Posts
Links, September 2022
First I have a whole collection of maps. There's a map to show where in the world Wikipedia edits are coming from. There's a map that shows all the different kinds of planning boundaries that overlap the in Britain. There's an incredibly detailed weather map. Finally, here's a whole series of maps that examine how much various governments fudged their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates. There are a couple of websites about making websites to share. First is this fun tool to make scrappy, zine-like websites for party invitations and so on. On the more technical side is a...
Instructions
Take these for the pain\ twice daily after eating\ Take these for a headache\ and these for your tired legs\ Take these for a pain in the neck\ in the mornings Take these if you miss your train\ And you can't see the funny side\ Take these if you suffer Take these for loss\ or a twinge in the heart\ Take them in the evening\ Stand by a window you can't see out of\ Take with water and look into the dark\ For as long as you can bear Take these for courage\ Take a partner by the arm\ Take...
Posting
POSTING. Why must you post? Why must the thoughts you have be assessed in public for their value? Be boring or interesting to yourself. For the sake of thinking unthinkingly don't show your thoughts to others. Otherwise, you'll never be able to think without an audience. — Open Mike Eagle, Informations
Interview cycle
I'm interviewing for other jobs. It's a very strange process that sometimes feels like having a professional affair. You arrange off-the-calendar meetings with some exciting new thing, because the old one has turned sour. I'll stop myself before I go to deep on the "jobs are like relationships" simile, which I don't really believe in. What I want to say is it's a tiring situation to both have a job and be applying for jobs. The interview process for tech jobs is particularly time consuming, although not as time consuming as other fields, I'm sure. Also, I have to remind...
Links, August 2022
First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It's astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond "pretty funny clip". It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works. It answers the question of how in on the joke various parties are. Finally, it's a tribute to how much Tim Curry threw himself into the...
Wet bulb
We've had successive record high temperatures everywhere, but most importantly to me, in London. There was a bit of respite for a week or so but yesterday the humidity starting rising and today the temperature will follow. I don't think I'll find 28° intolerably hot after getting used to almost 40° a couple of weeks ago, but the humidity doesn't make it easy. Hyde Park is parched. The leaves have fallen off the trees weeks early, which I'm told is some sort of survival technique. The high winds that saw off the last heat wave were so violent they cracked...
Cove
Pieces of aeroplane sprayed across the water in front of them, but only Arlo saw the distinct shapes of people striking the sea's surface. The beach was the thin fringe of a wide bay. At their backs, the drastic slope of the mountains dove into the ground. The town, just four streets deep, was squeezed tight between the mountainside and the sandy beach. The double blades of beach and town pinched off at the end of the bay: a headland the shape of a fist. It punched the passenger jet out of the sky, those still lounging on the beach...
A swim in a pond in the rain
Berlin, Germany
Sarah asked me the other day, "do you actually find you enjoy writing?" Writing is always something I feel I ought to be doing. I feel bad if I haven't written creatively for a long time. I don't think I'm a great writer, nor do I really hope to become one if I applied myself and commited serious time to it. Nevertheless, I read a lot, and reading gives you a taste for writing that often wants satisfying with doing a bit yourself. My friend Tom writes a lot and I respect him for his discipline. He's taken the task...
German is hard
Berlin, Germany
I was always a bit cocky about languages. I got good marks in them at school and by the end of sixth form I felt I had a pretty good grasp of French. That felt like a lot in the context of semi-rural England where very, very few people learned and spoke a second language fluently.* French faded because I was an idiot and didn't keep it up after I went to university. Spanish was never that strong but what little I had atrophied too. The thing about those languages though, and about the bit of Italian I've looked at,...
Taking down Goodreads
London, United Kingdom
TL;DR I'm switching from Goodreads to Oku. Sign up here (referral code). I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is Goodreads. The website and the native app are both terrible, it's owned by Amazon, and the means to get your reading data out of it and into something else are being made increasingly difficult. But for...
New job, new season
I left BuzzFeed two weeks ago and started at Kaluza the following Monday. The full implications of that are yet to be seen but for now they include: exciting new problems, lots of new people, nice new office, new cycle to the office through lots of parks, being a bit tired. I’m a really simple creature. When people at the office asked me on Friday how my first week went I kept just talking about how nice the bike ride through Regents Park and Hyde Park was and how I was looking forward to spring. I think that’s partly because...
A year in ads
When, from the outside, a collection of people or an institution is doing things I strongly disagree with, it often turns out that from the inside I can see all the mechanisms and incentives that make perfectly normal people works towards bad outcomes. Take online advertising. In my last year at BuzzFeed I finally bit the bullet and started working in the part of the team that makes the money: the ad tech team. Proposition: online publishing is generally supported by some combination of a paywall, donations, a benefactor, affiliate commerce, or ads. Financial Times is entirely behind a paywall....
The layoff business
London, United Kingdom
When I was growing up I sometimes thought I wanted to be a writer, but I quickly realised that doing it for a job wasn’t going to be fun or rewarding. My position is that I took the coward’s way out in choosing to go into software engineering, for a more financially stable existence, but I went into the world with a respect for the writing staff and a general dread at their constant mistreatment. At least in the time since I’ve entered the profession, software engineering has been a “seller’s market”. The pay is good, there are lots of...
They give it away
I think the time I spent on the Community team was interesting. Firstly it was the closest knit team I’ve ever been on, socially speaking. Partly there was a good social chemistry between team members and a sense that we had a fun part of the product to work on and we knew about it more than anybody else in the organisation. The pandemic baked in those personal relationships strongly, to the point that we became a sort of insufferable clique. The product problem was interesting because it was one of the few places working at a publisher where you...
