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A bout of gastroenteritis has been working its way though the house. Emma got it first, then Rowan, Eri and John. I’m the last one standing but I suppose it’s only a matter of time before I fall ill.
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Emma recovered briefly on Sunday and I took the opportunity to fulfil my promise of buying her a bicycle for her birthday (which was back in February for those, like Emma, keeping score). It was a bit of an adventure riding it back home—and it cost closer to double what I’d hoped to pay—but at least that’s one more thing checked off the list.
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I’ve been slightly concerned for the past couple of months that our house is at least partially under a flight path used by some commercial planes coming in to Haneda. I haven’t looked into it as closely as I could have so I’m not actually sure; but on at least one occasion I observed a trail of planes making their way south. That got me thinking what things look like from their perspective and that led to me installing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on the Xbox. What a frustrating piece of software. In one of the first flying lessons, I was asked to switch to cursor mode without any indication how that was meant to be done. I must have spent about 10 minutes butting my head against the metaphorical wall before eventually finding the answer on Reddit. ChatGPT was no help.
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The ‘pop culture has stagnated’ thesis has become conventional wisdom but I liked Noah Smith’s explanation for why. Smith’s focus is on the role of technology but I was most interested in his supposition that avant-garde art has withered as emerging artists who want to make money no longer bother trying to impress other emerging artists. In short, those who are in it for the money can now use algorithmic recommendation systems instead of hanging around other artists attempting to get the attention. This reduces the number of emerging artists congregating together which further weakens the dynamics of this group (which is itself important for pushing art forward).
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I finally got someone to listen to the 22 Goals podcast I’ve been raving about for two years. My friend sogaiu proved he’s the best of my friends by listening to not one but two episodes! This of course prompted me to listen to those episodes and fall in love with the show all over again.
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As part of my own personal Year of Efficiency (AKA I bought a house and have no money), I cancelled my Trakt and Droplr subscriptions. I like the Trakt service and the part of my brain that wants to record everything will miss not having a visually pleasing history of what I’m watching in Plex but I couldn’t justify to myself why that was important. Droplr was more difficult. It’s a file hosting service I’ve used for more than 10 years for files I want to make publicly available. This means that at some (extremely minute) level I’ve broken some of the links on the web and I hate breaking links on the web.
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I was looking on Apple Music for some recordings of the opera Carmen and came across this album from violinist Coco Tomita and pianist Simon Callaghan (Apple Music). I don’t know enough about classical music to know if it’s especially good or not but I enjoyed it.
