Week Notes // Supplementary Yuletide Edition
I hadn’t intened to write any more Week Notes this year.
Christmas was lovely, lots of nice gifts. Lots of good food. But, a couple of things have happened. I’ve managed to consume quite alot of media during the break so far. And far from being a quiet news week, it feels like quite alot of interesting stuff has happened. Some of which might make it’s way into a slightly more mature and developed form in the next week or so.
Thinking and Doing (what have I been thinking about, who did I meet, where have I been)
I decided to take the plunge with Readwise. I’ve been squirreling things away and found a lot of value in the tagging system. I’ve now moved onto a trial of Notion. I’m consciously a very analogue person. I retain information best when I’m the one committing it to paper. Similarly, I’ve struggled with password and login discipline historically. Being able to use Google details is a godsend when it comes to stuff like this. Enjoying the platform so far. As with readwise, using across laptop and mobile is seamless. The notes system is intuitive, especially if you’re used to maintaining a blog. I’ve started building out templates for the return to work and in particular for to-do lists. My existing system of to-do list maintainence is incredibly analogue and whilst it works for me, there are clear points of failure (i’m prone to losing the lists). Workspace funtionality will be useful for the newletter project.
We went on our annual book shopping trip in town. Before P arrived, Lisa and I did this every year. He’s now at an age where he a) likes books and b) will come for a splendid lunch so after a a bit of a break, this tradition has begun again. I bought Yellowface by RF Kuang, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Ate lunch at Dean Street Townhouse.
Am currently half way through a 2700 piece lego build with the boy. The detail on the larger sets is incredible. The level of thought that goes into the detailing never gets tiring or less astonishing to me.
Reading, watching, listening (the things I’ve found interesting this week)
As I stopped work so early in December (the 14th) and had quite a luxuriously long slog of time before my son finished school (the 20th) I’ve had a reasonably significant opportunity to watch quite a lot of films over the last couple of weeks, which I’ve really enjoyed. Studying film at University had the effect of seriously dulling my apetite for films, sadly. Only 20 years later am I finding my apetitie return. And there is so much good stuff out there.
I went to see Anatomy of a Fall (Dir. Triet, 2023) at the Curzon in Bloomsbury and then took my son to see Wonka (Dir. King, 2023) locally. Both films were seriously good. Needless to say, they were both incredibly different though.
Need to get to the cinema more next year. Other highlights have included:
Saltburn (Dir. Fennel, 2023) - what my American friends may describe as a ‘hot mess’. I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, the film is trying to say. Some scenes require an iron constitution. Keoghan is compelling.
Past Lives (Dir. Song, 2023) - beauty incarnate. Incredibly gentle. Reminded me of Brief Encounter. Lovely score, too.
Killers of the Flower Moon (Dir. Scorsese, 2023) - enjoyable but gruesome and horrifying.
Die Hard (Dir. McTiernan, 1988) and Die Hard with a Vengeance (Dir. McTiernan, 1995) - Christmas time demands it. We’d watched the second installment recently, so chose to watch the first and last films over a three nights around Christmas. The third film starts well but fizzles. The first one is peerless.
Brazil (Dir. Gilliam, 1985). Python does 1984. What’s not to like.
Making my way through To Paradise by Hanya Yanagahara. Just reached the end of ‘Book 1’. Compared to A Little Life, it’s a much more enjoyable read.
Enjoyed reading Phil’s new newsletter. No fat, no flavour. Quite.
Reading alot about RSS feeds at the moment. In the wake of Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the recent Substack Content Moderation issue, there is a lot of chatter about how the use of RSS circumnavigates some of the challenges of a ‘walled off’ Internet. In parallel reading alot again about blogging and how this represents a return a ‘smaller’, less corporate online world. A brief twitter exchange this week highlighted there are only two business models online - the unbundling of things, or the rebundling of things. A point further substantiated by the fact that Amazon Prime have announced this week that ads will appear for users as standard, unless they trade up (a move which places them in opposition to Netflix, for example). It’s also further evidence of ‘new thing in same as old thing shock’
Fascinated by the Open AI v New York Times lawsuit. Hypothesis: legal expertise will become a primary service provided by content and advertising businesses in the very near future. The use of AI and the way these models are trained is going to be a serious issue. That’s before you get into the issue of distribution and usage, neither of which are becoming any less complicated in the current media and talent landscape. The time to finish the blog post about what a new communications business and what it might look like could be now.
Currently sat writing this at my dining table. Have made a Cottage Pie with the remains of our boxing day Beef. This is simmering on the hob. Back to the Future 2 is on the TV.
I have lost track of which day exactly we’re on. Normal service will resume on the weeknote front w/e 14th January (unless I feel compelled to write another).
Happy New Year.
