Weeknotes 259

I’ve been relaxing at home by mostly doing nothing this week, which has been absolutely brilliant. I can now see I’d underestimated how stressed I was.

On Monday I streamed the Astro Bot: Winter Wonder DLC.

I realised too late that this game (and certainly this level) aren’t really conducive to streaming because there’s not much to figure out or discuss, just lots of cute stuff to look at. But I had fun anyway, mainly because of the friends who showed up in the chat.

On Tuesday I went for beers with James & Murray. The company was good, the beer was nice, the pub had a Christmas tree and I could feel myself beginning to unwind.

On Wednesday I streamed Still Wakes the Deep, which, amazingly and unexpectedly, is set on the 18th of December. I enjoyed it a medium amount although I found the design confusing at times and nothing much happened in the first hour and a half. I was forced to stop after that because I became so motion sick; if I ever go back to it, it’ll have to be in shorter doses.

On Thursday I met my brother for our traditional annual Christmas pint, present exchange and massive dosa in Covent Garden. The pub was rammed but the restaurant was more than half empty.

A replacement dishwasher finally arrived on Friday, weeks after I ordered it, in the only available delivery slot this side of Christmas. I bought it from the same place as the washer dryer but luckily it wasn’t delivered by the same people. I didn’t bother buying any “normal milk” this time and that was the correct decision.

To be honest I’ve never treated a dishwasher with the respect it deserves, but I’ve also never explicitly bought one for myself, so now that I’ve forked out hundreds of pounds for one I’d like to be more conscientious.

I looked up the water quality report for my part of London and learned that my water contains 268 mg of calcium carbonate per litre, which is 18.7 degrees Clark (°E), i.e. medium hardness according to the dishwasher manual.

So I bought a packet of what the manual insists upon calling “special salt” — which sounds like something you’d whisper through a letterbox — and poured it into first the wrong and then the right hole. I even, in another lifelong first, splashed out on a bottle of rinse aid. I’m not convinced I actually need either of those overpriced consumables but I’m prepared to give it a try while I still feel some residual enthusiasm for dishwashers.

The new dishwasher’s got wifi, a cutlery tray and a tiny projector which shows the remaining time on the kitchen floor below the door. All astonishing innovations to me even though I mainly wanted one where the water heater worked. I’ve only had the chance to use it once but I love it so far.

Yesterday I celebrated the solstice by going to Kin (nothing special) for dinner with Alice (special), then to Anne & Russell’s where I saw Chris and Andy and ate some vegan cheese and my first mince pie of the year (!).

I’ve been enjoying Chloe Slater’s Nothing Shines On This Island and Fig Tree a lot. British, but in a good way.

I, like many others, got an email from GitHub telling me I can use Copilot for free, an offer in which I could not possibly be any less interested.

I realise it marks me out as a dinosaur but I simply don’t want to deal with people who use an LLM for programming. If you can’t be bothered to write the code in the first place then I’m definitely not going to waste my time reading it.

Am I in denial about an inevitable future in which all software, music, novels, movies and video games consist entirely of AI-generated slop? Probably. Let me have my fun and I’ll let you have yours. We’ll see who rusts first.

I gave Balatro a try because it appeared on so many best-of-2024 lists. It starts with an uninteresting and unhelpful tutorial which made me lose interest after a few minutes and give up, so that’s the end of that.

Here’s what you have to sit through the first time you open it:

Hello there! My name is Jimbo. I’m here to help you learn how to play!

Your goal is to earn Chips to defeat the enemy Blind

This here is a Small Blind, you only need to score 300 Chips to beat it.

Select the Small Blind to start the round!

You earn chips by playing Poker hands

Each Poker hand earns a base amount of Chips multiplied by some Mult

See your Poker hands in the Run Info area, along with other info about your current run

Cards also earn you some Chips, press and hold to see!

Now tap up to 5 cards to play and press ‘Play Hand’

You can also ‘Discard’ up to 5 selected cards to try and make even stronger hands. Try it!

Careful! You only have a limited number of Hands and Discards per round

Earn 300 Chips before you run out of Hands to win this round. Good luck!

Fuck off.

I hope you have a great Christmas! 🎄