Weeknotes 316

Last full week of January. Sunrise is creeping towards 7am, sunset towards 5pm. We’re going to make it, for now.

Gym thrice. Seven hours of Revelation Space remain.

I got my £113 back!

Yesterday I considered popping to Mildreds for brunch, but a) their Dalston location has disappeared from their site with no explanation — another proud graduate of the Club Mexicana school of customer communications — and b) the brunch menus for their other locations say they stop serving it at 11:30am, which is absurdly early for a meal with the lion’s share of “lunch” in its name. What are they playing at?

I ordered a free-except-delivery trial veg box, and the one that arrived contained mostly root vegetables — parsnips, potatoes, carrots, onions, plus some spinach and surprise blood oranges — so for lunch today I roasted them with some garlic and it was glorious. I’d try for more creative recipes if I got these boxes regularly but as a one-off it was hard to resist the lazy simplicity of blasting some good-quality plants in the oven and eating them.

For funsies I tried that two-ingredient “cheesecake” that’s doing the rounds. The recipe, such as it is, was easy to adapt: Sojade makes a decent Greek-style soya yoghurt, and Biscoff are already vegan. It only took a minute to prepare and was of course delicious because it’s basically just loads of biscuits. I don’t care if the whole thing’s a psyop by Big Lotus, it’s a good idea with a favourable cost/benefit ratio and I’ll definitely make it again.

Unfortunately, scoffing a bowlful of Biscoff discouraged me from my plan to visit Maltby Street Market for Kegarmo’s final weekend there. I’ll have to see them in Tooting instead… maybe?

The Traitors concluded its increasingly unpleasant fourth season in a satisfying way. There were barely any percentages this time, precious little pre-watershed swearing, and no conversational meme as tenacious as the “big dog theory”, so I’m not sure what supercut I can do. Maybe second-person reflexive pronouns?

Nah.

I tried to watch episode two of The Studio but it was so painful I had to turn it off after ten minutes. This is exactly the weapons-grade smugness I was worried about. Unbearable.

To the relief of at least one of you, I started watching season two of The Rehearsal.

I enjoyed the first episode and I’m looking forward to the rest. While it’s not exactly a laugh a minute, the absurdity of “we’ve spent a disproportionate amount of effort on something inane” just about works for me, and the meta-comedy of the show interrogating its own status as comedy tickles the Stewart Lee part of my brain. The tone continues to be weird and alienating but I make myself feel clever by choosing to regard that as artistic intent rather than some kind of production mistake.

Continuing the theme of nihilistic anti-humour, I began playing the deliberately annoying Baby Steps.

My first session was pretty disastrous as I stumbled haltingly forwards for the best part of an hour, thinking I was following the path ahead, then ended up back where I started except with motion sickness. I realise Bennett Foddy’s games are supposed to be unenjoyable but I was expecting this one to provide at least some minimal structure to encourage me to keep going; in practice, once I’d sufficiently appreciated the hilarious joke of a man falling over, I ran out of things to do and gave up.

I came back another day and that session went better because I began striking out on my own and heading upwards even when there wasn’t an obvious route. It helped that the control scheme finally clicked and I started placing my feet intentionally rather than trying (and mostly failing) to cheese my way past every obstacle.

Obviously there are still many, many opportunities for repeated failure and jaw-clenching frustration.

I honestly can’t tell whether I’m enjoying this.

See yourself in February.