Weekend Update #4
I've spent the last week having a crash course in using Kirby as a CMS. At the moment, I've been experimenting with a clone of this site on a local server. Kirby lets you do this completely free of charge which is awesome for people like me who need some time to figure out what the heck they need to do, before committing. And not only does Kirby maintain thorough and extensive documentation, but it has also put out some really helpful video tutorials.
I'm not quite ready to go live but hopefully with the downtime over Christmas, I should have figured everything out and the site will be running with Kirby in the new year.
As for Bluesky, my experimenting with it goes from bad to worse. I mentioned last week about how, within seconds of signing up, a bunch of bot followers descended upon my account. This week I've noticed some funky goings-on with the algorithm over there. Despite following almost exclusively tech and basketball-focussed accounts and liking the sum total of one other post (on the topic of a MacStories easter egg), my suggested follows page is pushing a ton of political accounts, of which most I am certain are bots. The only possible explanation is that I followed The Onion.
I loathe that social media dominates so much of the internet landscape. It suffocates so much of everything else that is good the internet. I'll likely keep my account with Bluesky, but can sense I'll wind up deleting the app from my phone in a few weeks.
Listening…
I had put the release date of The National's new live album, Rome, in my calendar a few months back. Only to discover, as I excitedly went to check on the 6 December, that I was a week or so early. It then completely passed me by until their album Boxer turned up in my shuffle queue one morning this week.
I love The National. I had the pleasure of seeing them put on an amazing performance (music, lights and all) in 2019. I then narrowly missed seeing them at Primavera in Barcelona during summer 2022. They played a slot on the first weekend but I was only there for the second weekend.
Playing…
Having beaten Spider-Man: Miles Morales last week, I needed a bit of a palette cleanser before diving back in. Scrolling through my Steam library I spotted Forza Horizon 4. I picked up the Ultimate Edition earlier in the year at a dirt cheap price after they announced it would be de-listed (as it happened, it was delisted this month).
I've actually played some of Horizon (both 4 and 5) on the Xbox Series S and made a decent dent in both. But alas my Xbox sits atop of one of my shelves in my office. Unplugged and lonely.
Horizon is really great, mindless fun. I don't say that with any critical undertone. It is just entirely carefree which can be really refreshing. Sometimes just booting up a game and mindlessly bombing around the sandbox is all I need to scratch a certain itch.
Watching…
Having convinced my wife to wait until Christmas rolled around, we watched the excellent Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers (the cinematic release date was post-Christmas 2024; a knock on effect of the pandemic I assume). A heartwarming story of a teacher at a New England boarding school who winds up supervising a group of students who can't go home for Christmas.
There's a line spoken by Giamatti's character towards the end:
'I find the world a bitter and complicated place, and it seems to feel the same way about me'.
I am guilty, at times, of seeing the world this way, and then lambasting it and its inhabitants for not understanding my perspective or way of thinking. It's something I am continually working on — not to get too hung up and shut the world away. I'm not entirely confident I'll ever leave that trait behind. But I'm better than I was yesterday. And hopefully by tomorrow I'll be a little better than today.
Reading…
I'm still reading Paul Strathern's The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance. This will be a slow burn as I like to highlight passages as I go and then make notes on them in my Obsidian vault. I'm trying to embrace Andy Matuschak's ethos of 'working with the garage door up' so I plan to share what I've learnt. Or rather, what I'm learning.