Monday, 6 May 2024
Moments after this photo was taken, the crow launched into the air, shopping trolley in tow. Amazing sight.
If you happen to be getting by with one pair of glasses, make sure not to leave work without them. Currently enjoying the challenge of trying to keep my broken pair on my face with just one stem. Is stem the right word? Arm? Leg?
I’m always impressed when I see someone in a movie doing something while smoking a cigarette — just having it stuck in the side of their mouth while they clatter away on a typewriter or fix a bicycle or brush dirt off a recently exhumed bit of pottery. Could never do that back in the days of smoke. It just went straight for my eyes and anyway just felt wrong. I probably just didn’t try hard enough.
Sunday, 5 May 2024
Spent a birthday celebration night in a fancy hotel. Not a fan of the overly mirrored bathroom. I really don’t appreciate seeing myself from behind — or from any angle — while washing my hands. Wonder if there is some amount I could pay to have a room with no mirrors at all — now that would be luxury. But the rain shower was nice, as was the breakfast spread — perfectly crispy bacon — and the high thread-count sheets. Seems that if I did accidentally become fabulously wealthy, I could probably get used to it.
Speaking of Threads, what a strangely earnest social network it is. Seems to mostly be made up of people posting stories about someone doing something good or someone doing something bad. Then there are a hundred replies pointing out that either the person doing something good was bad actually or the person doing something bad was good actually. Kind of exhausting.
And the way it does quote posts is a bit dark patterny. They are almost all truncated so to see what people are quoting you need to click on the quoted post. Vive la engagement!
Currently quite taken by There’s a Rugged Road by Judee Sill. Just love the rhythm she puts into roll on roll on roll on bits. One of those songs I’d need to hum to explain what I like about it. Oh, looks like Greta Gerwig sings it in Greenberg.
Friday, 3 May 2024
Dropped the car off at the mechanic feeling very much like someone who hasn’t been to a dentist in five years and is only coming in because the pain is too much to bear. But the guy at the counter was friendly and helpful.
I wonder why I sometimes expect people in such positions to be critical and judgmental. Is it because I would be if I were in their shoes? I hope not, but …
Later in the day, the mechanic had to use the words catastrophic failure to describe how dire things were under the Golf’s hood. Happily, it didn’t come as a huge surprise and I’d just bought its replacement. And he didn’t charge me for the time it took to work out how bad things were.
Thursday, 2 May 2024
Day three of the sore throat life. Soothers’ Butter Menthols are far better than Strepsils at taking the edge off. Less medicinal and more flavourful.
Sick of eating soupy, throat friendly stuff so having supermarket shepherd’s pie tonight, which is, when you think about it, basically a thick mince and potato soup. Oh, found my USB adapter, so here’s some grapefruit.
Had to call a mechanic today, so immediately turned into a small child on the phone: I fink there’s somefink wrong wif my car. Can you fix it, pwease, mister?
Seems like finding another car has gone from being a leisurely just taking my time activity to a right here right now crisis. I’m trying to approach it like playing a game — do the research, check the stats, make a choice then roll the dice. It’s fun, he tells himself. The thing is, in the used car buying game you don’t find out whether your roll was good or bad until some time later, when the radiator fails or the back hatch refuses to open.
Using italics in strange ways in this entry. Will it stick or will it fade?
Tuesday, 30 April 2024
The first real rain of the year. Sadly, no petrichor that I could detect, perhaps due to my cold, which came on quickly overnight and set up camp in my throat and the right side of my head. A good day to be sick at home and listen to the rain overflow from a blocked gutter.
Chasing vitamin C I had my first grapefruit in how long? A year or so at least. Such bright red flesh!
