w/e 2023-02-12

Hello. We had quite a bit of snow here that sat around for two or three days. But it is meteorological spring and it’s only a week until astronomical spring. 🐇🌼

A photo looking across flat snow to about a dozen trees of different sizes and shapes, all covered in snow, with a blank white sky behind them — Our garden on Thursday

§ I very much enjoyed The Piano Behind The Curtain w/ Astrid Øster Mortensen on NTS this morning. An hour of beautiful chill tunes. (As I write this month’s isn’t there.)

Currently listening to NTS’s In Focus; David Sylvian which is – how could it not be? – excellent and transports me back 30+ years.

I finally got round to subscribing to NTS this week.

§ This week’s computer-based to-dones:

Got the charts live on ooh.directory. I am proud that I resisted my usual urge to generate them using D3.js, instead opting for the simpler Chart.js. They’re almost exactly how I want them.
Did the first bit of work on ooh.directory to be able to identify how frequently each blog updates.
Added 45 more blogs to ooh.directory.
Updated @samuelpepys’ tweets/posts for April for the modern 280-character world.
Worked out why the test coverage figures on some of my Django repositories were surprisingly low: after switching the tests to run in parallel I hadn’t added coverage combine. That was ages ago so it shows how little attention I pay to the coverage figure.
Transferred one domain away from Gandi.net, who are evil now. I exaggerate, but I’d been meaning to move my last active domain from there anyway, to keep things tidy, and now I can also feel self-righteous about it.
Found an odd little bug in the feedparser python module.

I think I’ve taken to listing computery things in the hope of justifying how I’ve spent my week, because it’s the closest activity to what I do for “actual work”. But seeing as the above collectively only took 2-3 days, it also seems somehow dissatisfying given I did no “actual work” and have no kids or anything.

So, some non-computer things that took up the time:

Fixed a radiator valve (with a hammer)
Took the car to and from the garage (long walks in the snow)
Baked four loaves of bread and 27 scones (we had guests)
Cleaned the bathrooms, kitchen, and did the hoovering (ditto)
Cooked four dinners (a couple, ditto)
Did two Rouvy cycles, four strength workouts, and five yoga workouts (to punish myself for my many faults)
Skimmed the newspaper every morning (in order to begin the day hating the world)
Spent lunchtimes reading Ask MetaFilter (still good) and MetaTalk (terrible place) and r/MetaFilterMeta (alternately sad and bitter)
Spent 5-6 hours reading blog feeds (not enough to keep up)
Researched a lot of t-shirts (I’m not much wiser)

A photo looking down from a hill over many bare trees covered in snow. A brick house is in the middle-ground on the right. In the distance are hills covered in snow-filled fields. — A view near us on Thursday

§ We watched Mystery Road: Origin this week (on iPlayer) which was good, whether you’ve seen the earlier/later seasons or not. After a while I didn’t care that much about the increasingly twisty plot, which was a shame, but the whole setting – a declining outback mining town, with generations of resentment built up between the Aboriginal people and the white people – and the characters kept it interesting enough.

§ Continuing last week’s theme we went to see Emily (Frances O’Connor, 2022) this week, which was pretty good. Most popular review on Letterboxd:

20 minutes in my mum turned to me and said “she’s autistic” and guy behind us started choking.

§ I’m aware that you’re allowed to stop reading a book before the end if it’s not doing it for you and sometimes I even manage that.

23 years ago I read this article on Salon.com and thought the books sounded interesting. I’ve now read four of the five and it introduced me to the work of David Markson, so I guess it was all worthwhile.

One of the books – The Demons by Heimito von Doderer – I found as two hardback volumes in a used bookstore in Denver, Colorado, in 2001, which I carted to California and Burning Man and then back home. I started reading it a few years later but got bored a couple of hundred pages in and put it down. See!

Last year I started again and sailed past where that old bookmark still was… but then plodded my way through the entire 1300 or so pages over 3½ very slow months. I should have put it down again but I am an idiot who didn’t want it sitting on the shelf for another 20 years until I wanted to try again.

It was OK.

§ In other giving up news: I forgot to say a couple of weeks ago that I started playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey but probably won’t pick it up again. It satisfied my desire for riding horses through gorgeous scenery but it’s too far over the RPG line for me – convoluted skill trees and inventory management and weapons upgrades – and after spending an hour walking round and round and up and down a mountain trying to find a guy I was supposed to meet with to progress some quest or other, having no idea how to find him, I think that’s enough unfun for me.

§ That’s all.

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