Weeknotes 293

I think — I hope — that today will be the last warm day of summer. I’ve had enough of being sweaty and angry for one year. I did have a nice sunny ride to Black Cat for lunch though.

Five gym visits. Five!

I watched Sinners. It’s clearly a good film: fun, inventive and impressively executed, especially its music and visual effects. The straight first half is stronger than the bonkers second half (just like the film which inspired it, ██ ██ █ ██) but overall it’s very watchable.

I also watched the first episode of Alien: Earth and found it a bit disappointing.

It’s tonally very uneven: it begins by strongly referencing the look and mood of Alien, by the end it’s switched to the Aliens vibe instead, and in the middle it speedruns the facehugger and xenomorph like they don’t matter at all. Throwing in pound shop Rutger Hauer and pound shop Mark Zuckerberg gives it a vaguely Blade Runner thematic flavour without any of that film’s thoughtfulness.

The tension-destroying flash-forwards demonstrate an embarrassing lack of restraint — presumably the show was edited by the same person as this video — and some of the visual effects are too ropey to be acceptable in the year of our lord 2025. The motion graphics are good though.

At least it’s better (and cheaper?) than Foundation. I’ll stick with it for a bit and see if it settles down.

I treated myself to a digital copy of Assassin’s Creed Syndicate while it’s on sale for £3.74, a price which doesn’t sting too badly for a game I already own as a (now anachronistic and useless) physical disc. For years it was effectively unplayable on PS5 anyway because of flickering but it was patched last year to run smoothly at 60 fps.

The game still holds up a decade later. I’m really enjoying legging it around ersatz Victorian London knifing scumbags and diving into haystacks. They literally don’t make them like this any more.

VEGAN TREATS CORNER: I took some of Kegarmo’s Biscoff chocolate tart into work and it went down very well. A teammate brought in vegan Krispy Kreme (?!) doughnuts and I had the salted caramel one which was amazing.

UNRELATED FITNESS CORNER: I’ve regained the weight I lost last week. The battle continues.

My brain doesn’t know how to process this photo of Nathan Fielder and Trent Reznor.