Notes from July 2025#
2025-07-01#
I was throwing away old plush toys because my daughter had enough will to decide so. As a bit of a hoarder, I am impressed. One of the toys was a giant hamster, and as I saw it in a container, I felt bad for it. Funny how the human brain works. This must be something of evolutionary value, and here it's triggered by a toy won on a feria. Unserious.
Season 2 of "The Tourist" takes us from the sunny Australia to Ireland. After being encouraged by Helen, Elliot decides to delve on his past, but only first minutes on screen, he gets kidnapped by masked assailants, and things go spinning. The show keeps the quality and the number of twists is just crazy. The comedic aspect cannot be overstated. The winner, however, is reformed Ethan, who was pissing me off in season 1, but now he's funny. And we have a hook for season 3.
It's an infinite scroll only when you follow too many accounts. With a carefully crafted follow list, you'll soon get to the place where you ended last time. On paper, that's a trivial problem.
2025-07-02#
A while back, after watching "The Series of Unfortunate Events," and after my wife told me that the books were originally for adults, but someone suggested the author to adjust it for the kids, I came up with an idea for a children book too. It was partially inspired by a "Quake" map. I started writing it and my wife was meant to do illustrations. Then it died. But I never forgot it, and I've been thinking recently that writing it in Cormac McCarthy style rip-off could be a fun thing to do.
"Care Bears and the Blood Meridian."
2025-07-03#
It arrived.
If we took into consideration how often I'm returning to albums, Garbage's "Version 2.0" would be strictly in my all-time top 5.
What Twitter taught us was: "Be concise or GTFO." The lesson was utterly lost on us later. Now it's completely gone.
There is something extremely liberating in being able to always tell the truth. Remembering what has been said to whom at which point is a very arduous thing. I wouldn't wish it to anyone.
My wife's cousin's husband, who's a professional drummer, told us yesterday that having goosebumps because of music is something unique among humans. I can still remember, for example, that one particular moment from "Nothing Else Matters" in Apocalyptica's interpretation which gave me this almost orgasmic feeling, and it was in 1997.
2025-07-09#
When I listen to music, I can literally see all the layers piling up in my head, as if I was watching the band playing in front of me. But I am utterly incapable of creating anything musical. I can whistle and I kind of played some instruments, but the idea of conceiving a melody, let alone a new one, is completely baffling to me. I just couldn't. I find it impossible that people create new melodies in such amounts as they do.
2025-07-11#
I skipped breakfast two days in a row, and it was very time efficient from my point of view.
2025-07-12#
"The beggars also have no money.
Whenever one of them dies of hunger,
It is, in fact, often a sign of poverty"
--Werner Herzog, (untitled poem)
(translation: Presley Parks)
"In the house of the hanged
They only speak of the rope."
--Werner Herzog, (untitled poem)
(translation: Presley Parks)
2025-07-13#
We drove to the Nativity scene museum today. We primarily chose it because it was an indoor activity and it was air-conditioned, but it surprised me greatly. Spain is somewhat crazy about those, so the museum seems natural. Coming from the Cracow school of the Nativity scene, I am used to a flat exposition, but here it was more like 3D paintings, with various layers in different scales (one even had a trick with mirrors which created impossible geometry). All very detailed. I need to repeat it.
You can go there too. https://www.museodebelenes.com/
Going to the Nativity scene museum in July might seem weird, but we were the only ones, so we had the museum only for ourselves.
After 14 months of writing notes here (time flies!), I have to admit it's a very good workshop of concise style. It taught me to leave the absolute necessary details, which is something that I struggled with over the years, as I was always trying to fit in too many details. That's not the way. In fact, it's better to say a bit too little than too much. Of course it's best to say the exact amount. But that's why I keep writing.
2025-07-14#
Whoa! YouTube, what is that? :D
And I wasn't even watching anything adult. For old people, yeah, but not the way one might think.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=S2fGP59mJ5M
2025-07-15#
We have guests over, and Żółw the Turtle hid for a couple of days and refused to eat and get into the water. However, today the guests were off for most of the day, and Żółw got out and even ate. We've been suspecting that he's been afraid, and it confirmed. Luckily the guests are off in two days, so everything will return to normal.
If I had to register with an actual id to post somewhere (I saw something about Bluesky in the UK), I would stop posting completely.
