…every major OS vendor has been adhering to the convention that checkboxes are square and radio buttons are round.
…
Apple is the first major operating system vendor who had abandoned a four-decades-long tradition. Their new visionOS — for the first time in the history of Apple — will have round
checkboxes.
Anyway, with Apple’s betrayal, I think it’s fair to say there’s no hope for this tradition to continue.
I therefore officially announce 2024 to be the year when the square checkbox has finally died.
The Web did a bad enough job of making checkboxes and radiobuttons inconsistent. I’m not saying you can’t style them, Web developers, but let’s at least keep the fundamental
shape of them the way that they have been for decades so that users can understand them!
But yeah, Apple’s new designs could spell the beginning of the end of this long-established standard. Sad times.
What’s the thing you’re most scared to do? What would it take to get you to do it?
After a few wishy-washy prompts earlier in the month1,
suddenly this is a spicy one!
“I’mma just hide here until next Bloganuary and do one of those prompts instead, a’ight?”
I’ve had sufficient opportunity to confidently answer: I’m most-scared… to express personal vulnerability.
For example –
I’m prone to concealing feelings of anxiety, shame, and insecurity (out of for concern that I’ll be perceived as weak);
I exhibit rejection sensitivity, especially when I’m under stress (which leads me to brush-off or minimise other people’s gratitude, respect, or even love);
It can be difficult for me to ask for what I want, rather than what I think I deserve (so my expressed-needs are at the whim of my self-worth).
“Oh my god you’re actually typing this stuff onto the Internet‽ What will people think of you, Dan!”
Two things I oughta emphasise at this point:
I’m doing much better than I used to.2
I “pass” as well-adjusted! My fear of vulnerability still causes me trouble, especially if I’m emotionally low or stressed, but nowhere near as badly as it used to.
I’m still learning, growing, and improving. I’ve had the benefit of therapy3,
coaching, and lots of self-reflection, and I’m moving in the right direction.
What would it take me to face or overcome this fear? I’m already working on it, day by day. Time and practice, just like you’d use to overcome any other obstacle. Time, and practice.
I’m glad that this challenging question came last in Bloganuary, after I felt sufficiently-invested that I had to finish. If this were the first question, I might
never have started!
2 The best evidence for the fact that I’m less afraid of expressing vulnerability than I
used to be is… well, things like this blog post, which I couldn’t conceive of writing say a decade ago.
I was told Windows installation should take less than 20 minutes, but these ones have been sitting outside my house all day while the builders sit on the roof and listen to the radio.
Do I need a faster processor? #TechSupport
I’m British. So I complain about very little. Instead, I tut loudly to myself.
But the thing that makes me tut the loudest, perhaps, is when I discover that somebody has put a roll of toilet paper on its holder the wrong way.
Of all the hills a person could choose to die on, I seem to have chosen the most absorbent.
I’m aware that there are some people who do not hold a strong opinion on the correct orientation of a horizontally-mounted roll of toilet paper. That’s fine; not everybody has to care
about these things. Maybe you’ll be persuaded that there’s a “right” way by this post (and there is), but if not, no problem.
But for the anybody who deliberately and consciously hangs toilet paper the wrong way… here’s why you’re mistaken:
Hanging it the right way puts the loose end closer to the user, which means they’ve got less-far to reach.
Hanging it the right way means the loose end is easier to find, which is especially useful if you didn’t turn the light on yet because you’re not ready to fully
wake up.
Hanging it the wrong way increases the amount of time the paper spends cleaning the wall, which isn’t something I want or need it to be used to clean.
Hanging it the wrong way increases the risk that the loose end is in a place where it is inaccessible, sandwiched directly behind the roll and against the wall, requiring the user
to manually turn the roll to expose it. When the same thing happens on a roll hung the right way (which is rarer on account of gravity) a pinched end self-corrects as
soon as you pull the roll slightly away from the wall.
It’s been argued that your way is “tidier” because unused toilet paper sits closer to the wall which which it’s approximately parallel. Sure (although I disagree that it’s tidier,
but that’s clearly subjective): but I counter that I don’t need it to be tidy, I need it to function.
I’m willing to concede that for some pet owners and parents, hanging the “wrong” way might discourage curious animals and toddlers from playing with the exposed end. But even that’s
not a guarantee, as wrong-way-hanger Dan4th Nicholas discovered. Photo used under a CC-BY license.
