Weeknotes 328

Afternoon. It’s a glorious sunny weekend in east London and I feel fine. ☀️

Three gyms. I’ve made a concerted effort to avoid snacks and otherwise eat sensibly and, oh look, I’m already a couple of kilos down from last week. I think the longer, brighter days, as well as the removal of various sources of work stress, are really helping.

Likewise cutting tech podcasts out of my life — one more iron bar in the cage of deprivation I’m building for myself — has improved my mood a lot. I was worried I might start running out of The Unmade Podcast episodes so I was grateful to discover their four-hour–long Christmas special.

I had a mostly quiet week. It rained on Monday and a rainbow peeked out from behind the rapidly diminishing St Helen’s.

Yesterday I made the most of the weather by cycling to the Barbican and descending into the bowels of the earth to watch the 4K restoration of Akira.

What a film. It still looks and sounds incredible; I’ve seen it in a “cinema” before (actually sitting on a beanbag in a warehouse in Hackney in 2013 — we all play synth) but the picture and audio on this version, as rendered by the Barbican’s Cinema 1, were much more impressive.

It did occur to me, as it does every time I watch Akira, that I don’t know what the hell is going on, but I don’t seem to mind that. Just brilliant, eye-popping nonsense which now can’t help but remind me of all the other times I’ve seen it, telescoping backwards through time, lumbering past different eras of memory like a giant teddy bear with milk streaming out of its eyes and face.

The enjoyment of that experience has slightly rehabilitated the idea of going to the cinema, contra the petty frustrations of the BFI IMAX. Maybe it was the venue, or the choice of film itself, or a bit of both, but it was comfortable and peaceful and none of the meek nerds in attendance were doing anything annoying, even allowing the film’s occasional moments of absolute silence to be absolutely silent. Plus it’s only a pleasant few minutes’ ride away. Maybe I should go more often.

Today I pootled back to Black Cat for lunch. The ride was cool and bright.

For All Mankind keeps threatening to do something exciting. Maybe it’s about to do something exciting!

I spent some time playing Manic Miner for nostalgic comfort. With the benefit of adult hindsight I can now see it’s really unnecessary how difficult the first level is. The next few are way easier.

In a similar vein I’m enjoying Ben’s new online Z-code interpreter, particularly since it lets me piddle about in Zork I for a few turns, close the tab when I get distracted, and then come back later for a bit more piddling.

Predictably the new Boards of Canada is exactly what I needed: deeply sinister and hopeful, with a tragic and life-affirming comments section. Another time-telescope of my own stupid life, except this one’s a kaleidoscope.

And Tom 7’s latest video, about spitefully subverting the industry’s gratuitous pursuit of security at all costs — “toxic max-security” — is delightful. My two favourite bits are a) the very funny trick with the CBC mode initialisation vector (“max-security people will also appreciate that this is provably immune to side-channel attacks […] because the data does not even need to be present during encryption”) and b) the Baldur’s Gate 3 reference.

In March 2023 I spent £130 on a 2 TB external Samsung T7 SSD for backups and stuff. It’s getting a bit full so rather than spend hours cleaning it up I thought it might be less painful to just buy the exact same one again. However, thanks to the magic of Moore’s law, it now costs [checks Amazon] £270, so I will not in fact be doing that.