Ryan puts WordThings & PictureStuffs on the Web.

Hi! i'm Ryan Wieczkowski and this is a weblog. i will be "blogging" about things including: moving from New York to the great white north of New Hampshire, writing the next great american novel, shifting careers, clothes sometimes, and other mid-20's activities. there will also be gifs and pictures. because its the 2010's and we're only really here for gifs and pictures. i use other social media type internets like instantgram and the twitter. i also have a facebooks but i use it only for candy crush and knowing when my friends' birthdays are.

[ryanwieczkowski]

It's my 15 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

[ryanwieczkowski]

My Baseball Hiatus: Why Baseball Makes Me Crazy and Ignore Most Other Parts Of My Life.

I have missed watching... maybe 10 games this year, maybe. For those of you paying, even a little bit of attention to my writings; I am an avid fan of the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club and the past two and a half months have been somewhat of an amazing time to be doing so. I am also INCREDIBLY, LUDICROUSLY superstitious about my fandom, and here is just one example: I wore a specific shirt when I attended the last game of the regular season at Citi Field and the Mets won. I then took off this shirt as one tends to do at the end of a day, but I comepletely spaced on laundering this shirt because I have been somewhat pre-occupied (we've also been traveling a lot this month). After driving back and forth from New Hampshire to go to Game 4 in the same day, I was specifically dejected and seeing the shirt from the last game of the regular season I decided to wear it unlaundered for Game 5 in the hopes that it would bring luck to the team. The Mets won that game and I credited the shirt, emblazoned with the phrase deep in every Mets fan's heart "Ya Gotta Believe", with playing a part in the victory. Any sane human being would then be content with their team's advancement and maybe do some fucking laundry or something. I am clearly attempting to establish that I have very little sanity. I wore this shirt again for Game 1, again unlaundered, and the Mets won again. I repeated this for games 2 and 3 and it yeilded the same result. I am obviously wearing the same shirt again today and i am 100% aware that it is disgusting. Previous superstitions include owning only the "on-field official" versions of commercially available team hats, so many so that I would wear one hat and if the team won I would wear it for the next game as well but if they lost I would cycle to a different hat. This superstition resulted in me owning 12 different hats. However it also resulted in five straight losing seasons, so this year I have only worn one hat. Where am I going with this? What was the point of me telling you how I eschew the socially accepted norms of personal hygiene? Probably because I am attempting to drive away whatever readership I have garnered through this blog, but also to explain my absence from writing. Baseball has the magical hold on me, most especially the Mets. They have this way of making me forget about almost anything else. I'll have to make a separate entry for the reasons behind that, but mostly just accept that as a fact. When things are going as well as they have been; it can really turn everything else into background noise, which is a super obvious character flaw (clearly exemplified by the movie based on the book Fever Pitch) but without character flaws we wouldnt be human and we would certainly be a whole hell of a lot less interesting.

[ryanwieczkowski]

I'll just tell them that it's kind of like scurvy. Except it's nothing like scurvy at all.

This was said by me, when I was in the hospital last week because my whole body revolted against the idea of me having lyme disease. I thought it was funny to keep saying I had "limes disease" and the only thing I can say in my defense is they gave me morphine. Before that point in my life I had never had anything stronger than the extra strength tylenol. Also, my doctor's name was Norman and he got very tired of me shouting "Norm!" when he came into my room.

[ryanwieczkowski]

The Happiest Place On Earth (if you have kids, are with kids, or are just anyone other than a bearded creep in your late-20s rolling solo)

Listen, I am sure the Disney World is probably great if that is your thing. I have several friends who will vehemently extol the greatness that is anything Disney and especially the parks, friends that will strongly re-consider our friendship after reading this. But I didn’t have that great of a time. And here are the list of factors surrounding it. 

One: I was there for my wife’s conference. Which meant I was rolling solo basically from 9am until 6pm for the four days we were there. For clarification, I am not using this as an opportunity for claiming I was being ignored; it is just a lot less fun to be on vacation by yourself. Especially because...

Two: This was a “vacation” that was added on to the end of another vacation. Our honeymoon actually. Because we were already in Florida and the conference just happened to butt up against the time we had blocked off for this trip back in November. So I think that I had hit a point of vacation fatigue by this time: considering we had driven to Florida from New Hampshire, then driven an average of a hundred miles most of the 10 days before we had gotten to Disney for our various honeymoon activities. I really sound super complainy now, but I really was tired and I knew we had the straight shot drive ahead of us as soon as we left Disney.

Three: Apparently I was getting the flu. The symptoms didn’t really hit until about seven or eight hours into the drive back north, when I had to pull over and relinquish driving (if you know me personally, you know this is an incredibly rare occurrence. I am basically, the driver for all car related activities regardless of distance.) for a significant chunk of the remaining trip. I had this incredible head pressure and couldn't stop sneezing/sleeping.

Four: I only like “golden age/renaissance” Disney animated movies. And by that I mean 1992ish until 1998ish. And of those, Aladdin and The Lion King. Because Pixar movies don’t count as Disney to me, and all of those movies are perfect except for Cars. Fuck Cars.

Five: In the interest of transparency, I wrote this a month ago and left it in my drafts folder by mistake. I don’t remember where I was going with this list, so I’ll probably just leave it here.

[ryanwieczkowski]

When you do something so often, you should really make a tag for it so your failures can be searchable.

I guess file this one under "shit, what happened to that?". As in, what happened to that thing you were doing with the culture, Ryan? Things were going well. You were recieving a positive response and you were having a good time.

Why would you just bail on that?

Well, blog, I know it’s a bad excuse but I got really busy. And the honeymoon kind of threw me entirely out of my extracurricular rhythm. When we came back, I fell into a different routine and by the end of the day when I would normally do any personal writing... it’s Baseball Season. 

But! I am here to say that I am back. I have a couple of write ups to do for some pieces of culture I experienced for the first time, and I have definitely bitten off more than I can chew with the current project. It is another television show that I am start-to-finishing just for you, and it steps up to the plate at a full 72 hours of watching.  And even though that is 13 hours shorter than .F.R.I.E.N.D.S., or however that is written correctly, I guess because these episodes are twice as long it feels like more work.

This is the part where I stop writing this post and feel like an asshole for calling watching tv “work”.

[ryanwieczkowski]

Florida is hot as balls, yo.

In case you missed it, and you did miss it because I didn't say anything about it ahead of time, I've been away from my duties at this here bloggery since last Friday. But I did have a pretty good reason: Bridget and I have been honeymooning across Southern and Central Florida for spring training baseball games. Today is the last day of that before we head back to Central Florida for four and a half days at Disney, so there's that too. It's not baseball, but it'll do. I'll be back to the writing next Monday guys.

[ryanwieczkowski]

Coffee Isn't Supposed To Be This Fucking Hard.

This motherfucking book. This motherfucking coffee company too, but mostly this motherfucking book.

I bought this book with incredibly little intention on ever opening it. It showed up in my life because it was Five Dollars on the Crate & Barrel website, and we had a bunch of leftover gift card money from the wedding. It was going to look awesome in the kitchen, and I was going to be able to trick anyone we had over to the apartment that I was some kind of fancy asshole or something. 

BUT NO. It wasn't going down like that. Because I made the mistake of opening this book and ruining my life for the past month. 

***Some Background On How Coffee Is Made In Our Home** I have been using the Sowden Softbrew  for close to three years now, needing a replacement for my french press after it was broken in the move to New Hampshire. It was the obvious choice for me after reading this NYT article about the guy who designed it and it was damn near impossible to track down a bad review of this thing (apart from apparently 7 idiots on amazon who expected something completely different I guess). It makes one of the best no-fuss cups of coffee I have ever had, and is large enough to use for making cold brew when I know it's just going to be sitting around doing nothing else for a day or so. 

I was happy. Ignorance is bliss.

Apparently it turns out I was fucking doing it entirely wrong the entire time. So I stepped up my game and nerded out on a couple of next level weirdo coffee accessories; a manual burr grinder that only has room for about as much as I need for making hot coffee on the weekend, and a digital kitchen scale to weigh out exactly the right amount of beans for the water. 

This is an expensive hobby to perform correctly because it turns out I was not using enough coffee for the amount of water I need, by a lot. Like, I needed to increase a solid 25-30% which I was not expecting because I always just followed the instructions for the scoop that came with the carafe. So on top of picking up all my new toys, I apparently need to grab more coffee and flex my muscles harder to grind it. And all of this without going out to buy a Chemex and also one of those pour-over jams like every other cool kid on instagram.

