Sidewalken

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.

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.