Weeknotes 249

The weather’s getting colder, I’m getting sleepier. The weekdays are, if anything, becoming busier, dense with technical challenges and fraught conversations. I should take some time off; maybe next month.

I had one of the top… five?… best burritos of my life for dinner at Club Mexicana on Thursday, followed by waffles & ice cream at Unity Diner. Heavenly.

I watched A Quiet Place: Day One. It was alright. It has some good performances but isn’t trying to be scary at all, just a delivery mechanism for a series of tense set pieces, and intentionally doesn’t have much going on beyond that. Overall it’s a decent but not unmissable attempt to tell a small new story in the universe of a larger franchise.

To me, a tourist, its locations looked a lot like New York, so it’s extremely impressive to me that it was shot in Watford. The main thing I learned is: if you insist upon owning a cat in a post-apocalyptic survival situation, don’t keep releasing it to scamper off and cause havoc.

Then I saw Strange Darling which I absolutely loved. It’s a perfect little concoction, a magic trick, anchored by an astonishing central performance. I’d happily watch it again right now.

I also saw Stopmotion which was basically not very good. It’s inventive in places but nowhere near as confident and interesting as Strange Darling. It probably would’ve worked well as a fifteen-minute short film but at ninety-plus minutes it overstayed its welcome.

A year ago I turned off Possum when I’d had enough of its puppet-based prattery, and in hindsight maybe I should’ve done that here too. It did at least keep me watching until the end to find out whether anything interesting or surprising would happen, which it didn’t.

I finally, solemnly played the last level of Astro Bot, so now it’s over. It got pretty difficult at the end and it felt satisfying to win. I hope there’s more soon.

I’m in the process of baking four loaves of sourdough this weekend: two for business, two for pleasure. It’s been months since I made bread — the last time was 1st June, despite me somehow deciding it wasn’t important enough to mention here — and, now that I can have the oven on without it making my flat uninhabitably warm, I’m really enjoying getting back into it. It’s reassuring that I can still do the whole procedure on autopilot and end up with something pretty impressive at the end of it.

I’m getting really bored of doing the washing up.

I’d begun to experience mild anxiety about the impending arrival of weeknotes 250, since a quarter of a thousand weeknotes seems like a significant enough milestone that I should think of something profound to say for the occasion.

Fortunately then I remembered my weeknotes are zero-indexed and therefore I’ve already reached that milestone with nothing to say except that I ate a nice burrito, so that little pinprick of disappointment has instantly released all the pressure. Onward.

See you in July 2029 for week 499.

Yay, it’s decorative gourd season! The last remaining time of year that’s so wholesome that even the internet can’t ruin it with vulgarity ♻️