I went to see Throwing Muses play the Electric Ballroom in Camden last night.

This is the third time I have seen them play (I have also seen Kristin Hersh play solo gigs a couple of times). So I guess you could say I'm a fan.

I first saw Throwing Muses at the Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1989. I'm startled to realise this is thirty six years ago. Fast forward to last night, I assumed the crowd would be ageing indie-kids of my generation, and I was mostly right. But standing next to me, as we waited for the band to come on, were a couple of much younger lads. I told them I had been roughly their age when I first saw the band. It turned out 1989 was a dozen years before they were even born! They had been introduced to Throwing Muses by an uncle, so I guess the band is still finding new audiences after all this time.

It was great to see the band again, even if three-quarters of its members have changed (the lineup has always been quite fluid). The heart of Throwing Muses is, and has always been, Kristin Hersh. She is a mesmerising performer - perhaps because she doesn't overtly perform so much as just share her weird, intricate, fascinating songs with us. She is also a great and original guitarist. Her son, Dylan, played bass (he's really good!) and I guess he too wasn't even born in 1989....

I didn't plan to go into this gig thinking about the passing of time, but those were the thoughts that somehow crept up on me. The songs of Throwing Muses and Kristin Hersh have been a constant for me since my mid-teens. It was weird to hear Soap and Water - introduced by Kristin last night as "an old song, and kind of a stupid one!". I can vividly remember hearing that for the first time, in the bedroom of a friend, who had just bought an early EP called The Fat Skier. That EP grabbed my attention like few records have ever done - I think I knew straightaway that I had discovered something special.

Anyway - a great gig, covering decades of songs from a prolific songwriter. Many just sounded great on the night, especially the higher energy songs - Sunray Venus near the start, Slippershell, and Bright Yellow Gun as the perfect final encore. Other songs had a more personal impact - I actually had a little shiver when I recognised the opening of Colder, a song I used to play over and over the summer I bought the vinyl of House Tornado. And similarly - hearing Bea played live and remembering that one from the 1989 gig.

It makes me happy to realise that there are some young folk discovering this music for the first time and, like me nearly forty years ago, realising that its something special.

Here's the crowd-sourced set-list in case you're interested.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwywwq5zkqwo

Some good news for a change - we have been waiting for this decision for months. For once, the decision went in favour of the common people, and against the acquisitive billionaires.

(I was always going to continue wild camping on Dartmoor anyway 😊)

This is a good result for England!

https://bibwild.wordpress.com/2025/01/16/using-cloudflare-turnstile-to-protect-certain-pages-on-a-rails-app/

There is a growing problem of so-called "bots" harvesting content from repositories in an aggressive manner. They are often poorly designed and have no care for the bandwidth or processing capacity they demand from the repository as they attempt to "hoover" up all available content (increasingly to use for AI training purposes). The result of this is to impact - sometimes severely - on the performance of the repository.

This piece by Jonathan Rochkind describes approaches to mitigating this problem. In particular, it describes an interesting approach to blocking only certain resources - e.g the search function - from machine processes, while leaving content resources freely available for machine processes to access.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09237

Refreshing my knowledge/memory of some of these (sometimes contested) issues with URL management. I’m still more sceptical than the author about how well Content Negotiation works in practice, but this is useful nonetheless

This website is served as static HTML, compiles by a really capable "static-site-generator" called Hugo. I had a problem to solve with rendering images here: sometimes I wanted an image which is local to a particular blog post to also show up in the homepage, which serves the most recent posts. The problem is that the relative URL for the image is different when that content is served on the homepage. I don't want to hard-code absolute URLs, but I do want to use the sources of the webpage in different parts of the website. Therefore, I needed Hugo to somehow intelligently re-write those URLs when compiling the website.

This is where Hugo's relatively new Markdown render hooks come in. I've added the following code to a partial under layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html

{{ $url := urls.Parse .Destination }}
{{ if or (eq $url.IsAbs true) (hasPrefix .Destination "/") }}
    <img src="{{ .Destination }}" title="{{ .Title }}" alt="{{ .Title }}"/>
{{ else }}
    <img src="{{ .Page.Permalink }}/{{ .Destination }}" title="{{ .Title }}" alt="{{ .Title }}"/>
{{ end }}

This has the effect of prepending the page's absolute URL to the image path at compile time. It is invoked every time a Markdown image element is encountered in the sources. If the image is not local to the page, then the image HTML tag is rendered with the URL unchanged (e.g for external images, or for images served from a folder relative to the webroot, rather than the current page's folder.)

Hugo's render hooks are an interesting and useful addition. As well as images, you can specify render hooks for:

• image
• link
• heading
• codeblock

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect was coined by the late Michael Crichton in a talk entitled Why Speculate, given to the International Leadership Forum, La Jolla, in 2002. Below is an excerpt from that talk:

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

I think this has become worse in recent years. Much of the mainstream press and TV news seems to dwell in the realm of speculation, more than dry, objective reportage. The important lesson is, frankly, to doubt everything you read in the news unless you have reason to trust the source. This is exhausting, and makes the whole business of actually reading "speculative" news reporting somewhat pointless.

As Crichton said, introducing the transcript of the talk on his website:

In recent years, media has increasingly turned away from reporting what has happened to focus on speculation about what may happen in the future. Paying attention to modern media is thus a waste of time.

In recent months I have successfully weaned myself off daily news consumption. I pick up bits and pieces, here and there, but I no longer intentionally go to news sources. At the weekend, I catch up with digests from a few, trusted sources. I do not think this has significantly impaired my awareness of current affairs, while it has certainly saved me from wasting a lot of time!

Using the excellent Dataview Obsidian plugin, inserting this snippet (below) into the note will create a table listing:

• all notes in the same folder as the note, and in all sub-folders, recursively
• all notes which link to the note
• all notes linked to by the note

Particularly when used in a "folder note" (a note which serves as the key note in any given folder), this is a simple way to create a kind of "section index" for that part of the folder hierarchy.

```dataview
TABLE rows.file.link AS Pages
WHERE
	contains(file.folder, this.file.folder)
	OR contains(file.inlinks, this.file.link)
	OR contains(file.outlinks, this.file.link)
	AND file != this.file
GROUP BY file.folder AS Folder
```