Two or three week-long story short: I had a lot to learn and I still have a long way to go and I’ve been drinking at least two cups of coffee every day for the past fifteen years. Somewhere in the actual, realistic neighborhood of ELEVEN THOUSAND cups of coffee. Not to mention the last two years with a Starbucks in walking distance of work, so thats three or four 24 ounce iced coffees every week day. 

And still, with all that, I don’t know shit. Which is amazing. I’m actually excited about this one, no matter how much I bitch and moan and fill up my kitchen with coffee paraphernalia and upgrade my perfectly fine electric kettle because I need one with variable temperature controls... to find out that there is still so much to learn about something I thought I knew all about is kind of magical.

[ryanwieczkowski]

Things To Do In New Hampshire When You're Dead.

I have never gone skiing before, something about my lack of hand/foot/eye coordination combined with hurdling down the face of a mountain never really appealed to me. Call me crazy.

It only seemed appropriate that given the spirit of this whole personal experiment that I give it a chance though. Really immerse myself in the world of white people in spandex gliding across the snow like majestic gazelles. I say white people specifically because, well let me give you a little back story.

Every March, my wife's program puts on this conference at this unnecessarily fancy hotel in the White Mountains (apparently, one of the only "great hotels" left considering all the rest burned down) and I tag along because I like not having internet. Honestly, I do. There is nothing quite as liberating to me as incredibly fancy booze delivered to me in a chair by a giant fire in the middle of the day while I read a book with no possibility of texting or checking the internet in any way... for a couple of hours and then I'm bored senseless. So this year, I took advantage of the free time and went out to check out the super fancy ski center they have on the property and discovered what I thought was my kind of skiing: Nordic Skiing. Cross Country skiing for normal people, this is what these ski people called it though. 

I was catapulted into a world of more incredibly expensive winter gear than I thought existed (Keeping in mind that 80% of the town of Hanover owns a fucking $800 Canada Goose jacket. I'm not bitter that I'm not rich, I swear.) and marveled at the people dropping these stacks on gloves and what look to be very thin and unnecessary jackets. I did however find a pair of gloves on sale for $15 that the package said would keep my hands warm in -20 degrees so I could not turn that down. While I was there I found that our room covered the trail pass for cross country skiing and all it would run me was a $16 equipment rental, so I figured I would come back the next day and give that a chance in the morning.

Yeah, that morning was apparently the fucking Grand National Nordic Skiing Marathon of Champions of some nonsense bullshit and the entire place was wall to wall skinny white boys in spandex that cost more than my laptop and corporate sponsors from such esteemed ski brands as Audi. We soldiered on (because I sure as shit wasn't going out into the wilderness alone) and rented our skis and were instructed to keep to the right so the racers could pass us and we were off. Thankfully there was at least one smart human being (not me) that picked up a trail map and politely guided me away from trails not explicitly for beginners, because going uphill on fucking six foot long planks of fiberglass is hard as a motherfucker. Staying flat is also hard as a motherfucker. And going downhill: that shit is pure suicide. 

After two hours that felt like eighteen, we were back. It was more or less like a significantly less intuitive elliptical machine that didn't stay in one place. I guess I could say that I'm glad I did it, if only to know that I'm most certainly not in shape enough to do it again next year. Next year: snow tubing. Or better yet, zip lining. Zip lining I don't have to do fucking anything except not get unhooked while in mid-air. That seems easy enough.

[ryanwieczkowski]

Me gustaría dar las gracias a The Academy

I know this is like, a week late at this point. Things have gotten a little bit hectic around here as this is going to apparently be the last weekend we have to ourselves for nearly two months and there is a lot to get done. BUT! Last Sunday I watched The Oscars for the first time in my life.

I didn't really grow up in a household that gave a fuck about movies or popular culture or awards shows when I was a child, probably because I had what people refer to commonly as "old parents" and my exposure to these things was a couple of decades earlier (however now my father has apparently really started to care about this whole sphere of reality which makes very little sense to me but whatever). So it wasn't common for me to spend an evening discussing outfits and snubs and musical numbers, and I never really knew a good 4 of the nominated Best Picture films.

This year I set out to change that. I actually watched almost every Best Picture nominee (I didn't get a chance to see Selma when it was playing anywhere near me so I missed that boat and therefore didn't get the chance to cry like Chris Pine when The LEGO Movie lost the only award it was given recognition for) and I had some well educated opinions on who deserved what and was able to articulate my reasonings. It was Weird with a capital W.

