52 Quintillion Minus Six?

Quick round up!

• I’ve now seen Eno four more times, and my thoughts from back in January haven’t changed. I’d also add that watching the film multiple times across a number of days really does highlight that the ‘spine’ running through the film is just too constant for the gimmick to work. The first time you rewatch, after a couple of months, you think ‘fair enough, there were a couple of new things there’. But after the third showing in 24 hours, it’s more ‘for god’s sake, that bit with taking photos of the beetles is in every version???’ I want a 90 minute Cybernetic Eno! Or 60 minutes on James! (okay, I might not want that all that much, but it’d at least be an interesting difference). It probably works better if you just watch a version once a year or so.

• Meanwhile, there’s attacking sacred cows, and then there’s Marcello’s brave reassessment of Be Here Now. I can’t go that far, though I’ve always felt Noel always wanted to be more musically diverse than you’d think…but this only showed up here and there across the Oasis albums because he always bottled it. The only thing I can listen to from it these days is D’You Know What I Mean?, which I will still stan for, but the rest of it…just no.

• April will be “GRPO month!” at Snappish Towers. I have two main experiments to work one; one will not be a surprise…the other probably won’t either, but if I can get it to work, it will be an interesting new approach to the particular problem

• It looks like the two cities I’ve lived in while being in the US have another thing in common: malls called “Northgate” that have failed. Right now, the Cincinnati one has one single occupant of the food court and the anchor stores are basically Torrid (closing in a few days), and Hot Topic (which admittedly, looks like every other Hot Topic and may be the last tenant standing)

• Adventures in toddlerdom: whereupon Daddy, Maeryn, and Helvetica all make poor choices which ends up with a cat walking around with melted chocolate all over its fur. Most of the bad choices were mine, but I’m still looking side-eye at the supposedly intelligent cat that decided that was a great place to sleep…