Weeknotes 334

I spent much of the week, including the bank holiday, hiding from the sun. I slept horribly on several occasions when it got up to 33 °C during the day and didn’t cool down much overnight. The sleep deprivation made me irritable and unfocused so I wasn’t particularly productive despite working from the air-conditioned office every day.

It was mercifully cool on Wednesday evening which reset me a bit with a single good night’s sleep, and the heat’s easing off again now. I hope to return to full humanity next week.

Three gyms. Human blood on the gym stairs.

I’m still enjoying There Is No Antimemetics Division. It’s not deep but it’s well-written and the constant forward motion of the story is making the time fly by, which is exactly what I’m looking for.

Some Inferno merch arrived on Friday, and yesterday I walked down to Rough Trade East to collect more. Because of the heat I’ve felt too unsettled to actually sit down and listen to it all the way through yet; it’s not of religious importance or anything, but all else being equal I’d prefer to be in a baseline receptive state of mind when doing something I want to enjoy. There’s no rush.

Then, at the intersection of the SCP Foundation and Boards of Canada, this afternoon I returned to the Barbican’s subterranean cinema to see Backrooms.

I love the singular vision and noisy aesthetic of the original videos so I was apprehensive about the transition to a Hollywood-scale production, but it really worked for me. It’s a challenge to adapt something so devoid of context into an actual narrative and I think they found an angle which let them preserve enough of what made the source material good while still building characters and story around it. I’d like to see more films so ideally this one will be successful and they’ll make them.

Guess who was my favourite fellow cinemagoer: the man in front of me who alternated between sneezing and blowing his nose for two hours; the man to my left who spent that time working his way through a jumbo bag of Tesco sweet & salty popcorn; or the man behind me who continuously narrated his opinions to his girlfriend like they were watching it at home?

I’m joking of course, I like all those men the same.

I finished season five of For All Mankind. I still like the show but overall this season was a disappointment. It did slightly improve towards the end as they wrapped up the local politics (tedious) and allowed a few more morsels of space exploration drama (thrilling), but I find it hard to understand why they’ve actively chosen to focus on the less interesting aspects of the world they’ve built. I suppose they could be constrained by their budget, but even then, surely these days it’s actually cheaper to render some CGI spacecraft than to construct a naff Promenade knock-off on a soundstage? I fear the explanation might be as simple as bad writing.

I also finished season two of The Pitt, which conversely has good writing and so could sustain my interest indefinitely. I don’t instinctively believe how unprofessional some of the characters can be at times, but they’re also constantly experiencing stressful situations so maybe I need to use my imagination more, and it makes for good drama regardless.

I picked up Silent Hill f in the PlayStation summer sale. I’m only an hour in but I’m finding it engaging so far: it’s visually, thematically and culturally much more interesting to me than other games I’ve tried in this genre. I also don’t yet feel like I’ve lost my grip on what’s going on or how the protagonist is feeling, unlike in, say, Alan Wake and Control, where I never had the slightest clue why anything was happening.

I’m actually a bit too much of a wimp for full-on survival horror (versus horror-themed action adventure) but it’s compelling enough that I’m powering through the adrenaline all the same. The motion sickness got me before the anxiety did.

Please, leave me behind.

And people say I’m hard to shop for.