Thom's Link Emporium - 20 February 2022

Links for the Week

• Enough with the hygiene theater. I want to take a shit without washing my hands

• I find Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a fascinating book. I read it at university and found it impenetrable, but there are a lot of books about it that describe it in semi-mystical terms. You’ve got to have a soft spot for a man who wrote a philosophy book that he thought solved philosophy so went to become a primary school teacher instead. This is a pretty good introduction to the Tractatus.

• Excellent insight into the experience of alcoholism and addiction

• What's wrong with bitcoin? The next in a serious of what crypto fans don’t seem to understand about crypto.

• A somewhat theologically technical theological view of the strange position we find ourselves of having two popes

• An unsolicited streaming app spec. John Siracusa is the master of things like this and there’s a lot to agree with on what a basic video streaming app should have. My particular bugbear is the atrocious Now TV app in the UK which fails on almost every point in this spec. You can’t even scrub through an episode, but instead have to fast-forward and rewind at various speeds to find the spot that it’s forgotten.

• On a similar note, Google Slides is Actually Hilarious. Almost all slide apps are infuriating to some degree, and I don’t find slides considerably worse than Powerpoint. Keynote is best, but hasn’t seen significant development in years. Which makes it all the more frustrating that slideshow apps appear to have become the default app for almost all documents in modern offices.

• Kind of Bloop - an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis's Kind of Blue

• When Jonny Greenwood joined the proto-Radiohead, On A Friday, he played keyboards but didn't know how so his keyboard volume down to nothing until he'd learned enough

Now Listening

• More on Euphoria later, but at the end of series one, Labrinth, who scores the show chose one of my favourite songs, A Song for You by Donny Hathaway and it’s just perfect. (Apple Music, Spotify)

• On another episode, they make use of Kelsey Lu’s cover of 10cc’s I’m Not In Love (KL: Apple Music, Spotify, 10cc: Apple Music, Spotify) which reminded me about this excellent clip from a documentary showing the astonishing lengths that 10cc went to to create the song:

Now Reading

• I’ve been working through all of Agatha Christie’s books over the last few years. There have been a few that weren’t much to speak of lately, but I’ve really been enjoying Towards Zero, which is the last of Superintendent Battle’s stories. He’s no Poirot or Marple, but I like him as a character and this story is engrossing.

Now Watching

• As mentioned above, I’ve really been enjoying Euphoria (HBO in the US, Now TV / Sky in the UK). It’s a bit like a high-budget Skins with actors who are already famous rather than likely to become so in a few years. It’s excellent and moving and Zendaya is brilliant.

• The Danish film, Flee, telling the true story of a refugee from Afghanistan is brilliant and gripping and rightly nominated for many awards. You can watch Flee on Curzon Home Cinema in the UK.

• Similarly, the The Real Charlie Chaplin is an excellent documentary on the filmmaker. It doesn’t shy away from his many teenage brides and other problematic areas whilst also giving a fair view into his position around the McCarthy trials. A great insight into a fascinating, if troubled, man. The Real Charlie Chaplin is also available on Curzon Home Cinema.

Quote

People nowadays think that the scientists are there to instruct them, the poets and musicians etc. to entertain them. That the latter have something to teach them never occurs to them.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in The Spiritual Dimension by John Cottingham