Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 14:45
Section: Journalism
Messages for Diego were left Wednesday, Sept. 25, outside Landmark Middle School in Moreno Valley. The 13-year-old student was attacked on campus on Sept. 16, 2019, and later died. (Photo by Beau Yarbrough/The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
For all you metrics nerds, I’m looking at total engagement minutes.
The name makes increasingly less sense as time goes on, and iPods join Walkmen as museum pieces, but the name is traditional at this point.
1. “Glue Sniffer” – Daddy Issues 2. “Make Me Feel” – Janelle Monáe 3. “Best Friend” – Sofi Tukker 4. “When the Tequila Runs Out” – Dawes 5. “Lucky Penny” – JD McPherson 6. “Hope the High Road” – Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit 7. “Wild and Reckless” – Blitzen Trapper 8. “Bikini” – Caroline Rose 9. “Kill of the Night” – Gin Wigmore 10. “Oldest Surfer on the Beach” – Jimmy Buffett 11. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” – Metalachi 12. “Island Song” – Adventure Time and Ashley Ericksson 13. “Hunt You Down” – The Hit House 14. “Flower of the Universe” – Sade 15. “Today is the Day” – The Eels 16. “Run to Your Mama” – Goat 17. “California Love” – 2Pac 18. “You Will Be Free” – The Thermals 19. “Matador” – The Buttertones 20. “Jenny Loves the Sun” – Dead Coast 21. “Bomb (Girly-Sound Version)” – Liz Phair 22. “Livin’ On a Prayer” – Metalachi 23. “Kelp Monster” – Babewatch 24. “Swedish Fish” – Bombón 25. “Suckerfish (Girly-Sound Version)” – Liz Phair
Tuesday, January 1, 2019, 16:08
Section: Journalism
These are the stories readers engaged with the most in 2018, according to Parse.ly, which is the software that the Southern California News Group uses to track reader engagement.
Once again, they’re mostly bad news. We write good news stories, but it’s the grim stuff that gets the most eyeballs, for multiple reasons.
Journalists generally shy away from stories about suicide, due to the very real, if somewhat surprising (at least to me), threat of suicide contagion. But the situation in Rancho Cucamonga, and then Chino, was so serious and already the topic of rumor and speculation that we felt we had to tackle it, both to put the actual facts out there as well as provide context and resources.
I’m pretty proud of the results. And I plan to return to the topic again in 2019, with a somewhat ambitious, months-in-the-making follow-up on the issue. Stay tuned.
I got fewer books read this year than I’d like. That’s partly because things got busy at times, but also because the final two Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books — Swords & Ice Magic and The Knight and Knave of Swords — are real slogs. Like Heinlein, toward the end of his life, Leiber was probably over-sharing about his sexual proclivities, making for dissatisfying adventure stories that are also impressively anti-erotic. I’m glad that I read them, but I’d never recommend the last two or three of those books to others.
The book club with my son included The One and Only Ivan, which is set to be a Disney movie in the coming years, I believe, and was a really great book assigned at school. We also read Traveler: The Spiral Path, the illustrated version of the first Harry Potter novel, the House with a Clock in Its Walls, and Squirm all of which we enjoyed.
With the release of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy on Tuesday, I went and dusted off a website I first created in 1998 and haven’t updated since 2003: SpyroHints.com.
The site has the same hints from 1998 through 2003 about Spyro the Dragon, Spyro: Enter the Dragon and Spyro: Year of the Dragon, although I updated the web page background (it turns out most users have a screen width larger than 1300 characters wide now) and updated the Amazon links on the store. (Fifteen years is along time to expect those links to remain viable on Amazon.)
One person counseled me to fully update the site to modern standards, but there’s something fun to me about the 1998 Web aesthetic, the animated Harry Potter knock-off logo, etc. Hopefully others feel the same way and, more importantly, still find it useful in 2018 and beyond.