Found some unopened hummus and tzatziki that I bought last December and was delighted to find they were both good to eat — that is, until I put my glasses on and saw that the expiry month was Jan, not Jun. Reminds me that I need to get new glasses. I broke my newest pair, which were themselves at least two or three years old, while in Japan — one of the dangers of living on tatami and futon. I’ve been using my old pair, which are maybe four or five years old since then. And they’re okay. I can read without getting a headache, but this is not a sustainable solution. Next week for sure.
I’ve lost the adapter that lets my old USB devices connect to the new USB ports in my MacBook. Pretty cool that for the want one cable I can’t access any hard drives or import any photos. How great is the future! I want to post my grapefruit picture — or just see whether it’s worth posting — but it’s trapped on my camera’s ancient CF card. Estimated time of finding the lost cable is about one week after buying a new one.
Monday, 29 April 2024
Nothing in my youth prepared me for how much time I’d have to spend peeling and chopping and grating and crushing garlic. Maybe I should go for the tube version or even one of those huge jars. I don’t have any reason to suspect that I have a particularly refined palate and would be able to tell the difference. But I don’t want to let down the team.
And cloves! So many recipes call for a certain number of cloves, as if cloves are stamped out of the clove factory at exactly the same size — or even vaguely similar sizes. I often buy the cheaper made-in-China garlic that comes as three bulbs in a pack and the cloves are easily half the size of a the grown-in-Australia version. When a recipe calls for five garlic cloves, like the green soup I made yesterday, I wish they’d put the weight instead. Much easier to work out if you’ve hit the target.
Stopping to get a loaf of the best bread from the best baker in Perth yesterday, I pulled off a perfect bit of parallel parking. I usually avoid this because I’m worried about holding up traffic and under-confident in my spatial judgement. I was so close to driving by that parking spot and finding a park far away or, equally likely, just giving up and going home breadless. But the road behind me was clear so I gave it a go and jagged all the timing and spacing on the turns. Good start to the day. And the soup was much better having the bread to sop it up with.
Saturday, 17 April 2024
Lunch was Ramen Keisuke. It got a lukewarm review from my wife’s friend forever ago so it kept getting nixed when I suggested it. But Tosaka doesn’t open for lunch so it got the nod today. Despite the Showa-era kitsch decor it doesn’t have a “run by Japanese” vibe to it. But the flavor! It absolutely nailed my ideal of a deep, unctuous Tonkotsu soup. Very respectable chashu too, though not close to Tosaka’s charred perfection. It has instantly zoomed to the top of my list of best ramen places in Perth.
Grinding your own sesame seeds to add to the soup was a very cool touch.
Coincidentally, the night before on Mastodon this screenshot popped up in one of those “What movie is this from?” posts.
I fired off the answer and in no time got a couple of responses telling me to check my spelling. Yep, my iPhone had helpfully corrected Tampopo to Tampon. Thanks, Apple.
Happily, Mastodon lets you edit posts, like all respectable social networks should do.
I went into Yvonnie Scarce’s exhibition The Light of Day knowing nothing about the artist or what I was about to experience. An Aboriginal artist from South Australia, Scarce’s handblown glass works illustrate the human effects of colonialism, from eugenics to negligent exposure to nuclear radiation. It feels like such a cliche to say that it was “powerful” or “thought provoking” but, really, it was. I need to think more about how much of our society was built on a foundation of, at best, turning its eye away from the harm it caused to Aboriginal people and, at worst, turning its power against them.
Custom WordPress RSS – Just One Category
If you want your main RSS feed to include only posts in a certain category, add the code below to your theme’s functions.php file, substituting CategoryNameHere for the category you want.
I found this in a 2009 post on Will Anderson’s blog.
add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'filterRSSQuery');
function filterRSSQuery($query) {
if ( $query->is_feed ) {
$query->set('category_name', 'CategoryNameHere');
}
return $query;
}
Posted in Nerdy
Tagged Nerdy How-to, WordPress
Baldur’s Gate – Caught Stealing
I keep getting caught “stealing” when I’m just trying to look at something. Gotta be more careful. It’s quite different than Ghost of Tsushima, where you can run about picking up linen, iron and supplies to your heart’s content.
