Weeknotes 2023.3: Under-sharing?

Signing out of Twitter on my phone was a wise idea. I don’t miss the ‘main character of the day’ syndrome, nor the constant shoving into my face of ads or content I’m not interested in. I shan’t be back for a while—possibly not ever since the new owner unceremoniously murdered the third-party app ecosystem that had made the site novel in the first place. Embrace, extend, extinguish is alive and well.

I have been taking photos, but have put off sharing them— partly because I’m working on a side project, an image tagger that won’t make me want to break things. One of the few times in the last few years where programming hasn’t felt like work. (I shan’t go into too much detail here, because I decided when I re-tooled this blog for the umpteenth time this was not going to be a place to talk about work or about computers—I have another place where I talk about that.)

I think my (late) New Year’s resolution is not to feel pressure to share things rapidly. It took me the best part of four months to post the massive Venice photo dump, and I think that’s probably a pace I’m happy with. Part of the reason I've not been posting so much lately to Instagram is because of me not importing things into my photo library—another part is that I broke off part of the door on my Sony digital camera, which makes me reluctant to take it out lest the charging port get gunked up. I'll have to see if any camera repair places can source a replacement—or maybe someone can find a way to 3-D print the part. (Using it as an excuse to buy a new camera during a recession doesn't seem wise.)

FOR ALL MANKIND, Season 2 was largely more of the same. I’m not sure I ‘get’ this show. Just occasionally it ascends into an intense brilliance, but too much of it still feels like torrid pantomime and reliant on dramatic and visual shorthand. And yet, despite thinking this is clearly not meant for me, I am still getting sucked into this show. The period details, the costumes, the ships, the characters, the sets, the accurséd long-distance romances and love triangles. Maybe this is how people get into soap operas. (Previously.)

We went for a nice walk in the sun today. Spring seems to have retreated again for now. Maybe the cold snap docked off any nascent flowerheads. We saw a man run past us on Hackney Marshes wearing nothing but trainers and running shorts. It was three degrees Celsius. I don’t know how he hasn’t frozen to the bone.