Dolphins

We decided to swing by the Bunbury Dolphin Discovery Centre on the way back from Busselton so got up early and headed off to get there for eight o’clock.

I am still haunted by our first visit, when I failed to take into account that the dolphins are wild and don’t just hang around the whole time the centre is open. They come and go as they please, which I’d have realised if I’d given it even a moment’s thought. So we turned up late, after they’d been in, and waited for a fair while hoping they’d make a rare second visit. They did not.

So we got there a little after eight this morning and just as soon as we got our stuff out of the car, ready for an indeterminate wait, the bell rang that signalled there was a visitor. We got to spend about twenty minutes as she swam about just in front of us. A very nice anniversary (plus one day) present.

Posted in Life Tagged
Posted on 2 November 2023

Mendokusai

I lived in Japan for close to 20 years and, after 10 years of living in Australia, there are still many Japanese words that are part of my mental language — you may never hear me say them, but they are the ones my mind goes for to describe certain things.

My favourite is probably mendokusai. Unlike some others, like fuinki or natsukashii, which don’t really have straight English equivalents, it translates pretty easily as What a bother! or It’s a hassle.

But there’s something about mendokusai that I love and that makes me prefer it. I think it’s the hard consonant sounds that do it for me — and that I can draw it out into three distinct parts: men doku sai. That doku means poison also helps add the feeling that something is such a hassle that it is toxic.

Posted in Language, Life Tagged ,
Posted on 12 October 2023

A Week In Late September

Started the week feeling stretched in a thousand directions at once. Things evened out after a day or two thanks to the restorative powers of conversations with friends.

Alvvays’ Perth show in December sold out quicker than I expected, leaving me ticketless. Although I signed up to a waitlist, I didn’t think much would come of it. Given their tight tour schedule, it seemed impossible for them to add another show. But something did come of it! They changed to a bigger venue and I managed to hold my procrastination at bay long enough to get a ticket. Looking forward to mucking up the lyrics as I sing along to them just as much as I do in the car.

The Barbie movie was fun. I especially appreciated the Malkmus reference, of course. Sadly, although it was supposed to have Japanese subtitles, they were nowhere to be found. Apple gave us a refund, but I would have far preferred to have got what was — and still is — advertised.

I finally got a Bluesky invitation as, it seems, many others did. Haven’t really used it enough to get a real sense of what it’s like, but I’ve found a few people who I’d like to keep up with. People seem really into using “skeet”. I see it way more than “toot” on Mastodon. The app is surprisingly slow and flaky for something I thought had big VC dollars behind it. I suppose I’m spoiled by Ivory and Mona.

Posted in Culture, Life, Moving Pictures, Music Tagged , ,
Posted on 30 September 2023

Irma Vep Saves the Day

I gave High Life a go last night and ended up having to bail about halfway through — something I almost never do when watching a film by myself. It was just too bleak and unpleasant — and I usually have a high tolerance for bleakness. Each minute sapped my curiosity about where things would end up further and further until it dried up completely. Maybe it had something to do with having driven for six hours earlier in the day.

It was still early when I pulled the plug, so I reached for another film that had long been on my to-watch list — Irma Vep. What an absolute joy from start to finish! I had expected something more serious about the struggles of creating art — part of the reason it’s been sitting unwatched for so long — and worried I’d have to cringe through some blithe 90s racism. I was wrong on both counts. There’s tonnes of drama and argument behind the scenes, but it’s all so enjoyable to watch, and Maggie Chueng comes across as being totally in control the whole time. All the performances feel so natural and the camera dances about the whole time, adding energy to every conversation. It’s a nice change from the fussy framing and intentionally stilted delivery of so many films today.

Posted in Culture, Moving Pictures
Posted on 9 September 2023

What’s In My Ears Right Now?

What to do when you’ve listened to Blue Rev a million times and can’t wait for a new Alvvays album? Simple — go back and listen to their previous one, Antisocialites, which also has tonnes of great songs. Probably works better if you haven’t heard it before. Can’t get enough of In Undertow right now. Has one of those bits that I love where Molly’s voice goes from highish to lowish, taking the song from great to greater.

Speaking of old music that is new to me, Morningside by Fazerdaze is a revelation. It was Lucky Girl that hooked me, but it’s not really representative of the rest of the album. Song after song had me amazed that this was her first album.

