Weeknotes 226

Hello there. May the fifth be with you.

It’s been properly sunny for the first time this year. I saw sunlight bouncing off a blue building and scattering through a red raspberry. This morning I rode to London Fields, sat on the grass and ate a bagel.

The warmer weather brought near-continuous lightning on Wednesday night. In the dazed moments after it woke me I was genuinely confused about what was happening outside.

My vote worked and the cruel, desperate Tories lost hard. Good. A lucky escape for the ULEZ but the true price will be paid by our monuments.

Yesterday I spent a few hours noodling on my WebAssembly interpreter for the first time in a while. Until now I’d been skipping the test suite’s assert_trap checks for runtime errors in various situations, but after a few hours of tinkering I got them all enabled.

This required error-checking code in 29 places: most common were out of bounds memory access and out of bounds table access with ten occurrences each, followed by three checks for integer overflow, then one each for indirect call type mismatch, integer divide by zero, invalid conversion to integer, undefined element, uninitialized element and unreachable.

Most of these are for catching boring mistakes or uncommon edge cases. The most interesting one is that fixed-width (e.g. 32-bit) signed integer division is undefined not only when dividing by zero but also in the solitary case of dividing the largest negative number by the smallest one (e.g. −2147483648 ÷ −1) because the result is a positive number too large to be represented (e.g. 2147483648).

Error handling doesn’t exactly add new capabilities but I found it therapeutic to methodically work through the list of failures, and now I’m legitimately passing more of the tests.

I saw Love Lies Bleeding. I loved Rose Glass’s first film and I loved this one too.

Katy O’Brian is incredible, Kristen Stewart plays a heartfelt and convincing Kristen Stewart, every character is a terrible person, and the story proceeds with unhinged energy into the escalating chaos of a Coen brothers movie. It has a bit of the queasy unreality of Saint Maud, and I suppose the whole thing is camp and pulpy and heightened, but it just really worked for me.

Seeing Katy O’Brian absolutely nail this part made me slightly disappointed that she wasn’t cast as (the admittedly much younger) Abby Anderson in The Last of Us season two. But never mind, she’ll be in the next Mission Impossible instead.

I also saw Late Night with the Devil which was alright.

It turned out not to be as high-concept as I’d hoped, nor even particularly committed to the concept that it did have, and it wasn’t in any way scary which is kind of a problem for a horror film. (In all of these respects it was less successful than Ghostwatch from three decades ago.) But it was creative and entertaining which is more than can be said for most films, and almost all of the performances were good enough to carry it.

The retro late-night aesthetic reminded me of both Alan Wake II and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel which isn’t the first time they’ve connected in my mind.

I’ve had the ridiculous new Vulfmon song stuck in my head all week and now it’s your turn. You’re welcome.

SCOTCH MIST: Several readers felt moved to comment on the “moose loose” mystery. One pointed out that this advert for wine gums prominently features a moose head, which really muddies the semantic waters; another said that, if we’re going to make “moose” mean “mouse”, the translation of “moose loose aboot this hoose” would need to be “mouse louse about this house”, introducing yet another animal into an already dangerously crowded hoose.

For a moment I thought I’d fallen victim to online misinformation and that this really was a “horse loose in a hospital” situation.

Alice displayed admirable commitment to investigating the problem by digging out her copy of a Scots version of The Gruffalo:

A moose took a dauner through the deep, mirk widd.
A tod saw the moose and the moose looked guid.

I haven’t read The Gruffalo but it’s unambiguously about a mouse so that’s that sorted. Of course it would’ve been only a moment’s work to ask any of my Scottish friends about this but I didn’t want to embarrass myself.

Blocking Twitter is working well. I’ve already lost the subconscious urge to visit it. Something about this process of adaptation reminds me of going vegan: after a while I’ve just accepted that certain hyperlinks are off the menu and should be ignored completely.

I took Friday off work and tomorrow’s a bank holiday. Four-day weekends are the best. ☀️

It feels good to take time off, it feels good to take time off…