Issue 6 - planning, t-shirts, laptops
A possibly weekly email about what's been going on in my brain
25 - 31 December 2022
It was Christmas, a time of shut shops and strangers talking to you on the street, and then Betwixtmas where time has no meaning, and now it is almost the new year. I could look back on the year just passed buuuut it's only 36 days until my holiday so looking forward is more fun.
(that was what I tried to send last week, this week has been grey and dreary so no recent photos)
Holiday planning
When I tell people I've been holiday planning there is often some confusion, as if you've spoken to me for more than five minutes I've no doubt already told you that things are booked and paid up and now I just need to go. What more could I possibly be planning?
Where I'm going, when, and how, has been lockded in for over a year now and (so my travel agent tells me) all booked. The easiest way to explain it then would be "the minutiae of each day". Specifically where each meal is likely to come from, options for sightseeing, travel times, alternate routes, costs, and more. I can imagine for some that level of detail would rob the adventure of its spontaneity, but for me, reducing the decision cost of each day lets me enjoy myself more. Especially for things that disproportionately vex me, like food choices: breakfast is usually provided for by accommodation, excellent, lunch though... and dinner, I should go out right? I'm in Japan! The food choices will be endless. Thus the spiral starts and I get an unhealthy dose of FOMO along with the social friction of eating alone and the risk that the food will just be bad. Laying out the possibilities beforehand, researching whether it's likely they'll have an English menu, checking reviews, all mean on the day I'll, in theory, have a suite of options to choose from, while also being able to go off-book if I'm feeling particularly fortified.
It's laborious but should pay dividends later, and critically it connects me to my itinerary, making it less abstract, reassuring me that I have A Plan tm which for me is a surefire way of removing stress. Whether that plan comes to fruition is, well, part of the adventure.
T-shirts
Part of my holiday preparation has been to get new t-shirts which really shouldn't have taken this long or this much mental bandwidth. I'm sure everyone has something that they endlessly search for better variants of; for me that was camera bags (until I got the Wandrd Prvke which is damn near perfect) and t-shirts (oh and underwear but that's not a story for this newsletter). My go-to was Uniqlo's Supima Cotton however they've been out of stock for months now, forcing me to look elsewhere. "Supima" it turns out is just a type of cotton and other sellers (John Lewis et. al.) charge a hefty premium for it. Unwilling to spend that much per garment, I ended up down a rabbit hole tracking down a specific model of t-shirt that I got several years prior from TeePublic that fits well, is nice to wear, and whose shape has lasted surprisingly well. I found the model, but it turns out that all the resellers are business-to-business, not business-to-John. I briefly considered roping my current workplace into this endeavour but my guess is that they'd only sell in bulk (80 rather than 8), and that seemed a little far for some t-shirts. The search, unfortunately, continues.
Laptop
The final "big" purchase for my holiday was a new laptop for photo editing and staying in touch / sane. I've been putting off making a decision, firstly because it's a BIG expenditure, and secondly judging whether I could gird myself for the nonsense laptop manufacturers cram onto their machines.
The Dell XPS 13 I got for my last Japan trip in 2018 is, on paper, a fine little machine - 13" ultra book, great keyboard, decent specs. Only when I got it the drivers for the abysmally named Killer Wi-Fi hobbled the speed for no good reason, this was after a protracted investigation as to why downloads took forever. Updating the drivers introduced me to a shockingly adolescent UI that unfavourably reminded me of early 00's warez releases, I half expected a MIDI tune to blast out of my speakers. Removing the drivers and letting Windows handle things "solved" the problem, but left a poor first impression and meant I had to weather the Dell update manager complaining about missing drivers every time I opened it. There were other niggles as well from screen freezing (a poorly implemented and never patched power saving mode) to Windows update irregularities. I don't use laptops on the regular so were these just quiddities of the form factor? And critically did I want to take my chance with that again?
Short answer: no. I purchased a Framework despite my specced machine being £200 more than an equivalent Dell or HP. The screen size and resolution is better (3:2 1504x2256, 4k at 13" is absurd), it's user servicable, and it's highly unlikely to come with the kind of bloatware that the other "big" name manufacturers load on and expect to remain resident for your warranty to remain valid. It has been constructed and shipped so now all that remains is repeatedly refreshing the tracking page. Yup, still in transit...
YouTube watches
- Pool diorama - this chap makes really detailed dioramas and has a lovely, quirky sense of humour
- The entire Warhammer 40k timeline in 20 minutes - despite playing and collecting 40k when I was younger, I never really engaged with the fiction so this is a great overview of what the heckins is going on
- Rian Johnson breaks down the arrival scene in Glass Onion - I enjoyed Glass Onion and this is a great breakdown from a director that obviously knows his craft
- Making handmade boots from wild boar - another one that went straight onto my Japanese craft playlist, I had no idea how labour intensive (or how many layers there'd be) making boots was
- Restoring a Certina DS-2 watch - a wonderful attention to fine detail
- OxBox playing Garfield: Lasagne Party - Outside Xbox and Outside Xtra are all round lovely, funny people and them playing a bad (or at least mediocre) game is such good fun to watch
- TechLinked What 2022 Taught Us - with similar energy, this covers a lot of the big tech stories from 2022 and has a good dig at the crypto nonsense along the way
Random links
- Eels stuck in Hawaiian monk seals' noses baffle scientists
- Hyperdia - train planner for Japan, takes a little while to get used to the interface but invaluable
This was hand-crafted by John.