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I completely forgot to write about the earthquake last week. So, yeah, at 10.41 pm on Thursday 7 October there was an earthquake that measured 6.1 on the Richter scale with an epicentre in Chiba, relatively close to Tokyo (NHK News). I was upstairs with the kids when the warning alarm went off on my phone. Emma and John slept through it and it was a struggle to get them downstairs in case there were subsequent shakes. Fortunately, nothing then or since.
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The number of COVID-19 cases has continued to stay very low and it seems everyone is confused as to why (Mainichi). My best guess is a combination of vaccines (Japan has administered two-thirds of its total population with at least one dose), masks (despite the state of emergency being lifted almost everyone still wears them in public) and a much smaller volume of tests (although the positivity rate has also fallen). If this continues, I’m not sure if work won’t want people to start coming into the office more frequently. I’m still almost exclusively working from home unless there’s a special reason that I need to come in.
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The cooler weather finally hit, with the weekend being especially gloomy. Despite that, I took Emma and John for a playdate with my friend Ferdinando and his daughter. It was nice to talk to another adult outside of Eri. It threatened to rain most of the time but fortunately held off. It’s a shame that Ferdinando’s son isn’t quite old enough to come out yet; it would have been nice for all the kids to be out together.
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I’m not sure what I was doing with the time but I haven’t watched any more episodes of Foundation, Ted Lasso or The Problem with Jon Stewart. After I raved about James Acaster last week, Dave suggested I check out the series of Taskmaster where he was a contestant and while I haven’t done that yet, it’s definitely near the top of the list. I assume it’s probably geographically gated but the episodes from that series are available on YouTube.
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I did just remember that Jenny Nicholson published a video essay on the recently released film adaptation of the musical Dear Evan Hansen. In finding the link for these weeknotes, I noticed that video already has 1.6 million views which is honestly a little difficult to process. The essay is 1 hour and 17 minutes long.
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I made more progress on Watchful and now have it passing a rename monitoring test on Linux. I do think I might be about to rewrite the way that the Janet wrapper communicates with the monitoring part, though. Up to now I’ve been using a simple pipe but sending raw bytes down a pipe isn’t particularly fun and I think I have an idea of how I can use Janet’s built-in event loop to communicate with the Janet wrapper more seamlessly.
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I’ve really cut back on the number of articles I read but I put some time aside to make my way through the trilogy of articles Eugene Wei wrote on TikTok and social media design. They’re all really good (part 1, part 2, part 3) as is his latest essay, ‘And You Will Know Us by the Company We Keep’.
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A sample of ‘We Own the Night’ by Al3jandro (Apple Music) is one of the snatches of music a player in Rocket League can choose to play when they score a goal. It’s not what I use but after an especially rough game in which an opponent who did use it scored numerous times, it got stuck in my head and I did the thing where I decided to listen to it repeatedly until I got sick of it. Well, it’s been a week and I’m still listening.