Sometime last year I saw a video of Courtney Barnett recommending some albums to Kurt Vile. There may have been more, but the ones I remember were Dick Diver’s Calendar Days and Chastity Belt’s I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone. That album’s opener, Different Now, was the soundtrack to hours and hours of wintery driving in Japan last December. Now Courtney has released a cover of it and, umm, it didn’t do much for me. Maybe the original is too hardwired into my head. I keep waiting for things to happen than don’t. Oh well, it’ll probably turn more people onto Chastity Belt so overall a good thing.

Posted in Music Tagged , , ,
Posted on 17 August 2023

Writing in “Chinese”

Lovely story on Language Log about an American prisoner in Japan in the 1980s teaching themselves “Chinese” and using it to send a special message to a member of the consulate staff.

Posted in Culture, Language
Posted on 8 August 2023

Properly Crispy

Happy to announce that my fear that Recipe Tin Eats’ method of tenderising the pork for sweet and sour pork by marinading it overnight in a sauce containing baking soda either wouldn’t work or would taste strange was unfounded. Super tender, super tasty and super crispy. Total home run!

I can’t speak for the sauce because we used a Japanese one from a packet — that was the flavour we wanted — but I doubt it’d be anything but great.

Posted in Food Tagged
Posted on 4 August 2023

Gathering Crickets

While playing the main story of Ghost of Tsushima, I tended to ignore all the little collectible things — singing crickets, Mongol artifacts, banners and the like. Basically, anything that didn’t make me a more effective killing machine seemed like a pointless distraction.

Nowadays, things are different. I start each play session by donning the Traveller’s Attire and choosing something to search for. Then I just follow the guiding wind across the countryside, taking out stray bands of mongols and bandits along the way, until I find what I’m looking for. I like that these items don’t appear as icons on the map. There’s no point in using fast travel because you don’t know where you’re heading — just the general direction. It’s very relaxing and peaceful to just walk or ride across the countryside.

Posted in Culture, Games Tagged
Posted on 18 June 2023

The Coffee Dilemma

A note for future me — when at work and faced with the choice between drinking instant coffee or using a couple of paper towels as a make-do coffee filter because you left the filters you bought the day before at home, always always always go for the paper towels even though it takes longer and looks ridiculous. That one cup of instant you had a year ago that you thought was surprisingly good was a one-in-a-million never to be repeated again.

Posted in Food, Life
Posted on 14 June 2023

Not Much of a Career

Last night I arrived a little early to pick up my wife from a dinner in Fremantle and parked on the side of the road to wait. While reading on my phone I heard some voices from behind and saw in my rear view mirror someone trying the handle of the car behind me. It took me a little while to realise what was going on and before I knew it my drivers side door was opening. I let out a surprisingly loud and aggressive shout as I pulled it shut and three guys ran off into the night.

I was genuinely surprised at my reaction. I am definitely more a flight than a fight person. I think it was the suddenness with which it happened. There was no time for my brain to get in the way. If they hadn’t run away immediately, I wonder whether I’d have kept up my aggro facade. Happy I didn’t get a chance to find out.

Once my heart had stopped pounding, Billy Bragg’s lines from Welcome to the New Brunette popped into my head.

The people from your church agree
It’s not much of a career
Trying the handles of parked cars
Whoops, there goes another year
Whoops, there goes another pint of beer

Posted in Life Tagged ,
Posted on 12 June 2023

Denser Than a Hockey Puck

Will I ever learn? On a whim, I looked up the lyrics for the Malkmus song Old Jerry and the line “Art is denser than a hockey puck” is supposedly “Heart is denser than a hockey puck”. What nonsense! I’m going to continue to sing “Art” as I barrel down the freeway.

Posted in Culture, Music Tagged
Posted on 11 June 2023

Hand in Hand

This was almost certainly unintended, but Shiv’s hand coldly placed on Tom’s as they drove away felt like a negative echo of Mr Darcy touching Ms Bennet’s as he helped her into her carriage.

