Yearnotes 3

And we’re back.

This year was much better than last year. My life feels more stable and that’s what I need at the moment. I don’t have any grand plans or big ambitions, which is fine; I just want to make good things and enjoy my time.

I’m grateful I didn’t have any real health problems to deal with. I’ve had a few aches and pains — half caused by exercise, half by lack of exercise — but nothing serious or permanent. This won’t continue forever so I’m actively appreciating it for now.

I’ve found the technology industry more depressing than ever this year. If I never had to see another piece of facile garbage generated by an LLM, or sit through another man talking about AI, I’d be very happy.

I’m particularly tired of “I used ChatGPT to do [whatever]” as a cynical proxy for “I don’t believe that [whatever] has any intrinsic value”. Fine, great, you’re entitled to feel that way I suppose, I just don’t want to hear about it.

On the positive side, I’ve really enjoyed using my home Raspberry Pi 400 over Tailscale with Prompt on my iPad. Somehow the SSH connection never dies so it’s like having an always-on Linux machine everywhere I go. (I’m writing this on it right now.) It’s sort of amazing that this combination of technology works so well.

My last public contribution to my WebAssembly interpreter was the day before I started my new job, but I’ve been continuing to chip away at it in private since then. It’s fun and meditative, although I miss the motivation of sharing progress in public. Hopefully I’ll get back to that one day.

The job’s going okay. It’s still too early for anything particularly good or bad to have happened. Ask me again in a year.

A year ago I did say “I’d like real coworkers in a real office” and it’s certainly delivered on that front. I’m genuinely enjoying cycling in three days a week and seeing my teammates in real life. With any luck I’ll get more colocated teammates next year and that should make it even better.

The return to office would obviously become much less fun if I moved further away but realistically that’s unlikely to happen for a while, not least because the sub–ten-minute bike ride makes me feel like living so centrally is giving me some real benefit again.

In 2023 I spent what seemed like a really long time playing Alan Wake II, so I’m going to take the opportunity to complain about that now.

Look, clearly there’s something interesting about this game because it’s a third-person story-driven adventure and I played it all the way through, and I have to acknowledge that it’s idiosyncratic and singular, for which I applaud it. In principle I’m always grateful to see modern games that aren’t cookie-cutter action RPG grindfests, and it’s definitely not that.

Unfortunately I did transition into hate-playing it just so that I could be done with it forever, and like Death Stranding it definitely outstayed its welcome in the endgame. I thought it would be over at the embarrassingly bad climactic battle, but there was still more game after that.

The only thing worse than its terrible combat and pointless inventory management was its awful, smug, arrogant writing. I found the whole thing infuriatingly pretentious and dull-witted, like a school English project that got way out of hand. It’s very unclear to me whether Alan Wake is canonically a bad writer or, like Midge Maisel, supposed to be good but rendered bad by real-world writers who don’t have the skill to pull it off.

It didn’t hold together technically either. The game’s systems were incapable of supporting even its own limited nonlinearity, and I bumped up against buggy graphics and illegible text all the way through.

Just not a good experience and apparently I’m cross about it. Maybe I’m disappointed because, unlike the majority of games, it seemed promising and so many of the right ingredients were there.

I started Tears of the Kingdom but it didn’t draw me in. I’d already seen the world, the tutorial was too long, and I lost interest pretty soon after that.

Maybe Cocoon was the best game I played this year? I stopped going back to Super Mario Bros. Wonder after a while, and sort of gave up on everything else. Chants of Sennaar was a last-minute close second.

Although, actually, I’ve got a lot of pleasure out of playing Connections every day, and I’ve solved more variant sudoku puzzles than in any previous year, so perhaps I’m just finding different kinds of game which suit me better.

I saw a lot of horror films this year. There’s something I always think about when I’m watching a horror film and it’s too boring to ever say out loud to anyone, so I’ll write it here where the stakes, standards and expectations are reassuringly low:

Every supernatural horror film has a scene where someone who’s being terrorised tries to explain the situation to another person and ask them for help, but that person never believes them and treats their explanation as evidence they’ve developed a mental illness.

Now, in reality — where the audience lives — there are no ghosts or gods or demons, only death and taxes, so that response is normal and correct and makes total sense.

But supernatural horror films aren’t set in our universe, they’re set in a fictional universe where the rules are different and supernatural forces exist. So why does everyone in those films behave as though they live in our universe where spooky junk isn’t real?

If all of human civilisation had developed in a reality where, say, ghosts existed, social norms would be totally different and nobody would balk in response to a story about a curse or haunting or whatever. You live in a world where these things can and do happen, movie character! Why are you behaving as if you don’t?! Make it make sense!

Anyway, doesn’t matter. A film’s just made up innit. I know that.

The Bear was clearly the best TV show of last year, and it could well be the best of this year too, although I might’ve enjoyed The Last of Us and Succession more. I don’t know how to tell.

I don’t really listen to music, but Knower Forever was the album I enjoyed the most, particularly given the gradual reveal that every track was recorded mostly-live. Last year’s Expert in a Dying Field and (latterly) Desire, I Want To Turn Into You have had a lot of plays too.

Reading: an embarrassing performance as usual. I only finished one book, Wool, then felt guilty about it. I keep carrying the sequel around in my backpack but I haven’t summoned the enthusiasm to open it yet.

2024 could be the year I finally accept I can no longer read novels, although that degree of self-awareness doesn’t seem very likely.

I try not to mention weeknotes too often in weeknotes, because nobody likes podcasts about podcasting. But I do think about them a lot, and this is probably the one time when it’s acceptable to mention it.

I’m increasingly aware that the content of any individual weeknote is trivial and uninteresting — that’s just what my life is like so I can’t do much about it. But is the cumulative effect of note upon note, week upon week, year upon year, somehow transformative? Does the repetition through time of the same reliable drumbeat make it more interesting than the sum of its pedestrian parts? No.

Oh well. Here’s to another year of that. Next stop five years.

As ever, thank you for continuing to read these for some reason, and good luck for next year. 🥂