A website told me today that my browser is incompatible. I opened the URL and was immediately redirected to the error page. No way around it. I use the latest version of Firefox, so it's not that I'm stuck on Internet Explorer 10 or something. I changed the user agent to Chrome, and suddenly it works. Seems they are whitelisting allowed browsers. Bastards.
I think I like reading movie scripts because they are very utilitarian in its essence while still telling a compelling story. It produces a unique outcome where something has to be brief but engaging, and there's no way to cut corner on either of those (unless you write it for yourself). I wonder sometimes if all that reading will affect my writing, but it remains to be seen.
Killer humidity is here.
2025-07-16#
As it often happens in development, we did it and it doesn't work.
Hello, rabbit hole, my old friend. I've come to talk to you again.
Okay, I tackled it. It was interesting in the end. Well, still is, as more things emerged.
2025-07-17#
I had a dream that I was driving a scooter to work and there was a police control on the way. They rolled out spikes on the road just before I managed to pass. The breathalyser test showed that I had only 0.5‰, and the police let me go.
The new episode of Music For Programming dropped.
https://musicforprogramming.net/seventyfive
Looks like Axios is paywalling. Well, it was nice, but if that's the case, then we'll be parting our ways. I wanted to say on that occasion that I really like the break-down format of their articles, and it's something that I started doing when writing various texts at work.
Whenever we meet boars during our walks with our dogs, they run away due to the fierce barking of the dogs. They are of a hunting breed, after all. However, yesterday something entirely different happened: one of the boars didn't run away, but stood his ground instead. We circled around him and continued, but we started wondering if he noticed that he doesn't have to be afraid of us. Time will tell.
Long arrows are coming back into fashion. [*]
2025-07-18#
I dreamt that I was in Silesia and was in an old tram (105Na) where I was explaining to people in there how does the pantograph work.
Now I think that it must have been the OTK-1 model. Of the pantograph, I mean.
Brutal.
"In other words, LLMs become “woke” because they are trained to be pro-social—to be helpful, kindly, truthful, and not to say bigoted or cruel things. Training it to do the opposite—to be anti-woke—is to activate every antisocial association in the English language, including racism, sexism, cruelty, dishonesty, and Nazism."
https://prospect.org/power/2025-07-17-how-did-elon-musk-turn-grok-into-mechahitler/
Jean-Michel Jarre concert#
I was planning to write something longer about our trip to Seville and Jean-Michel Jarre's concert there, but I failed to do so in a timely manner and now the fresh impression has evaporated, hence I'll write a couple of words about the concert itself.
I had no big expectations from the concert and, unlike with Simple Minds, I didn't go through the entire discography. I was prepared to hear the best of Oxygene, Equinoxe, Rendez-vous, and Magnetic Field plus some lasers and smoke, and then go home. But Jean-Michael Jarre turned out to be serious and he played more newer stuff and with much harder beat. At times, it felt like a rave party. And it was amazing.
The whole thing was recorder with high-definition drones and will be released as a live album, and I think I'm gonna buy it.
Ever since the concert, I've been listening to different albums in the car, and I see that he kept evolving. I missed out on some interesting electronic music. A lot of it reminds me the late 1990s but not as a dance music, which is interesting. I need to explore more.
One more thing to mention is that Jean-Michel Jarre was pretty relaxed and even laid-back. He talked a bit to the audience and every now and then, he would ask us, "Todo bien?" as if knowing that this amount of heavy electronic music might be a bit too much to some liking. A woman next to us was hiding her face in her palms at some point, so maybe he was right to be concerned.
He did, however, praised AI and said that we should not be afraid of it. He used some of those uncanny generations for visualisations displayed on large screens on the sides of the stage.
Jean-Michel Jarre said during the concert something that stuck with me: that the electronic music is inherently European and that it comes directly from classical music. I think he started with something like "We didn't have jazz." It sheds a new light on all the electronic music I know. But also, it made me look back at Murcof's "The Versaille Sessions" and realise it's pre-electronic music, which made it even a more fascinating release.
Humid heat has been replaced by terral, a much hotter but drier air, so while it's warmer, it is also more bearable for many people. The thing that we don't understand in the North is that what affects our impression of heat is humidity, not temperature itself.
Humidity makes not only the heat worse, but also the cold. It amplifies any temperature. The heat suffocate you and the cold is chilling to the bone where you can't hide in warm clothes that easily.
