Hey folks, and welcome to the first edition of The Spread Shot.
Why The Spread Shot? It’s a nod towards my favorite power-up from the 1988 Nintendo Entertainment System classic Contra. Notorious for its punishing difficulty, Contra was the Xennial preteen's version of the ancient proving grounds, a rite of passage where boys became men, where we had our first true taste of the hardship and the toils that would haunt us throughout adulthood. Tears were shed, controllers were hurled against the wall in uncontrollable fits of rage, and innocence was broken, but if you somehow managed to make it through to the end and kill this thing...
You could safely say you were ready for damn near anything life would toss your way.
For the non-gaming, non-xennial crowd out there, just know that, in Contra, once you picked up the spread shot power-up, you wanted to hang onto it. Its scattershot pattern would reach far and wide, decimating most on-screen enemies in seconds.
In this column, I'll be casting a similarly wide net, curating recent stuff I've read, listened to, watched, thought of, or experienced all into a semi-regular package. You can think of this column as the more casual, down-time in between longer posts. It’s the Substack version of chopping it up with your friends after school and playing pogs on the porch.
(And naw fam, I’m not even gonna bullshit you, this column also gives me an easy-out when the creative juices in the ol’ noggin run dry and I need something new to post.)
So with that exposition out of the way... away we go.
New Year's Resolutions - I know we're knee-deep in February now, but I'm still firing away at my New Year's Resolutions for this year. I've written in the past about my love/hate relationship with New Year's Resolutions, but these days it's mostly love. I like the idea of figuratively wiping the accumulated, residual gunk off of the last year and approaching the new one with a clean slate. Because of the stigma associated with the phrase, and because I want to be one of the kool kids, I prefer to just call them by the much less lofty term, annual goals.
For accountability's sake, here are some of mine for 2025:
Read 21 books this year, topping my previous year's 20. I also will take my first stab at reading a book entirely in Chinese.
Jump back into the Substack game and reach a subscriber count of 100+. Being that I'm at a net -2 subscribers so far, a month into the year, looks like this one may be a bit of an uphill battle.
Finish the Reddit/Focal Point 2025 Photo class. The Photo class has been on my radar for a while, but the commitment-level was just not there in previous years. After a few years of dabbling, I’m seriously looking to up my photography game this year.
Reading: The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator By Timothy C. Winegard -
The premise of Winegard's book is fascinating; an unfurling of human history as seen through the mosquito's deep but silent influence. Before I lept into this one, I was grabbed my the synopsis:
Why was gin and tonic the cocktail of choice for British colonists in India and Africa? What does Starbucks have to thank for its global domination? What has protected the lives of popes for millennia? Why did Scotland surrender its sovereignty to England? What was George Washington's secret weapon during the American Revolution?
The answer to all these questions, and many more, is the mosquito.
In execution, this book delivers on that wild promise... for the first two or three of its 19 chapters. Wineguard details just how lethal and widespread of a killer the mosquito has been to human beings, being responsible for murdering nearly half of the people to have ever walked this planet. He also floats the fascinating idea that when an asteroid slammed into the Yucutan Peninsula, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs, it was not the sudden, unexpected extinction event we've alwys imagined it as, but more of a death blow to a species already on its last legs, weakened and thinned-out to the point of imminent extermination, due to mosquito borne-illness.
The main problem with Wineguard's book is that after that killer intro full of wild promise, it sprials quickly into a more or less rote history of human (but actually mostly just Western) civilization.
We get heavy into the events of Greek society, the Peloponnesian wars, the Christian crusades, the Columbian Exchange, and the discovery of the new world, with Wineguard remembering to mention the mosquito or malaria every few pages with melodramatic, foreboding, but inconsequential prose like "Even then, the mosquito laid in the wake, shaping expansion and unleashing its invisible chaos on prospering economies." The mosquito content quickly diminishes, at times almost feels like an afterthought, and is not nearly as substantial as the book promises.
Still, Wineguard's writing style is much more engaging than your average history textbook, and I’m seeing it through mainly because of that. Take it as a pretty comprehensive history of western civilization and just be aware that the "hook" of this book does not really hit the mark.
Listening: jazzy but not too jazzy - Listen. We're totally fucked as a people. Everything that you knew is falling apart. We've lost the battle and the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can plan our next steps.
In the midst of the chaos-event known as Regular, Everyday Life in the Year 2025 the YouTube algorithm gods floated this quirky collection of city pop-esque jazz instrumentals my way. It reminds me of the jazzy (but not too jazzy) instrumentals that provided backing for the in-game menus of Sega Saturn and Dreamcast games of the 90s. It's funky, upbeat, smooth, and very much Japanese. In this dismal timeline it, along with a protracted, willful ignorance of the events transpiring out there, is preserving my sanity and somehow keeping a smile on my stupid face while the billionaires loot the federal treasury and my city burns.