Weeknotes 78

It’s day four of my five-day weekend. I badly needed this rest and I’m loving it so far.

Today we rode to a park to meet friends for lunch. Imagine! Because the park is in Britain this did involve spending half an hour sheltering from torrential rain under a tree, but there was enough sunshine afterwards to make it worthwhile and it felt good to allow a glimmer of normality back into my life.

I’ve been using the public beta of iPadOS 15 since it came out on Wednesday. It’s pretty good overall but Safari has gone really weird. The most disorienting change is that the location bar is now inside the current tab, so it moves around depending on which tab is active. Very odd. Presumably someone at Apple took a rip on a bong that lasted just one second longer than it should have, and now here we are.

I like pickle in sandwiches. When I ran out of pickle this week I went to the supermarket to buy some more, but they only had that terrible small chunk pickle which is presumably intended to simulate the experience of eating normal pickle that’s been pre-chewed by someone else.

I don’t understand why my local supermarket sells this unpleasant product at all, much less why it’s the only variety of pickle they stock. It makes no sense. Sort it out Richard Branston.

I’ve had no real success at finding the fun in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I’ve been obediently doing one “go here, do this” task after another; I don’t think I understand how to engage with it or what else (if anything) it expects me to do to enjoy it. Maybe I haven’t got to the good bit yet? (Why are video games like this?)

I saw The Tomorrow War because it was free at the point of delivery and nominally sci-fi. This was a case where my habitual refusal to find out anything about a film beforehand worked against me: it’s a passable summer blockbuster, but it’s definitely not good sci-fi.

The premise is fun enough but they really set the screenwriting machine on 1/10 for this one. It’s unbelievably unadventurous, to the extent that I was convinced they must be intentionally overdoing the by-the-numbers material as misdirection from some shocking twist they were working their way up to, but (spoilers) they weren’t, it’s just a very unimaginative film.

It’s also way too long and its central MacGuffin is pointless and nonsensical. Don’t bother I reckon.

We also saw Censor which was much, much better. It reminded me a bit of Saint Maud in that it was British, primarily about a character rather than an actual story, and visually very interesting. Judging by its IMDb score (5.9) a lot of people aren’t going to like it, but I thought it was great. Plus: only 84 minutes! Perfect.

We watched Inside for a second time and it was a different experience now that I’ve listened to its soundtrack so often over the last month. It was the straightforwardly funny songs that I enjoyed most at first, but now I realise it’s the heartbreak of That Funny Feeling that’s going to stay with me the longest.

Likewise, I’ve been rewatching James Acaster’s Repertoire and this bit from Represent got stuck in my head all week:

You get in bed, you turn off the light, and then you shout “no more jobs!”, then you go to sleep. Some of you don’t even refer to it as sleep, you just refer to it as “no more jobs”.

You have no more jobs, then you wake up in the morning then it’s jobs again, and then no more jobs, and then jobs… isn’t that just your whole life? There’s no more jobs and jobs on a constant loop, until eventually one day: permanently no more jobs forever. Just stretching into the distance, and really missing jobs at that point, isn’t it? You really miss jobs when it’s no more jobs forever. Too much of a good thing, the old death.

No more jobs.

I looked at a BMI chart and decided to aim to lose 16kg in total. Partly because it would squeak me over the line from “overweight” into “healthy”, but mostly because that’s the mass of those big bags of flour I buy and I like the symmetry.

11.4kg down. Not much progress but I’ll take it.