Weeknotes 16

Mercifully no breadmaking this week. Instead I made sourdough crackers to use up some excess starter.

This turned out to be very easy and tasty so it’s worth trying.

We finished Tiger King. It took many weeks to watch the whole thing because everyone in it is an awful person. It’s cleverly constructed but weirdly uncurious about the meaty details of various crimes — it relies heavily on the viewer being entertained by the wacky personalities of the people involved, which I wasn’t really, because as mentioned they are all lamentable.

The “aftershow” episode is more interesting because it was filmed recently and so everyone’s remote. I spent most of it thinking about the logistics: it’s one thing to mail an interviewee an iPhone and AirPods so they can join a video call, but how do you record the footage?

I used the endless lockdown as an excuse to buy an Oculus Quest. I have many reservations about Oculus but being stuck inside has made us desperate for novel forms of exercise so it didn’t take much mental effort to justify a wire-free Beat Saber delivery mechanism.

The Quest is impressive. The inside-out tracking works exceptionally well and the experimental hand tracking support is already good enough to use. The lightweight headset and complete absence of wires makes it easy to pick up and quickly start playing. The whole thing feels ridiculously futuristic to me.

Most importantly it gives me much less pronounced motion sickness than the PSVR. The feeling’s still there, like an itch in my brain I can’t scratch, but I can play for longer and I feel generally less nauseous. I don’t know whether this is because of better latency or better resolution or both, but it makes the whole setup actually usable which is a big, qualitative difference.

Four weeks ago I “treated myself to a month of Apple Arcade”, so inevitably the subscription renewed this week even though I finished What the Golf ages ago and haven’t played anything else since. That’s how they get ya.

If you’d asked me in February how often I took the recycling down, or unloaded & loaded the dishwasher, I would’ve shrugged and said “occasionally”. Whereas now the dishwasher and bins are all that exists for me.

As far as I can tell there isn’t a video game about loading a dishwasher. How can that be? The closest I can find is The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile and that’s not close at all.