Dungeon Crawling and Shortcuts
Plus, my favorite watch strap that I can't wait to get again.
It's Monday! I don't even have anything clever to say this time. So let's just get straight to it. This week, there's an audiobook I'm loving, a watch strap I may or may not have ordered already, and my favorite iOS Shortcut.
in this issue:
🐈 Dungeon Crawler Carl
⌚ Nick Mankey designs
📱 Random Shortcut tip
🐈 Dungeon Crawler Carl
You know the phenomenon when you become aware of something and then all of a sudden, you see that thing everywhere? That's what happened to me with Dungeon Crawler Carl. I had no idea what it was but once I became aware of its existence, I couldn't get away from it. While I'm generally a fan of fantasy, I'm not big into D&D, Zelda, Lord of the Rings, or any of the classic "nerd" culture stuff. It just never hit me the same way it did for so many others. So hearing the synopsis of this book did nothing for me when I first looked it up. It's about a human named Carl and his cat Princess Donut who get stuck in a kind of fucked up Hunger Games situation where they need to fight their way through a dungeon.
It's not a super unique concept, but I decided to check it out anyway after being told by my coworker Andrew that the audiobook was pretty good. But holy crap, the audiobook is amazing. Not only is it narrated by Jeff Hays who acts his ass off voicing so many characters, but it also has some clever voice and sound effects that really make it feel more like you're listening to a play than an audiobook. The story is pretty good (I'm already on book 2), but it's the audiobook that's really selling this experience for me. Unfortunately, I believe it is only available on Audible but you can do a free trial like I did to see if it's for you.
⌚ Nick Mankey designs
One of my favorite watches ever made isn't made by some legendary Swiss company or a fabled old British watchmaker. It's made by a design studio in Brooklyn called CW&T. If you search for the Solid State Watch on Reddit, you'll find a bunch of controversy about it because it's a super cheap watch that has been cracked open, remade, and sold at a markup. I would argue that it's justified because it's more of an art piece than a $13 watch you can get on Amazon, but I digress. One of the reasons I love that watch is because of its aesthetics. Sure, a watch should tell you the time. (duh, it's a tool) but it should also look dope as hell if I'm going to be wearing it every day.
One of the main reasons I think this watch looks so good is because of the strap. It's a custom strap made by Nick Mankey Designs and to be honest, the thing I miss most about my CW&T Solid State watch is that strap. My watch met an unfortunate end in a super hot car one summer and when I disposed of it I didn't think to keep the strap like an idiot. It was an elastic fabric that was so comfortable to wear and super easy to adjust and I've missed it ever since. Plus, Nick Mankey is a smaller business so it's always good to buy small when you can. He does a great job of adding stitching accents, colors, text, or logos exactly where they should be and doesn't overdo it. If you're looking for a good strap for your watch he does custom orders, and they're actually fairly affordable for a custom watch strap.
📱 Random Shortcut tip
Okay, I have a confession to make. I'm back on iPhone. I wanted to try out the new Siri and a bunch of other iOS beta things, so I borrowed an old iPhone 15 from work. This experiment has just confirmed for me what I already knew. I really love the Shortcuts app. I still don't think iOS is as useful as Android, more specifically Samsung's OneUI, which I've grown to love. But Shortcuts + the Action button is just such an elite combination. And in the new iOS 27 you can just type out what shortcut you want in plain text, and Siri will handle the rest. I haven't tried it with anything super complicated yet but out of the eight shortcuts I have right now, Siri one-shotted five of them. The one that I find the most useful is my random shortcut tip. If you're on iOS, build yourself a shortcut that, when you run it, will text you your current location. It's not anything insane or super complicated, but it is SO useful.
Any time you find yourself next to a store that you want to remember but don't feel like looking it up on Google Maps, just run the shortcut and get that location saved in your messages so you can look it up later. The most practical thing I use it for is to remember where a car is parked. The other day my dad drove us to Queens and as soon as we got out of the car I ran the shortcut. Later on, when we were trying to remember where we parked, I just navigated to that location. Again, not life-changing, but super useful. If you have your own car, you can also set this up so that anytime you disconnect from CarPlay the phone remembers where you parked, but I find this method more useful because sometimes it isn't my car that I got a ride in. I added a template to the link below so hopefully it works. If not you might just have to edit it a bit so that it sends the location to your phone number, but that's it! Simple and clean.
