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John had his school happyōkai on Saturday. He tripped over his shoes just before arriving at school and scraped both his knees. He still seemed to enjoy the times he was on stage and I was proud of him for doing his best. This is father code for he forgot the dance moves that, among other things, he was supposed to have memorised. Still, the important thing is he wasn’t traumatised! As far as I know.
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It took until February but I managed to get my incredibly advanced method for managing the household finances (a Numbers spreadsheet I am unreasonably proud of) up to date for the final few months of 2022 and set up and completed for January of 2023. My goodness we spent a lot of money on moving-related expenses last year. We’re expecting to move again next year so it’ll probably only be a 12-month reprieve.
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I got an e-mail late Sunday telling me that the 64GB Steam Deck I’d reserved is available and I promptly ordered it. At ¥60,000 it’s not cheap and I have that sinking feeling I always had when I was buying parts for my PC as a teenager that it’s already outdated techwise. Hopefully it ends better than my last foray into PC gaming (a desktop machine I had for a couple of months before realising I’d made a terrible mistake).
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I’m jumping backwards in time but on Friday, I was interviewed by Martin Feld for his podcast/PhD project, Really Specific Stories. Martin edits and fully transcribes the interviews so I’m not sure when precisely it’ll come out but it’s pretty cool to have been a podcast that Casey Liss and John Siracusa have been guests on.
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I really enjoyed the discussion with Martin and found myself wishing again I had the time to record my own podcast. Amanda suggested that she, me and a mutual friend record a podcast about Australians living in different places. I think she was being facetious.
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It’s not a traditional video essay but Patrick Willems released a video entitled ‘How to Analyze Movies’ that was originally written as a lecture he intended to record for one of those online learning platforms. At almost 90 minutes, it’s long but he uses Home Alone as a sort of case study to ground what he’s talking about in an actual example and I thought it worked quite well.
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Ted Gioia has an essay about music critics, specifically why so many of them did such a bad job reviewing the Beatles when they were releasing music.
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I finished a book! I don’t remember now when I started reading David Pilling’s Bending Adversity but it has to have been more than a year ago. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped; it flits awkwardly between a history of modern Japan and vignettes related to the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake. At the time of writing the earthquake surely loomed large, but more than a decade later its significance seems much more muted, leaving the book feeling very much of its time.
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As Brandon wrote about in his weeknotes for this week, we’ve discovered that Apple Music is apparently localising the #youngstar playlist. With my U.S. account, I see it as a playlist of up-and-coming Japanese artists; with his Singapore account, Brandon sees it as a playlist of up-and-coming international artists. I’m curious what people with App Store accounts in other jurisdictions see so if you’ve got an account, let me know which playlist you see. As for the playlist itself, I’m not much of a J-Pop aficionado but ‘Overdose’ by natori had me bopping about (Apple Music).
