Chad Comello

Chicagoland’s been getting some sustained rainfall, so this weekend that has meant some wet time outside with the 7 and 3 year old.

RIP Wendell Berry.

An ongoing series Typewriters + dictionaries + lexicography = the backwards index.

An ongoing series Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

It’s been nearly three years since my last podcast lineup check-in, so time to see where things stand in my good ol’ Apple Podcasts feed.

Mandy Brown on reading and the limits of empathy: To reduce reading to the practice of empathy is to divorce it of its real power and pleasure: to enjoy the fruits of another person’s creative effort, to think with the writer and their characters, not bec…

From the Wired story More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI ‘Literary Counterculture’: Across journalism, criticism, creative writing, and especially among compulsive LinkedIn posters, writers are converging on a set of choices that…

Glen Hansard died.

An occasional series A freshly molting cicada: A night heron: A fox in our backyard: A yellowjacket stuck between our window and the screen: A great egret: A snapping turtle spotted in the section of a creek under a road underpass (the lines are reflectio…

More photography here.

I’m obsessed with this “laptop” our 7 year old made: I asked him what the different features were.

Zachary Kai runs a series on his site called Shelf Source featuring “readers who share books they love on their sites.”

I don’t believe in the concept of guilty pleasures (just watch and read what you want!).

Just published a new essay at Cinema Sugar as part of America Month called Lincoln is the Better Angel of Biopics.

Last weekend we went to Wild Kratts Live!

An ongoing series Several of my interests in one: Steven Spielberg on The Rewatchables talking 2001: A Space Odyssey.

An ongoing series This Is A Gardening Show.

I was at the library last weekend with my two boys and we were playing a board game with pieces of all different colors.

Thanks to Chris Coyler for spotlighting the Internet Archive’s new book Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record (available in print and as a free e-book).

I’ve worked in libraries for a decade, much of that time at a public info desk answering people’s questions.

An ongoing series Love this deep dive on the color theory behind why so many control rooms were seafoam green.

Yesterday I took the boys to a community cleanup event tied in with Earth Day and one of the exhibitors was a local raptor conservation group that brought live birds.

Occasionally the 7 year old will for fun write a word or phrase in “fancy” letters as a way to give it a special emphasis.

A spinoff of an ongoing series A Real Bug’s Life.

I say this as both a librarian who loves books and a cinephile who loves movies: Do not read the book before seeing the movie.

An ongoing series Love this deep dive on the origins of The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine”.

More photography here.

There are tons of books about filmmaking and filmmakers, but I have a particular appreciation for books written about just one specific movie.

We had time for one Bluey episode before bed, and the first one that popped up on YouTube was Sleepytime.

Forget the Oscars—this is the ultimate resource for the best movies of 2025.

These days our two year old has taken to saying, “What you say, papa?”

An ongoing series Been loving Marcin Winchary’s thoughtful design takes lately, like Flickr’s inspiring URL scheme and the software versions of molly guards and Moylan Arrows.

Alan Jacobs wrote about his admiration for two “enormously complex projects that only became possible after the Industrial Revolution”: the manufacturing and logistical challenges the Allies faced in World War II leading up to D-Day and the studio system…

Steven Soderbergh in an interview talking about the grammar of filmmaking: There’s a certain way you put a sentence together to get the idea across; you can fuck with that, but at a certain point you fuck with it so much the idea is lost.

As a lover of nonfiction books, I’ve noticed many of the same phrases being used for subtitles—something that doesn’t happen with fiction since “A Novel” or “Stories” are basically the only options.

There’s a scene from Band of Brothers I’ve been thinking about a lot these days.

An ongoing series Make something heavy.

Part of our six year old’s bedtime routine is dictating a text for me to send to my wife while he’s brushing his teeth.

Continuing the trend of the last few years, this is a “books I managed to read” list rather than a curated selection of favorites as my reading hit an all-time low.

Hollis Robbins on training LLMs on poetry and the concept of judging “greatness”: Poetry is a kind of test case, a training ground for understanding what “expert knowledge” brings to the table.

See previous year in review posts.

An ongoing series Size of Life is another banger from Neal.fun, one of the best places on the internet.

Some thoughts after another Christmas season: In many ways our two boys were the ideal ages for it.

In his year-in-review post, Tom MacWright lauds the benefits of blogging: Blogging has been, for me, an unalloyed success.

An ongoing series Christmas music.

An ongoing series How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner.

For me: Clear out gutters Methodically blow leaves from around the yard perimeter into the middle area, dealing with wind along the way Initial mow to mulch the leaves Blow and rake again into a smaller area Start bagging Continually rake into a smaller a…

The hit game this autumn among my six year old’s playground friend group was one-way dodgeball, where another dad and I tried to nail them with a regular-sized dodgeball and one of those small rubber balls that come with the Little Tikes basketball sets.

Thanks to a few large coronal mass ejections from the sun, Chicagoland was treated to a brilliant display of aurora borealis tonight, which I attempted to capture through the trees outside our front door: Don’t think I’ve ever seen it in person before, so…

In the spirit of my band names list, here’s an alphabetical list of every nickname I can think of that friends, family, colleagues, or acquaintances have given me over the years.