Weeknotes 1561

Weeknotes

• 2023's near-constant pummelling of my health continued: this week it was an absolutely brutal cold/flu thing, the return in force of my eczema, and something that (now it's happened a few times I can notice it as a pattern) a thing that happens when the skin on my face is so dry, it scratches my eyeballs, they get damaged, dry out, have some kind of weird reaction and start hurting like hell. Friday morning was me struggling through an hour and half presentation trying to turn my face away from the camera so the extreme redness and crying-ness of my eye wasn't visible. I then cancelled the lunch plans I had with a friend and spent all afternoon in eye hospital A&E where the doctor prescribed me FML (buddy, I was already feeling it!) and eye moisturiser, which initially also hurt like hell, but by this point have really started helping. I am no longer severely light-sensitive, so we're on the road to recovery 🎉
• It's not been great, on the whole. I was considering going home for Mother's Day, but I just wasn't feeling up to it., but CM's mum came to visit and that was nice.
• There were some good things though: had a pub trip with some UTAW folks, had a nice chat with a friend who's going to be moving into our office soon, started running again in the mornings (which felt really great!)
• Really hoping this week is one without any more miscellaneous health/life events.

Reading

• I've been reading Hegel's Lectures On History to try and prepare for an essay. I don't really know whether I can do a pithy summary of something so substantial, but it's certainly very chewy.
• Finished Elites; some stuff in there that's genuinely useful insight for someone who... shall we say isn't always the most socially aware, about how the game is played at the top level. That said, some of it ready as though it did not get the thorough edit that perhaps it deserved—there's e.g. an analogy about Scrabble tiles at one point that genuinely does not work and someone should really have picked up on. Notes forthcoming soon hopefully.

Watching

• Mando series 3 is starting to pick up a bit: after a first episode that was way too goofy and a second episode that really felt like watching one of the cartoons, the third episode felt like what Andor would be if it were done by the Mandolorian team, which is to say: not as good as Andor, but moving in an potentially interesting direction.
• When CM's mum was here we started watching Once, a very sweet film about a busker in Dublin, but unfortunately I wasn't able to make it through before my eye started absolutely killing. What I saw I liked, though!

Playing

• Now that my PC isn't needed in the office any more, I brought it home and stuck it behind the TV, where it can maybe be used for any number of things; almost immediately it started blackscreening after booting, so I had to reinstall everything from scratch. So far I have used it to play a few games of Vampire Survivor, that game everyone said was really good last year, and it is, in fact, really good.
• I also ordered a Steam Deck on a friend's recommendation, as they're on sale and I thought they looked fun. Should arrive soon; looking forward to it!

Keep it real gang. Over and out.