Snappish Productions

It feels a little unbelievable, but in two weeks and one day, Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain (at least in his Steamboat Willie incarnation). For those of us that joined the internet in the late 1900s[^1], the idea that Disney wouldn’t push to extend the extension granted to copyrights in 1998 is unthinkable. Yet here we are, and both Mickey and Tigger will be able to crossover with Sherlock Holmes and Jay Gatsby in fifteen days.

The family arrives this week on their first direct flight from Heathrow to Cincinnati. It’ll be nice to have a direct link again like we did in Durham - it’s so much easier to just get on one plane at an airport that’s about twenty minutes away compared to having to fly from CVG to a major hub airport (and dealing with that on the way back, too). We shall hopefully be doing the same trip in reverse next March!

I do need to get my head in the festive game, though. It hasn’t quite hit yet this year…

[1]: Gen X/Late Millennial cohort takes 2D6 psychic damage from “the late 1990s”…

As we come to the fiftieth anniversary of the greatest Christmas song ever created, Tom FreakyTrigger has written up an investigation into the changing of the Guard, as the GlamChristmas era starts to fall out of the Christmas canon, leaving a distinctly American tinge over things. And that’s a little sad. Tom cautions against nostalgia in his piece, and I totally agree, but there is something wonderful about a bunch of Brummies just having a great time on the Top of The Pops set:

I miss the era of Britain which was basically: “We’re crap, but in a funky skillo way”¹

Of course, I’m a fine one to talk, given that I left the country and live in the country that has, perhaps due to the information superhighway, retconned the pasts of the Western world across television, music, books, film, video games, and more besides. But Maeryn will at least grow up groaning as I pull out Wizzard for one more go-around every December.

We survived our trip to New York, which sounds a little over the top, but we did get caught in a scary crowd crush on Fifth Avenue, which would be scary enough in normal times, but when you factor in a small baby who’s just woken up in her buggy as around twenty people press into her, it is a little frightening. But we got out of the crush, saw the tree at 30 Rock, and went back off to Brooklyn, and soon somebody was bounding all over the hotel bed like nothing happened. She will get sick of us telling the story when she’s about ten. Although that won’t stop us…

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1. Copyright, oooh, probably Jonathan Nash from Your Sinclair. ↩︎

At the end of every year’s Thanksgiving, Tammy and I resolve to make things more simple next year. And twelve months later, we always forget that and make things difficult for ourselves. Three different types of meat! Tiny pinecone entremets! More people than ever before! A small baby crawling in her play pen¹! And yes, as in every year, some things don’t quite work out as planned, but when everybody sits down to the table, there’s enough food for a week and desserts as far as the eye can see. But next year, we’re going to cut back a bit. Honest.

Anyway, a good time was had by all, Maeryn ate some turkey, and now it’s almost time to break out the advent calendars! And really not long before my family comes over the Atlantic to join us for the festive fun…

…but first, New York? We will have a very well-travelled baby by the time she’s one!

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1. I’m trying to make “The Box” happen and set up a backstory of her being in a gang with her cuddly toys, but it’s not sticking just yet… ↩︎

This week I unlocked a new achievement of living in America — changing a very full baby’s nappy whilst also on the phone to an insurance company trying to sort out a medication refill (actually, it was the ‘specialist pharmacy’, but the root of the issue was insurance rejection and whatnot). Hurrah for private healthcare and jumping through all the hoops.

My whistlestop trip to Chicago seemed to go well, meeting the rest of the Bookend.AI team and working out our immediate plans for next year and getting read for what we’re going to create in 2024. Which is crazily just around the corner…

(this song in my head the entire trip)

The Thanksgiving insanity has begun in earnest too; 15 savoury dishes, 15 desserts, or: “Ian tries to use as many molds as he bought this year - an impossible task, but he’ll try his best.” Every pot, every pan, every oven, all will be pressed into service as we try to feed nine people until they explode. And then we’ll do it all again next month!

A week in research adventures:

• Spend a fortnight prior with a paper stuck in your head. There has to be a better way to do good thing
• Take a weekend and fail. But you know it’s in there somewhere
• Carve out time during the week and on a Thursday afternoon, eureka! you get an example working and finally understand the mysteries of the vLLM KV Cache
• Thursday evening: plan out the paper in your head. Oh, this is going to be great!
• Friday: construct a quick eval
• Friday mid-morning. Yeah, well it worked for that example, didn’t it, sucker boy?
• Friday afternoon: deep sigh

I still think I can work on the problem and get something marginally useful, but it’s a bit of a rollercoaster. And reminds me why my good friend Sava spends so much time on his evaluations first. I had tried a few variations of the initial sample, sure, but not sending 5000 different ones through the model and I paid a high price for my hubris.

