Category: Longform
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Two Weeks
They say the vaccines give maximum resistance ‘two to three weeks’ after the second dose. I hit the two-week mark yesterday, and now consider myself ‘maxinated,’ more or less.
So I’m going swimming later today. It has been approximately fifteen and a half months since I last swam. Back in February 2020 and the preceding months, I was going two or three times a week, most weeks. So I’ve missed it.
I had hoped to go to London Fields Lido: start outdoors, to keep things maximally safe. But it’s all booked up till Monday, so I’m going to the much closer, but less busy, King’s Hall, my local pool.
Both, predictably, require bookings, so there’s little chance of them being crowded.
In other covidian matters, remember back in March last year, when I shared a video of someone showing how to clean your shopping? And then I quickly walked it back, on better advice? Well, at that point we were already wiping down all items arriving in the house, much as the guy in the video was doing. And we continued to do it. I’ve used more antiseptic wipes this last year than I’ve owned in any previous year.
Yes, we soon learned that Covid was almost entirely transferred by air, and hardly by surfaces at all (though we also learned the word ‘fomite'). But the idea that anything crossing the threshold was a potential infection vector burned deep, and remained.
Now, post vaccination, post maxination, will we keep on doing that? Probably not. It’d be nice to get the time back when bringing the shopping home or receiving a delivery. But I don’t know, it could take a while to stop feeling suspicious of things that have come in from out there.
Covid has made germophobes of us all.
Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch (Books 2021, 9)
The second of Aaronovitch’s series about the division of the Metropolitan Police that deals with magical goings-on. It’s a fun romp – I laughed more often than you might expect.
I don’t know how long ago I read the first one, Rivers of London, but I didn’t write about it here, and it must be a while, because I don’t remember much of it. Still, the backstory is handled nicely here, so I could get by fine.
A lot of it is about jazz and jazz musicians. It’s likely to make you check out the odd track.
Single Points
I noticed that GitHub was down this morning – or not down, exactly, but its web pages were profoundly broken. I tried different browsers, then jumped on Twitter to see if it was widely reported.
It was. People were saying the problem was Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN). Also that it was affecting other sites. I don’t know when CDNs started being a thing. I think they might have been recommended by some when I was still using WordPress. The idea being that a CDN can host your site’s static assets – images, mainly – while WordPress carries on with the dynamic bits, generating HTML pages on the fly, as it does. The CDN’s scale will mean it can serve those files faster than your little server.
I didn’t bother with them, not having that much traffic. But in the back of my mind there was always the thought, ‘What if the CDN goes down?’ The idea, of course, was that the CDN would be big, multiply-redundant, reliable: it’s not going to go down!
Here’s a CNN report about the outage. It affected a lot more than GitHub, it seems.
So, are CDNs single points of failure? Obviously there’s more than one CDN, but if the failure of any one can disable large chunks of the web, do they put us in a better position?
Jonathan Richman and the Handwritten Interview
Great story about interviewing Jonathan Richman, by writing a letter to him and receiving one back.
‘Jonathan doesn’t use the internet, email etc. and has never owned a computer or cell phone.’
– Oscar Zambuto, An interview with American music legend Jonathan Richman – all in handwriting
Though he does have an assistant who can say that.
Friends: The Reunion, 2021 - ★★★
It was fine. Good to see what they're all like now. Some funny bits.
Slightly surprised to find that this is on Letterboxd, because it's not what you'd normally think of as a movie, but hey.
That Summer Feeling
I’m sitting in the garden, writing on my iPad, and am wearing shorts for the first time this year (not counting cycling and exercising). Summer is here.
Also listening to Psychocandy. The Jesus and Mary Chain are a surprisingly summery band. Well, not that surprising, considering their surf-pop influences.
‘Feedback-strewn pop narcosis,’ as an uncredited Apple Music contributor describes ‘Just Like Honey.’
It's Never Good When a Useful Site Gets Bought
News comes out that Stack Overflow is being bought by something called Prosus. I’ve never heard of them, but they’re ‘a global consumer internet group and one of the largest technology investors in the world,’ to quote their own site.
This doesn’t bode well. Stack Overflow is without doubt the most useful site in the world, at least as far as programming and other technical matters goes. And its sub-sites cover a vast range of interests beyond the technical: use of English for both beginners and experienced people, for example; or science fiction; parenting, martial arts, the great outdoors, and a hundred more.
