Weeknotes 91

October! The best month. 🍂

I’ve made decent progress on my RubyConf talk at last, mainly because I’ve spent every available moment working on it. It still feels impossible that I’ll have it all finished and recorded by the effective deadline (this Friday). I’m just going to do as much as I can and accept that it’ll be half-baked.

The hard part is not the writing but the “research”: like its predecessor this is a talk about a specific piece of code, which means I need to actually come up with that code so I have something to talk about. When I proposed it I only had a rough idea of what the code could be, but I’ve spent the week playing and experimenting and I think I have something fun now. It’s remarkably different from what I’d originally intended but that’s material exploration innit.

Writing talks is stressful.

In the evenings we got through Midnight Mass, the latest vaguely spooky Netflix show from Mike Flanagan. It’s slower and much looser than The Haunting of Hill House but still pretty watchable, and a definite improvement over In Bly Manor There Are Also Some Ghosts.

It’s well-written & impressively shot in places, the central performances are good, and the slow reveal is fun. At times it felt like it was trying too hard to be a grown-up “meditation on faith”, which is a shame because the earnest religious mumbo-jumbo actually made it feel sort of childish; the idea works better as a pretty conventional [REDACTED] story told against an incidentally religious backdrop.

Nitpicks aside, I really like the tradition of these horror dramas dropping in October-ish. Keep making more please! Do a haunted house next!

On Friday I went and got the flu vaccine as a treat. I’m not in the habit of doing this — in fact I don’t think I’ve ever had one before — but it feels like an easy precaution now that society is slowly opening back up and winter is approaching. The pharmacist’s smalltalk (“are you getting a Christmas tree?”) was more painful than the needle.

I just have to make it through this week, then I’ve got a whole week off. 🤞