Weeknotes 19

Not much time or energy for weeknotes this week, so I’ll give you the short version.

On Monday I started a new job at Shopify. My team is working on internal tooling and engineering practices, which is exactly the sort of thing I’m interested in. At the moment I’m still onboarding so I haven’t thought about that yet.

The company seems good: competent, structured, relaxed. Part of me is apprehensive about being fully remote (almost everyone else is in Canada) but that’s what all tech jobs are like at the moment anyway so I intend to give it my best shot.

I enjoyed Charlie Brooker’s Antiviral Wipe. Although I’ve never been able to get through more than an episode or two of Black Mirror (“what if phones, but too much”), I enjoy the tone of the Wipe shows and thought this one worked well at a Difficult Time. I laughed out loud every few minutes which is a good sign.

Conversely, we binged season two of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel this weekend and I barely laughed at all. It’s a very watchable show — the performances are all good, and the production’s a lot more lavish and ambitious than the first season — but as a drama about a successful stand-up comedian it’s weakened by not containing any successful stand-up comedy.

The Sherman-Palladino gentle comedy shtick works perfectly for, say, Lorelei in Gilmore Girls, because we don’t expect her to be absolutely hilarious while managing an inn or raising a daughter, but it’s jarring to watch Midge rattle off a mediocre routine while her audience falls about laughing. Rachel Brosnahan does a great job but they don’t give her the right kind of writing. Maybe it would’ve been more effective to omit the stand-up bits completely and let our imaginations fill in the gaps.

I rarely visit my basement in Animal Crossing but I decided to check it today to see if I’d stashed anything good there.

Then I checked the attic.

Shit.