Status:

Had a couple of friends over last night to watch the football, which was nice but also the first time, in my 54 years, I’ve ever had someone over to watch the football, so it was a little odd. I wasn’t sure if we should be catching up or attentively watching the little men run around. Match was fun, and I confess to some schadenfreude at the eejits in their crusades cosplay at the end looking all sad. Fuck those guys. Learn your history.

Today I took some portrait photos for my bro-in-law who needs to update his CV. We had a highly amusing discussion about what he should wear and what kind of background, me knowing nothing and him knowing only a little more than nothing about what might go down well. In the end we went for what he wears to meetings. The pics came out really nicely, which was a relief, and might even be good enough, although we’re probably going to have another go now he’s got a baseline. In the old days we’d have spent a while going back and forth but I could only manage 20 minutes. Still, I managed 20 minutes!

Two social interactions within 24 hours. Definitely having this evening to myself…

Reading:

• The Dacre dynasty: how Britain’s rightwing press was radicalised — A dare-I-say essential read for anyone wondering why so many newspapers have gone batshit crazy over the last decade or so. If I had a pantheon on villains Paul Dacre would be high up there.
• What on earth is “QuickTime”? — An article about accumulated debt in a software that also has a nice history of the Mac’s QuickTime player. I got a key for QuickTime Pro around 2003 from a friend who worked in The Movies which I treasured until it was finally discontinued as it was the quickest way to turn a movie into images (and then I discovered ffmpeg).
• John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage — Nice interview focussing on the releases of Hairspray and Desperate Living.
• Clown Logic: The Crow nears 40 — leaving aside the clunky headline (‘The Crow at 37, or 33 if you’re talking about the collection’) this is a reassessment of James O’Barr’s goth classic which, despite it’s legacy, is really not a very good comic. But it resonated. Boy did it resonate. And this is a nice look at why that was.

Installing:

• WhatCable — Given that a UBS-C cable can be any number of things from a dumb charging cable to a high-speed data conduit, it always seems strange that macOS doesn’t have a utility to tell you what you’ve plugged in. This attempts to do that. Still a bit more limited than a dedicated device but better than nothing!