Weeknotes 192

Hot, humid, unpleasant.

I can’t do anything when it’s this warm. I lie motionless, gently steaming like a wet bulb, and wait for it to be over. 🫠

On Wednesday I did manage to meet Reema for dinner in an air-conditioned restaurant that served frozen margaritas, so that was pretty great.

I’ve been meaning to give Alan Wake Remastered a try for a while because Alan Wake II comes out later this year and I liked Control from the same developer. It recently appeared in a 30% off sale so I decided to buy it.

Oh, hold on, it’s one of those double discounts sales where you get another 30% off if you’re a PlayStation Plus member. I no longer subscribe to PS Plus but remembered buying a year’s membership on sale from Amazon in January 2021 that I never redeemed, so, great, I can redeem it now for the extra discount if nothing else.

But the code didn’t work, and Sony said to talk to Amazon, and Amazon said they couldn’t refund such an old digital purchase, and then Amazon said they’d refund it anyway to shut me up, and now nothing’s happened so I don’t know whether that was a lie.

So, point is, I bought Alan Wake Remastered for 30% off. My first impression is that it’s extremely clunky and naff.

In summary: I’m quite the bargain hunter.

The above precipitated a moment of self-awareness where I realised I now get so little enjoyment from almost all video games that I might have to accept that I just don’t like them, and that the few I do enjoy are anomalies rather than representative of the medium.

In particular I find combat almost unbearable, but then if there’s nothing happening I get bored and lose interest. I have no patience for managing anything or digging through fiddly menus, but over the last few years every AAA game has become an action RPG Homer car. The idea of intentionally playing, say, Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield is completely alien to me. What’s the last game I legitimately enjoyed that wasn’t made by Naughty Dog? Horizon Forbidden West maybe, and even then…?

In any case, I feel a bit sad that my abstract romantic notion of how much promise the medium holds is so rarely borne out by reality. Perhaps it’s time to let go of that hope and save myself the disappointment.

Episode nine of Foundation’s second season was unexpectedly quite good; things happened at last and they largely made sense. It remains to be seen whether this blip can be sustained into the season finale.

MANOS (THE HANDS) OF LATE: the splint I’ve been wearing to immobilise my index finger during typing has pretty much fixed the pain, but the resulting disuse of my first dorsal interosseous muscle has made it start twitching at random times, which is inconvenient and slightly unpleasant.

This week my physio prescribed hand exercises in the form of a wonky but well-meaning mobile app from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. The exercises seem to be working even though the demonstration videos have a DHARMA Initiative orientation vibe.

I’ve spent most of my life fumbling around in GNU Screen trying to work out which session to reconnect to. Today I read the man page and discovered that screen -d -RR reconnects to the most recently created session, which is almost always what I want. Just think how much more productive I’d have been in my twenties and thirties if I’d known about this.

Work’s going well so far. Returning to an office has revived a Before Times tension that’s familiar enough to be nostalgic: being around people is draining, yet I want to be around people some of the time. Right now the balance is good and I’m enjoying meeting new faces and learning new things.

Due to poor lunch planning I went to Pret for the first time post-pandemic, but it turned out to be comically expensive, so forget it.