You did your best
Paris, France
The new pattern for living seems to go like this. Emerge from a lockdown and shake off the careful life you built inside the restrictions imposed on you. Take a few halting steps out to your friend’s house, to the pub garden, walk the streets more and more carelessly. Soon you can forget the bread baking cycle and the little routines you imposed on yourself so you didn’t bang your head off your own four walls. Live more energetically and spontaneously (while you still can). Soon, travel is back on. Head out of the city and see your parents. Dare...
It can be a village
We were cycling to work together this morning and my girlfriend bumped into an acquaintance she hadn’t seen in a few weeks in the bike lane. I cycled a little ahead of them down from Ludgate Circus to Blackfriars Bridge and listened to them make smalltalk and catch up. Being in a busy but flowing bike lane on a morning commute usually makes me feel good in a tribal kind of way (us the cyclists vs. them the nasty cars). However, this felt nice because it made the city feel more like a town, and a sort of utopian European...
The feeling of away
I’ve been away from home for just over a week now. I’ve been in France. When I’m not in the UK I feel a lot less claustrophobic; I feel like I have such a wider range of choices to choose for my life. An advantage of this trip has been spending time with people who actually live in not-the-UK. I believe to some extent that people are the same everywhere but it’s been nice to see the variations in the patterns of a life. To stereotype, in France I’m talking about long lunches, cheese, and drinking like a grown up...
The mountains and the beetroots
When I cycled to work this morning the air felt like the mountains. Maybe once it gets cold and dry enough the smog drops out of the air or something (unlikely). Either way, the sky was blue, the sun was low and golden and blinding. The roads were full of cyclists breathing steam and I didn’t trust any patches of glittering moisture I saw not to be ice. I got to work early; I just didn’t want to squander those hours of sunlight when the night comes on so early. By 6pm it can feel like it’s always been dark...
Drink up
London, United Kingdom
I can’t stop watching and listening to things again. I’m back in a cycle of cueing up a continuous stream of video content from dawn until dusk. I walk into the bathroom watching TikTok, I come out casting a podcast to the speakers in the living room, where I work from home. I get on my bike and put my headphones in, queue up another podcast episode while I ride through the streets. It’s getting dark in the evenings. If I don’t get out in the morning before work I don’t go outside. Today I went outside to drop off...
Carbohydrate tubes
I ran out of steam with cooking a little bit this weekend. A lot of that probably has to do with some gargantuan hangovers I inflicted on myself a few days in a row. It also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a victim of my own success in using what’s already in the cupboards. I used up those spices that have been sitting around. I used up those frozen sausages in the freezer. I used up the dregs of that short-grain rice. The upshot is that my cupboards and my fridge are more fundamentally empty than...
Eating and swimming
Running’s been difficult lately, but swimming in the ponds is getting better each week. It’s cold enough now that it burns your skin all over when you get in. It’s cold enough that when you feel the cold on your legs as you step down the ladder you think, “not everybody would do this”. Very self-satisfied of me. When the burning fades off, this sudden feeling of wellbeing washes over. Other than that the weekend was quiet There was lots of good food: more red riso arancini, celeriac soup, pancakes with bananas and Biscoff, sourdough from the bakery, embarrassingly good...
Museums of Oxford
It’s getting darker and colder, but so far I don’t mind. Like I said before, I’m cooking a lot of satisfying food. It’s still warm enough to get into the Hampstead Heath ponds every Saturday morning. The crowd there is thinning out and there’s now a pleasing corps of batty and rich ladies of a certain age who we’re starting to see on a regular basis.
Time to cook
I like to cook a lot. Sometimes I cook all afternoon, one meal after another. I end up with a fridge full of boxed up meals that I can pile through in the week or give to loved ones. Dinner guests are relatively rare these days, in the wake of the pandemic year. Some people have been scattered away from the pestilent city centre. Some people are understandably still reluctant to dive into a full social calendar. Others, like me at the moment, are busy all the time because they’re making up for lost time. Today I’ve been on something...
Snow day
London, United Kingdom
London had its first snow day of the winter. We set out for a run in the mid-morning when the first specks starting to stick to the frosty tops of parked cars. By the time we were circling a park it was coming down thick. The roads were coated with a layer a couple of inches thick and quickly became communal playgrounds for bored families. Sleds emerged. Where do the sleds come from? After we got back from running I went to Dulwich park to take some pictures. We sat on a bench in the cold and had a burger...
This is not the apocalypse you were looking for
— This is not the apocalypse you were looking for, Laurie Penny in WIRED
Local power and the social order
— American Genry, Patrick Wyman in Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future
My top films of 2020
I think the last film I saw in the cinema before they all closed was The Lighthouse. After that weird nautical trip we emerged from The Ritzy in Brixton in the middle of the afternoon, dazed and out of sync with the normal world where people were charging up and down the pavement. The cinema was only a couple of minutes down the road from where I was living at the time; it didn’t seem like a big deal. A couple of weeks earlier I saw 1917 in the Picturehouse in Dalston. I really loved it. Of course when I...
My top miscellanea of 2020
I’ve spent a lot of this year living in the worlds other people have made for us. The world of our senses is either too boring (the insides of our homes, dinner arriving in cardboard at the front door) or too awful (bodies in refrigerated trucks, forests burning, and police brutality) to enjoy, so I’ve been turning to media more than ever. It’s been mediating my perception of the world, organising the information so I can take it in, or turning it into stories so I can connect with it on some emotional level with my burned out stump of...