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It was Eri’s birthday but unfortunately what she got was all of the kids coming down with some kind of respiratory illness (possibly not the same for all of them). So not much of a present, in other words. I’m one of those weird people worried that people don’t have enough children but I can certainly see why people don’t.
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We’ve passed the preliminary stage of the home loan application with Shinsei. Things are taking longer with SMBC so maybe in the end we won’t have to make a decision because there’ll only be one choice.
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I bought an Xbox Series S (that’s the less powerful one from the current generation). I’m not entirely sure why. Ostensibly it was after discovering that Jedi: Survivor doesn’t run on the Steam Deck and wanting to ‘be ready’ for when I play that ‘with’ John (which is to say, when I play while he watches). But the truth is that I still have to finish Jedi: Fallen Order and so that doesn’t really explain things. I think I just wanted to spend money on a console and the PS5 is still too expensive for my blood. The irony is that the progress I have on the Steam Deck version of Fallen Order didn’t carry over to the Xbox so I’ve had to go all the way back to the start. I’m also disappointed that its streaming performance to the iPad is poor. I’d hoped that it might be better than the PS4’s and that even if I couldn’t play much on the TV, the iPad would work as a mobile screen. I’m sad to report not so much.
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I didn’t write about this in my weeknotes but back in October, I decided not to renew my subscription to omg.lol, a fun collection of Internet services that Adam Newbold sells. Newbold is a wizard, able to conjure up project after project apparently without the need for things like sleep. I was using it primarily for social.lol, a Mastodon instance that Newbold runs. However, after reading more about the design of the AT Protocol I decided to go all in on Bluesky—at which point my omg.lol subscription felt superfluous. All of which is an extremely long-winded way of taking credit for the past two weeks as Bluesky has exploded. I can now easily lose myself in the fun of scrolling through an eclectic collection of memes, commentary and links. It’s like Twitter in the good old days.
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Speaking of fun, Andy Baio linked to two webpages that are terrific examples of how fun the web can be. The Pudding has a page about the way that love songs have evolved over the past 60 years and Ben Wallace wrote about exploring YouTube videos that were uploaded in the early years of the iPhone.
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Josh Barro is one of my favourite political journalists and I’ve been a paid subscriber to his excellent podcast, Serious Trouble. I somehow missed the fact that he has his own blog and really liked his piece on why Democrats deserved to lose the 2024 Presidential Election. Noah Smith wrote something in a similar vein.
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Usually it’s Brandon with the obscure musical recommendations but this week I have an album that was released back in 2020 that I don’t think was especially popular: Cereal by a French musician, Pastel (Apple Music). I heard it while frequenting my local diner for a late night plate of hot chips and have been digging its jazzy grooves for the past week or so.
