Weeknotes 326

Hello. Happy Easter. 🐣

Well, that’s a quarter of 2026 already gone. Have you? Did you? Could you? Same.

Thrice gym, albeit on a weird compressed Tuesday–Thursday schedule thanks to sleepless nights at the beginning of the workweek and a bank holiday at the end of it.

I stopped getting up at 5:30am to go to the gym before breakfast and started going between breakfast and work (i.e. roughly 8:15am) instead. It’s worse in some ways — after a cup of coffee I’m no longer able to sleepwalk through an hour of exercise while remaining consciously unaware of the horror of it — but the major advantage is that I’m getting a proper amount of sleep and the morning no longer feels quite so interminable.

On Friday I had lunch at Plates, London’s only Michelin-starred vegan restaurant, as an Easter treat. The few times in my life I’ve done a tasting menu I’ve found the theatrics a bit of an ordeal and this one was no exception, but the food itself was very good and I could walk there & back, so the whole exercise wasn’t much more than three hours out of my day.

The laminated sourdough bread was a definite highlight, like something an alien would make if they didn’t know the rules of human bread, and the (“flavours of”) banoffee pie was a straightforwardly excellent dessert despite of course being deconstructed.

I did appreciate how unpretentious an experience it was, especially the nonjudgemental advice about which utensil to use and what items were best eaten in a single bite. It’s nice to have the restaurant anxiety ramped down a little even as it’s being ramped up by the ceremony and cost.

Yesterday was sunny so I took myself on a spontaneous dander down to Unity Diner to try their Easter special: a Biscoff hot cross bun ice cream sandwich.

Hard to eat politely, but really fun and comforting.

I saw Send Help and it turned out to be a fairly classic Sam Raimi film, in a good way. It’s light fun, silly and tonally uneven, with some gross-out comedy horror if you like that sort of thing. The only significant problem is that it’s too long because it accidentally went over ninety minutes.

It’s left me looking for an excuse to rewatch Drag Me to Hell (99 minutes with credits).

I’m tempted by Life is Strange: Reunion but the generally lukewarm review scores and (skimmed) commentary make it sound like disappointing nostalgia-bait rather than a satisfying conclusion, so for now I’m choosing to leave it alone. Maybe I’ll get it on sale one day for the sake of closure.

I’ve tried very, very, very hard to succeed at work but have forced myself to admit at last that I can’t, not in the way I was trying to.

And some glass has broken and I have in some respects given up, at least on that, at least for now. I’m no longer able to keep pushing, trying to lead, to teach, to fix, to make things better, endlessly, fruitlessly; instead I’m going to simply show up and do what I’m asked, which perhaps is all anyone wanted me to do in the first place, and so everyone, I think, will be better off.

The loss of hope and ambition feels like a tiny bereavement in its own way. I have to know my limits though, and I can only do what I can, and I can’t let my brain get poached alive in my skull over, really, nothing, nothing, fucking nothing, only misplaced notions of my identity and worth, stupid pride in the work, misfiring neurons, maladaptive instincts, complicated airflow, nothing. Breathe in and chill out. It’s just a ride.

I don’t know what happens next but I’ll find a different way to keep trying somehow.

In an attempt to improve my mental health and avoid putting all my brain eggs in one fruit basket I’ve stopped listening to tech podcasts and switched to plundering my unlistened backlog of The Unmade Podcast episodes, which I’ve been saving for a rainy day, which this is. It’s doing the job beautifully; each episode gives me several unqualified lols.

I particularly enjoyed this bit about the elegant simplicity of the world we’ve constructed for ourselves.

TEDIOUS GIT CORNER: For as long as I can remember I’ve been setting Git’s core.excludesFile option to ~/.gitignore so I can globally ignore files I never want to commit, and until quite recently GitHub’s documentation recommended a similar approach.

However, this week I realised core.excludesFile has defaulted to ~/.config/git/ignore since 2012 (!), so I can just bung my global ignorefile there and not bother with the extra configuration. This makes me feel mildly embarrassed about not having committed to XDG more generally but it’s a good first step. I don’t want to get in too deep though, lest I become one of those perpetually not-angry-just-disappointed NO_COLOR penguins.

The images of Earth from Artemis II are so beautiful, especially this moonlit view where you can see the atmosphere and aurora and zodiacal light so clearly. Gosh.

This starling blew my mind. (More here.)

Bloody love a four-day weekend.