Weeknotes #95

This was one of those weeks where it just went. Part of that was no doubt due to the holiday on Wednesday. I took the opportunity of a day off to take the AirPods to the closest Yamato Transport office for drop-off. There was a bit of confusion over how to print the label I needed but we got it done in the end and, by Friday, the money had been refunded to my account. I’m still disappointed they didn’t work out but that disappointed us more than made up for by the satisfaction with my new second-generation model.

The weather on Wednesday was fantastic—I think early November is Japan at its most pleasant. It’s still sunny enough that you’re warm but there’s none of the humidity that ruins the warmer months. Dropping off the AirPods was really secondary to taking the kids to Musashino Chuo Park and really the only thing that would have improved things was if we’d brought some lunch with us.

I’m very proud of the fact that I got the preparation of our Christmas cards done over the weekend. It feels very early to send them out but I’m a little concerned how long it might take for them to make it to Australia and Eri and I thought it was better for them to be there early rather than late. A couple of months back, the Christmas card I’d sent to my aunt’s old address last year was returned to us. The round trip took nine months!

I dipped my nose back into my RSS feeds again. I used to work at getting that close to zero and it’s now over 4,000. Following a Byzantine route, the likes of which the Internet excels at, I found myself reading a bunch of commentary on The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker by writers more well-known for their political opinions (Ross Douthat and Freddie deBoer). As with politics, I found myself agreeing more with deBoer than Douthat.

I said I felt like I was on a roll with Succession but I guess that put the jinx on things and other than the tenth episode (i.e. the end of season one) I haven’t made it any further yet. I’m not sure what I think about the show overall. It’s sumptuously shot and the acting and writing is top-notch but I fear it’s all empty calories. I mean what’s it about at the end of the day? The descent of Greg into being a Machiavellian arsehole?

I neglected to mention this last week but sometime in October, Disney finally took full control of the Disney+ service in Japan. Previously it’d been run by NTT and while NTT’s service wasn’t awful, Disney’s own service is arguably up their with Netflix as the gold standard. In addition to meaning you can now log in with your credentials from other regions, Japanese language versions of the shows are also included for most movies and TV shows I’ve checked (although, weirdly, not for Frozen II). Looking at how much is available through the service, I was reminded of just how many beloved properties Disney now owns.

I really wanted to like episode five of Pat Finnerty’s series ‘What Makes This Song Stink’ and while you have to concede that Finnerty put in a staggering amount of effort into the ‘song comparison as American football game’ framing device that the episode is built around, it’s ultimately distracting and gets in the way of Finnerty detailing the problems with Lenny Kravitz’s ‘Fly Away’ and ‘American Woman’. In particular, I really wished there’d been more time spent putting Kravitz into context. Does Finnerty feel the same distaste at ‘Are You Going to Go My Way’? Or is it the opposite and the fact that Kravitz wrote that that makes these later songs so hard to stomach?

I switched my shell over from Bash to zsh in macOS. I’ve been running zsh as my shell on Linux for ages at this point but I’d stuck with Bash on the Mac because, well, it (mostly) wasn’t broken. After switching over, I had some problems that I thought were with zsh and which almost caused me to switch to Fish but it turned out that this was all fixed by installing a more recent version of GNU Screen.

Are you humming along to ‘Are You Going To Go My Way’ (Apple Music) yet? How about now?