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Saharan dust eh? The amazing abseiling window cleaners, who are disappointingly neither giraffe, pelican, nor monkey, came to work on the building here exactly a day before the winds blew, and now the glass and shiny surfaces are dirtier than they were before, woe unto us. Also, my jacket’s been anointed with a reddish tint, which looks rather fetching actually.
(There are some swathes of glass that the abseilers don’t touch, for which I am responsible, and I’m sort of OK now at achieving a streak-free finish with a sponge, a squeegee and bucket of mysterious water. But it’s difficult, and the professional window cleaners deserve maximum respect.)
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Some work, mainly on Sunday evening.
Earlier, I think during a restorative bike ride, I’d remembered that “real artists ship.” So now, at last, a growing number of bus services suddenly have fare tables easily accessible on bustimes.org. It’s not much, and there are definitely friendlier ways of presenting the data (see the more ambitious version of the feature from more than a year ago), but it’s literally better than nothing. And “shame driven development” is a thing – I think having people using a thing acts as an incentive to keep making it better.
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Going and doing and seeing things.
I was going to go and see a live performance, but the performer contracted the novel coronavirus, so that didn’t happen.
Went (physically) to a Web3 meetup. It was more self-aware and less amusingly cringey than expected, but … still, obviously, I have no immediate plans to mint any tokens or anything like that. I have some thoughts I might collect later. Above all, it was a chance to stand in a room of people and exposed pipework amid networking opportunities, which … you know.
Last week I went and played some board games with some strangers. James Acaster does something similar in James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes; pleased to say the vibe here was friendlier, more inviting. Would I go again? Maybe – would going again itself count as a new experience?
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My last/only profound thought about “pineapple on pizza”: if I meet a pizza with pineapple on it, it’s likely in the context of free pizza, and free is good, so by extension pineapple must be good too. Maybe.
On a similar vibe, I have a theory about what makes something acceptable or not to deep-fry, but I’m not ready to share it yet.
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Some content consumed in the past few weeks, in roughly reverse chronological order:
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Simon Rimmer and Tim Lovejoy’s appearance on Fortunately…. Rimmer came out with a great sort of Marxian analysis of the history of licensing laws, and did you know he invented pulled pork?
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The Witchfinder (BBC). Such a cast – among others, it was a nice surprise to see alistair green appear briefly. Someone complained that it’s not densely hilarious, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it’s worth persisting with; it’s a nice place to be (burning innocent women aside), and they went to the trouble of making it so it’d be rude not to watch.
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The Curse (Channel 4). Weird, extraordinary.
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Inventing Anna (Netflix). Crap, but in the way that snuggling up in a big warm heap of manure is probably quite nice?
Smart people only pay for Netflix one month at a time, but I’ve accidentally let my subscription renew for another month. That’s how they get you – it’s like what Jeremiah Colman said, “I make my money from the mustard that people throw away on the sides of their plate.”
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