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The school term started! For John, this meant the beginning of primary school while Emma moved into the third grade. New South Wales has a year of kindergarten before Year 1 so John is technically a year older than I was when I began formal school. However, we moved after kindergarten and so in one sense I have the ‘memory’ of starting primary school in Year 1. Rowan has also started a preparatory program for (3-year) Japanese kindergarten that he’ll begin next April and so I’m walking Emma and John to school on most days. It’s been nice.
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The weather is warming up and it was already quite summery over the weekend. It was pretty cool in March but April has started out warm and I’m worried we’re on the brink of being assaulted by another unforgiving summer.
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My Japanese studying slipped as I fell back into programming. I actually can’t remember why I wanted to do this but I got interested in updating Circlet to work with the latest version of Mongoose. That didn’t take an especially long time but then I became interested in getting WebSocket support to work and that’s taken up the last week or so. I’ll hopefully have it in a releasable state relatively soon.
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Last week I wrote about the dilemma of whether to bump the fee attached to my Bitcoin transfer which was taking forever to process. It still hadn’t gone through by Thursday and so I did bump the fee and sure enough, the transaction was processed a few minutes later. The fees in the end were around US$16 in today’s money which kind of sucks. At least I have it in a more up to date wallet, I guess?
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I also mentioned last week that I finally watched the epic Alt Shift X video about Jon Snow. Well this week I finally watched the Big Joel video about conservative comedy (it came out about two weeks ago). It’s 107 minutes and not so incredible that I’d recommend it to someone who wasn’t already a fan of video essays but I do appreciate the ambition of it. That sounds like I’m damning with faint praise but that’s really not my intent. A lot of video essays of media are ‘let’s analyse this film/show/song through a critical lens’ but what Henry (I can’t find his surname easily) does here is to try to look at how conservative comedy functions in general and what causes it so often to fail. Again, I admire the ambition.
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Speaking of finally, I made it to one of the most formative episodes of television from my youth, Seinfeld’s ‘The Betrayal’ from season nine (Wikipedia). This is the episode where the show essentially plays in ‘reverse’ with scenes being shown in reverse chronological order. This was not well received when it aired initially but I remember it blowing my mind when I first saw it. This was three years before Memento and felt so incredibly subversive for a network sitcom. I’ll admit that in 2024 that it does feel a bit gimmicky.
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After linking to ‘Doctor Worm’ by They Might Be Giants last week, I found myself wanting to listen to the version of ‘She’s Actual Size’ that I remember listening to in the mid-2000s. This wasn’t the original version from 1992’s Apollo 18 (Apple Music) but was a live version that includes a particularly fun audience participation segment. I eventually worked out I had got it from the album Dial-A-Song: 20 Years of They Might Be Giants. That album unfortunately isn’t on Apple Music, but it is of course on YouTube. More information about that version is available on the delightfully named This Might Be a Wiki.
