Lily today: come on papa, join our chaos
I take Lily here every now and then, and she's twice met and 'played chess' with another toddler!
In a coffee shop (no13 on London rd), having banger after banger 90s shoegaze, we've had ride, mbv, cocteau twins and pumpkins. This coffee shop also does incredible batch brew.
Made me chuckle...
My daughters favourite story for the past two weeks has been about Bop and Biff two boxers who train for a fight, knock eachother out and then become friends and have a big feast, no idea why this resonates so much with her 😂
There are only five emoticon reactions in Outlook and none of them are suitable for the most common thing which is to say a quick thank you. A thumbs up feels very informal! And I can’t really think of when I would use a heart in a work situation and not actually also send an email.
Ended up in Starbucks this morning why is my Americano so bubbly 😂
No responses from my Banjo app testers yet. No response is not good I think 😂
Banjo app is ready for testing, icon finally designed - now to see if people like it 😱
There is basically no other use case than humour!
Been disturbed by Google Reimagine today. Imagine the UX meeting about users... Our users are people who want to um lie and mislead others, more easily?
Watched God on Trial 2008
I also learnt the useful concept of schismogenesis, which is kind of like the anthropological equivalent of counterwill. Many cultures seemed to be predicated on something like pathological demand avoidance, consciously against restrictions to freedom or intergroup violence.
Interesting point at the end about how chiefs rose to power potentially via charity. By caring for the captured and lost, who grow into a force.
I basically feel unqualified to have an opinion, it was very dense on facts about different civilizations in a way that I found difficult to assimilate, and not coming to it with a deep knowledge of anthropology or archaeology, the revolutionariness of the ideas was over my head. Basic takehomes where a) the hobbes/rousseau conceptions of pre-agricultural humans are myths, and that humans held a variety of social structures, which implies creativity and freedom. b) our modern unequal and heirarchical society is not an inevitability from agriculture/technology/ scale.
Finished The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Week of staycation begins tomorrow. Planning visiting friends, playing music, reading. Need more music in my life! I'm being tempted by the idea of busking to see what its like, and also setting myself up as a music teacher for banjo/mandolin.
Treated myself to the Kenyan Peaberry from Pact as a staycation present and it's 😋, exactly the flavour profile I love. Ordered myself some distilled water to try and make my self the ultimate V60.
Learnt a new tune: https://thesession.org/tunes/825
One of the reasons I don’t trust behavioral psychology is the fact that I burnt my toungue multiple times a week for years on coffee and tea until I actually thought about it and decided to try not to do that.
I liked how the psychiatrist Stutz expanded the idea of the inevitability of suffering into three categories: pain, uncertainty, and work. It would seem that work would be one of the easiest to accept , but it took me ages.😅
We’ve been trying to find a slug which has been living in our kitchen. Last week we found it hiding and I took it outside and threw it over a fence. This morning it appears to have come back? There’s no food for it inside unless it’s eating cat food?
Watched the film Stutz
Finished reading The Screwtape Letters by C.S Lewis
It's unique and artistic but I just found some of the premise vulgar, and somewhat shocking in a way I possibly wouldn't have cared about years ago, but I think this stopped me from loving it. A lot of art/media in the 90s was about this rebellious, pushing boundaries, edginess which seemed on one hand to be about this freedom to be real about the dark side of humanity but often in a way where you are kind of manipulated somehow into joining in as a watcher of the film - which seems out definitely out of fashion now, for good reason? I think Bukowski was like one of the godfathers of this. I'm a bit too squeamish these days...
Finished Breaking the Waves 1996:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_the_Waves
It was engrossing, and technically great but personally it felt distastefully sadistic at times, perhaps a product of it's time.
On annual leave until September 🥳 apart from 2 days. Outlook app uninstalled from phone.
Lily picked me a new book from the library - One flew over the cuckoo's next - what a choice!
Finished Code Red by Chris Ryan. Not the typical book I read, my daughter (3) picked it out at the library for me. It was actually enjoyable to read something less weighty than what I normally pick!
R.Crumb only listened to old music: "When I listen to old music, it's one of the few times.when I actually have a kind of a love for humanity. You hear the best part of the soul of the common people, you know. It's their way of expressing their connection to eternity or whatever you want to call it. Modern music doesn't have that. It's a calamitous loss that people can't express themselves that way anymore."
Summer in England is apparently like this 50% of the time now
Just watched Crumb (1994):
Now syndicating my stream to Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@jamesalvarez
Henry in the longish grass
Honestly I’ve often wondered why butterflies are so unwieldy! Turns out it’s maybe for generating static electricity:
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2024/july/butterflies-static-electricity.html
The worst thing about the office is not being able to take my shoes and socks off when it’s this hot 🥵
Nearly got this cross posting to twitter…
Currently questioning my choice of framework for an up and coming archival project in Digital Humanities in light of reading: This Page is Designed to Last.
Software sustainability is such a big issue in University settings as money comes in grants, subsequently runs out, and leaves ancient legacy software headaches.
I could totally build this up coming app to render static HTML, thus rendering it solid for years to come, but it currently I could see it adding a lot of friction to updating the site for non technical users.
Whenever I see private API keys in a private git repo, I tell them of a time when someone forked the repo to work on it but made the fork public and got our email account locked down. And I will also now send them this:
https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/anyone-can-access-deleted-and-private-repo-data-github
More generally: Never use private forks.
Got my new stream rendering on my PHP site 😍 - British dates and times of course. Design needs some tweaking but I need to get on with my work now...
Testing a picture… This is my most recent setup for egg fried rice.
Sometimes you come across someone's website which is just a goldmine of good stuff, curated lists, links, writing and gorgeous to look at - I feel like I could easily spend hours on Joodaloop
I created this stream today - I have been wanting to add microblogging to my site, and serendipitously came across https://streams.place/ which does everything I want, looks beautiful and works by sending messages to Telegram!