w/e 2024-04-07
Little worth reporting on.
We started the week by finishing moving the large pile of wet claggy earth to the other end of the garden, while the conditions became increasingly muddy. After digging and moving 41-wheelbarrows full it was a relief to wake up one morning and realise that no more earth needed moving.
§ I’m still managing to squeeze in a bit of client work around my other part-time job (watching TikTok); about 1½ days this week.
I also started on making some of the behind-the-scenes pages on ooh.directory nicer, so that it’s easier and more pleasant to do things like add more blogs. Django’s built-in admin screens are a huge benefit but for day-to-day use, or tasks that don’t map directly to database tables and rows, they can be a little cumbersome, and not super attractive.
I also spent about half a day working out why some of the fields in Django Admin on a couple of my sites had wonky layouts. Something changed in Django at some point which required an undocumented fix in my customisations, although one thing is still broken. Computers.
§ Some more TikToks I’ve liked that I don’t think I’ve previously mentioned (stars indicate my favourites of the lot):
weevil.scientist excited about going to the gym for the first time and how fun and not scary it was
Amy Mason on why she’s late ⭐️ and a large London theatre brainstorming how to plug a hole in the budget
retrosix on spending many days figuring out how to fix a Sega Mega Tech
mossyrockk singing about trying on a friend’s sports bra ⭐️ and parallel parking
hallielooyaa reviewing New York’s cookies (and everything else she does so dead-pan)
Twice this week I’ve seen TikToks from people I follow (Amy Mason and DK Dreamhouse) in which they’ve said how nice everyone’s been to them on there. Obviously, this is like how a few years back my Twitter bubble was delightful even while the place as a whole was laced through with terrible people (fewer than now, but still). But it’s nice to find that, despite everything, people are still able to get so much joyful interaction with strangers on the internet.
§ We started watching Renegade Nell on Disney+. I really enjoyed the first episode – it was fast and fun and silly and Louisa Harland from off of Derry Girls is really good as Nell. But after that it was like it didn’t have the energy to be more than a so-so kids’/young-adult show. Its supernatural stuff feels a bit bolted-on, like they felt a sassy 18th century highwaywoman wasn’t interesting enough without giving her occasional superpowers and having witchy/wizardy baddies. And the latter made me miss the darkness of Taboo or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. So I’ve given up on that.
We’ve watched one episode of This Town on BBC iPlayer and might go back to it if we get short of other things, but it didn’t grab us. I liked the idea but it was all a bit… distant? The set decoration always seemed so carefully constructed that nothing felt real unlike, say, This is England. It wasn’t over-the-top enough to be fantasy, but too “just right” and clean (even the grubby places) to be convincing.
Half-way through Ripley and without wishing to jinx it… so good so far.
§ There we go, padded it out with TikTok and TV, just like actual life.
Oh, one evening we did watch a sparrowhawk sit on and slowly kill a pigeon. It was just like one of those TikToks that goes on too long so you skip it before you get to the end.
