Weeknotes 67

Back to work.

I’m unexpectedly gravitating towards using my desk in its standing position more and more by default. When I first got it I’d stand for at most an hour first thing in the morning, then again after lunch if I was feeling particularly spicy, but now I rarely lower it into a sitting position unless I’m doing something passive like watching a talk.

It’s surprising how pleasant and freeing I find it to stand for most of the day, although I don’t have any evidence that it’s helping my health or posture in any more profound way than “this, right now, is comfortable”.

I was spending too much time thinking about how to get vaccinated and it was generating too much pointless anxiety, so I’ve let go of the whole idea for the sake of my sanity. In principle it could happen if I spent time paying attention to the various smoke signals indicating which vaccination sites have spare doses at the end of the day and rushing over to them in time, but one abortive attempt this week revealed that my bike is no longer in rideable condition after a year of neglect, and I’m just not a calm enough person to be able to keep frantically checking without some of that agitation leaking over into the rest of my life.

I still resent that “how much time can you bear to spend on Facebook?” is the system but I’m newly resigned to just waiting. On Tuesday the NHS site updated to lower the minimum age from 50 to 45 so there’s at least some indication that I’ll get there eventually if I continue doing nothing.

My need to return to the gym only worsens over time. Should I get a treadmill to put under the standing desk instead? Tempting, but I barely have the space.

I exhausted all of the content in Worship the Sun and recorded nearly 18 hours of video in total. It’s not possible to finish a game which is not itself finished but I felt a deep sense of satisfaction when I beat its currently-final challenge.

According to Chris there’s one remaining small collectible hidden somewhere but I’ve accepted that I’m not going to be able to find it until more clues are added in a future build.

As anticipated, there is now an iOS test release of NetNewsWire with iCloud syncing. I’ve been trying it all week and it works perfectly. What a relief.

In further self-indulgent friends-moving-away news, it hit me this week that I’ll never again meet Alice at the Brown & Green in Mayow Park, or Paul at Bodega 50 in Stoke Newington. The things you take for granted, eh? On the plus side neither of them are dead yet so presumably there’ll be opportunities to meet at distant inferior establishments in future.

Wednesday was 14th April and I took that as a nice excuse to listen to Avril 14th a little more than usual. This song follows me around anyway because YouTube keeps recommending covers of it — presumably because I always watch them — but it was fun to have a tenuously topical reason to revisit the original. I love how it’s constructed and part of the reason why I enjoy cover versions is because it’s interesting to see how much of the fiddly detail they preserve.

It’s nearly 20 years old! Oh no.

Season 4 of Arrested Development is very weird and I don’t really understand what they thought they were doing with it.

We watched the first episode of Schitt’s Creek. It was mildly entertaining but also — and this is crucial — mercifully brief. More than one person has told me it doesn’t properly get going until later seasons so I’ll see if I can get there.