Last week I had Covid and it was pretty rough. My wife also had it and is suffering some long-term (likely permanent) harms. Is this how we’re going to live now? All getting covid every couple of years until we’re all suffering from long-covid?

I’ve not posted much recently. It’s not that I’ve not been writing, but the fear and doubt are back. I should try to be more consistent with these weekly updates at least, so I am at least keeping the blogging flame alive.

Anyway, I just broke up for the summer. All efforts are now on preparing the house and our lives for another baby arriving next month.

  • The Secret to Japan’s Great Cities. I have never been to Japan but it’s the probably the place I’d most like to visit. This fascinating video goes into how Japanese city planning differs from typical Western cities, while also looking at challenges faced by Japanese cities.
  • AI as Self-Erasure. Matthew Crawford on AI and language.
  • Tech has no answers for you. Jason Becker’s angry but entirely on-point post about a tech sector that exists only to exploit and extract, rather than solve any real problems.

Reading

I finished reading Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Great book. Get the 2012 re-translation if you can — earlier versions were heavily censored due to the prudishness of the Soviet state (which is kind of funny — we imagine political speech being censored, but this really was just them being offended by a bunch of characters swearing and drinking heavily).

Now I’m reading Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection for my fiction fix, while still plodding through This Life.

Listening

After watching Glastonbury on the BBC recently, I’ve been going back to a bunch of 00s bands, such as Bloc Party and Interpol.

Also, I’ve been enjoying the podcast If Books Could Kill, which dunks on non-fiction bestsellers.