Office Foliage
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At my desk these are attacking from either side.
(Error loading gallery)The view above, and the room as a whole.
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (Books 2018, 11)
Gaiman takes on Thor, Loki, Odin, and the rest. Most of my knowledge of the Norse gods comes from Marvel Comics, with a bit of general cultural osmosis (for example, everyone has heard of Yggdrasil the World Tree, right?)1
I enjoyed it, but it feels like a slight work. That’s a shame, because these are mighty tales, or should be. I guess it’s a book meant at least partly for children, but it’s not marketed that way. And even if It’s meant for kids, the telling should be strong.
I suspect that if you already know the tales, this won’t offer much new to you. And that’s where the problem lies, I think. Instead of turning them into real narratives with proper characters, each story is not much more than a summary of the events. So he’s telling us the story of the story, rather than really telling (showing) the story. It’s a shame, because I know Gaiman could have done something much more interesting with these.
I’m probably being too harsh, though. It’s not like it’s bad. I enjoyed reading it.
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In searching for the link to put in there, I discovered the existence of Explain XKCD (or just possibly, rediscovered it, as it does seem a little familiar). Which is cool. Some people put a lot of time into contributing to things online, to the benefit of us all, and I salute them. ↩︎
Regarding Eurovision: I sort of understand why you can’t vote for your own country. Though if you could, would the most populous country automatically win? Or the country with the biggest LGBTQ community? I don’t think so. People would still vote for a song they liked. But it would be interesting to try it one year.
But more importantly: why can people in the UK not vote by text? Seems weirdly old-fashioned.
It’s been a 24-hour rollercoaster for my daughter (and all of us) as Brooklyn Nine-Nine has now been picked up by NBC. Phew.
Duplex Duplicity?
In A Little Duplex Skepticism, John Gruber says what I’ve been thinking about the Google Duplex demo:
It’s totally credible that Google would be the first to achieve something like Duplex, but the fact that all they did — as far as I’ve seen — was play a recording just seems off. It feels like a con.
I’ve only heard a bit of the “booking a haircut“ recording on a podcast. I thought it sounded a) impressive if real, but b) very possibly fake.
That kind of technology will come, eventually; but are we that close to it today?
(If we are, then whether or not we want it to be used in the kind of way demonstrated, is a whole other question.)
Google, of course, gave no timelines, no suggestion of when such a feature might be available. Given that, it makes you wonder why they even bothered to demo it.
Until his morning I couldn’t have told you the name of Frightened Rabbit’s lead singer, though I like some of their music. Now Twitter tells me of Scott Hutchison’s tragic death.
All I can say is: if you find yourself in a dark place, please, talk to someone. Help is there.
My daughter has just told me that Brooklyn Nine-Nine has been cancelled. God damn it. In this golden age of television that we’re living through, it’s consistently the funniest thing out there. Never an episode goes by that we don’t have to pause and jump back because one or more of us (to be fair, usually me) were laughing so hard we missed the next line.
I hope they don’t leave on another end-of-season cliffhanger.
I’ve never seen this before: my iPhone’s dock is missing this morning. Everything else is working fine, though.
Back to the Minnow theme. One of these days I’ll stop experimenting and settle on a theme.
Looped
It’s six years old, but I finally got round to watching Looper. Interesting. Not sure about it. Some of the time-travel stuff didn’t make sense — or was confusing, at least. The loopers do their killing and body-disposal in the past, but by the time Bruce Willis comes into it, everyone involved is in the same time, 2044, the past of the movie.
Also I thought I had heard that it wasn’t well thought of, but Rotten Tomatoes has it at 82% from audiences and 93% from critics. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?
This review at The Mary Sue is good on the weak points. Some interesting discussion in the comments, too.
The future was unconvincing — people still driving petrol-burning cars in 2044 and 2074? And the status of women was terrible. You can be a sex worker or a farming mom in future America. I mean, OK, we didn’t see the rest of society, but it’s not great. And a major Bechdel fail. Oh yes, and: the currency is silver? Actual, metallic silver? Time travel has really messed things up.
I enjoyed it on the whole, though, and the ending is great. We could have done without the voiceover, but maybe Rian Johnson, the director, has plans to release a cut without it in one possible future. Now where have I come across that idea before?
When you’ve got a child who’s on the electoral register, but they’re not yet old enough to vote; and they have the same initials as you? That can cause problems.
Good day today: spent most of it struggling to get Java — running in Tomcat on the Mac — to call functions in R. Successfully in the end, thanks to Stack Overflow and others. Tonight: Infinity War!
Top-Ten Album Lists
Two album-related memes have been doing the rounds on Facebook lately. Both involve posting cover images of ten favourite albums across ten days. One involves doing so without any comment, but the more interesting one to me involves the poster writing about their thoughts on each album. I was nominated by my friend Peter to join in with the long-form version.
I’m all about owning my own content, as you know, and not having it locked away in Facebook’s walled garden. So my plan is to write about ten albums, but to do so here, on my blog. Links to the posts will automatically be crossposted to Facebook anyway.
I started compiling a list of possibles, and thinking about starting to write posts. First I decided to restrict it one per artist. Otherwise I could just pick five by The Beatles and five by The Clash.
But then I played some albums, and thought some more.
See, I knew right up front that it was going to be almost entirely a white-guy fest. I wanted to approach it honestly, and not try to appear to be anything I’m not, so that’s how it would have to be. It would be reflecting my life as a music fan. As it stands the long list has one woman and no non-white people.
But as I played those albums — albums I love — and as I thought about them, I realised two things:
- I know these albums too well. I’m not bored of them, but they can drift past without me really being aware of them, through overfamiliarity.
- This won’t be very interesting, and certainly won’t have any surprises for anyone who knows me.
So I’ve come to a decision, I think: I’m going to do it slightly differently. I’m going to write about ten albums that I like now. Ones that I’ve discovered in the last few years, maybe, or that I’ve known for a while but have listened to a lot more in recent years.
I’m not entirely sure what that list is going to look like. I only have two, maybe three definites on it at the moment, and it’s going to take a while to construct it. But I think it could be a much more interesting list — certainly for me — when it’s done.
And I’ll do a post with a rundown of what the original list would have been, just for completeness.
So watch out for those in the next few days.
What?!? Commando comics are still a thing? I used to love them when I was a kid. And look at those issue numbers: up in the five thousands!
Today was the first day wearing shorts this year. And also the first time ever wearing shorts to work. Another reason to love this new job.