Weeknotes 187

August…‽

The continuing drizzle and cool breezes come as a miraculous, anomalous relief after the last few boiling-hot summers and before the many boiling-hot summers to come. I haven’t plugged in the air conditioner at all this year.

On Monday I returned to the Everyman and met Aleks for Barbie. It managed to pull off being fun and imaginative while ultimately staying safe enough to be unremarkable but I enjoyed myself and it made me laugh. I’m confident it’s 2023’s best film featuring a joke about the Photoshop user interface.

A beer? During a film? At lunchtime? Don’t mind if I do.

How does comedy kryptonite Will Ferrell keep getting cast in things?

Remember Sex Education? That was good.

Then a delightful lunch at Club Mexicana with Murray on Thursday. So if you’re jonesing for h-notes, now you’re all caught up.

On Friday I went to Girl Ray’s album launch at Rough Trade East, a charming casual gig which crucially only lasted an hour so I was home by half nine. 👌🏻

While organising my calendar for next week I was tricked by the fake summer bank holiday again. Don’t be fooled! It’s not until the end of the month! Tragically there is no solution to this annual problem.

MAN GIT REVERT: I’ve had to stop using break in git rebase -⁠-⁠interactive because it doesn’t set REBASE_HEAD when you break before the first commit, and that inconsistency is wasting more of my time than I ever spent choosing the right commit to edit in the first place. We regret the error.

In a piece of spinoff content whose desperation rivals that of the Disney corporation strip mining their Star Wars IP for origin stories, I submitted a Ruby patch to add an optional element size argument to Array#transpose so you can say e.g. array.transpose(3) and always get a three-element result instead of a surprise empty array in the case when the input is empty.

To me this seems both useful and obviously correct — #inject takes an optional argument to allow it to gracefully handle emptiness, so shouldn’t #transpose do the same? — but I don’t think anyone else in the dwindling pool of Ruby enthusiasts agrees or cares so that’s probably the end of it.

Speaking of being an expert in a dying field, I’ve been rewatching the heck out of the excellent Coal Drops Sessions version of The Beths’ Expert In A Dying Field. I like that song! I like that canal! Together at last.

Ever think about how much lateral pinching you do in the course of a normal day? Me too.