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What happened this week? Everything and nothing? It’s difficult to avoid every discussion devolving into something related to COVID-19. It is the alpha and the omega. And yet I don’t think a constant focus is healthy for anyone’s wellbeing so I’ll leave it at the following: cases in Tokyo began to rise rapidly on Thursday and, not coincidentally, I arranged with my boss to work primarily from home (I’ll still come in on Fridays).
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Working from home is the reason this is a bit late. I usually compose each week’s post on the train into work and, well, that didn’t happen today.
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I learnt the word ‘exonym’ while researching why it’s ‘Germany’ in English but ‘Deutschland’ in German. Interestingly, the word was coined by an Australian geographer.
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Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe, has collected a list of things (for want of a more specific term) that were achieved quickly. I often wonder about why things take longer to complete nowadays than they once did. It’s tempting to blame it on regulation but I’m not sure it’s that simple.
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Star Trek: Picard wrapped up and while I see all of the problems everyone who hates it sees, none of it bothers me. I try to provide an outlet for Rob who had to sit through repeated diatribes from me about The Last Jedi that were very similar in tone even if, on the substance, the circumstances are very different. For as much as I disliked TLJ, I always thought it was trying to do something artistically challenging. That’s not the case with Picard.
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Strictly speaking this is from the week before, but I finally became a patron of Alt Shift X. He’s most famous for his YouTube videos explaining various aspects of A Song of Ice and Fire (and Game of Thrones) but I love his recaps of Westworld.
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I’m on a Discord server with a bunch of friends who are hanging out during… this period. One of the most common things to share are links to songs people are listening to. That’s great generally for discovering new stuff but bad personally because almost everyone else uses Spotify as their music service of choice whereas I’m in bed with Apple Music. After a bout of whining/pleading, I got a bot added that looks for messages containing URLs to one service and adds links to alternatives.
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Speaking of music, Pete Brown posted about an electronic version of ‘Istanbul (Is Not Constantinople)’ by They Might Be Giants (Apple Music). It’s not my favourite thing but a bit of fun nevertheless. Figure it’s probably a good time for that.
