The Column

Motto: Just one. That's all it takes.

I, Aaron Gillespie, self-proclaimed best-guy alive, along two other best guys alive, started a movie podcast! It's called "We Scene a Movie" - and it's available on a podcast player near you!

We three often found ourselves discussing movies when we were together - and the heat coming off our hot takes was too much for we three to bear alone. We realized we'd have to distribute the thermal energy and use podcast listeners as heatsinks. By distributing these hot takes across the greater surface area afforded to us by those people who listen, we are more effectively able to maintain a rate of heat transfer to the ambient environment so as to keep our takes cool and performing nominally.

For more strained and extended metaphor jokes, give our podcast a listen!


We will put up new episodes every-other Sunday. Check in this Sunday, December 2nd (or whenever you want after that, cause that's how podcasts work), for a in-depth …

Motto: BAAAAAAH

Some history (if you don't care about history and just want to read about Aaron & the iPhone, skip down to after the next photo in this post):

My very first phone I got sometime around my junior year of high school. It was a flip phone with a VGA camera (in today's terminology, that's 0.3 megapixels). I thought it was so cool. If you took someone's photo with it, you could usually tell who it was! It had ringtones to pick from, you could call your friends on it, or you could text them using the T9 buttons (but who texts?). My first week with the phone it flew out the window of a moving vehicle onto a gravel road. It survived. Having this piece of technology of my very own was EXTREMELY exciting. I started reading about phones and other pieces of consumer technology using my parent's computer on Mozilla Firefox.

After a year and a half, my parents got me my first smartphone - the Motorola Moto Q. It had a huge 320x240 display and a 1.3 megapixel cam…

Motto: I Voted

I hated economics in school. It was a boring subject. The study of supply and demand was too demanding. Interest rates didn't interest me. The law of diminishing returns got less and less cool the more I learned about it.

Then a dozen years went by. Things changed.

Now I like economics, but it's it's not because I suddenly find supply and demand fascinating. Interest rates still don't interest me. The parts of economics I like aren't those communicated in the simple example problems teaching the fundamental truths of economics. I like to think about marginal cost and reward, the concepts of value and utility, and how economics applies to me as an individual, not a business.

I just got a phone. It's expensive, but it's also the single device I use more than any other. If your phone costs $1000 and you use it 2 hours a day for 2 years, that's $0.68/hour. It also replaces any number of other devices you would otherwise need to spend money on…

Motto: Mic Check One Thousand Two Hundred Twelve

I have a kid. He's really cool. He sleeps a lot. He eats a lot. He's very large for his age. His temperament is incredible. He smiles all the time. He's pretty easy to soothe most of the time. He looks like me mixed with Melissa, which I suppose is obvious but is really neat. 

Today Griffin giggled for the first time. I about cried out of happiness. That's something I never really experienced before having a kid. I think there's a country song about that. Being a dad can be pretty cool.

In other dad-related news - my lawn mower wouldn't stay running. I took it apart, cleaned the carburetor, and put it back together.



Then it fired up on the first pull. Then I over-the-top-celebrated for a solid half hour before mowing the lawn.

So that gives me dad cred... but I'm not king dad. Griffin doesn't have king dad. Griffin's grandpa was king dad. For evidence of that - see Column #301.

Moving on.

Hollow Knight was…

Motto: This is Shooting-From-The-Hip Poetry at Its Nothingest

Before we start - expectations be framed.
Each bits of this is self-contained. 

I've written a book.
The main character was a clock.
I gave him a tic;
so th-this is how he would talk.

Pet peeves with which everyone agrees:
Slow drivers. Slow walkers.
Loud eaters. Loud talkers.
Pet peeve that's just for me:
Using the flash at 100+ feet.
Learn how pictures work, idiot.

The price tag of the new iPhone is XS-ive.
Yes I'm aware it's pronounced "Ten Ess" and not "Ex Ess"... but I'm just not good at making tennis jokes, love.

Not all of these are going to rhyme.
I cannot do that all of the time.
They also might not fit in meter.
Because I forget to check.

Do things the right way & have a nice start to your day.
Aaron's assertion, annoying as always:
Be better by being bounded by burden.
Cut corners cause cascading consequences.
Don't dilly-dally. Do due diligence. Delayed duties drive d…

Motto: Hamburgers are Fun on a Bun

File this Column under "Aaron tells other people what they should be doing", which I realize is too common of a theme.

You know what's fun? You know what's rewarding? Honing a skill. Creating something new. Doing a craft. Working on something just because you want to. It's a lot more fun than enjoying someone else's work. It's a lot more lasting fun than enjoying someone else's work.

Creating things brings a sort of whole-brain engagement that only happens with the absolute best of storytelling. I wrote this Life Tracker thing to keep track of all sorts of different aspects of my life so I might be able to read through the data what makes me most happy... what I found out was that what made me most happy was actually BUILDING the thing. Doing the data work. I was more than just coding - I was creating. I was generating a thing that had never existed before and the possibilities were endless. That's really exciting. …