I made my first batch of mince pies this weekend1. Which means, as I think about it, I’ve have eaten an entire 227g block of butter this weekend. It’s…probably best not to dwell on that.
We’re entering that quiet lull; a Saturday spent trying to clean up the house a little, then I’ll be on my own for a couple of days as I clean carpets and make up a new set of beds…and then my family arrives on the 18th. Which means I’m basically considering myself on holiday from that evening, even if I do have two more days of work left. Admittedly, on the last day, I plan on reviving the old British school custom of “Bringing in Games on the last day of term”, which is a bit more of a challenge when you work for a remote company.
Back to tidying up…
And after 13 years, I’ve finally found a pastry recipe that works as a really good mince pie. For too many years, I tried to make pâte sucrée work, but this time around, I’ve used the semolina-enhanced shortbread from Sift. Much crisper and able to support the mincemeat filling! ↩︎
Dec 8, 2024 · 2 minute
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and buying at waitrose
This week, another little part of my Britishness fell away. The dressing gown from British Home Stores that I’ve had for an indeterminate amount of years (probably at least 15), described by Tammy as “looking a bit ratty when I first met you,” has been replaced with a brand new gown. From L.L. Bean. You honestly can’t get more “middle class liberal American dad” than that. I might as well just tear up my British passport.1
One thing I didn’t mention about Thanksgiving last week is that it is also Lucidwork’s busiest time of the year. We power the search behind some surprising big brands, and my goodness, did we facilitate a lot of sales over the sale period. I probably shouldn’t yet put a figure on it, but we’d be in with a shot at a cabinet position in the next administration if it was all ours. I had somewhat forgotten just how much I like being involved with search — sure it’s not saving the planet, but the idea of actually making the Internet navigable and giving you what you want to find? It ties back to me getting onto the net back in 1997 and finding all the tricks to make Infoseek and AltaVista produce good results…and now I’m doing it behind the scenes2
All this and reconnecting with an old university friend? Not a bad week at all, to be honest…
Although I can’t do that, as part of the remaining Britishness I have left rests on a Le Carré reading of the fact I have passports from three different countries. Though I’d be a hopeless spy. ↩︎
What I really want is for us to be given the keys to the BBC archive so I can create a semantic video searching application for the entire BBC archive. And fill my 40Tb SAN downstairs with all the iPlayer content it can swallow ↩︎
From this article in Atlas Obscura. And yes, apparently, the breakaway wall slid back into place when the shop was shut. Hardly anybody seems to do this sort of thing any more, and it’s a big shame. I get that a lot of commercial and residential architecture has just devolved to big boxes and some sort of mistaken Poundbury aesthetic (see also: Poundbury itself), but why can’t we have fun? I’m not asking for total Archigram1, but maybe we could do something a little differently every now and again?
Coincidentally, we spent a large part of Saturday at a ridiculous supermarket that has a monorail. Why does it have a monorail? Because the owner thought it’d be cool (and one was going cheap). It helps that it’s a shop where you can get anything from actual three feet sugar canes to Cadbury’s chocolate directly important from the UK, but the sense of over-the-top Midwestern excess in the interior and exterior decoration makes it like no other supermarket you’ve ever been to.
Anyway, Thanksgiving! Perhaps the most subdued Thanksgiving I’ve had since emigrating, maybe? Fewer people, no guests at all, and a low single-digit number of desserts. Am I ill? Yes, actually, we’re all ill. But we put together a solid dinner, even with a little, Official Agent of Chaos running around, demanding to be entertained, preferably with the Stick Song2. And, although the hazelnut aero filling collapsed, I know exactly why that happened, so I’m still on track to create The Aero Bar That They Said Shouldn’t Be Made this Christmas.
I think that’s the best bourbon pecan pie I’ve ever made, too. Thin crust, filling thrown together at 22:00 Wednesday evening without a recipe…not bad at all. Of course, without a recipe, I can never truly recreate it…sigh
December awaits. The temperatures have started plummeting to -8ºC as if to get us in the festive season…snow on the ground too!
Nov 24, 2024 · 2 minute
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exciting stuff continued
I feel like a good 80% of my posts this year have had the theme of “isn’t this year going quickly?” This is…yet another. With Thanksgiving coming up so soon, it made me realize that I hadn’t yet spent a weekend for a month coming up with Christmas card designs…and I needed them this week to get all the posting underway. But when I actually sat down with Flux and Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large, I found myself completely lacking any inspiration1. Also, it turns out Flux is terrible at stylistic prompts, so my first attempt at reusing some prompts from last year all failed miserably.
