Thinking I should catch up with Biffy Clyro albums after catching up with Biffy on the latest Jools series. Starting back at the start and Joy.Discovery.Invention is such a killer start.
The new laptop is working out well – I had some troubles trying to restore a “full” backup from my old machine, and then realised there were some root-owned files that hadn’t been backed up anyway, so ended up buying a new SSD drive and using rsync to transfer everything. Rsync is my tool of 2025, and probably 2026.
Issues with transferring to a new device have been pretty minimal:
- An issue with the keyboard not kicking back in properly after wake-up was fixed with a quick email to Juno support, and an
apt upgrade. - An issue with the Windows key not working was fixed with an email to support, and me pressing Fn-F2 to unlock it. No idea what that function key is supposed to be for.
- Flywheel Local sites seem slightly borked, but this might be the version of Local I’m running. Some internet searching helped anyway.
Other than that, I’m slowly reinstalling software needed, making sure to use the same source where possible (apt / flatpak / snap) to make sure the same config files get re-used. Smooth.
New shoes, bright and rigid. As the wind bellows down, their fresh, dark treads bite against the spotty pavement and I feel strong in my core. Remembering my tai chi; direction comes from above the head, hanging like a jellyfish. Action is propelled from beneath the earth, a volcano erupting into the body.
One day I will write about Autumn, but January is a busy month. I find myself project managing across timezones, and while I’ve worked with Australian and American clients in one day before, I’ve not had to coordinate across 4 timezones concurrently, on a deadline of just a few weeks.
I’m focusing a lot, sprawled out among a chaos of documents, systems, and unknowns. It’s going ok. I think. We’ll find out in a few days, but for now, it’s strangely exhilarating to be using less technical skills that I haven’t employed in a few years.
I’m nearing the final volume of Jason Aaron’s Scalped series of graphic novels. The writing is so good – I read the first two years ago and so very nearly gave them away, but instead opted to ship the whole series in from the US. Everything is dangerous, gritty, yet also sympathetic. There are devils everywhere, but the true devil – colonialism and exploitation – lurks outside of the books’ covers, bleeding into the same themes driving the news still.
Migration also seems to be a theme across other media recently. I watched Godland on iPlayer in December, a sallow-paced landscape of a film about a Danish missionary priest finding himself in the wilds.of Iceland. It is at a reserved film, yet the drawn-out, underspoken scenes let their patience do the storytelling.
In that sense, it is similar to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, another film that deals with man being in places uninvited. Having watched it last year, I went back to the source and read Roadside Picnic. I was glad it was quite, quite different to the film – like two parallel tales running alongside each other. Like a lot of good sci-fi (The Left Hand of Darkness, Do.Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and so on) it can be hard to summarise into whether the story was “good” or “bad”. Their effects sink into your mind during the reading, and you’re never quite sure what future event will provoke a reaction from it that was unrealised at the time.
And to round the circle off, I am enjoying playing ARC raiders a fair bit recently. For a game all about the adrenaline of playing hide-and-seek against giant robots, it can be a strangely relaxing experience where the moments of hectic running and firing and bathed in an ambience of lonely exploration. Breath of the Wild meets Minecraft in an Electric State world, perhaps.
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