Won the battle against the harpies! Thought I was being clever by positioning most of my party on the cliffs above where I knew the battle would take place, but half of them were lured jump into the water in the first turn. Even so, just managed to prevail.
Posted in Games
Tagged Baldur's Gate, Play Diary
Dinosaur Jr – Learn Your Lessons
Two months later I’m still somewhat bemused by the combination of brain chemical swirls that led me to not seeing Dinosaur Jr when they played in Perth for what I’m pretty sure has to be the last chance I’ll have to see them. First I felt I didn’t have the money, then I thought I wouldn’t be able to get there in time after work. Later, when I knew I could afford it and was willing to take the loss if I couldn’t get there in time the only seats left were, I thought, terrible so I still didn’t buy tickets. I ended up driving past the venue on the way home in plenty of time to see even the opening act.
The only time I’ve seen them was back in 1995, a week or so before I moved to Japan, and it was an awesome show. My main memory was of Mascis going off on a massive solo that the bassist stopped trying to keep up with so he just took a break and lit a cigarette while J wailed away on his guitar for a blissful eternity.
Jesus, Simon, learn your lessons.
Posted in Music, RSS
Tagged Dinosaur Jr
Persona
Somewhat surprisingly, this was completely absorbing. I had the impression that Bergman would be a slog, but I was riveted from start to finish. There’s so much power in these two women. Although it’s not always clear exactly what is going on, you always feel like you know, which is just as important. I had read somewhere that this was about a woman adopting the other’s persona and was expecting something along those lines, but I felt fairly early on that was not what I was watching — way more going on.
This is my first Bergman film. It’s kind of hard to believe that the insufferably pretentious kid I used to be never picked up a VHS copy of this at Planet Video back in the day.
Posted in Moving Pictures, RSS
Tagged Bergman
Spatial Scare
I bought some AirPods recently and they’ve been great — good sound and comfortable to wear. They have this thing called spatial sound that’s supposed to create something like a surround sound effect. I’ve only really noticed it when watching a movie and I turn my head to one side or the other and the sound shifts. It’s pretty subtle and feels like a bit of a gimmick because practically all the time I’m watching a movie on my MacBook I’m staring straight ahead at the screen.
The other night I was watching an episode of the recent show Mr and Mrs Smith. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine were having a fairly intense talk about whether having children would be a good idea when there is a tapping at the door. And it sounds like it’s coming from right the glass door right behind me so my heart does a mid-chest flip. I pull out the AirPods and look outside and it takes me a moment to realise that it was just the show.
I rewind a bit and start watching again and about a minute later I hear the tapping from behind me again and I jump out of my skin again even though I’d just gone through the same thing not ten minutes before. Spatial sound may well be a bit of an afterthought now, but if someone put a lot of thought into it, they could create something pretty great.
Making decisions | A Working Library
From Mandy Brown on A Working Library:
There’s a really important thing that sometimes nervous people like me don’t realize — that the expression “to make a decision” is perfectly accurate: a decision is something you create. There’s an inclination to think that with enough research and thinking and conversation and information, it’s possible to determine what the correct decision is; to think that decision making is an intellectual puzzle. But generally it’s not. You make decisions. Something is created when you make a decision. It’s an act of will, not an act of thought.
Posted in Links
Tagged A Working Library
Sometimes
I was thinking of posting a youtube link to My Bloody Valentine’s Sometimes, which I think of as the acoustic track from Loveless, although it obviously isn’t acoustic at all. It wasn’t a single so didn’t have a proper video but someone had put one together using scenes from Lost In Translation. It makes sense, because Kevin Shields contributed to the soundtrack, which was the first music I’d heard from him since Loveless.
