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How this site works
Note: There's a follow up to this because I've since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more. I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following: My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple....
PTSD: Pandemic Superpower
— My PTSD can be a weight. But in this pandemic, it feels like a superpower., Stephanie Foo in Vox
Profile of a killer: COVID-19
On the pathology: On the epidemiology: — Profile of a killer: the complex biology powering the coronavirus pandemic, David Cyranoski in Nature
That time Grimes thought she was Huckleberry Finn
— This boat don't float, Lora Pabst in Star Tribune
The Distrust of LBJ-Era Filmmaking
— ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ ‘Strangelove,’ and the Distrust of LBJ-Era Filmmaking, Adam Nayman in The Ringer
When Oil Derricks Ruled the L.A. Landscape
— When Oil Derricks Ruled the L.A. Landscape, Nathan Masters in Lost L.A.
Walk directly into the sea
We slept unhappily and woke up wary aliens to one another. I shuffled downstairs for breakfast and coffee but there wasn't any milk. I'm known to shower first thing every morning, with stubborn regularity, but today I masochistically let the discomfort and sadness of yesterday fester on my skin and in yesterday's clothes, which I slipped back on to lay on the bed. The cat curled up against me as I started reading, creature next to stone golem. At midday we resolved to drive over to Richmond Park to run around it. Tying my shoes and looking out the window...
Supermarket dash
All week we’ve been building up to a big trip to the supermarket — the real, have-to-drive-there megastore. The others wanted the Big Shop experience; Emma wanted to give the car some use, save it from sitting unused and rusting for the duration of the spring. Some of them have also grown tired of the tight loop of stocking the kitchen just-about with grocery box deliveries and trips to the (still beloved, by me) corner shop. So today we went. The roads are still plentifully stocked with crazy city driving. There was a brief respite over Blackheath, which feels incongruously...
Virtual rate cut forces Nintendo gamers into riskier assets
— Virtual rate cut forces Nintendo gamers into riskier assets, Leo Lewis in FT
The Pandemic Shows What Cities Have Surrendered to Cars
— The Pandemic Shows What Cities Have Surrendered to Cars, Tom Vanderbilt in The Atlantic
The bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?
I'm reading the epic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, at the moment. At the moment it's the 1920s and Moses is trying to wrestle swathes of land off the robber barons who've built their manor houses on Long Island, so that he can build extensive park systems and a parkway to connect them to the city. It's a mammoth book but I'm really enjoying it. The 1920s is an interesting era in American history not just because of my teenage obsession with The Great Gatsby and the associated milieu, but because it's also a period when the Klan...
Shortages
Dried pasta, soap, and toilet roll are high value items. There is much hand-wringing and shaming about who goes to the shops when and to buy how much (particularly the old and the medical front line). There is also hand-wringing about lovers trying to reunite before travel restrictions get fiercer. People are guiltily cycling around London and slinking into one another’s kitchens and bedrooms. The NHS are taking volunteers for logistics workers, who will drive medicine and equipment around, drop patients off at home when they’re discharged. There’s a growing pool of people at a loose end, despite the fact...
Animal Crossing Isn't Escapist; It's Political
— Animal Crossing Isn't Escapist; It's Political - The Atlantic, Ian Bogost in The Atlantic
Bubbles in the street
During the eight o’ clock cheer, somebody was blowing bubbles that drifted down the street. I hung out the bedroom window and took more care to try and see the other people in the windows than usual. The girl who sits at her laptop in the bay window opposite was smiling and slapping at her window. Two figures in white stood at a pair of windows on the third floor opposite. Another anonymous man could be partially seen behind venetian blinds. Today it culminated in singing Happy Birthday for somebody on the street. Louie & Ella are playing in here,...
New Normal
It’s my friend’s birthday today. He’s with his parents in their house on the the side of a hill in the Peak District. He’s quite content up there I imagine: he has his girlfriend, their dog, his vegetable patch (don’t we all). My birthday is at the end of July, and I think I’d sulk a bit if the current restrictions are still in place. I’d like to see some friends. I’d like to go to dinner. Some places are discussing their ‘exit strategies’, how they’ll emerge from their hunkered-down positions. Much is made of the fact we’ll never go...
