Weekly digest 20
Sunday, March 23, 2025Hi, I hope your Sunday is going well (or whatever day it is you're reading this).
My kids are now better, but my wife has gone down with one of their diseases. Nasty thing, ulcers and blisters all in her mouth. She doesn't have a fever with it or anything though, which is good. Just very painful. Unfortunately, it has meant postponing Mr Three's birthday party again!
Saturday was lovely. Got up early with the kids and let her sleep in. Took the kids to see my parents for the morning and had breakfast there. Came back, played some Outer Wilds while Mr Three slept upstairs and Mr Zero slept on me, then we all went outside for some gardening.
This week I finished my extra-curricular course on algebraic curves for my top year 11 students. It wnet pretty well — I'll do a full write-up and post the notes soon. It'll be nice to get my Thursdays back though — I was going in on my day off to run the sessions.
Links
- So, you're a frustrated Apple user looking for alternatives? — BeardyStarStuff thinks discontented Mac users should reconsider Linux.
- The Folkmoss Logs — A Bear blog with very cute design
- RSS blogrolls are a federated social network — I don't even have a blogroll yet (can we please rename these as in my country and others "bogroll" is toilet paper) but this is an exciting prospect if we can get RSS readers to support the blogroll element.
- Imagine if all those who are silent about the terrible evil being committed in Gaza spoke up — Owen Jones is one of the few mainstream British journalists with the correct level of outrage over Israel's continuing slaughter in Gaza.
- The Dance of Joyful Knowledge: Inside Georges Didi-Huberman's Monumental Note Archive — Fascinating look at a philosopher's enormous slip note archive.
- Why I love Bluey (and hate Cocomelon) — any parents of young children will feel validated by this. It's also a fascinating comparison of how these two children's shows are produced. See also this great article on The Dead World Of Blippi. He's basically the reason we don't let our eldest on YouTube, as he seems to be mirrored on so many channels there is no way to avoid or block him.
- The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied.
- The Substack Dilemma: How Creators Are Inadvertently Fueling America's Failure
Playing
Blimey Outer Wilds is good isn't it? Very original and charming spacefaring mystery game. Don't want to say much more — it's definitely a game that can be spoiled.
Listening
I'm thoroughly enjoying Libro.fm — a DRM-free alternative to Audible that also forwards some of your subs to a local bookshop. This week I finished Love In Exile by Shon Faye, an exploration of the evolving politics of love (in various forms) through confessional writing on the author's own struggles in loving others and herself. Now I'm listening to Minority Rule, Ash Sarkar's first book on how the culture war functions in today's political and media landscape from a Marxist perspective. So far it's a banger.
This reminds me — I need to finish porting my reading library to this new site. Maybe that'll be a project for the Easter break.