Great, we’ve been paying billions for a nuclear ‘deterrent’ that nobody wants and that doesn’t even work.
Days of the Bagnold Summer, 2019 - ★★★½
Fun wee story about a teenage metal fan and his mum one summer. With music by Belle & Sebastian into the bargain.
Boyfriends and Girlfriends, 1987 - ★★★
We watched this on BFI Player, where its English title was the direct translation of the French one: _My Girlfriend's Boyfriend_. But Letterboxd knows it as _Boyfriends and Girlfriends_. The French title is both better and more accurate, and the potentially-ambiguous meaning of '_amie_' is matched by that of 'girlfriend' when used by women.
Anyway, another of Eric Rohmer's excellent gentle comedies. And why not?
Custom and Use
In the lone footnote of his latest post, Ian Betteridge bemoans the use of the term ‘users’ for people making use of software:
I’ve always hated calling people users rather than customers. You owe “users” nothing. You owe your customers everything.
I remember seeing this complaint years ago. ‘Why do we refer to people with a term that comes from the illegal drugs trade?’ was a common refrain.
It’s true, people taking illegal drugs are sometimes referred to as ‘users’. But only really in 70s cop shows. I grew up on Starsky & Hutch and Kojak as much as the next guy my age, but I don’t look to them for appropriate linguistic terms today.
More to the point, the term ‘user’ doesn’t come from the drug trade, it went to it. The term just comes from the English language: from the verb ’to use’.
Anyone who uses any item is a ‘user’ of that item. If I cut a slice of bread, I’m a user of the bread knife. If I go into the garden to gather the still-uncollected autumn leaves, I’m a user of the rake. And so on.
Ian prefers the term ‘customer’, and that’s fair enough if you bought the item in question. But he also writes about using Obsidian, which is a piece of software that is available at no cost. I use it every day, but I’m not a customer of the people who make it. Ian may pay them, as it’s possible to do for certain features, or just to support them. But there are plenty of examples of software for which that is not the case. It’s just free. You’re not a customer of Linus Torvalds when you use Linux, for example.
Anyway, my feelings are almost the opposite: being a user — or a reader or a listener or viewer, for that matter — is the truth, is the state that has power, has meaning. Not the tawdry commercial act, the mere fact of when or whether we bought a thing.
🔗
… 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.
A Good Marriage, 1982 - ★★★
I like these Eric Rohmer films, with their low-key humour. In this one, Sabine breaks up with her married boyfriend and decides that she wants to be married. So the next step is to find a suitable man.
No man can resist her (she and her friend both tell us); but she doesn't want to seem to be chasing him…
The Harder They Come, 1972 - ★★★
Classic Jamaican film starring reggae singer Jimmy Cliff. I enjoyed it, but it doesn't seem the great thing today that people say it is. A long time has passed since it came out, though.