Weeknotes 57

Not having a telly in lockdown is shit. You can’t watch telly.

As of Thursday, I have a telly again! The men unexpectedly brought my old TV back with a brand new panel fitted. A modern TV consists of little else but a panel so it feels like a weird technicality to call it “my old TV” but it was still logged into my YouTube account so I suppose its soul has been continuously present.

When the men were unpacking it I could see that the factory-fresh screen was still protected by a sheet of transparent plastic. I started anticipating the rare satisfaction of peeling it off but then one of the men did it himself, quickly and without ceremony, probably for the tenth time that day. In hindsight I probably could have stopped the man in time by saying “no, please don’t peel the plastic off the screen, I would enjoy doing it and I don’t get out much at the moment” but apparently I have too much dignity to do that sort of thing.

I started playing the PS5 version of Control that came out this week. I can’t tell whether I like it yet; it certainly takes itself very seriously, but it’s hard to predict whether there’s going to be enough substance to justify the deeply portentous cutscenes.

It’s a very good-looking game. The art direction is fantastic and the PS5 ray-tracing mode has a glossy and slightly woozy feeling which fits the mood perfectly. The destructible environments are fun and the Brutalist architecture of the building is impressive even though I would ultimately prefer to not be playing a game about being stuck inside during a lockdown.

I’m conflicted about the weird fiction vibe. I do generally like the creepy, anxious, Southern Reach Trilogy meets Devs meets House of Leaves aesthetic, but (as in all those things) it doesn’t really work as a narrative setting. When the answer to every question is “it’s just like, weird, man” it makes it hard to empathise with the characters or feel invested in anything that’s happening.

I think this is why the SCP Foundation works so well: it’s showing you a world, not telling you a story. Maybe that’s what Control is trying to do too. I dunno.

I’m more straightforwardly enjoying WandaVision now that it’s found its feet. The first two episodes had an unfavourable wheat-to-chaff ratio and I was worried it was going to become an interminable Lost-style wind-up where you have to sit through half an hour of fluff for ten seconds of plot development, but the pace picks up quickly after that and they don’t waste much time showing exactly what’s going on. It’s fun to see something different and strange like this. And, well, no spoilers, but I’m happy about which other characters they chose to bring in so far.

Summoning fzf with ⌃T is going fantastically. I’m already completely dependent upon it and can’t imagine having to use tab completion at the shell again.

The only hiccup was that installing fzf’s key bindings also took over ⌃R for history search, which is fine, but it meant I had to hit enter twice: once to pick an item from the search results and insert it at the prompt, and again to actually run that command. Fortunately it was easy to edit $(brew -‍-‍prefix)/​opt/​fzf/​shell/​key-bindings.zsh to make enter behave the old way and now I only have to hit it once. Perfect.

I bought a bunch of daffodils yesterday and today one of them opened. Thus it is basically spring.