Weeknotes 175

It was May bank holiday two of three on Monday. This time it was grey outside so I just had a big sleep.

I spent Wednesday night shouting in an underground room in Fitzrovia again, this time over dinner with friends of Interesting.

I did in fact enjoy myself — it was lovely to see so many familiar and/or friendly faces all at once. I met a reader of these weeknotes (hello!) and a reader of my book, both of whom politely gassed me up by saying nice things. Small world, especially if you ignore whether you’re intentionally spending time with an extremely narrow subset of all possible people.

Oh and, in a more real coincidence, Wednesday was also the tenth anniversary of that book’s publication date.

This really crept up on me, although I should’ve anticipated it when I noticed ten years had passed since my Programming with Nothing talk and then made a fuss about it. That talk ultimately spawned the book so, because time is linear, it’s not surprising that one anniversary should follow the other. I just wasn’t paying attention.

Given its niche appeal I’m not confident Understanding Computation is good enough or useful enough to justify the ridiculous amount of time I spent writing it, but I’m still glad to have done it and grateful for the friends and adventures that followed.

A few years ago, in the Before, I proudly daydreamed of doing something special to mark this particular anniversary — put the whole book online for free? self-publish a second edition translated into JavaScript? — but that didn’t happen did it.

Anyway, point is, don’t get any big ideas.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out on Friday.

It’s as charming as ever, and technically very impressive, so for my own sake I’m trying to ignore how frustrating I found the first few hours of being stuck in the tutorial. I won’t detail my petty complaints but the summary is that everything’s a bit more fiddly than in Breath of the Wild and part of me pines for the elegance (and novelty?) of that mindblowing first game. But this one’s much larger and more ambitious so I’m motivated to grit my teeth through the minor annoyances and get on with the serious business of enjoying it.

Okay, one petty complaint: given that you can always exit to the Switch’s home screen anyway, would it kill Nintendo to let you pause the game normally during cutscenes, which is when I’m mostly likely to want to pause because it’s a good time for a break? The answer is no.

See? I think that’s representative of the calibre of my nitpicks.

I bought a Switch Pro Controller and it’s so much more comfortable that I feel silly for not having got one years ago. (Just as well, because Nintendo hasn’t sent my wonky joycon back yet.)

It’s been so long since I played a game on the Switch that it took me a while to relearn where the primary button is and adapt to the left stick being in the wrong place.

I had tickets for Steph Strings last night but couldn’t summon the energy to go. That’s the second time it’s happened this year — I also bailed on Sungazer in March because I’d seen them recently enough that it didn’t feel worth the hassle on the night.

It’s necessary to book tickets so far in advance that I’ve accepted the reality of buying the option to go to a gig without also making the impossible commitment to actually going. I recognise this is a bit wasteful, but will future-me really want to exercise that option in six months’ time, given unknown future circumstances, regardless of the sunk cost? Nobody can say.

The alternative is to never go to anything, so as long as I follow through some of the time I reckon this arrangement isn’t too absurdly profligate.

TUNNEL CLOSURE: I did, six weeks later, get fined both ways. The system works.

I think I caught something this week.