Weeknotes 255

Hello. It’s cold and it snowed on Tuesday.

Heating’s on.

I remain incredibly busy, sort of stretched, like non-dairy spread that has been scraped over too much sourdough. Next week is Thanksgiving in the US which hopefully means it’ll be a slightly easier one.

On Thursday I met Chris for beers near Old Street. The proper pubs were heaving so we hid away in an unloved sports bar instead. While they did insist upon showing The Football, it was a match from the 1998 men’s World Cup which nobody seemed particularly interested in watching, giving us all the space we needed to put the world to rights.

Yesterday I visited my parents and got temporarily stranded in St Leonards twice, once each way, by delayed and cancelled trains. To my arrogant metropolitan liberal elite surprise it’s actually a nice little town to wander around when killing time; I enjoyed a vegan sausage roll & bagel from two different bakeries in the morning and a pint by the fireplace at a pub in the evening. At one point I even thought “next time I’ll break my journey intentionally!” but that’s probaby the pastry intoxication talking.

Several people asked — apparently sincerely? — whether last week’s audio was me or Arnold Schwarzenegger, which is the greatest compliment I can imagine. It’s Arnie of course, slowed down 4× with sox tempo -s. duh duh duh

I rewatched The Princess Bride to continue the nostalgic comfort of The Dark Crystal. It’s still good. On this viewing I was struck by how stark the framing device is: cold open on Fred Savage feeling ill, Peter Falk rocks up and reads him a story out of nowhere really, the story ends, Peter Falk leaves and that’s the end of the film — nobody grew or learned or anything, it was just a bit of fun. Great!

It left me in the mood for either Gremlins (too early?) or My Dinner with Andre.

I’m still making my way through season two of Industry. There were a couple of good zippy episodes in the middle, then one set in Berlin which was bad enough to make me question whether to continue. I must keep reminding myself how good everyone said season three was.

The Connections archive I rely upon has been taken down. While I understand and appreciate the intellectual property issues, it’s still frustrating since the archive was merely timeshifting — by only a few days in my case — material that’s otherwise freely available.

nytimes.com limits you to playing today’s Connections but it does host the full back catalogue of puzzles as JSON, which as all web developers know is the only way to publish information for consumption by a web browser. That means it’s in principle possible to run a shell script like…

#!/bin/sh

number=1
while true; do
  date=$(date --iso-8601 --date "2023-06-11 +$number days")
  filename=$date.json
  if
    [ ! -f "$filename" ] &&
    ! curl --fail --remote-name --show-error --silent --write-out "%{url}\n" \
      "https://www.nytimes.com/svc/connections/v1/$filename"
  then
    break
  fi
  number=$((number+1))
done

…to download the lot for enjoyment at one’s leisure, although that would be tantamount to both hacking and piracy so I do not recommend it.

I nearly bought a PlayStation VR2 by mistake when I saw it on sale for almost 40% off. Luckily I paused to imagine what it’d be like to put it on and play a game, and the gentle swell of nausea in anticipation of the motion sickness was enough to make me close the tab and save myself a lot of money.

I’m getting really, really bored of doing the washing up. The situation’s been slightly improved by the realisation I can use the defunct dishwasher as a very effective drying rack but it’s still not exactly doing its job even when it’s allowing water to drip from eight bits of hand-washed crockery simultaneously. Maybe Black Friday’s a good time to buy a new one with all that money I just saved.