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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - on TV!
Good fun. I can tell that my teenage self would have eaten this stuff up. Some characters were a little overacted but on the whole solid. Only a little bit of trimming from the book, nothing too egregious—although I would have liked to see more from Waterloo. But overall the pace felt better in the show than in the book.
Some really strange editing choice as well, especially in the later episodes. Hard cuts, jarring stuff. The editors don't seem to know quite how to end an episode; the credits always just sort of leap up out of nowhere. Maybe the producers were expecting that people would watch this as like a box set without interstitial credits or something.
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Megalithic Portal
The Megalithic Portal is an incredible site for exploring ancient stone structures. I’m very into standing stones (menhir) in particular. Something about their permanence has the hypnotic quality of fire to me. On any given weekend May → September odds are that I’m standing out on a moor staring intently at a many-thousand-year-old Rock.
Anyway I digress. The Megalithic Portal is a fantastic resource for Rock Enjoyers, but their website has an extremely clunky raster map interface that only loads a subset of Rocks at once. So if you’re looking at a Rock in one part of the country but want to see a Rock in a different part of the country, you have to jump through Eleven Hoops to get there. I don’t want to jump through hoops though, I just want to Look at Rocks.
So I set out to make a map of my own.
The key discovery was that for each site on the Megalithic website, there’s a corresponding GeoRSS feed of nearby sites, with metadata for each nearby site including site name, latitude and longitude:
<item> <title>Langleydale Common 8</title> <link>https://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=50089</link> <description>Rock Art, (No Pic)</description> <geo:lat>54.614212686267</geo:lat> <geo:long>-1.9452625039514</geo:long> <media:thumbnail url="images/mapic/tg29.gif" height="20" width="20" /> </item>The URL from this feed is parameterised based on the site’s latitude and longitude, so from any given Rock feed, I can iterate over each of the items and generate URLs for each of the related Rocks—meaning that I can hop from one feed to the next, saving each new item to an SQLite database as I go.
A year ago I’d have said that sounded like a lot of work.
But we’re not living a year ago, so I got Claude Sonnet 3.7 (via Aider) to do it for me. It only took a little bit of prodding.
Okay, so now I have an SQLite database with a thousand or so barrows and tumuli and dikes and embankments and (yes) Rocks around where I live. But the whole point of this is to view all of the sites at once, without having to navigate the Megalithic Portal’s esoteric RSS-based raster maps and leap through their Eleven Hoops.
Back to Claude, to set up a simple HTTP server which reads all of the sites out of the database and plots them on a simple Leaflet map. It gets it in one. Boom roasted, I watch my own job evaporate like Thanos in front of me. What will my family think when they realise that I have been replaced by a robot named after a Beanie Baby.
In an attempt to make myself feel even remotely relevant I go sign up for an OS Maps dev account so that I can use the Ordnance Survey maps as the base layer; this takes me like 20 minutes. I try not to think of how few milliseconds it would have taken Claude.
The whole thing costs £0.54.
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Conclave (2024)
80% of the runtime is a Good Movie. It looks really good and is well-acted. Ralph Fiennes looks like my grandpa, which is a bit uncanny.
The sound design is a little weird—there are lots of scenes with gratuitous breathing noises as people stand around wondering what they should do. It also feels like the sound designer unnecessarily muted background noise, so that when characters talk the sound sort of pulses in and out to ensure total silence in between the lines.
There are subplots that are not resolved and never go anywhere—terrorist plots occurring outside, Fiennes’ crisis of faith—and subplots that appear out of nowhere in the final five minutes of the film and also don’t go anywhere.
The whole movie builds and builds and then goes, “Oh no! Anyway,” like Jeremy Clarkson, and then it’s the end.
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Now: 3 - 9 March 2025
Thursday was maybe the second or third Nice Day of the Year—a pleasure. Doors were opened and washing was hung out on lines across the neighbourhood. The solar panels booted back up and charged up the battery downstairs to like full power. The grass and the trees and the hedgerows and thickets all across East Durham came alive and started booting pollen out into the hazy sky and pretty much disabled me from like 10am onwards.
Then at the weekend we had a couple more nice days; on Sunday I even went for a run in just a t-shirt. The Boston Marathon (not that one) is looming and I want to make sure that I’m prepared, so I’ve been out pretty consistently as the weather has gotten better.
A bit of sweat and fresh warm air feels like just about the only thing keeping me together, mentally, at the minute. I’ve gotten to the point in my career where I’m starting to butt up against the limits of my background: yes I can read Shakespeare (with annotations) but no I don’t have the muscle memory to keep track of Turing machine states in my head. I can understand—and handle—feeling out of my depth, but reading through historical computer science A-level exams, or trying to figure out logic puzzles, makes me feel like I’m in a whole nother body of water, in terms of out of my depth.
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I’ve given up YouTube for Lent, which is one of those things that only 30ish-year-olds in 2025 do, because 30ish-year-olds in 2025 have impulse control problems related to YouTube Shorts. In February I spent probably more time than I want to know about watching 22-second clips of men laying concrete or traffic accidents on UK roads. I’ve lost that time for good, but the Lenten Spirit of Jesus Christ is going to help stop me from losing any more time in the future.
As a result I’ve gotten back into books; that’s right I’m back baby, I’ve put Dhalgren behind me and I’m reading for pleasure again. I finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell this week and I’ve moved on to Michael Schur’s How to be Perfect, which has been… middling. Maybe a bit less rigorous than I’d like it to be. Oh and Sam and I are reading Hamlet, which is a lot more dramatic and a little bit more funny than I remember it being. Anyway the point is that without the distraction of rapid-fire content about two-handed greatsword technique I’m back to staring at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.
Also found a hole in the bothy roof, but it's over the byre and it's Officially Springtime so not horrible -
Shakespeare on Genius.com
I'm of the firm belief that if you're going to read Shakespeare, you should read with annotations. Shakespeare interjects too much context, and indeed sometimes writes things in such a roundabout way, that the text alone winds up only revealing part of the picture. Or at least it does for me.
But annotated Shakespeare tends to be the domain of books that you have to go out and rent from the library, if the library has them at all—and there's no way of determining whether the annotated edition you're getting is any good.
Genius.com, however—yeah, the rap lyrics website—hosts a bunch of Shakespeare plays, and the more popular ones even have pretty good, comprehensive annotations! Problem solved. Here's Hamlet.
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