sangsara.net

Category: Weeklies

  • Week 32.21

    • Kim left quarantine and got the all clear this week, so I’m getting used to living with another human being in the house again. It mostly means that I can’t listen to the new albums out this week without carving out some time and sitting down with headphones on. I’m curious about the new Nas and how the Atmos mixes of Abbey Road and Sergeant Pepper’s have turned out.
    • The Tokyo Olympic Games have come to an end and this might be the most Olympics I’ve ever watched and the one I’ll remember best on account of the circumstances. I certainly don’t remember any of the earlier ones very well.
    • To acknowledge the occasion, I thought I’d read some Japanese lit again. This week I finished Breasts And Eggs, which was a bit depressing, and made the decision to immediately move on to Tokyo Ueno Station, which was also quite a miserable exertion, and coincidentally, written in protest of the 2020 games. Luckily, it only took another hour or so to get through.
    • I considered making it a trilogy of Japanese melancholy, but went for Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace instead. I wanted some sci-fi or anything with a pace and high stakes conflict really. I’m now about 25% through it and my Kobo reckons it’ll take me another four hours to complete. It’s… not bad. A solid 3-star novel at the moment. It describes a familiar dystopian world where we’re all short of essential supplies, living in high-tech slums, plugged into VR for hours, with corporations ruling the world and waging war against each other. What it does differently is ask you to believe that streaming as a career is still viable for these broken future people, more viable really, and that corporately owned, scientifically engineered super soldiers can not only be celebrities with product endorsements and merch, but even their AI-controlled NPC avatars in the MMO game can. Getting a glimpse of them in the virtual world is as big a deal as in real life. That’s the part I’m struggling with instinctively, but I should know better. Let’s see how the next generation, who will undoubtedly be raised on virtual art, property, and goods, approaches this scenario.
    • Gaming wise, I’ve only been regularly playing Call Of Duty Mobile and a crappy ad-ridden game called Solitaire Cruise (I think). I just want a nautical themed solitaire game. Years ago, when I was in the military and had hours to kill each day and only a very weak administrative computer to do it with, I played a tiny Windows game called High Seas Solitaire like a form of meditation. It was a vehicle for banner ads from a company called Zapspot but I didn’t care. It had peaceful wave sounds and a few squawks from birds, and stacks of cards you had to clear, tripeaks style. I just want that back in my life but I’m not going to buy a PC to do it.
    • Over the weekend, we had occasion to eat a very rich delivery dinner from one of Singapore’s best restaurants, and put together a true crime marathon on Netflix. Sophie: A Murder in West Cork and Jeremy Epstein: Filthy Rich, both about horrible crimes committed against women, both unsettling and frustrating; effective arguments against ever going out or trusting other people again. My kind of television.

  • Week 31.21: Calling… you hear the calling

    Let’s start with games; skip this if hating on games is part of your identity. I spent way too much time on Call of Duty Mobile this week. It’s the mobile game addiction I’ve always been searching for, but not the one I expected: all stupid guns and camo instead of illustrated gacha. The new season has started and I’ve already cleared half through the Battle Pass objectives which are meant to last all month.

    A couple of weeks from now, there’s gonna be some sort of new undead/zombie survival game mode that I’m looking forward to. Call me old and an MMO noob, but games with timed events and “seasons” are fascinating. I’m used to being able to play any level or mode you want once you’ve bought it or it’s been released. But here, in Fortnite, and I’m sure many others, the principles of live broadcast TV have been co-opted to create time-limited community experiences. Is this how the metaverse works? 🤪 I’m into it though (while acknowledging Episodic Everything calls for a huge time commitment).

    I don’t know who this might help, but do not go into Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club games with high expectations. I got Game #1 of 2, The Missing Heir, and was thoroughly disappointed. Specifically, I wrote down “what a crock of shit” in my notes. I ended up finishing it with the help of a walkthrough just to have it over with.

    These are game designs from the late 80s, remade with all new graphics (honestly good), but the core gameplay and writing survived for this first-ever release outside of Japan. For historical reasons, I can see why they did it. But nobody really needs to click through obtuse dialogue and travel-to-location menus over and over until some new option gets unlocked, not in 2021. I would have preferred if they went for a linear visual novel with less interactivity. As things stand, it was a dated, painful experience and I’m glad I didn’t buy the two-game bundle.

