Weeknotes 66

I’m still on holiday, but only for a couple more hours, which I am savouring.

The time off was fantastic. It doesn’t yet feel safe to go anywhere or do anything so I didn’t go anywhere and I didn’t do anything. In practice that meant ten days of sleeping, reading, cooking, baking, drinking coffee, playing games, watching TV & films, and catching up on a few household chores.

I still hadn’t hung the picture so Nat bit the bullet and did it without me. It looks great despite not being positioned according to any fundamental mathematical constant. Should’ve just whacked it up myself eight months ago, would’ve been fine. Who knew!

Since I moved into this flat in 2015 I’ve been using a tired, studenty EXPEDIT as an ersatz living room TV stand. This week I replaced it with a much nicer piece of furniture designed specifically for that purpose, and of course it’s a million times better and I’m annoyed with myself for not doing it years ago.

I have an identical tired, studenty EXPEDIT performing similar duties in the bedroom, but it feels too hasty to do anything about that just yet.

My deficient personality aside, one reason why the living room EXPEDIT persisted is because it was a convenient place to store a lot of books. I now have nowhere for those books to live so I’m going to have to consolidate them with the book storage in other rooms even though those are all full too. Ugh. Am I going to have to throw books away?

We watched a couple of films on Apple TV+: Wolfwalkers, which was sweet, and Cherry, which was fucking embarrassing.

I spent a lot of time playing a new build of Chris Patuzzo’s work-in-progress puzzle-platformer Worship the Sun. In fact I know exactly how long I spent — twelve hours and fourteen minutes — because I recorded myself doing it and uploaded it to YouTube for Chris to watch back at his leisure while making a pained expression. Paul’s been doing the same so hopefully together we’ll be helping Chris to squash some minor bugs and push the game closer to completion.

It’s a really good game and I’ve been enjoying it a lot. Some of the puzzles are definitely very challenging but I haven’t got completely stuck on anything yet. In fact it’s the first game for a long time that’s given me the experience of ending a session at an apparent impasse but then having a flash of inspiration away from the computer, in the shower or before sleep or whatever, that unlocks further progress. It’s a really satisfying feeling that used to happen a lot when I played adventure games as a kid and I’m pleased it’s happening again now.

It’s also fun to fiddle about with OBS Studio and record myself playing a game for hours on end. I’ve never streamed like this because I’m always using the PlayStation’s built-in YouTube integration, but OBS is pretty impressive and I’ve enjoyed mucking about in front of my green screen and generally thinking aloud while wrestling my way through puzzles, so maybe I’ll figure out a way to stream a console game this way.

I’m so glad I took the holiday and basically did nothing for a week. I really needed it. In fact I now realise that I need a second week off but that’s not the plan I made so it’ll have to wait.

Still no sign of getting vaccinated, which is increasingly frustrating because I know so many people who’ve already had their first dose at least. I’m trying to not let the frustration overwhelm me because I’m currently healthy and my life is stable so rationally I don’t need to be vaccinated with any kind of urgency. But in my less rational moments it’s still a bit upsetting to be so far back in a queue of unknown length while others are celebrating and slowly returning their lives to some semblance of normality.

I suppose it’s just variant FOMO.

My gym reopens tomorrow, and I really want to go so that I can begin slowly clawing back my former fitness, but I don’t feel like I safely can.

This week lots of British people were complaining online about last-minute changes to broadcast TV schedules. Those changes of course had no effect on Netflix, Disney+, YouTube etc so I didn’t even know about them until I saw all the complaints. The main thing I’ve learned is that I’m completely out of touch with what proportion of people still watch linear TV.