Microposts
I didn’t have China Miéville co-writing a novel with Keanu Reeves on my 2024 bingo card, but here we are.
Currently reading: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka 📚
My current book-club book. Shouldn’t be any trouble to finish it by the 18th.
This year I’m going to do my book posts Micro.blog-style, using its Bookshelves feature. We’ll see how they go.
I read 27 books in 2023; just over one a fortnight, which seems faster than it felt at the time. And I posted 111 times, with the following monthly breakdown:
| Month | Posts |
|---|---|
| Jan | 16 |
| Feb | 11 |
| Mar | 5 |
| Apr | 10 |
| May | 6 |
| Jun | 1 |
| Jul | 7 |
| Aug | 13 |
| Sep | 12 |
| Oct | 9 |
| Nov | 9 |
| Dec | 12 |
With my yearly theme of ‘Getting Out and Connection’, I’ll try to put a few more posts out into the world in 2024.
What the hell is this shit? Tried to open a link at CNN and I get this response, in Safari, Firefox and Chrome. Brave? I don’t even have it installed!
I’m watching Shane MacGowan’s funeral on YouTube, and loving how it seems totally chaotic. Like a Pogues gig. ‘Nick’s going to lead us in “A Rainy Night in Soho”,’ says the priest. ‘Oh, no, this is live, and Nick’s been delayed.’
Nick Cave, that is.
Pity the sound is complete mince.
To a first approximation it takes me all day to bake the Christmas cake. To be fair, I had to go out and get unsalted butter, and 4½ hours of that was just letting it be in the oven. But here it is now, cooling on the rack.
Speaking of letting it be, it must be about time to watch Get Back again.
BBC 6 Music DJ: ‘We’ve set up a deck in the studio so we can play you some vinyl directly, instead of having to digitise it.’ Then he has to run across the room to where the turntable is.
The sound you hear is not the turntable spinning, but John Peel doing so in his grave.
🔗
Hell of a record. It’s like immersing yourself in a haunting. Depression, anxiety and ghosts – which, to me, are probably all the same thing anyway. The Halloween release was clever, but I suspect that if you played this loud at midnight you’d clear a room pretty fast.
Experimental post using the “Publish Quote” Shortcut from @jarrod. As to the music, it’s OK, but I’ll need to give it another listen.
Hazel O’Connor trending on Twitter. Mainly because of people saying ‘I saw Hazel O’Connor was trending and feared the worst, but it’s fine.’
Looks like someone asked for ’80s songs with the best sax', and ‘Will You’ fits. Thought Gerry Rafferty should be there, but ‘Baker Street’ was 1978.
Tried Siri’s new slightly more conversational mode in iOS 17. Said ‘Siri, pause’ while a podcast was playing out loud, and it did. Said ‘Thank you,’ and it said, ‘You’re welcome,’ which is nice.
Still no Scottish voice, though.
This is a good piece about the different ways we communicate:
Are you a writer or a talker?
That is, when you need to think about something, do you generally reach for something to write with, or look for someone to talk to?
I’m definitely a writer, and I know how it feels to explain something in careful detail, in a document, an email, or just an instant message, and have someone reply with, ‘Maybe a quick call to talk about it?’
This helps me to realise that I shouldn’t get infuriated at them. They just have a different communication style.
Speaking of ChatGPT, I like Cory Doctorow’s explanation of it and its cousins from his latest piece:
AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs.
Dave Winer (I think he’s still @dave on Micro.blog) talks about using ChatGPT to
make calls about a user’s WordPress account. I want to know what sites the user is following in their reader app.
ChatGPT notwithstanding, I’m mildly horrified that a) WordPress makes that info publicly available, and b) Dave wants to use it.
Well, it’s obvious that no one reads this, or they’d have drawn my attention to the ridiculous typo in the title of the last but one post. And of the book it was naming. My apologies to Becky Chambers.
I’m not sure who the New York Times folks are trolling with today’s Connections, but it’s a good one.
