Weeknote #21 [W26.08] - A few nice conversations

I had quite a few nice conversations this week.

”We should not care about art”

On Friday, I met Kabeer and Mayank, who were my seniors at BIT Mesra. I do not have many fond memories of that place, and I realized while sitting with them how long it has been since I have made a conscious effort to think back to those years or to get in touch with old friends from there.

We talked late into the night, eventually the conversation turning to controversial opinions. None of them turned out to be particularly controversial within the group. The closest we came perhaps was my claim that, “we should not care about art” (something which, hopefully, I’ll write more about on this blog soon).

Color sliders

Saturday was Indie Web Club day.

I arrived just as Azan was showing Ankur and Tanvi cool stuff that can be done with the OKLCH color color space. Which immediately made me want to try it out on my blog. So during the session I added the color slider that you can now see on top right (if you’re reading this on Substack, check it out here).

The way that OKLCH works, based on human perception of colors, it is easy to set the hue as a variable and change it dynamically (with a slider in this case) without worrying about breaking accessibility.

I also had a nice conversation with Calra about How Minds Change, the audiobook I had just finished. And there were several other interesting conversations with Jatan, Saachi, and Devanshi.

Boyfriends and Girlfriends

On Sunday, for Cinema Next Door we had a screening of Éric Rohmer’s Boyfriends and Girlfriends, which was hosted by Mariam.

There were several difficulties during the screening. Firstly, we had to start late because there was another event at Underline right before. Then we had to pause the screening twice. Once to fix subtitles and then because the projector started showing a warning. But thankfully, during the discussion it was a relief to hear that people seemed to love the film regardless.

Rohmer is one of my favourite directors, and this is my favourite film by him. I love his films for how he shows, with a a combination of humour and empathy, how strangely we sometimes behave in pursuit of love.

I did an incredibly idiotic thing during the discussion. I had forgotten to insert the SD card into my camera. None of the photographs I took were saved. Which makes me almost want to cry because I remember thinking I had captured some very nice moments.