Weeknotes 214

I’ve spent all week in a daze from jet lag. Embarrassing.

For the first time ever I did manage to sleep for almost the entire flight home, but obviously I still lost eight hours and it’s taken me longer than usual to pay back the sleep debt of having to wake up in time for work every morning.

Monday was a total write-off and the rest of the week has been very busy on not enough sleep. Last night I slept for nine hours so I’m hopeful that’s finally reset my circadian system.

Part of me is wondering whether this implies that the full-body exhaustion of not sleeping on the return flight is a necessary ingredient in adjusting more quickly to the time difference, but I expect it’s more likely to be a combination of a) jet lag naturally getting worse with age and b) me being unable to exercise with a broken foot, given that exercise is usually what snaps me back to normality. At least there’s a chance of the foot improving over time.

The foot is improving over time. I’ve switched to a much smaller boot — more a shoe, really — which makes me feel more vulnerable but still does the essential job of immobilising the flat part of my foot. It’s certainly less inconvenient and conspicuous, and it’s a relief to be able to flex my ankle again as I walk. It’s just a bit annoying that it’s so much thicker than a normal shoe and makes me list permanently to one side like an incorrectly loaded cargo ship. Maybe I should treat myself to another one for the uninjured foot so I’m properly balanced.

My pristine left Converse lies in wait, emboldened by its travels, biding its time.

I forgot to mention I made it to Boogaloos for breakfast last Saturday before heading home. Even adjusted for nostalgia it was the tastiest meal I’ve had so far this year, no question.

Then over to Mission St for Grand Coffee, a hobble up Valencia to grab books from Dog Eared Books and chocolate from Dandelion, and finally a taxi to the airport. I’m glad I got to hit a few favourites in one go.

I feel bad that I’ve been exclusively focused on work and recovery, and thus neglecting friendships, since I broke my foot. Now that it’s mending I’m going to make an effort to be more sociable next week. hashtag accountability

I watched what exists of True Detective: Night Country. I initially gave up on True Detective after its first season and this one’s a big improvement — both lead actors are excellent and I’m finding its Arctic setting moody & compelling. I’m also never one to complain about strong Twin Peaks vibes.

On the other hand, the pacing’s a bit slow and there’s a risk of the subplots stretching the central mystery too thin. I’m enjoying it but I wish I’d waited until the whole season had aired so I didn’t have to wait a week between episodes.

And then I watched Grounded II, a two-hour documentary about the making of The Last of Us Part II. Unsurprisingly I loved it; it has a lot of interesting detail for fans of the games, and more generally I find it inspiring to hear creative people talk about doing creative things together.

I am, of course, excited for what comes next.

I played a bit of the lazy and boring Silent Hill: The Short Message but quickly lost interest.

The new glasses are definitely a big upgrade for watching TV and playing games. In fact, everything is so sharp that the image looks almost oversharpened, with a similar otherworldly feeling to when motion smoothing is turned on, and I’ve noticed the extra fidelty makes my motion sickness a bit worse during video games.

I’m hoping my blur-addled brain can habituate to this alarming clarity after an adjustment period, because being able to see so much more detail from a distance is fantastic.

The Prompt 3 beta finally expired so I’ve got to decide whether I can justify paying £100 (!) to buy it.

For now I’m trying out iSH instead. It’s a full Linux environment rather than a dedicated SSH client, but it’s working well enough so far: you can apk add openssh-client to install an SSH client and key agent, and cat /dev/location > /dev/null & to keep it running in the background. Unless I’ve forgotten something, I think that’s all I need…?

This provokes the tantalising question of whether I could be doing all my Linux faff locally on the iPad instead of SSHing into a Raspberry Pi. I dunno; maybe? One annoying, self-inflicted problem at a time.