If I had to pick a least favorite quarter, which is not something we would do at Three Point Four Media because we are very busy working and not spending our time concocting hypothetical games to write about in newsletter openings, I would say the first quarter is by far the worst.
The weather, for one. So much rain recently. Businesswise, it’s also bad. We all come off the winter holiday New Year period raring to go out, and then, yeah, nothing happens. Part of this is our position as a tiny minuscule speck of a firm in the vast maw of the contentmediaadvertisingmarketingwhateverwedo landscape but a larger part is that it takes the world awhile to get going again. A fascinating, yet consistent, experience, year after year after year. You would think I would be used to it by now, but nope.
Q1 is trash. Here’s to Q2. We did it, Bill.
An article
It’s been a minute since we’ve had a Zach Baron joint at The Loop but Inside the Glorious Afterlife of Roger Federer delivers, even if it’s sad that they clearly had to mention Fed’s sunglass collaboration as quickly as possible. A fun Q&A with the world’s most aggressively normal retired professional athlete.
You’ve mentioned your kids—you have two twin boys, who are nine, and two twin girls, who are 14. Are they serious tennis players?
Not serious, but we make them play.
Really?
Because I don’t want my kids to be the only kids in my circle not to play. And obviously I live in a tennis circle, and otherwise they’re the only kids not playing because all the other kids play tennis and this is their passion. So that’s why I say to the girls, who were not super in love with it in the beginning, like, “Guys, I mean you have to play a little bit.” So they all four play now.
Bonus article: Wine scams.
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A video
The Godzilla Minus One team won the Oscar for visual effects despite having a tiny budget and limited resources. In this short video, they explain how. The lesson? They won an Oscar for visual effects because they had a tiny budget and limited resources. It forced creative thinking and problem solving. Every warship in this movie—and there are a bunch—was filmed using the same 20-foot set with cgi filling in the rest. They created a dogfight by getting some of the strongest crew members to shake a plane. Hollywood, depending into a vfx crisis (Defector has done good work on this front) could learn some lessons.
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A project
We’re working on a series for a large financial institution about where to go on vacation. Learning a lot about hotels we can’t afford, golf courses we can’t afford, restaurants we can’t afford, experiences we can’t afford. It’s important to write aspirational content.
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A movie
A bizarre and exceptional film. I saw this in theaters when it first came out and watched it again last week (free on Apple TV+; a much better use of time than Napoleon). There are two or three completely different movies crammed into 128 minutes. Ben Affleck has an Airstream before they were cool. Anna Kendrick spends the most of her screen time sitting on large furniture, looking tiny. Every plot point is implausible in an overly complex and ridiculous way. Loved it.
The Accountant 2 came out of nowhere and J.K. Rowling, one of the main characters, had this to say a couple weeks ago: "I head to LA in a little over a week to do some rehearsals and pre-production and start shooting my chunk of it. I’m not even sure, I think they start early next week, because then I'm in the week after and doing my supporting thing."
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A run
Put another 45 minutes into the legs this week, a loop around Prospect Park with a friend, then back to the homestead. Six miles? 10k? A little more? I dunno. Somewhere around there. The details are unnecessary at this point.
Next week, I’m hitting the NYC Runs Spring Fling 10k, assuming I can figure out how to get to Governors Island by 9am on a Saturday. This is all progress.
Bill’s back in two weeks. File those taxes, people.