Friday Notes (Dec 20, 2024)

Until now, I haven’t posted here all month, and I’m not sure I’ll post anything before the end of the year. My attention definitely is more towards Substack these days, and I increasingly ask myself why to bother with WordPress anymore?

For one, their technology continues to depress me. This week it’s because the notifications bell icon can’t clear the little dot that means messages pending. It’s on all the time, but there are no messages pending. Basically, at this point, I’m pretty disgusted and done with WP.

But first let’s have at least one more edition of Friday Notes.

Starting with what I just mentioned, the constant presence of the dot on the notifications bell:

I wondered if the dot is gray for no notifications and will turn orange (or whatever) when there is one but then I saw it is orange on other pages. WP being “consistent” again.

I think this is just more incompetence on the part of the WordPress development team. Which, as I’ve said before, I have zero (even negative) respect for because they don’t write good code to begin with and have left bugs I’ve reported (and which they’ve acknowledged as bugs) still hanging after two years.

Bottom line, more and more I find myself questioning why I’m even here anymore. WordPress, once acknowledged as the prime blogging platform, seems to be a fading star now.

Same thing happens to restaurants. Visionaries open them to great results but then move on leaving just money-grubbers behind and the place becomes a once-great has-been.

I might even move my programming blog to Substack, a far more vital and interesting platform (but one with its own set of “what were they thinking” design choices).

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That said, I’m trying to present the less rant-y side of myself to Substack, so maybe I’ll keep this blog for going on and on about the shit that pisses me off (an endless list, but venting is how I let it go).

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As long as I’m whining about technology, Apple continues (along with Google) to top my list of Big Tech Companies I Hate. Microsoft has, so far, managed to stay off that list, but they do test me sometimes. The other day I woke up this on my Windows PC:

And none of my attempts fixed it. It would never sign in to the iCloud. Got Apple service on the line, and their best advice was to uninstall and reinstall. Which did fix the immediate problem but copied all my downloaded photos to a new directory and recreated the iCloud Photos folder.

I think part of the problem is having the app keep copies of the photos on my PC as well as in the cloud. This seems to confuse it and make it take several minutes to present the folder contents when I open it. So, this time I’m using the “free space” option, so only thumbnails are kept locally, and this does speed things up.

But once again, #$&%@ Apple insists on you doing it their way, and their way almost always doesn’t work well for me. I guess I’m just not an Apple customer.

I’m so done with them that, as I’ve said, I’ll never willingly give them another dime. No ebooks, no iTunes, no Apple news, no Apple TV+, and sure as hell no Apple credit card (I don’t know what they’re even thinking with that one).

I’m bummed that I’ll eventually have to buy a new iPhone to keep access to the ebooks and iTunes I do have (a considerable library).

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As usual, we’ve had no snow to speak of so far this year (until last night). We got a very light dusting on Halloween and another light dusting on Thanksgiving:

Which is funny because of my three questions:

1. Will it snow by Halloween? (bad)
2. Will it snow by Thanksgiving? (okay, even good)
3. Will it snow by Christmas? (required!)

There was no snow on the ground yesterday, but today I woke up to this:

So, I think we’re assured of a white Christmas.

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Netflix recently had the new Bad Boys movie, and I thought it would be fun to watch the first two, also currently on Netflix. Synopsis: The first is something of a minor classic, but they really didn’t need to return to that well.

Bad Boys (1995), starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, and directed by the infamous Michael Bay, is an exuberant fun movie co-starring Téa Leoni, Joe Pantoliano, and Marg Helgenberger (of CSI fame). In many ways, it’s a standard Jerry Bruckheimer 1990s action film but is at least a bit notable for having two Black actors in starring roles in a mainstream action film. I very much enjoyed watching it again. I give it a low Ah! rating.

Bad Boys II (2003), same director, same stars, is an incoherent mess of a film that tries to substitute quips for a sensible plot. The action scenes are particularly incoherent and amount to little more than visual and audible noise. The situational comedy (if one can call it that) tries too hard and consists of hoary cliched emptiness. I thought the anger management stuff was dated in the 1990s film. It’s beyond dated in a 2003 film. And I felt so bad for Martin Lawrence playing an idiot clown. The only redeeming quality is co-star Gabrielle Union, who I’ve always liked. I give it at least a Nah! rating and it might even rate my lowest Ugh! rating.

Until I started writing this Note, I didn’t realize there’s a 2020 film, Bad Boys for Life. It’s directed by Adil & Bilall, who directed the fourth film. I can’t recall if I’ve ever seen this. It apparently wasn’t memorable if I did.

Finally, there is Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024). Nothing like being completely inconsistent with how they name sequels. We have a Roman numeral, an extended title, and a colon title. Whatever. It was okay and gets an Eh! rating.

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Speaking of the older movies in franchises and their recent versions, I’ve also been watching (on Netflix) the first Fast and Furious movies.

What struck me was how physically grounded the first two (and even third) are. As the series progressed, the action scenes became more and more preposterous and detached from physical reality.

