Weeknotes 102

I stumbled over the finishing line at work this week and now I’m on holiday. 🎄

So far I’ve just been relaxing and doing nothing, which is what my brain craved because it was running on empty. I know that I need a change of routine in the new year to prevent myself from getting into this situation in the first place but I haven’t worked out what that should look like yet. For now I’ll just catch up on sleep, bake bread, play some video games and watch a man solve sudokus in a calming way.

On Wednesday I met Maxime for dinner when she was briefly in London. This was really fun and felt safe & normal. It’s made me more excited about the possibility of meeting the rest of my teammates in person next year.

I decided to post some presents to my brother’s family rather than risk public transport to deliver them in person. I thought I was being clever using Parcelforce for this because (unlike the other delivery services I looked at) they didn’t say anything about needing to print my own shipping label, which made sense since they alone allow packages to be dropped off at the post office. But as usual my hubris was punished because it turned out they do require it, they just waited until after I’d paid to tell me.

I don’t own a printer so I had to go to Ryman to print out the label. The good news is that it’s 25p per page; the bad news is that they also charge a flat £2.50 for the privilege of using their printer at all. It was a thrill to temporarily hold a single sheet of A4 paper worth £2.75.

We finished season three of Succession which ultimately turned out to be fantastic. The last three episodes in particular are among the best TV I’ve seen — just a really satisfying culmination of many hours of excellent writing and acting. I have loads to say about this but I both don’t want to get into spoilers and am lazy so you’ll have to imagine me writing something clever.

In the gaps when Nat isn’t playing The Witcher 3 on PS4 we’ve started watching season two of The Witcher on Netflix for a bit of variety of medium. It’s nonsensical but pretty watchable, thanks largely to Freya Allan’s convincing performance as Ciri.

The Witcher does occasionally give me the same feeling as Foundation: it’s so dizzyingly expensive and takes itself so seriously, but none of that opulence or solemnity stands a chance of landing because underneath all that it’s a silly premise presented in an inept way. So the best strategy for enjoying it is to let the visual effects and bombastic drama wash over you and try not to think about what any of it means.

This wasn’t very good was it? The system works.