Oh gosh I've missed two weeknotes in a row. In fairness to me, there has been a lot going on -- much of which I can't talk about yet (but should be able to next week), and we have also been away for two weekends in a row, in London and Manchester.
Last weekend's trip to Manchester was a lot of fun and reminds me two things: I miss living in the north; and I love hanging out with gay men. We went up to see Brenda, who was Kim's mum's best friend and who we have stayed in touch with. Brenda was at the coronation of the late queen, and is a treasure house of memories as well as being a lovely, delightful person to be around.
After leaving Brenda's house on Saturday we decided to stop off in Manchester's gay village to have a look (I haven't been there for a couple of decades, and Kim never has) and a quick pint. We ended up of course chatting to a lovely bunch of young boys (they were all in their early 20s so very much boys to me), and a very very drunk and emotional girl, plus a couple of older men in television. Five pints and a jelly shot (bought by one of the boys) later we broke my "no Uber" rule because we were too drunk to work out how to get back to our hotel on the tram.
Related: I fucking love trams.
I also just love Manchester, a city on the scale of London but without the feeling which I get from the capital of things having been closed down, unavailable unless you have vast amounts of money or are a property developer. It feels good. I get the same feeling from Bristol too.
Meanwhile next week I'm off to Arvon up near Hebdon Bridge for a week's writing, which I'm looking forward to immensely. I've been an absolute slacker with my my writing lately, so this is an opportunity to pick up the practice again. And this time, I'm pretty sure I'll maintain it.
Things I have been writing
I wrote a post responding to a few articles on the pre-emptive work underway to block Meta's purported new ActivityPub-based platform which may or may not be called Threads. Threads, of course, was also the name of the Instagram messaging service which it shut down a couple of years ago, proving that big companies really have no imagination.
The post blew up a bit thanks to being linked to on Daring Fireball -- it's almost like old-school blogging where someone would write something and you would create a long, considered response never went away.
I'm also going to write something responding to Bloon's post on how the "Twitter migration" to Mastodon failed. I don't think it did, and I think that Bloon is looking at it from a very particular perspective which isn't representative of the kinds of users for whom moving away from Twitter was a matter of safety rather than entertainment.
Things I have been reading
Since I last wrote I have finished off two books: Fumio Sasaki's "Goodbye Things" and China Mieville's first novel "King Rat" (not to be confused with the James Clavell novel of the same name).
Sasaki's book is good but really if you're interested in minimalism as a practice I wouldn't start here -- there are better books out there. I enjoyed reading it, especially for the rationale he provides for his choices and as a piece of highly-Japanese writing.
Mieville's book is an interesting one, both because it shows his style coming into existence and as a slice of writing which is very much of its time. It's set against a background of the drum and bass/jungle community in the late 1990s and it very much reminds me of my dear, lost friend Cherie who was very much part of that scene. I never quite got it but my orbit back then occasionally took me into the world of jungle. I never really got it, but I liked the people I met.
