It’s a cold one out. I find myself peaking at weather apps and out of the window with trepidation. The forecasts are less reliable and the clouds rush up as if from nowhere to catch you in your lazy confidence of a clear day.
Well yes, after years I’ve decided to move my blogging day to Monday instead of Wednesday. No day is particularly more favourable than any other day to sit down and gather my thoughts; it’s a generally unfavourable activity which just puts me in my mind all the things I haven’t done since I last sat down to gather my thoughts: A litany of unread emails and long, unavoidable and boring tasks. Theoretically this should mean that my Sunday afternoon and evening can be spent clearing the decks for the week ahead, or at least that was the plan but I sit here now at 0715 on Monday morning writing this and already it’s gone awry.
It was nice to talk to some people who took me up on my offer to just hang out and chat last week, let me know if you’d like to hang out and chat. Alarmingly, I have quite a few things in my notes for this week so I might exercise a Content Strategy and only write about some of it and save the rest of it for a later date.
Name for things
I’m going to write some idle thoughts I had this week, some are specific and some are vague because they’re things I feel deserve specific terminology. If you know the terminology or have suggestions, please let me know:
- When folks say they are dazed, confused or feeling out of sorts because of ‘endless Zoom meetings.’ Before we were working from home, wasn’t it just non-Zoom endless meetings? I’ve been back on site working a few days last week and left each day with the feeling of a lot of time having passed and having achieved very little just like at home. Hasn’t it always been this way? Why is it being online new?
- Brexit talks with the EU have been bogged down in fishing and fishery stuff. For some reason an awful lot of our political, cultural and social future seems to have to do with fishing. I’m sure I could dig into it and find out exactly why we’re making so many momentous global decisions on the basis of fishing but it seems to be this recurring issue that I perhaps naively imagine, affects a fraction of people compared to the wider issues of leaving the EU. It reminds me of something I saw recently about winter sports employing twice as many Americans as the coal industry, and yet the obsession with one is actively destroying the other. Charismatic dying industries? Nail industries? And why is the EU all about fishing?
- A recurring theme for this blog; what happened to technology? Has the enchantment of technology faded globally or is it just a local phenomena? I actually miss the excitement and awe I felt at seeing an iPhone of the first time. Is it because basically there hasn’t been anything new for ages? Or are we just over-saturated with novelty? Or is it actually all just a bit crap?
Short stuff
- The latest Exponential View has a conversation with someone from Deep Mind where they discuss one of my favourite cottage topics – the nature of truth and proof in mathematics with artificial intelligence.
- Space and submarine horror are the same genre with different special effects budgets.
- Netflix has a pretty brutal divorce rate with shows, generally dropping after second season despite critical success. Surprise surprise, it’s all to do with data: When you have a pretty good handle on what’s going to work in the long run, no matter how critically-acclaimed, you’ll make less risky decisions and stick to the middle of the bell curve. A Shazam effect for TV.
- The Cyberfeminisms Index by Mindy Seu is an incredible archive of all things cyberfeminism.
That’s it, it’s rushed. All that extra time I made. I read some really good things but I just haven’t had the time to write about them. Love you, speak to you next week.