Weeknotes 1566

Weeknotes

• The camera arrived, and it's perfect: small and light and extremely portable. The pictures I've taken so far have come out looking nice :)  In the latest Memhaz Josef and I kinda talked ourselves around to believing multi-purpose devices are bad, which I think might've been a bit strong, but I really really like having a little thing that's Just A Camera.
• MISSION ended—it's not necessarily the "real end" as most of the gang will be sticking around at the coworking space and I'll be popping in from time to time, but definitely the end of an (6-month) era :(  It's been a great time!
• We're on session 4 of our new D&D campaign and I'm having a hard time actually role-playing—my character in our last campaign was a bit of a "let's just get on with it" kinda thing. I think my problem is less thinking what my character might do than it is acting what my character might do if it's sufficiently different from what I might do. I'm not good at being intentionally rude, even In The Game.
• Went back to the gym on Monday for the first time since my heart issues and my legs ached for the rest of the week. I felt OK though; it's good to be back.
• Went to London for the TUC AI conf, met some union bods I've only ever spoken to online before, which was smashing.
• First FUB back in a while, we were talking about Rousseau and it's really wild how once you go deep on one philosopher (Hegel at the moment in my case) you start "getting" a lot more of the material from the folk who are one or two up or down the "chain" from them. Rousseau's "general will" feels a bit "world-spirit"-y.
• My uni friend group used to have a fortnightly get-together in the off weeks between the fighting game night we all went to. People moved, things changed,  we all drifted away, and I realised this year that I missed it, so I suggested that we do the same thing again (with less emphasis on the fighting games). We had our third one this week and it's been really great! It's so nice having a low-intensity chill evening where you can just chat with pals.  
• My eczema's been flaring for a while now and I've been looking for things that might chill it out a bit while waiting for it to un-flare. One thing I didn't really think until I was googing around for eczema sufferers QOL improvements but has turned out really well: making sure you have non-irritating sheets. Mine were polyester, which is dreadful, but I've switched them out for some cotton ones (Homesense is your friend here!) and it's a massive improvement. (The other thing I'm trying to cutting down the sugar in my diet but I feel like I'm always doing that so it's not really worth mentioning.)

Reading

• The History Of Masculinity book is dragging a bit ngl but I'm getting there.
• After someone asked me whether I happened to have an epub of a particular Stafford Beer book (I feel like people asking me things like that means I have the right kind of reputation) I'm back on the cybernetics. I'm going to try and make my way through The Brain Of The Firm along with the General Intellect Unit reading series, which was honestly the point where I fell off listening to the podcast about three years ago! Also reading some secondary texts—Cybernetic Revolutionaries and The Cybernetic Brain (lots of brain chat here, very funny).
• I realised we have a copy of Bad Blood (the Theranos book) on the shelf which I don't remember buying and have been meaning to read for a while, so I started that. It is pretty much the perfect narrative non-fiction book of this kind; I can't wait until the FT lad does one of these about Wirecard.

Watching

• I finished Mando S3 because... well, honestly I'm still bad at choosing not tp finish things I've started, however little I'm enjoying them. The episode itself was pretty eh, but I'm honestly happy with the state of things at the ending: Mando and Baby Yoda are going to have more adventures, but they've got their little hut to chill in, and the main villain who's been hanging around from the first series has been defeated, all his cloning nonsense has been undone. That's a nice point to stop on.

Listening

• gonna be real I have chiefly been listening to this, it's been stuck in my head all week:

keep it real folks! over and out