Weekly digest 21

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Good day, and happy Mother's Day to those applicable.

  • Left my coffee cup at home on Monday, somehow this disruption to the routine was enough to make me forget to make a coffee all day. It was dreadful.
  • We finally had Mr Three's birthday party yesterday after several postponements due to illness. It was a success.
  • Got a new phone, and very disappointed to find the todo.txt app I used to use is no longer listed on the Play Store. I contacted the developer and was told Google had demanded a security audit costing over £1000, and hence he'd had to close the account. This one was the best todo.txt app because it had a great home screen widget as well, but other todo.txt apps also seem to have been delisted. I'll use the todo.txt feature built into Markor in the meantime.
  • Ran an Only Connect game for year 7s house matches. They enjoyed it but got very few of them right.
  • I've begun turning the notes from my "GCSE introduction to algebraic curves" sessions into something a bit more publishable. Now that they've been tested on some real students, I can more clearly see what bits can be streamlined, where I potentially added complexities unnecessary at this level of analysis, and so on.

Links

Listening

Today I finished listening to the audiobook of Ash Sarkar's Minority Rule. It's a good book. Like many non-fiction books, I felt the later chapters were less forceful in terms of contributing tightly to the book's overall arguments (that the right has successfully weaponised the left's identity politics to divide the working class — and that the left has made it extremely easy for them), but found them to be interesting essays in their own right.

This week I listened to Lana Del Rey's 2012 album Born To Die. She is not an artist I have followed closely but I remember enjoying the singles at the time (when I did a music technology course I had to write an analysis of a current randomly selected chart song; I was assigned Video Games and still think that song is marvelous). Lana Del Rey features prominently in one of the recent audiobooks I listened to, Love In Exile by Shon Faye, so I've been revisiting her music.

That's all for now, have a good week.


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