My parent’s air fryer broke the other day. The timing was, as is the way with this kind of thing, perfect. With most of our dinner already cooking and the chips being the last thing to go on, a fryer failure was the last thing they needed. Luckily, I have the exact same model and was able to deliver it just in time to save dinner. Save your applause, I’m not the hero of this tale.
What happened next has really stuck with me these last few days, and has me thinking about our approach to products, to ownership and the balance between convenience and conservation. After dinner the discussion turned to what should be done about the broken air fryer. It wouldn’t switch on at all, there were absolutely no signs of life. Basic troubleshooting (checking a different socket, changing the fuse in the plug) yielded no progress, so I asked was it still under warranty. It wasn’t. I’m away from home a lot lately with work so I offered up my fryer until my folks decided what they wanted to do. I assumed they’d look up whatever the newest model was, and maybe pick one up the next day they were in town.
The following morning I came into the kitchen to find a rat’s nest of cables, electronics and a triumphant looking father perched over the disembowelled De’Longhi proclaiming that he’d found the problem. He had narrowed the issue down to a few likely suspects, and then using his trusty multimeter had discovered that a thermal fuse had tripped (this is a safety mechanism to automatically shut the fryer down if the temperature got too high, it is however a non-resettable fuse) causing the whole unit to die. A four euro part ordered online would solve the problem, and for a fraction of the cost of a new unit, crispy and somewhat healthy fried goods would be back on the menu!
This, is quite frankly amazing, and not just from a monetary perspective. The refusal to see something as a single use good, but rather as a collection of individual components with their own lifecycles is something that my Grandfather’s generation grew up with, and is completely in opposition to the disposal device dystopia that we find ourselves in today. My Dad in turn has taken that same approach to life, and somewhere inside I feel myself coming around to the same line of thinking. I want to be more like my Dad, I want my first question when something breaks to be “how can I fix this?” instead of “how am I going to replace this”. I think it’s incredibly important that we empower people to feel confident taking their devices apart, that we make repair guides and replacement parts easily available and that the throwaway culture of cheap electronics starts to be seen more akin to littering.
Manufacturers and retailers would rather we see their products as monolithic, black boxes that consumers should never be so bold as to look within. Planned obsolescence and proprietary repair requirements are not only an insult to our rights as consumers, but also an aggressive attack on our ability to consume responsibly.
Side note: if you only check out one link from this post, please read about the Phoebus Cartel and the birth of planned obsolescence
The pandemic was a crazy time. We all tried things to fill the time spent in and out of lockdown. Some baked bread, some watched Tiger King and some fell down the rabbit hole that is author Brandon Sanderson’s series, genre and medium transcending, shared narrative universe - The Cosmere. I did all three, the bread was great.
Sanderson is a weird guy. Not creepy weird, just esoteric weird. His output is prolific, often releasing multiple books in a single calendar year. His college room-mate was Ken Jennings, yes that Ken Jennings, of Jeopardy fame. He was drafted in to complete one of the greatest fantasy series of all time (IMHO), The Wheel of Time after author Robert Jordan passed away, despite having only published two books of his own. He has the record for the most successful kickstarter campaign of all time. His bibliography page on Wikipedia has over 70 entries. And he’s only in his forties.
Some people love A Song of Ice and Fire’s author, G.R.R Martin, but loathe him at the same time for his glacial output rate. I love Sanderson, but sometimes it feels like I’m drowning trying to stay on top of everything that comes out!
This is an old piece of writing that I never finished, but with my new found enthusiasm thanks to this micro.blog I thought it would be nice to see it through. Looking back it’s hard to believe that the race that was about to take place somehow surpassed all expectation and provided us with the most exciting (and controversial) finish to a season in recent memory.
I’m writing this the night before the 2021 Abu Dhabi grand prix, the final race of what many would consider the single greatest season in Formula One history, the culmination of the year-long battle between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen and in a larger sense, a moment that feels pivotal for F1’s place in the greater sporting world. After the longest, most gruelling season to date, both drivers arrive to the circuit level on points, wrapped up in the maelstrom of controversy that was the Saudi grand prix, with one final frantic dash to the finish line separating either driver from their place in the history books. Lewis can leave tomorrow with his eighth World Championship, and the outright record for the most titles won by one driver (a record he currently shares with Micheal Schumacher). Max on the other hand is on the cusp of clinching his first, and in doing so join the exclusive club of Formula One World Champions, ending 7 years of Mercedes dominance and dethroning the man that many argue is the greatest driver our sport has ever seen. Quite simply, this is peak F1.
Formula One is a unique sport in many ways.
