Weeknotes 179

It’s definitely warm but it hasn’t been as unbearable as I’d feared. The fan helps a lot.

Most of my brain is now specialised to the task of spotting tiny flies hiding on walls and windows. If anyone needs that as a service, let me know.

The sun’s started staying up until 21:15 as if that’s normal and fine.

I must admit I enjoyed watching Tim Apple’s earnest pronouncements on Monday. WWDC keynotes are always silly but I’m not clever enough to resist getting a little swept up in the manufactured sense of occasion.

The headset looks impressive and the presentation gave me a twinge of hope that it’ll be responsive and high-resolution enough not to make me immediately motion sick, although, uh, I don’t have $3,499 lying around so I won’t be buying one anyway.

Overall I’m glad Apple is trying something technologically ambitious. I appreciate the slightly mundane way they’ve positioned the product — not an escape from reality, just several large displays floating around whichever room you’re sat in — and I’m a little excited to see what the second- or third-generation version will be like in a few years once the hardware has got smaller and faster.

The macOS Sonoma section of WWDC shamed me into upgrading my laptop to Ventura, finally giving me access to futuristic features like “seeing my photos”. I always put off this cyberchore because of how difficult I make it for myself by insisting upon wiping the whole thing and setting it up from scratch, but it wasn’t too bad this time around and everything seems to basically work.

To be honest the underlying emotion wasn’t really shame but rather a gradual realisation that reinstalling my laptop’s operating system was a displacement activity that would legitimately prevent me wasting any more time refactoring my bloody WebAssembly interpreter.

But the upgrade went smoothly enough that it couldn’t stop me shipping one change which tidies up some of the mess and prepares the way for many other improvements to the preprocessor.

I find it incredibly satisfying to get everything in its right place. I only wish I could do it more quickly.

My prosaic Git discovery this week was git config -⁠-⁠global diff.colorMoved default, which made my refactoring diffs much more useful by identifying lines that had been moved around but not otherwise changed. It turns out this feature’s five years old so I should’ve noticed it sooner.

The narrative pace of Silo’s fifty-minute episodes is ostentatiously glacial. The sunk cost keeps me coming back against my better judgement so I hope it picks up soon.

I’ve been burned plenty of times by mystery box shows but this one acts like it’s not even interested in its big core mystery, instead constantly inventing small ones with no consequences for the sake of keeping the scenes rattling along. I don’t care who ate a forbidden snack relic! Just tell me whether you’re set in an allohistory in which Germany won World War II and everyone’s a secret Nazi!

I did manage to watch the modern marvel of colons and en dashes that is John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. I didn’t write any notes at the time and I already can’t really remember anything that happened in it so it was probably fine.

Oh, wait, I just remembered one thing: I like that it starts in medias res with Wick desperately trying to escape Manhattan and getting the crap kicked out of him by everyone he meets. It’s an exciting and novel opening that you probably couldn’t pull off without having the existing characters and story to motivate it.

But then the climax of the film is a punch-up in a room made of glass, which is way too similiar to the previous film’s climax of a punch-up in a room made of mirrors. I wonder what fragile, reflective and/or transparent material has been used to construct the location of the fourth film’s climactic punch-up? Ice probably.

On Wednesday night I hit the twentieth anniversary of my arbitrarily chosen starting point for going vegan.

Not actually noteworthy, of course, other than that it’s fun to watch a counter tick past a nice round number, and it’s memorable enough that for a while I’ll be able to stop going “uh… I think… shit… it must be getting on for twenty years?” when people ask me about it.

Also on Wednesday night, I went out for beers with Chris and James, the latter of whom I hadn’t seen since the Before, so that was very pleasant.

Related: I drank too much alcohol on a couple of occasions this week and suffered a bit as a result. Novel! Remember pubs?