Microposts
📚 Books 2024, 4: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The latest book club book for me, and I read it in a day. Short, easy, and supposedly the most popular crime novel ever, or something.
It was OK, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as Murder on the Orient Express, which I read at Christmas.
Ten people are invited to a house on an island. Ten people die. But there’s no one else on the island! How can this be?
📚 Books 2024, 3: The House at the End of the Sea by Victoria M. Adams
First, a disclaimer: the author of this book was on the same Creative Writing MA as me, and I read a prerelease PDF that she sent me.
That said, it’s a really good young-adult fantasy story set in the real world, present day.
Or I think ‘middle grade’ is the sort of level it’s marketed towards. The main character, Saffi, is about 12. Her younger brother is maybe eight or ten. Their mum has died tragically young and their dad takes them from London to live with their grandparents in a B&B by the sea in Yorkshire.
The titular house has been in the family for generations, and it has A History. The kids hate it at first, but Saffi tries to adjust and to keep her brother’s spirits up. She is helped by a slightly mysterious local boy they meet.
And then a group of guests arrive at the B&B. In the middle of the night. Without coming through the door.
Things get stranger after that. Will Saffi and Milo save the family’s legacy, themselves, and their new friend’s home, from the plans of these powerful figures out of myth and fairytale? Only by reading will you find out.
It’s great. Get it for your kids.
Well this is an exciting turnup: remember early in the pandemic, when there was an article in The New Yorker New York magazine about the inability to get a particular pasta shape? The pasta shape was equally mysterious over here. I wrote about it: Bucatini.
Well, at last, here it is.
Great, we’ve been paying billions for a nuclear ‘deterrent’ that nobody wants and that doesn’t even work.
🔗
… delighted to announce the open source first release of Pkl (pronounced Pickle), a programming language for producing configuration.
If Apple needed a general-purpose language for configuration, why did they invent their own, rather than using Terraform, say?
But then, this Pkl (‘Pickle’) seems a lot more expressive than Terraform, and a lot more down-to-Earth and less cloudy.
Could be interesting. (H/T @danielpunkass.)
Pending the deal’s publication on Wednesday, it appears that Sunak has offered to keep Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland) aligned with European standards if the DUP returned to Stormont.
It’s still January. It’s the northern hemisphere. So why is this rose flowering? I’ll be wanting to prune it in about a month.
‘Oh rose thou art sick’… But the climate, not the rose.
Currently reading: Monument Maker by David Keenan 📚
I’ve read a few of his before, and they’re all strange. This one may be the strangest yet, but I’m only about 40 pages into a huge book.
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.