Blimey! It’s over a month since I made any attempt to put together a “weeknotes”. Perhaps “month notes” would be more appropriate. It’s been a week of looking after my youngest as his primary school has different half-term holiday than other schools where we live. Clocks went back and the weather’s become gloomier. Our plans for days out with the kids have been messed up by illness (me for a week with Covid, I suspect) and rainy days. I can’t shake the time-absorbng ennui I’m feeling at the moment (which feels like being mentally scattered). But maybe it’s that time of the year. I’m starting to wear jumpers and look longingly at winter coats in my wardrobe.

My eldest son bought me a physical copy of Alan Wake 2 as an early Christmas present. He knows that, while I’m a fan of the original game and working my way through Control, I wasn’t going to buy the new release (£60+ for a video game is far more than I’m ever going to pay). Besides, I just started playing Red Dead Redemption 2 – which I’m enjoying. But, I’ve started Alan Wake 2 which seems to me to be deliberately slow to start. We’ll see how it goes.

The sudden closure of Omnivore, the read-it-later service that I’ve completely relied on for the last couple of years has precipitated some further digital reorganisation. Long-term, my aim is to move towards FOSS apps which are open-source and community driven (rather than ephemeral startup bids). Away from the big bad silos, algorithm-driven services, apps, walled-gardens and restrictive, overpriced hardware. (There’s also a desire to have control of my own attention…) I’ve shifted a little more actively towards the Fediverse and now using Mastodon (which now feeds the “microblog” entries on this site) and back to Lemmy and Pixelfed and signed up to use the new Loops app – though I’m too old to understand the attraction of Tik-Tok looping videos. I need to invest time in properly understanding how to use the indieweb and ActivityPub. These things are hard to get to grips with but, maybe, the friction is part of the point. Persisting and overcoming the friction requires agency and attention.

Omnivore’s closure means that I’m back to using self-hosted Wallabag. Wallabag is a perfectly good read-it-later app but doesn’t have the glossiness of Omnivore and it’s excellent highlighting and exporting of notes. Combining Wallabag with Hypothes.is’ Firefox online annotation plugin seems to work almost as well as Omnivore. I realised that I was using a version of Wallabag from 2020 so upgraded without much fuss.

Staying with techy things, I did my monthly backup of everything I use which is laborious but gives me the (foolish) feeling that should everything go wrong, I have everything backed up. And backed-backed up. And, for really important data backed-backed-backed up. If I had lots of money, I could just buy another NAS with large drives and automate everything. Having zero money means I rely on using old drives and working hard at making space work.

Three things absolutely delighted me this week. The first was dscovering a brand new episode of Pilgrim by Sebastian Baczkiewicz, Belle Meadow Fayre, on Radio 4. Pilgrim is a radio series I’ve enjoyed since 2008 and it looks like they’ll be more to come. The other was the release of The Cure’s new album, Songs of a Lost World and the live-stream of their performance at The Trixy on Friday. Amazing.

It was the start of the month and Loula Yorke released her monthly mixtape on Bandcamp, a mix of field recordings, ambience and her modular music. She releases great explanatory notes to accompany each mixtape.

I’ve been watching the second season of Elementary, the modern-day Sherlock Holmes tv series set in New York. It’s not demanding in any way and I’m mesmerised by Jonny Lee Miller’s performance as Holmes. Recasting Moriarty as both Irene Adler and Holmes’ love-interest was an excellent decision – though I wonder if they used Moriarty too soon and would have done better to gradually introduce the character and even have Irene Adler working with Holmes before she’s revealed for a longer time. I’m not quite sure why I didn’t watch it when it was originally broadcast.

My comic reading this week has consisted in catching up with the current X-Men run (which isn’t grabbing my attention at all), the Absolute Batman and Absolute Wonder Woman first issues (better than expected) and re-reading Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy (fantastic).

I’ve got quite a few books on the go at the moment (reflects my unsettled mind)m currently reading:

• Not a Speck of Light by Laird Barron (his latest short story collection – I’ve read many of them before).
• The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke (her new novella)
• The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggett