Sep 27: What did I do this week?
2026-09-27
Song of the week: Thurston Moore - Smoke of Dreams
Emoji of the moment: 🍽
Listened and learned
I remembered that the library system here has audiobooks, and their app for them turns out to be pretty good, so I've been listening to those a bunch. It's very convenient to have a big curated collection of books that you can just press play on. So far:
- Röda khmererna ("The Khmer Rouge") by Peter Fröberg Idling: I've read a bit about the Khmer Rouge (which really should be Khmers rouges, shouldn't it?) before, so not much new for me here. It's just fascinating that they did all that.
- I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman: I think this might be a book I would've quite liked as a teen or young adult, but it doesn't have anything very interesting to say to me today, and it's not fun to read, either - not because of it being bleak, but because the writing is so plain and uninteresting. Would recommend reading a plot summary but not the whole thing.
- Vilja veta - Sápmi ("[To] Want To Know - Sápmi") by Annelie Drewsen and Katarina Lycken Rüter: an overview of the Sámi people and their history. Says mostly the same things as English Wikipedia's Sámi people article.
- Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang: I'm only 68% of the way through this collection of (more or less) sci-fi short stories, but I'm pretty sure I will finish it and keep enjoying it. I think it seems like the author is more interested in exploring the potential ramifications of hypothetical technologies than in telling stories, and so they are a little thin as stories, but that's fine. Efficient delivery of interesting ideas.
The app lets you have two active loans at a time, so I'm doing one fiction and one non-fiction. The current non-fiction one, which I'm 10 seconds into, is Första generationens svensk ("First-Generation Swede") by Elaf Ali, which is apparently about the author's experience of growing up in Sweden as a child of immigrants.
Enjoyed my smartwatch
I said I was going to make a separate post about it, but it stopped feeling like an exciting new thing before I got around to it. It's nice, though! Aside from it telling me what time it is, I'm enjoying the convenience of setting timers and controlling phone music, and the sleep tracking is pretty accurate and helps me set energy level expectations. I wouldn't pay full price for one, but this one was €30 or so used (actually completely unused, somewhat suspiciously...), and I'm happy with that. Also, it has user-created watch faces, and they are almost all comically visually busy (1, 2).
Read a good article
There's no such thing as Just a Tool
Yeah. The thing with "AI" assistants for me is that even if training the models weren't so problematic and harmful in multiple ways and they didn't make you worse at thinking for yourself (as studies say they do) and they actually worked well (for me, a person who is good at computers), I still just simply wish to do the things myself. I want to type the code and write the words and draw the things with my own gay hands. I want to make things, not manage someone else who makes things. If they had no downsides, I still wouldn't be interested.
