Sidewalken

Started this slow Saturday morning with the idea of roasting some lamb for dinner. Can’t seem to find the recipe that delivered perfection to my table last Xmas. None of the recipes on recipe tin eats or serious eats look familiar. Maybe I’ll go crazy and wing it with a basic reverse sear.

One thing I won’t be doing is donning a pair of creepy black gloves like the meat boys do in their manly meaty videos. So industrial.

Wondering whether I should give Yorgos’ new one a try after the awfulness of Poor Things. I am a fan of kindness, after all.

Whenever I walk past a certain area outside our staff carpark I am overwhelmed by overpoweringly thick sweet scent. Someone spilled either a thousand bottles of maple syrup or a couple of bags of fenugreek.

Finished watching Barbie as our TV time movie. I love how it’s so subtle at times and then hitting-you-over-the-head overt at others. Of course, I had to get the kids to rewind the Steve Malkmus/Pavement bit so I could watch it again. I bounced off Slanted and Enchanted pretty hard when it first came out and passed up the chance to see them live on that tour, missing out on what I’ve been told was an awesome version of Fillmore Jive. The lyrics and music just seemed too crystalline for me at the time. Pockets full of rocks and sand? No, thanks. I was much more comfortable paddling in the shallow waters of Mascisy self effacement.

Here’s a hot potato tip. If you’re boiling some little baby potatoes, don’t leave them boiling for an hour. Even if you have pierced them with a fork, they will split open. Oh well, live and learn.

Here’s a hot photo tip. If you go out to take pictures, make sure your camera has an SD card in it and the battery is charged. I went out yesterday and had to use the slow SD card from another camera and then the battery ran out in about ten minutes. Oh well, live and learn.

I arrived early for a doctor’s appointment. Spent a few minutes trying out the new old camera.

For the last few months I’ve been thinking on and off about getting a little compact camera that I can carry around everywhere. Although they were once everywhere, the compact camera market has been decimated by smartphones. Now there are barely half a dozen available and they all seem to be perennially out of stock — and very pricey to boot. More than once or twice I’ve thought that there must be thousands of these things gathering dust on bookshelves and in boxes across the city.

A couple of days ago I was talking to my daughter in her room when my eye landed on the little Canon Powershot that has been sitting on her bookshelf untouched for the last four or so years. It was exactly the kind of thing I’d been looking for and I’d completely forgotten that she had it. Time to get snapping.

Left a chair out on the verge today to see if anyone would pick it up. It was structurally sound, but the white leatherette cushioning was flaking like dandruff so I had low expectations. Two hours later it was gone. Thank god I didn’t pay the $40 the council wanted to charge to take it off my hands.

I hate that I can’t share digital games, books, music and movies the way the we used to. Sad to think something I’ve bought and enjoyed has to just sit in the cloud, a bundle of ones and zeroes, not enriching anyone’s life.

Big Pavement news today. An ancient music video made for Summer Babe has been unearthed. It was apparently shot in about two hours and, like most good Pavement videos is basically just the guys goofing about.

Although I’m still into the journalish approach to blogging, seeing a dull list of dates as my titles is boring. So I’m going to try to spice things up by adding a few words to them. It’ll probably mostly be song lyrics and lines from movies. I might try to hook them in to whatever I’m writing about but maybe not.

Cooking with olive oil today for the first time in ages and the house smells amazing

Back in the middle of April I decided to take a break from my usual approach to blogging, which was basically one topic per post, each with a title and tags and categories, and each theoretically able to stand on its own as kind of timeless encapsulation of my thoughts. Instead I started with a date and just wrote what I was thinking or doing that day.

It’s been great!

In two months I’ve written about one post every couple of days. Not having to dress up my thoughts with titles and other metadata has really taken a lot of pressure off and made me enjoy writing on the internet again. I’ve been thinking that I may try “normal” blogging again sometime, but it’ll be in addition to the journalish things I’m writing now rather than instead of them.

Instagram is by far the best way for camera stores to advertise cameras that they don’t have in stock.

Many yesses to this by Tracey Chou:

i think we should stop giving our ai bots female names (alexa, siri) and give them names from the old white boys club (john, james, chad) in honor of how overconfident and annoying they are even when they’re completely wrong or making stuff up

Aftersun was exactly what I expected it to be, but it hit me unexpectedly hard.

This popped up again last night. Never fails to transfix me.

Pitted my giddy nihilism against the garden yesterday and the garden won. Still, got halfway there and finished it off today. Insert the usual regrets at not keeping on top of things and vow to do so next time here. At least this time I won’t have to get up at 5.00 am to gather leaves and pull weeds.

