Weeknotes 335

June!

Cooler at last, even raining most days, escalating to wild sheets of water blowing down Bishopsgate on Thursday. I’m sleeping so much better.

Three gyms. Another kilo down.

I tried to watch If I Had Legs I’d Kick You and unusually had to stop halfway through. It’s probably a good film but I found it so unpleasant and stressful that I couldn’t justify continuing.

Three episodes in, Star City is surprisingly not shit. It’s certainly better and more convincing than season five of For All Mankind, with a higher density of space drama, and the grainy desaturated Chernobyl aesthetic complements the storytelling nicely.

I started watching Widow’s Bay. The comedy and horror are both gentler than I’d expected and it didn’t immediately hook me despite the cosy nostalgia of the setting. After a slow start, episode four took both aspects up a notch and I feel more invested now.

I’m mostly enjoying Silent Hill f, aside from a comically bad “puzzle” involving scarecrows. It’s just about managing to hold my attention; it’s very thin as a video game, more a walking simulator than anything else, but the scenery is good and it’s easy to survive.

“THREE IN THE” CORNER: I previously wrote about enjoying a puzzle whose solution involved deducing an unstated implication of a more relaxed-seeming rule. This week two of those came along at once: Mind the Gap, where “different parities must be separated by the loop” implies “██ ██ ███, ██ ██ ███” (easy consequence of the rule itself); and 20 Almost Balanced Lines, where “even and odd sums differ by one” implies “██ ██ █ █ ███” (harder consequence of the rule and choice of lines). I’m sure you’ll agree this is very fun.

I had a dream about a bird. I was riding in the back seat of a car on a warm evening with the window rolled down. We stopped near a tree full of darting songbirds. One flew in and landed on my outstretched finger as the car pulled away and got up to speed. After admiring the bird I held it out the window to fly away and the fast-moving air instantly sucked it beneath the wheels, obliterating it. Horrified, the other passengers demanded to know why I’d done that.