That being said, I am in no way, shape, or form qualified to be critiquing movies in any sort of knowledgable forum... which is why I'll do so on the internet. I kid, but Birdman was too weird to win and if they were going to give it to a weird movie Wes Anderson really deserved it because that was the best movie he's ever made. 

It was more of an interesting sociological four hours of watching people pretend to like each other and be interested in musical montages that made little sense all while secretly tugging at their collars because we were all embarrassed every time any of Neil Patrick Harris' jokes fell flat. And they did. With staggering effectiveness NPH managed to put on a clinic of how to make as many jokes not good in a short period of time. Take notes, kids, because it takes real talent to make a funny person unfunny. I assume. 

All in all, while I have no idea what actually happened all night and it seems as though a lot of the decisions were deeply entrenched in Hollywood Politics, I agree wholeheartedly with the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor wins and this is the last time I will pretend to speak from a position of strength in this arena I know nothing about.

[ryanwieczkowski]

If you beat up a hooker when you're done, you don't get all of your money back. Apparently.

As a male in my late-20s, this is going to come as a relative surprise for my age demographic: I've never played Grand Theft Auto before. It sounds incredulous to say that, considering its such a controversial and popular game. But it just happened to work out that way, and I will use this as an opportunity to break down my video gaming history. In the interest of making it short I'll start in 1997 when the original Grand Theft Auto (that means the view-from-above game that no one would recognize from the immensely popular GTA 3 that looks like the current game) came out.

Around when GTA originally came out, I was still playing Sega Genesis thanks to the world's greatest idea ever to exist: Sega Channel. What the fuck is that, you say? Sega Channel was a service that we got in my house from the cable company, where you put this weird cartridge in the system and then plugged that cartridge via co-ax cable into your cable box. Then, via the magic of some crazy pre-internet voodoo sorcery, there were 50 different games every month on my tv. This crapped out in 1998 when the service was discontinued and I got a PlayStation. The only game that sticks out in my mind is Final Fantasy 7 and the only thing about that was really the snowboarding minigame.  I had an X-Box through my college years, and I was just busy playing Halo with other people at school. A couple of year I went dark from video games down in Miami, and then I got a Wii when those first came out and I literally played the Tennis that came with it and Mario Kart Wii for the next three years. After we moved to the snowy north and started to experience the first winter here, it looked like we would need some inside entertainment so I got a PlayStation 3 but I immediately purchases MLB The Show and just played that whenever there wasn’t a baseball game on basically even today. In case you haven’t noticed the trend; I seem to buy these relatively expensive toys that open a world of gaming possibilities to me… and I play one or two games to death. Honestly, only about six months ago we got a Wii U and the only reason for it was that the new Mario Kart was supposed to be fantastic. And also Smash Brothers.

This brings the story to last week, when my wife saw the packaging from her valentines day present and realized that there was yet another holiday coming up where I was going to destroy her in gift-giving. Its kind of my signature move: I love giving her gifts that are in a completely different league, because I’m uncomfortable getting nice things I don’t think I deserve so I much rather giving her something awesome and watch her enjoy it. This year was set up to be no different: I got her this crazy children’s toy that unzips its torso and has all the plush versions of what its organs should be in there that she can perform adorable stuffed toy surgery on. She’s a doctor, you know this, so this is crazy awesome and I knew she would be excited about it.

Yeah she saw the company name on the box it shipped in and figured out what she was getting, so she went out and surprised me on Friday before Valentine’s Day with a PlayStation 4.

But we had no idea what to get for it, because I only knew one game I wanted (surprise surprise, its MLB The Show) and its not out until the end of March. So we go to GameStop and I’m just staring blankly at the wall not knowing what the hell any of these games are, so I googled “best ps4 games” and by head and shoulders it was GTA 5.

Fast forward to now and I’ve put in like 12 hours of play time, so I’m somewhat invested, and I’m here to personally weigh in on how I feel about beating up hookers and shooting people in the face and stealing cars directly from people at red lights and running from the cops. The long story short is: I didn’t expect this much swearing. Literally one minute into the game, because the first time you start the game up there is no title screen of any kind you are just thrust into some kind of bank heist with a character I haven't even seen again yet and some guy in my crew yells "Shut the fuck up!" at one of our hostages. The fucks and shits and motherfucks and "n-words" have not stopped flying since, this is something I didn't know happened in video games. I'm not against it, more just me saying that I wasn't aware of it. This and I'm still not very good at driving the cars at all are my only real commentaries on the game. 

