Week 03

January 20, 2020

Still not drinking, it definitely has its benefits. You can just drive to the pub and then drive back again, amazing. I didn't really manage to do anything super-interesting this week, must try harder. Or maybe that's the problem and I should try less hard.

Darts

I go to a social club round here with some of the local Dad's and play darts sometimes, like an old man. It’s the country, we have to make our own fun. I think my grip has been wrong all this time, so have switched to a the three finger grip - seems to be more consistent although it’s ruined my accuracy, but you’ve got to move off the local peak sometimes.

Local Peak

I use the term 'local peak’ a lot, it comes from evolutionary theory and is summed up by the phrase 'you have to get worse to get better'. I had a look for a good explanation and found one by Stewart Brand - Fitness Landscapes - I wonder if I picked it up from one of his books? I probably wouldn’t have gone into tech if it wasn’t for The Media Lab and his friend Kevin Kelly’s Out Of Control - they are still some of the most interesting people around.

Painting on the iPad

Started trying to learn to paint on the iPad. It is really hard. At least an order of magnitude harder than drawing. I'm definitely not on any kind of peak in the painting landscape.

Good Things

I watched Angels In America this week, HBO’s adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play. It’s notionally about the AIDS epidemic but that’s selling it short, it’s really about everything. It’s amazing.

I’d try and describe it but it really is it’s own thing. Massively inventive and not afraid to be full-bore operatic if it feels the need. It really shines a light on how un-adventurous a lot of TV is these days, all this 'peak TV’ talk and a 17 year old miniseries blows most of the current output away. Also, if Angels in America only needs 6 episodes to tell it’s story then there’s no reason whatsoever for the average Netflix series to take 10.

Highly Recommended.

The Web’s Still Weird

I was trying to download a random video and got lost in the search weeds but ended up finding this gem:

Simply open a Vimeo video, find the \<video> tag in the dev tools DOM structure and change the src attribute from blob:… to x. Nothing will happen - this is ok. Now change it again, to y. Chrome will convert it ‘magically’ to the URL like in step 8 or 9. :-)

Wat? When he says 'change the src attribute to x, then to y’ he literally means change the src attribute to the character ‘x’ and then the character ‘y’ - it totally works but I have absolutely no idea why. Would love to know how this bizarre behaviour came about.

Quotes

Both from Angels in America.

“Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so.”

“You are fabulous each and every one. The great work begins “