Weeknotes 41

Sorry, even more media this week. Look, it’s Halloween season and the nights are drawing in so I have to stay up late watching spooky things and there’s nothing else to tell you about cos there’s a pandemic on. 👻

We continued our accidental Mike Flanagan season by watching Hush. I enjoyed what it did within its constraints and, at about 80 minutes long, it didn’t overstay its welcome or try to stretch the premise further than it deserved.

We also went back and rewatched The Haunting of Hill House to see how it compares to Bly Manor. As suspected it’s much better: the writing is more convincing, the direction is more consistent and the visual ideas are more imaginative. The season itself has a really nice structure built around the shape of the family and the nonlinear storytelling works more naturally than the mess of Bly Manor. This anthology is fundamentally promising so I’ll watch a third season if Netflix commissions it, but if this trend continues I’m not confident it’d actually be any good at all.

As we mine more of Flanagan’s back catalogue it gets increasingly weird to see the same actors cropping up repeatedly in quite different roles. Henry Thomas’s decent performances reminded me to rewatch his audition for E.T. which, annoyingly for him, is probably better than any of that adult stuff.

I struggled past the finishing line of the Star Wars films that I’ve been using as workout distractions. The best I can say about the sequel trilogy is that it’s less miserable than the prequels. I’d already forgotten everything that happens in The Rise of Skywalker but at least I was warmer this time.

I haven’t had much luck finding the next thing to watch while exercising. The first episode of The Umbrella Academy didn’t grab me and its tone seemed annoying. The new season of Star Trek: Discovery is off to a promising and refreshingly optimistic start but its weekly releases won’t keep up with my need for roughly 45 minutes of mindless entertainment every day.

Please don’t make me watch The Lord of the Rings.

Work sent me a UniFi Dream Machine to improve my home network. Trying to set it up from my iPad was a straightforwardly terrible experience: the iPadOS UI doesn’t work properly in landscape orientation so there were offscreen buttons I didn’t know existed, and the mandatory account signup process requires the app to already be connected to the internet even though achieving an internet connection is the goal of the exercise. Both of those problems weren’t immediately evident so I wasted a couple of frustrating hours before realising I needed to start again on my phone, after which everything went more smoothly.

Now that it’s working I’m pretty impressed with it. The signal strength is good throughout my flat and the management interface is friendly and informative. Most importantly it says “Everything Is Great!” in large, friendly letters at the top of the dashboard. I don’t know whether that’ll last.

I had fun listening to the (spoiler-filled) 536th episode of The Incomparable covering The Last of Us Part II. I found their coverage of the first game in episode 208 difficult to enjoy; this one was greatly improved by having fewer panellists with more interesting opinions. I agreed with almost everything aside from Siracusa’s story complaints which contradict my own feelings about the characters’ motives.

Automatic dark mode on all my devices is exacerbating the mild seasonal affective disorder brought on by shorter days. I can turn on the lights when I wake up but my screens are all still black.

Today the sun set at 18:00 but in a week’s time it’ll set at 16:45. Absolutely unacceptable.

I’m more wary of time zones now that I work with Canadians so I visited gov.uk/when-do-the-clocks-change to double-check when to suspend my provincial human assumptions. I was surprised that the dates go back to 2017 because that’s the last time anyone pruned them. I get the impression it used to be a point of pride to keep this page up to date but now it’s just sitting there. As with everything else in the UK of 2020: why bother?