Into the Wild
Mazie and I watched Into the Wild tonight. I first saw this in 2008 and read the book a month later. I told Mazie I thought she would like the story and she was game to give it a go. She isn’t much into movies.
We both enjoyed watching it and prompted a lot of good discussion. We also revisited McCandless Wikipedia article which has some updates from the last decade that I wasn’t aware of. The Eddie Vedder soundtrack is still amazing.
“Happiness only real when shared.” — McCandless
Florida Spring Break: Day 7
- Up at 7am to head back to Orlando.
- 7:30a Drive to Orlando
- Great day at Discovery Cove.
- Fabulous time in Crazy Train Escape Room.
- Return car, get to flight.
- Back to central time.
- Lyft home.
- Finally get to sleep at 2:00 am.
Roundabout flight plan from MCO to MSP to avoid storms.
Crazy Train Escape Room
Our final thing before leaving Florida and heading home was to visit Doldrick’s Escape Room and do their Crazy Train: The Ballad Of Skeemin’ Plotz escape room. Tammy saw this room was rated 61 in the world by the Top Escape Rooms Project in 2024 so we had to check it out! It was our 66th escape room and our first room in Florida.
This room was great! You are given 75 minutes to solve this room and it is wonderfully themed like an old school cartoon. You have to stop Skeemin’ Plotz and all of his various attempts to skeem. The story was great and the overall room mechanics were flawless. Screens serve as windows looking out of the train and you see and interact with things happening inside and outside the train. The difficulty on the puzzles was all “just right” and we were super engaged through the entire room. The time breezed away, we used (technically) no clues, and successfully stopped old Skeemin’ Plotz! Room 66!
Florida Spring Break: Day 6
- Tammy and Mazie go for run around St. Augustine. Warm and humid morning. Jamie and Tyler hang out at Airbnb.
- Head to Blue Hen Cafe for breakfast.
- Chocolate tour at Whetstone Chocolates.
- Explore downtown St. Augustine and visit tons of shops.
- Explore Fort near downtown.
- Great dinner at Saint.
- Drive back to Airbnb.
Cool to see the Apple Sports app just got support for F1! 🏁 This app is how I connect to almost all sports I care about now.
This Airbnb in St. Augustine has a great vibe. The tiny pool is actually a “cool tub” with a chiller for the hot summers.
I remember 10-year-old me being envious of the cool Pinewood Derby cars my cousins Josh and Jarvis had made in Scouts. “It’s strange the stuff we remember” — indeed.
Blogging as a Gift
Engagement is the powerful drug of social platforms. Sometimes it is blatant and in your face, such as a notice that your post is trending. More often it is wrapped as a feature, such as analytics as addiction letting you know how many views, likes, and other such engagement your post receives. This feedback loop is a slot machine: random, addictive, and unpredictable.
Being a blogger removes all of that. As Manton Reece, the creator of micro.blog, recently shared no one cares (for now), and that is okay. This is writing on the web. First off it is almost always harder to write a blog post. This post has structure, sentences and paragraphs, not just a “blurb” spewed into the melee. Actual thoughts strung together with English grammar. The open web lacks engagement devices such as those views, likes, and “re-whatevers”. You may trigger an email. I got one of those this morning from Manu on a post I wrote yesterday. That’s rare. And no one else knows. No one sees that I received a “❤️ 1”.
So why do it? Why write post after post into the void with nobody engaging? Why bother with a more difficult approach?
I’ve been blogging for two decades. It isn’t all that different from journaling, but it is completely open and world readable. I would encourage bloggers to not think about the individual post. Instead, think about the collection of writing, over weeks and years, as a body of work. It is a body of work that you are constantly adding to. Growing and improving. The individual post is but one breath. It comes and goes. But over the course of time this adds up. It is the cumulative action that creates something truly great.
But who is your audience? Who is this for? You. Yourself. Your family. Your friends. Your friend’s friends. Your neighborhood. And they can have it whenever they want. As a gift. A gift from you to them. Not a gift to be measured in engagement, but instead as a body of work. A gift to the web, which is a gift to people.
Florida Spring Break: Day 5
- Up at 7:00 am.
- Leave Airbnb at 7:30 and drive to Turner’s donuts for breakfast
- Drive to Kennedy Space Center
- Listened to Nintendo Direct — Switch 2 on the drive.
- Experience Kennedy Space Center: Rocket Garden, Astronaut Hall of Fame, VIP behind the scenes bus tour, Saturn V building, Atlantis Building, Ice Cream at Milky Way, Modern building (unknown name)
- Left Kennedy Space Center right as they closed
- Got gas and visited a WaWa
- Ad-hoc dinner plans at Ferreri Pizza
- Finish drive to St. Augustine
- Check in to Airbnb in St. Augustine