The Fast and the Furious (2001) retains all its watchability and fun and heart. As with the first Bad Boys movie, it’s a (relatively) fresh idea. Car movies aren’t new, but the other elements and Vin Diesel raise it above the norm. Another minor classic that kicked off a franchise. (And I’ve had a little bit of a “thing” for Jordana Brewster ever since The Faculty, a fun alien-horror dark comedy film by Robert Rodriguez.) Easily ranks an Ah! rating.

That said, these movies are serious car engine porn. Note that they actually aren’t really racing porn (to me, anyway). Most of the races are short and don’t actually make much sense. They tend to feature a lot of seemingly unnecessary clutching and gear shifting. I see them almost more as mechanized tone poems than anything else.

The second one, 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), is interesting for not starring Vin Diesel, but only Paul Walker. It follows the aftermath of Brian O’Conner’s allowing Dom to escape in the first film. He gets involved in a caper down in Miami. It’s another pretty solid film. I’ll give it an Ah! rating, but a slightly weaker one than for the first.

So far, I’ve only watched up to the third, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006). Which suffers a great deal in casting Lucas Black as a high school student. It’s very common to cast older-but-young-looking actors as high school students, but I don’t recall any movie that so utterly fails at it. He was 24 when they filmed it. The drift racing is interesting, especially since it looks to me as if they really did it, it wasn’t special effects. It’s a standalone film slightly outside the F&F mainline. Vin Diesel does make an appearance at the very end, so the film is in-universe. Definite Eh! rating.

I plan to watch the next two (#4 and #5) this coming weekend.

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I reported last month about A Blog Invasion and followed up in the last Friday Notes. Over a three-day period, mainly centering on the middle day, I had 12,227 page views. Considering my average daily views is 75 (standard deviation ±28.4), that was way above average.

WordPress wasn’t much help other than agreeing it was some sort of web spider. I still wonder if it was someone’s LLM training. (If so, it will be a superior LLM given the high quality of the training data. 😁)

What is funny is that my stats now appear to be flipping me the byrd:

I’m waiting for that bump to scroll off left so I can actually see my regular stats again.

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Speaking of standard deviation, that huge bump in views made me curious, so I extracted the daily hit data (manually using the stats page) and generated a histogram:

The shaded area shows the standard deviation on both Visits and Views. Generating the chart with a reasonable standard deviation required filtering out those three days of over-the-top stats. They completely ruin the stats.

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I met an artist on Substack, Sussie Reed, who turns regular pictures like these:

Into bold poster art like these:

She’s looking to drum up work, so I commissioned both of those from her ($100 each), and I’m quite delighted with the results. If you have any photos you’d like turned into bold art like this, hit her up on her Substack.

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I’ve been enjoying the music of a Japanese supergroup of rather extraordinary female jazz musicians. Here’s a video that introduces the members:

What I love about these gals is how much fun they’re obviously having. Each one is a virtuoso on their own, and together they play some of the tightest most energetic and fun jazz I’ve seen in a good long time. Watching them is sheer joy.

Here’s another video:

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Fellow WordPress blogger and mathematician/educator John Baez made a comment that caught my eye in a recent post about Martianus Capella:

I’m no expert on this, but it seems as the Roman Empire declined there was a gradual dumbing down of scholarship, with original and profound works by folks like Aristotle, Euclid, and Ptolemy eventually being lost in western Europe—though preserved in more civilized parts of the world, like Baghdad and the Byzantine Empire. In the west, eventually all that was left were easy-to-read popularizations by people like Pliny the Elder, Boethius, Macrobius, Cassiodorus… and Martianus Capella!

And I can’t help but feel something like that has been going on in modern culture for a while now. I saw a post recently comparing the usefulness of teaching Shakespeare (which most students never use in real life) to teaching mathematics (which most students never use in real life).

But the value of literature is not remembering Shakespeare’s works but the experiences of other people and cultures. While Shakespeare’s history could be iffy (a tradition that continues in many period pieces today) he was usually an acute observer of the human condition. Hence his enduring value.

Likewise, learning mathematics teaches you to think logically and to understand the nature of abstraction.

Both broaden the mind, which is rather the point of a good education.

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This photo of climbers waiting for their turn on the peak of Mt. Everest says a lot to me about modern culture:

It’s rather astonishing, really, considering that climbing Everest was long the domain only of the most extreme expert mountain climbers. Now there’s a long, long line waiting for people on the peak to take their selfies.

It’s hard to put in words why this photo disturbs me so, but it does. And it kind of kills my interest in ever being a tourist again.

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Lastly, here’s really the only reason why I hate winter (darkness):

I can deal with cold and the snow and even the ice, but the damn darkness is depressing.

It’s also why the winter solstice (Dec 21 @ 9:20 GMT) is my favorite holiday and the only one I take particularly seriously. (Some of that bleeds into an appreciation of Christmas but doesn’t explain why I love Christmas music so much.)

Starting (slowly, see Solar Derivative) on Saturday, the days start getting longer again. It will take a few days to become apparent, but summer is once again on its way.

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Stay jazzy, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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