Thursday was yet another hottest day of the year, which reminds me of a classic Simpsons bit:

BART: This is the worst day of my life.
HOMER: The worst day of your life so far.

At the Makerspace I used the laser cutter to make a replacement back panel for the chair I’m refurbishing after rescuing it from the street where someone had dumped it by the bins.

Carpenter's bench with an old broken plywood chair panel and a new replacement

Original part, broken by exposure to water, and replacement

Despite my test cuts and tuning, the laser didn’t quite cut all the way through everywhere, and I had to carefully score the back to remove the piece from the sheet. Someone gave me a tip for using the laser on thick sheets more effectively, but it was too late by then.

There’s a lot of sanding of the panel and the whole chair still to be done, but it’s progress.

The Japanese (and Chinese) word for “solar eclipse” is 日食 (nisshoku), from characters meaning “sun” and “eat”. Something is taking a bite out of the sun, and I always liked that. “Lunar eclipse” is analogous: 月食 (gesshoku).

The eclipse on Thursday evening wasn’t as impressive as the total eclipse in 1999 (even when experienced through British clouds) but it was still more than the one I saw in 2005, and it was an odd experience. Human vision being what it is, wide variations in brightness are actually very hard to perceive. However, everything took on a pale cast, and the leaves of trees looked silvery. The crows in the park seemed to be acting strangely, perhaps confused by the phenomenon.

I had smugly bought a couple of pairs of eclipse-viewing glasses cheaply back in April when I first realised there was an eclipse coming up, and I even managed to remember the “safe place” that I had put them. We went to Burgess Park, which didn’t work out as well as hoped because the centre of the park was closed off with tall fences for a private event, and it’s not all that easy to find an area with a clear view of the sun when it’s 10° above the horizon. But after moving around a couple of times, we found a suitable spot and had plenty of opportunity to see the eclipse at and around its maximum.

On Friday we caught a train to Retford, so that we could get a shuttle bus to somewhere in the middle of nowhere Walesby Forest for Vegan Camp Out. I’d never heard of Retford before, but it has a direct train from London every hour. Unfortunately, this is split between LNER and Hull Trains, so it’s one every two hours for each operator, and you can’t just buy an off-peak return ticket and take any train. (And, in fact, you can’t buy a return ticket at all on LNER, as part of some ill-conceived weasely-named Simpler Fares scheme that makes buying a train ticket more like air travel in all the wrong ways.)

Anyway, we took Hull Trains. It was fine, although the window of the train didn’t inspire confidence in the quality of the “heat stregthened [sic]” product:

Corner of train window with text saying that it is 'heat stregthened' (with a missing N)

Is this train window glass legit?

That wasn’t the only misspelling I saw this weekend. The most significant was a person with a tattoo across both thighs, in a metal band lettering style, spelling out “ANIMAL RIGTHS”. Some ragrets, surely.

The festival was fun; we were spoilt for choice with 100% vegan catering, of which about two thirds wasn’t vegan burgers and chips. I don’t mind a vegan burger and chips, but I prefer a bit of variety and imagination.

There were informative talks – I learned a lot about the unfairly maligned and abused feral pigeon – and entertaining ones; there was comedy and music and most of the things you’d expect from a festival. We danced a couple of tunes at the ceilidh until the amount of dust being kicked up from the parched and desertified earth made it impossible to breathe.

The weekend didn’t seem overly cultish, but the common bond between attendees made it feel safe and cohesive. I had a few interesting conversations with random people. There seems to be some controversy about the organisers which neither of us is sufficiently online to decipher.

It wasn’t the best-organised festival I’ve been to. I only found out on Sunday that we could have taken a coach directly from London, which would have been cheaper and more convenient. The shuttle bus to Retford wasn’t advertised anywhere on the festival website, but only on Instagram. The bins weren’t emptied often enough, and there wasn’t enough seating in the main stage, leading to people packed chaotically on the floor. In an emergency, it would have been impossible to evacuate safely.

I was disappointed to see a number of items sold from stalls on the site – T-shirts, stickers, badges – with designs that bore the unmistakeable signs of having been extruded from the slop generator. Others have realised that not doing so is a competitive advantage, however:

Hand-made paper notice saying 'All our artwork is human-made. No A.I.!' next to a drawing of a pigeon.

Defiantly human-made at Little Green Pigeon

We were passed by a whirlwind on Sunday afternoon as we sat eating lunch. It looked like something out of Looney Tunes with so much dust sucked up into it. It probably isn’t an unusual phenomenon, but being able to see one is: without the visible dust it would have been indistinguishable from a gust of wind.

I was taking a disco nap on Friday evening when I was rudely awakened in a state of confusion by blaring sirens from inside and outside the tent. I fumbled to get the noise to stop, which dismissed the alert; I was only able to find out what it said by going into my phone’s settings and looking at the alert history.

And then I was just angry.

I don’t care if you do want to disseminate a message to the whole country. “Don’t have a barbecue” is not the level of urgency that justifies setting off an air-raid siren in everyone’s pocket. I don’t think it even justifies waking me up from a nap.

I have now, of course, turned off the emergency alerts. It was an oversight that they were on in the first place: I had turned them off before, but had since replaced my phone and didn’t realise they were back on. I’ve gone my entire life without the dubious benefit of being able to receive direct alerts from the government, and, especially now that I’ve seen what they decide to use it for, I don’t feel the need to worry about “what if?” hypotheticals.

I reached a 3,000 day streak on Duolingo – that’s more than eight years of daily use – and felt that it’s a good point to let it lapse and free myself from the digital shackles of gamification. None of it is real. I’ve uninstalled the app. Goodbye, owl. It stopped being fun a while ago, and I shan’t miss the silly noises and animations.

A few links: