Weeknotes 130

I gave my Brighton Ruby talk. I felt extremely nervous but managed to keep it under control and I think it went alright in the end.

I’m glad to have appeared on the official Brighton Ruby lineup at last, and to have broken my almost 3.5-year streak of not giving talks in person. I’m also relieved I don’t have a talk hanging over me any more because that is stressful and I’m not as resilient these days.

It was a lovely event. Thanks Andy.

This week’s episode of For All Mankind was exciting but distractingly inconsistent about whether long-distance communication is instantaneous or not. It’s okay for a show to be relaxed about this sort of detail as long as it doesn’t try to make it integral to the plot, but this episode did, so that’s a bit of a problem.

Thinking about whether I cared about this made me realise that For All Mankind is a guilty pleasure rather than some kind of serious alternate history and/or hard science fiction, and I‘m fine with that.

I watched Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness now that it’s on Disney+. It’s mostly silly fun with some genuine surprises and a few lovely Sam Raimi moments. The usual Marvel previs disease sucks some of the life out of the big set pieces but that’s not enough to spoil the good parts.

Seeing it in IMAX Enhanced format (i.e. no letterboxing) was mildly novel and made me feel like I was getting better value from the pixels on my TV.

There doesn’t appear to be any way to explicitly remove items from the automatically-populated Continue Watching section on Disney+.

If you want a film to stop showing up, you have to perform the extremely undignified pantomime of opening it and fast-forwarding to the end so the computer is tricked into believing you’ve watched it. And if it’s an episode of a TV series, you have to go to the final episode and do that, otherwise each episode you “watch” will be instantly replaced by the next one and you’ll be fast-forwarding through every episode all day like an animal.

Why can’t they just let us delete things? It feels like a low bar.

Thanks to Alice I got a spontaneous trip to see Stewart Lee at the Royal Festival Hall. He was funny and belligerent in equal measure, which is normal, with flashes of genuine contrition, which isn’t. I laughed at the bit about the spider bite but I don’t think the chicken juice bit works.

Also, well done to Alice for reaching week 200! I suppose she’ll always be 70 weeks ahead of me in absolute terms, but another way of looking at it is that she’s currently 54% ahead of me and it feels like I can asymptotically close that gap as long as I keep going.

(Update: correction.)