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Rowan turned 1 and John turned 5. At one point, we were going to have a single ‘party’ for both of them but I can imagine that’s the kind of thing that leaves a scar (admittedly not this early on) so we ended up having two parties. After all, who doesn’t want an additional chance for cake? We gave Rowan some more board books he can chew on (unfortunately) and John some more Brio (including the Edward and Henry trains he’s been asking about for months).
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I forgot to mention last week that after literally years of putting it off I finally bought a MicroSD card for the Nintendo Switch. The onboard storage is basically filled with the handful of Mario games we have and I was curious about the new setting for Rocket League where you can run the game at a lower visual setting to prioritise frame rate. And whoa. Turns out there’s a reason gamers always want to maximise this number. So I’ve been playing a lot of Rocket League on the Switch is what I’m trying to say.
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I wrote another post about connomming. I’ve now written five of these and should probably keep some kind of index of them somewhere.
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I pulled a muscle (or several) at some point in the past two weeks as I’ve had this bad sprain around my right chest and back area that’s been a constant source of annoyance. The chest pain was severe enough initially that I worried that I had some kind of heart problem before belatedly remembering that your heart is on the left side of your body. In any event, it’s been a reminder that I’m rapidly approaching 40.
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I quite liked this Twitter thread about minimalist design (as distinct from Minimalist design).
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I also really liked this essay from 2018 about the collapse of, what the author calls, racial liberalism. I fear that term occludes more than it reveals and fortunately it’s quickly defined early on:
By racial liberalism, I mean the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry—in other words, white people’s definition of racism. Institutional or “structural” racism—that is, race-based exclusions that result from deep social habits such as where people live, who they know socially, what private organizations they belong to, and so on—were not to be addressed. The core ethic of the racial liberal consensus was colorblind individualism.
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Another week, another outstanding episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It was another Spock-centric episode and it’s remarkable to me how I’ve gone from disliking the character (and actor!) outright to now admitting that there’s still a lot in his background for them to explore. Bravo, SNW writers.
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Considerably less outstanding were the four episodes of Obi-Wan Kenobi to which I subjected myself. This show is bad. I know there’s a thing that nerds do where they overemphasise plotting but when the issues are as egregious as they are here, the problem rises above mere narrative inconsistency. Don’t worry, though. If incomprehensible plotting isn’t an issue for you, the thematic concepts in the show are also a mess. What exactly is Obi-Wan learning? He needs to re-engage with the universe and help fight the Empire? We know he doesn’t do this because in A New Hope he’s back to hiding out on Tatooine, having apparently given up on training Luke over the objections of Owen. It doesn’t make any more sense if the lesson is instead that Obi-Wan simply needs to have hope. In the first episode, it’s established that he plans to train Luke, presumably because he has hope.
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It possibly says more about my memory than pop music but I’m always surprised to rediscover that ‘Jane Says’ is from 1988 (Apple Music).
