General

The newsletter/subscription purge continues (I swear)

Today I cancelled a Substack newsletter and a streaming service:

  • Sweary History (after not quite a year)
  • Netflix (after being subbed for many years)

The reasons were a bit different for each, but both are part of my ongoing digital decluttering process.

For Sweary History, I actually quite like James Fell’s foul-mouthed writing style, and his personal posts (which require a paid sub) were especially enjoyable and informative. But as someone who chronicles human history, and given how dark and awful so much of human history is, Fell often wrote about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. And in the same way that actively seeking out current news was making me generally unhappy, I found getting a dose of daily “look how terrible people have been throughout history” started having the same effect. This morning I started to read the latest newsletter and just stopped partway through, like a little switch in my brain flipped. I unsubscribed.

Netflix was different. I found that I just wasn’t compelled to watch any of the current stuff on it (Archer has grown stale, Stranger Things is something I want to catch up on, but it seems the season four episodes are long, and it’s more of a commitment than I’m willing to make right now), plus Netflix seems to think they can keep raising their prices and make up declining subs by squeezing their most loyal subscribers that much harder.

Didn’t work for me! I checked “too expensive” as my main reason for dropping the sub, and it’s true. If Netflix was cheaper, I’d probably just keep it, but it’s $18.47/month after taxes and that is too much for the very minimal use it gets.

For streaming, I still have Prime Video (as part of Prime), Disney+ and Apple TV+ (as part of Apple One), so depending on how things go, I could potentially get down to just a single service. And more time to draw.

An interesting and possibly unfortunate confluence of events

Tomorrow–Monday, September 19–is going to be a strange day. Here are just a few of the things happening:

  • Fire alarm repairs. Per the memo for our condo, “repairs of the fire protection equipment” are needed, somehow. Not testing, repairs. The memo contains no details on what this means.
  • My birthday. Self-explanatory (I hope).
  • Queen’s funeral. This is kind of an official holiday in Canada, but with mourning instead of partying (for most, anyway). Schools (including post-secondary) are closed, so my partner has the day off.
  • Talk Like a Pirate Day. It has always bothered me that this utterly stupid thing falls on my birthday, just because. Check your history books, kids (the good ones, anyway)! Pirates were not fun-loving rascals, they were murderers and thieves. It doesn’t matter how many Monkey Island games you played, it’s still true! Maybe if they called it Talk Like a Pirate as Romanticized in Movies and Video Games Day.

So basically, I get annoyed by fire alarm testing/repairs, don’t have the day to myself (I’m selfish, I admit!), have to put up with every stupid pirate joke conceivable and someone will probably blend those with Queen Elizabeth’s funeral into something like, “Yarr, the Queen be dead. Love live the King. Yarr.”

Basically, I am ready for Tuesday.

The shortest and snarkiest review of Around the Sun

I am weirdly fascinated by R.E.M.’s 13th album, Around the Sun. It was a commercial and critical flop (though there are some people who really liked it), and I think Peter Buck’s assessment, circa the release of its follow-up Accelerate, though unduly harsh, has the right general sentiment:

[It] “just wasn’t really listenable, because it sounds like what it is: a bunch of people that are so bored with the material that they can’t stand it anymore.”

Peter Buck

I don’t think it’s not listenable (and Buck probably doesn’t either, really), but I remain intrigued by how the whole album is so refined and carefully constructed, yet utterly tepid.

And then I came across this, which is actually a follow-up to the person’s full review, and it made me laugh out loud because that’s the kind of mood I was in:

Full review can be seen here.

Random music thought: The song “Aftermath” is actually pretty decent, but could have been better if the tempo had been boosted. It feels like it’s always running about two beats behind where it should be, if that makes sense (I am not a musician or even musician-adjacent).

Autocorrect: The dream doesn’t quite live on

From a comment in a Verge article:

Obviously a Danish noble from that time period would not be black, but I find it pretty easy to Dudley’s my disbelief if the actor is playing the role effectively.

The author of the post replied to indicate autocorrect had changed what should have been “suspend my disbelief” to “Dudley’s my disbelief” which is an amazing turn of phrase, a great example of autocorrect still not really getting language, and an even better expression than “suspend my disbelief.”

I’m just delighted every way I look at this.

I am less delighted by a lot of the other comments for the associated Verge story. I hesitantly offer a link to it out of a sense of completeness: Amazon’s putting a three-day pause on reviews for The Rings of Power

I see clouds!

The stones outside the living room window were dotted with raindrops when I got up this morning. There are clouds in the sky. The forecast high is in the teens. Scattered showers are predicted. This is all very weird. Could it be summer is going away, and with it the horrible heat and humidity twins of terror and discomfort?

Well, maybe not entirely:

To be clear, this is for September 9 and 10, 2022.