    In anticipation of playing NEO: The World Ends With You which just came out, I started watching the anime adaptation which covers the events of the first game. I wasn’t expecting much because other such series have suffered from cutting the story down too much, or low budgets, or the inability to translate an action-oriented game to a different format.

    Wow, this one seems to be an exception. It’s all here, the stylish character designs, graffiti and hip-hop inspired art direction, and even new mixes from the soundtrack. The battle scenes are actually dynamic, three-dimensional, and inventive. It captures the excitement, look and feel, and atmosphere that the old Nintendo DS game implied and articulates it. If the new game is anything like this, I can’t wait to get started.

    (The post title is a reference to this song from the original game.)

    ===

    Otherwise, lots more Olympics. If I just tune into some live event, that’ll be a couple of hours evaporated in mushy minded sloth. It’s too easy to have it on and kinda pay attention. Michael C. mentioned in his last weeknote that he’s a conscientious objector to the games on account of the public health hazard and incompetence surrounding Tokyo now. I’m not joining in solidarity, but since I’ve started watching them I’ve developed an opposition to certain events because they are just unnecessary suffering, especially in the Japanese summer heat.

    Take weightlifting: why do we need to see men carry the equivalent of 10 fully packed travel suitcases above their heads? Someone lifted 226kg today. His knees were wobbling. I saw several bruised and swollen knees being iced, actually. Their elbows probably pop out all the time. It’ll be wheelchairs and discount vodka for many of them in their later years. Do we need this? Why isn’t Russian roulette at the Olympics then? I’m sure it’d be a hit.

    ===

    Did I do anything productive? Erm… I took some photos (without leaving the house)! We get some nice sunsets in my area, and while this example was far from the best, I decided to get a camera out and play with some RAW processing on my iPad. I got some shots over an hour and a half and made a collage.

    Also got back to some 3D modeling in Dreams, but discovered my brain is currently not wired to do it very efficiently, so I’m in for some painful neural trench digging over the next few weeks.

  • Week 30.21

    • The Olympics are underway, and I watched as much of the opening ceremony as I could stand while playing Infinity Loop on my phone. The parade was tedious, but the game is a very satisfying cleaning-up of puzzle pieces, not unlike the satisfaction you get from performing a Tetris, but without the time pressure. I played it years ago and suddenly found my way back this week. I like it a lot as a chill way to pass time.
    • Tetris Beat has been announced for Apple Arcade: a new musically driven version of the game, which sounds to me as a fan of Lumines like the best thing ever. Unfortunately, in my initial excitement I misread that it was coming from Tetsuya Mizuguchi himself; it is not. Still, I have high hopes for it, especially since being on Arcade will mean we’ll get its monthly drop of new tracks/levels without IAPs or scummy mechanics.
    • The Wikipedia page about the Tetris Effect — how your brain starts to imagine fitting shapes together in real life after you’ve been playing too much — is worth a look. It happens for other games too. I remember when I picked up pool and would play for hours each week, I was seeing geometry and angles on everyday objects. Like, ‘if I hit that at this point here then it’ll go that way and land over there.’
    • I dropped back into Hades after months of having it sit on my Switch and gave it a real go. Wow, it truly deserves to have won Game of the Year at the Game Developer Choice Awards. For an unforgiving action game, it manages to frame your eventual death/defeat as such a natural thing, nothing to be upset about, that it feels not-stressful and kinda good for mental health.
    • Anyway, those other games. For someone who doesn’t really care for sports, I’ve watched more of the Olympics so far than expected. Gymnastics, archery, skateboarding, judo/taekwondo, and table tennis have been entertaining in particular. Our local broadcaster Mediacorp has 14(!) live channels in their meWATCH app, which I’ve got going on my Apple TV. It’s actually really good.
    • Since the games are in Tokyo, I figured I should read something Japanese. That’s currently Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts And Eggs, and although only a chapter in, I can say it’s been a welcome change from Klara And The Sun, which I finished awhile ago and found disappointing with nothing much new to say about artificial intelligence and a future where genetic editing blahblahblahGattaca.
    • I also read Chaos On CatNet, the follow up to Catfishing, and it was… sequelly. More action, new characters, bigger scope and higher stakes. As a result, I missed the coziness and quiet insular internet thrills of the first, but I can see why it went down this road. I’ll still read the next installment whenever it’s done.
    • Kanye’s new Donda album failed to materialize on schedule and no one is surprised. I haven’t bothered to watch recordings of the “listening party” event because I’m sure the tracks will change and I’d like to hear them properly the first time. Whenever it arrives, my AirPods Max and its new headphone stand that I impulse bought on Lazada will be ready.
    • I drew myself as a Peanuts character, following the instructions from this excellent Today At Apple video on YouTube.