I share a home with a wrong-way hanger, but about 13 years ago we came to a household agreement: I’d quietly “correct” any
incorrectly-installed toilet rolls in shared bathrooms1, and nobody would deliberately switch them back2,
and in exchange I’d refrain from trying to educate people about why they were wrong.3
Like Mike Wozniak, I also have a pet hate for people leaving the cardboard tube from toilet paper rolls in suboptimal places,
like on top of a closed pedal bin. But I don’t see so much of that.
1 A man can do whatever the hell he likes in the comfort of his own en suite.
2 This clause was added after it became apparent that our then-housemate Paul decided it’d be a fun prank to go around the house reversing my corrections (not because he preferred the wrong way, but just to troll
me!). Which I can admit was a fun prank… until I challenged him on it and he denied it, at which point it became gaslighting.
3 This doesn’t count as forcing an education on my household. My blog isn’t in your face:
you can skip it any time you want. You can even lie and say you read it when you don’t; I won’t know, especially this month when I’ve been writing so prolifically – now on my longest-ever daily streak! – that I probably won’t even remember what I wrote about.
I’ve never really been very sports-motivated. I enjoy casually participating, but I can’t really see the attraction in spectating most sports, most of the time1.
I’m a good team player at basketball, for sure.
My limited relationship with sports
There are several activities I enjoy doing that happen to overlap with sports: swimming, cycling, etc., but I’m not doing them as sports. By which I mean: I’m not doing them
competitively (and I don’t expect that to change).
I used to appreciate a game of badminton once in a while, and I’ve plenty of times enjoyed kicking a ball around with whoever’s there (party guests… the kids… the dog…2).
But again, I’ve not really done any competitive sports since I used to play rugby at school, way back in the day3.
“Yay, sports‽” This photo was taken in a Cape Town bar which was screening the 2019 Rugby World Cup final between
England and South Africa. Much as I didn’t care about the sports, I loved the energy and atmosphere that the fans brought (and I’ve sufficient comprehension of the sport to
appreciate that South Africa played a spectacular game, putting up an unstoppable wall of players to overcome the odds and take home the cup).
I guess I don’t really see the point in spectating sports that I don’t have any personal investment in. Which for me means that it’d have to involve somebody I care
about!
A couple of dozen strangers running about for 90 minutes does nothing for me, because I haven’t the patriotism to care who wins or loses. But put one of my friends or family on the
pitch and I might take an interest4!
What went wrong with football, for example
In some ways, the commercialisation of sport seems to me to be… just a bit sad?
Take soccer (association football), for example, whose explosive success in the United Kingdom helped bolster the worldwide appeal it enjoys today.
Up until the late 19th century soccer was exclusively an amateur sport: people played on teams on evenings and weekends and then went back to their day jobs the rest of the time. In
fact, early football leagues in the UK specifically forbade professional players!5
Back in the 19th century the rules hadn’t been fully-standardised, either. If you look carefully at this contemporaneous picture, you’ll see that all these players are wearing the
same kit, because there’s only one team. Also, the goalkeeper is wearing riding chaps because he’s permitted to bring his horse onto the pitch for up to 13 minutes in each match. I
may or may not be making all of that up.
As leagues grew beyond local inter-village tournaments and reached the national stage, this approach gave an unfair advantage to teams in the South of England over those in the North
and in Scotland. You see, the South had a larger proportion of landed gentry (who did not need to go back to a “day job” and could devote more of their time to practice) and a
larger alumni of public schools (which had a long history with the sport in some variation or another)!6
Clamour from the Northern teams to be allowed to employ professional players eventually lead to changes in the rules to permit paid team members so long as they lived within a certain
distance of the home pitch7.
The “locality” rule for professional players required that the player had been born, or had lived for two years, within the vicinity of the club. People turned up to cheer on the local
boys8,
paid their higher season ticket prices to help fund not only the upkeep of the ground and the team’s travel but now also their salaries. Still all fine.
Things went wrong when the locality rule stopped applying. Now teams were directly competing with one another for players, leading to bidding wars. The sums of money involved
in signing players began to escalate. Clubs merged (no surprise that so many of those “Somewheretown United” teams sprung up around this period) and grew larger and
begun marketing in new ways to raise capital: replica kits, televised matches, sponsorship deals… before long running a football team was more about money than
location.
And that’s where we are today, and why the odds are good that your local professional football team doesn’t have any players that you or anybody you know will ever meet in person.
