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1. Fic writing
- The longboi continues. We find the lads in the Calm Lands, having a terrible time, quelle surprise.
- Signed up for /1character (a certain legendary guardian, of course, is that one character). Mostly drafted, might post this weekend (or might inexplicably wait for two months or whatever, who knows).
- /yuletide nominations are in. I’m going to pursue a similar strategy to last year in terms of offers; maybe this will once again result in a net gain of one (1) blorbo.
- Filled a prompt for an event called “AO3 is down”, as if I ever post to AO3 when it’s not down ha ha ho ho, but it’s Auron and Jecht shenanigans.
2. Gaming
- Not that I concentrate on like one Pokémon game a month or anything, but I finally got Legends: Arceus and what can I say, I love prequels!! Especially prequels whose setting in pre-modern-Japan-alike makes me think of the second best game (Rise Of The Ronin). I feel like this is what the main Pokémon series would have been if it was first released as a Switch game in the 2020s. Anyway it’s great.
- I’ve also been playing Pokémon Shuffle on my phone a lot, which works much better than War Of The Visions as an “empty the brain for a couple of minutes” game.
3. Home and the environs
- We had a great day out at the aquarium in a small and long-bus-ride-away town, where we saw (deep breath) goats, chickens, rabbits, dogs, fish, seals, capybaras, geckos, turtles, otters, parrots, penguins, probably more I’ve forgotten. Why are animals facing in opposite directions so cute. @adt and I have tried facing in opposite directions but we’ll never be as cute as they are.
- Took advantage of European Heritage Days to see some Buildings, only slightly marred by the fact that some of them were churches populated by old men who variously tried to convert us to Christianity, talked to us for around an hour about how brilliant some very mediocre stained glass windows apparently were, and told us at great length about how the youth of today wouldn’t hack it in the navy (???).
- We finally got the roof fixed. Next scheduled home maintenance task is “can we find somebody who will solve the mystery of ‘having a shower occasionally makes drops of water run down the kitchen wall’”.
- It very suddenly and noticeably became winter on the 22nd, so autumn lasted like three weeks or something.
- Went for a nice walk, had some nice chips and some nice bubble tea (not at the same establishment), and discovered there was an anime convention going on in some random suburban hotel, only three months or so after Con At My Workplace! The weebs truly are irrepressible.
4. Music
- Choir season has restarted.
- Listened to some Pink Floyd, enjoyed Dogs in particular (although The Division Bell will always be my favourite album of theirs, an opinion shared by nobody).
- Got a few cheap CDs from a Discogs seller, including Heathen, my favourite Bowie album (also an opinion shared by nobody). I haven’t listened to that much music recently though … need to work on this. I think we’ve been too busy going out and having fun at the weekends.
5. Reading
- Read Pretty straight guys by Nick Cohen: oh god New Labour were so bad. Not as if Keir is any better. Oh god.
- Read Conversations with friends by Sally Rooney: ok this really contextualises Green dot of “read in July” fame, because CWF has a very similar plot (slightly weird bisexual young woman of the “nobody understands me” variety has an affair with an older married man), and I now see GD as an attempt to ride on the success of whatever very particular popular genre of fiction this is – I mean, Rooney is one of the most well-known novelists of the last couple of years, right. I don’t know whether the resemblance is intentional or merely subconscious, but the relative complexity (in a good way) of Rooney’s writing seems to justify her success.
- Finished a couple of books for work, but I’m not going to mention this in these posts anymore because they’re now automatically counted on the book tracking page.
- About halfway through Politics on the edge by Rory Stewart … wow what’s it like being literally the only principled person in the Conservative party. Crazy stuff.
6. Recs
- Thought this piece on “cultural snobbery” was interesting.
