Weeknotes #202

Thursday was another public holiday (Wikipedia). It’d been a while since we’d been to a ‘family restaurant’ and so we trekked over to one of the closer ones: Jonathan’s. We used to go to a Jonathan’s near our old place about once a month and my memory is of the food being decent. Either my memory is wrong or things have taken a turn. Fortunately, we walked home via a park we don’t normally visit and Emma, John and Rowan had a blast.

Plenty of shops in Tokyo put up their Christmas decorations the day after Hallowe’en but I resisted bringing out our ‘decorations’ (really just a Christmas tree) until Saturday. I probably should have waited until the start of Advent but since we’re leaving this year on 16 December, if I wait til this coming Sunday, the tree will be up for less than two weeks.

I won one of the nightly 3v3 tournaments in Rocket League and it was a reminder why I keep playing the game. Coming into the final, we had easily swept through our best of three semi-final whereas our opponent had lost the first game before clawing their way back. Their results throughout the tournament lulled me into thinking our victory was a fait accompli. Forgive me, for dropping sports cliche after sports cliche but after being thoroughly embarrassed in the first game, we pulled together as a team to draw even after the second. The final game was a nail-biter with the game going to overtime where our sharpshooter scored the winning goal.

Oh, and the Australian cricket team did well too, I guess (ABC News).

It’s been a while since I’ve done any programming and I got the itch again. For ages now, I’ve wanted a collaborative crossword app that I could do with Eugenia. I’ve gone back and forth about doing it as an iOS app or a web app. Trying it as a web app won out and I started hacking something together using Squint and Solid.js. I don’t have that much working at the moment but I do have a webpage that automatically updates as I change the code.

Tanner Greer wrote about some new translated excerpts of Wang Huning’s travelogue America Against America. Huning wrote the travelogue in 1975 and marvels at the transformative power of American society. Much of that amazement makes for bracing reading today. As Greer observes:

Wang’s confidence in American ambition is expressed in a one particularly painful passage:

If tomorrow someone were to propose building a highway across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Europe, or a highway running across the Pacific Ocean all the way to Asia, it would not be considered crazy. On the contrary, people would think this was an amazing idea.

These are not new sentiments. Foreigners were saying things like this about the American people all the way back in the 1820s. I do not think this would be most foreign visitors first observations about Americans today. It is, however, the sort of thing foreign visitors say about China. If a road was to be built across the Pacific today, we would expect the Chinese to build it.

I’m not American but it did make me wonder if I should have lived a more ambitious life.

I often find myself merely skimming posts on Patrick McKenzie’s (relatively) new blog, Bits about Money (which is a terrific name), but his latest on Binance and Changpeng Zhao was excellent. This was one of my favourite bits:

Binance also operated in the state of Heisenbergian uncertainty, sometimes known as Malta. Malta has a substantial financial services industry, which welcomed Binance with open arms in 2018 and then pretended not to know him in 2020. This continues Malta’s proud tradition of strategic ambiguity as to whether it is an EU country or rentable skin suit for money launderers.

I watched them both in fits and starts but I finished both the 1974 version and the 2017 version of Murder on the Orient Express. I gather my opinion aligns with the critical consensus: Branagh is too focused on making the film ‘exciting’ to make a good murder mystery. I concur strongly with Danny Boyle’s video essay.

After lamenting the lack of new music in my media diet last week, I feel especially guilty linking to a greatest hits album. And yet, what a greatest hits album. If you’re remotely curious about Australian hip-hop, the Highlights from Hilltop Hoods is the place to start (Apple Music).