Weeknotes 201

This week in socialising: saw nobody, did nothing. The sun basically sets at 4pm.

Conversely, I’m continuing to solve a lot of variant sudoku (e.g. finished the November pack) and am really enjoying it. I’m definitely learning.

London’s getting chilly. I love pulling on a knitted hat and feeling the air sting my cheeks as I ride.

Turns out I didn’t use my air conditioner at all this year. Despite the extended and unpleasant heat, we didn’t get any punishingly hot individual days and I sometimes had an air-conditioned office I could work from, so it never became unbearable enough to warrant the hassle or expense of wheeling it out.

Likewise I haven’t put the heating on yet. The premise of intentionally making my flat warmer feels a little obscene after such a long summer. I have my doubts about whether that attitude will survive contact with December.

As is traditional (previously, previously, previously, previously) I pulled a muscle in my back while cycling to work. It’s a minor injury but a disruptive one because it interferes with walking, sitting and sleeping, which pretty much covers everything I do. I’ve made peace with the fact that the constant risk of injury is the price I pay for riding a bike.

The pain was bad enough that I skipped the gym entirely on Wednesday, breaking my weekday streak, but I resumed on Thursday so that’s fine.

All of the above points could be comfortably summarised as “I am old”.

Season four of For All Mankind has started, and the first episode was great, if not quite as nailbiting as last season’s. This would be a good time for anyone who bounced off the previous season to rejoin the story, since… well… another decade has passed and things are different. So far it’s also being consistent about one-way light time, in case that was upsetting you more than the Danny storyline.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that some of the old-age makeup is getting a bit extreme after thirty in-show years. One character in particular is now so much older than the person playing them that the effect has become completely unconvincing. (Or maybe they’re just not a great actor — another contemporary character has always felt completely believable to me at every age.)

I suppose I have, through inaction, implicitly given up on The Morning Show.

The first episode of The Curse was brilliant and surprising and I absolutely loved it. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

The last film to plop out of the spooky pipe was It Lives Inside, a horror about Indian American immigrants which started out really interesting and got a bit silly at the end. The horror bits didn’t work particularly well but the rest of it definitely had more going on than the higher-budget scary films I saw this year.

For reasons which remain unclear (sunk cost? bloody-mindedness?) I’m continuing to play Alan Wake II. After a lengthy slog I reached the part where Remedy answer the burning question: what would the most fun and surprising section of Control be like if it was self-indulgent and irritating instead? It made me so cross that I had to turn the PS5 off and do something else.

(That Control sequence works so well because it happens far enough into the game that its combat feels powerful and effortless. For a company who clearly put so much love and care into their games, it’s a total mystery why they chose to make Alan Wake’s combat feel like a punishment rather than a reward.)

Ruby 3.3.0-preview3 came out and renewed my excitement for the final release next month. But as a user I’m increasingly confused by the escalating parser arms race: this preview contains Prism (né YARP) and also continues to invest in the existing parse.y, which feels weirdly redundant. What, if anything, is the plan here?

Overall pages of Shift read: zero. That’s going well then.