How We Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic
— How We Use Our Bodies to Navigate a Pandemic, Gia Kourlas in The New Yorker
Inside the Public Hospitals Trying to Save New York
— Inside the Public Hospitals Trying to Save New York, Jonathan Mahler and Philip Montgomery in The New York Times Magazine
Didn't I Write This Story Already?
In November 2015, Naomi Kritzer wrote a short sci-fi story called So Much Cooking. It was published in Clarkesworld, a science fiction and fantasy magazine. The story is told in the form of a cooking blog written by a woman living through a global pandemic of a flu-like virus. This week, Kritzer posted on another sci-fi blog to acknowledge how prescient she'd been in some aspects of her story. Of course being the author she mostly focused on where she got it wrong. Check this out from her story, on social distancing: On running out of things more than usual,...
Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020, CEO Tells Staff
— Google to Slow Hiring for Rest of 2020, CEO Tells Staff, Mark Bergen in Bloomberg
Here's How Those Hot Jigsaw Puzzles Are Made
— Here's How Those Hot Jigsaw Puzzles Are Made, Amie Tsang in The New York Times
A quiet birthday
It’s Easter Sunday. We ran 10k, to the river and back; it was sunny and the paths up the banks were quiet. The residential streets were even quieter, though every house was full up with its residents. These’s no simple phrase to describe a street that is quiet in the sense of traffic coming and going, but packed with everybody who lives there being at home at once. Yesterday we celebrated a birthday by cooking and eating a lot of food, drinking, playing games, and getting high. The birthday girl’s parents surprised her by knocking on the door after having...
Care package
The Prime Minister was moved into intensive care last night. They’re trying to downplay the seriousness of his condition. They’re emphasising that he hasn’t been intubated. Today some artist friends of ours, who we bought lots of art from at a show a few weeks ago, dropped off a parcel on our doorstep. It was a nice package of beautiful objects and warm wishes presented in the chaotic and pleasing way artistic people are seemingly able to carelessly toss together. It also contained some Easter chocolate, which brought home that we’ll be under these conditions for another of those calendar...
Haruki Murakami Challenged On Women
— A Feminist Critique of Murakami Novels, With Murakami Himself, Mieko Kawakami in LitHub
Enter Talisker
The bike and the cat have both arrived. They’ve shut the local park, a preemptive action ahead of a hot and sunny weekend. The endless internal and external dialogue about what is okay and not okay to do to stay happy continues. The cat gives some respite. Our minds can be filled with fretful thoughts about her instead of about the virus. The death toll is climbing quickly here, as in other places, but it feels much less visible now. We are in a kind of stasis now that the conditions of how we should live have been established. Birthdays...
How a French Midwife Solved a Public Health Crisis
— How a French Midwife Solved a Public Health Crisis
USNS Comfort
The hospital ship the USNS Comfort docked in New York Harbour a few hours ago. From the news images it looks like something from the Second World War: a long, narrow, white thing covered in lifeboats and bearing the red cross. Presumably it’s painted like that to stop enemy bombers from firing at it in wartime. Everybody keeps comparing this to wartime. I’m filling my time with exercise, reading, and work — and to some extent it’s working. I’m taking pleasure in the small things. I don’t have it the worst out of anyone. Lots of people, thought they’d never...
Continuity of government
Boris has the virus, as has the Secretary of State for Health, and the Chief Medical Officer*. They’ve built a hospital with 4000 beds inside a big conference centre in London. They’ve built another at the NEC in Birmingham. The one in London has been dubbed the NHS Nightingale. I don’t know if the Birmingham one has a name. A hangar at Birmingham Airport is being repurposed a temporary morgue. The city’s bored and socially isolated population crushed Deliveroo last night. Today we might go on a bike ride — I need to buy one first unless we want to...