Weeknotes 240

Frazzled, frazzled. Too much to do and nowhere near enough time to do it. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends this week and I can really feel it. I hope I can get back to normal soon.

I smugly made it to the gym on Monday but then immediately broke my August streak on Wednesday because I was snowed under with other stuff. That’s disappointing but I’m not going to let magical thinking get the better of me: streaks aren’t real and I can & should still exercise whenever there’s time. Bodies don’t care about human numbers! They’re made of meat!

In a damning demonstration of my priorities, I did manage to get to Kings Cross on Friday for lunch with Tara, finishing with a coffee outside in the warm sunshine. The anxiety centre of my brain felt a little flustered by the interruption but the subordinate remainder of my brain understood it was exactly what I needed.

The journey to Kings Cross took me through Old Street station for the first time since TfL finished (?) rebuilding it.

It certainly looks nicer on the outside. The immediate interior seems to still be under construction, and once you get as far as the ticket hall it’s the same grimy old shit as before. But I’m glad the new main entrance is finally open, because on foot it’s way more convenient to cross City Road on the north side than to cross Old Street and Great Eastern Street to reach the Cowper Street entrance.

I was momentarily surprised that there no longer appears to be any ramp entrance at all. On reflection I suppose that’s irrelevant since you’ve never been able to reach the ticket hall (not to mention anything beyond that) without going down some stairs. The missed opportunity is regrettable but they’ve clearly struggled with even this unambitious degree of redevelopment so it’s probably too much to ask for the station to actually become accessible within our lifetime.

I’m disappointed by Rails’ decision to remove the Ruby version information from its generated Gemfile altogether. I was looking forward to getting ruby file: '.ruby-version' by default, and I understood the need to hold off until it could be made to work with development containers, but until now I hadn’t realised that this hiccup had escalated into the unexpected belief that telling Bundler which Ruby version to use — so the tool you’re relying upon to manage the versions of your dependencies can warn you if you’re using the wrong version — is bad actually.

From my perspective this is a significant usability regression for the sake of a workflow which, subjectively, seems pretty obscure. Oh well. Guess I need to get into the habit of adding it back myself every single time. 🤷🏻‍♂️

After the comparative triumph of episode seven, the season finale of House of the Dragon is surely one of the most inexplicable and maddening episodes of television ever produced.

It had another fantastic performance from Emma D’Arcy but otherwise was by far the worst episode of a show that has plodded a bit but always — until now — felt competent and purposeful.

I understand the season got cut from ten to eight episodes at the last minute for budgetary reasons, with the subsequent WGA strike preventing rewrites, but somehow that still doesn’t seem to justify how badly it came together at the end. It just feels careless at every level.

GOOD NEWS: the new Louis Cole album came out, accompanied by a big dump of YouTube videos. I’m slowly working my way through them and haven’t picked out a favourite yet, but blimey, it’s really good.

BAD NEWS: Louis Cole is unwell and has postponed the London Knower show by a year. I’ll hold onto my ticket and hope for the best.

New London teammate starts tomorrow. Exciting times.