theTangentSpace

Didn’t have the metaphorical bandwidth to post last week, but here we are again.

Happenings

• Met up with an old friend from Liverpool and his new (to me) partner. It was a lovely day; despite having barely spoken a word for years we got on very well and had plenty to chat about still.
• Bit of gardening in the sun.
• Mr One still not giving us the best sleep.
• Finally got the last parents’ evening of the year out of the way. It was the nice one, too — my best class, very short meetings (“your kid is excellent, have a nice evening!”).
• Had a fun chat with my sister (all around legend and avid reader of the Tangent Space), in which she sent me a sequence of men’s fashion photos to rate and discuss, to help me figure out what clothes I even like these days (I need to update my wardrobe a bit…).

Links

• Probably most readers here are now familiar with Bubbles, but the my IRL folks who read aren’t deep into the new old cool world of blogging and won’t have seen it yet. It’s a website that is a bit like Reddit except all the posts are automatically aggregated from thousands of small independent personal sites. You vote on the ones you like, and can comment. This is huge for blog discovery, I’m already finding plenty of posts I like.
• Swedish Library accidentally stayed open and everything was fine
• Budget friendly tech isn’t what it used to be. This post about what Apple nerds consider “budget” resonated with me because I was looking for a new bag this week and reading/watching lots of bag reviews. The EDC community^[1] is also significantly inflating the expectation of what a “budget” bag is — which seems to be anything below £150 (!). Also, the markup on adding a few more inches of fabric to get a roomier version of the same bag is insane (like £70 price difference sometimes).^[2] Anyway, I bought a “budget” bag on the second-hand market and still thought it was quite expensive.
• If you’ve been on Bubbles, you’ll already have seen Your Blog Is A Radio Station but it’s a good post in the “blogger blogs about why blogging is cool” genre.
• Why Does Everyone Think 1984 Agrees With Them?. Jacob Geller with another banger.

Playing

Still happily chugging along with Chrono Trigger. I got my first game over, which since it was against the game’s final boss (?) triggered one of the the game’s several endings — in this case, the bad one: “But… the future refused to change”.

I also managed to get what seems to be a reasonably playable version of Morrowind to work on my Miyoo Flip. This was pretty delightful, as I had to go into the loft to dig out the old Windows CD-Roms for the game, use an external optical drive plus the open source engine OpenMW to install the game on my laptop (I have done this before a few years ago on a previous Linux laptop), then copy the game files onto the SD card of my Miyoo Flip, which is also running OpenMW. Something about installing a CD-Rom I’d bought in the mid 00s onto a 2025 budget handheld the size of a GameBoy SP really pleased me. Also, Morrowind is one of my all time favourites.

A few weeks ago I linked to parseword and said I probably wouldn’t be playing it much. Actually, I got really into it. The clue quality is good, and I like that each clue has an Easter egg to uncover by highlighting a particular combination of words.

Reading

Slowly working my way through the last few pages of The Right To Oblivion. I’d like to post about this one, it’s been very interesting.