Weeknotes 34

I got some positive feedback on last week’s #breadchat so I’m afraid there’s more this week. Only negative feedback can stop this; I don’t make the decisions.

I baked a loaf for my dad’s birthday and posted it to him with some marmalade.

This was logistically a bit difficult (e.g. where do you buy a box for posting bread?) but worthwhile because he seemed pleased with it.

The lame is working out quite well so far. I can’t score particularly deeply with it but it does give me a bit more leverage and makes it easier to get the right angle. I’m going to try switching to a smaller banneton so that the dough doesn’t have to be squeezed into the pot, which’ll hopefully allow it to open up more when I score it.

For some reason I haven’t yet complained about how difficult I find it to slice sourdough, but this week I reached the limit of my frustration with this maddening task and ordered a fiddle bow bread knife to make it easier. It feels and looks weird to cut bread with what is essentially a hacksaw but it works incredibly well and I’m relieved the nightmare is over.

I thought Denise had scooped this important announcement when she mentioned my “fancy knife” but it turns out she meant the lame so my weeknote infosec remains airtight for now.

I bought Lonely Mountains: Downhill for the Switch and have been enjoying it. Initial hiccups aside, it looks and sounds lovely and is pleasantly meditative to pick up and play for ten minutes.

More like Celeste on a Bike, am I right? No.

The relaxation of repeatedly smashing my brains out on a rock was interrupted by the joycons on my Switch starting to drift really badly. This isn’t a big deal when you’re pretending to waddle across an island in Animal Crossing but makes it almost impossible to pretend to cycle down a mountain.

I bought some contact cleaner and sprayed an impossibly tiny amount of it into each joystick which seems to have fixed the problem. In a way £7 feels like a lot of money for such a small number of molecules but the drifting has stopped and I now have a massive stockpile of molecules if I ever need more so it’s probably worthwhile.

We watched the first two episodes of Lovecraft Country. The first one hooked me immediately by looking fantastic and patiently establishing an intriguing premise. The second one, in an impressively precipitous decline even by J. J. Abrams’ standards, was an incoherent mess that made me feel cross with myself for getting my hopes up in the first place. That’s the end of that then.

I’d intended to submit a talk to RubyConf this week but couldn’t summon the enthusiasm. This is partly because I’m lazy and brain-fogged, partly because the submission form is too obtuse (I always stumble at how to split a single coherent idea between their three “abstract”, “details” and “pitch” fields), but mostly because I couldn’t convince myself my talk idea was both viable and in good taste.

I wanted to talk about the high place phenomenon and how it relates to our ability to quickly simulate many possible outcomes in our heads. The latter is an important skill that helps us to make sensible decisions about, say, the design of software, because it provides an opportunity to work through the technical and social consequences of a choice (“future time integrated suffering”) before we commit to it. Some people get better at this over the course of their career so I suspect it’s something that can be consciously practiced and improved.

It’s not impossible there’s something interesting here — that it’s beneficial for some part of your brain to be constantly playing out the consequences of possible actions and warning you about them, despite it feeling alarming at times — but to talk about the call of the void without trivialising any of the issues involved would be difficult even for someone who properly understands them, which I don’t.

So, like I said, not a good idea. At least I have that much foresight.

Summer is over because I’ve had my last Friday off. I’m sad to go back to five-day working weeks, not just because I crave leisure time but also because I think four-day weeks are far more humane while not being significantly less productive. I hope I can readjust.