Weeknotes 1

I’m feeling a bit better this week. The gym has now deigned to open so every weekday I’ve set my alarm and gone there early like someone who has somewhere they need to be, which I don’t. I’ve lost a little bit of weight and my shoulder hurts less.

I want to get healthier but am conscious that I don’t have an income, which means that every mealtime necessitates an agonising tradeoff between caloric and financial budgets. Mindblowingly these incentives are not well aligned.

I haven’t been to KFC, Greggs or Doughnut Time yet.

For dinner on Friday I had fun making the Anna Jones cassoulet I mentioned last week:

(I don’t know why the audio sync is so bad. It’s fine on the original story but perhaps Instagram’s video export is wonky.)

We watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was alright and has aged better (albeit less) than its predecessors, probably because of how much it leans into the gentle comedy. Despite being quite bloody-minded and completionist I really doubt I’ve got the patience for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Because I’m a bloody-minded completionist I went to see The Rise of Skywalker by myself at 11am in an empty unheated cinema. It wasn’t good and I had to use my backpack as an improvised blanket but I’m glad it’s all over and I enjoyed the Half in the Bag and Hello Internet episodes it unlocked.

This week I finished For All Mankind, which became surprisingly good over the course of ten episodes. Between that and The Morning Show it’s been a strong start for Apple TV+, although I now don’t have any reason to keep paying so will probably cancel until one of those shows begins its second season.

I’ve got lots of time for Ashly Burch but Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet does not look good.

I bought Outer Wilds and have been enjoying it so far. For the first hour or so I came close to losing interest because there’s no clear goal, but exploration quickly becomes its own reward and I’ve now been drawn into the mystery.

It does, of course, have the usual problem of unnecessarily small text that can’t be made any larger:

There’s a lot of text in the game so this might be the thing that stops me from playing it much more. I’m going to try anyway because it’s interesting and inventive and I’d like to see where it goes next.

I know these weeknotes make it sound a bit like I’ve only been playing video games and watching telly, which is largely true, but I’ve also had time and energy for some nice coffees and lunches and dinners with friends, and that’s been really great.

There’s a standard set of polite questions that people always ask me when they find out I’m vegan, one of which is “how long have you been doing it?”. I never really know the answer to this; lately I’ve been saying “getting on for 20 years” because I dimly remember starting sometime in the early 2000s, but that’s a very vague answer and I wasn’t sure it was even right.

So I was glad to stumble across this photo when looking for something else in an old backup:

I took this the day I decided to go vegan. I was already basically vegetarian so I used up all the dairy products in my fridge and drove to the supermarket to buy soya replacements. The photo’s EXIF data says that it was taken on the evening of 7th June 2003, which is as good a starting point as any.

As of , I’ve been vegan for about .

Mate, have you been to that absurd Samsung “experience space” at Coal Drops Yard? It is extremely strange and gross and bad. They’ve clearly spent an obscene amount of money on it but have forgotten to develop products that anyone wants. They have a Galaxy Fold that you’re not allowed to fold or even touch. There’s an internet fridge. I tried to have a go on the VR demo but it didn’t work.

As of tomorrow my old team at FutureLearn will be 50% women, which I think is a milestone worth leaving a job for.

Yesterday morning I started thinking about making a poster of the text “stop overthinking it” but quickly disappeared down the mental rabbit hole of deciding how big it should be and what font to use and whether it should be framed and whether it would be better as a T-shirt. In summary: the system works.

I often find it convenient to have this comprehensive list of utter shits to refer back to.

This is a recycled tweet. Is that acceptable weeknotes content? Yes.

Sainsbury’s is already selling hot cross buns.