Weeknotes 284

Hello. It’s been mostly bright and cool, except for Friday, when it was 28 °C. No thanks.

Gym: three times. I’ve comprehensively stopped losing any weight. That either means I can chill out and stop exercising, or I have to maintain this sorry grind forever to prevent myself backsliding. I have my suspicions.

Yesterday I went to Lou & Dan’s for a good party. Here’s a photo of me accidentally wearing a party hat that’s the same colour as my T-shirt.

Today I visited my parents for Father’s Day. Thankfully it was calm and uneventful, so no mythic resonance this year.

Work’s pretty miserable at the moment; I dunno what else to say. It should at least quieten down over the summer.

I finally finished Children of Memory. I enjoyed it less towards the end, and the revelation of wtf’s going on left me feeling (irrationally) like I’d wasted my time a bit. I suppose I’d hoped for a different flavour of twist, and I did get that. But the initial appeal of a smaller, more human story wore off as it went nowhere, which made me miss the scale and scope of the previous two books.

Well, at least I’ve completed the Children of Time series and don’t have to read any more of them! oh no

I haven’t decided what to “read” next. I’ve got a few audiobooks in my backlog, as well as a few good suggestions from weeknotes readers, so I’ll probably just pick something on a whim and see how I get on.

I’ve now watched all but the last episode of Pachinko’s first season. Episode four was so relentlessly sentimental that it was hard to get through — I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many characters cry in the space of an hour — but it settled down a bit after that.

I can’t really tell whether it’s good. It’s certainly heartfelt, and the themes feel significant in aggregate, but minute-by-minute it’s hard to buy into what the characters are meant to be feeling because we’re constantly told how much generational trauma they carry without actually being shown it. I expect this all works better in the book.

Alice’s last weaknotes reminded me of a Shep story so amusing that I felt compelled to link to it. 🌬️☕️