Weeknotes 265

Hello. Happy Groundhog Day.

I had a good Monday at work, getting past another project milestone with the team. Making progress is more difficult than necessary but we’re doing okay.

On Thursday I had dinner at Mildreds with Marina & Sofía. I’ve been to Mildreds so many times that it’s hard to say whether I like it. I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad meal there, but there’s also nothing on the menu I’d particularly recommend, despite the novelty of every item being technically edible. It’s food; it’s fine.

I went to Purezza for pizza yesterday. Brilliant.

The days keep getting lighter, but I don’t. I continue to wish I was exercising regularly, and continue to fail to do so. One unused month of gym membership down, eleven to go.

On the plus side, I half-accidentally ended up not drinking any alcohol in January. Which is to say: the opportunity to drink didn’t even present itself for the first few weeks, and then I noticed I had a streak going, so I decided to ride out the rest of the month too. I rarely drink anyway so my only real act was opting for Sam’s Brown Ale at the Blue Monday pub. It didn’t taste great, but then nothing tastes as good as a streak feels.

I nearly cracked open a beer last night for the sole purpose of freeing myself from the psychological tyranny of the streak, but that didn’t feel like a good enough reason.

On a whim I joined my local library online and got a library card number so I could log into Libby and “borrow” some free audiobooks. That’s quite good isn’t it? Socialism!

In theory the audiobooks are preparation for gym visits so I can always have something ready to listen to, instead of desperately fishing around for enough hours of non-awful podcasts to get me through. In practice I couldn’t find many books that were both long enough and available to “borrow”. Perhaps I should take another run at my old audiobook of Consider Phlebas.

This audiobook nonsense is transparently a displacement activity to make me feel good about gearing myself up for exercise without having to actually do any exercise. Ideally it’d be easing me into the exercise mindset to make the transition easier. I’m not convinced that it is.

I continue to enjoy Severance a lot. It’s so visually arresting that I’ve stopped worrying too much about whether it makes any sense. Also: ██████ ███!

I saw another couple of episodes of Silo. It is such a frustrating show. The production design, costumes and visual effects are so good, but the script and performances sometimes feel like barely any effort has gone into them, and the balance of time spent on the different plot threads suggests a lack of understanding of which aspects of the story are actually interesting. It’s mainly curiosity — and sunk cost? — that’s keeping me watching at this point.

Twin Peaks: poor Waldo. 🍩

I picked up Life is Strange: Double Exposure on sale. I’m still in chapter one so I don’t know what’s happening yet but I like the vibes so far. In the end I lost interest in True Colors but maybe more Max Caulfield is what I really needed. The genuinely good performance capture and facial animation go a long way to compensate for the dialogue still being a bit mannered.

Playing a Life is Strange game makes me wonder whether I should be looking forward to Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. Maybe?