Media Diet, May 2024

A roundup of noteworthy things I’ve played, read, listened to, or watched over the last few weeks. In May, we were on vacation in Sweden in celebration of our respective birthdays, and I still am/was working a lot on my new macOS app, UI Actions. (Which is coming along quite nicely, thank you!)

Redwood Material’s Nevada EV Battery Recycling Facility Attempts to Rival China - Bloomberg (Archive) – Recycling FTW. But this venture there, man! Staggering numbers, really hard for me to visualize. Very, very cool. “While the toll of mining the raw materials for batteries is considerable, more than 95% of the key minerals can be profitably recycled. At Redwood, nothing goes to landfill, and no water leaves the facility except the sanitary waste from sinks and toilets. There are no gas lines; everything is electric. It’s also built for scale, allowing the company to quickly break down a truckload of assorted batteries without manual sorting or tedious disassembly."

🎤 Fern Brady: “Power & Chaos”, YouTube – Standup special by Scottish comedienne Fern Brady. Loved it. I’m man enough to admit I had to use CC every now and then. 😅

🎤 Fern Brady: “Male Comedienne” – After seeing “Power & Chaos” I had to check out her other stuff, too. I’m ESL, and while she’s sometimes hard to understand (because Scottish is beautiful but also very much its own thing) she’s never not funny.

📺 Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi – Nice yet forgettable, like most SW stuff these days. I’d take one more episode of Andor over this any day.

📚 “Altered Carbon” by Richard K. Morgan – Re-read. Still a very, very tight and satisfying cyberpunk novel.

🎤 Aaron Woodall: “No One Pretends To Be Religious” – Stand-up special by a former Mormon. I mention this because he himself is riding that “ex-Mormon” train hard here but it didn’t do much for me.

🎶 “Radical Optimism” by Dua Lipa – An unsurprisingly¹ upbeat album, musically. Nice.

🎮 Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – Started getting into this one at the end of the month. I’m not too far in, just left the first tutorial planet. I hope it’ll be as satisfying an experience as its predecessor, Fallen Order.