Remember when you’d walk into a local music, book, or video store and there’d be an adorable section where the employees would recommend what they were interested in that month?
Welcome to our little version of it, called Remap Recommends.
It's a chance for the staff at Remap to let you know what they've been playing, reading, listening to, or watching.
Patrick Recommends: Reading 5% at a Time
I read a lot. I also do not read very often. It depends on your definition of "reading." Because while I spend much of my day on the internet and, inevitably, countless hours reading words, that's not what I'd really call "reading," you know?
What's the last book I read? A short story collection by Stephen King. The last book before that? Stephen King's Revival, which I have to say was a real banger. But reading does not come in fits and starts for me, it's just been altogether dead once I moved to San Francisco in my early 20s and my career started taking off. Playing video games for a living has consumed all the time I'd used for reading.
Well, 20ish years later, I'm trying to change that. In a Rob-coded fashion, I tried to kickstart things by buying a new device. In this case, it's just a boring Kindle. Maybe a different E Ink reader will make sense once I've become a regular reader, but it seemed to make the most sense to just get my goddamn foot in the door. And while the charm of a new device was enough to boost me through half of the first book I nabbed, Wake Up and Open Your Eyes by Clay McLeod Chapman, the Kindle entered a dormant start of slowly losing a charge on my side of the couch.
Reading, like anything, can become a habit. To become a habit, though, requires work. You need to make it part of a routine, so that it feels weird not to do it. (My body genuinely feels off, for example, when I don't work out after two days.) The method came up with, ultimately, was one born out of a little bit of annoyance.
While reading, I hated seeing the page number, percentage number, or "hours left to read" taunting me at the bottom. I realize that turning a page in a physical book is, obviously, going to reveal how close you are to to the end, but I found it distracting to watch that number click up while I was reading. (I feel a similar anxiety while running on a treadmill—always checking the numbers. Similarly, how I checked the clock at work when I was a teenager.) I found a way to flip this off (you just have to click it a few times), but then it dawned on me: maybe this was the way to turn this into a habit. What if I decided to read a set amount each night?
I set an arbitrary number: five-percent every night. At five-percent, you drop stop once you've finished the chapter. It adds up to a few chapters during every session.
Folks, I love this. I still turn off the percentage while I'm reading, but every 15 minutes or so I'll check in and see how close I am to the end. Not because I'm excited to stop reading, mind you, but because I'm excited to see if I can bust through the goal before I need to be asleep. It's exhilarating to have a night where I hit 10-percent, which is now happening pretty regularly when I fire up the Kindle.
This helped me blast though the second half of Wake Up and Open Your Eyes, despite loathing the book. I'm having a way better time with The Ruins by Scott Smith, a recommendation from my colleague and friend Kirk Hamilton. Between some combination of The Ruins being a far superior book and a few weeks of doing my five-percent rule, it's clear I'm already going to move past my soft goal of reading one book per month in 2026. I'll become a reader yet, one percent at time.
Rob Recommends: Brent Hull, Snarky Woodworker / Builder
MK and I watch increasing amounts of architecture and home design stuff and find our tastes getting further and further into the weeds as home improvement becomes a more practical hobby. Yet how-to videos are generally kind of boring, so we still like a fair bit of criticism or theory to accompany practical advice or demonstration. Enter Brent Hull, who came to our attention via this bit of absolute catnip.
McMansions are easy targets, but what striking here is the fact that this guy is a builder in greater Dallas area and he is absolutely shit-talking a peer who has built McMansions to this one particular template that he finds aesthetically, intellectually, and morally repulsive. You can tell this is the product of twenty or thirty years of stewing over a hack's ugly incompetence.
His channel isn't always this acerbic. In fact, for the most part, his channel is dedicated to really educational analysis of homebuilding techniques for things like windows and cabinetry and how those have evolved in the building trade over the years. Along the way, he's also justifying what is doubtless the extremely expensive service that he provides to clients, and explaining why his way is the right way despite the sticker shock that comes with it.
But as someone who will never be working with him or able to afford services like his, it's still neat to see someone who knows what they are talking about put words and illustrations to feelings a lot of us have. We all know there are certain tics that you find again and again in places built in the 2000s that make them feel poorly-made, but it's hard to put you finger on if you don't work in the trades. What reads as solid and durable versus cheap and temporary? What is good as opposed to what is merely expensive? This is a channel that sheds light on a lot of that stuff in ways that will help the kind of person who suddenly finds themselves with the need replace their windows, or to know what they can expect if they start getting into the bones of an older home.
Chia Recommends: The Chair Company
Tim Robinson’s comedy is polarizing, I feel like everyone I know either loves his work or hates it with very little in between. I personally really enjoyed I Think You Should Leave, so seeing his face pop up on HBO Max one night while my family was considering what to watch next was a pleasant surprise. My previous experience with his work could have never prepared me for what we were about to watch that fateful night.
The Chair Company sees Tim Robinson’s particularly cringe-inducing comedy applied to a workplace drama, and it’s fully unlike anything I have watched before. I don’t particularly think I can get into too many other specifics of the show because it’s so delightfully weird that I think any attempted description of its plot points would do a disservice to the work.Just know that Tim Robinson plays the main character Ron, who becomes obsessed with a chair’s manufacturer after one of their chairs falls apart under him during a work presentation. I fully spent half of the show’s eight episode runtime unsure what, if anything, was real within the diegetic space of the show, and I loved every second of it.
My partner did not particularly like I Think You Should Leave, and was only really convinced to come along on this journey because she had heard the buzz around the show. And while at first blush it might seem like the show is just an extended ITYSL skit, and that Tim is playing the same character that he always does in his shows, it becomes pretty quickly apparent that the context that character is being put in this time is very different. The friction there is where the real sauce of the show exists, and why I think that if you, like my partner, have initially dismissed The Chair Company because you didn’t like ITYSL, you should give it a shot. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.