It happened. The hogs were not afraid of our dogs today any more. We had to capitulate and go around. I'm not gonna risk any close encounter with them. But thanks to that, we were able to see a mother hog with 5 little piglets in the distance because they were on the other way. The piglets, on the other hand, ran away pretty fast.
They cannot steal your NPM account when you don't have one.
I like finding old notes that I left on accounts I follow.
2025-07-19#
One of the more bizarre things out there was replying to the question "What's that song's title?" with "'Sandstorm' by Darude." I knew this song back in the day, but I learned about this joke late in the game. A coworker replied like that and I was like, "No, that's a different song," and he laughed. Then he explained it. But he couldn't say why this particular song.
I guess it's more of a composition because there are no lyrics.
When I heard The Knife's "Marble House" for the first time back in 2007, my English was less advanced and failed me, and I built a mental model of "House of Marbles." I didn't realise until years later. I still like to imagine on those idle afternoons that the song is about a house with large amounts of marbles in it.
Guests are gone, so I'm back to watching movies. "Dream Lover" from 1993 with James Spader and Mädchen Amick is a late 80s/early 90s thriller. It has huge time jumps, but other than that, it's pretty standard stuff. With 30+ years on a counter, it was a bit unpredictable, although at times because James Spader's character behaved like a blinded idiot. Only for connoisseurs of that era movies (a bit of outdated cringe too). Christopher Young provided an interesting soundtrack.
The movie reminded me heavily of Steven Soderbergh's "Side Effects" from 2013, down to the plot twists. The man is shameless in these regards. After seeing that movie, I said that he basically redid a 80s/90s thriller. Now I know which one exactly. :D
And earlier, there was "Kimi," which was a strong homage to Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window."
2025-07-20#
Werner Herzog's "A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin" is a book/interview with a famous movie director. On top of so many crazy stories that happened to Werner Herzog and some interesting trivia about movie making, it also shed some light on him as a person. I admit that I had him for this irresponsibly crazy guy, but there's nothing more wrong. He's bold but not reckless. I found book inspiring in art-creation-related aspects. I can definitely recommend it.
Following the book/interview with Werner Herzog, I decided to see his 1987's "Cobra Verde," the last movie that he did with Klaus Kinski. A story of a Brazilian rancher who ends up as a slave trader in Africa. The most interesting thing was presentation not following the usual Hollywood style: all the buildings in Brazil and then later in Africa, plus original clothes, are a breath of fresh air in the way they look on screen.
Now that's interesting. When I click a tag now, it gives me three options: just browse the tag (the old behaviour), browse the tags by the user who used that, or mute it.
I almost had the text ready when I experienced a shift in style paradigm to meet more Cormac-McCarthy-like style. Oh, the dangers of taking time to finish a piece of text.
I don't remember why I started taking notes so extensively. Partially, because it was a writing exercise, but there was more. Luckily, I took a note of it, so I can check it later.
After being surprised with the first heat this year, I accustomed to it and I am operating more or less normally.
Someone was using my handle on Twitter (now X) over a month ago, but now the account doesn't exist at all.
An idea for a story: a nosey person follows a coworker out of curiosity to their home and there, the coworker is nowhere to be found and the house is empty, but there is a door in a floor leading to a liminal-space maze where at the end, there's a cheeky message to Nosey. He gets angry and starts destroying the room, but the room is like a movie prop. Then it turns out that the world outside of that room is a prop too, endlessly. Nosey cannot get out. He breaks and starts crying.
Season 2 of "Veep" is the same but more. There are 3 new characters this time around. Everyone talks fast and throws offences so often and so layered that it's nothing short of amazing. And at the same time, no one seems to be offended. I guess the show is a good illustration of how much it sucks at the world of politics. With every episode, I am getting more and more certain that I would never want to be a politician.
I made it. I finished writing a text about a friend (sort of) who was unfortunate to pass away a couple of years ago. I think I'll publish it next week. I still have one additional text to fill in (welcome to an ergodic website).
2025-07-21#
I hereby reject all your cookies.
That is not why I became a web developer, Mr. Chrome.
2025-07-22#
It happened to me a couple of times that I would join a company and I wouldn't understand what my coworkers were saying due to an accent that I was not accustomed with. But then, step by step, it improved and suddenly I was able to understand them. This, by the way, worked both ways. I'm no better in these regards.