I feel pretty good in predicting no more days of 30C for the rest of 2022, though. If I’m wrong, I will curl up and cry. And sweat. A lot.

Curiously unmotivated

Yesterday (Saturday, August 27, 2022, for the record) I was curiously unmotivated to post. I was up late and as I watched the time tick by, and it got closer to midnight, I thought, “I should at least post something, even just a haiku.” and yet I did not. I watched some videos, I had a nice shower, I did some reading. I slept.

I regret none of these things. Sometimes you just need to let everything slip away and get lost in your own head for a while. Which I did.

Now that that’s done, here’s a haiku and a cat:

Enjoying nothing
Is no easy thing to do
Brains don't shut down nice

Cat:

At long last, FIRE DANGER is back

Today, with a projected high of 34C, I decided to postpone my run until tomorrow (the forecast is for the same high temperature, but I’m going to try getting up super-early to compensate. We’ll see how that goes!) and instead took a brisk walk up and down the river trail instead, about 7.7 km in total. While I sweated reasonably profusely, it was not nearly as much as the recent soakings I’ve gotten when running.

And after having spent the previous paragraph talking about hot, dry weather, it may seem surprising that these signs just went up on the river trail, the second latest in the season I’ve ever seen them appear (the earliest is May and the latest was never, in 2019):

The FIRE DANGER sign this year is actually new–they added REPORT FIRES TO 911 and removed the line about staying on trails. And actually, it appears they kind of merged two signs into one, maybe because all fire danger is now considered EXTREME. Here’s a shot of the two previous signs from 2017:

This was taken with an iPhone 6 and looks surprisingly bad. Where are all the pixels?

This concludes The History of the FIRE DANGER Sign in Metro Vancouver.

I read the news today oh boy

Just before turning in for the night, I decided to check out the CBC News website (https://www.cbc.ca/news if you’re curious) to answer the question:

What have I missed since I stopped regularly checking the news?

The answer:

Pretty much nothing that would make any kind of difference in my daily (or weekly, monthly or yearly) life.

I’d say that a lot of the stories fall into a giant bucket of, “So what?” It’s just stuff to fill the page. And while not all of it is negative, much of it is. And I just don’t need this in my life anymore. I’ve Marie Kondo’d my way out of my daily news fix and the joy be sparkin’. Well, maybe not joy, but there’s certainly no feeling that I’m missing out on something by skipping out on the news of the day.

I’m rather enjoying this purging and simplification process. What will I toss aside next? Come back at some undetermined date in the future to find out.

Bonus random thought: Medium has a lot of articles on note-taking apps.

No, the stylesheet didn’t go haywire

I tinkered with the color of links last night and went for some kind of blue, but it’s just temporary as I mull The Great Blog Redesign of 2022. Yes, I’m committing to doing it this year, which means I have just under five months to keep to my self-imposed schedule.

We’ll see how it goes!

Oh yeah, the pandemic

What’s weird is the pandemic is very much an ongoing thing. I think the closest it felt to being behind us was right at the start of July 2021. Here in BC daily cases were down to the 30s, with some health regions reporting no new cases. We’d just entered the third stage of a four stage “back to business” plan that saw the mask mandate lifted and most other restrictions eased. The final step was to come September 7th, when remaining restrictions went away, life returned to normal and we could all look forward to watching terrible movies about the pandemic and chuckle together about what a weird time it was!

Of course, what actually happened is the more contagious Delta variant popped up, cases took a huge jump up, restrictions were re-introduced and by mid-August the mask mandate would be back in place and stay there until March 11, 2022.

But here it is August 2022, and we have yet another super-contagious variant running amok, this time Omicron BA.5. Most people have been vaccinated and received at least one booster shot, but the idea of herd immunity is long forgotten, replaced by the acceptance that most people are probably going to catch COVID-19, some multiple times, and hopefully long COVID won’t be as horrible as it might seem.

And yet, with all numbers going in the wrong direction, the general attitude seems to be a collective shrug. Masks remain optional, and mask usage has declined steadily since March. There are very few restrictions, and everyone has basically been told to watch out for themselves (and hopefully others). There has been talk about a possible renewal of the mask mandate in the fall if numbers keep going up, but I don’t see that happening unless hospitals start getting seriously taxed.

It feels like we’ve come to accept COVID-19 as a really persistent flu bug and we’re all just spinning the wheel and taking our chances on if and when we get sick. In a way this isn’t even a bad thing, because we have to move past the pandemic mentality at some point.

But I do wonder when we’ll be able to talk about the pandemic in the past tense. It feels like we’re a long way away right now, and even though life has mostly reverted to what passes for normal, I feel an unease about all of this not quite being over, and what it may hold for the future.

On a more positive note, kittens!