Well, actually thats not true. My biggest takeaway is that I am in a staggering amount of awe at how large the sandbox I get to play in. I've spent a good couple of hours just tooling around on a dirtbike exploring what exists up in the hills and down in the slums and out in the desert of the world that was created by these programmers. That is the most impressive thing about the future to me, not the story or the physics but the amount of time that was spent making some little stream of pond out in the hills somewhere that will never amount to anything in the grand scheme of the story of the game: no this was made just to try to make a world that sucks you in and makes it feel like you, the character, actually live here.

Its scary how powerful this feeling is, but I'm pretty jazzed at how cool it'll be when I get that new baseball game.

[ryanwieczkowski]

They really were on a break though.

Hey, good for me. I was able to write about a movie and a podcast while working on this one. I do apologize though, this should have been up at the beginning of the week, but I can't just stay in bed all day watching Netflix and shitting in a bed pan. 

I knew getting into it that it would be an endurance test, since tiii.me has been down I had to do a rough estimate that the show is eighty-seven hours long. Yeah. Eighty-seven hours and it's only been available on Netflix since the beginning of the year. So, again, good for me.

Let's get this part out of the way right up front: fuck these guys and their Golden Age of Downtown New York City life. I'm sick of reading about how they paid their rents with shells and beads, but there was this one episode where Chandler was going to be moving in with Monica and he tries to give Joey like $2,000 to pay his bills for "a few months" and I wanted to throw my laptop out the fucking window. But I didn't because I don't open my windows in the winter around here for fear of polar bears and I'm not living in a fantasy world where I would be able to afford to replace my laptop.

While we're on the topic of getting things out of the way. Just this one thing real quick. The B-roll shots of the twin towers don't stop being awkward, and they go on for like... the first seven seasons. 

Getting down into it though. I am finally the age of the Friends when they are in their stride, so this comes at a pretty alright time in my life to compare myself to where Must See TV thinks I should be in my life. And its actually a pretty fair assessment. Having just blow all my savings and a good amount of my not savings on a wedding, I'm right where Chandler was after he quit his job to go sell "slorps" in the advertising industry... with the glaring difference that I no longer live in a major metropolis and I didn't quit my job to leave the middle of nowhere. I quit my job to move to the middle of nowhere. Thats still cool, right? We'll be fine because my best friend is a soap opera star and my wife and I can borrow some money from him to stay in our rent controlled apartment while I ride out this internship.

I think I'm conflating my life with the life of the Friends. Or should I say, Friends Like Us, as the show was supposed to be called and that would have failed in two seasons because no one wants to watch that show. Not that too many people in their late-20s actually watched the show anyways.

Even so, shit on this show as much as you want, but I personally thought it was funny as hell. If it wasn't such a major time-suck I would probably watch the whole thing again sometime. But as it is it kind of set me back a lot on my schedule for doing this whole blog project thing. I guess I'll have to do something easier next time.

[ryanwieczkowski]

You'd be amazed what you'd learn if you would just listen.

Here we are, thing Number Two. And you thought I wasn't going to follow through on this because frankly I don't follow through on serialized writing projects most of the time because I keep falling back on my larger projects or get wrapped up in cleaning the apartment because that is a seemingly never-ending struggle.

This weekend was one of those weekends, embroiled in the eternal grips of cleaning an unending tidal wave of crap that never gets fully put away: I discovered what has been hiding in plain sight on my phone for weeks, the StartUp Podcast.  

I listened to the first twelve episodes in a row (a thirteenth episode came out on Monday and I'll probably listen to it today) on Saturday while I sorted through things, stopped briefly to jot down notes in a Field Notes that I ironically misplaced between then and now when I had a chance to sit down and write this out. I was enthralled, and it wasn't even what I thought I was getting myself into when I sat down. 

I downloaded all of StartUp nearly a month and a half ago (and selected the subscribe option so new episodes just kept piling up on my phone)  after I had discovered a different podcast, Reply All, with an insane episode about this app that Bridget has been using for some time called Figure 1... which is like instagram for doctors to post crazy shit they've seen to show other doctors, but you can totally fake your way onto the program as a normal person. Anyway, one day gearing up for a road trip I was going through all the podcasts I enjoy and finding the companies that were putting them out so I could get a bunch more going on my phone. I found that Reply All was put out by an outlet called Gimlet Media and that they had one other podcast; StartUp.

