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Elon Musk sacked half of Twitter’s staff (ABC News). I wouldn’t normally post about this kind of thing but it feels like Musk’s leadership could shatter Twitter in a way that never felt possible. I’ve been more sanguine than most of my timeline about what Musk’s ownership of Twitter might portend but the chaotic manner in which the cuts were made (and Musk’s lack of courage in making them) are causing me to wonder if that sanguinity is justified.
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If I flee anywhere, I would prefer it be something I run on my own server but I don’t believe I’d enjoy the experience (or cost) of managing a Mastodon instance. In the interim, I’ve paid for an account on omg.lol’s Mastodon server. I’m @pyrmont@social.lol but have no current plans to post there.
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The weather continues to be remarkably pleasant. It’s difficult to enjoy it much, though, when you have the nagging sense that it’s a result of climate change. I don’t believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity (mostly because I believe that given enough pain, we’ll find a way out of the crisis) but it is definitely a threat and we should be doing more than we are. And if I’m wrong about our ability to handle things, well, it perhaps goes without saying how bad that would be.
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I did a cursory search through my previous posts and I don’t think I’ve mentioned that a couple of months ago, I embraced #beardlife. Despite the time I’ve had it, I’m still not accustomed to what it looks like in the mirror and am considering going back to being clean-shaven.
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We bought a new location-tracking device for Emma to take to school. This replaced the one we’d bought when she started primary school but which stopped working on Friday morning. The maker of the device eventually issued a statement explaining what happened but this took hours and in the interim, Eri and I were frustrated enough with their silence to buy an alternative. Do we need such a device at all? Isn’t this the kind of helicopter parenting I looked down upon before I had kids? In some senses it is but in my defence Japanese primary school children regularly walk to school on their own (albeit usually in a group with other students) which is the reason we bought ours.
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Marco Arment regularly slags off all of the Apple Watch’s watchfaces on the ATP podcast and while most are not to my taste, like most of Arment’s takes he views things in binary terms when I’d argue the situation is more nuanced. If you grade them on a curve of being digital watchfaces, some are fine. However, it wasn’t til I read Arun Venkatesan’s write-up on the new Metropolitan face that I gave it a try and I’ve been pretty happy with it so far.
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Scott Yoshinaga linked to this video of Adam Savage interviewing Norman Chan about Robosen’s self-transforming Optimus Prime. It’s 10 minutes but you can easily skip through the video to see how the Optimus Prime toy transforms itself.
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I was listening to Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief (Apple Music) over the last week and it’s much better than I remember. I was tweeting to Isaac Halvorson about it and initially explained my earlier view as a reaction to the change in their sound from OK Computer but it’s much more like that album than Kid A or Amnesiac are. I don’t know what I was thinking.
