Weeknotes #113

Preparation for the move continues. The new place has much less space than where we live now so in addition to packing, we also have to get rid of a lot of stuff. In terms of my personal things, I decided to sell the vast majority of my old books, CDs and DVDs to Book Off (my favourite business name in Japan). I’ve had most of these items for more than a decade and packing them up in a box was a pretty intense sentimental experience. I kept telling myself that they weren’t doing any good sitting unread on a bookshelf and would be better off being found by new readers.

Apple held an event on Tuesday (U.S. time) where they announced the Mac Studio and Studio Display (Apple) and I was surprised how unappealing I found both products. I do hope somebody buys them because I don’t want Apple to lose interest in desktop Macs or external displays again but they’re not for me. The rumours are for a refreshed Mac Mini to come out sometime this year with the next iteration in Apple’s M-series of chips and that might be the one.

Or maybe not. I’ve got a spreadsheet where I track the Apple products I own and one of the columns in it is the per day cost. My current Mac (a 13” MacBook Pro I purchased in 2017) remains the most expensive Mac I’ve bought measured on that basis and will remain so until early July. If I want to wait until it’s cost me, say, ¥100 a day, Soulver is telling me I need to wait until 5 December 2024 (!). So maybe waiting for an M3 Mac Mini is a better option, especially when I’m not feeling any real performance issues with my light usage.

I signed up for Audible. I listen to a lot of podcasts (it’s almost a year old but my most recent list is here) but I’ve been wondering of late whether there are more productive things I could be doing with my listening time. Perhaps audiobooks? And so while the Audible iOS app is about as crappy as every other native app from Amazon, I went with it anyway. My first monthly credit was spent on the recently released unabridged version of Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker.

In writing the previous bullet point, I wondered when I first started listening to podcasts. I think it was the original iteration of The Talk Show which, according to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, started on 28 June 2007 (!!). That was back when I was coming to the end of my time on the JET Programme which feels right. I have fond memories of walking around Minoh listening to John Gruber and Dan Benjamin on my iPod Nano.

I can’t remember what prompted this but I started wondering about the etymology of the term ‘edgelord’. Alas, there’s no definitive write-up so here’s Merriam-Webster’s.

I lost Wordle for the first time since I started playing. 65-day streak gone.

I guess I’m back in the swing of TV watching again because I watched the third episode of the new season of Law & Order and the first episode of HBO’s new series about the Los Angeles Lakers, Winning Time. The Law & Order episode was a marginal improvement over the second but the entire show continues to feel very flat. I remain stumped as to why they cast the actors that they cast. Fortunately, it’s the complete opposite case with Winning Time. John C. Reilly is fantastic as Jerry Buss and Quincy Isaiah has the charisma to believably play Magic Johnson.

Harris Brewis (AKA hbomberguy) released the Deus Ex: Human Revolution video essay he’s been working on since forever. It’s three and a half hours so and, as much as I like Brewis’ videos and personally enjoyed it, really only for die-hard fans of either Brewis or the Deus Ex series.

Since nostalgia is kind of the theme of this week’s entry, the musical artist that best captures nostalgia for me is Josh Pyke and the song that really gets me in the feels is ‘The Summer’ (Apple Music).