Planning for Next Year
Or not
At Three Point Four Media, we are looking ahead to 2022 because it’s November and that’s what you’re supposed to do in business. Our accountant and financial guru (Hey Scott. Love you!) is always like “so what are you goals for next year?” because that’s his job and he’s good at it and you should hire him, and Bill and I hem and haw and then change the subject to Michigan football or basketball, whichever is in season. (Endless comedy that is.)
As a small operation with manageable ambitions, work on some stuff we enjoy and make more money than last year feel like enough. Plus, we had some tangible goals in 2020 and, uh, those went sideways real quick.
The links, the links.
An Article
This piece about using DNA repositories to solve cold cases unfolds over a few years, and it’s fascinating and illuminating to read about the protagonist’s more or less real-time struggle with the ethics of what she’s doing while the science and technology advances as well. Everything Raffi Khatchadourian writes is weird and great.
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A Movie
Chris Pratt is some sort of army man/scientist(?)-turned-sad-school-teacher who, though a series of convenient plot twists, goes into the future, fights a bunch of aliens who alternate between being totally unkillable and exploding on contact with anything remotely hard, and saves the day. While the military’s post-mortem will almost certainly reveal some questionable decision-making by, I dunno, everyone involved, they sure did increase the drama. I loved it. Great movie.
Movies like this make me realize how we’ve crossed the rubicon with CGI, and there’s no going back (which is fine): “We live in in an age where everything is possible, really, with CGI. There’s nothing that you cannot imagine in your head or read on a script, or whatever, that you can’t actually do now.”
Anyway, if you’d like my ranking of expensive prestige action movies on streaming services featuring white men originally famous for their comedy who pivoted to getting jacked and shooting guns, I’d go 1) Red Notice, 2) Tomorrow War, 3) Red Notice, but I’m not tied to that order. It’s hard to rank Shakespeare’s plays, too.
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A Coffee Shop
This week’s coffee shop review comes from Greg Lalas, a long-time friend and one of the people most responsible for any professional success I have had.
Twoflower Cafe, Great Barrington, MA
Hi, everyone. Like many of you, I assume, I didn’t do coffeeshops for about a year. When I did decide to restart my cafe routine, I went to Twoflower Cafe.
Basically, there are three things you need to know about Twoflower:
You don’t go there for the coffee. I mean, it’s fine. Tastes like coffee. The cappuccino has espresso, milk, and foam, but you’ll never mistake it for Sant’Eustachio in Rome.
The vibe is perfect for a small-town cafe. The owner Rupert, a tall English bloke with short gray hair and wire-rimmed glasses, is a lightning rod of positivity. He knows everyone, always makes a dad joke when you walk in (“Here comes trouble!”), and has hired the nicest staff in Berkshire County. If you’re WFC (working from cafe), there are farm tables inside, bistro tables outside, and good wifi.
The scones are, as they say, to die for. I know, I know: Most scones taste like they’re made from chalk and look like diseased coral. But these? Whole different world. I don’t know what magic dust is in the dough, but they are moist and dense and delicious.
So if you’ve resurrected your coffeeshop game lately and you find yourself in GB—I don’t know, maybe buying weed at one of the FIVE (!) cannabis shops in town—stop into Twoflower. It’s a giant leap toward normalcy.
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A Project
We’ve been working with the good folks at Modus Agency on blog posts and case studies. They are doing great work, and we’re helping them figure out how to talk about it. Always be iterating.
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A Run
The New York City Marathon was a couple weeks ago and I did not run because five boroughs in one day is frankly a least two too many. But the Abbott Dash to the Finish Line 5K takes place a day before, is much shorter, and ends in the same place. Great race. It also doubles as the USATF 5K championship, and I lost by just less than a mile, which I’m counting as a W.
Bill’s emo pontification and tales of midwestern life will return in a couple weeks.