  • Week 29.21

    • Don’t try this at home: Kim is away in the UK this week; not the most advisable travel idea. Cases there are rising sharply and I oop, I suppose the same could be said for Singapore. A couple of clusters have formed around illegal KTV operations (the comedy of that phrase!) and a fisheries port, which has led to fishmongers and wet markets across the country becoming danger zones. We had 88 local cases on Sunday, the highest since August last year. For the record, the UK had about 56,000 cases on Saturday alone. The mind boggles.
    • So until she gets back and clears the quarantine process 🤞, I’m on a sort of Sabbatical+, where I have more freedom to eat junk food and play games well into the night. I didn’t leave the house all weekend and it was the best.
    • I finished Root Film on the Switch, and while I still enjoyed it on the whole, it became needlessly convoluted and improbable in the final acts. Pick it up on sale maybe, but bear in mind it offers no challenge whatsoever. In any case, Root Film was always going to be the appetizer for the two games under Nintendo’s Famicom Detective Club banner, which I’ll try to buy and play next.
    • Thanks to the NYT’s SF Summer reading list curated by Amal El-Mohtar, I discovered the joys of the CatNet series (just two books at the moment). Catfishing On CatNet is the first, essentially about teens hanging out in online chat rooms and getting pulled into an adventure, and it was so much fun that I blazed through it in about a day.
    • I then missed hanging out in chat rooms so much I decided to give Discord another try and joined a few servers. The quality of conversation in most was a step down from what I remember of IRC in the early days of the net. Then, spending time in chats was a main attraction, not an alleyway off the main boulevard of social media. So I was disappointed until I found a server dedicated to older people, a distasteful category I now find myself in. Ah! There, I found people speaking in complete sentences and actually communicating with one another. I may continue this.
    • I saw Black Widow and felt it unnecessary and stupid. I’m kinda over Marvel the way I’m over Star Wars, except the first episode of Loki on Disney+ worked well with the pairing of Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson — I thought I’d be annoyed by his usual mannerisms but it’s actually been a long time and we’re in a pandemic, so you do your thing Owen, we’re here for it.
    • Installed iPadOS 15 Public Beta 3 on my main iPad. Haven’t run into any issues yet, and I’m relieved at finally being able to customize my home screens with only the icons and widgets I want, leaving everything else in the App Library. You can also have two of the same app icons up as well, so I have Photos on my first Home Screen but also on the page I’ve dedicated to photo editing apps a few swipes away. It’s the little things!
    All in a day’s work with Dreams
    • A feeling of being useless, sitting around consuming all the time without making anything, has been fermenting and I’ve consciously allowed it. Over the weekend, I made it my mission to begin prototyping a game I’ve had in mind for awhile, let’s give it a code name… Feline Fiddler? Nintendo’s Game Builder Garage was going to be where I’d learn the basics and try to start, but upon investigation, you have to use its built-in asset library, and if you can’t find what you need in there, too bad. So I ultimately went with Dreams on the PS4, and oh boy, is it a stupendously powerful tool for 3D modeling, animation, and visualization.
    • On Saturday, I started playing the demo game project that comes as part of it, Art’s Dream, which showcases what you can do with it. And then started doing a few tutorials. By Sunday afternoon, I was able to assemble something close to the scene I had in my head using models others have built and shared on the platform, light it, and walk around in it with a character. And it’s all achievable on a PS4! I don’t see any reason why there couldn’t be something like this on iPads, apart from the App Store rules. Maybe Roblox is something like this? I should check it out…

  • Week 28.21:

    • This week was partially lost to the lasting side effects of my second vaccination. I spent several days feeling ill, fragile, and tired. There was a local case of a teenager who experienced cardiac arrest while exercising a week after his first dose. So when I had to move the couch a little on Wednesday and it caused my heart rate to spike again, I just elected not to exert myself at all afterwards.
    • I didn’t have any coffee for about four days, which might have made the headaches worse. I didn’t have any alcohol for seven. Probably the longest stretch since the pandemic began.
    • Felt like the perfect conditions to finally get started on a visual novel, so I’ve begun Root Film on the Switch. I played the (narratively unrelated) Root Letter years ago on the PS Vita, and it was a shoddy game. This one’s much better. It’s got great atmosphere and vibrant, lovely artwork, with almost all dialogue fully voiced.
    • Nintendo also announced a new Switch model that appears to address my main gripes with the original: the awful, dim screen and poor battery life. The latter was already “fixed” with the silent gen 2 upgrade over a year back, but now we’re talking OLED. I may be tempted when it finally gets here, provided the markup isn’t extreme.
    • We were meant to visit Gardens by the Bay for a walk and to see the Chihuly exhibition, but since I wasn’t feeling up to it, we settled for the new Fast and Furious movie instead; our first time in a cinema since you know when. Hey what do Apple and F9: The Fast Saga have in common? Most of the people we used to like are gone, a successful formula is followed all the way to the bank, and they’re just obsessed with magnets.
    • I’ve been coming up with lame standup routines in the shower. What do you call sexist jokes? Classical humor.
    • During the movie, the sole of my barely worn New Balance sneaker damn near came off. I had to hobble home to avoid it falling apart in public. I don’t get why shoes do that when you wear them a few times and then leave them in the cupboard for a couple of years. The glue disintegrates? Does that happen if they’re unsold in a store too? Anyway, managed to find a new pair of Nikes in my size on their official Lazada store, which used to be almost impossible. Feeling good about my future shoe needs.
    • Pushing our luck even further with the going out, we had dinner at an izakaya over the weekend which, as many others have noted, feels really weird now with the ruling that no music should be played in restaurants (to keep people from speaking loudly). It was… libraryesque. One more reason to choose outdoor seats.

  • Week 27.21

    Mon, 28/6, 9:31 PM

    Today’s the 28th day of my sabbatical, so I guess it qualifies as a full month now. It may be premature to declare, but guys, I’m sure I could do this for a year or two, no sweat. If I didn’t have a fixed period planned, I wouldn’t even be counting the days.

    But since I am, it feels like the first phase is over. As occupied as I’ve felt, it’s only been the equivalent of lying about listlessly, eating empty calories, and falling asleep in the sun. There’s a feeling beginning to stir that I should be doing more. That a pen should be on paper, a sprite on screen, or a running shoe on pavement. Okay definitely not the last one.

    Am I being too ambitious? Wasn’t the point to do nothing? I’d better let this creative despondency build up a little bit more just to be sure.

    Tue, 29/6, 3:02 PM

    My iPhone 12 Pro is less than a year old and its peak battery capacity has already dropped to just 90%. For comparison, my iPhone X still retained 97% after more than a year of service. I’m wondering if it’s because I almost exclusively charge wirelessly these days? In any case, I don’t seem to be alone in this.

    7:15 PM

    Have I always had such noticeable mood swings? Stupid question. If they were noticeable before, I’d have noticed them. Now I’m keenly aware of how I can go from low-energy miserable to happily fascinated and back again in one afternoon.

    As the saying goes, “the devil makes work for idle thumbs”. I potted around my finances for a little bit and realized StashAway’s cash management offering performed abysmally in June against already low expectations, like 0.8% APR. For small amounts of emergency cash, I don’t see why one wouldn’t just employ stablecoins and yield farming to get closer to 10%. So that’s what I’ll focus on doing next.

    Earlier today I had a chat with an old friend that I haven’t talked to in probably a decade. But we’ve known each other for… 25 years? Long enough that memory is less like a map and more like a stack of snapshots of road signs. But of course we live in the post-Facebook days, so I often see updates on Instagram or Twitter. Quite recently, I clicked on a link in one of her tweets. Then last week as I was going through my blog archive and saw her name come up, it seemed natural and easy to just reach out and say hi. Then she tells me she’s also seen my online activity lately, and even came by to read this blog. Huh.

    Listen, I believe there are no coincidences when marketing algorithms are involved. Someone you know checking something out on a platform is quite likely to put it in your feed as well. As unintended consequences go, I’m really happy with this one. But if they can prime my antisocial brain to reconnect after years and years, you’d best believe they can make you buy that Cheesy Zinger Double Down meal from KFC.

