w/e 2022-09-11
I’ve been home alone all week while Mary’s been in London, and have another ten days of it, as she’s now trekking in Northern Spain for another fortnight. Consequently, I’ve been trying to keep busy – mostly typing into the computer – so as not to let my mind wander. We don’t want another, “I wonder if I can learn to scythe?” incident.
As well as a dash of work I’ve continued to tinker with $new_project and setting up a VPS for hosting it. The latter has been both interesting and frustrating. It’s nice to poke around at something that’s relatively new to me, and get things working. But I’m still constantly attempting to piece together best practices from various conflicting blog posts and Stack Exchange answers.
As ever there are several ways to configure and set up everything, with me trying to work out which blogger or answerer actually knows what they’re talking about. What I really need is a book titled Best Practices for Setting Up A VPS To Serve A Django Website In Production Using All Of The Modules, Libraries And Tools That Phil Needs.
I’m never sure that what I’m doing is “right”, and it’s hard to know where to ask questions that are a bit more conceptual, as opposed to specific ones about configuration. The proliferation of spammy websites in Google search results that have scraped Stack Overflow and GitHub does not help.
And, being used to Heroku, I miss having a nice web interface with graphs and buttons, which feels comforting, a demonstration that things have been running OK.
I would probably be a bit stressed about it if I was tinkering with the server of an existing, running website but given no one cares if I break this it’s fine. So far.
§ “Where were you when the Queen died?”
“I was on Slack.”
On the one hand I’m fascinated by seeing processes that have been in place for decades or centuries going into motion to ensure stability and continuity.
On the other wouldn’t it be nice to live in a proper democracy?
§ I watched the third and final season of Ladhood this week, which continued to be fun and sometimes bleak. The conceit – an increasingly sad and bitter early-30s Liam looking back on his late-teens self screwing things up – could have been bleaker still though. At least an early-30s Liam wondering “is this it?” has plenty of time to change things, whereas a Liam two or three decades older would have shifted to wondering “was that it?”
I also watched two movies I’d never heard of on Mubi, solely because they starred Adèle Haenel which, as good as she is, was probably not the best guarantor of a good film.
The Trouble With You / En Liberté! (2018, Pierre Salvadori) was the weirdest mix of tones I’ve seen, kind of a quirky romcom – with the comedy of that slightly odd French kind – with quite a bit of surprisingly graphic violence.
Deerskin / Le Daim (2019, Quentin Dupieux) was also quirky, and sometimes graphically violent, but was at least consistent in its strange tone.
§ That is all.