Grant nonfic

     I listen to a whole bunch of music and, while some of it is just because I like it, a lot of the songs tend to mean something. One of the lyrics that really comes to mind is “Fuck where you’re from, fuck where you’re going, its all about where you’re at. This is the outro on the song “Lord of the Game” from Death grips first mixtape Exmilitary. Death grips is an experimental hip hop group from California. This is their first mixtape and is comparatively not that weird, but it still has its strange tracks. The group's style is very abrasive. From the drummer Zach hill smashing on drums so hard he frequently breaks them to the lyrics of MC Ride being yelled so loud that they become hard to understand.      Death Grips doubles down on most of the criticisms of hip hop: it's too vulgar, loud, all it talks about is drugs and whatnot. Those criticisms aren’t true for really any musician, but Death Grips definitely toes the line. Their first studio album,...

I think my ideal trip would just be a long cross-country trip where I tour the best climbing routes and spots in the world. I hate working so the idea of being a bum that just lives out a van and travels through different areas just following the best temperature is really appealing. Outdoor climbing is fundamentally different than indoor climbing, most indoor climbing is top-rope climbing so if you have climbed than you have top-roped. The issue with top roping is that unlike in a gym you can’t leave the rope on the mountain because the elements will weaken it and then you will die, which is pretty lame. Top-roping outdoor is kind of trash because you need to hike an hour to the top of the mountain and then repel down. The big innovation for outdoor climbing is lead climbing the main advantage it offers is that the rope, belayer, and climber all start at the bottom. This eliminates the one-hour hike before you get to climb. The problem is lead climbing is like 1000000 times more d...

            Last week Frank Ocean performed at a club and released basically 3 new songs. He had released something like 3 singles in 2017 and appeared on a few albums but not much has been heard since he released Blonde and Endless back in 2016. I'm pretty pumped for a new album because blonde and endless are probably two of my favorite albums, Channel Orange is good, but it doesn’t reach the emotional peaks of Blonde or Endless and doesn’t have the same level of innovation and avant-garde structure of his most recent releases. He released formally one song, DHL, and at the club event, there were a few remixes of two other possible songs, Dear April, and Cayendo.             Either way, almost any update from Frank is nice. In 2016 he finished his contract with Def Jam by releasing Endless and then one day later he released Blonde under his own label boys don’t cry. Beca...

I want to get way more trains in America. Trains are the way of the future and we need to start moving towards a car-less society soon. Cars are huge polluters and moving more towards public and mass transit systems is the way of the future. Not only are the issues with the environment but also with future cities. La is notorious for having awful traffic despite having tons of 6 lane highways, not to mention street parking as an aesthetic looks terrible. In fact, there are 200 square miles of parking spaces in LA. 200. That's massive. Cities designed around cars, which are like all American cities, run into this problem. If you think of a big city you automatically think of the sound of cars honking and the congested and hard to navigate streets. American cities aren't designed for pedestrians, they are designed for cars.   There is no easy solution to this problem without bulldozing a lot of cites which is not going to work very well and is going to hurt poor people disp...

     This is a photo of me minutes after getting my cast off when I broke my arm. So I have broken 4ish bones in my life and it always sucks. This most recent time in the summer of 2018 I was biking down a slope, I hesitate to call it a hill because of where we live but there was some inclination, and I was maybe going a little to fast. And this stick was sitting in the road and I didn't move to avoid it and I hit it and then flipped my bike and I scraped my left arm and broke both of my right arm bones pretty close to the wrist. Needless to say, this threw a wrench in the rest of my summer plans and even school life.     I got the cast off on August 31st but the bone was still fragile enough that I couldn't do any real physical activity. What sucked was I pretty regularly climbing when I broke it. Climbing is a sport that is highly reliant on the forearms to grab the little holds and the like 6 weeks I was in a cast caused a lot of atrophy in my right arm ...