Sidewalken

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.

Left my phone on the treadmill again today. In decades of using iPhones, iPods Touch, Clies and Palm Pilots I have never lost or misplaced a single one ever. Now twice in two weeks! WTF!

This was taken a month or so at Point Walter. A couple of tourists were splashing in the waves against the sandbank and they just kept going and going and going.

And one more from Point Walter today. Do I ever go anywhere else?

I think it’s nice how when I want to buy a TV, camera, phone or computer I will spend weeks surveying all the details, the price points and alternatives. Actual spreadsheets have been made.

But when I bought a car I basically just went to the car shop and said, I want a grey one, for about this many dollars please. and took the first one they showed me.

Wish we could have waited to see the ghosts come by to eat.

Spent hours this evening diving into various cameras I maybe want to buy. My brain is overflowing with pros and cons and specs and features, throwing me this way and that. After a while splashing through the shallows of what I might like to spend, I was suddenly swept to the extreme — to me but not to many in the camera world — other end of the spectrum. I almost had myself convinced that if I had the cool new compact retro camera, I would take more and better photos and have more fun doing so. So close to pulling the trigger but I want to earn it.

I’ve decided that before I throw a bunch of money at a new device I’ll make at least 200 proper finished photos with the gear I have and decide then whether it’s worth it. Yes, very sensible — good adulting. Now go to bed.

Post-work workout today. First visit to the gym in the evening and it was quite a bit more crowded. Decided to give myself another chance at The Bear and loved it. It’s the perfect time for a half-hour stint on the treadmill and was completely absorbing. It was painful to see Sydney struggle through her day while being sabotaged in both malicious and “fun” ways but also great to see her work her way through it.

One of the drawbacks of watching video on your phone while on a treadmill is that you have to remember to take it with you when you’re done, which I forgot to do when I took a break to do some do something else. Luckily someone had turned it in so I was able to get it back from the front desk. Wasn’t a fan of the front desk bro telling me, “You’re lucky he handed it in. He could’ve stolen it.” Thanks for clarifying that, dude. I usually don’t mind the rudeness of strangers, and this wasn’t even that rude — the tone just rubbed me up the wrong way.

Edited a previous entry today because I had been a bit hard on myself. Being able to edit posts should be a basic free feature of every thing that lets you write on the internet.

Started a pantry clean-out today and one of my darkest secrets has bubbled up. Whenever I’m making pasta I always buy a new pack because it’s just too much trouble to call home and get someone to dig through the cupboard and give me a vague answer about how much is left, but I never use the whole thing. Still, I didn’t expect there to be this much lurking at the back of the bottom shelf. Pretty stoked that there’s so much of the wholemeal pasta. The supermarket seem to have stopped stocking this brand and the others are basically inedible.

Bought a frozen “meat lovers” pizza for a late lunch and realised as I put it in the oven that instead of tomato base it had a so-called rich BBQ sauce or, more accurately, a sugary liquid abomination. It decidedly did not hit the spot.

Picked up Baldur’s Gate for the first time in a few weeks. Turned down a quest to help steal an idol but rather regretting it now. Am I once again falling into the trap of approaching a role playing game by largely making the kind of decisions I’d make in real life — a bit too fearful of making “mistakes” and a bit too keen to avoid conflict? Spent five or so minutes listening to a behorned woman sing a paen to her slaughtered teacher then got stuck in a doomed battle with a bunch of goblins.

Actually ventured into the garden today and made a start on a couple of big pruning/lopping jobs. Only got halfway done before the rain started but at least I’ve taken the first step.

The fancy 24/7 supermarket has every kind of hummus you could possibly want but absolutely no French onion dip, so I can’t celebrate the end of a fairly intensive week of work with a post-midnight bowl of chips dipped in French onion dip, one of the few indulgences I actually save for special occasions that are not just a day ending in the letter Y. Making do with chips and a beer instead.

Mandy Brown’s look at gendered AI from 2016 is a great read.

