Weeknotes 272

It’s properly spring. On Tuesday I cycled home from work in daylight for the first time this year. ☀️

Thursday was the spring equinox and my first day off. It was sunny and 18 °C so I went for a quick ride in a T-shirt, visiting Broadway Market and Homerton for coffee, stopping off to lie in the sunshine in London Fields. Glorious.

On Friday I met Chris for coffee and had a call with Mike, two welcome opportunities to catch up.

Then I met Phil for coffee on Saturday! We both write weeknotes so instead of catching up we just had a staring contest.

Today I recovered from all of that by doing nothing.

I made it to the gym five times this week, which proves that holidays are good for your health. An hour of exercise does consume a lot of my energy but that’s not a problem when I don’t have to go to work afterwards.

I’m not getting into Children of Ruin quite as much as its predecessor yet. There are more characters to keep track of, they aren’t as well-drawn, and I’m finding the jumps between timeframes harder to engage with than the parallel stories of the first book. It’s still filling the gym time successfully for now, plus I’ve already bought Children of Memory so the sunk cost will probably provide enough momentum to get me through it.

I enjoyed the Severance season finale a lot. In the end it didn’t explain much or answer any major questions, but it provided some satisfying emotional closure and had a few great sequences that felt well-earned and unique to the show. The story made sense and I’m happy where it ended up.

This was a good season. I’m glad it avoided becoming a purely mystery-box show and instead made time to focus on its characters, performances and visual style. The finale made me realise I don’t really mind which of its mysteries ever get resolved; I’m just looking forward to spending more time with these people in season three. And I’m going to miss the increasingly rare experience of watching a TV series week-by-week at the same time as my friends and getting to chat about it in the gaps. Remember the past?

I also saw The Wild Robot which was very sweet and had a beautiful painterly look. At a few points the animation became so impressive that I couldn’t get my head around how much work it must have taken. Also: Matt Berry!

A couple more Twin Peaks episodes down. Coma has probably the highest density of creepy shit of any episode I remember, minus Laura Palmer saying “meanwhile” in the season two finale. They’re about to reveal the killer so I might not make it much further, or I might skip ahead to the good bits.

I’m afraid I did start watching a four-and-a-half-hour video which purported to explain Twin Peaks. It was such obvious made-up nonsense that I had to stop after an hour. I’m not sure what I was expecting.

I idly tried to pick back up the work I was doing on my WebAssembly interpreter last year, but it’s in such a rough state that I couldn’t immediately see which of my half-finished branches were still relevant. I really need to triage those work-in-progress pieces before I can start on anything new, which in itself doesn’t seem like it’d be much fun, so I give myself about a 50% chance of actually doing it.

Turns out Club Mexicana are also opening in Boxpark’s new Liverpool Street food court. For me this is about as geographically convenient as possible so I’m choosing to be optimistic.

I like being on holiday.