Weeknotes 277

Hello!

My sleep’s slowly improving, so I’ve been able to properly return to the gym, with four visits this week. I’ll have lost another four-ish kilograms in April, heading for twelve-ish overall since the beginning of February. I feel immeasurably better for it.

A third of the way through the year and still no booze, for no reason other than pure bloody-mindedness. At this stage I don’t miss it or think about it at all really. In principle I dislike the idea of being unable to occasionally enjoy a drink, but the more time passes, the harder it becomes to imagine a good enough justification for breaking the streak.

To be honest I’m not doing much outside of sleep, work and exercise, which is fine by me but unhelpful for weeknotes. Work is draining and stressful so by the time I finish every day I just want to unwind in peace, and the weekends increasingly represent an opportunity to do that for two full days at a stretch.

In my defence I did have a sunny bike ride over to Finsbury Park this morning for brunch at Roz & James’s new place, which was really nice and doubtless good for the ol’ noggin.

The spring weather is making my flat warmer. It’s such a relief to be able to open the windows without pond life swarming in. You really don’t appreciate a functioning gutter until it’s gone.

I’m still plodding through Children of Ruin to pass the time while I exercise, but the pace of the storytelling is glacial and I’m not particularly engaged. A couple of times this week I chose silence because I couldn’t summon enough curiosity to pay attention to it for an hour.

I’m into the final quarter and I suspect the meandering plot threads are about to knit together at last, so I’ll see it through. Then I’ll have to decide whether to break the seal on Children of Memory or write it off as sunk cost.

Episode two of The Last of Us was its most intense so far, in ways both expected and unexpected for fans of the game. I loved it. I’m not interested in an adaptation being “faithful” for its own sake, and again I think they’ve made smart choices about what to change for TV; in particular I appreciate the way Dina has been repositioned and I can see how it’s likely to pay off later. It’s fun to feel excited about this show.

I watched A Real Pain which I didn’t enjoy. Intellectually I understand the idea that Kieran Culkin’s character is meant to be charming but on a visceral level I found him annoying and couldn’t wait for the film to end so I didn’t have to hear his voice any more. I loved Succession but after this it’s going to be difficult to convince myself to watch him in anything else.

I’m tentatively enjoying Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. It’s a more potent, better-developed version of what Life is Strange: Double Exposure was trying to be: emotionally engaging characters, warm nostalgic vibes, a compelling sense of time and place. If nothing else I can feel myself really wanting to like it. It’s been slow to get started, and I’m not sold on the performances because the voice actors sound too old for their characters and don’t have much chemistry, but it looks great and I’m curious enough to keep going.

In the countryside where I grew up there was a constant background chorus of birdsong. In London it’s the Doppler-detuned microtonal chirping of Lime bike alarms instead. #latecapitalism