Weeknotes 199

Another busy and intermittently stressful week.

I’m low on energy at the moment and feeling a bit short-tempered and irritable. Am I ill? Tired? Dehydrated? I don’t really know. I’m going to try to exercise, sleep and drink lots of water to see if I can snap out of it.

In fact I joined a different, better gym and have gone there most days this week, so I’m hoping that’ll help, although it’s always possible it’s the odious slog of cardio that’s making me grumpy in the first place.

I hope the above remarks aren’t destined to be quoted in yet another cautionary tale about the dangers of carbon monoxide poisoning.

I saw Murray on Monday for talk prep and dinner, so that cheered me up.

Oh, and the clocks went back last night, giving me an extra hour in bed and making it easier to meet Phil for a very pleasant coffee & breakfast this morning.

I’m still enjoying the lighthearted fun of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. I’ve found myself appreciating how the flowers’ voice acting makes the whole game feel more humane, and how the ditching of the traditional time limit makes gameplay less stressful and encourages exploration. I don’t understand why they bothered keeping lives, though, since they don’t seem to do anything in single-player mode at least.

I tricked myself into buying Alan Wake II because it (the game) is spooky and it (the time of year) is Halloween. I knew this was an obvious mistake even as I was doing it. Why am I like this?

The nice-looking graphics are let down by the same user interface and accessibility mistakes that always spoil cross-platform games: there are way too many menus and navigating them is a fiddly chore; there’s a cursor you have to waft about with a joystick so the developers can pretend you’re playing with a mouse; the contrast is frequently bad enough to make interface elements illegible; there’s a setting to make the subtitles large enough to read from the couch, but… none of the other tiny text in the UI? For god’s sake. All this makes me genuinely a bit sad because there’s bound to be some decent, heartfelt creativity buried beneath the elementary missteps, and I’m disappointed to see it going to waste.

I do kind of like that it uses the same “this isn’t meant to make sense, but it’s a vibe” narrative approach as Control, but whereas that game was pretty compelling from one minute to the next, the combination of this one’s absolutely dogshit combat and anti-interesting “investigation” gameplay — wandering aimlessly around a map waiting for a white dot to appear over something — exhausted my frayed patience within a couple of hours and I turned it off. There goes another £50 I’ll never get back.

In Remedy’s defence, the intro is absolutely terrifying. ♻️

These are my two hundredth weeknotes, despite them being weeknotes 199 thanks to the unique way in which they’re numbered. I can never remember (i.e. have never bothered to decide) whether it’s the new-leftmost-digit ordinals or cardinals that are significant here. Either way I don’t have anything unusual to say to mark what may or may not be an occasion. Perhaps next week I will, and that’ll set a decisive precedent.

Although I’m intimately familiar with the periods of confusion caused by the US and UK misaligning their daylight saving dates, I can never remember (i.e. have never bothered to learn) how much time passes during those cursed weeks, so I decided to look up the answer and burn it into my brain once and for all.

The US gets three or four more weeks of daylight saving time than we do in the UK! There are two or three extra weeks on the spring side, depending on the year, and always one extra week on the autumn side.

The US starts daylight saving time on the second Sunday in March; the UK starts on the last Sunday in March, and you’ll notice that, annoyingly, “last” isn’t actually a number. There are 31 days in March, and 31 modulo 7 is 3, so if Sunday falls on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd of March (as it did in e.g. 2020, 2014 and 2019 respectively) there will be five Sundays in the month and so the second and “last” Sundays will be three weeks apart. In any other situation there will be only four Sundays, so the second and “last” will be two weeks apart.

The UK finishes on the last Sunday of October; the US finishes on the first Sunday in November. Mercifully those Sundays are a week apart by definition which avoids maths.

So, for the benefit of future me: the US begins daylight saving time two or three weeks early in spring, and ends one week late in autumn. It is humanly possible to remember this. (Admittedly the situation has changed during my lifetime, but it seems stable at the moment.)

It’s not interesting but it’s true.

Anyway, yeah, double-check the times of your transatlantic meetings this week.

Dark early, innit?