(I still haven’t given up, mind you. Because it would be quite nice if I can find a way of making it work)

How did the year just…run out? I’m in Chicago this week for an all-hands meeting at New Company (which currently is a lot easier to organize than at Old Company), and the the next week is Thanksgiving, and then it’s December! I don’t even have enough time to put together a proper dessert menu, let alone make it…though that won’t stop me trying, obviously.

One thing that is quite different over here opposed to the UK (& Ireland, which is somewhat pertinent to my situation) is that you don’t really find a lot of photobooths here. Back in Britain, most largish supermarkets will have one somewhere in the shop. Hence adverts like this:

In the last decade, the photobooths have changed a little in that you can now get a download code to go with the pictures. And this download code can be used when obtaining/renewing a passport digitally.

Over here, things seem to be a little different, which I’m guessing is due to the US passport system dragging their feet on things a little. Which is to say that I been around UPS, FedEx, and Staples shops and not one of them will give me a digital copy. So today we’re going to go rogue and basically beg them to allow us to take a picture in front of their white balance screen. And then we’re going to paint all the flat walls in the house white so we never have to do this again.

Hallowe’en ended up being…snowed out? We just had some flurries for about forty minutes, but it was enough to reduce my visitors down from the hordes of last year to two groups. I felt bad for the first group who arrived very early and therefore didn’t get a lot of sweets versus the group that came around 8pm. I still have so many sweets left. But you always have to prepare for the potential of high traffic! Turning children away makes you a monster!

Finally, RC Cola went odd.

The leaves are red, gold, brown, and falling all other the place. It’s going to freeze in the next few days. I have started working on my plans for 25 desserts at Christmas. Winter is definitely coming. And that means I don’t have a lot of time left for ordering the season’s mold and chocolate requirements! BakeDeco should have a VIP section, that’s all I’m saying.

We are also booked for travelling to Britain next year! We’ll be coming over in March to celebrate Maeryn’s first birthday. She’s getting in a lot of travel considering she’s not even a year old yet…

No post last week because we had to get up at 4am to catch a flight from Durham back to Cincinnati. Durham thoughts!

• Durham remains rather similar, but with a lot of building still going on. The wonderful old South Bank building is now a new glass skyscraper in progress.
• Tons more housing around, which is good, but sigh, I do wish commercial architects could be allowed to produce something different than the usual boxes¹.
• I cannot work digital door locks, which means I end up standing in front of a door at 10pm thinking “I literally train neural networks for a living, how can I not make this work??”
• My concept of distances between places in Durham is slightly skewed by my previous history of walking everywhere. My estimates of ‘oh, that’s really not far’ are not entirely shared by other people or reality itself. Oops.
• Spiral staircases look fun, but in the middle of a living room are an accident waiting to happen!

Nothing too exciting this week, but next weekend, I have to make somebody’s first roast dinner. No pressure!

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1. Don’t worry, I am still firmly on Team Build More Council Houses, but in the absence of that, any real increase in supply is to be welcomed… ↩︎

I am sounding less like somebody that has smoked 60 cigarettes a day for 50 years today, which is an improvement from earlier in the week. Still not exactly well, but getting there. Which is probably a bad omen for going to NC later this week and breathing in all the terrible things in airports and planes getting there and back.

But! In other news, I have now officially become an American. And no, it’s not a green card or citizenship. I have those already! What I mean is that I now have a deck attached to my house. And a deck box to put cushions in. I might as well have the Stars and Stripes tattooed on my face at this point. But it is nice, and the small one will likely get a lot of use out of it as she grows older. Also, I got stopped in the street by several neighbours asking about it, so I have provided a local talking point! Doing my part for the local community…

I’m now on my second round of lung infection antibiotics and I seem to have developed pinkeye. Being immunocompromised (due to a different medication) and having a baby is a fun adventure!

In the meantime, go and read Owen Hatherley’s long-threatened Transformers essay in New Socialist. I have a bunch of issues with it (no real discussion of TF UK or the tumblr/indie disco days of IDW, plus a bit of a misleading timeline on how TF operated in the 2000s), but in general it’s a great read.

Also! Watch this part of this motoring documentary from 1993 and see how long it takes you to come to the conclusion that if you were on a jury, you would never vote to convict her in the eventual murder that must have taken place.