- “The average college student today” – yep, a lot of this resonates with my experience. I’ve only been in the job for five years and in that time students have become noticeably less well equipped to deal with the material (scrapped an entire module last year for this reason). The problem is exacerbated in my increasingly unpopular discipline, imo, because a. the “good” students decide to study something else in the belief it will make them more employable (actually a total falsehood! But we can’t tell them that if they don’t enrol in the first place), and b. with fewer students, we have to take basically anyone who applies, including some who really shouldn’t be signing up to a 3–4 year course involving heavy reading and all the rest of that humanities stuff. Also, from the article: “Students routinely get up during a 50 minute class, sometimes just 15 minutes in, and leave the classroom.” This happens to me all the time, most recently yesterday. Obviously my natural reaction to things like this is “oh dear I’m bad at holding their attention”, but for the sake of my own mental wellbeing I should probably try to remind myself that, to coin a phrase, it’s the children who are wrong (and by “wrong” I guess I mean “fucked up because of techbro capitalism”).
- Obsessed with this table of spelling differences. My default is en-GB, but most academic publishers seem to require en-GB-oxendict, which is a bit jarring. Colourize though, wowee!
- List of freely available instructional materials for a huge number of programming languages, although calling them all “books” is a bit of a stretch.
- Some of the Rise Of The Ronin art/screenshots I have been enjoying: good-looking guy although I forgot his name, pistol boys, the shinsengumi’s number one twink, the problematic fave!!
- shoopuf
7. Techbro
- I came across a blogpost where the Bridgy team referred to their service (not uncritically) as “load-bearing infrastructure for the open social web”; I’d been wanting to stop relying on it for some time, but that was the cue for me to turn it off. As I keep saying, I don’t want to rely on some other person’s service! Without Bridgy Fed, posts on my site are no longer shared in their entirety to the fediverse, but my RSS → GTS script is doing a perfectly serviceable job of posting links to them that I can share, so it’s not a huge loss. They’re also no longer being shared to Bluesky, which is perfect.
- What I did miss was the ability to boost (or whatever it’s called over there) Bluesky posts on my site’s account, having set up that functionality in August and enjoyed using it to appreciate various Rise Of The Ronin-related images. So I did the one thing I said I wouldn’t do and set up an ATProto PDS, sigh, for the express purpose of reposting/replying only and never sharing anything original, and probably blocking anyone who might ever attempt to follow me (nobody yet has). Despite following a couple of guides I was unable to get this set up a. on the usual PDS and b. without using Docker, so I ended up getting the cheapest Vultr VPS I could and running the PDS on it as the sole service (with half the recommended memory lol). This is probably not worth spending three and a half american dollars a month for.
- It’s funny how GoToSocial, a tiny obscure fediverse server with like two and a half people developing it, is so robust and sensible, while ATProto, the darling of the entire “I want an open web but the fediverse is cringe for some reason” contingent, is liable to break in various ways as soon as one does something the slightest bit unusual. I’ve been trying to make a custom feed so I can “follow” people without actually following them, and any attempts to access it from where I’m led to believe it should be accessed have just failed completely.
- Not much going on on this site as I haven’t really been in a Posting mood … I had a brief urge to write something about why I (as of earlier this year or whatever) favour anonymity in online interactions, so maybe that’ll resurface.
- Upgraded Forgejo, which was actually incredibly easy despite my expectations.
- Tentatively having a gradual go at rebuilding (parts of?) this site using Flask. I really don’t know what I’m doing and I suspect I’ve already done several stupid things with the folder structure. I also don’t know if it’s even possible to port things like my tracking scripts to Flask and have them work the way I want them to (i.e. not having to restart the entire server every time I save a file). One of many longterm projects.
8. Work
- Teaching is happening, I guess? I have one enormous class and several tiny ones, nearly all of which are in the same room. I also have two book reviews and a seminar paper to write before the end of the semester though, plus a whole new module to design by the start of the next one, yikes.
9. Upcoming
- American music concert, which we may just about be ready for in time, although someone should have had words with Barber about how ludicrously high his Adagio goes. This has however taught me the point of a certain playing technique that I was made to learn about 18 years ago and thought unnecessary until yesterday, so I suppose it has its uses.
- Going to see the pros do Tchaikovsky 4 and some other stuff.
- Three and a bit weeks of the semester left until reading week, at which point I guess I’ll have to think about those book reviews.
- My mum is coming over again?! This seems excessive.