But now I need to take a break from vaporwave.
2025-07-23#
Ozzy Osbourne is no more. He wasn't my musical hero, but I liked some of his songs and he was there like an orientation point. And now he's not. I can't explain why it moved me the way it did, but it did. And it feels a bit strange. I guess there will be more and more situations like that. Let's be happy for the music he gave us, otherwise I could go crazy.
History (serving files from a server) repeats itself, first as tragedy (PHP), second as farce (Next.js).
For when I'm at a lighter workload, I have plans to open a bug ticket to our platform provider that it's possible to see users passwords as super admin, which means they store them as plain text, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to display them to me, and that's a huge security risk. "Passwords should be hashed and salted and whatever more they do with them these days." Then I would insist that it's not a request but a serious flaw in the system. Then they would close it after some stalling.
To give perfect flow to any sentence is any writer's dream scenario.
Due to my children book project, I started analysing Cormac McCarthy writing style closer, so I can use it more consciously. It should be at least fun for me, then we'll see.
I started reading "Moby Dick" in the meantime and oh boy, how much water is poured there is almost amazing and uncanny by today's standards. Or at least my standards. My mind is racing with rewriting whole chapters into single paragraphs. "Terse Moby Dick" could be an interesting exercise if I had enough time. Maybe an idea for retirement project if there is such a thing in 20+ years.
A post from samim#
'water is transparent only within a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum,
so living organisms evolved sensitivity to that band, and that's what we now call "visible light". '
2025-07-24#
I remember that at some point MCU movies started to bore me and I wanted to like them, but there was no going back. Something ended without my say and I could have only accepted it as such. Looking back, it feels like a lost of time. :D But then it was fun.
I just found out that archive.org has some of my old articles, so I might be able to recover some of my archive.
A coworker got me talking about MCU and when I saw it after writing, I realised how much of a nerd I am. I also realised it fits perfectly this meme format.
2025-07-25#
I am getting fascinated with Donald Trump writing style. All these CAPS LOCKS, and Capital Letters to highlight important things, and a tonne of commas, to the same effect. And then this could be used to connect seemingly unconnected topics. It's bad for politics and the world, but it could be used with an interesting outcome in a work of fiction. It would be a TREMENEDOUS story, story that would tell Something, and people, intelligent people, would be AMAZED. :D
I might not be able to level it up with the vitriol, though. This is a weak spot in which the whole thing might collapse.
Something I picked up from "Moby Dick" that I was not able to figure out myself from the context.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ere
An unfortunate thing about the "Doom" hashtag is that it is also used to tag posts about doom metal. As if "hashtag doom metal" was not an option. On the other hand, it gives me some news that I wouldn't see otherwise.
A post from On This Day In History#
Today in 1965, 60 years ago: at the Newport Folk Festival, the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan stops playing "acoustic" and performs an "electric" interpretation, giving a transcendental turn to rock and folk music. Folk-rock is born.
2025-07-26#
"He looked like a man who had never cringed […]."
-- Herman Melville, #MobyDick
Years ago I did a test on the Internet (though what it really was about, I cannot say now), and the result was that my closest affiliation in terms of worldview were Quakers. I briefly checked who they were and moved on upon learning it's a variant of Christianity and never went any deeper. But whenever they are mentioned anywhere, I pay more attention to them.
The other day we were walking and like normally there are no clouds this time of year, this time there were. And what's more, the sunset made them very orange. The picture, as always, doesn't give that away and instead looks like fire in the sky which still looks cool, but that's not what it was.
"Old" from 2021 (so not that old) is a science-fiction movie about a group of people who end up trapped on a mysterious beach where time seems to flow faster and they age rapidly. I like these "what if" concepts and additionally Netflix forced me to see it because they will be removing from its offer, those fucks. The movie starts a bit like "The White Lotus" with a mix of "Infinity Pool," but evolves into its thing. I liked the exploration of our relation to time.
And then, when the end credits kicked in, I learned it was M. Night Shyamalan's movie. And suddently it all made so much sense. There is something in his sensitivity which aligns with mine and so his productions click in, no matter what's the grand idea of what if behind them. With the sole exception of "The Last Airbender." He shouldn't have done it. Like ever.
