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Joe Biden announced he would not contest the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election (ABC News). From the standpoint of defeating Donald Trump’s election campaign, this seems like the best strategy. I’m doing my best to not become invested in an outcome that is not in my control.
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Now that I’m not taking the kids to Yoyogi Chapters on Saturday mornings, I took the opportunity to take Rowan on the Laview express train that runs from Ikebukuro up to Chichibu. Rather than go down to Ikebukuro and then back up to Tokorozawa (the first stop), I went the other way. This put Rowan and me in Ikebukuro at around 10.30 and so with oodles of time left in the day, when Rowan asked if we could also go on the shinkansen I thought ‘Why not?’ and we caught the Yamanote train around to Ueno before riding an E5 Hayabusa shinkansen (Wikipedia) to Tokyo Station. This was both Rowan’s and my first time on the E5.
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My weight was under 66 kilos for the first time since… I’m not sure. Possibly last decade, possibly the decade before. This coming week I’m thinking of moving away from my alternating 42-hour/23-hour fasts and instead switching to the one-meal-a-day diet. As of Sunday evening, I’m at 66.7 kg so I might wait one more week.
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I didn’t make much progress on my Conjure plugin for Janet. Instead, for reasons that I can’t articulate, I worked on a pull request to Janet itself that would have made a clearer distinction between two variants of an immutable sequential data structure that Janet calls a tuple. It was not accepted which was to be expected. I was frustrated nevertheless and incredibly grateful that a fellow user of the project, sogaiu, was on hand to talk me down from doing something intemperate.
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I guess in preparation for eventually watching Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, I watched the first and second instalments. The first remains an absolute delight. The second is an incredibly rough watch. I don’t know if the term ‘casual misogyny’ existed at the time it was made but if not, it should have been coined for it. I’m not a Tony Scott fan so ‘What if the first movie looked more like Top Gun?’ was never going to have much appeal but the almost constant sexism that runs through it made it a chore to complete.
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I got back into my rewatch of Neon Genesis Evangelion and am now halfway through the show. I can’t pretend to divorce the sentimental attachment I have to the show from my opinion of it but, for what it’s worth, it still plays to me as as easily one of the (maybe the?) most inventive and thought-provoking anime series of all time.
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Adding to that endless catalogue of ‘I can’t believe Apple Music didn’t tell me about this…’ moments was the discovery that Matt Corby’s cover of ‘Lonely Boy’ has been available to stream since August 2023 (Apple Music). This is one of my favourite songs ever (as Apple is aware because it’s my 14th most-listened song of all time) and yet no notice of this EP’s release. Top stuff, Cupertino.
