Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 45

Weekly Whaaa…?

I use the ISO weeks from Monday to Sunday, so ISO Week 45 is the week of 2024-11-04/2024-11-10.

Software of the Month

I’ve been using espanso, a free text expander utility, for the last few month. It’s working out very well!

One can install espanso just by downloading the app from their website, but I took the “install using Homebrew” route, because using command line tools like Homebrew is the particular flavor of nerdom which afflicts me.

Setting up espanso, whether as an app or via Homebrew, does require a bit of comfort with the command line and the configuration files are written in YAML format. In other words, it might not be the most intuitive for a general audience. But if you’re already familiar with those things, or willing to stretch your comfort zone a bit, it’s a very handy utility that can save a lot of repetitive typing. I’d certainly recommend it—especially if you use multiple machines and want to sync your configuration files between them using something like Dropbox (which I use), Google Drive, GitHub, or etc.

Viewing, Reading, Listening, and Playing

Goosebumps

Starting on Halloween, we watched all of the first season of Goosebumps. It’s only 10 episodes, so we’ve already finished it. It definitely seemed to help deal with processing the election news.

Star Trek

Our Star Trek “Viewing Alpha” is also basically caught up to the current productions, meaning we’re up to the current season of Lower Decks.

Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds have all been enjoyable—although Discovery’s first season was honestly a slog, to the point that we almost gave up on watching everything Star Trek. Redemption narratives and torture scenes are both pretty far from our preferred fare, and I’m still not certain why the producers made the choices they did for the first season in particular. Strange New Worlds is definitely the type of hopepunk / cosmospolitanism that we look for when we turn to Star Trek.

Policing the Crisis

The main thing I’ve been reading has been Policing the Crisis. Its chapters feel deeply pertinent as a set of lenses to better understand at least the last decade in the United States, including reactions to Black Lives Matter and how the most recent national election played out.

The Pounding System

I first got into dub reggae in early high school, spurred on by learning that it had been a huge influence on groups as varied as Bark Psychosis, Seefeel, Massive Attack, and Portishead, as well as hearing some at local record stores. At this point, dub has been a thing I turn to when stressed for decades. (In particlar, I love this Dub Over Dub compilation of Errol Brown’s dubs of Treasure Island and Channel One tunes.)

Although I’ve been aware of 2Tone ska’s complex relationship with with punk, post-punk, and new wave since becoming a fan in high school, I’ve only in the last few years have gotten around to intentionally learning about the UK-based dub and reggae groups like Dub Syndicate who turned out tunes during the 1980s and in turn influenced not just the aforementioned groups, but also Warp Records, Orbital, and B12 style UK techno.

The Pounding System, Dub Syndicate’s 1982 debut album, features players from Creation Rebel and African Head Charge, with some of their tunes sounding quite recognizable as the starting points here.

If bass music, or dub in particular, are things that speak to you when times get tough, this might well be worth your time. I’m looking forward to slowly moving through the rest of Dub Syndicate & related On-U Sound groups.

Dominion

Finally, we’ve also been frequently playing the board game Dominion as a way to switch our brains away from stressful things. (There have been many stressful things, which partially explains why this is my first post in a couple months.)

Since we’re aiming for quicker games most evenings, our house rules “Do-mini” variant uses only 6 copies of each card. This keeps our games closer to 30 minutes, instead of the full hour or more we tend to take for the official rules version with 10 copies of each card.

Kudos

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