Weeknotes 46

Heating update: aside from that momentary lapse two weeks ago, the heating is still off. Maybe I really will make it to December before properly turning it on. This bodes well for my energy bill if not the long-term habitability of our planet.

Bread update: my twice-weekly loaves are now large and round.

I don’t have a scientific explanation for why they’ve finally got good. I’ve tweaked a few parts of the process and am probably getting better at shaping through practice alone. Regardless of the actual cause, comparing this to August’s efforts makes me feel like I’m making decent progress.

Community progress: Remedial Chaos Theory. I was getting a bit worried by the dip in quality around the start of season three but this one pulled it back. It was a funny and inventive episode despite some of the jokes being spoiled by the season’s running order changing at the last minute.

For uninteresting reasons I usually have the subtitles turned on while watching TV, which in this case demonstrates how unsure the subtitling dumdums are about the lyrics to the Community theme song. The line that definitely goes “give me some rope / tie me to dream” is variously subtitled as “give me some more time in a dream”, “give me some rope tie me to a tree”, “give me some rope / time in a tree” and so on. There’s no consistency between consecutive episodes so I imagine it’s a different subtitler’s interpretation each time.

This sort of thing happens all the time in The Thick of It too, which is frustrating given how much its jokes depend on nuance and specific references. I understand that it can be hard to hear what someone is saying or singing, but I wish more subtitles came from an authoritative source rather than someone having to type whatever they reckon they heard.

My PlayStation 5 arrived on Thursday and I took Friday off work to “play games”, which turned out to be a euphemism for vacuuming the thick layer of dust around my television and tidying up all the wires so that I could connect something new.

I really like it. It’s comically large in two of its dimensions but fortunately narrow enough to turn sideways and hide behind the TV which makes it invisible for practical purposes. I don’t have any games that take full advantage of its graphical potential but it’s such a relief for the whole UI to be so snappy and smooth. The few games I have played (see below) spent virtually no time stuck at loading screens and that’s good enough for me.

I know most people will only ever pair their controller once, but given that it’s your very first interaction, it’s so disappointing that you still have to connect it with a wire. If Sony cared they could do it wirelessly or — galaxy brain — ship it already paired. ♻️

Embarrassingly there aren’t any launch titles that I’m keen to play, so I’ve spent the most time with Astro’s Playroom, the free game that comes preinstalled. It’s ostensibly a tech demo for the new controller hardware but it’s also an impressively rich, dense and joyful game.

It definitely does a good job of showing off the new controller. The combined effect of the sound, vibration and adaptive resistance on the triggers is really convincing when you’re, say, activating a rocket engine or compressing a spring. I didn’t have high hopes for this but I’m impressed.

It’s also far more charming than it needs to be for a pack-in freebie. The whole thing is a loving tribute to the history of the PlayStation and I enjoyed identifying the many, many games that are being reenacted by cute robots throughout each level. Well done Sony! You should rip off Super Mario Sunshine more often!

Amazon’s shipping notification email for the PS5 said “on the day of delivery we will email you a one-time password to read to the driver”, which hasn’t happened to me before. At first I thought the point of this code was to authenticate me to the delivery person, but when he showed up he had to enter it on his phone instead of checking it against a code he could already see, so presumably it was really there to verify that he made the delivery.

I expect getting all of these things safely delivered is a nightmare. I’m just relieved my box didn’t contain a bag of rice instead.

We watched The Queen’s Gambit over the weekend. I found it entertaining despite very little actually happening — the high quality of the performances, sound design and visual effects moved it along nicely. By the latter half (er, middlegame?) it was really digging deep to find new ways to make a game of chess look exciting, although the music had to do a lot of the work.