That’s a bit of a long a way to say “nah, I’m not terribly into sports”, isn’t it?
2 The dog loves trying to join in a game of football and will happily push the ball up and
down the pitch, but I don’t think she understands the rules and she’s indecisive about which team she’s on. Also, her passing game leaves a lot to be desired, and her dribbling
invariably leaves the ball covered in drool.
3 And even then, my primary role in the team was to be a chunky dirty-fighter of a player
who got in the way of the other team and wasn’t afraid to throw his weight around.
4 Unless it’s cricket. What the fuck is cricket supposed to be about? I have
spectated a cricket match featuring people I know and I still don’t see the attraction.
5 Soccer certainly wasn’t the first sport to “go professional” in the UK; cricket was way ahead of it, for example. But it enjoys such worldwide popularity today that I think it’s a good example to use in
a history lesson.
6 I’m not here to claim that everything that’s wrong with the commercialisation of
professional football can be traced to the North/South divide in England.. but we can agree it’s a contributing factor, right?
7 Here’s a fun aside: this change to the rules about employment of professional players
didn’t reach Scotland until 1893, and many excellent Scottish players – wanting to make a career of their hobby – moved
to England in order to join English teams as professional players. In the 1890s, the
majority of the players at Preston North End (whose stadium I lived right around the corner of for over a decade) were, I understand, Scottish!
8 And girls! Even in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were women’s football
teams: Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C., also from Preston (turns out there’s a reason the National Football Museum was, until
2012, located there), became famous for beating local men’s teams and went on to represent England internationally. But in 1921 the FA said that “the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged”, and banned from the leagues any men’s team that shared
their pitch with a women’s team. The ban was only rescinded in 1971. Thanks, FA.
My employer Automattic‘s having a bit of a reorganisation. For unrelated reasons, this
coincides with my superteam having a bit of a reorganisation, too, and I’m going to be on a different team next week than I’ve been on for most of the 4+ years I’ve been
there1.
Together, these factors mean that I have even less idea than usual what I do for a living, right now.
What is it I do here again? Something something code WooCommerce something something marketplace awesome something, right?
On the whole, I approve of Matt‘s vision for this reorganisation. He writes:
Each [Automattic employee] gets a card: Be the Host, Help the Host, or Neutral.
You cannot change cards during the course of your day or week. If you do not feel aligned with your card, you need to change divisions within Automattic.
“Be the Host” folks are all about making Automattic’s web hosting offerings the best they possibly can be. These are the teams behind WordPress.com,
VIP, and Tumblr, for example. They’re making us competitive on the global stage. They bring Automattic money in a
very direct way, by making our (world class) hosting services available to our customers.
“Help the Host” folks (like me) are in roles that are committed to providing the best tools that can be used anywhere. You might run your copy of Woo, Jetpack, or (the client-side bit of) Akismet on Automattic infrastructure… or
alternatively you might be hosted by one of our competitors or even on your own hardware. What we bring to Automattic is more ethereal: we keep the best talent and expertise in these
technologies close to home, but we’re agnostic about who makes money out of what we create.
This stock photo confuses me so much that I had to use it. It’s WordPress, as seen in Chrome on Windows Vista… but running on a MacBook Air. The photographer has tried to blur their
site domain name (but it’s perfectly readable), but hasn’t concealed the fact they’re running µTorrent in the background (for Obviously Legal Reasons, I’m sure). Weird. But the
important thing is that, crazy as this person’s choices are, they can use Automattic’s software however they like. It’s cool.
Anyway: I love the clarification on the overall direction of the company… but I’m not sure how we market it effectively2. I look around at the people in my team and its sister
teams, all of us proudly holding our “Help the Hosts” cards and ready to work to continue to make Woo an amazing ecommerce platform wherever you choose to host it.
And obviously I can see the consumer value in that. It’s reassuring to know that the open source software we maintain or contribute to is the real deal and we’re not exporting a
cut-down version nor are we going to try to do some kind of rug pull to coerce people into hosting with us. I think Automattic’s long track record shows that.
But how do we sell that? How do we explain that “hey, you can trust us to keep these separate goals separate within our company, so there’s never a conflict
of interest and you getting the best from us is always what we want”? Personally, seeing the inside of Automattic, I’m convinced that we’re not – like so much of Big Tech –
going to axe the things you depend upon3
or change the terms and conditions to the most-exploitative we can get away with4 or support your business just long enough to be able to undermine and consume it 5.
