2020-10-25
I was locked down for two weeks, so when I got out I wanted to make the most of the autumn leaves.
Dulwich Woods are only ten minutes awawy but they were new to me
The residential neighbourhood is heavily planted too
Most of the time though, I’m back inside. I saw On The Rocks with Rashina Jones and Bill Murray after I listened to the Big Picture episode about Sofia Coppola.
2020-10-12
I’ve been placed into self-isolation, it’s been three days now. A friend of mine who I saw last week got a test after some very low level symptoms and he tested positive. He feels horribly guilty for the cluster of people around him who are now in self-isolation, which goes to show how much of this situation has been laid on the consciences of individual people, wrongly.
I’ve been doing okay so far. We’ve been playing Mario Odyssey and Ticket To Ride, and we baked a load of bread. I’ve never baked a loaf of bread before, even through the first wave (of the disease and the baking).
2020-10-12
I read The History of the Bible this weekend and enjoyed it a lot. I have a little collection of books about theology now, not because of any interest in faith but because I think it’s an interesting vein of history and culture. The bible is so often quoted, wittingly or unwittingly, in popular culture and everyday speech. Here are some good excerpts from the book.
The first I’ve included because I like the readings of the Old Testament that give God a personality. In this case it’s a taunting condescention. I also just think the language here is amazing.
2020-10-03
I woke up today and I was really, really tired. It’s the end of the first week in a new role at work. I lay in bed until an uncharacteristic noon and having just gotten up, everything feels like far too much effort. If I’m tired or unhappy I can usually carry it around with me as I get on with things but I feel very under it today. I hope it’s not COVID-19 fatigue (the clinical kind, not the morale kind).
2020-09-28
The numbers are up again (the bad ones, the COVID-19 ones) and the daily cases are actually above where they ever got in the first wave. The response has been slower, patchier; nobody’s ready to jump straight into a full national lockdown again. It feels like it could be coming, though. I’ve mixed feeling about how ready for that I am.
We have this new home: spaces to work and to rest that are separate from one another. We have a garden, although autumn’s washing in and that the garden is becoming less of a crucial assett over time. I have a new job to worry about, a sense of forward momentum that is very different from the feeling of forestalled progress we felt in the first lockdown.
2020-09-15
I rewatched lots of Pixar shorts the other night. So much of Pixar’s storytelling is fixating on parenting, growing up, child development. Also it seems like each Pixar short is some kind of experiment in animation or storytelling.
A great example is Piper, the story of a sandpiper on a beach learning to find shells in the sand. The animation of the surf, and the sand with all its different consistencies and levels of water saturation is amazing. Also, there’s experimentation with really pushing the virtual camera’s naturalism. There’s a shallow depth-of-field to emulate a macro lens like we’re used to seeing in nature photography of small subjects; it helps us get a sense of scale. When the subjects move quickly and suddenly, the frame struggles to catch up as if a camera operator on the beach has been take off-guard. The focus is sometimes over-pulled and brought back, implying a human hand on the dial trying to keep up with the action.
2020-09-15
We watched Boys State this week. It’s a documentary that follows a cohort of Texan teenage boys going through an intense one-week political bootcamp at the Texas state capitol. They’re divided randomly into two parties*, given lessons in the state constitution, and then they run a compressed set of elections for party chairmen, gubernatorial candidates, and ultimately for state governor.
I really enjoyed it, though I felt myself predictably enamoured with the charismatic and thoughtful liberals Steven and René. Conversely, I found myself predictably horrified with the mini-demagogue-to-be Robert, and the Steven Miller Jr. in Ben Feinstein.
Week Notes - 7th September 2020
2020-09-11
Ideally all the books in the API should stay in the store even if they haven’t been included on any of the named shelves in the last Goodreads scrape. When a new scrape is run it would add any books that don’t appear, shift any books that are in the store but don’t appear in the latest scrape to a no-shelf status (representing books I know about but have no relation with, I guess). All of that is much easier if Goodreads has a persisting book ID. If the data persists I can add my own columns to the data too, like whether I own the books.
2020-09-09
We’ve had a lot of peace. We’re spending a lot of evenings in the pool, where only twenty people are allowed at a time and only swimming in a clockwise loop. We’ve been taking sick days when we feel worn out. I’ve been reading a little more. Emma has planted the raised bed at the end of the garden with bulbs that are supposed to sleep over the winter and erupt in spring. She forgot to check they were the right way up, but faith and bad statistics tell us about half of them will grow okay.
2020-09-01
We’ve been on the coast of North Devon. Today the younger ones struck off from a larger group of trundling adults and children to get into the sea (we were standing on the headland and the water looked so calm and blue that Emma couldn’t think of anything other than finding somewhere to get into that sea).
We found a small rocky beach at the end of a crumbling single-track road. Emma and I went ahead in one car and wondered whether the others had lost their nerve on the way down. That was until we saw the others walking down the cliff path as we bobbed in the shallows. We swam out to the rocks and balanced on them, rising out of the water like miracles as we stood on ones that had already been covered by the waxing tide.