Weeknotes 52

Happy new year! 🍾

The days all run together at the end of December, especially in the dead calm between Christmas and New Year. (I’d never heard the word “twixmas” until I saw Lucy Prebble use it the other day, but I suppose that’s what it’s called.)

Most of the time I had absolutely no awareness of what weekday it was. This is the most confused I’ve felt about the passage of time during the festive season. The obvious culprit is the unusual situation of not having seen my family or left my flat, but perhaps being completely unmoored from any kind of TV schedule played a part too.

At one point I remembered and briefly identified with Matt’s tweet that says “it’s like god’s out of town for the weekend, no-one’s watching”, but then I dug out the tweet and realised it’s about Easter, so that’s wrong then.

I enjoyed Megan Amram’s gender reveal party post so much that “laundry mistake” is definitely starting to show up as an occasional utterance.

As a silly holiday project we decided to watch Avengers: Endgame because it’s the highest grossing film ever and it’s free at the point of delivery on Disney+. I say “project” because Nat had never seen any of the Marvel films so I tried to pick which ones were necessary to make sense of Endgame as well as a sensible order to watch them in.

We ended up seeing Captain Marvel, The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Doctor Strange, Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp before finishing with Endgame. None of those films is especially good by itself but a lot of them are entertaining and it was fun to have a long cumulative story to watch together over several nights.

Obviously I also enjoyed the puzzle of finding the smallest set of films which introduced all the characters and set up the relevant plot points. (I almost included Thor: The Dark World just to establish the Reality Stone, but in the end it didn’t seem like it would add anything beyond “there’s also a red one”.)

The main difference from my previous attempt is that I noticed and enjoyed the Community cameos this time.

I don’t want to get all “blogging about blogging” but writing my 2020 yearnotes made me realise that weeknotes have helped me to get better at unblocking myself with compromise instead of getting hung up on the brain crack of perfect execution. I had loads of fun ideas for what I could put in the yearnotes but, instead of forcing myself to do all of them, I just wrote as much as I could be bothered to and shipped it. Was it as good as it could have been? No. Was it better than publishing nothing at all? Also no

The risk of writing without overthinking is that sometimes overthinking is useful: it makes me realise that what I’m writing is uninteresting or inconsiderate, or makes me look bad, or could be used against me by someone looking to pick a fight on Twitter. But the bargain I’m making with myself is to accept that risk in exchange for just getting something out there.

A few times I’ve regretted what I’ve written here but overall I still accept the risk because I know how paralysed I get by drafting and redrafting, and therefore how high the risk is that I’ll just decide to drop the whole thing once it gets too frustrating. So it makes me slightly vulnerable and I sometimes feel embarrassed later when I look back at what I’ve said. Oh well.

Community: Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing. I don’t understand what Yahoo! Screen is but I’m finding season six surprisingly enjoyable so far.

I keep trying to work out whether I’d recommend Community to someone who hasn’t seen it. The best summary I’ve come up with is “I spent less time laughing than I did thinking about what a sitcom even is” which I suppose works as either a recommendation or a warning depending on your preferences.

I can feel the end coming.

This morning I started and “finished” A Short Hike on Switch. It’s a beautiful and effortlessly charming game which mashes together the best feels of Celeste, Animal Crossing, Super Mario, Breath of the Wild and The Witness into a single comforting experience.

I’ve already spent several happy post-completion hours just wandering around, exploring the island and discovering secrets. I especially love that the in-game reward for exploration is easier exploration, which is a wonderful feedback loop to encourage more contented pottering.

I’m not dreading going back to work — which is a nice feeling! — but I’m also far from ready to end this blissful holiday routine of lie-ins, long breakfasts, coffees, baths, naps, video games, films, melon margaritas and extremely late nights. Fortunately I took tomorrow off so I do at least get a day to ease myself out of it and back into something closer to grim reality.