Weeknotes 21

Out there, in the external world, each week is worse than the last. Feels apocalyptic.

Indoors, things are mostly fine. It has now been exactly six weeks since I last left my flat. Everyone else I know (or follow on Instagram at least) has long since resumed going for walks and bike rides and picnics but I’m too concerned that I’ll transmit a deadly disease or get in an accident so I’m playing to my strengths and staying inside. The occasional grocery delivery makes this practical, as does a preexisting interest in healthy indoor activities like sitting in the same position for hours.

On Wednesday, as if to reward me for my caution and community-mindedness, my lower back started hurting out of nowhere. This has never happened to me before. When I woke up the next day the pain had become incapacitating and it took me about an hour of puffing and wincing and ibuprofen before I could shuffle into the next room like Torgo. It’s not safe anywhere.

I’m doing lots of old man exercises and the pain is slowly getting better.

I am now three-quarters onboarded at my job, where I continue to soak up as much information as I can. Between scheduled activities I managed to give some feedback on a pull request and spend some time chatting with my team, so I’m gradually easing into actual work. I also got paid a salary for the first time in five months which felt like oxygen entering my lungs after a long held breath.

We watched Midsommar, a cautionary tale about the horrible consequences of politeness. It looks fantastic and I was impressed by the sound design and performances. I don’t know why I never got around to seeing it in the cinema when it came out last year but I wish I had now.

Although Hereditary is more conventionally frightening I think Midsommar might be the slightly better film since it manages to keep up its pace rather than fizzle out halfway through. A big strength of Hereditary was its handful of genuinely surprising and shocking moments, and Midsommar has a roughly comparable number of those too, although they’re a bit more graphic.

I mentioned before that the Oculus Quest gives me surprisingly little motion sickness. I keep being reminded of it as I play Red Matter and Echo VR, both of which feature gameplay that would’ve been vomit-inducing on PSVR but somehow seems completely fine on the Quest.

It’s remarkable to me because I’d assumed I would never be able to play games like this — I was excited to try Sony’s Blood & Truth when it came out a year ago, for example, but had to give up after a few minutes because it was impossibly nauseating. Apparently the technology has somehow compensated for my physiological limitations and I can enjoy it again.

It’s now three weeks until The Last of Us Part II comes out. I think about this every day.