Ruins of Thurnham Castle
Went for a walk around the ruins of Thurnham Castle today. It’s the remains of a Norman earthworks castle. I enjoyed the ruins much more than I expected and the area around is full of twisty paths through woods and sharply descending steps. Jan and I explored some of the landscape beyond.
Beating the Battery Blues
Phew! Finally put a new battery in my iphone. Made a couple of mistakes – and lost one miniscule screw – but all seems well. Phone is working. It was something that HAD to be done as the old battery was lasting about an hour between charges.
Devil’s Kneading Trough
Visited the Devil’s Kneading Trough near Wye today which has a lovely view of southern Kent from the Downs. It was exactly the right length of walk for the kids. Alice picked blackberries.
The Two Towers
“Frodo was alive but taken by the Enemy.” So ends The Two Towers. My slow read of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings now advances into The Return of the King. Gandalf returned. The Ents laid siege to Isengard. Saruman’s power was broken. Gollum led Frodo and Sam into a deadly trap in Mordor.
Frodo Lives! I wonder if Tolkien realised he couldn’t pull the death of a major character and resurrection in the next volume more than once so revealed that Frodo isn’t killed by Shelob? Or that he didn’t want the second volume to apparently end so bleakly?
The Choices of Master Samwise. Tolkien seems to spend more time presenting the travels into Mordor from Sam’s perspective than he does Frodo. Sam becomes the hero of the tale (proving himself in the fight with Shelob). Scenes like the Oliphaunt appear to have been written to show Sam’s continued capacity for awe and wonder. Is Sam one of the only morally-firm characters of the novel? When he thinks Frodo dead, Sam realises there is no other choice but to continue to Mount Doom alone. (Ignoring that Sam leaves Frodo’s body then decides to return to it.)
Faramir. Boromir’s brother, Faramir, plays a similar role to Strider from The Fellowship. He joins the (few) characters who refuse the ring, realising its danger. Tolkien uses Faramir to introduce a great deal of information about Gondor. Tolkien also seems to reveal the quality of a character through their treatment of halflings (and Frodo particularly).
Double act. Enjoyed the comedy of Shagrat and Gorbag at the end. Tolkien runs the risk here of humanising orcs. Both are nasty, evil creatures that feel put-on by those in power over them. They reveal what being ordinary on the side of Sauron is like – which is something (so far) we don’t get from the human or elf side.
One ring to rule them all. It was only in the course of re-reading The Two Towers that I started to wonder what exactly the power of the ring actually is. It’s SO powerful and corrupting there is no choice other than to destroy it. We get glimpses of its power (invisibility, extended life, the ability to understand languages and so on) and it’s talked about as if it has some sort of consciousness. Yet, other than having power over all the other magic rings, what the ring actually does isn’t (as far as I can make out) explicitly addressed. Very vague.
Frodo Lives! The cliff-hanger ending has an Empire Strikes Back quality. Gandalf (and Pippin) is on his way to Minas Tirith and Sauron’s armies, led by the wraith-king are on the move. Frodo has been captured and Sam is ring-bearer and alone.
fixing joycons again
I seem to keep fixing joy cons. This time my youngest managed to chew the thumbsticks. Luckily I had some replacement parts. Wonder if Hall Effect thumbstcks might help.
Haddit with Reddit
After 12 years using Reddit, I’ve deleted my data*. I’ll give it a few days to check that my comments and posts have been completely wiped and then I’ll permanently delete my account. Like many other long-term user of Reddit, this is in response to the greed of Reddit’s management and their despicable treatment of Christian Selig, developer of the Apollo app. There’s been a lot of coverage about this recently and the right thing to do is to leave Reddit. I’ve used Apollo for many years and it has been the primary way that I accessed Reddit. I doubt I would have used Reddit very much without Apollo.
Reddit was a mechanism I’ve used for making contact with others with whom I had shared, somewhat niche interests. I’m sure I wouldn’t have encountered contemporary writers like Laird Barron, John Langhan or Caitlin R. Kiernan without belonging to one of the subreddits that have celebrated their work. Or learned about apps like Obsidian. Or got support with tech hardware. Or simply shared enjoyment of music, comics, tv series or movies. “Reddit” was a search term I added whenever I needed information or help online.
It feels like there’s something bigger happening at the moment in terms of online communities. In the early days of the net, many of us used Usenet and blogs. Facebook and Twitter more or less centralised everything and made accessing communities online very easy so – combined with the smartphone – these platforms became ubiquitous. (Google and Microsoft were less successful in this.) My impression is that Reddit enabled people to replace their various accounts on various forums scattered across the internet with one location and one sign-on. Reddit seemed to be the final end of Usenet as a place to discuss anything. This centralisation also concentrated power in the hands of companies who, as we know, monetised user data and now require subscriptions.
It feels that the movement towards decentralisation – away from big tech’s control over platforms – seems to be gathering momentum. I don’t believe we’ll see a return of forums, Usenet or other social media platforms of yesteryear. It does look like social media federation is, though. Simply, the idea is to build a federated network of platforms which no one company controls. Mastodon – essentially a Twitter alternative – is the largest of these federated platforms at the moment but there are many others.
I’ve been on Mastodon since 2018.
In terms of a Reddit alternative, I’ve moved to Lemmy. It’s pretty early days there and – like Mastodon – takes a little time getting used to how to subscribe to communities (the term for subreddits) on different instances. There are lots of communities being set up that seem empty – but I’m sure that they’ll fill up.
What seems to me like an important development in the adoption of Lemmy is wefwef.app, a browser-based app that has a similar interface to Apollo.
* I have to thank Power Delete Suite which made export and deletion of my Reddit data effortless.