First of all, it’s not exactly accessible, certainly not in the way football, cricket or any other run of the mill sport is. A kid watching football on TV can witness Lionel Messi drop his shoulder and pirouette around a defender, watch him take a split second to glance up and realising that the goalkeeper is off their line, strike with the most delicate of touches to send the ball floating tantalisingly above the goalkeeper’s fingertips and into the net. After observing poetry manifest itself in the form of a 5’7” Argentinian, that same kid can grab her football, go outside and spend the rest of the evening trying to replicate her hero.
The next day when she watches an F1 race with her friends, and she sees her favourite drivers mere inches apart from one another, pulling more than 5 times their body weight in G-force through a corner, and hurtling the down a straight at speeds in excess of 300kph, she doesn’t have any way to take that experience and recreate it herself. Outside of the rare few that have grown up with some exposure to motorsport via wealth, luck or a combination of the two, most people don’t have a frame of reference through which they can relate to the experience of driving an F1 car.
In many ways this should be detrimental to a spectator sport. How can we as an audience care about what we’re watching when we have no basis for it in our own experience of the world? I like to think of this as the ‘astronaut equivalence’. The very idea of becoming a Formula One driver is as foreign a concept for most people as the notion of setting forth into outer space. Neither profession is something that you can ‘practice’, and the only way to even get your foot in the door is to rise to the top of a number of other disciplines along the way. And yet it is exactly this exclusivity that is so attractive.
Sidenote, there is an interesting parallel in the number of people that have been to space and the number that have ever competed in an F1 car, with around 650 intrepid explorers strapping themselves onto the top of rockets throughout history whilst 770 drivers have taken to the grid of an F1 race. Compare this to the over 100,000 currently registered professional footballers around the world.
When I watch the latest crew of astronauts blast off from Cape Canaveral, there is a potent cocktail of excitement, awe, anxiety and fear in the deepest pit of my stomach. The only other time I get that mix of feelings is waiting for the lights to go out at the start of a grand prix. There is so much energy coiled up in those cars before the green light, standing still almost against their will, against their very nature as objects designed purely for speed. Then there are the drivers, seemingly unaware of the tension in the air, the weight of expectation from the crowd, and the absurd fact that 1000 horsepower is waiting to respond to the slightest twitch of their right foot. When we watch a race, we are watching real life superheroes do things that the rest of us could never even begin to attempt. At every bend we watch them take unimaginable risks, and hold our breath as they do battle over inches of tarmac. F1 is more than just a sport, it is a celebration of engineering excellence, a throwback to the danger of gladiatorial combat, and an awe inspiring expression of man and machine operating together as one.
It might not be for everyone, but tonight hundreds of millions of people are going to bed imagining the infinite number of scenarios that could play out on track tomorrow. There will be pundits and punters arguing back and forth all morning over driving style, team work and strategy. The previous 21 rounds will be dissected, every overtake, every collision and every statistic, prediction and opinion will be rendered meaningless. The cars will take to the grid, Lewis and Max sharing the front row. The lights will go out. Thousands of components refined over millions of simulations will dance in perfect unison to accelerate them towards the first turn, reaching nearly 200 kph before they jump on the brakes. What happens next is anyone’s guess.
An old post from a previous attempt at keeping a blog going.
I was lucky enough to get the chance to shoot some photos at Robert’s first headline tour around Ireland. I haven’t been at a gig since the pandemic began, I haven’t taken a ‘real’ camera to one in probably a decade, and let me tell you, it felt good. I’ve been taking photos in some form or another for nearly 20 years, and I think the image in this post is my favourite I’ve ever managed to capture.
There is something about watching someone at work on the stage letting it all out, something about the collective energy of hundreds of people moving and singing and screaming together, and then doing your best to try to capture the feeling of being in the midst of it all.
The last two years have taken so much, it feels so good to start taking them back.
I’ve realised that on occasion entries from my Day One might make sense to share.
“Lightfall”, the new expansion for Destiny 2 launched today. I haven’t played Destiny in a long time, probably a year or more at this stage. I still have memories of the original game launching, how hyped my friend group were, and how I was living in Wicklow at the time with no way to play it.
The guys were in a party waiting for midnight to come round, and I felt like I was missing the start of a journey that was going to last a decade. Over the years that would follow we as a group would fall in and out love with the game, as sour tastes were replaced with perfect balance patches, and the sweaty, tense, strategic teamwork required for clearing a raid still stands up as some of the best fun a group of friends can have whilst playing a game together.
I hope that this expansion rekindles a little of that, this is the 2nd last DLC for Destiny 2, with D3 coming around the corner. The plot has developed to a point I could never have seen coming, and it feels like I’m going to need to watch some myNameIsByf videos to catch up with the things I’ve missed. The traveller is in orbit? Some cabal and fallen are our allies? Who is the witness? See you in orbit.
