Show Notes - Week of July 5, 2021

Greetings, readers from Day 192 of 2021 and the six thousandth day hot day in a row. {1] You can tell I am not cut out for the heat. It is only 23°C right now and I am still complaining. 

There are a few updates this week - some Kickstarter news, and then the regular sections on cycling, music, beer. I also created a first post on the Gaming section. The larger post about the logistics and technology of the game I am running is still in draft but is coming. Let's dive into the updates.

I have mentioned Kickstarter many times in the past year. I have backed several different initiatives and this week I was happy to jump on another. Drive is a great science-fiction web comic from Dave Kellett and I already own hardcover versions of Volumes I and II of the series. Kellett has a campaign out to fund Volume III and one of the stretch goals has a challenge to get 20 supporters to send in pictures of Drive-inspired spaceships made from Lego. My younger daughter and I created one decked out in Pride colors, with a little Duplo for fun, and a Benny minifig just because. Here is a picture of what we submitted for the Kickstarter challenge.

I highly recommend Drive if you are interested in space opera science fiction and are looking for something with some humor and levity to offset heavy themes. The link to the web comic above has all existing Drive comics for free, and I encourage you to support Drive and Kellett via the Kickstarter.

Cycling Update:
I finished off Leg #7 and am now moving past Regina and on to Winnipeg. This is the longest leg of the cross-Canada virtual tour so far, coming in at 595 km. I picked four stops along the way. Here is the updated progress chart. 

Here are some fun facts about Regina courtesy of Wikipedia. It is of course the provincial capital of Saskatchewan, making this the third capital of the virtual tour after Victoria and Edmonton. As of the 2016 census, there were about 236,000 people in the metro Regina area, and it looks like people from Regina are called Reginans. Continuing with my fascination of air service to the communities I travel through, the Regina International Airport has an IATA designation of YQR. And in what might be the most truthful statement about Regina, the Wikipedia article says Regina "is situated on a broad, flat, treeless plain". Yes. Yes it is. 

View of Regina from a distance. By Masalai - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22842225

New Music:
It has been several weeks since I last had a New Music update on this blog. For some reason, music just fell by the wayside, but I have had much more time for music in the last fortnight. Enough so that I have a playlist to share this week. 

My Music Finds playlist for the week of July 5 has three albums. The first song from each album is copied to the start of the playlist to give you a feel for the album and to create a better album collage. 

First up is Mô’Ti Tëi with the album "Well Dressed Exile: Second Humming". I heard the song "Crying Shame" on FIP, the French streaming radio station. I love the music in this album, and often but not always love the singing. Think blues and jazz with clean sounding guitar.

Next was an album that showed up in my Tidal feed, "Half Mile Harvest" by The Teskey Brothers. I am surprised I had not heard of this band before this week. I immediately loved "Pain and Misery" and stopped to listen to the entire album followed by their 2019 album, "Run Home Slow". Great vocals and music, with a slow blues and Americana feel. 

The last album was something I heard on SiriusXM and then dug into on Tidal at home. The band Mudcrutch is the initial line-up of what became Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Petty pulled the band together in 2008 and released two albums before he passed away. The eponymous 2008 album is pretty good. "Scare Easy" was the song I heard on SiriusXM and is the best on the album. Imagine the Heartbreakers with a bit more of an Americana sound. Definitely worth listening to especially since their 2016 album is one of the last recordings from Petty. 

New Beers:
I tried two new beers and one mead this week, bringing my lifetime check-ins to 779.

First up was another from Banded Peak Brewing. Banded Peak is an amazing brewery. I have now checked in seven of their beers with an average score of 3.68. The lowest was their Pilsner at 3.25, which is a style I do not often enjoy, and which likely caused the score to be lower. Beer #777 was their Chinook Saison Farmhouse Ale. I was a bit skeptical going in as I have not enjoyed a lot of the farmhouse ales I have tried, but this one grew on me. It is dry, like it says on the label, with a nice crackery taste. I found myself commenting aloud to myself that I liked it, which must be a good sign for the beer if not my sanity. (3.75 / 5)

Continuing my sampling of East Coast beers is Beer #778, the Déjà Moo Milk Stout from Garrison Brewing in Halifax. This was a really good stout, but I thought it was more of a cappuccino stout than a milk stout. More lactobacillius would have given it more creaminess, but still it was definitely drinkable. (3.5 / 5) On a related note, this was the two hundred sixtieth brewery I have checked in a beer from. 

Last up was the mead. Fallentimber Meadery makes some great meads and so I was looking forward to their Traditional Mead. #779 was clean and not too sweet, with a very slight level of carbonation. Unlike some meads that can be almost thick to drink, this was light and easy to drink, but maybe too much so. I missed the slickness of their other meads and the intense flavor. It was well done, but not as stellar as others from them. (3.25 / 5)

[1] Slight sarcasm.