Weeknotes 200

Whoa! Exactly two hundred weeknotes?! Amazing!! 💯💯

I went to a new doctor for a routine physical exam. The receptionist asked to see some ID, which I didn’t have with me because I wasn’t buying a four-pack of Stella in 1998. Even after he de-escalated to “anything with your name on it” I still couldn’t help, no matter how many times I theatrically patted the pocket containing only my keys and then the other pocket containing only my phone.

In the end I showed him one of the name-bearing imaginary cybercards on my phone and that was good enough. Since this was a pure box-ticking exercise I’m curious whether it would’ve worked to borrow a pen, write my name, take a photo of it and show him that, but the poor guy was only doing his job.

The nurse asked about my diet, I mentioned I’m vegan, and she followed up with “do you eat much of that vegan cheese?”. Apparently overindulgence of specifically vegan cheese is now a big enough public health danger to show up on standard questionnaires.

Turns out I’m basically fine (I hardly ever eat vegan cheese). No bad news beyond what I already knew, i.e. I need to go to the gym more often.

I pulled my finger out and cancelled my old gym membership. I don’t particularly enjoy going there and the opening times no longer work well for me. I basked in the thrill of deleting the direct debit for about ten minutes until I found out I owed them for a final month and had to meekly phone a collection company and pay to avoid a late fee. The brief surge of agency wasn’t really worth the hassle of having to call someone afterwards.

The new gym is working out better, mainly because it opens 24/7 and doesn’t require conversation. I managed to go every weekday this week. Mindblowing life hack: on days when I’m too disorganised to have time for a full hour, I go for 45 minutes rather than sack it off entirely. Hashtag better than nothing.

It’s one of the mercies of modern life that I rarely have to interact with clocks, even during what is clocks’ busiest time of year thanks to the daylight saving change, since they mostly set themselves.

But! The batteries finally ran out in my bathroom clock and it lost power for the first time since I bought it in 2016. With new batteries it worked fine again, except something wasn’t quite right, and it took me a couple of days to realise it had been reset to its default of showing a 12-hour clock instead of the obviously correct 24-hour format. I had to read the online manual for a slightly different clock to find out how to fix this: hold down the SET button for two seconds and use the up/down buttons to change mode. Phew.

Why this otherwise perfect device even supports the 12-hour clock — not to mention Fahrenheit — is a true mystery.

I’m lacking the time or energy to be sociable at the moment, although on Friday I rode to Homerton for an errand and opportunistically stopped off en route to meet Jess (and dog!) for coffee next to London Fields, sheltering from the drizzle.

Then in the evening I trekked up to Highbury for a lovely dinner with Roz, James and friends.

On Halloween itself I watched When Evil Lurks, a new Argentine horror. It’s excellent and absolutely brutal and I was gripped all the way through.

This and The Wailing, i.e. the two foreign-language films I watched, were the clear standouts this year. Both strongly recommended.

There’s a new Underworld single (thanks Vanessa) whose first five minutes didn’t do it for me but the sixth gave me goosebumps. Remember the past?

I felt a bit bad about being so curmudgeonly about Alan Wake II. I do want to give it a proper try because a lot of effort has gone into making it and it’s ostensibly in a genre (narrative-driven linear third-person single-player games) that I enjoy.

So I went back to it, relaxed a bit and powered through the boring parts, not hesitating to turn down the difficulty whenever I needed to hurry through the most frustrating of the bullet-sponge enemy encounters.

Unfortunately I’m still finding the gameplay aimless and unconvincing. Everything feels as arbitrary and consequence-free as a Doctor Who episode, and I don’t feel drawn into the story or invested in any of the characters. The layers of procedural busywork aren’t fun and feel like padding to make it last longer than it should.

What a shame. It’s clearly a labour of love, but its combination of earnest metanarrative, unearned spookiness and bargain-basement jump scares comes across as deeply naff and adolescent.

Well, at least it makes me appreciate how good Naughty Dog are.