Weeknotes #157

We returned to Japan almost without incident. I’m especially pleased to report that neither Emma nor John had any vomit-related mishaps either to, on or after the aeroplane. I did almost take my mother’s car keys back to Tokyo (thank you, RFID sensor in the car for warning her that she was driving the vehicle without the keys) and our three pieces of checked in luggage all managed to make it to Japan on completely different flights. But after the trip there, I consider that a success.

It came to my attention while in Australia that the word ‘frambious’ is not, in fact, a word. This prompted the kind of shock one imagines would accompany the revelation that the Dutch prime minister is a horse. We have used this word in my family my entire life and both my parents were surprised to hear it was something someone at some time had completely made up. Curiously, it’s entirely localised in my immediate family; when I offhandedly asked my grandparents if they’d heard of the word, they looked at me like I asked them if they thought ‘dunchork’ was a word. Searches of Google have not succeeded in providing any indication of what would have prompted my parents to coin the term.

Oh, and frambious has a similar meaning to precarious but implies a degree of fault in whoever arranged things into such a state.

I wasn’t able to catch up with almost anyone during the stay which was a real disappointment after not being back for three years. Rowan made things difficult but hopefully that’s something that won’t be such an issue when he’s a year older. Apologies to Amanda, Ariel, David, Julie, Kurt, Matthew, Nadia, Robin, Rosi, Tom and Yoshe.

The big news in my corner of the online world has been Twitter cutting off access to (most) third-party clients (TechCrunch). Needless to say, I feel even better about decamping to Mastodon toward the end of last year. I’m eagerly awaiting the release of Ivory and am very jealous of Brandon.

I’m experimenting with using Anybox as a replacement for Pinboard. Anybox runs on Apple devices and uses iCloud as its sync engine. Given one of the reasons to leave Pinboard is that the service is a little (dare I say) frambious, it’s reassuring that the Anybox guy could shut up shop tomorrow and the app would still work just fine (at least until Apple’s OS updates broke it). On the other hand, it also means there’s no public archive of what I’m saving.

I started watching some of the videos on the YouTube channel of T.J. DeVries, a core maintainer of Neovim. I regularly use Neovim but had resisted using it other than as a drop-in replacement for Vim. After watching a video in which DeVries sets up a fresh install of Neovim, I was inspired to throw away my init.vim file and see how things go with init.lua.

I quite liked Martin Keary’s video essay from a few years ago entitled ‘Star Wars Music is Getting Worse’. Keary does a good job explaining how the music, especially in A New Hope, told a story in its own right rather than merely telling the audience the scene they were watching was significant. I’d be very curious to hear his thoughts about the music in Andor.

And speaking of music, I was chatting to Amanda about what we’d been listening to and we got to talking about Blackpink. I told her that my preference with Korean pop was to listen to it in Japanese (not as crazy as it sounds) and she dutifully linked me to Blackpink’s 2018 album, BLACKPINK IN YOUR AREA (Apple Music).