Quick Jury Service review: A lot of sitting around and doing nothing except waiting for somebody to tell you that you can go home. But! I have at least tried Decibel, and I can recommend their somewhat generous portions of Korean fried chicken.
Otherwise, I’m too tired to write much of anything else this week.
This blog is now 20 years old. Which is somewhat terrifying. Not only is this two decades of uninterrupted blogging, somehow managing to muddle through when so many vast titans of the blog craze have fallen by the wayside, but it’s also the same amount of time since I went to UNC for my ill-fated attempt at a doctorate. Yet it was a part in a chain of events that started with me taking a card off the third year noticeboard in the Kilburn Building and ending up here in Cincinnati. And the blog has been a haphazard chronicle of that.
Ideally, I would have gone back through the archives to give you a list of my favourite pieces1, but I absolutely hate going through my older work so…no. I will say that I think one of my regrets is that I didn’t really post a lot during my time in California from 2011-2012. I know that there were multiple reasons for that: I was somewhat downcast at being stranded in Santa Monica for months and months; I was worried about the NDA issues surrounding talking about my work with Activision at the time…but it wasn’t like I was doing a lot during the evenings, and while I did try to get out and about in the surrounding areas at the weekends, I should have added more entries while I was trapped2. These days, I’m pretty good at adding an entry once a week, even if it ends up being little more than an Instagram embed, and I think that’s a decent cadence for the time being.
I’ve also been thinking about the technology behind the blog a little. Over the past 20 years, the blog has been powered by:
There’s also been quite few different designs and sideblogs. There was a photography sideblog, a different blog which ran longer pieces on obscure Britpop songs that literally only existed so I could try and become a music journalist3, Twitter embeds, Disqus for comments for quite a long time, a custom XML-RPC Python blogging app I wrote that added what music I was playing automatically to the post, and probably a bunch of other things that I’ve forgotten. When I moved to Hugo, I ditched all my custom CSS designs and just used the Hyde theme which you see today. I am tired of it, but I don’t see myself sitting down and fixing up something new in the immediate future. I think if I switch out the body font from Open Sans to something else, it might be a little more appealing to me again.
Anyway, yes, twenty years! The domain is renewed through 2030, so hopefully I’ll continue to be here at least until then…and who knows what new things there will be to talk about in the future?
It’s not a great piece, but it is one of my favourite days of the 2000-2010 decade ↩︎
Look as I wander around Santa Monica trying to find somebody to take my health insurance! ↩︎
I’m not saying it was a good idea, but I got a lovely email from Johnny Boy, pissed off a couple of terrible American bands, and Paul Morley recognized me at the old Oxford Borders, so I’m claiming victory. ↩︎
On this somewhat downbeat celebration of ‘freedom’, have a picture of a cat that just wants to go to bed.
For some reason, it seems to be popular with a certain group of people to blame Obama for…something. He didn’t pass a bill codifying Roe, despite of course most of these people being around for the Obamacare battles in the House and therefore should remember how strong the anti-abortion Blue Dogs were during that. But somehow Obama should have waved a magic wand across the House before moving onto the Senate to do the same magic trick on people like Joe sodding Lieberman. And that’s not even getting into the fact that there’s nothing that protects a codifying law more than Roe anyway, but again, it’s Obama’s fault. The ostensibly anti-imperialist leftists then go on to post a bunch of anti-Ukrainian slobber that makes you wonder why they don’t just carve a ‘Z’ on their cheek and be done with it. And then signal-boost Pizzagate accounts as a cherry on top.
Yes, it has been an angry few days, and I’ve been mostly trying to focus my anger on the people how did just tear up 50 years of settled law, but it turns out I have a lot of rage to go around. Yet it has also been a weekend of hope and joy? We went to the Cincinnati Pride Parade on Saturday, and watched thousands being able to enjoy their lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even 20 years ago. And everybody there is ready to keep fighting against turning the clock back (except while dancing to Running Up That Hill).
And finally for the week - two other pieces of good news! We finally, on the third year of trying, managed to harvest some blackcurrants ahead of the squirrels eating them all. I even made a Bakewell Tart with them! Plus, again, after three years, Blood On The Clocktower arrived. Even if we never actually play it, it is a great memento for reminding us of the time Tammy fooled an entire bunch of strangers for two hours and killed them all (…and in the game? — Ed.)
Now, back to staring at NDCG scores and cursing, sometimes at Twitter, sometimes at the screen…
3D printing is witchcraft in general, but resin-based UV-curing printing? It slowly rises from a liquid to form the shape. It’s basically a replicator but instead of being able to produce food…it produces little models and eventually lots of additions to my Transformer toys (firstly: finally replacing this lost piece from decades ago). Or printing out a 40K Tyranid Epic army one weekend.
It really is quite amazing and not something I don’t think I could even dreamed existing, let alone having in the house when I was little. And so many children will just grow up thinking that’s just the way things are, which is terrifying waves stick at cloud and looks for his VHS tapes…1
That’s basically the end of the good news for the week. COVID has finally caught up to us, blowing apart everybody’s plans and leaving us in the worst sort of limbo.
