Weeknotes 263

The lonesome foghorn blows.

Some small wins at work this week, which I will take.

I’m getting more sleep but have yet to brave the gym.

Alice injured her foot last Sunday, immediately and rudely defying my wishes. Get well soon Alice.

In the interests of Getting Out More, I went to DIY Magazine’s Hello 2025 on Tuesday night to see Chloe Slater. Unfortunately when I arrived shortly after 7pm I discovered she wouldn’t be on until 10:15pm, and the first act wasn’t that good, so I went home again after their set.

I believe this still counts as Out despite not being a clear win.

On Wednesday night I received a surprise video call from Aleks and spent an hour catching up on everything that’s happened since she moved away last year.

Yesterday I went to the Southbank Centre to see The Employees.

It was an interesting and captivating show. I don’t feel like I understood much of it, but on a purely sensory level I was pretty engrossed. The technical ambition was impressive too: they used Accsoon CineView devices to wirelessly stream video from several DSLRs and they only occasionally struggled, at one point needing a hasty switch of camera operator when one conked out entirely.

It started out pretty slow but built to a fully unhinged crescendo.

I particularly appreciated that the audience were encouraged to move around as much as we liked. After getting unlucky at Dorian Gray I’m now slightly on edge about being stuck in a bad seat, so the mere knowledge that I could easily get away from anyone who was spoiling the experience helped me to relax.

Rewatching the first season of Severance made me want to play Control again because I remembered liking its New Weird corporate setting, but it turns out the bad experience of Alan Wake II might’ve retroactively spoiled Control for me. It brings the same laboured, incoherent, brain-injury vibes from the outset, relying on a cheap in media res structure to avoid establishing anything for the player to understand or care about.

The first time I played it I bought into all of this as mysterious foreshadowing, but in hindsight it’s just pretentious and lazy. Have some real characters! Make something make sense!

The second season of Severance is good so far and I’m looking forward to more. I didn’t know ██ ███ would be in it, so that was a nice surprise.

I’m still watching The Traitors and enjoying its trashy nonsense.

I struggle to ignore the contestants’ ongoing lack of interest in the single concrete clue they’re given: which of them arrive as the final group at breakfast because they’re at risk of being murdered. Do the production team shoot ten different permutations every day to throw them off the scent? Do they edit out any mention of this massively helpful information? Have the contestants somehow been successfully told not to pay any attention to it?!

There has to be a rational explanation. Please, someone more diligent than me, just find out what’s going on here so I don’t have to think about it any more.

It’s also amazing how tenaciously the idea of overusing percentages has persisted over several seasons. My season one supercut suggests it might’ve been started by… Imran? It’s maddeningly inconclusive.

I rewatched the Twin Peaks pilot last night. It’s a singular piece of TV that truly changed my brain when I saw it in 1990 and I suspect it’s imprinted deep into my psyche in ways that I’m not consciously aware of. It amazes me that something can be so delightful and so horrifying at the same time.

Sarah Palmer’s bottomless grief still gives me goosebumps; the glimpse of Bob in the mirror is almost more than I can deal with and he’s not even clambering over anything yet. Most horror movies slide right off me but I find this show viscerally frightening because I apparently don’t wish to be murdered by a sweetcorn-guzzling ghostie.

While I enjoy watching videos of pets on YouTube, I have to turn them off if they include subtitles for what the animal is “saying”. Undignified.