Weeknotes 160

It was set to be a busy week until I went for a bike ride on Monday and pulled a muscle in my back again. I had to cancel several meetings and spend the rest of the week shuffling around with a theatrically pained expression instead.

I’m mostly mended but haven’t been able to ride anywhere yet. Very frustrating.

Fortunately I did manage to hop on the Overground and meet Chris for (more) ramen to keep my body & spirit going.

Only one stream due to injury woes, and that didn’t work very well because 60%–70% of the frames were being dropped for a reason I don’t understand. I want to keep making steady progress on this project but sometimes it doesn’t feel very fun.

On the plus side, the label shadowing and function body fixes were merged into the WebAssembly spec. Oh, and I made my thousandth commit.

I haven’t been properly using Twitter for a while, and now that third-party clients have been officially killed, this is probably the right time to let it go. I’d been crossposting my Mastodon weeknote & livestream updates there just in case anyone cares but I’m increasingly convinced they don’t.

I’ve not managed to get into the habit of using Mastodon in the same way I used Twitter, i.e. for idle chatting and complaining. I can’t tell whether this is because Mastodon is less conducive to that sort of thing — it’s certainly quieter — or just because I’m not feeling the same social media urge any more.

So I’m making a bit more of an effort to participate on both the Ruby and personal fronts, but it definitely seems like there’s less of an audience and it’s hard to shake the feeling I’m tooting into the void.

Twitter was fun for a while there, wasn’t it? Ah well.

I completed The Last of Us Part I. I enjoyed it a lot and I’m glad I had the opportunity to revisit it like this. Left Behind holds up surprisingly well too.

Episode two of HBO’s The Last of Us was again excellent and made some clever choices about how to adapt the early part of the game. I have more thoughts but I’ll try to shut up about this show until the season’s finished.

Bones and All: very good. It’s slow and pensive, with not much happening between the occasional moments of graphic violence. Excellent performances from all involved.

The last time I did proper freelance consultancy work was in 2016. Did you know that £100 in 2016 is worth about £140 today? I’m no expert but I’m beginning to suspect salaries and day rates haven’t kept up with inflation.

The energy ombudsman upheld my complaint and told the supplier to recalculate my bills for the last seven years and pay me £200 as an apology for being comically inept. Nothing’s actually happened yet but I naïvely assume they can’t ignore this request as easily as they ignored mine.

Ideally I’d like any payment to be tendered in the form of valuables reclaimed directly from the mansion of the company’s former CEO who cashed out to the tune of £4m shortly before it went bust and got bailed out with £6.5bn of public money, but I would also accept cash.