Weeknotes 142

Hello! At the time of writing, western Europe has not yet been vapourised by a nuclear weapon.

It’s officially autumn. I love the cooler weather and the blue skies. There are conkers all over the pavements and paths. 🌰

It was quiet outside on Monday as the UK shut down for statey funes. It’s only a vocal minority who believe this is genuinely important but the rest of us still have to let them get on with it, on account of how we live in a society. Ironically these are exactly the sort of people who’d never extend others the same courtesy, and that is how the world works.

While A Nation Mourned, I finally managed to solve a variant sudoku, Dragonsnake, by myself.

This is the first time I’ve finished one of the non-GAS puzzles unaided so I felt a twinge of achievement. In absolute terms it’s not particularly hard (only 3 out of 5 for difficulty) and it took me about fifty minutes to plod through it. I was still pleasantly surprised I was able to solve it at all because that’s something I couldn’t have done on my own before.

I’d assumed I wasn’t learning anything from idly watching videos of other people solving similar puzzles, but knowing all the consequences of the constraints (e.g. avoiding checkerboards and impossible perimeters in the shading; avoiding fives and alternating polarity on the German whisper lines; establishing the minimum length of renban lines) really helped me to make steady progress, so I suppose I must be retaining something.

It’s a fun puzzle with a delightful interplay between its rules, so if you’re even mildly curious then I recommend having a go or at least watching Simon solve it.

On Thursday morning I had some time to kill between errands in Covent Garden so I opportunistically tried to pop into Prufrock but it was too busy for comfort. It’s typical of weird coffee hipsters to leave no space for a completely normal person like me who goes to a coffee shop because of what a coffee man said on his coffee YouTube channel.

On Friday I rode up to Finsbury Park and met Chris for a coffee and mooch about. More conkers.

Thor: Love and Thunder was fun but uneven and underwhelming. It’s weird how abstract some of these MCU films are getting now that they’re running out of comparatively normal things to put in them.

I really enjoyed the first episode of The Rehearsal and I’m curious to see where they go with it. I think — and hope — that it’d be hard to resist the temptation to escalate such an interesting premise.

DECREPITUDE WATCH: Over the last few months I’ve had a fair amount of pain in my fingers and wrists. I noticed this week that it seems to be easing off which comes as a significant relief. I assume taking a break from constant typing is helping.

I’m at a low ebb. Next week I’d like to start some projects, have some new ideas and get my brain moving again.