Is there anything less funny than a local community Facebook group on April Fool's day?

If I were to give one piece of advice to someone, it would be to take photos of everything. The people you love, the things you love, the things you do. There will be times in your life when you want to surface forgotten memories on command, and photos and video are perfect for that.

I wish I could also recommend to categorise images as you take them but that is a waste of life. I spent hours looking over the last ten years of my life this week, and it's so strange to view that amount of time compressed like that. The points in your life that overlap chronologically but not in your head, are quite interesting.

Also, be careful with rsync --delete. I lost years of photos to reckless use of that command and it haunts me 13 years later.

Community is one of very few shows that consistently make me laugh, no matter how many times I've seen it. The episode where Jeff plays pool in shorts just nearly made me suffocate.

Messages has been around since 2009, and it's still a problem that when someone sends me a message that gets converted to an SMS, Messages doesn't automatically go "oh maybe this person is currently out of data - let's switch to SMS until they send another iMessage". I refuse to believe I'm the only person who experiences this.

I love Bo Burnham, but he's too good at writing vocal melodies to use them all on comedy. I've heard a lot of Inside because Charlotte loves it and there's more melody in this one show than a lot of bands pull in an entire career and that makes me sad.

Don't let them play Robbie Williams at my funeral.

I've been using dark mode on all my devices for a couple of months and I can confirm I absolutely hate it. Everything looks worse to me in dark mode.

I'm not normally a pessimist but I'm starting to feel like good decisions are really only decisions that haven't gone bad yet.

I finished Children of Ruin last night. It was a bit of a battle by the end. The latter half lost all pace and I struggled to maintain my interest sufficiently to finish it.

The second book lacks the electricity of the first, and the rhythm of the story is more of a heart attack towards the end. Moments stretch out for chapters, and generations last paragraphs. I even re-read the last chapter, worried that I'd absently skimmed something important; but no, it was just extremely hurried, for whatever reason.

I'm not relieved to be finished, but I'm happy to be onto something else. I'll certainly pick up Children of Memory when the paperback is released.

I have previously torn through trilogies as a single volume - The Fifth Season; Ancillary Justice, move into their next volumes as naturally as a new chapter, but the Children books reset to their original timeline and follow a fresh branching path. It's not a terrible structure for a trilogy but it has felt quite repetitive thus far. The same story being told from a different viewpoint, in a different medium; the end of each strand converging to fall back and be re-woven into a new thread. It's elegant in principle but, in practice, I think I'd have benefitted from more of a break. I was excited. We all make mistakes, especially when driven by emotion.

I've moved onto Too Like the Lightning, which was briefly everywhere on my radar, and is now not. But it was there just enough to grab my interest, and at just the moment where I had some Amazon voucher balance to use.

I'm two chapters in, and the world-building is incredible. Scope is such an inconsistent concept in storytelling because Children is set in solar-systems over the course of thousands of years, and I don't think there was ever a point that any of it was as detailed as the first chapters of Lightning. It's not problematic or anything, but it is noticeable. I feel like I've physically inhabited Lightning's world, but I feel like Children is just something I've read about. I'm excited by Lightning in a way I never was about Children.

Today I saw a car in the car park and it had a sticker in the rear window that said "Ford C-Max mk1 and 2 Owner's Club" and I wonder if there's a mass-production car that doesn't have an owner's club. It made me want to find their forum and see what they talk about, but it's a private Facebook group. Petrol or diesel, they are all one family. It's good that they're not prejudiced about fuel types; that would be disappointing.

People are so strange, and arbitrarily tribal.

Have I already had dinner? Have I had one of the worst and most depressing weeks in recent memory? Did I go to the gym today? Is our oven currently heating nine pizza bagels from LIDL's American week? Is it only goddamn Thursday?

Yes