February 2025: What’s it like in New York City?
Happy February! At least in the UK, the days are getting longer and milder. I left work in full sunlight today, and I don’t need to wear a scarf outdoors any more. It’s much warmer than where I was a fortnight ago – I spent a week in New York, and it was coooooold.
I was in the US to see the opening preview of Operation Mincemeat with a group of friends. We all met through our love of the show, and I’m glad that we could all celebrate as it takes the next big step. We had fun seeing the original cast again, and witnessing its Broadway glow up! It was nice to be there, and even nicer to be there together.
Mincemeat wasn’t our only New York adventure. We saw some stunning views from the Brooklyn Bridge and the High Line; I ate a lot of delicious Italian food; the Transit Museum was fun while the 9/11 Memorial was sobering. I met some lovely New Yorkers at two events at queer-friendly bookshops, and I popped into several public libraries. Oh, and I finally get why people like bagels so much. (My prior experience was UK supermarket bagels, which are a pale imitation of what New York has to offer.)
I’ve never been a big fan of big cities, but I can see the charm of New York, and why so many people like it. I’m in no rush to go back, but I’m so glad I went.
After that trip, I’ve been enjoying a quieter February, though I’m preparing for my next event: Monki Gras at the end of March. This is my fourth time attending the conference (and third time speaking), and it’s always a fun and fascinating few days. This year’s topic is “sustaining software development”, which I’m especially interested in because I almost made sustainability my yearly theme.
The rest of the month has been fairly calm, focusing on work and some home improvement projects. I’m trying to sort out my LEGO collection and craft supplies, which have become a completely disorganised mess while I’ve been focusing on other parts of my life. Sometimes it feels like home organisation is a sliding tile puzzle – if you clean up one thing, another thing falls into chaos while you weren’t looking. And isn’t that true of so many things?
What have I been writing?
Seven articles – my busiest month in a long time!
It’s cool to care is about my trip to New York, and how caring deeply – about art, my friends, and shared experiences – has brought me so much joy. It’s a more emotional and squishy piece than I usually write, and I’m really proud of it. If you only read one thing I wrote this month, please read this.
How I create static websites for tiny archives is the complete opposite, a code-heavy post about the websites that live on my home computer. When I wrote about using static websites for tiny archives last year, the most common question was people asking for code, and now I have something to point to.
Unexpected errors in the BagIt area is another technical post, describing some of the work I did on digital preservation at Wellcome Collection. BagIt is a common packaging format for files in digital archives, and I wrote about all the ways you might want to check a bag contains valid data.
I wrote adding auto-generated cover images to EPUBs downloaded from AO3 for a friend at the start of the month, a small tool to help manage her fanfiction collection. Later I wrote making inventory spreadsheets for my LEGO sets for myself, as I sort through my LEGO collection.
Finally, I wrote two articles about the blog itself: good embedded toots describes my sans-JavaScript, lightweight approach to embedding Mastodon posts, while cosmetic updates to this site describes a few visual tidies and improvements.
I also wrote a batch of “today I learned” posts:
Bitly will delete your account if you don't use it for three years
What does Flickr return in the flickr.photo.getSizes API for videos?
The British Forces Post Office (BFPO) and the Loamshire Regiment
What’s making me smile?
🪴 The other musical I saw on Broadway was Maybe Happy Ending, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen. It’s a delightful South Korean musical about two robots who develop a relationship, fall in love, and have to grapple with the pain of loss and death. It feels like a Pixar movie brought to life on stage. It’s a simple story, but deeply moving.
🏥 I was inspired by Erin Kissane’s talk at XOXO, about how we build and maintain networks that allow us to find our people and support each other. It draws on her work on the Covid Tracking Project, discusses the decline of corporate-owned social media networks, and explains why we need to build better networks.
📸 Esther Schindler’s article about creating family photos that people want to keep struck a chord with me. As I went through my own photos last year, it was the pictures of friends and family that stood out to me, not the generic snaps that anyone could have taken. I found myself nodding along with a lot of her thoughts.
🦎 I’ve long been a fan of Off Book, a podcast where Jess McKenna and Zach Reino improvise musicals. Writing a musical is daunting enough, but making one up on the spot? Incredible. I’ve been listening to their latest episode Focus on Now on repeat, because “We only know 1% of the cool shit we can do” is an absolute banger.
Looking back, this month has been all about connection and joy – finding it, celebrating it, and holding onto it. I hope we can all find the same in March.
Speak soon,
~ Alex