In short: I know that we’re the “good guys”. And I can see how this reorganisation reinforces that. But I can’t for the life of me see how we persuade the rest of the world of the
fact6.
Any ideas?
Footnotes
1 I’ve been on Team Fire for a long while, which made my job title “Code Magician on Fire”, but now I’ll be on Team Desire which isn’t half as catchy a name but
I’m sure they’ll make up for it by being the kinds of awesome human beings I’ve become accustomed to working alongside at Automattic.
2 Fortunately they pay me to code, not to do marketing.
6 Seriously, it’s a good thing I’m not in marketing. I’d be so terrible at it. Also public
relations. Did I ever tell you the story about the time that, as a result of a mix-up, I accidentally almost gave an interview to the Press Office at the Vatican? A story for another
time, perhaps
But if I ever happen to be somewhere that the lottery results are being announced, I sometimes like to play a game I call Not The Lottery.2
Here’s how you play:
Set aside the money it would have cost for a ticket.
Think of the numbers you’d have played.
When those numbers don’t come up, congratulations: you just won not-wasting-your-money!3
Want to play Not The Lottery retroactively? Cool. I’ve made and open-sourced a tool for that. Hopefully it’ll load below
and you can choose some numbers (or take a Lucky Dip) and have it played through the entirety of EuroMillions history and see how much money you’d have won if you’d only played them
every week. Or, to look at things from a brighter perspective, how much you’ve saved by not playing. It’s almost-certainly in the thousands.
Loading game… please wait… (if it never loads, Dan
probably broke it; sorry!)
Winning the lottery
But that’s not what the question’s really about, is it? We don’t ask people “what would they do if they won the lottery?” because we think it’s likely to happen4
We ask them because… well, because it’s fun to fantasise.
And I sort-of gave the answer away on day 20 of Bloganuary: I’d do my “dream job”. I’d work (for free) for Three Rings, like I already do, except instead of spending a couple of hours a week on it on average I’d spend about ten times that. I’d use the
luxury of not having to work to focus on things that I know I can do to make the world a better place.
If money was no object, I’d spend more time with these happy folks (and many more besides), making volunteering easier for everybody.
Sure, there’s other things I’d do. They’re mostly obvious things that I’d hope anybody in my position would do. Pay off the mortgage (and for all the works currently being done to
infuriate the dog improve the house). Arrange some kind of slow-access trust or annuity for the people closest to me so that
they need not worry about money, nor about having to work out how to spend, save, or invest a lump sum. Maybe a holiday or two. Certainly some charitable donations. Perhaps buy
really expensive ketchup: the finest dijon ketchup5.
But mostly I’d just want to be able to live as comfortably as I do now, or perhaps slightly more, and spend a greater proportion of my time than I already do making charities work
better.
I don’t know if that makes me insufferably self-righteous or insufferably simple-minded, but it’s probably one of those.
Footnotes
1 I’ve been caught describing it as “a tax on people who are bad at maths”, but I don’t
truly believe that (although I am concerned about how readily we let people get addicted to problematic gambling and then keep encouraging them to play with dark patterns that hide
how low the odds truly are). I’ve even been known to buy a ticket or two, some years.
2 While writing this, I decided to retroactively play for last Friday, having not seen
whatever numbers came up. I guessed only one of them. Hurrah! That means I saved £2.50 by not playing!
3 There are, of course, other possible outcomes. You could have missed out on winning a
small prize – the odds aren’t that low – but the solution to this is simple: just keep playing Not The Lottery and you, as the “house”, will come out on top in the end.
Alternatively, it’s just-about possible that you could pluck the jackpot numbers from thin air, in which case: well done! You’re doing better than Derren Brown when in 2009 he
performed a pretty good magic trick but then turned it into a turd when he
“explained” it using pseudoscience (why not just stick with “I’m a magician, duh”; when you play the Uri Geller card you just make yourself look like an idiot). Let’s find a way
to use those superpowers for good. Because what you’ve got is a superpower. For context: if you played Not The Lottery twice a week, every week, without fail, for
393 years… you’d still only have a 1% chance of having ever predicted a jackpot in your five-lifetimes.
