…a lovely break from life…”

Dave Atkinson, in yesterday’s edition of The Quack, reflecting on COVID lock-down from four years out:

I tend to think of the early lock-down era as a lovely break from life that we were all unfortunately too scared and stressed out to enjoy. I do remember saying out loud I hoped there were lessons from this era we’d carry forward when it all ended. I especially liked the feeling, for a little while, we were all on the same page.

My memories of early lock-down are coloured by grief—Catherine had died only two months before we all went on anxious furlough.

I remain unclear whether enforced isolation was ultimately helpful or harmful to my grieving self: it certainly drew Olivia and I closer together, and allowed us to take comfort in a very small life after wading through a very big life for as long as we could remember.

But I can’t help but be angry at the universe for dealing that hand at that particular time, a time when my soul wanted nothing more than freedom, spaciousness, and the universe thought it right that I be locked in my house, alone with my complicated child, to stew in the opposite of that.

Flatland Cavalry

This little video featuring Flatland Cavalry is a delight. 

We don’t have to do this like that
Comin’ at it like a heart attack
And all our tears can’t wash the hurt away
It’s a shame we had to fall this far
To find the bottom of a broken heart
Ain’t nothin’ left down this path
We don’t have to do this, have to do this like that

Be sure to watch through to the cover of Landslide.

Dallying with Other Browsers

Other than simply “being able to browse the web,” I have four specific things I need in my web browser of choice:

  • Available for both my MacBook Air and my iPhone (and syncs bookmarks and browsing history between the two).
  • Supports 1Password for password management.
  • Supports Kagi as the default search engine.
  • Supports some method for ad blocking on both desktop and mobile.

I’ve been promiscuous over the years, switching between Firefox, Camino, Opera, Safari, Chrome, using each for long periods, and then getting frustrated.

I’ve been using Safari pretty-well full time for several years, but with my recent decamping to Kagi from Google, I decided to try Orion, the browser made by Kagi itself, with both native support for its own search and built-in tracking and ad-blocking.

Orion proved an estimable drop-in replacement for Safari, and it almost checked all four boxes; it fell down, however, with 1Password support. In theory Orion does support 1Password, and it’s easy to install, requiring only a small tweak in the 1Password settings to work properly. But 1Password stopped working enough times, in weird and wonderful “open tab after tab after tab filled with error messages” ways, always, of course, at inconvenient “I need to do my banking right now” times, that I abandoned it.

I took a brief detour to Firefox, for old times sake: it has versions for macOS and iOS, syncs between the two, supports 1Password, supports switching to Kagi for search, but, because it doesn’t support extensions on mobile, didn’t support ad blocking. I’ve become so inured to an ad-free mobile web that there was no way I could continue.

So I’m back to Safari: Mac and iPhone support, of course; excellent 1Password; kludgy-but-sufficient support for Kagi via an extension that rewrites built-in Google searches; great ad blocking via Ghostery (desktop) and AdGuard (mobile).

Go to Vienna

Ann Patchett, in These Precious Days:

I hadn’t meant this as a dating strategy, but it functioned as one just the same, so I pass this along as advice: if you meet someone you like and you have the means to do so, ask that person to go with you to Vienna.

a squiggle tucked in the bottom of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence”

A few years ago James A. Reeves threw sunshine on Prince Edward Island, and on Clark and me:

Today I noticed two of my favorite blogs come from Prince Edward Island. Over the past few years, Peter Rukavina and Clark MacLeod have become welcome presences in my feed that epitomize a relaxed, more personal internet of yore—and hopefully the future. I have no idea if one referred me to the other or if they even know one another. I also realized I had no idea where Prince Edward Island was, so I looked it up this afternoon. It looks beautiful on the map: a squiggle tucked in the bottom of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, its arms cocked northeast toward the coast of Newfoundland and the frozen cadence beyond: Labrador Trough. Baffin Bay. Cumberland Sound.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t through sunshine back.

James reappeared in January, after a season’s absence from my feedreader, and I find myself looking forward to every post. He is, at heart, a psychogeographer, and so his writing about place—Why Am I in Ohio?, MysteriumOn a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe—is particularly welcome.

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