Life
I learnt how to make pastries this week! For my birthday a few months ago, a few people chipped in to gift me a workshop at a local French bakery and on Friday, it was finally time. It’s all but impossible to find a decent croissant in this country (and believe me, I’ve looked) but Astrid’s Petite Cuisine delivers and now I know her secrets it was so much fun to get to learn how to make those fluffy pillows with just the right amount of crunch on the outside. Honestly, making puff pastry from scratch always seemed like it would be a massive faff but it turns out the whole day just flew by and now I’m questioning my professional choices up until this point. Who knew you could be in the flow when folding dough and butter?
Side note: pastry week on The Great British Bake Off has always seemed a particularly cruel challenge but now that I’ve done it in an airconditioned, professional kitchen, I really feel for those people in a hot tent with the world’s tiniest fridge because you need to keep the dough and butter cold at all times (even in that professional setting, at one point, my dough got too warm and it had to go in the freezer for five minutes).
I also spent a day in London for a work event and while the journey there was a bit of a nightmare (there were horses on the tracks so everything was massively delayed), it was a lot of fun once I got there and I even managed to say goodbye, in person, to a professional contact who’s always been supportive and helpful but who’s moving into a different career.
Entertainment
I realised that The Outer Limits (the original from 1963) is on Amazon Prime here. It’s one of those classic science fiction shows that I’ve still never seen but I’ve watched the first episode and I’m looking forward to catching up on the rest.
I’ve also started Your Friends & Neighbors on Apple TV and, what can I say, nobody plays a self-important rich dickhead like Jon Hamm plays a self-important rich dickhead. Very fun.
OK, technically this is from last week’s Doctor Who but it only appeared online in full a few days ago and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. I’ve seen countless comments online calling this Murray Gold’s magnum opus and… they might be right? 🙃
Also, no spoilers, but holy shit, this week’s Doctor Who?!
Links
You’ve probably seen this but in case it passed you by: the Chicago Sun-Times managed to print a ChatGPT-generated list of book recommendations for books that don’t exist. It even made it into the print edition. Why did nobody notice? The paper got rid of almost its entire editorial board two months ago, including some with nearly six decades of experience.
I guess the UK government isn’t the only government that completely misunderstands artificial intelligence and just spews out hype-y bullshit. Magical thinking (🇩🇪) is a good summary by my friend Joël for Woxx. In the same newspaper, this (🇩🇪) was an interesting insight into professional translators and tools like DeepL.
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