Books

• Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir
• The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
• Boswell's Life of Johnson
• In Search of Lost Time: The Way By Swann's, Marcel Proust, tr Lydia Davis
• The Chronicles of Amber, Roger Zelazny
• Letters from Amherst, Samuel R Delany

I read …

I've been spending spare moments putting together a sort of musical experiment - it doesn't feel coherent enough to call it an instrument yet - written in Scheme using Spritely Goblins and David Thompson's Chickadee framework. I do not know if either of these technologies is the best for the job but …

This was the first week I've gone to an office for five days straight since March 2020. I'm enjoying commuting and getting more of a sense of separation from my work and home life.

• A terrible Philip Adams article from 1983

• Nature is not allowing scientists to include ChatGPT as …

• Visualise and/or animate the effects of git commands - a warning that this blew up when I tried using it to visualise a simple git rebase

• Sapling is Meta/Facebook's source control system, a fork and rewrite of Mercurial which they've started to open source. The fact that it interoperates …

Last year was a really big one for me - I changed jobs and institutions just before the end of 2022, and was lucky enough to become a group lead in the new team in May. It's been challenging but really exciting, I feel like I'm getting a lot more out …

• I never have the wherewithal for the Advent of Code but this year I've really been enjoying practicing my R skills on The Hanukkah of Data

• New Nazca geoglyphs just dropped

• Villem Flusser and social media

• The Prime Minster of Latvia has an Irish accent

• The Topologist's Map of the …

Since I set up Funkwhale I'd been thinking of using it to host my music collection so that I could listen to it from anywhere, but I did the sums and the cost of the extra storage would be about the same as if I got a static IP for …

When I was very young, perhaps four or five, I can remember imagining that the world was a flat slab of rock, and that the sky was a hemispherical dome suspended over it, and which somehow always managed to be centered on our car as it drove over the flat …

It's been good to see people from Twitter coming onto the Fediverse, or reviving the accounts which they started in 2018, but I'm also getting worn out. Though not nearly as worn out as the admins and moderators, who have been doing an amazing job.

Hugh's essay captures a lot …

It's been quite a week on Mastodon eh.

• The death of God and the decline of the humanities

• Ethan Hein on the Ghostbusters theme with a collection of links to Ray Parker, Jr's other stuff

• Fuck Your Magical Antisemitism an entertaining zine on problematic aspects of the Western occult tradition …