Weeknotes 172

Hello!

I’m grumpy at the moment and trying not to let it leak out into weeknotes too much, because who wants to read that? I hope this is a passing phase rather than my new personality.

On the plus side, we’re well into the upward steep bit where the sun rises much earlier and sets much later from one day to the next, and I’ve had some nice sunny rides this week. ☀️

I made it to LRUG on Monday but chickened out of the pub again. After years of atrophy I’m starting to doubt whether my psychological appetite for large-group socialising — or, to put it another way, meeting new people — is ever going to return to pre-COVID levels.

There’s a new ContraPoints video about bigotry. It’s almost two hours long but I’ve watched it twice and it’s probably her best one yet.

It’s not as high-concept as some of her other work, just extremely clear and persuasive. It’s brilliantly constructed and perfectly executed; the straightforwardness makes it slightly less entertaining but more accessible, which it turn makes it more likely to reach a wide audience.

If you haven’t got along with her videos in the past, I recommend you give this one a try, then share it with any friends who are still unclear on the issues involved.

I think the ContraPoints video hit me harder than expected because I’m becoming increasingly exhausted by the volume of meaningless nonsense I’m exposed to. I want to make sense of the world and it really wears me down to try to pick through the mountains of absolute dogshit ideas that dominate modern life. So the opportunity to sink into two hours of effortlessly clear and coherent discourse was the most relaxing brain bath imaginable.

The season finale of The Mandalorian was exciting and fun. It’s still a good show!

The government emergency alert test arrived on my phone today as threatened. It was intrusive and unnecessary so I’d like to avoid getting another one.

In my phone’s notification settings the alert categories are called “Extreme Alerts” and “Severe Alerts” with no explanation of what these are or what the difference is. The government page also doesn’t mention the alert categories, which demonstrates how seriously they take the responsibility of operating this system, i.e. not at all.

I’m not sure whether “Extreme” or “Severe” is worse, so I turned both off to be safe. Come friendly bombs

A fully-vegan Indian takeaway opened in my neighbourhood a few years ago, which is ordinarily the sort of thing I’d like, but they’d only been given a 3/5 food hygiene rating on their first inspection so I decided to wait and let them get their act together before I tried the food.

I’ve been checking every couple of months and was excited to see they were recently re-inspected and… got a 3/5 again. So I’m still waiting.

Anyway, they’re closing down tomorrow.

It took me most of the week to do it, but I eventually posted the joycon. 🤞🏻