Weeknotes 72

Once I got through the critical first step of sorting out my desk wiring I lost all momentum and it’s now stalled in a half-finished state. The dangling cables are a bit inconvenient but not inconvenient enough to force me to complete the job properly. Our house was permanently like this when I was growing up so it’s probably genetic.

I’m enjoying Returnal more now that I’ve stopped trying to make progress. Instead I’ve been casually dipping into it for half an hour to play like an arcade game, and that’s fun enough. I’m less frustrated with it when I treat it as an occasional meditative distraction rather than a massive feat I’m trying to perform. I do think this means it doesn’t really work on its own terms but I’m still finding it a legitimate way to get some idle entertainment.

I eventually beat another boss, which helped, as did the realisation that various shortcuts open up as you progress, so although I remain still extremely weary of the repetitive bits near the beginning, at least I can easily skip over the repetitive bits in the middle.

The new Apple TV remote is really good. The old one was a disaster and it’s a relief to replace it with something that works more like a normal remote. A power button: bravo! No big Siri button on the front: perfection! My expectations are low.

The box for the new remote also contained a new Apple TV which seems fine. The only difference so far is that I can watch 4K 60fps YouTube videos, which looks cool on soothing nature footage, but… my god, have you seen those clips of Gemini Man? It looks incredibly weird.

The aesthetic of high frame rate movies is so alien that it’s almost impossible for me to imagine it catching on. I suppose cinema progresses one funeral at a time; even though I feel extremely distracted by the absence of jerky movement and motion blur, I expect that kids who grow up watching video like this will just see it as completely normal, and mentally categorise 24fps films in the same bucket as anything that came out before the introduction of colour or sound.

Speaking of 60fps, I’m excited about the performance patch for The Last of Us Part II. I’d been holding out for some kind of update before replaying the game on PS5, and it looks like this patch is what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve only played the opening few minutes so far to test it out but it looks amazing.

Over the weekend we watched all existing episodes of Mare of Easttown, which (as you probably know by now) is brilliant. Aside from the overtly good stuff — great writing, great direction, great acting, yeah yeah — I’m enjoying the novel vowel fronting of people who say they’ve left their pheune at heume or whatever. There’s also something funny about scenes with Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce relentlessly doing American accents at each other.

I love it! I bet it wouldn’t have done so well if they’d called it Everyone’s Miserable.

I know I’ve said all this before, but a two-day weekend is not long enough for my brain to recharge and reset itself for another week of thinking, talking and programming. Work is mercifully giving everyone four-day weeks again this summer, so my brain just has to hang in there until July.

6.5kg down.