In fact, it’s not hard for me to imagine a straight line (or at least a moderately meandering one) between a generation of bot makers who anoint their creations with gendered names and personalities and the impossible reverie that is the singularity: could the very notion of the singularity be the embodiment of the oppressors fear that the oppressed will one day rise up and slay them? Perhaps the attention some men apparently spend on wondering whether AI will eventually surpass them should be instead spent on noticing the fact that women already have.

Microsoft’s on-the-horizon Recall feature is the most Don’t Create the Torment Nexus thing I’ve seen in ages. And that’s a world in which the Vision Pro, self-driving Cybertrucks and Humane AI pins exist as actual products you can buy. Lots of new tech stuff is goofy or creepy or gross but this just takes the cake. Domestic abusers who want to tighten their grip of coercive control will be lining up to take advantage of this.

Generally very happy with the new car — a huge step up in every way. But there are some niggles. It has Apple Carplay, which is great, but it takes some time to kick in after you turn on the engine, during which it insists on playing the radio. It does the same after you turn the engine off. The Carplay bit shuts down immediately and it switches over to radio. Why no option for silence?

If you’re ever in a duel to the death with me, here’s an easy way to defeat me. Give me a choice of two options and ask me whether I want the former or the latter. Use the seconds-long period during which my entire cognitive resources will be tasked with working out which is which to land the killing blow.

So I set myself some goals for the weekend and said I’d be happy if I got just a couple done. I actually thought it likely I’d do them all, considering how modestly they were worded. Well, I did not end up doing them all and only technically achieved my goal of doing at least two.

I made the chicken curry satay I had planned and it was exactly as delicious as I’d hoped. It was a bit much for the rest of the family, but I slavishly cater to their every whim and desire every other time I cook so they can suck it up this one time.

Didn’t have any of the friend catch-ups I had hoped for but met my sister for the first time in ages so that counts.

As for the others, I walked past my garden with barely a glance, chose sleep over finishing a movie — probably a good choice — and just couldn’t find time to make it to the ocean.

Most of my weekends tend to evaporate in a cloud of blah, so it was nice to have this list of things I wanted to do so when I found myself doing things that weren’t on it at least it felt like a decision rather than just going with the flow.

Not exactly a surprise, but there’s no way Ghost of Tsushima will work on a Mac. It needs a chip that can understand a certain set of instructions that every Intel chip since 2012 has been able to do but no Apple silicon can do. It’s cool. In fact, I didn’t even want to play it on my Mac. I’ve got so many other games to play. I’m actually happy I can’t play it, as my previous posts will indicate as soon as I edit them to make it so.

A while back I was all set to write a blog post about how so many of Bob Dylan’s big long songs from the mid-sixties were just too long and would have benefited from having a good third or quarter cut from them. But I listened to the main offenders, Visions of Johanna, Sad-Eyed Lade of the Lowlands, Desolation Row and It’s Alright Ma (
I’m Only Bleeding) and a handful of others and I was completely wrong. I wouldn’t want a single verse dropped from any of them.

The Books — Smells Like Content

My goals for this weekend. I’ll be happy if I get to do at least two of these things.

• Watch a movie all the way through.
• Do a thing in the garden.
• Spend some time zoning out near a large body of water — preferably with waves.
• Cook a meal that’s for me and not one of the usual crowdpleasers.
• Have a conversation with a friend.

I was a very gullible child. I once borrowed a book on magic tricks from the library. It was set up so you read a description of the trick on one page then turn to the next to find out the secret. But I didn’t get that. The first trick was one where you put your hand palm down on a table then slide playing cards under it one by one. Once you’ve got ten or so cards under there, you raise your hand and amaze your friends because all the cards stick to your hands.

So I tried and tried and tried to do this for hours but couldn’t pull it off. I went to bed feeling sad and angry that I just couldn’t do magic. The next day I turned the page to try a new trick only to discover the secret of the sticky cards. I tried it and, of course, it worked. Mind blown.

