Weeknotes 230

June again somehow. When will it all end?

An unusually busy week, although the Monday bank holiday was so pleasant and relaxing that I don’t really remember it. I don’t think I did much.

I went to some leaving drinks with my team on Wednesday, but that’s about it for socialising.

Oh, but! Earlier on Wednesday a couple of men came round to investigate the gutter. They discovered that my theory was almost correct: the drain is in the middle, between me and my neighbour, and it was indeed clogged with all kinds of vile detritus.

When they arrived the gutter was, as is traditional, full of stagnant water and thriving pond life.

It didn’t take them long to find and unblock the drain itself.

And then, once the water had gurgled away, it took them about an hour to scrape the gutter clean of the rotting, writhing sludge which remained.

It’s so satisfying to see it clean at last, and a massive relief that the biohazard has been removed before summer properly hits. Obviously I wish I’d pulled my finger out and got this sorted years ago when it first became a problem, but I was trapped in the mind prison of believing it was just a badly designed gutter which was doomed by construction not to drain properly, and that misguided belief is what prevented me from taking the basic steps needed to make progress.

This might be the first time that writing weeknotes has actually helped me to get past a mental block and materially improve my life. Normally all it does is ruin my Sunday.

Now I can have the windows open whenever I want. It’s absolutely glorious. ☀️🪟💨

After months of complaining about not going to the gym, I’ve somewhat arbitrarily decided to make June the month when I start improving my fitness again. My final excuse for procrastination disappeared when I got the all clear about my foot, so I’ve added the rings complication to my watch and slogged to the gym to spend an hour on the treadmill every day (i.e. both days) so far this month.

I need to break out of my cycle of inactivity and I’m hoping that occasionally mentioning it here will give me a degree of accountability.

Some of the motivation came from watching Alanah Pearce’s video about how she lost the 15kg she gained after breaking her knee. I haven’t gained quite that much since I broke my foot — more like 10kg — and I’ve lost weight before so I know what’s involved. I still found it reassuring, and a little bit inspiring, to be reminded that it’s a normal and surmountable situation.

My limited company was finally dissolved, so that’s the end of that.

I couldn’t find a way to disable Ctrl-[ on my iPad so I mapped it to something useless on my Mac to make myself start using Esc there, in the hope that the habit would transfer to the iPad.

It worked but I’m not convinced it’s actually an improvement. I found it difficult to remember to press Ctrl-[ when I first made the switch, but now that I’m used to it, I think the two-pinky manoeuvre might be an ergonomic improvement over stretching my left hand all the way up to the corner of the keyboard to press Esc. It only now occurs to me that just because I can press Esc on the iPad doesn’t necessarily mean I should.

On the other hand, it’d be nice to be able to press the Esc key like a normal person (or as close to normal as a Vim user can get) so I haven’t made a final decision yet. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to keep you informed of all developments.

I reached the credits in Animal Well, which is a bit like finishing it, in a way.

I almost got there all by myself, but right at the end I found I was either unable or unwilling to invest the time necessary to scour every pixel of the map to find the final things I needed, so I cracked and looked up some hints online for the two puzzles I’d nearly finished but was absolutely stuck on. Not great design tbh, but I suppose that’s what the internet’s for.

I’m certain the game contains tens more hours of exploring and finding secrets, but seeing the credits roll is, I think, enough for me. Although I’m mildly curious about the things I don’t understand yet, the thought of grinding through every single room again waiting to accidentally stumble upon something new is not appealing at this point in my life.

Overall I enjoyed it but it could use some polish to tip its balance away from frustration and towards fun. I broadly recommend it because it’s cheap and charming even if I don’t agree with all of its choices.

I tried to watch Simon Anthony play Braid but it was almost too excruciating to enjoy. The most painful sections were these three minutes spent trying to time a jump and these ten minutes of failing to understand the meaning of a glowing green key.

I’m fascinated by what’s going on here. Ordinarily he’s a genius-level puzzle solver but his relative lack of video game literacy makes him unable to even recognise when he’s being presented with a puzzle, so he gets hung up on fiddly platforming instead.

I’m certain I have many blind spots like this. I wish I magically knew where they were and how to overcome them.

I saw Civil War and thought it an was excellent, impressive, perfectly paced film. Like Men and Devs it’s visually striking when it needs to be, with some moments of visceral tension which I’ll remember for a while, but it also knows when to back off and let the sound design and more subtle visual effects sell the world it’s trying to portray. I found all the performances fully convincing too. Recommended!

I miss Dunst. Time to rewatch Melancholia.

I read about Paul’s success with Pagefind and decided to try it for myself.

Pleasingly it only took a few minutes to set up: I changed my Netlify build command from jekyll build to jekyll build && npx pagefind --site _site, added a minimal search.html to my repo, and… it works! It’s kind of a rough-and-ready solution but it’s much better than the nothing I had before and it was incredibly easy to get working. Pretty impressive.

It’s an uncanny novelty to be able to search my own archives so easily. I actually quite enjoyed discovering how many times I’ve mentioned lambda calculus (not enough) or The Last of Us (too many).