Weeknotes 49

Cyberpunk 2077 came out on Thursday so I streamed it in the evening.

I didn’t really enjoy it. Even ignoring the fact that it’s full of bugs which make it borderline unplayable, I just don’t like this kind of game and I wish I could stop overlooking that in my excitement to play something new. I’ve wasted so much money on unappealing action RPG junk that I play for an hour before getting bored, just because I hope that this’ll be the one time I find it fun. In this specific case you’d think The Witcher 3 would be ample warning that I wouldn’t have a good time, but no, apparently I’m unable to learn that lesson.

I also need to become more diligent about avoiding multiplatform games. Most of my all-time favourites have been platform exclusives; when a game like Cyberpunk 2077 has you steering a fake mouse cursor around the screen with an analogue stick, you know that your experience hasn’t been prioritised.

I filled in a form asking Sony for a refund. I don’t expect to get one but it’s worth a try.

A couple of months ago I hoped that we’d start seeing films getting a simultaneous home release, which is happening now that Warner Bros has decided to release all of its 2021 films on HBO Max. Of course HBO Max doesn’t exist in the UK so this doesn’t immediately help me, but I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll eventually be able to watch more new films in a comfortable environment, whether that’s at home (likely) or in a cinema that’s actually making an effort to provide a good experience (less likely).

It goes without saying that Christopher Nolan’s angry. Remember when directors got angry about Netflix testing playback speed controls?

Nat continues to play a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2 and I continue to enjoy watching it. My favourite part of this is our morning coffee ritual: we take a sip, Arthur Morgan takes a sip.

I have, unsurprisingly, been watching more YouTube. This weekend I found myself going down a nostalgic rabbit hole of musicians I originally found through YouTube and probably wouldn’t otherwise have heard of.

My favourite three videos were:

1. Hands by Victoria Hesketh (Little Boots), which I have a very clear memory of watching sometime in 2008. The DIY charm of this video definitely primed me to enjoy her adding a Tenori-on and a stylophone as well as her subsequent non-YouTube career.

2. Weird Bed by Elise Trouw. This is obviously much newer and less DIY but no less impressive for it. Her single from last year is, I think, perfect.

3. This unbeatable living room set by Genevieve Artadi & Louis Cole (Knower). I missed this when it was uploaded earlier this year so finding it now made me really happy and reminded me of seeing Louis Cole live in 2018. (Remember gigs?) The band sessions of Overtime and Time Traveler arguably sound better, but to see so many of their best songs together in a single 20-minute video is joyful. Etch it onto a golden record and shoot it into space to show the universe what the point of humans is.

At work my team’s been spending some time implementing Ruby 2.7 pattern matching in TruffleRuby, which I’ve found a fun and interesting introduction to how this kind of feature gets built. TruffleRuby implements ordinary case … when expressions with, essentially, desugaring: your case a when 42 gets rewritten into something more like if 42 === a. So case … in will work similarly, but with more complicated matching semantics (including variable assignment) in place of the simple ===. It gets a bit fiddly because array and hash patterns can be nested and you have to be careful to send #deconstruct and #deconstruct_keys to the right objects at the right times, but I think we’re making good progress.

Four more days at work and then a couple of weeks off. I’m enjoying my job at the moment but I really need the holiday.