Weeknotes 254

On Friday, out of nowhere, I got a hankering for Marmite. Yesterday I bought and ate quite a lot of Marmite. Today I don’t want to ever eat Marmite again. I don’t know what it means.

I now have a cellular connection on my watch and I’ve been trying to get some use out of it by occasionally leaving the house without my phone.

So far I haven’t gone further than the shop two minutes down the road. Even those jaunts felt wrong at first because I’m never normally outside without the familiar weight in my pocket, so part of my brain was permanently registering that my phone had been stolen. The sheer exceptionality of the sensation seemed transgressive too, as if I’d forgotten to put trousers on.

I’ve since refined that vague anxiety into something much more specific and rational: what if I urgently need to take a photo of something? This never happens.

Over the years I’ve become a bit obsessed with how Arnold Schwarzenegger says “consider that a divorce” in Total Recall. When I do an impression of it I say it slowly and really labour the smorgasbord of exaggerated vowel sounds in “div-oh-ah-ur-se”, but I recently rewatched it and he actually rattles it off quickly with a satisfying rhythm.

C’nsidduh duh duh divouarse. Utter genius.

While looking for the above clip I found this video in which Paul Verhoeven repeatedly claims the line is “consider this a divorce”. I don’t understand why he’s done that but I’m going to put it down to him being Dutch rather than having any sinister intention to mess with me specifically.

I watched two things this week that I’d describe as aggressively tedious. The first was Skinamarink, another case of an interesting short film premise being pointlessly stretched out to an hour and a half. It has so little visual content that it felt like spending 100 minutes in a sensory deprivation tank. I was expecting it to be creepy and minimalist, but instead it’s… not… anything? I nodded off at a couple of points, which probably isn’t a good sign.

The other was Silo which opened its second season with the surprising creative decision of making the most uneventful episode imaginable. I gave up on the second book halfway through and so far I don’t have high hopes for this season either.

But it’s okay! I also saw In a Violent Nature which was great and inventive and contained a surprising quantity of viscera. For aesthetic reasons it made me think of third-person video games, particularly God of War (2018) and Red Dead Redemption 2 which are good (visual) associations. I found the ending extremely tense and effective even though a lot of people seem to dislike it.

For my own sake I’ve had to start muting everyone who posts about US politics. It’s not them, it’s me.

That Mike Tyson interview where he told a 14-year-old she’s going to die really cheered me up (thanks Paul).