theTangentSpace

Happenings

• We had to cut off a family whose son was nominally friends with my eldest, but actually has been pretty consistently mean to him, as well as being a bad influence on his behaviour thanks to “consequence-free” parenting. It came to a head on Sunday when our kid was pretty relentlessly bullied both physically and verbally by their kid, and the parents didn’t seem bothered (in fact, at one point the dad laughed at how upset ours was getting). A few empty threats to take him home, but overall no consequence. No apology was offered, and when we cancelled their future playdates, we were just told “he didn’t mean anything by it” when, well, obviously he did — the only bit he didn’t intend was any consequence coming of it.
• My eldest was shaken up by this through the week, and that knocked his confidence a bit at school (thankfully this other kid now goes to a different school). But he was brave enough to try Squirrels (the youngest branch of Scouting) this week, and he had a good time. He made an apple crumble, and everyone there was really nice to him. We’re hoping he keeps it up; it’ll do him good to have friends outside of school doing structured activities.
• My littlest has had diarrhoea all weekend. The joys…
• We switched away from the ethical bank Triodos. We love the concept and do think where you money goes is important… but, well, last year we were victims of an elaborate phishing scam — a site claiming to be the website of a legitimate brick-and-mortar shop, complete with a full, professional-looking catalogue of products and a fake customer service helpline (that we actually used!). The only issue was this real shop didn’t have a website — only a Facebook page, where we found comments from several other “customers” who had lost thousands of pounds to this scam. We found Triodos to be entirely unhelpful for fraud protection. For one, their fraud helpline was not 24/7. We had to wait until business hours to get help despite our panic we were about to lose all our money. Each time we were called we received conflicting information about how to proceed; we didn’t feel they were sympathetic or that interested; and once they finally started proceedings to recover our lost money, the next time we called there was apparently no record we’d even contacted them about this, much less any process in place to get the funds back, so we had to start again. This massively damaged our trust in this bank. So in the end, we switched to the most ethical “mainstream” option.
• Be the change you want to see in the world — teach your kid to type on an adorable ortholinear keyboard:
• My after-school maths club continues to go well. We’re done with matrices and their inverses. Tomorrow I’ll introduce sets and subsets.

Links

• I’m on pxlarea at (27, 27).
• PhilosophyTube is garbage, and here’s why. Clickbait title, but a completely fair critique. I used to be a pretty big PhilosophyTube fan, but this is pretty obviously deliberately misleading. I do think PhilTube went quite downhill once Abigail’s acting career took off; I haven’t watched any for a year or two now. Don’t trust influencers for your philosophy education, folks. At the least, trust “boring” academic channels^[1] more than “style-over-substance” channels like PhilTube. But mostly, read books. This guy has other critiques of other philosophy-related content creators, including catching Michael Burns engaging in plagiarism.

Playing

Still plodding along in Terranigma. I made it to Neotokio! This game is set on a kind of miniature, mythicised version of Earth, with vast historical epochs condensed into abstracted representations. The humans who are represented are so mainly via playful but respectful satires of their culture. Neotokio is this game’s version of Japan, and, well, let’s just say the developers had a lot of fun lampooning their own culture. I was laughing throughout my visit.

I also restarted Nier: Automata. I had it digitally on Switch and got so far, but I’m playing a physical copy on the PlayStation now. It’s awesome, I can’t remember why I stopped playing.

Reading

I’ve been reading The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin in between my Aristotle readings. It’s very interesting, I can’t wait to see where it goes.