Weeknotes 342

It’s been nice and cool this week. I’m bracing for next week.

Three gyms. Numbers all over the place, and not in a good way.

I slid back into Redemption Ark as mooted. Although its ratio of exposition to narrative remains unfavourable, events have begun to move slightly faster (i.e. at all) which is helping to hold my attention as I plod.

I watched two more Star City episodes (Awl in a Sack, Plow Deep) and now have only one left. I feel confident saying it’s a better, classier, more grown-up show than For All Mankind — doubly so in FAM’s later seasons — with the dead giveaway being that I don’t mind that hardly any of it is set in space. I’m forever pleading for For All Mankind to stop faffing about with its soap-opera–grade plots, characters, actors and performances and show us something fun in microgravity, but Star City is strong enough to be fully engaging without having to resort to CGI spacecraft.

Somewhat against my better judgement I bought a Switch 2 to cheer myself up, spooked by the a) absolutely certain price increase coming in September and b) extremely likely future release of a Switch 2 exclusive 3D Mario game. If I’m going to have to buy one eventually, I told myself, I might as well do it while it’s less expensive. I apparently found this convincing.

The setup process was unnecessarily fraught: do I want to perform a high-stakes one-time “system transfer” of my old Switch to the new one, or move data over manually later? I don’t know! What will happen to my Animal Crossing island, etc? Do I actually want all of my old games transferred, or just the subset I still intend to play? Will anything be deleted from the old system? Am I allowed to move everything back again if I change my mind?

None of this should be a big deal, but I find it hard to feel relaxed about these decisions because Nintendo has historically been so hostile and inflexible about saves, backups, multiple devices etc, ostensibly to defend against problems which don’t affect me at all (cheating? piracy?) at the expense of convenience. It’s a horrible way to begin the process of playing with a new toy. Just let me have fun!

Also, upsettingly, linear PCM 5.1 surround audio didn’t work, so it was stuck in stereo. Everything on my TV and soundbar appeared to be set up correctly, but no dice.

After an infuriating hour of changing every setting (and the HDMI cable) it started spontaneously working in its original configuration. It now works most of the time, and when it doesn’t, I can fix it by turning the TV off and on again, so that’s… fine?

I’ll keep trying to work out the exact sequence of events which triggers the problem, but who the hell knows when HDMI-CEC is involved. Reddit is littered with people having similar problems so there’s a tiny chance it might even get fixed by Nintendo one day.

The only proper Switch 2 game I’ve bought is Donkey Kong Bananza. It‘s fine so far — not the 3D Mario I long for, but an okay substitute in spirit. It’s definitely fun and innovative even though it doesn’t come close to capturing the magical feeling of Super Mario Odyssey and is probably a full notch below Astro Bot in terms of carefree platforming enjoyment. (Also, the camera is bad.)

On a bargain-craving whim I also bought Portal: Companion Collection (£3.37) and Inside (£2.09) in Nintendo’s summer sale, so I’m looking forward to experiencing some nostalgic fun from those once the bananas run dry.

FORGOT TO MENTION CORNER: I had an electrician round last week to fix the completely dead lights in my bathroom. I’d assumed one of the decade-old integrated LED downlights had given up the ghost, but no, it was just the light switch, a repair I could’ve easily and safely made myself but lacked the equipment to diagnose in the first place.

While he was here I got him to pull one of the downlights out of the ceiling and investigate whether I could in theory replace all of them with ones which take GU10 bulbs. He said I could. Now I’ve got to decide whether the cost of doing that is outweighed by the convenience of being able to change the bulbs myself and (optionally) put KAJPLATS bulbs everywhere so I can get rid of my smart light switches which don’t work very well. History would suggest I’ll do nothing unless and until my hand is forced.

In a moment of clarity I realised how much time I was wasting scrolling through posts, stories and reels, so I’ve deleted Instagram from my iPad to try to bring that behaviour under control.

For path-dependent reasons I have some friends with whom I only communicate via Instagram DMs, so I don’t want to remove the app from my life entirely, but I clearly can’t be trusted to have an infinite dopamine dispenser so readily available on my main device.

So now it’ll be quarantined on my phone along with all other Meta properties — I think just WhatsApp? — where it can do only limited psychic damage.

We’re heading into performance review season at work which is (for the first time in an otherwise largely propitious career) bad news for me, not least because my ability to maintain a beatific state of productive zen is predicated upon not paying attention to how upsetting and disappointing the whole situation is, so the invitation to reflect is unwelcome. Just have to make it through summer and wait for everything to cool down.