Weeknotes 206

This time of year’s a bit exhausting isn’t it?

Some overseas teammates were visiting all week. It’s always refreshing to have technical conversations in person and generally spend time together outside of the context of a video meeting. It’s also more tiring than the usual routine of mostly typing.

On Wednesday I met Aleks & Reema for a Christmas-adjacent meal at the Spread Eagle. It was lovely to see them despite the food and service being basically bad. Of course the pub was busy at this time of year but they still took our money.

Thursday was the office Christmas party at which I ate a lot of vegan sushi and drank precisely one beer so I could cycle home afterwards.

And today I went to Murray & Theresa’s for a very pleasant afternoon of mulled wine and mince pies with friends. As a result I’m now feeling fully festive.

I finished Bodies. It was fun but too silly to have any emotional impact. Most of the performances weren’t good and the writing had a bad case of “real people don’t talk like that” disease. Anyway: fun!

I’m still really enjoying For All Mankind and I’m invested enough in the overall story that I don’t mind it becoming increasingly implausible as the seasons roll on. Ed Baldwin, a formerly complex and sympathetic individual, has now been reduced to a zany cartoon character who could never exist in reality.

I made it through all hundred 4×4 puzzles in Cracking the Cryptic’s December pack. Most of them only took a couple of minutes as advertised; a few took longer which means I’m missing a trick. Regardless, it’s satisfying to feel myself getting better at solving variant sudoku.

I was relieved to hear that Naughty Dog have cancelled their ill-advised multiplayer game. Their choice to “continue to focus on single-player narrative games” is obviously the right one. I wish they could’ve made that decision years ago and wasted less effort, but better late than never.

I’m tired. Two days left until the holidays.