When I downloaded it, I assumed it was going to be about StartUps in general. Maybe profiling a new one every week, or giving you advice from people just generally on starting your own... who knows what the hell I thought it would be, I just know that maybe I would find it interesting and that I enjoyed the style and caliber of program I previously encountered from this company.

Yeah, turns out it was about a hundred fucking times better than what I was expecting. Its about turning your back on a safe job, diving head first into something you know less than you thought you would, and how to pick yourself up after every time you fall on your dumb fucking face. Because spoiler alert: no matter how smart you are, prepared you are, funded you are, or visionary you are you are going to fall on your face consistently in new and creative ways you had never thought possible. 

The show turned out to be about the founding of a start up podcasting company (the same one that actually put out Reply All and this program, so my mind actually shit my pants when I heard them announce that about half way through my listening adventure) and all of the things that go into the procurement of a name, a pitch, a logo, some funding, some more funding, the hoops you have to go through to get that funding, growing faster than you had expected, the inevitable pitfalls of not doing all your due diligence, not having enough cooks to finish the broth, and... you know what, fuck it. Go listen to this podcast. I can't rant and rave about it even close to enough. Its right here at this website, both podcasts are incredible and worth your time. If I were writing a longer post I would certainly dive deeper into what a great ethos it is that Gimlet has, and that the podcasting medium needs more of this content that is driven further and further by the substance. 

Personally, I find this to be refreshing and amazing in ways that I couldn't have expected when I first downloaded it. And I wholeheartedly look forward to whatever this company does next.

[ryanwieczkowski]

Sleepless in the whatever British-equivalent of Seattle is.

Ok, so here it is. The first in my promised series of Ryan Consumes Culture, and where better to start than why something highbrow and British and smart with science and math and certainly not a glorified love story movie. Wait. Scratch that, I'm going to watch The Theory of Everything instead. So, I thought it would be a somewhat noble endeavor to actually sit down and watch all the Best Picture nominated movies and also a great opportunity to work outside of my wheelhouse (Disclaimer: I have never watched a movie with a critical eye, I have zero formal or informal training in cinema theory or cinematography or cinema anything.) since my normal area of consuming culture is the written word. Rather than starting with something easier for me in a book, here I am with a movie. I came into this movie with great hope; I sat down with all these visions in my head of a movie harkening back to A Beautiful Mind which is my benchmark biopic for any math-oriented human being (Good Will Hunting also a great one), and I thought about my own personal experiences with astrophysics and could barely contain my excitement for awesome chalkboard equation scenes and dealing with personal limitations coming head-on with the minimal human understanding of time and space. ~(I am a huge nerd for this stuff. I read A Brief History of Time as one of my eighth grade summer reading books. I've read the counter-point in Leonard Susskind's The Black Hole War. I've read all three available Brian Green books. And I'm also open to any further suggestions. Seriously, astrophysics is cool as fuck and you're an idiot if your mind doesn't explode thinking about the possibilities.)~ I am not going to provide a synopsis of the movie here, it is based on real-life events and thats also not what I'm really doing here. I'm here to consume culture and use this as a way of making myself accountable to keep going, so mostly I'm just going to write reactions to the things I've done. I got none of the cool things I expected. There were probably ten minutes of science or math in this whole movie. And it turns out I was basically just duped into thinking that I would get these things, when in fact the movie is based mostly on Stephen Hawking's wife's book instead of the hardships that Stephen dealt with. No, I got a movie about how hard it is to get into a relationship with someone who is being trapped in their own body when he told you like fifteen fucking years ago that this was going to happen and after (in the movie time-line anyway) you've been on like four fucking dates. I got a movie that basically paints this scummy choir director and this home help aide as two opportunists who basically roll in and destroy this barely functioning relationship. Seriously, the scene in which we are introduced to Elaine Mason she basically just looks at Jane and is all like "you can't sit with us" as she shows her that she gets Stephen in ways that Jane couldn't possibly fathom. I got the fucking Notebook of science movies. This movie was a fucking cocktease from the tenth minute on. However! Eddie Redmayne (the actor that portrays Stephen Hawking) was unstoppable. He was the only thing that kept me going through this whole experience as he transformed his body, face, and speech into something that didn't resemble him in the slightest. He was absolutely phenomenal. It truly feels as though the Academy (I don't know who nominates movies for Academy Awards, so I'm just going to call them The Academy... you know, rather than look it up.) is confusing one amazing actor portraying an incredibly important human being in a really half-assed movie as a piece of work deserving of merit. Eddie Redmayne is most certainly deserving of the award for Best Actor, this movie as a whole did not deserve even a nomination for Best Picture. Coming from someone who knows nothing of cinema and has only seen four of the other nominated movies, this is my opinion. I did it! I wrote about something outside of my wheelhouse and got started on my list of one hundred pieces of culture in 2015. And I already have an idea on what I'm going to do next, but also totally open to suggestions so feel free to drop me a line on what you think I should include.

