§ I touched a floppy drive for the first time ever.
A lot of my new job, at the moment, involves contending with a huge library of interactive Adobe Flash programs.
As with floppy drives, I had never worked with Flash before although its legacy has always loomed large in the Creative Coding circles I frequent.
There is something beautiful about it: an accessible way to create programs that are self-contained, cross-platform, multimedia, and interactive.
I still really need to find a good, modern debugger, though.
§ Going from working in a single-story building to somewhere with four floors has had a dramatic impact on my “flights climbed” Health metric.
§ Apple’s marketing stunt worked, I watched Silo.
Some details of the environment were great—I really liked the computer interface design—overall, however, the artificiality of the set was a bit of a turn off.
I kept finding myself imagining what the actors were experiencing as they were filming each scene. How big was the set? How immersive? Was it just an enormous wall of LCD screens? Watching the later seasons of Game of Thrones was a similar experience.
Despite finding the design slightly off-putting, the story itself was original. I found myself genuinely surprised by the ending of season one and am sufficiently interested to see where the writers take the show from here.
§ By and large, the new season of Black Mirror feels silly. It also doesn’t seem particularly concerned with technology—you know, the reason it was named “Black Mirror” in the first place. An interesting choice.
§ The day after Meta launched Threads, their Twitter competitor, I finally got an invite to Bluesky.
Frankly, I am not sure I see a future for Bluesky once Threads enables support for ActivityPub, the underlying protocol behind Mastodon (and this blog). Effectively everyone already has an Instagram account which means they now automatically have a Threads account too. If you don’t have an Instagram account you can join any Mastodon instances and will still be able to communicate with anyone on Threads.
Bluesky, in comparison, will look insular—even after it leaves its long invite-only phase.
§ Caroline and I took down a large, ungainly juniper bush in our front yard. This gave us two things: a bunch of wood that is naturally rot-resistant and room to start growing a patch of watermelons. In the past, we haven’t had much luck growing pumpkins, America’s second favorite oversized cucurbit. We are hoping for better luck with watermelons and their shorter growing time.
§ Our quail all managed to break loose from their enclosure in the middle of a rain storm.
Frankly, I am not entirely sure how long they were loose for. It wasn’t until I spotted Tumbleweed’s unmistakable dusty orange plumage as she was looking for shelter under a backyard tree canopy that I realized what had happened.
Take a moment to picture me, frantic and soaking wet, chasing five small birds around my tiny, unfenced, yard, attempting to catch them with a cheap Amazon.com butterfly net.
Miraculously, I was able to round them all up and return them back to safely of their enclosure.