Still getting used to the size of my car. I thought it was a small car but, really, it’s not. Much longer nose and much wider than the Golf. The extra width got me into a spot of bother earlier in the week as I reversed out of my carport and found myself jammed against a wooden pillar. After extricating myself, I found what I first thought were scratches but turned out to be a thing called paint transfer. Happily, after paying probably too much for a removal product, the paint is now gone, leaving just the daintiest of dents.

Very much enjoyed reading when goodness is not so good by Winnie Lim. Found me at the right time.

Citizen Sleeper starts out feeling rather small and sterile. You are a digitised human mind in a robot body on a space station that has seen better and worse days. To start off there’s nothing much you can do except earn a little money by helping salvage parts from your ship. But once you get some food and start exploring the station the flow of stories gently swells and begin to envelop you.

I’m still, I think, pretty near the start. I think that because I’m still living in the empty container I started in. Even so I’m currently trying to help a doctor get away from the criminal gang that controls her, collect information about the station to help a hacker/engineer who promises to help me disable the tracking built into my body so I can stop worrying about having enough money to cover the bar tab of the bounty hunter who, after having tracked me down has granted me temporary freedom of the station as long as I pay for his booze every few days.

I’ve also made some friends — the guy who cooks the stir-fries that keep me alive, a fellow labourer on the colony ship under construction on the station and his daughter and, ummm, a sentient vending machine.

More than many other games, I feel like I’m in these stories and actually care about the people and bits of sentient code. They’re kind and helpful, but not selfless, which makes it feel more real.

Felt like the weekend was heading towards another two days of nothing. Was looking for a tiny USB drive in the junk-filled drawer beside my bed and decided to throw out anything that I didn’t need rather than just pushing it to one side for the billionth time. Got on a roll and ended up doing the same with my bedside shelves as well. Filled a few bags with unused prescriptions, Japanese credit cards, empty iPhone case boxes, broken lightning cables, pet registration renewal notices and a thousand other kinds of detritus. It’s a small thing, and although the USB drive never turned up, I’m looking forward to waking up tomorrow with one tiny piece of my life in better shape than it had been.

Mechanical Giraffes

A few days out from Apple’s next developers’ conference and it seems it’ll be drenched in so-called AI features. All I want, though, is to be able to see who in a group has seen a message I sent so I can see whether my daughters are deliberately ignoring my request for them to hang out the laundry. That’s it.

Rumour is that Apple will attempt to brand its AI stuff as Apple Intelligence. Like many Apple things these days I really don’t see the point.

Serious downpour this evening, which resulted in having to drive through several huge puddles — the kind of puddles that would reliably have caused my uni car, a 1968 Holden Torana, to stall. I remember walking home one day and seeing it in the driveway and thinking, Oh no. I hope my dad hasn’t bought this ancient thing for me. What a terrible child!

It had a couple of issues, primarily the dodgy brakes. You needed to pump them to get them to work. The first press down did very little. The second was when you slowed down. It sounds terrible to me now, but I learned to live with it. After a couple of years the brakes developed a new problem — suddenly engaging at full force after just a slight press of the pedal, which would cause the car to skid forward.

The first time was on an empty back street and, typically, I figured it was just some thing that would fix itself.

The second time was on Great Eastern Highway during peak hour. Approaching a red light with one car in front of me, I did the usual pump then press and the brakes grabbed. I went into an uncontrolled skid left up onto the verge and footpath then back onto the road finally ending up just in front of the car I had been behind. A stream of curses flowed my way, which I answered with a river of adrenaline-drenched apologies.

To this day I’m amazed and thankful that I managed to not hit any pedestrians or any other cars. I gently crawled the car to our family mechanic, Tony, the next day to get the brakes replaced so there was no third time.

Realised that I’m just not enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 so putting it aside for a while. After many hours I still don’t feel like I have a grasp of the basics. Also dropping Cyberpunk 2077 from my currently playing list. I just don’t like the toughguy/girl cartoonish-adult crimey vibe. Again, I’ve found it to just not be very fun.

So instead I had some actual computer fun yesterday by diving into Tunic, a cute isometric game of exploration and simple combat. It’s apparently like the Zelda of old. I’ve never played any Zelda games except for maybe an hour with Breath of the Wild so I can’t vouch for that.

Decided to break up my treadmill The Bear sessions with a rewatch of Succession. I’ve been wanting to revisit it recently, but rewatching a four-season show seems like a waste of time with all the other things I’d like to spend my time on. But watching it while plodding away on the treadmill doesn’t. God, how I’ve missed those jerky zoom-in to closeup shots. So much to love in this first episode. Among the many highlights was seeing Kendall rapping along with the Beastie Boys as he gets pumped for his big business meeting. The music, which is playing in his headphones drops away and we are left with him chirruping away in his high twerpy voice. Perfect glimpse of Kendall as he sees himself versus how he comes across in reality.