I haven’t seen Lost since it came out. I was living in Tokyo at the time and totally connected with the feeling of excitement of being an outsider from a much duller town in a vibrant and pulsating cityscape. I remember thinking it was cool to see Scarlett, who at the time I thought of as the minor character from Ghost World, in a lead role. It was fun to see Bill Murray doing his thing before he had become ザ Bill Murray.
Putting this on my very long watchlist of things to watch again.
I also need to check out Somewhere and The Beguiled.
Posted in Music
Tagged Lost in Translation, My Bloody Valentiene
Cult of the Lamb: Inventory Bug
Last night, after thoroughly enjoying the demo, I was raring to give the full version of Cult Of the Lamb a go. I was happily working my way through the opening tutorial scenes when I got my first piece of gold and was prompted to open the inventory by pressing tab. When I pressed tab again to close it, the game froze.
After playing through the opening a number of times and trying to do things differently but still getting a freeze, I gave up and went to bed. This morning I found the answer. It’s a bug, of course, that seems to affect the Mac version mainly whether you’re using the keyboard or a controller. Instead of pressing the same button you used to get into the inventory, you have to press either F, for keyboard, or the B button equivalent on a controller.
Hope they sort out a fix soon because this doesn’t happen in the actual demo and I’d hate to think how many people would give up basically before the game has even begun.
Update a few hours later: Darn – another freeze after delivering first sermon. I’m sure this stuff must have worked before so I’m sure they’ll get it working again soon. Right?
Posted in Games
Tagged Cult of the Lamb, Mac Gaming
Bring the Noise!
One of the main reasons I recently updated to a newer laptop was to run Lightroom at a less lugubrious pace and to be able to use its new machine learning enhanced selection and noise reduction tools. On my decade old MacBook I could, with a lot of patience, make some use of the selection tools. Trying to use the noise reduction however reliably crashed the program. Not only that, it logged me out of my user. Very weird.
Happily, the new machine performs both tasks with ease. I’m especially impressed with Lightroom’s ability to clean up noise from high-ISO shots taken with my ancient Canon 5DII. Click the image below to see the before and after in more detail.
Pavement – Witchi Tai To
When Pavement played the first show of their recent reunion tour, they finished off with this cover of Native American jazz pioneer Jim Pepper’s Witchi Tai To. Such a lovely and positive vibe with which to end the show and start their awesome year-long tour.
I will forever wonder why Bob was left out of the band intro. Nothing sinister, I reckon — probably just Malkmus forgetting what he was going to say. Bloody slacker.
Like all other Pavement covers they make it sound like their own song.
Gyoza Moments
Some things I like and don’t like about making gyoza —
Chopping Chinese cabbage is my least favourite part, mainly because my chopping board is a bit too small, as is my knife, so I end up with bits of cabbage all over the kitchen. It seems like I chop for an hour or two without making much progress then suddenly it’s over and I have a large heap of finely chopped cabbage. Nice.
Salting and squeezing the cabbage is probably my favourite part. Basically you take the chopped cabbage, put it in a bowl, stir through a couple of spoonfuls of salt, put that into sieve over a bowl and wait for twenty minuets. The salt will draw water out of the cabbage so there’ll be quite a bit in the bowl. Most of the water will need a bit more encouragement, so you put the cabbage in the middle of a tea towel and wrap it up and squeeze it as much as you can to extract as much water as possible. I don’t know why I find this so satisfying. Maybe its because there’s nothing like this in any other recipe I make. Anyway, it’s fun.
Bonus second favourite part — getting a nice deep dark crust on the underside of the gyoza. Without it, I’d consider my gyoza a failure.
If you haven’t made gyoza and want to give it a try, go for J. Kenji López-Alt’s recipe.
think of the big picture
From Elle on Mastodon:
whenever my boss says “think of the big picture, elle” I’m immediately an astronaut floating silently in space tethered to my ship looking down on earth, and nothing he wants seems important or even relevant really so this strategy has backfired on him more than once is what I’m saying
Posted in Links