September 2024: Brass bands and Belgium
Hello! I hope you’ve had a wonderful September. Autumn has arrived in the UK – there’s a chill in the air, and the leaves are turning a lovely shade of golden-brown. I’m about to break out my jumpers and scarves, and I can’t wait to enjoy the cosy vibes.
This newsletter is still very quiet – I’ve mentioned it to a few people, but I haven’t shared the link yet. I plan to start sharing it more in October.
I had a busy September!
I got to see my sister Coco rehearse for a brass band competition. She’s a percussionist for Flowers Band, who are based in Gloucester – several hours drive from me. I don’t get to see her play as often as I like, so it was lovely to see her play at an open rehearsal – the band were preparing for the British Open. It was even lovelier when the band came second place in the competition, and I get to be a proud older sibling.
I went to iPres in Belgium. This is a conference about digital preservation that’s been on my radar for years, and I was glad to finally go. I was running a session with my colleague Tori about Data Lifeboat and social media archiving, and we came away with a lot to think about. Expect to see a more in-depth account on the Flickr Foundation blog soon.
I wrote about digital decluttering. For too long I’ve been a digital hoarder and saved everything, just because I can. I was treating storage as limitless, but that’s not a sustainable approach. I’m trying to be more selective about the data I keep, and just hold on to the stuff I’ll want to look at again. This is something I’ve been thinking about for months, and I’m glad to start writing some of these thoughts down.
I wrote a couple of smaller posts as well:
- Going between Finder and the Terminal – a few handy shell scripts
- Drawing a better bandwidth graph for Netlify – so I can see if I’m likely to exceed my bandwidth allowance
- A curious case of a Python value that looks like
None, but isn’tNone - I learnt that I can use
$_to get the last argument to the previous bash command, which is useful for chaining commands
I’ve been tinkering with animated WebP images. I encountered my first example of an animated WebP recently, which is when I learnt that this is a thing. It doesn’t seem to be particularly widespread yet, and it seems to have patchy support in open-source image libraries – but there’s enough that I could add support for animated WebP in dominant_colours.
I’ve also been redesigning my site’s navigation. I’ve long felt that showing a list of posts sorted by date is a poor fit for my writing – it puts a lot of emphasis on the most recent thing I’ve written, which isn’t necessarily what I want. I’ve made some changes to put more focus on navigating by topic, not by date. I’m not done yet, but I feel like I’m moving in the right direction.
What’s made me smile?
🎭 Why Am I So Single? at the Garrick Theatre. This is silly and exuberant and about fifteen minutes longer than it needs to be, but I had so much fun. It’s a heartfelt conversation between two friends about the struggles of modern dating, mixed with jokes and songs.
I went in cold, so it was a complete surprise when I got to see a non-binary lead character in a West End musical, played by a non-binary actor. And they made funny, relatable jokes about being non-binary! I’m not sure I ever expected to see this, and I cried a lot of happy tears.
📔 Sheine Lende, by Darcie Little Badger. Shane is a Lipan Apache with the power to summon animal ghosts, and she helps her mother look for people who’ve gone missing. When two children and her mother vanish through malignant fairy rings, Shane must lead the search – on both Earth and the realms beyond.
Darcie Little Badger does absolutely gorgeous worldbuilding, and this is no exception. It’s the prequel to her debut novel Elatsoe (which I read last year), but it works as a standalone novel.
🎶 I Do This All The Time, by Self Esteem. This song played at the end of Conversations We Never Had, which I saw the Edinburgh Fringe, and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. It’s a beautiful and poignant song which packs an emotional punch.
📗 Before We Forget Kindness, by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. There’s a café where you can travel in time – but there are rules. You can only time travel for a few minutes, you can only see people who’ve visited the café, and nothing you do will affect the future or the past.
We meet four people who travel back or forwards in time – like a child who goes back to see his parents before they were divorced, and a daughter who wants a final conversation with her estranged father. This series is always an emotional read, and I cried several times. I’m impressed by how Kawaguchi keeps finding different stories to tell within these rules.
✍️ To Forget is an Ethical Act, by Emily Gorcenski. She went back and reviewed all her tweets, deciding what to keep and what to purge. I thought this was a fascinating exercise in conscientious archiving, and reflecting on what our digital legacy might be. It matched a lot of the themes I took away from iPres.
So far next month is looking like a quieter one. It’s been an unusually busy summer, so I’m looking forward to some time to relax and spend more time with my friends.
I hope October is kind to you,
~ Alex