4 What if we lived in a world where we did use statistics to think about the
hypothetical questions we ask people? Would we ask “what would you do if you were stuck by lightning?”, given that the lifetime chance of being killed by lightning is significantly
greater than the chance of winning the jackpot, even if you play every draw!
Well, I probably ought to start with my backlog! Between our traditional Family Christmas Book Exchange and my birthday, it’s pretty common for me to have a lot of books on the “next to read” pile on my bedside table, this time of year1.
I’m enjoying Time’s Mouth, but it’s taking some time to enjoy fully. Note that my previous paragraph may be misleading: not all of these books were (recent) gifts, and not
all the books I recently received as gifts are shown here. Trust nothing: or all you know an AI made the entire image based
on the prompt “eclectic pile of books Dan might like”.
Aside from that: a book that I’d really like to re-read2
is Antkind by Charlie Kaufman.
Antkind is quite something. Here’s a synopsis: film critic “B.”, its protagonist, discovers an independent filmmaker who’s spent literally his entire life producing a film with
a three-month runtime. The filmmaker agrees to show it to B., but only if thon3 watches it in a single sitting: the film is scripted to provide opportunities for breaks for sleep, toilet
trips, eating and so on. B. watches it and discovers to be a masterpiece and the most impressive piece of art thon has even seen.
In local news, a man was killed today when he was crushed to death by a book after he fell asleep reading it.
Despite the arduous effort required to watch the film, B. decides that it’s a sufficiently important and significant piece of work, with great artistic merit, that it needs to be seen
by the world!
Thon takes the print for distribution… and then promptly loses the entire thing in a fire. All but one frame, with which – with the addition of thon’s own memories of their single
viewing of the movie – B. attempts to reconstruct and recreate. The process drives thon somewhat insane, and the story begins (continues?) to be told by an delusional and unreliable
narrator in a an increasingly surreal-to-the-point-of-absurdity setting.
Somehow, despite everything else that might make this book confusing, the biggest headscratcher for me was this footnote reference. There are no footnotes nor endnotes in the entire
volume. It’s the only such reference in the entire story. It could be a printing error or the result of some editorial cuts… but it appears in a section about the impossibility of
perfectly recreating a piece of art, which makes such an “mistake” strangely fitting: is it a deliberate piece of meta-humour?
I remember getting to the bit set in the far future, where there’s a war between the employees of a fast-food chain and an endlessly replicating army of robot replicas of Donald Trump…
and as I reached that part of the story I thought to myself… wait, how did I get here? Every step along the way felt like it was part of the same narrative, but if you compare
what’s happening right now to what happened at the start of the story then you wouldn’t believe for a moment that they were in the same book.
It’s truly bizarre and I’m looking forward to my re-read of it4…
just as soon as I can face lugging the mammoth tome off the shelf.
1 Gotta admit, this was a convenient blog post to be writing from bed during a Saturday
morning lie-in.
2 I keep promising myself I’ll re-read Antkind some day, and possibly blog
more-deeply about my thoughts on it, but it’s been sitting on my bookshelf gathering dust since I first read it, shortly after its release. It’s too heavy to comfortably read in bed,
is part of the problem! Maybe I could get the ebook version…
4 But I’ll probably stop at reading it twice, unlike the protagonist who would, based on
thon’s description of their usual film review process, read it seven times in several different ways (forward, backward, etc.).
Write about a few of your favourite family traditions.
We’ve got a wonderful diversity of family traditions. This by virtue, perhaps, of us being a three-parent family, and so bringing 50% more different
traditions and 100% less decisiveness over which to accept than a traditional two-parent family. Or it might reflect our outlook and willingness to evaluate and try new things: to
experiment and adopt what works. Or perhaps we just like to be just-barely on this side of the line across the the quirky/eccentric scale1.
Having family photos taken in the style and dress of the Victorian era might be becoming a family tradition: this hangs proudly in our living room in the space formerly occupied by
its similar predecessor from some years ago.
But there are plenty of other traditions we’ve inherited or created, such as:
Pancake Brunch Sundays sort-of evolved out of a fried Sunday breakfast that used to be a household tradition many years ago. If you come visit us for a weekend you’ll
find you’re served pancakes (or possibly waffles) with a mixture of traditional toppings plus, usually, a weekly “feature flavour” around midday on Sunday. For no reason now other
than it’s just what we do.
Sunday Brunch stops for nothing, not even birthdays.
