Weeknotes 74

June! June!

By cancelling and rebooking I managed to bring forward my second COVID-19 vaccine appointment by three weeks, so I’ll be getting my second dose at the end of June instead of late July. This feels like a meaningful difference given that (see above) it’s actually June right now.

No more nocturnal Velcro® incidents yet. The literal and metaphorical tension builds.

The Mare of Easttown conclusion was satisfying.

In these shows which invite the viewer to guess who done a bad murder I always find myself more interested in working out which of the characters and subplots are there to provide emotional or thematic substance while being completely irrelevant to the primary mystery. It seems likely that writers have to throw in at least a few of these filler elements otherwise everything you see is significant and that doesn’t leave much room for guesswork or twists.

I think Mare found a good balance: there’s just enough filler to hide what’s really going on and provide cover for a bit of a surprise, but the main characters are still the main characters and it doesn’t turn out to have been a homicidal ghost or robot or robot ghost or whatever. Spoilers.

Also Kate Winslet’s good at acting.

The media highlight of this week (year?) was Inside, Bo Burnham’s new special. It’s really good. I’m tempted to talk about some of its ideas but I don’t want to spoil anything because all good things are better when you don’t know anything about them. Let’s just say that it’s required viewing for anyone who uses the internet, which is likely to include you, so off you go.

Inside had tough competition from Saint Maud, which turned out to be a wonderful film with some striking images and performances. (In fact one of the most surprising moments is shown in its Prime Video artwork so good luck trying to watch it without ruining that bit.) I thought it was going to be a horror film but it isn’t really. Anyway: great!

Still idly plugging away at Returnal. Still getting nowhere. I’m clearly playing it wrong because at the moment I don’t understand how any human could have finished it.

Here’s something that happens sometimes for no reason: you’re having a good run in which you’ve laboriously collected full health, plenty of money and tons of upgrades; you go into a room while exploring; the doors lock and a massive unbeatable (by me) monster spawns and quickly kills you. It’s such a lazy and witless piece of design that I honestly think it would be more interesting if they had the game restart at random just to remind you who’s in charge.

I got Assassin’s Creed Valhalla to give myself a bit of a break from playing level one of Returnal for the millionth time.

I haven’t spent much time with it yet so I’m still plodding through the extended boring bit they put at the beginning of games to make sure that nobody has too much fun too early. As usual it takes a bit of effort to ignore the leaden dollops of mythology — especially since it’s Norse in this case, one of the medium’s most persistent and po-faced repeat offenders — and there’s too much generic RPG mess getting in the way of the stealth action proper.

But you can play as a female character, which is guaranteed to make a video game more interesting than it would otherwise have been, and you can set all of the in-game text to be big enough to read from a sofa across the room, which is where people sit when they play console games, so overall I’m enjoying it enough to keep going.

At one point I realised how relieved I was that dying sent me to a recent checkpoint rather than all the way back to the beginning of the game, so bear in mind there’s a chance that my expectations have been set artificially low.

I have three more working Fridays before the four-day weeks begin. 🙏

8.5kg down.

June‽