Weeknotes 224

Back to the hospital on Tuesday afternoon for another foot X-ray. The consultant looked at the essentially unchanged scan, then at me, then back at the scan, then back at me, and said “are you vegan?”, which nobody had asked before. So now I’m taking calcium and vitamin D every morning in the hope it’ll encourage the bone to actually heal.

Then in the evening I went to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to see The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s an amazing production with impressive technology and an unbelievably good performance from Sarah Snook. I’ll be thinking about it for a long time. Expensive but really worth it.

I got a good seat but unfortunately the tallest man in the audience sat directly in front of me so I spent the full two hours looking mostly at the back of his head. Another man wandered unrestrained up and down the aisle beside me for the entire show, attracting my attention every thirty seconds or so.

Obviously the theatre would laugh at me if I complained about any of this — even though on the face of it I straightforwardly didn’t get what I paid for — because, well, everyone knows that when you go to things you just have to take your chances and suck it up, don’t you?, which is the main reason I don’t go to things.

I watched the rest of Fallout. It’s entertaining but not great. It certainly looks fantastic, if a bit heavy on the old anamorphic bokeh, and it’s pacy and legible most of the way through. The storytelling becomes a bit less legible towards the end of the season, creaking under the weight of the many mandatory Reveals, and I struggled to feel anything about its characters or situations, except for one funny kissing scene. It’s hard to care about the fate of the silly MacGuffin when the emotional stakes are so low, and that slightly deflates the drama of the season’s climax.

It’s hard not to compare it to HBO’s The Last of Us. Fallout’s main advantage is that it’s telling a new story in the game’s universe instead of trying to speedrun an existing narrative in a handful of hours; in some ways that makes it more interesting for an audience already familiar with the games, and perhaps allows for more creative freedom and inventiveness, certainly in the long run. But overall, despite being more original than TLoU, it just doesn’t have the same impact. It’s fun. It’s good. That’s fine.

I’d love to see new stories told with new characters in the world of The Last of Us, whether through games or TV shows, but realistically I don’t think that’s ever going to happen. Even a successful Part III would be something of a miracle at this point.

Out of curiosity I went back and gave Fallout 4 another go for half an hour, but nah, the UI’s a dire mess with an unbelievable quantity of menus, so absolutely no thank you. Not for me.

Maybe I should’ve waited for the next-gen update that’s coming on Thursday, but I assume it won’t make the game any different.

I originally slid off Super Mario Bros. Wonder and I’ve been trying to get back in by picking it up in idle moments and beating the next couple of levels.

It’s diverting but never tips over into being fun. I’m confused about what’s not working for me, especially since I love Super Mario Odyssey, Galaxy and the other 3D Mario platformers so much. Are the 2D games really so different? It’s all just jumping on sentient mushrooms.

I installed the free demo of Dredge and found it strangely compelling in a meditative Alto’s Adventure kind of way. I played enough to get drawn into the story and invested in my progress, then the demo ended, which is how they get you. I bought the full game so I could keep going, but it turns out that demo progress doesn’t carry over and I have to start again. Oh.

I’m still getting a huge amount of enjoyment out of the new TV. No regrets. (By the way, I didn’t throw the old one away, I just demoted it to a different room.)

Last year I removed Twitter from my Safari favourites but I still find myself reading it occasionally, either because I’ve followed a link to a tweet from somewhere else, or because some dopamine-hungry part of my lizard brain has reflexively typed twitter.com into the address bar before my conscious mind was able to stop it.

Every time I end up there I can’t resist clicking on some ragebait trending topic and within thirty seconds I’m feeling sick and angry about J. K. Rowling or whatever. It’s absolutely pointless to keep hitting myself like this. It’s a bad website and I should never go there.

So I enabled the oddly-named “Limit Adult Websites” option in Screen Time and added Twitter under “never allow”, and now I can’t go there at all, which is finally doing the trick. I feel a bit uncomfortable about the “adult” part (but doctor, I am an adult) and wish I could configure a more straightforward allowlist without any baggage — for example, I had to temporarily disable content filtering to read an inoffensive blog post about engineering leadership, which doesn’t seem right — but this setup works for the moment.

The London mayoral election booklet arrived in the post, populated by the most unhinged roster of candidates I’ve ever seen. Many of them share the same dogshit platform: get rid of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, “stand up to woke”, “protect our monuments” etc. Hopefully this serves to split the swivel-eyed vote so the rest of us can get on with living our lives, breathing air and vandalising statues.

The net effect is depressingly inept, as befits a file hosted at the path /sites/default/files/2024-04/Election booklet final 2024_1.pdf (final 2024_0.pdf is also available). The only lol in the whole document is the “Ashlea Simom” typo. Try harder next time.