Family Day is an annual event, marked on or near 3 July each year, with gifts for children and possibly an outing or trip away for everybody to enjoy. It celebrates
the fact that we get to be a family together, despite forces outside of our control trying to conspire to prevent it.2
Family Film Night takes place most months: in rotation, the five of us take turns to nominate a film or two that we’ll all watch together along with snacks and sweet
treats. It might be seen as a continuation of the pre-children tradition of Troma Night from back in the day, except that we don’t go out of our way to deliberately watch terrible
films: now that happens just as a result of good or bad fortune! We also periodically schedule a Family Board Games Night, and a Family Videogames
Night.
Books! Books books books! BOOKS!
Christmas Eve Books: a tradition we stole from Iceland is that we give books on Christmas Eve. Adults in our household now don’t really get Christmas gifts, but everybody present is encouraged to exchange books on Christmas eve and then sit up late reading together,
often with gingerbread, chocolate, and/or a pan of mulled wine keeping warm on the stove. I find it a fun way to keep my reading list stocked early in the year, plus it encourages the
kids to read3
Festive meals, while I’m thinking about that end of the year, are pretty-well established. Christmas Eve is all about roast duck pancakes. Christmas Day sees me roast
a goose. New Years’ Eve is for fondue. Plus vegetarian (and sometimes vegan) alternatives to the otherwise-unsuitable things, of course.
I’m certain there must be more, but the thing with family traditions is they become part of the everyday tapestry of your life after a while. Eventually traditions become hard to see
them because they’re always there. I’m sure there are more “everyday rituals” that we’ve taken on that are noteworthy or interesting to outsiders but which to us are so mundane
as to be unworthy of mention!
But every single one of these is something special to us. They’re an element of structure for the kids and a signifier of community to all of us. They’re routines that we’ve
taken on and made “ours” as part of our collective identity as a family. And that’s just great.
Footnotes
1 Determining which side of the line I mean is left as an exercise to the reader.
2 It’s been what…? 6½ years…? And I’m
still not ready even emotionally to blog about the challenges we faced, so maybe I never will. So if you missed that chapter of our lives, suffice to say: for a while, it looked like
we might not get to continue being a family, and over the course of one exceptionally-difficult year it took incredible effort, resolve, sleepless nights, supportive
families, and (when it came down to brass tacks) enough money and lawyers to seek justice… in order to ensure that we got to continue to be. About which we’re all amazingly grateful,
and so we celebrate it.
3 Not that they need any help with that, little bookworms that they are.
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Boo to this prompt! This Bloganuary already asked me how I like to play and about five things I do for fun; now
it wants me to choose the thing I “enjoy most” from, presumably, that same set.
What is a song or poem that speaks to you and why?
Much better.
Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac.
I’ll save you looking it up: here’s a good live recording to put on while you keep reading.
At 5½ years older than me, the song’s been in my life effectively forever. But its themes of love and loss, overcoming naivety, growing up and moving on… have grown in significance to
and with me as I’ve grown older. And to hear Stevie Nicks speak about it, it feels like it has for her as well, which just doubles the feeling it creates of timeless relevance.
In concert, Nicks would often dedicate the song to her father, which lead to all manner of speculation about the lyrics being
about the importance of family. And there’s definitely an undertone of that in there: when in
2015 she confirmed that it was about a challenging moment of decision in her youth in which she was torn between continuing to try to “make it” as a musical act with her
then-partner Lindsey Buckingham or return to education. Her father was apparently supportive of either option but favoured the
latter.
Ultimately she chose the former and it worked out well for her career… although of course the pair’s romantic relationship eventually collapsed. And so the song’s lyrics, originally
about indecision, grow into a new interpretation: one of sliding doors moments, of “what ifs”. In some parallel universe
Stevie Nicks dropped out of Buckingham Nicks before Keith Olsen introduced Lindsey Buckingham to Mick Fleetwood, and we’d probably never have heard Landslide.3
Stevie still sings Landslide in concert, and now it feels like it’s entered its third life and lends itself a whole new interpretation. Those lyrics about turning around and looking
back, which were originally about reconsidering the choices you made in your youth and the path you’d set yourself on, take on a whole new dimension when sung by somebody as they grow
through their 60s and into their 70s!
In particular, coming to the song as a parent4
is a whole other thing. Its thoughts on innocence and growing-up, and watching your children do so, reminds me of my perpetual struggle with comparing myself to the best parent I know. An intergenerational effort to be my best me; to look forwards with courage and backwards with compassion for myself.
