Words On Wednesday

The beer flight is reaching a slow and inevitable death, and there’s nothing that you or I can do about it. Picture it: you walk into a new bar or micro brewery and their tap list is both overwhelming and intriguing. Everything sounds great, but you can’t say from the name and style if it’s something you would like. Instead, you order a flight of four different beers and sample each of them. A flight, for those unfamiliar with the term, is “a line of four or five small glasses atop a long, wooden board” (Dunphy, 2024). It makes more sense to order four small pours of four different beers, rather than stake your entire pint on something at random or on the recommendation of someone else. If any of them strike your fancy, you order another pint of that (because too much of a good thing is never enough). Breweries and their administration would have you believe this isn’t the appropriate way to consume beer. You can’t possibly appreciate the nuance of a specific brew if you’re only drinki...

I got a MacBook Air for my wife a while back when her Surface Pro 7 started critically failing, and the process of setting it up and learning macOS has been super weird. For a very long time, I was aggressively opposed to anything from Apple. Their products were a bunch of overpriced, underperforming junk that didn’t have any place outside artsy studios used by media content creators. At least, that was my take on the brand. People who paid big bucks to use a browser at a coffee shop were just wasting their money for a faux status symbol. Eventually, I became apathetic to Apple and its presence in the personal computing device arena. It wasn’t for me, but I wasn’t everyone. There are plenty of people who like Apple hardware, they prefer Apple software, and I want those options available to them. I wasn’t interested, but why should I care what other consumers choose to use? I wasn’t a Google fanboy anymore, since Chromebooks really just aren’t a valid replacement for a full laptop or de...

Hopefully concluding a pretty heavy run on leadership books, I recently finished a thoroughly military approach to leadership by some Navy seals. Being written by some Spec Ops guys, this book is obviously geared toward military situations. In many cases, these are pulled directly from the Iraq war following the September 11th terrorist attacks. I’m not one to lean heavily into patriotism or military action, but it’s a fantastic example of high stakes and exactly what can go wrong in the best or worst case scenarios. Though the military operations are the primary examples, Willink and Babin provide more generalized interpretations and applications that are relevant to civilian and business life. Each chapter consists of a military example, and the ways that those events translate to wisdom in the lives of anyone. The formula is honestly really effective. One thing I like about “Extreme Ownership” is how practical it is. There is never a case when you need a philosophy degree to underst...

I’ve had an active membership with Runescape for a few years now, but I think it’s about time to take a break. I started back in 2018 with a three month bronze premier club. That taste of membership got me wanting more. In 2019 and every year since, I have maintained membership with the gold premier club option. That’s half a decade of sustained membership. I haven’t kept membership this long since the very first time I actually paid for Runescape way back around 2007. For a while, I played enough to justify premier club each year. My metric was whether I could play enough to make enough money to afford bonds for next year’s membership. I haven’t paid REAL money for Runescape since I canceled my monthly membership  back in 2013 . I was able to make enough in-game currency to buy membership that way. Over the years, a few things happened. Bonds got exponentially more expensive. What used to be 14 million coins  is currently 114 million coins (as of April). That’s way more mone...