Posted in Culture, Moving Pictures Tagged ,
Posted on 31 May 2023

That Was Close

Phew! That was close. Pretty sure nobody noticed but I just deleted a post in which I questioned the wisdom of a multinational conglomerate releasing a new gaming product. Luckily I remembered that I don’t really care what multinational conglomerates do with their money as long as it doesn’t impinge too much on my ability to enjoy their wares or cause huge harm to large swathes of people, or even minor amounts of harm to very few people.

It wasn’t even an interesting opinion — basically that I, like everyone else, thought it was a puzzling idea.

Posted in Culture, Games Tagged ,
Posted on 28 May 2023

Skipping Over

I have reached the point with Blue Rev where the songs I used to skip over — Pomeranian Spinster and Tile By Tile among others — are now the ones I skip to.

Posted in Culture, Music Tagged ,
Posted on 28 May 2023

A bit of a hit around

We’ve been driving past Robertson Park tennis courts for years, thinking we should pop in and give it a go sometime. That feeling gained some impetus when I found out that Steve Malkmus played there when Pavement came to Perth in February. Silly, I know, but still …

Today we finally did it and it was a tonne of fun. It’s been over ten years since I last played tennis, and that was at a house we were staying at down in Yallingup and was very much fuelled and/or hampered by copious amounts of wine, so this was the first sober tennis I’ve played since I was in high school.

It was just $15 an hour and mercifully uncrowded, so our many wayward hits didn’t cause any bother for anyone else. We didn’t actually keep score or anything like that. Our main goal was to keep some kind of a volley going and help each other get the ball over the net. All in all a very good hour.

Posted in Life Tagged ,
Posted on 21 May 2023

Maybe Ulysses is the one

My search for a way to edit my blog on my phone or iPad may be over. It turns out Ulysses has pretty robust WordPress publishing support. You can post and edit back and forth on either Mac or iOS and it seems to keep a track of things fairly well. It’s not quite as seamless as MarsEdit — there’s an extra step in the publishing process where you have to confirm that the post settings such as categories and dates and the like are right — but it beats fighting with the WordPress dashboard. Unfortunately Ulysses interactions are one way only. There’s no way to get posts that didn’t originate in Ulysses or for it to update the local version of a post if the one in WordPress has been edited elsewhere. But I think that is outside of the scope of what Ulysses is supposed to be.

And you can get the benefit of Ulysses’ best feature — manual ordering of posts.

Now all I need to do is work out navigation, tweak the archive display, and fix the image problem and I’ll be able to stop futzing about behind the scenes and focus on writing.

Posted in Technology Tagged
Posted on 21 May 2023

Something Like MarsEdit on iOS

I wish there were something like MarsEdit on iOS. The WordPress app is okay for little edits but feels like a web page. There’s a distinct lag to every interaction that makes it feel just a bit off.

Posted in Internet, Technology Tagged ,
Posted on 20 May 2023

Just One Cookbook’s Macaroni Gratin

This macaroni gratin is probably the first actually new recipe I’ve made this year. It was a late request on a Sunday, with just enough time to get to the shops.

For ages I’ve shied away from anything vaguely rouxish. I’ve never quite gotten the hang of mixing flour into things properly. But this time was a total success — not even the slightest floury hint.

Posted in Food, Life Tagged
Posted on 20 May 2023

Fun with WordPress

Although I’m something of a ChatGPT sceptic, I have to say it is pretty handy for quickly working out how to do things with WordPress without having to trawl through countless posts.

So far I’ve used it to find out how to:

  • Display posts from only one category on the home page
  • Hide a category in the list of categories
  • Display dates the way I want
  • Show related posts without using a plugin

One thing it failed to do, though, was tell me how to style lists with a dash rather than the usual dots. Its answer was wildly misleading. Oh well!

My little project of moving from Hugo to WordPress, but trying to keep things as simple as possible, is coming along nicely. There’s a lot that doesn’t quite look the way I want — for example, category pages and images overall — but I’ll keep chipping away at it.

Posted in Technology Tagged , ,
Posted on 20 May 2023

Net Happiness

It makes me happy to think of the millions of people out there joyously gliding, crafting, cooking, ascending, recalling, fusing, climbing, and all the other things you can do in the new game. If world’s net happiness has been boosted even just a smidge, that’s pretty cool.

Posted in Culture, Games Tagged ,
Posted on 13 May 2023