All of which is pretty awesome for a song that under other circumstances might be just a catchy twist on a classic country rock chord progression with some good singing. Sliding doors,
eh?
2 This is my first year doing Bloganuary, so I didn’t get to answer this prompt last time
around.
3 Nor, for that matter, any of the other excellent songs that came out of Nicks’ and
Buckingham’s strained relationship, such as Silver Springs, Second Hand News and, perhaps most-famously, Go Your Own Way. I guess sometimes you need the sad
times to make the best art.
4 Nicks, of course, famously isn’t a parent, but I refer you to a 2001 interview in which she said “No children, no husband. My particular mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a
wife. Maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better.”.
Name an attraction or town close to home that you still haven’t got around to visiting.
I live a just outside the village of Stanton Harcourt in West Oxfordshire. It’s tiny, but it’s historically-significant, and
there’s one very-obvious feature that I see several times a week but have never been inside of.
The Old English name “Stanton” refers to the place being “by stones”, probably referring to the stone circle now known as The Devil’s Quoits, about which I’ve become a bit of a local expert (for a quick intro, see my video about them). But that’s not the local
attraction I’m talking about today…
When William the Conqueror came to England, he divvied up large parts of the country and put them under the authority of the friends who helped him with his invasion, dioceses of the
French church, or both. William’s half-brother Odo1
did particularly well: he was appointed Earl of Kent and got huge swathes of land (second only to the king), including the village of Stanton and the fertile farmlands that surrounded
it.
Odo later fell out of favour after he considered challenging Pope Gregory VII to fisticuffs or somesuchthing, and ended up losing a lot of his lands. Stanton eventually came to be
controlled by Robert of Harcourt, whose older brother Errand helped William at the Battle of Hastings but later died without any children. Now under the jurisdiction of the Harcourt
family, the village became known as Stanton Harcourt.
These three (Normanesque) towers of Stanton Harcourt are, from left to right: the manor house kitchen, Pope’s Tower, and the tower of St. Michael’s Church. Photograph copyright
Chris Brown, used under a BY-SA Creative Commons license.
The Harcourt household at Stanton in its current form dates from around the 15th/16th century. Perhaps its biggest claim to fame is that Alexander Pope lived in the tower (now called
Pope’s Tower) while he was translating the Illiad into a heroic couplet-format English. Anyway: later that same
century the Harcourts moved to Nuneham Courtenay, on the other side of Oxford2 the house fell into disrepair.
It’s a piece of local history right on my doorstep that I haven’t yet had the chance to explore. Maybe some day!
Footnotes
1 If you’ve heard of Odo before, it’s likely because he was probably the person who
commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry, which goes a long way to explaining why he and his entourage feature so-heavily on it.
2 The place the Harcourt family moved to is next to what is now… Harcourt Arboretum! Now you know where the name comes from.
Cache removed and temporarily disabled. The council have just started installing new signage to advise of a new 20mph speed limit around here. 🎉
When they recently did the same in a nearby village, they removed a cache of this type as a (presumably accidental) side effect. I don’t know if this cache’s host is among those that’ll
be affected but I suspect it will so I’ve temporarily removed this one as a precaution and I’ll reinstate it after the works are complete.
This feels disappointingly like the prompt from day 2, but I’m gonna pivot it by letting my answer from three weeks ago only cover
one of the five points:
Code
Magic
Piano
Play
Learn
Let’s take a look at each of those, briefly.
Code
Code is poetry. Code is fun. Code is a many-splendoured thing.
When I’m not coding for work or coding as a volunteer, I’m often caught
coding for fun. Sometimes I write WordPress-ey things. Sometimes I write other random things. I tend to open-source almost everything I write, most
of it via my GitHub account.
Magic
Now I don’t work in the city centre nor have easy access to other magicians, I don’t perform as much magic as I used to. But I still try to keep my hand in and occasionally try new
things; I enjoy practicing sleights when I’m doing work-related things that don’t require my hands (meetings, code reviews, waiting for the damn unit tests to run…), a tip I learned
from fellow magician Andy.
My favourite go-to trick with an untampered deck of cards is my variant of the Ambitious Classic; here’s a bit from the middle of the trick from the last time I performed it in a
video meeting.
