Weeknotes 178

It’s a pleasant twenty degrees this weekend. The forecast threatens a nightmarish thirty degrees next weekend. I’ve ordered a fan.

I was pleased with myself for catching flies with a handheld vacuum cleaner until I realised I’d created a small plastic box filled with live insects. It’s none of your business what I did with them.

Work on my WebAssembly interpreter has become mired in obsessive rebasing and refactoring, a tendency which was suppressed by livestreaming but has become unconstrained now that I don’t have to justify myself to an audience.

While I do find it soothing to tease out highly interchangable modular parts from a frozen nobby of code, I’m aware that in the next few days I need to just ship all the work in progress and move on to something new before I lose my grip on reality.

The Mrs. Maisel finale gave the story an emotionally satisfying conclusion even though it dragged on a bit. They couldn’t resist violating the aesthetic distance one last time by delivering a potent dose of unfunny stand-up and then having all the characters pretend it was funny. You can’t fool me, fiction!

The Succession finale was perfect: funny, sweet, human, brutal. A fitting end packed with memorable scenes, quotable lines and impressive performances. I loved letting the emotions and woozy nostalgia wash over me. Unlike everyone who’s saying they were already sick of it, I’ll miss this show.

Wow, people on the internet love doing Succession spoilers, don’t they? Here’s HBO revealing the ending on Twitter, presumably to punish anyone who didn’t watch the episode immediately.

Some of Monday was spent on Project Bank Holiday Wickend, an attempt to watch the three old John Wick films and then the new one. In the event I only made it through the first two.

The films don’t make much sense on their own terms because they treat the plot as a flimsy excuse for lots of punching and shooting, and they’re pretty good at that bit. They’re overall a bit naff and artless, especially the soundtrack, but they get the job done.

I’m not very excited about watching the rest so this project might fizzle out despite the possibility that the fourth film’s the best one.

Silo continues.

On Saturday I baked a loaf of bread and took it to brunch with James and Roz where we tried all three of those new vegan cheeses from M&S. The company was great and the cheeses — as a one-off novelty — were surprisingly good too.

New new new Knower! (I’ll stop this now their album’s out.)

Genevieve’s vocals are just beautiful on this one.

2.5 million people have already watched this Tenacious D video so it’s not exactly news but it’s still the most wholesome thing you’re likely to see all week.