And yes, I do feel a bit annoyed that I have to deal with people going “Stranger Things!” anytime Running Up That Hill is played in the future, but I’m trying to put those feelings aside. waves stick at cloud again ↩︎
Okay, perhaps a slight over-exaggeration, as this was an introduction to using the airbrush, but after creating my own molds, spending weeks A/B testing caramel recipes, and grinding my own chocolate from cacao beans, I’ve quite possibly come to the end of the line for completely new things to do with chocolate. Unless somebody wants to make polycarbonate kite and dart molds. Please, somebody make those molds.
I was quite apprehensive about the airbrushing, mainly because I’ve tried at least two times before and it was a complete failure. Thanks to a tax refund, I got the fancy airbrush and a recommended compressor that feels like you can also use it to power a nail gun…and suddenly it all just worked. I’d been building it up and up for a couple of months, to the extent I took a four-day weekend to give myself enough time. And then the spraying was done in about 2 minutes. It took longer to clean up.
The other thing I tried to do over the weekend was to look at cars. I’ve been thinking about retiring my long-suffering 12-year-old Honda Insight for a while now, and I’d like to go fully electric. For a variety of reasons, I’m not even going to consider a Tesla; instead, my focus has been on the Kia EV6 or the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Both of which are like gold dust at the moment, but I found a garage that had an EV6 and was eager for me to come down and check it out. So off I drove, where I got to look at a very shiny car…and they even opened the doors so I could look inside. But they weren’t willing to let me actually drive it. Or any other EV6 that comes in their doors without me agreeing terms to buy it first. Which seems odd. Oh, and also asking for $10,000 over Kia’s MSRP. Needless to say, I didn’t stay too long.
Having spent a lot of Thursday afternoon on EV forums, it seems to be a somewhat common occurrence…but how am I expected to purchase a car without having actually driven in it even once? It’s a lot of money for it to become an impulse purchase!
So no new car just yet…or likely any time soon, to be honest. Which means we are going to do the one thing I promised never to do; we are actually going to put my car through a car wash. For the first time in nine years (I’m not sure exactly why this happened, but eventually Not Washing It became a thing!). Terrible scenes. Just terrible.
I’ve spent most of this week’s evenings reading all of Sandman Mystery Theatre, a Vertigo comic from the 90s that ran for 70 issues which I dismissed at the time as…I’m not really sure, some sort of cash-grab by DC trying to ride on the popularity of Gaiman’s Sandman? Anyway, I was an idiot, because it’s a fun, pulpy read where the oh-so-90s grisly murders are more than made up for by the Nick’n’Nora-inspired relationship antics of Wesley and Dian. I actually found myself quite upset when I got to #70 and there was nothing further to read.
(it had an interesting structure too; every storyline except for the last was 4 issues long, which I think really helped with the pacing and the idea of “well, I can read just one more story and oh, how did it get that late?")
Anyway, my thoughts on thirty-year-old comics aside, it’s been…a rather boring week full of grown-up stuff. Tidying the house some more, packing things away into boxes, absolutely rinsing the latest Kroger Diet Coke sale1, and managing to deal with one of the two postal issues I’m currently entangled in. Oh, and I went to the dentist too! How exciting. I have really neglected the “all the projects I want to get done in 2022” for the past two months…so I need to get back to those. Plus I now have three pieces of technical writing to get done, so things are piling up!
However, all that is on a slight hold this week, because I need to get things ready for next weekend’s project: airbrushing chocolates. It’s likely to be a disaster, but we’ll see if I can get something that looks presentable out of all the cocoa butter I’m going to be spraying everywhere…
Yes, I have bought 144 cans in the past five days. What of it? ↩︎
Back from Durham. It’s still there! It’s a lot different, but also a lot still remains the same.
Well, we’ve definitely reached the point of The Story of… where I’m more irritated by it than enjoying it. I was expecting this somewhat - the move to BBC2 and bunging all the episodes out at once, plus COVID - well it was all going to harm it, but the omissions and the inclusions as we’ve got into 96/97 have driven me round the bend. Shed Seven, for crying out loud? Less than thirty seconds or so on Your Woman? All that time spent with Saffron?
I do realize that it’s basically who is willing to talk to them; I was quite annoyed at the omission of a band that had a 25th album anniversary this week1, but I understand that at least one member seems to be less willing to revisit that period2. Meanwhile, too many of the Britpop people they have on seem to have come straight out of This Morning With Richard Not Judy’s Angus Deayton’s Authorised History of Alternative Comedy. “Halcyon days” indeed. And maybe I can forgive some of that…but you can’t forgive the show talking about “now dance is popular!” and “wasn’t Scooby Snacks subversive!” when the programme literally had Mr. C on a few weeks ago. And he was funnier!
At least the Aqua segment was entertaining. 1998 next week. Which will almost certainly include this — which is a song that feels like it’s dropped out of the culture in the past ten years or so3:
And I hope they talk about the infamous 1999 episode when they get there in a couple of weeks…
Okay, in things that aren’t me complaining about a silly music documentary series…look, it was a quiet week. I have moved a little further along with Camouflage; I have a GAN that has been training for just over a week now which should be in a position to be used for downstream tasks in the near future. I also tinkered with an addition to the project this week which might end up becoming a much larger part…if I can just get the loss function to work…
Next week: A Slight Return To Durham!