Weeknotes 156

Me again. As foretold a year ago, the hellish “consecutive days” prophecy has come to pass. Weeknotes 208 is going to be a killer.

Happy new year! 🍾

I’m home from seeing my family for Christmas. Aside from the usual stress it was intermittently relaxing.

The most relaxing moment was when I returned my rental car without being charged more money for imaginary damage or missing fuel. All the other cars I’ve rented recently have had a segmented fuel gauge, so as long as there’s enough in the tank to illuminate the last segment (quarter? eighth?) when you return it, that counts as “full” and they don’t sting you with some absurd refuelling charge. But this car had a pixel-resolution fuel gauge, which made me sweat as I drove the half hour from the petrol station to the rental location to drop it off, desperately willing that final pixel to stay lit. Stupid technological progress.

While driving back through London I saw a couple of billboards with Fireflies graffiti, made to appear as though it’d been sprayed over an existing advert. It looked pretty convincing and took me by surprise. I assume it’ll ramp up into a more overt campaign for HBO’s The Last of Us soon.

I watched all of The Traitors, which contained the most percentages I’ve ever seen in a TV show.

(Don’t worry, I wrote a computer program.)

It was compelling enough to keep me watching, although I’m not sure I was still enjoying it by the end. It was a bit too relentless and repetitive; a tight six or eight episodes probably would’ve been better than twelve. It also reminded me why I don’t enjoy deception games: I’m bad at them, and it’s upsetting when other people are good at them.

A friend got two episodes in before realising they were watching a different show altogether, which cleared up a lot of the confusion in our conversation.

I saw some films!

The Banshees of Inisherin: funny, elegiac, bleak, visually beautiful, fantastic performances. I really enjoyed it.

Everything Everywhere All at Once: I was looking forward to this because the cast and premise ticked a lot of my boxes, but it turned out to be an incoherent, tediously wacky mess with nothing to say. Look, I recognise that it’s infinitely more imaginative than the norm, but I also can’t remember ever more strongly willing a film to finish than this one. It went on for ages with nothing meaningful for my brain to recognise and latch onto, like watching a football match. Disappointing.

Top Gun: Maverick: bad, cheesy fun, which is what I expected. Some good bits with planes. Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer provide an even more effective memento mori than The Banshees of Inisherin.

I enjoyed the cheerful nihilism of Red Letter Media’s video about their single remaining VHS copy of Nukie. Amazingly the auction of that tape is already at $76k after only two days.

My energy company gave me the Christmas present of arbitrarily imagining that I’d used £350 of gas in the last month, probably. This is so ridiculous that I’ve started ignoring the gas part of my bill entirely. What could go wrong? (The energy ombudsman says “your case is currently being investigated”.)

I did sneak in five mini mince pies before the end of the year. So that’s, what, three full-size ones? Call it three.

My sourdough starter has been in the freezer for months. Today I took it out in an act of defiance against the idea that 2022 had extinguished the simple pleasure of baking. Let’s see if it survived.