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I neglected to mention last week that Japan held its House of Councillors (i.e. upper house) election on Sunday 20 July (Wikipedia). If you’ve heard about this election at all, it’s probably because of the performance of Sanseitō, a right-wing populist party that attracted attention for advocating for a ‘Japan First’ policy platform and criticising foreigners in Japan for certain practices. Japan’s Liberal-Democratic Party is a centre-right party that’s generally kept more conservative elements of Japan in check but they’re arguably at one of the weakest moments in their history and I feel some trepidation about the party splintering and more radical elements eventually wielding political power.
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On Saturday I took Rowan over to Yokohama. I’ve always wanted to go down to the Bay and so after catching a Shōnan-Shinjuku train down to Yokohama, we went to the end of the Minatomirai Line and over to Yamashita Park (Wikipedia). There’s a ship, the Hikawa Maru, that’s permanently berthed next to the park and while I thought about going aboard, it was extremely hot outside and Rowan was pretty eager to get back home. Something for another time.
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I’ve had another bout of ‘I should use IRC more’. The catalyst of all things was a random comment on the computing community website, Lobsters, about its IRC channel. I was a heavy IRC user throughout high school but when I tried to get back into IRC in the late 2010s, I wanted some of the affordances (mobile clients, push notifications, continuous connection) we’ve come to expect from group messaging apps. The best solution I could find was IRCCloud. It’s not bad but given how little I ever do end up using IRC, I couldn’t justify its price and finally cancelled it earlier this year. Cut to this weekend and I realised all I really need is a tmux session running on my Linode. After some struggles with the venerable client irssi, I stumbled across relative upstart catgirl. It doesn’t work exactly the way I want but it’s very close. I’m currently debating whether to fork the project and create my own version that would fix the one or two niggles I have. Viva la open source?
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There must be something in the air because now the YouTube channel Trash Theory has done an episode related to the alternative rock of the late 90s, this time focusing on the Offspring.
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Speaking of the music of the late 90s, a meme went around Bluesky the other day that involves posting the album covers of four ‘perfect’ albums from the year you turned 16. That’s 1998 for me which, as I attempted to assemble my list, really can’t hold a candle to 1997. I settled on Morcheeba’s Big Calm, Faithless’ Sunday 8PM, Massive Attack’s Mezzanine and Fatboy Slim’s You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby.
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In putting my list together, I was looking up Triple J’s Hottest 100 from that year and noticed that at some point Apple Music added ‘curators’ (as opposed to ordinary users). This is a perfect categorisation for Triple J and gives them a fancy landing page on which to list things like their playlists, featured albums and video segments (Apple Music).
