Weeknotes 307

A better week, with a fair bit of sorting out. Still pointlessly stressful but it would’ve got worse if I hadn’t put my foot down. I think I’m making progress.

Some kind people got in touch to be encouraging or check I’m okay. Thank you.

Three gyms. One morning it was -1 °C outside so I’ve had to start wearing a coat for the three-minute walk there.

After work on Tuesday I had dinner with Tyler & Joe at Rosa’s which was delightful. The drunken noodles were tasty although heavier on the raw chillies than I was expecting. Rosa’s also have their own alcohol-free beer which is pretty good.

On the walk home I popped into that new Aldi on Commercial Street but I didn’t see anything good. (For example, they don’t have Aldi-brand bran sticks.)

Today I’m riding trains down to the coast & back to visit my parents.

I chose Piranesi as my next book. It’s fascinating and magical so far. For some reason I’d felt a bit reluctant to start it — maybe I thought it’d be too serious or dense somehow? — but I’m gripped and so glad I picked it. It’s exactly what I need at the moment.

I watched Strange Harvest, a horror film presented as a Netflix-style true crime documentary. It’s an interesting idea but not that well executed; I don’t enjoy true crime documentaries, so watching a fictional one was also not fun, even though it’s a clever way to combine different varieties of found footage. I kind of liked where they went with it but I’d have enjoyed it more with a conventional structure.

I still want to like Pluribus but unfortunately Dan nailed it: it’s boring and it’s going nowhere. Nothing happened in the fourth episode and my curiosity is wearing thin.

I honestly don’t understand why the showrunners are doing this. Is the problem that they’ve planned something interesting that will happen eventually, but they’re too busy huffing their own farts to realise that the audience doesn’t know that yet and will never find out if they lose interest and stop watching? It seems like such a basic failure of storytelling that I can’t get my head around how it can be happening in such an otherwise competent production.

I’m also sort of sick of Carol as a character. At first I found her refreshing but her anger and cynicism has quickly become so one-note that I’m finding myself rooting for her enemies to succeed just so I don’t have to hear her throw another sarcastic temper tantrum.

This video of one of my favourite pieces of music (Olson) being played by a PDP-1 at one of my favourite places (the Computer History Museum) is so niche that I’m amazed and grateful it exists. Sometimes The Algorithm comes through.

Next week is Thanksgiving, which means I get to work more normal hours and not spend so much time stuck in video calls. I’m looking forward to it.

A month left til Christmas. Where did the year go? Good job our lives last forever.