theTangentSpace

A little look over the penultimate week of my summer break.

Happenings

• Bat! In my bedroom. With a follow-up here. So yeah, I was lying in bed, it was raining outside, and the window I heard a flapping. Assumed it was one of the birds nesting in the tree by my window getting bothered by the rain. Then I heard a flapping by my ear… We shut it in the room and went to sleep downstairs hoping it would find its own way out the window. The next day we found a bunch of droppings and eventually found it in the curtain. I popped a bowl over it and released it out the window.
• I went out with my parents and sister for a particularly significant anniversary of my parents. It was a bit strange to just be us with no kids or partners! It was only a small thing; we sat in the terrace of a pub for a bit and chatted.
• We bought school uniform for my little boy. Feels like a big milestone!
• Saw the Odyssey movie. Really enjoyed it. I do have a bunch of disorganised thought about it as an adapation overall, but the way the scenes were imagined were pretty awesome. Big ticks for the wooden horse, Polyphemus, Circe, and Hades. Not so much the sirens, who weren’t that impressive, and the whirlpool of Charybdis was a bit small.

Reading

Book 4 of Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle. This chapter examines having the right attitude to wealth and money, anger, appropriate humour, and very interestingly “greatness of soul” (megalopsychia), which we don’t really have as a concept, but it essentially means you’re worthy of honour and you know it. You can’t be unworthy of honour but think you are — that’s vanity. And you can’t be worthy of honour but think you’re not — that’s overly humble. And if you’re not particularly worthy of honour and you know it, that’s appropriate modesty, but not greatness of soul. To be great-souled, you have to think you’re “all that”, and actually be “all that”.

This strikes me as quite different to Christian ethics, in which being very humble even if you’re really a very impressive person is a virtue; or the modern liberal ethic in which we’re generally considered all to be equally worthy of honour. To Aristotle, however, this is a hugely important thing, enough to be the longest chapter of Book 4 and one of the longest chapters of the whole text thus far. Definitely one to think on: is great-souledness really just another kind of vanity, or is there really something commendable about it? Is there any modern figure you’d consider great-souled who might impress Aristotle?

Playing

I’ve reached chapter 3 of Terranigma. I can’t really go into it due to spoilers, but man, it’s so fascinating.

Also, I got together with my sister for a bit of retro gaming this week — more on that in an upcoming post.

On this site

I’ve been looking into implementing more “IndieWeb”^[1] features on the site.

I added some microformats. This is essentially just a little extra labelling of content in the html code. It will make zero difference to human readers of this site,^[2] but it does mean that other apps that might want to parse my site (for example, read-it-later apps or social media link preview generators) will have an easier time identifying the different parts of a post such as the title and date of publication.

Next I’ll (attempt to) implement WebMentions, for more cross-blog interactivity, and then use bridgy or bridgy-fed (or maybe both!) to allow commenting on my posts via the Fediverse as well as in the box down there.