What I ended up with is a bit of a cheat. But then the whole thing is a bit of a cheat, so…anyway, what many of you will get this year is a variation on a theme. One prompt, different scenes. So you’ll see a coloured pencil version of the Yorkshire Moors covered in snow, but it’ll be utterly unique to everybody else’s. You’re welcome2.
We’re having a quiet Thanksgiving this year, with a drastic reduction in numbers. Consequently, I’m also drastically reducing the dessert count. It may have been as high as 20 in the past few years, but this week, it’s going to be dialled back to three. I know. It feels wrong. I’m also under orders to keep Christmas down to an acceptable number too. Terrible! I will be lucky to get into double figures even when combining both holidays! All the molds just sitting idle! Maybe I can get away with six or seven…
Yes, I know. But writing prompts is at least some work. ↩︎
One card is going to be very different but that’s because it’s a gag card. ↩︎
I have braved the optician for the first time since 2021, got complimented on my 20/20 vision (I mean, with glasses, but at least they actually work…) as well as my accent and walked out without having to wear bifocals for the next two years. Hurrah!
(meanwhile, I’m reduced to “are we upset more about the one with white nationalist tattoos, the utterly insane one, or the nonce?", so that’s going well)
Nov 10, 2024 · 3 minute
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and believing sees me cursed
Stars’ third album, Set Yourself on Fire, is now twenty years old. I remember listening to it, on the streets of Chapel Hill in 2004. The day after. The day before, we started out at the infamous 112 N Graham St shared house, watching the returns come in and laughing along with Jon Stewart. Indecision 2004. And then the night turned. The laughter and chatter stopped and the party broke up and we slithered away.
I took a picture of this sign as I walked down Franklin Street the next day, every single person on the street looking shell-shocked and ruined. How could the country re-elect this person, this administration, given all the disasters of the previous four years?
What I didn’t know is that one day, I’d look back on that walk with something approaching nostalgia. That I’d watch returns coming in and see the country vote for an insurrectionist and mass internment camps. And not just in the places you’d expect. The entire country covered with red shift arrows, that they’d taken a long hard look at the two candidates and decided they wanted the one that gleefully talks about the execution of his enemies. This Is What They Want And By God Take Away Our Healthcare While You’re Dragging People Off The Streets.
Maybe it won’t be so bad; after all, 2004 gave way to 2006 and 2008. But I then read about the coming attempts to completely wipe out what’s left of the 14th Amendment and I start wishing for Robert L. Booth.
Meanwhile, all of my social media feeds have turned into the standard Democratic circular firing squad, although my ire is most reserved for the people shitting on the Democrats for the past year now telling people to get their passports renewed before the coming further assault on trans rights1.
God, that was strange to see you again
Introduced by a friend of a friend
Smiled and said, "Yes, I think we've met before"
In that instant, it started to pour
Captured a taxi despite all the rain
We drove in silence across Pont Champlain
And all of that time you thought I was sad
I was trying to remember your name
Back in 2004, I could not wrap my head around this lyric. How could you not remember? How could you not remember that name? A feeling made more acute by never having had a name to remember. Twenty years on…and I understand a lot better now. Some names stay, but many do not. That’s okay, because there will be names that last forever.
I’ve also been thinking about this speech again.
I don’t think progressives really understand the trouble they’re in concerning the direction of the party. Biden, to everybody’s surprise, actually governed closer to what a hypothetical Sanders administration would look like, given the makeup of the Senate and the Courts: stimulus and massive amounts of infrastructure spending, reducing inflation without the crushing unemployment of the 1980s, protectionism, kickstarting manufacturing builds, reducing the amount of Americans paid under $15 from 31% of the population to 13%, cancelling billions of dollars of debt, and the only reason he didn’t do more was because of the Supreme Court, saving union pension funds, and being the first President in the history of the USA to walk a picket line. And none of it helped. Do you honestly think the centrists in the party are going to look at that and suggest Medicare-for-all? When it turns out that people actually don’t care about soaring unemployment compared to the prices they confront weekly at the supermarket, how do you think they’re going to react to ‘we’re going to take away your health insurance’ even if the new thing is technically better?↩︎
Nov 3, 2024 · 1 minute
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and I just can't help believing the ann selzer prayer candle
My current status oscillates between the above and the below:
Thankfully, this weekend Tammy is out of town, so my focus is on Maeryn, who is a) delightful, and b) an all-consuming distraction, which is exactly what I need on this weekend of all weekends.
Yeah, you all know I’m refreshing every feed every time I can, but trust me, it’s a lot less when you are trying to make sure Danger Baby isn’t Committing Crimes1.
