Here’s a playlist of some old favourites from my music library.
Including Muddy Waters by LP is a bit melancholy; it reminds me that Valley of the Gods is probably never going to come out since Campo Santo got eaten by Valve.
Thoughts on Blade Runner 2049
Love this essay on Blade Runner 2049’s Baseline Scene from Andi McClure. Like her, I think I liked 2049 more than the original Blade Runner. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it’s certainly fun, and you can totally see why the director got to do Dune afterwards.
A Few Cozy Mysteries
I lucked out and got to read two lovely cozy mysteries over this Christmas break:
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice For Murderers
A man dies in a lonely teashop, and the proprietor decides that she is going to solve this mystery. I loved this book, and it was the perfect read for my holiday. This joins the Thursday Murder Club for great mysteries involving older people solving mysteries.
You may have heard of the idea of love languages: Vera Wong’s love language is food and I found myself starving after almost every chapter.
Aunt Dimity’s Death
Not a murder mystery, but more fantastical mystery, I nevertheless was mostly charmed by this book. However, a misapprehension gained early in the book led me down a wild goose chase that never paid off; the book is for the better not paying my hunch off, but my wife went down the same road, which suggests this is either intentional or at least a flaw others have tripped on.
Still. This was a cute read, and could probably be comfortably consumed a weekend or less, if you don’t have children clambering across you.
Ten Years of Blogging
It turns out, that today is the ten year anniversary of this blog. I opened this blog with a description of my history with blogging, and started with a decision to make the blog open without topics. That lasted until 2016, when I split my technical blog off.
I’m super happy to have made it to ten years. To ten more years!
Some Favourite Posts:
- An Unproven Hypothesis about Kitchen Clocks
- The Peloponnesian War and Histories, by Herodotus
- On Burnout
- Surrealism In The Morning
I also wrote some work related blog posts that I really was happy with:
- A Brief Note on Environments and Scopes in SpiderMonkey
- An Inline Cache isn't Just a Cache -- this turned into an MPLR paper eventually, in a round-about-way.
Popular Posts
Year after year, my most popular blog post remains Some Notes on CMake Variables and Scopes. I totally get this -- CMake scopes and variables are bizarre.
This year, my number two most popular blog post has been Polybius: The Rise of The Roman Empire, which I find gently baffling.
I've managed to hit the front page of Hacker News, with Faster Ruby: thoughts from the outside.
New Album Alert: Devotion by Muriel Grossman
Muriel Grossmann is a really fascinating saxophonist who has been putting out many fantastic recordings over the last few years. This latest one, Devotion, is really interesting! Heavy blues influence this time.
Climate Change and Therapy
This article from the NYT really speaks to where I’m at; while I’m not in therapy for climate issues, the struggles are all real, the challenges all real.
Human well-being, the psychologist David W. Kidner wrote, has historically been linked to “participation in a healthy ecocultural context.” Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful
This is amplified by living in a place that more than many others refuses to own up to the work and scale of transformation required.
The Wailing Mall - Alan Palomo
So far, I know nothing about Alan Palomo, but I’ll definitely be learning more after this track
Postcards - Lemon City Trio
Quite enjoying this album (which is oddly not listed on their Bandcamp?)