Van Gogh experience#
We drove to Van Gogh's multimedia exhibition. There are no real pictures from him, but there are some creative presentations. The main point is a large room with projections on walls, the floor, and the central column. His brief story told partially through his letters. I learned, for instance, that was inspired by Japanese paintings. My wife told me it's a very well known thing, but I didn't know it.
Then in the last room there was a colouring activity. You could choose one of 3 of his paintings (2 with sunflowers and the starry night) and, well, colour them with neon markers. Just normal markers, but the room was in UV light, so they were glowing in the dark. Cool gimmick.
On the way out there was one of his paintings on the floor and if you stood in a certain spot, it would look on a photo as if you were in the painting.
I also had no idea that the image of a skeleton smoking a cigarette was actually van Gogh's picture. I bought a fridge magnet with it on my way out.
2025-07-27#
I had a taste for Desperados and we coupled it with "The Gray Man" from 2022 because it felt like the right choice for a beer movie. It's a spy action flick, something between James Bond and Mission: Impossible, full of incredible scenes (like a tram chase in Prague). Ryan Gosling plays his usual character and it was fun, but it only showed me that those movies are not for me anymore. We might still see a franchise here. The hooks are there (like the invisible boss).
"Rise of Empires: Ottoman: Mehmed vs Vlad" is a docuseries about titular Mehmed (season 1) and Vlad Dracula (who doesn't really show until season 2). I haven't seen season 1, but I joined my wife for season 2. I liked it because the scene reconstructions took more than a half of time and all the controversial points were discovered by historians in between them. This gave us enough drama and just enough info dump. It's far more interesting than any existing Dracula fiction.
At one point the historians were enthusiastically discussing impaling 20,000 people, and it got me thinking that the current genocide in Gaza will likely be discussed in the same, "cunning" manner in a couple of hundred of years. It would be interesting to follow up which of currently scoffed at historic butchers are turning noble.
I can't locate a plan/idea for the children book I had a couple of years ago. I went through my old papers and found many other things that I was looking for at other times, but not this one. And I don't think I can restore it all from my memory.
[edit] Okay, I got it. I remembered the wrong size of paper I used to write it down. Upon revisiting this detail, I went to one last place. And there it was.
2025-07-28#
I have just read two articles about Seraphinne Vallora, a company creating fashion models with AI. There is some backlash, but it's also popular among viewers (it's also telling that they didn't want diverse models when offered and those were just not popular). And it reminded me of a conversation I had close to two decades ago. A friend asked me if I fantasise about models and I told him that I don't treat them as real because I could never meet them anyway. I was ahead my time, it turns out.
But also, the supermodels were always statistically rare (almost impossible) and perhaps it's not a surprise that they are being substituted by AI, along with corporate talk and recruitment responses. It's like this hyperreality that was never there. Simulacrum. Additionally, Seraphine Vallora has been struggling so far with generating convincingly plus-size models, which might be further exhibiting it as well.
"[...] very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends."
-- Herman Melville, #MobyDick
"[...] I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations, never mind how comical [...]."
-- Herman Melville, #MobyDick
2025-07-29#
Thou shalt not shadow a variable nor constant.
2025-07-30#
I felt like running from evil at the entryway, but in the end, I didn't.
"You say that the boiling frog metaphor is factually wrong because the frog doesn't behave like that in reality, but tell me who's boiled if not you?"
I shan't use modern English.
I got this fake verification scam and I reported it, but I also opened their website and now I'm trying to feed them with a fake card (from the generator page for app developers) to see what will happen.
2025-07-31#
Welcome, Tidal. Let's start our adventure with Brenda Jackson. Then we'll see. I'll cancel Spotify later today (but I have time till August 11th for that).
I had hummus with slices of fresh onion for breakfast and it reminded me why and how much I like hummus.
I spent 10 minutes today trying download High Tide artifacts from Github and finally resorting to googling, only to find out that I need to be logged in to have the button for that. An inactive button or even a text label in that place would be friendlier.
It looks like it's spelled TIDAL.
For a moment I was mistaking it with Tinder because I didn't use either.
Anyway, I decided to not transfer my collection from Spotify and to start fresh. So far, so good. But we begin our road trip tomorrow and I needed a 6-hour playlist for tomorrow's drive and it took me a while to come up with stuff to listen to. And then there will be 6 more days. I'll do them one day at a time.