Saturday 10th September, 2022 - Death of the Queen

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Sep 10, 2022

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

I’ve been a bit surprised by how the queen’s death has affected me. I wrote a few notes right after I found out, which was actually quite a nice moment, and I didn’t feel all that bad. It’s the remembering throughout the day that causes the emotions and water works to get into gear, accompanied with the weight of history and all these important things.

Then I remember the most important thing which is that none the of that really matters, and you get on with your day and the sadness passes, almost immediately.

I’ve included below two lists from this week’s notes, very lightly edited. I’m not feeling like doing a whole lot of analysis this week.

There’s also some great podcasts, and a list of links, though I haven’t been able to read many of these, due to the Reading List feature of Safari deleting things I add, no matter how many times I resave them. Anyhow the ones with ???? are there based on the title alone.

Death of the Queen

I read about it this morning while checking email outside a cafe. I first read Richard III as I scrolled and thought the BBC was doing some sort of history special. Then the picture of the queen entered the screen, surrounding page much blacker than usual, time appeared to slow down slightly, and the thought dawned on me. Oh. The breeze on my face, the sun recently risen. It was a sort of light moment, peaceful, extended, you are there, and things are happening around you. After it passes you slow down your movement and thoughts and just observe everything around you happening all at once. She’s died.
I would have loved to sit down with her and have a chat, so many things that I would have asked her
"No institution, city, monarchy, whatever, should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don't. But we are all part of the same fabric of our national society and that scrutiny can be just as effective if it is made with a measure of gentleness, good humour and understanding.”
You gets bits and pieces here and there over your lifetime, and eventually there is a Queen with many sides, and I feel like I’m saying goodbye to all of these

The future of the future

We are all in a book club, excitedly reading the same book at the same pace, at least that’s what we’ve been told or led to believe. And it’s fun some of the times, and other times not so much, but we like the book club vibe
As time goes on you start to realise that some people are at different places in the book
The quartet that plays in the background are having some difficulties with their instruments, strings are detuning and snapping occasionally, but we continue on all the same, it’s ok, we’ll work it out
So we continue, and it’s fine for a bit, but then it turns out that some other people have been swapping out sections of the books at random when we weren’t looking
So now we’re not all reading at the same pace, and on top of that we aren’t even reading the same pages a lot of the time
But we press on regardless, and miraculously, a lot of the time it doesn’t actually matter all that much
But you have this feeling in the back of your stomach like the rollercoaster is going to come off the tracks at some point, or maybe you’ll mistakenly end up going off in the wrong route and get stuck in a service tunnel, with no one aware that you disappeared
And so people are living their lives and writing books and standing on pullpits shouting about thisism or thatism, and it’s all very energetic, but they have forgotten about the time dilated books with the pages swapped out, and life goes on regardless
Except now it’s the future, and our books have AIs in them, and their ability to time dialate and page swap is so mindbogglingly large that we can’t even really comprehend it anymore
And you get these moments where you are able to see it all happening, maybe through meditation, or drugs, or a life changing event, you get popped out of the system, and momentarily you can see the insanity of it all
You realise that you are like a fish out of water, looking back at the place it grew up in, and you are floping around
And it’s only getting more like that as time progresses
Pretty soon the AIs are able to identify areas of the solution space that we would never have been able to know were possible, much less locate
Then they create the story to take us there
Our stories intersect just long enough to exchange vital information and limit the possibility of an illusion break
Illusion breaks can get expensive to cleanup #aiproblems
I have to interrupt this rambling to inform you that based only on audio going through my ears and into my over active imagination, that Sam Pay from the Song by Song Podcast quite possibly is a young Dominic Sandbrook from the Rest is History Podcast. There I’ve said it.
As I’ve been learning recently changing bandages isn’t always straight forward, ripping bandaids off is all very well and good but sometimes it’s just too damn painful so you have to do it in the middle of a seemingly unrelated ramble

Ssg development

This week’s been a bit of a wash out because suddenly for no apparent reason all my deploys from all my projects started failing, and I’ve been totally blocked. Quite a spanner when it’s already so darn difficult even to just read blog posts offline.

Turns out there’s some node version issue with the Netlify github action:

https://answers.netlify.com/t/github-action-failing-at-build-netlify-cli-with-node-version/74772/20

When it rains…

Podcasts

Bitcoin Review: Bitcoin Hardware Wallets Review (Citadel Dispatch Podcast) - I’m still confused by all the stuff available, I wish there was some really simple way, like saving your wallet to a SIM card, but I’m guessing that would be insecure https://anchor.fm/citadeldispatch/episodes/Bitcoin-Review-E5-Bitcoin-Hardware-Wallets-Roundtable-e1n8idb
Portugal: On the Edge of the World Ep #227 (The Rest is History Podcast) - This mini series is just superb, I didn’t know much about Portugal, I’ve never been, but there’s a really interesting history there, with daring exploration, trading with distant lands around the globe and even what is probably the largest international relocation ever, so much box packing tape https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/227-portugal-on-the-edge-of-the-world
J.R.R. Tolkien Ep #255 (The Rest is History Podcast) - Another mini series that I enjoyed muchly, I never really got into the books in my youth, I tried reading the hobbit, but not having grown up with British history around me, my brain just wasn’t interested in all these weird sounding characters, later in life I got to work on the Lord of the Rings films, and that was amazing, anyhow Tom and Dom really bring the whole thing to life painting a marvellous picture of the entire history, in some ways I think I preferred learning about it this way than by reading the books https://shows.acast.com/the-rest-is-history-podcast/episodes/225-j-r-r-tolkien
Mobile Databases, GDPR Fun, and Heroku Shuts Down Free Plan (Shop Talk Show Podcast) - There’s an interesting discussion about the Heroku massacre, I’ve been pretty cold on Heroku since they started asking strange discriminatory questions on login, happened during the pandemic lockdown, I’ll have to figure out how to move my site, looks like I’m building my own raft yet again https://shoptalkshow.com/531
TV after Software (Another Podcast Podcast) - The analysis of the current state of software/tech across entertainment and creative industries is really very enlightening, if you regularly listen to their episodes then this is a must listen, it really helped me view things in a new way https://another-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/tv-after-software-N5v7Imzi

Links

Obituary: Queen Elizabeth II https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61605149
HN Thread: Queen Elizabeth II has died https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32768834
One kitchen, hundreds of internet restaurants - The shape of the bar chart in this article reminded me a lot about how I feel about certain music compositions, which makes me very suspicious about said compositions, but also, I really like those friggin compositions!, shit #ihateeverything