Weeknotes 65

I’m on holiday.

I don’t set a holiday email autoresponder because the system is exactly the same as when I’m not on holiday: I will get back to you eventually. ♻️

I’ve been very tired this week. I don’t have a good reason why. The most likely explanation is simple accumulated fatigue from not having taken a break since Christmas. It’s been great to do nothing for the last few days without feeling like I have to cram in all the Jobs before the work week starts again. I had imagined I’d spend this holiday getting Jobs done but maybe it’s fine for it to just be restful. The Jobs can wait.

For example: I had a nap on Friday, and a nap yesterday, and a nap today. I love naps, especially when the window’s open and a breeze is blowing and the sun’s slicing in around the blinds. #naps

The pandemic gave us all permission to temporarily stop going to things, but now that society has adjusted, who’s to say we have to revert to the old ways once they no longer risk literally killing us? Will it be socially acceptable to reply to future invitations with “thanks, but I’ve stopped going to things”? Only if together we make it so.

One of my holiday plans was to play Disco Elysium now that it’s out on consoles. I’m not having a good time with it. Subjective judgements aside, I don’t understand how anyone can give a perfect score to a game that’s barely been adapted for console play at all: it’s text-heavy but a lot of the text is so small as to be completely useless on a TV, and the whole UI is so clearly designed for a mouse that even the simplest interaction is clunky and frustrating. There may well be a good game buried under the obtuse writing and compounding accessibility nightmares but I can’t tell.

Overall I’m feeling a bit sad about games at the moment. So many of them are unplayably bad and I’ve wasted so much of my money on duds. Disco Elysium is typical in that it seems like exactly the sort of thing I should enjoy but can’t: it’s so carelessly made, and so disrespectful of my time and attention, that I feel like a mug for being optimistic enough to buy it in the first place.

Looking back through my email receipts for the last year or so, I can see that the money I spent on Outer Wilds, Ghost of Tsushima and Watch Dogs: Legion was more or less completely wasted, and Cyberpunk 2077 would’ve been too if they hadn’t got embarrassed and refunded everyone.

Video games are capable of such transcendental goodness that it’s sort of worth struggling through the dross, but when I’m between successes it can get really hard to remember what’s fun about them.

Anyway, I played some Super Mario 3D World and talked to a friend about Breath of the Wild and that cheered me up.

We watched Judas and the Black Messiah, which was well-acted but didn’t really come together as a film, and I Care a Lot, which was quite silly and very entertaining.

The former cost £16 to rent which is sort of ridiculous but did provide the extra entertainment of eyeballing the playback position and asking each other “have you had £5 [or whatever] of enjoyment so far?” when pausing it to take a break. Interactive cinema.

The latter was free at the point of delivery and that’s the main thing.

For Easter I made some sourdough hot cross buns via (eventually) Denise. I used apple sauce instead of an egg and that seemed to work well. I also accidentally turned on the grill because I forgot they were still proving in the oven so half of them ended up topped with melted cling film, which conversely did not seem to work well, but the other half were quite nice.

Yes, I do read.

I decided I was curious enough to continue on to season 4 of Arrested Development. It’s very odd. I’m watching the remix because I thought it was the only version that Netflix still had available; I later realised that the original episodes are there under “trailers & more” but it’s too late to go back now.

I felt really confused by a scene with Henry Winkler very obviously green-screened in when they could’ve just shot a medium close-up instead. I assume there’ll be plenty more stuff to get confused about.

I’m still doing daily stretches but, after three months of taking pointless photos of my progress, have decided to free myself from the prison of recording the results. Nothing’s changed for the last month anyway. The advantage of stopping the photos is that the whole procedure now feels way less inconvenient even though I’m still doing the actual important bit.