Boulangerie: August 2023
Unbaked bits from the month!
The Boulangerie is a regular, unscheduled feature of Technocomplex, appearing once or twice a week. It is for half-baked, rising dough, the just-now-in-the-oven entries. After all boulangerie in French is bakery. Entries are always very short. To find out when new loaves have been set out, follow @mrdelong@mastodon.online or watch Substack Notes.
August 20, 2023
Boulangerie: Wet (and floating) vintage cars? Nope. Instead sunny skies!
The Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance in a tropical storm? For rich people, you know, it doesn't rain. And it didn't.
I just got an invitation to watch the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance via livestream. The email certainly must have been scheduled to go out a while ago, so perhaps no one thought about the weather or the incoming tropical storm. Or maybe the very, very affluent attendees just have some great deal with the weather that us regular folks just can’t afford.
Update: I just checked the forecast, and it looks like today’s show is going to be okay. Maybe a little gusty. Gale warnings tomorrow, though. Maybe the weather deal sticks!
Looks like the start of the show coincides with Hilary’s arrival, too.
Update, August 21: But, in the end, it looks like Hilary spared the show. Here’s the winner:
… under sunny skies, too.
August 8, 2023
Boulangerie: Handwriting and humanity
Neil Serven ponders a lost art.
Thoughtful article on using pen, pencil, paper, and hand to send messages forward into other lives and other times.
Digital media has merely altered the way we leave our affectations, with emojis—like tattoos, drawn by some other person’s hand—providing the wink and the flair. But I would argue that it’s a way that humans have become more childish. Left to express our agonies in a prefabricated, toothless font, we feel our personalities being held back. In lieu of the flourish with the pen, we turn to artless eggplants and all-caps shouting—a cowardice that forgoes the risk of putting out something with a true, personal insignia, a way of letting history know that the mark left there is ours.
Serven, Neil. “What Emojis Can’t Express: How Handwriting Reveals Our True Selves.” Literary Hub (blog), May 1, 2023. https://lithub.com/what-emojis-cant-express-how-handwriting-reveals-our-true-selves/.