Weeknotes 216

Windows open. ☀️

For the second week running I got out of the house a little bit more than not at all. I went for beers and burgers with my teammates on Thursday night, and met James for lunchtime chat and phở on Friday. I’m calling that a success.

Oh, and with all the mathematical pancake excitement I forgot to mention that I went back to my local brewery’s taproom last weekend and cracked open Shift at last. So far it’s doing a good job of easing me back into a world that I’d sort of forgotten about in the intervening four months.

I just checked and I’m only 40 pages in, so I won’t get too excited yet.

FOOTNOTES: Today I broke out my unworn left shoe and chanced a brief trip to the local shop minus the boot. It still hurt but it’s given me the confidence to try going bootless for the journey to work next week.

I’d hoped that going back to a regular shoe would let me walk normally again. I’m still limping though. I can’t tell how much of it’s psychological; maybe if the pain doesn’t get any worse after a while I’ll be able to relax and put equal weight on both feet.

I finished True Detective: Night Country. In the end it was a bit silly and had more spooky nonsense than could be sustained by its plot and runtime. It was still atmospheric and well-performed all the way through so I don’t regret watching it despite it not really holding together.

Which is an interesting contrast to Constellation! I tried watching the first episode but it was so badly acted and amateurishly shot that I didn’t bother to continue.

Instead of the sublime Jodie Foster it’s anchored by a bland, baffling performance from Noomi Rapace, who looks permanently as though she’s just walked to the kitchen and forgotten what she went in there for. Just rewatch Prometheus instead I reckon.

I am really, really enjoying replaying The Last of Us Part II Remastered. It remains a masterpiece and I’m amazed all over again by the incredible care and attention to detail that’s been put into it. It looks and feels impressively smooth on the PS5 so either the remaster or my new glasses were worth the money.

I’m excited to see both git replay and non-interactive autosquash get released in Git 2.44. These feel like important weapons in the eternal battle to get programmers to use rebasing properly (or — let’s face it — at all).

My bedroom never gets truly dark and over the years I’ve tried several sleep masks at different price points to shut out the last of the light. They’ve been mostly naff regardless of cost.

For my recent trip I bought a new one for a tenner on Amazon and I’ve been pretty impressed with it. I think it’s the only one I’ve tried that fully blocks all light. One night I even slept with the lights on by mistake because it was impossible to tell. Slogan idea: “inconveniently effective”.