Weeknotes 174

It’s getting so light in the evenings now. Apart from the fifteen minutes of biblical hail on Thursday it’s really starting to feel like spring.

I finished the first chunk of new work on my WebAssembly interpreter. It turned out to be more involved than expected and at one point I nearly became extremely bogged down because I’d convinced myself the preprocessor needed to do more to get the job done. Fortunately the ritual of writing out a commit message with a convincing explanation of my reasons was enough to make me realise they were silly and I could avoid the entire digression instead.

It’s nice to have merged something after pausing the project for a while. I’ve also been trying out some refactoring to bring the implementations of the parser and the preprocessor closer together, but — scandal! luxury! — that’s only happening in the privacy of my own laptop at the moment.

Big week for fomo, with several friends going exciting places, doing exciting things and making exciting changes in their lives. It mostly doesn’t bother me — of course, I’m happy to see good things happen to people I care about — but I do get an occasional pang of worry that I’m not Making The Most Of It. When that happens it’s a good opportunity to remind myself to stop being a massive idiot and appreciate what I have.

For example, it was nice to see the Tories getting absolutely rinsed in the local elections.

Out of curiosity I’ve been trying season one of Shrinking on Apple TV+. Each episode feels like that brief confusing fug after waking up from a nap stretched out to an entire thirty minutes. The jokes are never unexpected enough to raise a smile, the relationships and characters don’t ring true at all — people don’t talk like that! — and once per episode there’s a mawkish scene trying to make you feel something without putting the effort in. The joke’s on you, Tim Apple! I feel nothing!

I also watched the first two episodes of Silo. Calling it now: the twist is that they’re the robot crew of a doomed generation ship inside a computer simulation run by ghosts. (It’s intriguing enough but Rebecca Ferguson’s weird performance is pretty distracting.)

To my surprise The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is finally coming into its own. It’s always been a mildly amusing spectacle but I’ve never felt like I know where it’s going or why it’s happening or even, really, what it’s about. But this season is retroactively framing the whole story in a way that gives it more narrative drive and provides some of that missing structure, and I’m enjoying it a lot.

This week’s episode, The Testi-Roastial, was a good example of the framing working well and making the show more coherent and entertaining. I just wish they’d done something like this three seasons ago.

I’ve been avoiding saying anything about season four of Succession for fear of accidentally spoiling it for anyone, but: blimey, it’s still good isn’t it? Aleks came round today and we watched (rewatched in my case) the whole season to date and I appreciated it even more. Excellent telly; if it is to be said, so it be— so it is.

I saw Rye Lane which was silly and sweet and fun and had plenty of good familiar London in it.

Coronation: fucking embarrassing.

New Knower!