??? This is me, but in my late 20s and on through my early right nows.

    Like many writers, I went through an extreme em-dash phase (if you think I use a lot of em-dashes now, you have no idea). Then I moved on to the colon, and at some point, the semi-colon. This was in my late teens and 20s. I was reading a lot of Henry James…..and then a lot of academic writing.

    via A Theory of the Modern Exclamation Point!

  • Finished reading: Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros 📚 The best part was getting Outlook reminders from Siri while listening to The Hot Chapter. 💌

  • This is my spring Pink, cursive text that says “Can’t, volleyball”

  • Three different drivers almost hit me with their three different cars as I rode my bike in the Lombardy Street bike lane between Broad and Leigh Streets. What if this was actual infrastructure instead of a narrow gutter?

  • A Benadryl disaster.

    I spilled a bunch of tiny pink Benadryl pills into a wet sink. Lots of pink streaks in the sink from me trying to scoop up the slippery guys.

  • Love and Monsters, 2020 — ★★★.  The Hawkeye reboot with Ariana Greenblatt is kind of weird.

  • Vivarium, 2019 — ★★★½. fully fund urban public schools

  • Barbie, 2023 — ★★★★. I apologize for all the times I played guitar/Matchbox Twenty/The Zack Snyder Cut at a person.

  • The Green Knight, 2021 — ★★★½. The ‘Appa’s Lost Days’ episode but for Groot.

  • Leave the World Behind, 2023 — ★★★★.  It wasn’t their day, their week, their month, or even their year.

  • Finished reading: Heartburn by Nora Ephron 📚

    The funniest book I’ve read in ages. The audiobook is read by Meryl Streep herself!

  • Finished reading: Babel by R. F. Kuang 📚

    Love the universe more than the book, I think (Poppy War for life, though!).

  • While You Were Sleeping, 1995 — ★★★½.  Ahhh a classic comacomedy!

  • Sort of related to the previous post, here’s Anne Helen Petersen working through the recent Nazis On Substack situation and choosing a different path forward:

    So here is what I can promise you, reader: that I will continue to be a thorn in the side of Substack’s leadership when it comes to this issue. That I will continue to use my power as one of its initial writers — one who they use as counter-evidence to the claim that they profit most off anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theories — to hold them to account. That I will try to make this particular home better and safer, because we are all so weary of building new homes only to have the Nazis (and anti-Trans assholes) show up once again and drive us to the fringes - which is where they belong.

    I have a direct line to the founders at Substack. And in the weeks to come, I will be re-publishing the emails I send to them every week on Notes. I hope you’ll join me in telling them: to make the spectacularly simple decision to turn off Nazi monetization. Let’s start there.

    via Finally, a note about Substack and Nazis.

  • Lots of smart thoughts and tough questions in this piece from Erin Kissane as folks flee Twitter for Threads:

    I personally think Meta’s machinery is so implicated in genocide and a million lesser harms that it should be trapped inside a circle of salt forever, but even I recognize that there are billions of people around the world who have no other social internet available. These are the trade-offs.

    Thankfully, I don’t need to rely on social media to sustain Good Morning, RVA, but I have started experimenting with using Instagram as a way to share the content more widely. Now I’m reconsidering how I do that (and maybe looking for my salt cellar)…

  • Is there another way to talk to Siri?

    A search on AppleTV gone wrong. The text in the search box says “Hello no no no wow you were sleeping” and the caption overlaid says “Ross likes to talk to Siri like an old British ghost woman, and this is what happened when he searched for ‘While you were Sleeping.’ (She did find it, though.)”

  • Christmas in Connecticut, 1945 — ★★★.  I demand a zany kitchen scene!

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