Weeknotes 271

Last Sunday I made triple quantities of preserved lemon and chickpea stew, another #amwte classic. I’ve been eating it for lunch and the occasional dinner all week and it’s been delightful. Arguably it’s a bit too autumnal for March but it’s still cold outside and I expect a more seasonal dish would survive less well in the fridge for a week.

I’m going to do dal again tonight (sorry) but this time I’ll drain the tomatoes.

Three times at the gym. I’d planned a fourth visit this morning but it was closed for unknown reasons. Basically still counts.

On Wednesday night I had an impromptu ride over to Finsbury Park to give James a hand with some furniture, taking my usual quiet route via Highbury & Islington and Drayton Park.

When I got to Highbury I thought something apocalyptic had happened: police vans parked on pavements, people spilling into the roads. But no, as I got closer to the stadium I realised there was an Arsenal match on.

It was easy enough cycling with the crowds, but after I passed the Emirates Stadium and Arsenal tube it took absolutely ages to inch my bike through the tide of thousands of people stumbling in the opposite direction, eating burgers, drinking beers, looking at their phones.

When I went home 90 minutes later I took the Green Lanes route instead.

I had to take most of Friday afternoon off with a splitting headache. It’s been a frustrating week at work but for now I’m putting this down to random illness rather than anything causal.

I finished Children of Time which I ultimately recommend. The separate plots came together at the end in a satisfying and unexpected way. The mixture of doom and hope, and the hard sci-fi leavened by fun hand-waving, worked well for me.

I’m now a couple of hours into Children of Ruin. It’s good so far and I’m enjoying a different perspective on the same universe.

I watched the second half of Nosferatu and would like to revise my opinion to: deeply stupid. It might’ve been more effective if watched in a single session but, well, it would’ve needed to be shorter and more interesting to make that happen.

Conversely, I watched the slightly longer Anora and didn’t feel the time drag at all. Every scene was necessary to tell its part of the story, and each was as short as it could be to get that job done. The film was funny and sweet with a magnetic, confident performance from Mikey Madison.

I’m surprised it won so many Oscars, not because it’s not good, but just because it didn’t feel like that kind of worthy, Academy-pleasing film. I think I’ve either completely avoided or not enjoyed most of the Best Picture winners in recent memory — Parasite being the most obvious exception — so I just assume by default that they’re going to be boring, silly or earnest. This one was a happy exception.

Sign of the times: I didn’t notice it contained so many occurrences of the word “fuck” until I read about it afterwards. Fifth highest ever! Fourth highest is Uncut Gems, which was (perhaps not coincidentally) the film I most often thought of during Anora’s more frantic sequences.

While Red Letter Media’s otherwise unrelated Presence review is worth watching anyway, these two minutes are excellent, contrasting Sean Baker’s idealistic conception of cinemas with the modern reality of actually trying to watch a film in one. I was very happy to be able to see Anora at home.

The penultimate episode of Severance season two was very good again, although more obviously an intentional tease this time, artificially delaying all of the gratification until next week’s episode instead of letting information arrive more naturally when the opportunity presents itself.

That’s fine though; I’m being entertained, not studying for an exam, so I appreciate the dramatic tension and don’t mind waiting. I’ve enjoyed this season a lot and I’m looking forward to the 76-minute (!) finale.

Connections #635 was a good one.

The last of the new Astro Bot levels rolled out this week and I nearly sat down after work on Thursday to play them all, but decided to wait until my upcoming holiday so I can properly savour them when I’m less frazzled.

So I started playing Arkham Asylum instead. It’s… alright so far? I’ve only played Arkham Knight before so I only know roughly what to expect. The scope of this game is obviously more limited but people do like to bang on about how it’s got the best story of the Arkham games so I’m at least a little curious to see what happens once I get past the introductory couple of hours.

Three more days left at work before twelve contiguous days off. Love it.