Weeknotes 132

It’s too hot and it’s getting hotter. I can’t do anything except sit around and sweat. 🥵

Homeland season two turned out to be quite good. Since I’d only seen season one before, I’d always feared the show would suffer from the Prison Break problem of not knowing what to do once the initial motivating question (will Michael break out of prison? is Brody a terrorist? is Bruce Willis a robot?) had been answered.

But yeah, they did in fact come up with some exciting things to happen next, and Claire Danes is still great, and I was even interested enough to buy season three. Let’s see how far this goes.

The orientation of the advertising displays on the Elizabeth Line escalators defies explanation. They’ve been installed parallel to the escalator itself, so you have to tilt your head by thirty degrees to properly see whatever terrible video they’re showing. It’s so disorienting and unpleasant that I can’t imagine any human intentionally choosing it to be this way.

Assuming it was unavoidable for some logistical reason and not merely apathy: why do none of the videos take advantage of the weird angle by rotating their content to compensate? A tragic missed opportunity.

As long as you don’t try to look at any of the escalator displays, travelling on the Elizabeth Line is very nice.

My home internet connection has been almost unusably slow this weekend — to the extent that I haven’t even been able to visit BBC News or Twitter, which cheered me up — with the exception of YouTube, which has spookily continued to deliver watchable content. I don’t fully understand what quirk of network topology allowed this to happen but it’s both impressive and strange to kill time by watching full-screen video because simple web pages don’t load.

Unsurprisingly I relented and set up the air conditioner on Wednesday night because it was becoming too difficult to sleep otherwise.

I was disappointed to fall short of last year’s surrender date by a full five days, and I could continue suffering to make some kind of inane point to an audience of nobody, but why bother?

My mental health hit an ATL this week but I’m dealing with it and I’m going to be okay.

Physically I’m bracing for 40 °C weather tomorrow and Tuesday. It’s due to be the hottest ever recorded in the UK. #thisisfine

I’d originally planned to head up to Yorkshire to see Paul on Monday but I’ve rescheduled that trip for Wednesday so I don’t get roasted alive in a broken-down train.

So instead I’m going to join the rest of the country and focus on survival for the next 48 hours. Of course I’m not at any real risk but it’s going to be inconvenient to hide from the sun instead of doing whatever I like, and the heat makes me too lethargic and listless to do anything productive with my time.

Survival aside, I’m looking forward to seeing Chris tomorrow, and then Alice on Tuesday if the rails don’t buckle, and then Paul on Wednesday if the rails have unbuckled by then.

Correction to an earlier item: Alice‘s weeks are one-indexed and mine are zero-indexed, so I should’ve said that she’s 69 (not 70) weeks ahead of me, which at that point constituted a 53% (not 54%) lead. A truly classic interoperability bug; we regret the error.