Phillip Retuta's Blog

The Life and Times of a Filipino-American

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Break Away Sugar Glass.

2015-10-24-19.00.05I made a sugar glass bottle to use as a prop in videos; it breaks so easily and is as painful to smash over your head as a giant wafer cookie full of rainbows, but it’s incredibly fragile and sticky to touch. Plus, it’s very time consuming to make just one bottle (you have to boil the sugar mixture for a steady hour or so). You therefore have to be very precise and very cautious when using it, especially in one take. Still, sugar glass is a lot of fun to play with, and there’s definitely something very satisfying in creating silicone molds and boiling what is essentially candy.

Here’s the mold (with Morgan’s matching nail polish):

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And here’s the bottle in action!

A video posted by Phillip Retuta (@retuta) on


In case you want to create your own, follow the instructions from Indie Mogul:

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Pumpkin Carving.

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I had some friends over to carve pumpkins tonight: Scott and Ann Marie brought Sebastian, an old doggy playmate of Nico’s who’s gotten inexplicably plumper. Alex brought Michael, her fiancee who’s gotten explicably more cut. My old roommate Kris brought over himself, a flask, and the determination to turn up.

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Afterwards, I coaxed all of them to be in a Nico video where she fights us and knocks all of us out cold:

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Breakneck Ridge Hike.

2015-10-11-14.14.14Well, I went on a pretty impromptu trip upstate with my roommates Morgan and Brian, and our mutual friend Brett: we drove a few hours from Brooklyn to go hiking at Breakneck Ridge. I’ve never done a real hiking excursion before, and to be perfectly honest, it was refreshingly exhausting.
We climbed three of the major hills/mountains the Hudson Highlands region of New York has to offer, and I never imagined I had the physical endurance to spend 3+ hours climbing rocks and traversing the rocky ledges without any appropriate gear or experience. By the end of it, I was physically tired and dripping with sweat, but the views, the exercise, and the adventure with three of my closest friends was well worth it. I just didn’t expect that my sedentary and otherwise unhealthy lifestyle allowed my body to even undertake such a physical feat; I guessed I’d collapse of a heart attack while scaling at least the first half of the first ridge.

Afterwards, we drove back home and stopped by Tarrytown/Sleepy Hollow for a well-deserved Bubble Tea at a Chinese takeout restaurant — which, by my guess, would be the only “ethnic” restaurant in all of Westchester. When we arrived back in Brooklyn, we ordered a shit-ton of Indian food and played Mario Kart 64 for the remainder of the night. Calves burned from the hike and my mouth was set ablaze as I ate Lamb Vindaloo, and I gladly watched Brett beat all of us on Toad’s Turnpike. In summation, it was a great weekend.