🍿 Top Gun: Maverick was, no doubt, the best comedy of the year. By the end I felt like standing up and chanting U–S–A, and I was bombed by those photogenic sociopaths not so long ago. The magic of cinema…
Anything else?
A phenomenon so common, it has its own Wikipedia entry:
Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address or becoming permanently unavailable.
Sifting through dozens of old blog posts as I transfer them to Micro.blog, a few things are becoming evident. Having a newborn in the household is not conducive to writing. The period from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day is. And most of the internet I have linked to in the past no longer exists.
Take this short, 8-year-old text about vim. It mentions one podcast and two blogs; none are still around at their original location. The podcast was Technical Difficulties which, if memory serves, was a podcast of Gabe Weatherhead and Erik Hess that ran for 2 years from 2013–2014 before disappearing into oblivion. One of the two blogs was Dr. Bunsen by Seth Brown: also gone, but at least available through the Wayback Machine. The second was from Steve Losh whose website is either down or having temporary difficulties, but in any case unavailable on Wayback.
So this little expedition through just three links took me a good 15 minutes; updating all of the old posts with new links and explanations like this one would not be the best use of anyone’s time. But what are the alternatives?
Gwern Branwen’s website comes to mind, as he goes as far as hosting complete pages on his own server while using icons to point to the original URLs. The afformentioned Wayback Machine also hosts web page snapshots. Would a script converting original URLs to their archived counterpart be hard to find, if not make?
Those are not bad ideas — for a digital garden-type project. For an effemeral blog such as this one, the effort-to-benefit ratio leans the way of my learning to live with link rot. So it goes.
This rump week would be a better time than most to work on the pipes here, if not for my having to do actual work. Which is all good! There are some exciting news coming in early 2023 which yes, need my absolute attention even on a holiday.Still, I will dedicate a few hours transferring posts from the ole' pelican-powered Infinite Regress — around since 2014 as a self-hosted blog and since 2012(!?) on SquareSpace — to using micro.blog full time.
It was an easy choice, driven by two factors: the Tufte theme for micro.blog is just that good of a look — thank you, @pimoore! — and posting from MarsEdit Via BBEdit for titled posts, such as this one. on an M1 Mac is just that good of a workflow. Also fairly expensive — the 2014 me would have balked at a $5–10/month subscription and two pieces of $50+ software — but at a certain point time becomes more valuable than money and if you haven’t already reached that point I hope that you soon do.
So, I will be happy with just a transfer of old posts, plus-minus switching up footnotes to marginnotes and sidenotes as needed. Time permitting, I will make a few tweaks to the page layout, colors and font, but these will be gravy. The Infinite Regress layout has lasted more than 8 years, and I can easily see this one lasting 8 more.
Speaking of IR, converting it to a digital garden-like website The link is to Maggie Appleton’s overview of the history of digital gardens, and if you haven’t been to her website before, you are in for a treat. is the next big project, one that will have to wait for the next infrastructure week.
🍿Strange World had some interesting ideas, but the message got in the way of a good movie. And I don’t mean Disney’s first openly gay character (even there, The Mitchells… did it better), but its notion that destroying rather than improving technology will save the planet. Nope.
🍿Glass Onion: more Triangle of Sadness than Knives Out — the latter being a better movie — but still enjoyable. Kate Hudson and Janelle Monáe were excquisite.
One can hope that the third in the series, if there ever is one, focuses more on the murder mystery than on eating the rich.
Not much time for TV this year — which is a good thing! — but here is what we Yes, “we”. Watching TV is for me a communal thing and the last time I watched any show by myself was finishing up Veep in mid-2014 during my last few night shifts as a fellow. watched, in no particular order:
And yes, looking back at the list I have to wonder what it would have looked like if we did have time for TV. Geez.
I’ve been listing podcasts since 2014 and 5 years ago to the day it became a yearly ritual. Here is to another year of quality podcasts.
The Joy of Why by the mathematician Steven Strogatz is the best science podcast from the best science website, Quanta Magazine. He doesn’t pander to the listener and focuses more on the practicality of science than the gee-whiz isn’t science so gosh darn great ethos that plagues other popular science podcasts. The downside is that it is sometimes just at the edge of my understanding Or, if the talk is about mathematics, way way off. but is that really such a bad thing?
The Jim Rutt Show is a strange beast. The topics are more about the philosophy of science than science itself — with rare but brilliant exceptions — and Jim has a no-nonsense, tells it like it is personality that I find endearing but some might say is a bit grating. He also has unusual ideas about the future of humanity — “Game B” is the preferred name — which I am yet to digest, but that only comes up rarely.
FT Weekend by Lilah Raptopoulos is probably the heart of “Game A”: nominally it is for and about the ultra-rich readers of the Financial Times — think the abominable passengers of the yacht in Triangle of Sadness — catering to their tastes and interests, but really it is there to satisfy the podcast-listening upper middle class’s interest in that world. Funnily enough, I watched Triangle of Sadness based on Lilah’s interview with the director.
Conversations with Tyler by Tyler Cowen haven’t made an appearance in a while, but I continue listening and this year has been one of the better ones. His interview with Jeremy Grantham, the investor turned philanthropist, is hands down the best one hour I’ve spent listening in 2022.
Countdown with Keith Olbermann is my guilty pleasure which at one point I listened daily but then realized it was unsustainable and saved it only for special moments like the day after the American midterm elections or Keith’s twitter ban. Snark is like candy — pleasurable in tiny bursts, but too much will rot your brain. Caveat audiens.
These are only the new or semi-new regulars. Others continue being in rotation: With rare exceptions, but so it goes. 2022 — 2021 — 2020 — 2019 — 2018 — The one where I took a break from podcasts — The very first one
Speaking of Quanta Magazine, their own series of year-in-review articles is out. If you have no other plans this weekend (heh), you may learn what was new in 2022 in:
Enjoy!