Weeknotes 292

Busy at work all week. A peaceful, sunny weekend in south London. Nothing else to report.

Another three times at the gym. I suppose I’ve found my level. I hit my target weight at last.

The mornings are already getting darker and the sun’s no longer visible when I get up.

I tried to play the latest batch of Astro Bot levels but quickly realised I wasn’t enjoying it any more. Without the novelty of any new mechanics or even slightly nonlinear levels, not to mention the gradual loss of the muscle memory I acquired while playing the main game, it doesn’t feel like fun to grind through challenges that I have to replay fifty times until I get all the way to the end without making a mistake. I suppose I’ve finally wrung all the entertainment out of it.

I’d love another Big Game to get properly stuck into but I’ve no idea what it would be. No, not that one.

I saw Bring Her Back and enjoyed it a lot. It has great performances from everyone, especially Sally Hawkins, and occasionally intensifies to the point of being extremely unpleasant, which is what you want from this sort of film. A really promising follow-up to Talk to Me.

I also watched The Piano which I’m almost certain I’d seen before but didn’t really remember. This was precipitated by Succession reminding me how good Holly Hunter is, and yeah, she’s great in it. It’s pretty strange and I’m not convinced I deeply understand what’s going on, but it’s so compelling and hypnotic that the details don’t matter.

THINGS I’VE NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT CORNER: It’s convenient that pg v1.6.0 now includes a precompiled native gem for Linux, removing the need to install a native dependency like libpq-dev. But presumably by using its own copy of OpenSSL it’s not going to know where the Linux distribution’s OpenSSL package stores its root certificates, and so won’t be able to verify any server certificates with sslrootcert=system? Maybe other precompiled gems already have this problem and you always have to set SSL_CERT_DIR or SSL_CERT_FILE yourself to work around it? I don’t understand.

Love these chill summer vibes from Elise Trouw.