Hint: it involves a ring and a toothpick. If my parents thought it was unusual that their six year old son was suddenly wearing a ring while showing them his first ever magic trick, they were good enough sports not to show it.

Picked up the new-to-me car today and how good does it feel to know I never have to drive my junky VW Golf again. Even before its current calamities — heck, for as long as I’ve had it — there’s always been something or other either wrong or suspect about it. Not going to miss the strange noises and the feeling that something could go wrong at any second.

Dreamt last night about picking up the car and in the dream I drove off and realised that I had forgotten to pay. So I headed back to pay and the brakes failed so I spent what felt like hours careening around strange streets, crashing into other cars, curbs, hedges and anything else you can imagine. It was not fun. Nice of my subconscious not to have me crash into any people though.

Watched Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense movie for the first time in decades. What a beautiful artifact of 1980s culture. I remember taping this off TV and making my own version of the packaging. I copied the writing style — I’m sure I had no idea that there were things called fonts back then — over a cut and pasted image of, from memory, a painting of a woman with a strangely elongated neck. My favourite songs are pretty conventional — This Must Be The Place and Once In A Lifetime.

Reminds me of the bible of Japanese grammar that was my constant companion back in uni. For some reason I decided that a picture of Albert Camus made the perfect cover image.

The only good music videos are the ones in which you can see the band playing for at least eighty percent of the song. The only exception is Pavement’s Gold Soundz, which features the guys dressing in Santa costumes, stealthily stalking about an LA mall with bows and arrows, firing shots into the air to bring down a plucked chicken from which they pull some car keys then driving to a bit of a roadside hill to enjoy some cookies and milk. Sure hope they washed their hands after throwing that chicken around.

Is there an accepted etiquette position on keeping earbuds in while talking to shopkeepers? Until now I’ve reflexively taken them out and put them in my shirt pocket, but because I use those squishy foam tips it’s kind of a hassle to put them back in each time. If I were on the other side of the interaction, I don’t think I’d mind a customer keeping them in as long as they were able to hear me and be present in the situation. But is that how the people who are on that side of our interaction feel.

I first gave Apple’s Discovery “radio” playlist thing a try when I got my AirPods back in January. It was pretty great. Lot’s of songs I hadn’t heard by artists whose names I sometimes recognised but often didn’t. Some cool finds: Gnaw, Little Things, Fix.

I still check it out now and then, but I feel it’s pandering a bit too much to its idea of my taste. I wish there were a way I could tell it to push the envelope of things I might like out a bit.

The question has been raised, in a fun way, as to whether I’m a person who doesn’t put things back where they belong. Although I would vigourously defend myself against the charge that I may leave the toilet seat up, I have to admit to having a very high tolerance for things being out of place.

From where I’m sitting in the dining room right now I can see a can of shaving cream I bought a week ago that I have somehow not managed to take up to the bathroom, a Japanese/Australian power adapter that’s been waiting to get put away for three months, and a box full of kitchen cleaning stuff that we cleared out from under the sink to make space for some plumbing work a month or so ago. These have all become part of what I accept as my “normal” living environment.

I am excellent at putting leftovers in the freezer and awful at actually eating them. Time after time I’ve realised I have no idea what is in any of the plastic containers or how long they’ve been there and ended up throwing it away. Well, I broke the cycle today and actually took some frozen lentil curry to work. Wow! Best work meal I’ve eaten since my leftover satay beef!

About a year ago my favourite crackers — Vita-wheat Sesame and Poppy — disappeared from supermarket shelves. I assumed they’d stopped making them. But looking for something else in the fancy, overpriced 24 hour supermarket the other day I found them again. Such happiness! The perfect base for some Castello Blue Cheese.

How great is it that X, the social network “formerly” known as Twitter, still lives at twitter.com? You know they’d love for it to all be at x.com, but with all the money in the world and they decided it was just too difficult to work out all the overlapping and intertwining dependences and, it appears, just gave up without comment. Good to remember next time you find yourself not able to follow some plan you had, whether it’s giving up on chips or trying to exercise every day.