Weeknotes 1564

Weeknotes

• No posts for the last few weeks—chiefly because I've been quite low-energy, at least partially as a result of the clock change both robbing me of an hour of sleep and taking an hour of morning sunlight.
• Despite that, though, the weeks have been marked with a slow improvement of mood coinciding both with a reduction in work pressure and and my health feeling like it's creeping back to somewhere in the range of 'good'.
• I went to see the Garth Marenghi live show with my old housemate and we had a grand old time. Despite not finding the book super-inspiring, the show itself was great fun. Shouts to the guy in the leather jacket over the aisle from us who was waggling his hand in the air like a primary school student during the Q&A but didn't get picked on. I really want to know what he wanted to ask. If you're doing a Q&A with a comedy character you're basically providing feed lines for them to do jokes with, so I really want to know what it was he thought he was going to be able to do.
• I've been able to get a driving test slot in a month's time. A bit nerve-wracking but I think I've got it. Currently looking into cars 👀
• It's Easter Sunday today. Regular readers will know that I am, obviously a Christmas-type person, but while I love it dearly it's at the coldest, darkest point of the year, while Easter is around Spring and we get to enjoy the lengthening days and (at least this year) blue skies and sunshine. We get the joyous hymns and sermons speaking of glorious resurrection and ascension.
• We've had several days of it being properly sunny and even a bit warm; nothing else quite lifts my mood like a sunny day.

Cooking

Some really a+ new recipes we've tried recently:

• We went through a few cookbooks and pulled out some stuff we wanted and we're working through the list; Rough Night Rice from Vegan Japaneasy is pretty quick and has a really smashing flavour and feeling of... weight, I guess is the best way I can describe it? It's very substantial. The recipe is also lying: it's enough for 4 servings.
• CM really wanted some bolognese, but not ~authentic Italian style~, more the "lots of tomato sauce" style, so we tried this and again it was the perfect kind of hearty. I described it as "like the sort of thing I would've eaten while camping as a kid, but in a good way".

Reading

• Jay Hulme's poetry collection The Backwater Sermons, which CM put me onto, is about queerness and Christianity and COVID and literally has a poem whose title is the day of my birthday, in case it seemed like I wasn't being targeted enough by the subject matter. Really beautiful stuff, weirdly crunchy and visceral in a way that I find poetry often isn't for me.
• I finished Boys Man Man (Of Boys And Men) and I wrote up up ~2k of a notes draft. The short version: it's ok-ish but still not really what I was after. My reading of books about masculinity continues.
• Started on the selected works of GK Chesterton. So far, all of the introduction bits by the editor cues me up to think "yeah! this sounds like something I'd be really, really into" and then I start reading what's actually there and I find it... a bit underwhelming, if I'm honest. Only really covered the Father Brown stuff and some of his autobiography so far so maybe it gets better when we get to the apologetics?
• This article about Brandon Sanderson was good, imo; my brother and I have been fascinated with Sanderson and his fixation on building magic systems etc. Apparently it wound some people up, like the author was accepting this guy's hospitality and being sniffy at him and his son salting their ramen or whatever, but clearly at least part of the point of the article is "this Sanderson seems a bit of a robot but genuine, sweet and kinda guileless in a way that is difficult for someone like the author, who hangs out on Twitter all day, to parse".
• An excerpt from Fergus Butler-Gallie's book about being a young C of E priest, which is, imo, mis-sold by the headline; it feels like (having known quite a decent number of them) a very true account of being a young person who has lived a normal young person life but feels called to a role which requires you to be the voice of God in the lives of others.
• Longtime Old UK Blogosphere Hand Dan Davies has started a Substack, which is nice as he's not been a regular blogger since... well, since I started exploring the UK blogosphere in the late '00s/early '10s. Not much on there yet so you can catch up, all of it worthwhile imo.
• This article provides a good summary of C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, which apparently does a great job of situating you in the medieval mindset and which I will have to seek out.

Watching

• I've caught up with The Mandalorian and I think I might be done with it, honestly—after a promising-ish third episode it appears to have decided to go all in on being a live version of one of the Filoni cartoons and I'm afraid I just do not care.
• Also watched the new Mario film with the gang on Friday (bit of a tonal whiplash going from the Good Friday service into that), thoughts on that in the latest episode of Memhaz.

Playing

Putting the PC behind the TV has meant that CM and I have started playing games together:

• Frog Detective, a charming little game that manages to avoid lapsing into excessive twee-ness
• Gone Home, which I have not played in literally ten years. Remember when everyone used to complain about walking simulators? Still good.
• Wide Ocean Big Jacket, about a camping adventure, again charming without being twee.

I have also been playing some bits and bobs on the Steam Deck including:

• Katana Zero: I really like me some side-on combat platformers!
• Hollow Knight: and just normal platformers!
• Fez: I played this on Xbox 360 back when I was in uni, and there's a bit where the game fake-crashs but it did make our console actually crash. It's good.
• Into The Breach: I remember when all the games lads were bang into this: they were not wrong, it is an unquestionable banger.
• Hyper Light Drifter: very pretty.
• Kentucky Route Zero: is one of the best games ever and it's wild I've never picked it back up again to finish.

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Keep it real, gang. Over and out.