Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 30

Weekly Whaaa…?

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Monday, so ISO Week 30 is the week of 2024-07-22/2024-07-28.

Viewing

Easy A

Emma Stone stars in Easy A, a film inspired by (and earnestly referencing) The Scarlet Letter. It is set and entirely shot in Ojai, California.

Among the other great actors, it has Malcolm McDowell in a minor role as the school principal. This casting is extra fun because my friend Andrew, who grew up in Ojai, was very proud of having McDowell be (in Andrew’s learned opinion) the second-most famous celebrity who chose to live in Ojai (Sergio Aragonés, the Mad magazine cartoonist, was the first).

Olympics2024

Yep, we’re streaming some of the Olympics online!

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

• Jason Heppler’s How I use Obsidian post covers a lot of the strengths to using Obsidian for notes and longer-form writing. Although I don’t currently use any of the plugins or organizational strategies discussed here, I’m considering making a Dataview-powered way of searching my literature notes along the lines of the Doing History with Zotero and Obsidian guide by Elena Razlogova linked to from this post.
• Jacky Alciné’s post about not bothering with electoral politics online anymore provided me a very welcome reminder of what’s behind some people’s reasons to avoid discussions of elections online.
• Ernie Smith’s Cassingle Culture weaves a ton of punk / (indie) pop culture / media history into a breezy yet deep narrative of cassette singles. Bow Wow Wow? Boy George? Malcolm McLaren? Yep, they’re all in just the first few paragraphs, before we even get to the Go-Go’s and R.E.M.

TWI(R)L

This week I (re)learned… 

• The concept of ethicswishing (via Adactio).
• Apparently Seattle is the one place in the USA where Generation X has outnumbered other demographics, and it’s informed their move beyond Boomer politics. (Via blogdiva on Mastodon.)
• The utility of turning off all unnecessary plugins when you start experiencing weirdness in software. For the last month or more, Obsidian on my phone has frequently crashed when I select words or edit a line in a bullet-point list. This stopped after I turned off a couple plugins I wasn’t really using, but which were probably consuming a lot of memory.