w/e 2021-05-16
My back is nearly better and I’ve been easing myself back in to some gentle exercise. I even went up a ladder to clean out a gutter.
§ I’ve made bread a few times recently, using this recipe for No Knead Whole Wheat Bread. It’s easy and there are few steps. I put the water in the microwave for a few seconds to get it to room temperature, and I use a big Pyrex bowl with a lid rather than a Dutch oven. Tasty bread, crusty crust, soft insides, little work.
§ I’ve spent a lot of time this week reading blogs, newsletters, tweets and chat about memes and cryptocurrency nonsense and Twitter outrages and that kind of thing. I’m not sure there’s a good reason other than it’s entertaining. It’s not like I’m going to have conversations with friends in the offline world about any of this. It’s just a load of gradually cooling takes sitting in my head now, untouched.
Is it useless knowledge? Little, if any of it, affects my day-to-day life or is useful in any professional capacity. I guess you could say the same about a lot of “real” news. For example, knowing that there’s a coup in Myanmar doesn’t affect my day-to-day life either but I feel like I’m supposed to have at least a vague awareness of that kind of thing.
This is even assuming I remember any of it. I know this week’s Main Character was the guy I’ve never heard of who got fired from Apple for being a very public misogynist but I’m pretty sure there was a different Main Character the previous week and I can’t remember who that was at all.
In the meantime, while I stare into the iPad, the ever-filling shelves of unread books and magazines glare at me and the stangant “to do” list tuts quietly in my direction.
§ Since I wrote the above I’ve read this edition of Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter which grapples with a similar thing longer, and better, than I have.
So when I say I’m thinking a lot about cryptocurrency, what I really mean is that I’m thinking a lot about absurdity. I’m thinking about the way that groups of people who are good at harnessing attention are giddily, proudly using that power to drag absurdist memes/currencies/fortunes into mainstream discourse and force the rest of us to care about/debate/or at least know about it all. Personally, it scrambles my brain.
It also quotes bits of Matt Levine’s Money Stuff that I’d thought about quoting for their entertainingly giddy despair about all this, then forgotten about, so win-win.
§ We watched the third season of Better Call Saul and it continues to be fun. It’s not gripping (oddly Jimmy’s arc is the least interesting) and I feel like I’m waiting for Jimmy and Mike to team up properly, and I wonder where Kim ultimately fits in. I guess this is a difficulty with prequels: the audience already having some image of an end in mind. But, still, fun.
§ That’s about it.