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My technique for remaining calm during the second Trump Administration is to remind myself consistently that (1) it’s not my country and (2) every day is a day closer to the end of his term.
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This admittedly doesn’t do a lot to assuage the concern that Trump will precipitate a conflagration in North-East Asia that pulls in Japan. I don’t especially like the idea but one of the ways to reduce the risk of that might be for South Korea to obtain nuclear weapons. Robert Kelly explains the case for South Korean nuclearisation.
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While I should be exclusively focusing my energies on preparing for the upcoming move, I’ve allowed myself a small amount of time in the evenings to read (at an extremely slow pace) the online book, Beautiful Racket. It introduces the Lisp dialect, Racket, and came recommended by sogaiu. Since I’m a hobbyist programmer who gets too wrapped up in syntax, I’ve never seriously considered Racket because its syntax descends from more traditional Lisps and I have a strong aversion to this (unlike the syntax variant first used by Clojure). But Racket’s superpower is its support for loading code written in custom languages and I’m curious to understand it better (not least because I tried to add something similar to Janet at one point). Of course I should not be doing this and should instead be working on Grapple. I can hear the critical voice in my head saying this is the reason I don’t accomplish more.
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My weight went back up to 70kg after the Christmas trip and I’ve been meaning to get it down to around 65 again but without much success. I’ve mostly given my permission to slack off for January but want to get back into things soon.
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For the past few weeks, I’ve been embroiled in a small-scale edit war with the person responsible for the English place names Google Maps uses near our apartment. In particular, I tried numerous times to update two train stations that used capitalisations/abbreviations that did not read as natural for English speakers. Each suggestion was rejected without comment. After escalating the issue, I’m pleased to report that the good guys won and the universe is ever so slightly improved.
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Dan Olson published the video essay, ‘Mantracks’, and I finally got around to watching it. This is the latest he’s made in a series about hoaxes and conspiracy theories and it’s… fine. I’m not especially interested in the topic and while I always enjoy Olson’s presentation of his ideas, I’ll admit that I struggled to maintain interest for the 1 hour and 25 minute running time. That prompted me to go back and watch a few of his media criticism videos from the 2010s and I was reminded all again how much I liked those (his essay about Fight Club is a good example of what they were like).
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I’ve complained before about Apple Music and how it can get very confused about the metadata it should display for albums that were in my library prior to me joining Apple Music. The solution I’ve come to is to delete the album from my library and then wait a substantial amount of time before adding it back (if I don’t wait long enough, Apple Music will simply add back the album with the same issue). I still haven’t worked out the minimum amount of time to wait but it’s eight months seems to be an upper bound. Back on 17 May 2024, I deleted Fatboy Slim’s Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars (Apple Music); I added it back this week and it seems to be working.