You’ll usually find a few decks of cards on my desk at any given time, mostly Bikes.1
Piano
I started teaching myself piano during the Covid lockdowns as a distraction from not being able to go anywhere (apparently I’m not the only one), and as an effort to do more of what I’m bad at.2
Since then, I’ve folded about ten minutes of piano-playing3,
give or take, into my routine virtually every day.
This is what piano playing looks like. But perhaps only barely.
I fully expect that I’ll never be as accomplished at it as, say, the average 8-year-old on YouTube, but that’s not what it’s about. If I take a break from programming, or meetings, or
childcare, or anything, I can feel that playing music exercises a totally different part of my mind. I’d heard musicians talk about such an experience before,
but I’d assumed that it was hyperbole… but from my perspective, they’re right: practicing an instrument genuinely does feel like using a part of your brain than you use for anything
else, which I love!
A lot of my RPG-gaming takes place online, via virtual tabletops, and is perhaps the most obvious “playtime” play activities I routinely engage in.
At the weekend I dusted off Vox Populi, my favourite mod for Civilization V, my favourite4
entry in the Civilization series, which in turn is one of my favourite video game series5. I don’t
get as much time for videogaming as I might like, but that’s probably for the best because a couple of hours disappeared on Sunday evening before I even blinked! It’s addictive
stuff.
Learn
As I mentioned back on day 3 of bloganuary, I’m a lifelong learner. But even when I’m not learning in an academic setting, I’m
doubtless learning something. I tend to alternate between fiction and non-fiction books on my bedside table. I often get lost on deep-dives through the depths of the Web after
a Wikipedia article makes me ask “wait, really?” And just sometimes, I set out to learn some kind of new skill.
In short: with such a variety of fun things lined-up, I rarely get the opportunity to be bored6!
Footnotes
1 I like the feel of Bicycle cards and the way they fan. Plus: the white border – which is
actually a security measure on playing cards designed to make bottom-dealing more-obvious and thus make it harder for people to cheat at e.g. poker – can actually be turned to work
for the magician when doing certain sleights, including one seen in the mini-video above…
2 I’m not strictly bad at it, it’s just that I had essential no music tuition or
instrument experience whatsoever – I didn’t even have a recorder at primary school! – and so I was starting at square zero.
3 Occasionally I’ll learn a bit of a piece of music, but mostly I’m trying to improve my
ability to improvise because that scratches an itch in a part of my brain in a way that I find most-interesting!
4 Games in the series I’ve extensively played include: Civilization,
CivNet, Civilization II (also Test of Time), Alpha Centauri (a game so good I paid for it three times, despite having previously pirated
it), Civilization III, Civilization IV, Civilization V, Beyond Earth (such a disappointment compared to SMAC) and Civilization VI, plus all their expansions except for the very latest one for VI. Also spinoffs/clones
FreeCiv, C-Evo, and both Call to Power games. Oh, and at least two of the board games. And that’s just the ones I’ve played enough to talk in detail about:
I’m not including things like Revolution which I played an hour of and hated so much I shan’t touch it again, nor either version of Colonization which I’m
treating separately…
If you could make your pet understand one thing, what would it be?
The strangers who we keep inviting into our house do not want to steal your toys and do not need to be “seen off”.
“Somebody’s at the door! I’d better bark to see them off!”
Lately, we’ve had a lot of strangers in the house: builders, plumbers, and electricians, all working on some significant building works.
And even though she’s got to be starting to recognise the same old folks coming and going, day-in and day-out, our little pup still goes completely mental every time the
builders turn up, each morning.
It’s been… a little stressful and chaotic for us all, here. Every few days a new hole appears in the house, and a new set of curious buried problems emerges (why does this pipe go
here? who thought it was good idea to wire these sockets like that?).
I get it. They come and go but don’t smell like they live here. They make a lot of noise and dust. But seriously, dog: these people aren’t going to bring us any harm2.
Just chill out already!
Today we’re having one of the biggest bits of work done: the removal of the ceiling in the main hallway and the installation of a new staircase. So the dog’s spending the day…
elsewhere! We’ve sent her off to play with her little doggy friends at our dogsitter’s house. It’s probably for the best.
2 Some days they don’t come through the front door at all, but up the scaffolding and in
through the roof: she knows they’re here from the banging sounds but not from which direction they’ll approach, and she’ll sometimes gather all of her toys into a pile and guard them…
y’know, in case they’ve come here to steal all her most-valuable well-chewed playthings.
