Weeknotes 166

It snowed!

I’ve been busy with work this week so haven’t had much energy for anything else.

I’m itching to make progress on my WebAssembly interpreter but I think I have to accept that streaming doesn’t fit into my schedule at the moment. Even when I do have a couple of hours free for it, I’m not in the mood. So it goes.

I haven’t worked out how best to wind up the video series which until now has been the entire purpose of the project. I don’t want to leave it hanging forever with no resolution, or rule out the possibility of doing more in the future if I feel like it. But drawing some kind of line under it will give me permission to tinker with the code at my leisure instead, and I’m excited about that.

I went to the Barbican to see Madison Cunningham supported by Rosie Frater-Taylor, Tara Lily, TYSON and Tawiah. The music was great and, well, it’s a very comfortable and civilised venue that I can walk home from afterwards, which apparently is what I enjoy these days.

I also saw Self Esteem at the Hammersmith Apollo. She put on a good show but it’s a bad venue in a bad part of London an hour’s tube ride away from my flat so that made it a bit less good.

I’ve been giving space banjo simulator Outer Wilds another try. Although I still feel frustrated by how overwhelming and undirected it is, this time I’ve at least made some discoveries and even intentionally progressed a couple of threads of investigation.

I came very close to giving up again several times but kept reminding myself that there’s always somewhere else you can go when you get stuck. Ultimately it’s not a well-designed game because so much of the frustration could be mitigated by slightly more structure at the beginning, but its scope and ambition are impressive and it’s hard to not be at least a little bit curious about what’s going on. Maybe I’ll get through it this time.

GAS CLOSURE: my energy supplier finally fixed the gas meter number on my account, only twenty months after I first asked them to. This involved them refunding all the incorrect bills since 2016 and then — separately, not as part of an atomic transaction — rebilling me for the right meter over that same period. So I got a heady few hours of seeing my account be thousands of pounds in credit before it crashed back down to reality. What a rush.

Aside from finally being done with this pointlessly difficult piece of admin, the real relief is that it worked out slightly in my favour: my actual usage was more than a grand lower than what I’d paid for, and I got the £200 apology credit too. Of course this all concerns an energy account fantasy integer instead of real money (I’ll spell it “fiat” in a delicious twist) but at least the situation didn’t somehow generate a massive bill on top of the inconvenience.

I spent today back at RHS Wisley where the daffodils and crocuses were out and it felt like spring.