Weeknotes 227

More beautiful sunny weather. Yesterday morning I rode from Hackney to Clapton — a brief final stop at Black Cat to collect merch — to Peckham, cool breeze and sunshine all the way.

Then, incongruously, to a dark kitchen in Bermondsey to buy a vegan doughnut. Mine was crème brûlée flavour and it was pretty good in its own right, not just because everything tastes better when you’ve had to cycle to get it. Five quid’s a lot of money for a single doughnut but I appreciate it’s a shit business.

One of the many deep injustices of picking a fussy dietary regime is that it often gets lumped together with all the others for the sake of convenience and, I suppose, economies of scale. What I really want is a vegan doughnut that isn’t gluten-free; if anything I need extra gluten to compensate for all the eggs and butter I’m missing out on.

Disappointingly I haven’t seen the aurora yet. It wasn’t visible from Hackney, or at least from my flat specifically, bathed in the cold semiconductor glow of streetlights and chicken shops.

I accept it as axiomatic that I’d like to see the aurora before I die, but it’s not like I’m doing even the bare minimum to pursue that goal, e.g. walking five minutes to an unlit park on an evening when it might be visible. At this rate I don’t fancy my chances.

I began implementing assert_malformed in my WebAssembly interpreter but there are about forty different syntax errors which get checked by the test suite so I haven’t had time to work through them all.

The most tenuous so far is inline function type does not match explicit type, raised when a type use’s optional inlined parameter and result declarations don’t match the actual function type referenced by its type index. I mean, okay, type mismatches are syntax errors, but it’s also encroaching upon validation (i.e. type checking) territory, and I haven’t even started to think about that yet. Fortunately the preprocessor has already sorted out all the desugaring by the time the parser gets involved, otherwise this would’ve been extremely painful to implement.

I saw nun-based film Immaculate and really enjoyed it. It has a fantastic, committed performance from Sydney Sweeney and is legitimately horrific in several different topical ways. I knew nothing going into it and was delighted when I realised what they were doing, laughing out loud when the ludicrous central conceit was revealed. It would be a better film without the jump scares but, like Pearl, its final shot will stay with me.

I also watched another couple of episodes of Ripley. I’m finding it visually interesting and largely watchable, although Andrew Scott’s permanently glazed expression is already testing my patience a bit and I’m not even halfway through. I suppose the plot has only just kicked in so I’ll give it a proper chance.

I finished Dredge in dribs and drabs. It puttered along well enough but the core gameplay loop was pretty shallow and never fully reeled me in. Its early suggestions of cosmic horror were tantalising and then the narrative itself was too insubstantial to properly follow through.

I bought Animal Well but have yet to play it. I hope this turns out better than Tunic.

I found Gabi Belle’s momentary escalation to “ok grandmother! let us usher you to the bed” so entertaining that I’m now saying it all the time, despite it not being a reference to anything that anyone would recognise. As usual I care only about amusing myself.

This week’s borderline-obsessive relisten: Things Will Fall Apart.

yes understood, things will fall apart just like they should
this little shred was good
don’t think it through, things will fall apart they always do
at least something’s always true

Reassuring.