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Week 06

February 09, 2020

The Good Place Finale

The Good Place ended, and it was very good indeed. Having spent 3 years discussing ethics it finally got down to the mechanics of dying. I thought it handled it very well, and there were some tears in our house. I think we may very be at 'peak television' if you can make a 4 season prime-time comedy about philosophy that educates and entertains at the same time. I look forward to seeing what Micheal Schur does to top this one.

Progress

I can now deploy this website with one command, w00t! Spent a while trying to write a Bash script to rsync it but, as per usual, got tied up trying to do pretty basic stuff (the equivalent of path.resolve(__dirname, "../public") in node) and none of the many ways suggested on the internet seemed to work properly. I'm sure I could get it working if I RTFM but life is too short. Luckily there's an rsync package on npm that did the job, took me about 5 minutes after I downloaded that. Use the tools you know etc. etc. Also added some embed tools, look, there's a video down below!

Climate Change

It's hard to think about climate change. It's so enormous that it doesn't really fit in my head, especially when a lot of rational people are just going "we're all going to die" or equivalent. I think we have to be very careful about destroying hope, but this bit from The Newsroom in 2014 really nailed it, a pity it's taken 6 years for the real news to catch up.

Management Consultants Considered Harmful

This is a fantastic article: How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class

I'd love to see a big 10 part Ken Burns series on how the corporate ethics of the 50s turned into the disaster we currently have. You could stitch together the threads of Rodgers` Age of Fracture, Tooze's Crashed, corporate raiders, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Neoliberalism, Trump's presidency and Brexit to plot the line we followed to late capitalism. Much as I sometimes enjoy Adam Curtis it's too easy to dismiss his woozy dreamlike approach, you need someone who's going to really get in there and dissect this stuff, Ken Burns would kill it.

Phrase of the Week

stability maintenance apparatus - as in "the revelations that there were medical professionals in Wuhan trying to warn about this virus back in December but were silenced by the stability maintenance apparatus has provoked an uproar"

Good stuff

On the last series of The Newsroom, I've enjoyed a lot of it but it gets unbelievably cheesy at points, you sometimes expect The Star Spangled Banner to play over the monologues.

Started watching Locke & Key on Netflix. It's one of my favourite comics and I really hoped they'd get it right. So far they seem to have done a good job. A few changes here and there, but the vibe is present and correct. The actor who plays Bode, Jackson Robert Scott, is superb.

Bits

  • "heteroskedastic" is a good word isn't it
  • You can fill in a form on a website to send a payload into space, probably the most 2020 thing I've seen so far this decade - https://www.spacex.com/smallsat
  • Lyft may surpass Uber in the US, maybe being a trash fire of a company doesn't pay in the long run 🤔 - https://blog.apptopia.com/lyft-is-on-pace-to-surpass-uber-in-the-u.s
  • For reasons, the song Sexy M.F. by Prince is now stuck in my head but the lyrics are now 'Sexy Harry Potter shaking that ass' etc. Thanks brains, I hate it.
  • The beat for I Can't Go For That by Hall & Oates is the 'Rock 1' preset from the Roland CompuRhythm CR-78 drum machine. Look at this beautiful piece of machinery:

Roland CompuRhythm CR-78