When a big company buys up a small one, it rarely ends well for the users of the small company’s products or services, or so it seems to me. Yahoo bought Flickr and let it largely wither on the vine.1 Similarly with Del.icio.us. Google has bought numerous properties and either rolled them into its own products, or abandoned them.
In this case the purchaser is not a technology company itself, but just a holding company. Those ones tend to result in the bought company coming under pressure to make more money. The buyer wants to recover its investment. That tends to end up with the the bought company either selling intrusive advertising space, or selling its customers' data.
It doesn’t have to go that way. Maybe this Prosus will be different. But I can’t help thinking it’s a sad day for mutual help on the web.
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It’s much better again now that it’s owned by SmugMug. ↩︎
Vax 2
Got my second dose of the vaccine today, just about an hour and a half ago. Down to a local pharmacy, fifteen minutes early for my appointment, and home before my actual appointment time. It was empty! Worryingly so. Why aren’t people queuing up to get their jags?
Can't Get You Out of My Head, 2021
Convention dictates that I should give a star rating to this. I’m not going to, though, because I’m not sure what it was trying to achieve. What I try to do with star ratings is judge how well, in my opinion, the film achieves what it was trying to do. I don’t claim I always manage that, but when it’s not clear what the film’s purpose was, it becomes next to impossible.
Or: you can’t reduce something as long and complex, audacious and challenging as this, to a mere zero-to-ten scale. 1
Across six films, totalling around seven hours, Adam Curtis gives us ‘An Emotional History of the Modern World,’ as the subtitle calls it. As I mentioned in my last post, Kerry Thornley of Discordian fame is interviewed early in it. That is, an interview with him is used. He’s dead, so it’s not like he was interviewed for these films. Indeed, as far as I can tell, nothing was shot for these films: the visuals are entirely comprised of library footage.
Curtis narrates over them — sometimes with quite a disconnected effect, where the images have no obvious connection to the story he’s telling. Similarly, the use of music can be quite jarring. Sometimes it’s completely relevant to the matter at hand, but often there’s no obvious connection. And the titular Kylie song is not used at all.
It’s not even that obvious why the series is called that, come to think of it. And some of the individual episode titles are even more opaque, notably the last one: ‘Are We Pigeon or are We Dancer?’ I feel sure it’s a quote, and I think it’s probably from a song, but I was alert to it turning up, and as far as I could tell, it didn’t.
OK, a quick DuckDuck gives mainly hits about the episode, but also some about a track by The Killers called ‘Human,’ which includes the line ‘are we human or are we dancer?’ So it’s probably alluding to that. Oddly that line is inspired by a Hunter S Thompson quote that I’m not familiar with, ‘We’re raising a generation of dancers.’ Which sounds pretty good to me, even if Hunter meant it critically.
Anyway, what’s this absurdly long film about?
It’s a bleak, depressing, but nonetheless compelling vision of human history, covering conspiracies and conspiracy theories, wars, revolution, surveillance capitalism, and capitalism more broadly, the tension between the collective and the individual, and a whole hell of a lot more.
But Curtis never gives a thesis statement. He never tells us, in the news journalist’s way, what he’s going to tell us. Or more to the point, what conclusions he’s going to draw from what he’s going to tell us. And his style is very disjointed: he dots about in time and space, with little more to connect the dots than a ‘but’: ‘But in China…’
In that particular tic, it’s not at all unlike the postmodern games of Illuminatus!.
He does come to kind of a conclusion at the end of the two-hour-long sixth episode, but it’s not a very satisfying or convincing one. Which is fair enough, I suppose. One of the recurring thoughts is the idea that society today is too complex for anyone to understand it fully. The problem with that, that he draws our attention to, is that that understanding has caused many politicians to give up trying to change things for the better, which tends to result in burgeoning corruption.
He does end with a note of possible hope, but I think I might have to watch parts of it again to get all of the nuances.
Letterboxd supports half stars, so five stars is ten points.↩︎
Mark E Smith (Co-)Wrote a Screenplay
A screenplay by Mark E Smith, cowritten with Graham Duff? Sounds like it could have been great:
… Smith was an unexplored writer of strange fiction. Duff sums up the narrative of the film: “Essentially, the Fall are trying to record an EP at a studio on Pendle Hill, while the surrounding countryside is at the mercy of a satanic biker gang and a squad of Jacobites who have slipped through a wormhole in time.”
– John Doran, Satanic bikers, time portals and the Fall: the story of Mark E Smith’s secret screenplay
Never made, sadly, but it’s coming out as a book: The Otherwise: The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was.