[ryanwieczkowski]

Ryan Consumes Culture: 2015

A full twenty days late, here comes the obligatory theme of the new year. I want to try to take more time to consume new culture, not necessarily new as in brand-new but new as in new-to-me. Inspired by an episode of the podcast Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin in which he interviews Ira Glass, which by the way I don't love the podcast but I really do love the episode, Alec asks Ira what he would do if he had more free time and Ira responds in a much more eloquent way than I can regurgitate for you here that he would "consume more culture". I am taking a fairly liberal stance on what I'm going to consider "culture" in 2015, but I feel as though it will force me to expand my horizons much further than a typical 'read a book every week' new year's resolution. Although, lets be honest, I must have acquired at least a hundred books in 2014 and maybe got around to reading ten of them. That might have been too much honesty I might come back and delete this. Getting back to the point, culture this year can mean anything from:

movies. maybe this will be the year I watch all of the Best Picture nominees and have an informed opinion on which i think should win.

live theater. I have never been the kind of person to go to the theater, so maybe I should broaden those horizons.

there is probably more than one album out there that I should really listen to. i tend to not seek out much in the way of new music.

there are plenty of TV shows that I've never seen all of.

books. because i still love to read and should explore new books instead of falling back on old favorites.

an art exhibit, who knows maybe i'll learn to appreciate modern art.

podcasts. those are really becoming a thing again.

just don't recommend Serial to me, i've already listened to it.

maybe I'll travel to a new part of the country or the world at some point, even a brand new town can be a cultural experience in this experiment.

also, i am open to suggestions. not just in these categories; but maybe there is a type of culture that I'm not representing here that I should.

I want to consume one hundred new pieces of culture this year from any of the above mentioned categories and write a new entry about each of them here. I do want to warn you now that these will probably not just be straight up reviews of each thing, so if thats what you're looking for I apologize. I want to capture the day/couple of days/week in which I took the time to devote to my experience. Too often we spend our time looking at blog entries about some form of media as though it were just a longer form Amazon review, and forget that we read what people have to say because sometimes its an experience that we can't have for ourselves. I will end up tagging all of these entries with various related things, but all of them will also include "Ryan Consumes Culture" as well in case you want to find just those posts. I never know how to end entires. This is the end, you've reached it.

[ryanwieczkowski]

If I Had a Nickel...

This is almost becoming a blog about how I should be writing more in my blog. *note to self: million dollar idea, a blog about writing in a blog. so meta.* But as 2014 rolls slowly towards its close, I guess its about that time of year for me to wax poetic about growth and change and life and meaningful thoughts and whatnot. Oh, and to write more about how I need to be writing my book more; because I've come up with some awesome idea or something. Because that's what the end of the year is all about guys: being a weird lumpy fuck about what you should have done in the last twelve months and how you're going to step up your shit in the new year. But heres the thing: I actually did pretty well this year. I took on a new job, and it really broadened my horizons with how things operate here at the college and the way that brand management is carried out through an organization of this size. It's a great experience and has been largely instrumental in several large decisions I'm making. I got married. That's supposed to be a big fucking deal, right? Turns out things are exactly the same except the biggest difference is now i get to say that I have the Coolest Fucking Wife in The World instead of Girlfriend. I lost a bunch of weight, which was awesome but then i put it almost all back after the wedding which is just kind of hilarious. However, maybe I could have spent more time on developing my personal writing. Maybe I could have found some free time to take a new course or something. Maybe a bunch of things. Overall: 2014 was pretty excellent. If anything, I guess I have to bust my ass if I want 2015 to live up to the hype. Oh, and maybe I should find a real direction for this personal blog. Or keep it the way it is and develop some kind of second blogplace for me to have more focus and showcase my skillz.

[ryanwieczkowski]

The Barn Coffee Roasters, in Berlin. The craziest fucking coffee video I have seen that I remember.

[ryanwieczkowski]

GPOY. Now and Forever. at the Winter Garden Theater.