I will see you all on the other side…
What I didn’t know, though, was that the final Selzer poll was dropping at 19:00 on Saturday night. So as I was rocking Maeryn to sleep via the gentle sounds of Björk’s Hyper Ballad, I may have sworn in front of her. But she was almost asleep, so it’s fine. Totally… ↩︎
Oct 27, 2024 · 3 minute
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such a very nice man Toby!
Two books down this week. Firstly, Michael Palin’s new volume of his diaries, covering 1999-2009, and Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice, the first foray into extending Le Carré beyond his death.
Considering I spent a good deal of this year reading the older volumes when I discovered that Palin was releasing this book in September, I couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. It feels shorter than the previous entries, and a bigger sense of things and threads missing. Since 80 Days, there’s always been sections in the diaries that are basically “you should probably go and buy the book of the relevant series to find out what happened here”, but this time around, even things like a trip to India for Conde Nast and trips to film festivals are reduced to ellipses. This time period is also the point where the first volume of diaries is published and so things get a little meta…and I think some of the reaction of other members of Python to the first volume1 might be a reason why it also feel likes a lot (not all, but a lot!) of arguments and discussions that would have been present in the first few decades are no longer surviving the editing process. In fairness, it’s not like Palin owes us anything, and the series continues to be a revealing and honest account of a comedy and travel legend, but perhaps less essential than the earlier books.
Karla’s Choice opens with an apologia for everybody who thinks this is a really bad idea; Harkaway is at pains to point out he understands if you think he shouldn’t be adding to his father’s work. And yet the book mostly works — he’s got the mannerisms of all the characters correct, from Esterhase’s excited Hungarian-English to a pitch-perfect version of Beryl Reid doing Connie Sachs. There’s a spy plot, the rise of Karla, some papering over the continuity between the loosely-connected books. And of course, the Lady Ann.
I say mostly works because every so often you come across a section which screams “Look! This! Is! A! Reference! Do! You! See?!!” Does the book really need a gossipy aside early on from Roddy Martindale, for instance? But, considering I thought the entire concept of the book was a bad idea and that is was going to be a disaster, it is in fact, a good Smiley story. And that’s enough. Not essential, but for those of us that have exhausted Le Carré, a nice little addition. I imagine there will be more.
As is now tradition, I’ll be putting up my “books read in 2024” page in December. You’ll be able to tell when I idly googled Games Workshop’s Black Library and discovered the Horus Heresy sequence was finally over…
Idle appears to be the one most upset, which tracks with what we know of Idle, but when reading the first volume a few months ago, yes Idle is singled out for criticism here and there, but Palin always seems to be sympathetic to Idle’s odd position within the team (being the only one writing by himself), and honestly the diaries of that time probably paint the worst picture of Cleese more than anybody else. And Cleese in the 2000s doesn’t really seem to be fazed. ↩︎
The classic IKEA glassware has, for now, moved aside for something that’s essentially Ostalgie for a time and a place that I was never here for. Specifically, Pizza Hut in the USA during the 1980s. Almost indestructible. And sure, you might say that a toddler is going to test that theory. Which is why we have 24 of them.
I feel like I had a lot of fun ideas for this weekend’s post, but I didn’t write them down and my back pain has obliterated them from my memory. Apologies for that. I think I have one more tech blog post in me for the rest of the year, but if that’s going to be the case, I do want to make it a good one. Or at least somewhat comprehensive. Graphs and all that. Maybe even LaTeX.
Meanwhile, I stared at two new Lego sets this week, and I’m not going to buy either of them (in fairness, the X-Mansion looks so much like the Museum modular that it seems pointless to have both, and I already got the Lego Friends Botanical Garden, for under $60…so I don’t fancy spending $330 on a set that isn’t really much better…). Look at my self-control! Let’s not revisit this subject when the new modular set is revealed.
My prize for successfully completing Thank Goodness You’re Here. They even splashed out on the fancy Yorkshire Tea!
In the past 48 hours, I have been out with Maeryn and twice asked if I’m the grandfather. Less of that, please.
Back from San Francisco. One of my ears is still a little dodgy, and I still feel sunburnt from my 20 minutes in the Castro last Sunday. It was a weird trip, with seemingly half the hotels having strike action in front of them, having to move across the city, not being able to actually get into the office on Monday because there was nobody there, and then leaving the place on the evening of actually having the meeting I was flying out for instead of spending multiple working days in the Bay. Still, flying across the continent for one day to talk about artificial intelligence and search has to be pretty close to Living the Dream, I think…
…and then the tumble dryer breaks down when you get back to keep you grounded…
