Weeknotes 329

Another week of beautiful spring weather and relative peace, with five days spent in a particularly quiet office thanks to the tube strike. Otherwise, nothing doing.

Three times at the gym, diligently staying off the snacks. I’m slowly, noisily losing weight, about another kilo and a half down, and feeling better for it.

To clarify, the noise is of the statistical rather than auditory variety.

The strike left the roads absolutely rammed with cars and wobbly Lime bikes. The congestion, warmer weather and inexperience with city cycling seemed to make everyone more aggro. I took my time and kept my distance.

I voted for Zoë Garbett as mayor of Hackney on the strength of her manifesto and, I suppose, more abstractly, a general naïve desire for us all to make it.

I’m past the halfway point of Children of Strife. It’s making a bit more sense now but the plot feels very diffuse and I’m still waiting for something to happen after all this table-setting. I do like Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ideas and sentence-by-sentence writing so I wonder how much more I’d enjoy it if it were more aggressively edited at the structural level.

For All Mankind is spinning its wheels again. It’s disappointing that they’ve managed to make a show about space exploration feel cheap and claustrophobic by confining most of the action to a small marketplace set that’s less convincing than the Promenade or the Zócalo. I hope they’ll pass those savings on to the second half of the season and show us some exciting space stuff soon.

I watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a high-budget, low-concept piece of junk about nothing. You win some, you lose some. Not recommended.

VALIDATION CORNER: Jo sent a great video covering some of the cultural context of Akira and the main reason why it doesn’t make much sense, which made me feel better about my decision to enjoy it on a sensory level without worrying too much about the mechanics of the story. Likewise Phil shared a lovely post which explicitly explains why the first level of Manic Miner is so difficult, thus confirming I’m right about this and, let’s face it, probably everything.

A few people sent me Do I belong in tech anymore? (and, transitively, Loss of an ideal) and it rang true to me. I’m so tired of all this but I’ve definitely accepted defeat. Now I’m just hanging in there until either it blows over or I can afford to stop working altogether. I don’t see any immediate risk of either happening.

Relatedly, speaking as someone who’s organised their life and career around a deep love of software: “software brain” is awful, and software brain people are awful, but their distinguishing characteristic is a complete inability to realise that they’re awful, so there’s no point trying to appeal to their self-awareness because they haven’t got one. I choose to just give up and move on.

After thirteen years, new Boards of Canada is really happening, which I now realise doesn’t mean anything to almost anybody I know, but it means a lot to me. I may have ordered some merch. 🍊