    Wed, 30/6, 6:19 PM

    I’ve spent the last four hours playing Call of Duty Mobile and absolutely slaughtering what I hope were other players half my age. Two people checked in with me today and asked how things were going. I told them I was basically larping as the deadbeat, couch-dwelling boyfriend they probably had in college. I have FPS headache now, but god it feels good.

    Fri, 2/7, 4:07 PM

    I’ve done little else but Call of Duty since Wednesday and am now Level 80 in the game, which sounds like a big deal. Only now that I’ve hit this watershed achievement, the game is exposing me to other players up to Level 150. They keep moving the goalposts.

    I’ve even ended up paying real Singapore Dollars for the current season’s (really just a month-long themed event) Battle Pass, which gives me all sorts of useless gear as I keep progressing. Other games’ in-app purchases give you collectible characters and items that impact gameplay. In Call of Duty Mobile, you get outfits and wacky paint jobs for your guns (!) that no player will ever see except if you shoot them in the face from two feet away. When I saw this before I got addicted, I thought skins for guns was the pinnacle of dumb. Now I’m Level 80 and won’t be caught dead with a plain black assault rifle.

    Sat, 3/7, 5:48 PM

    I’ve just been dosed with the second shot of the vaccine and am now waiting in the observation room. I don’t know if I’m imagining the slight lightheadedness.

    Almost everyone I know has had side effects after the second dose, some quite vicious. I’m already expecting to spend the next two days in bed with a fever and headaches. I wonder if I can still play Call of Duty Mobile in that state.

    When I did some quick maths to estimate how much I’m spending per day on this sabbatical, that is to say net outflow on housing and taxes and expenses not being offset by income, it was a slight shock. While I was always fine with the idea of effectively paying for this break, I hadn’t framed it as “pay $x daily to play Call of Duty Mobile”.

    Epilogue

    OOF. That second dose of Moderna hit hard. I wanted to post on Sunday but I couldn’t even bring myself to look at a screen all day. It started 9 hours after the shot with chills in the middle of the night. All day I had a high fever, headaches, an elevated heart rate of 110–120 bpm for about 18 hours, and all the delirious dreams that come with those. It was extremely stressful trying to sleep but being plunged into a maze of nonsensical images and incompletable tasks instead. At one point I woke up and tried to explain what I had been seeing, and it felt like I had brain damage because the words just weren’t available.

  • Week 26.21: A milestone

    We’ve made it to the halfway point of 2021! And because I started in week 27 of 2020, that makes a year of posting weekly updates to this previously neglected blog. Has it been worth it? It will be. This morning I suddenly recalled how I used to have a TV card (it was a thing) installed in my PC back in uni, which allowed me to tune into trashy British programs over the air (I was bored in my dorm room because we didn’t have broadband, you see). It was just one of those memories so heavily buried that they seem unreal. So I went back and read some old blog posts from around that time. Instantly, that whole period came back, and there’s nothing like meeting your younger, better-in-some-ways self again via a journal entry. I recommend it.

    This week in books: I finished Project Hail Mary which I was enjoying as of the last check in, and it held up all the way to the end. I’d like to recommend it to everyone, because I believe its sciencey bits are so accessibly written that anyone will get the general idea and stay locked into the story, whether or not they have some aversion to stories set in space or involving science and technology. These people exist; I’ve met them! It was also a welcome change in terms of style and pacing, having come off a Neal Stephenson where every page asks to be chewed slowly and thought about. In comparison, PHM is like sausage gravy through a straw.

    I’ve mentioned before how playing video games is a often good way to pass time, whereas reading books is a good way to spend time. I was reminded of that this week as I poured a few more hours into Persona 5 Strikers, realizing all the way that I was not particularly enjoying the combat gameplay, barely enjoying the animated scenes and story (although I like the world and characters), and despising its barely concealed time-stretching mechanics. That is to say, the designers have contemptuously extended gameplay time without having to offer any value, so that you the player are told to go from Area A to Area B to talk to everyone you can find to get a password (a McGuffin) before returning to Area A. Completely unnecessary, and made more painful by how long loading times are on Nintendo Switch. My solution: the next game I play will be a visual novel.

    Other bits:

    • It was Amazon’s Prime Day and I got us some bath towels and Buffalo Trace bourbon at ridiculous prices.
    • I don’t often play mobile gacha games, but a new one called Alchemy Stars stood out because of its line-drawing/color matching gameplay. It’s a little like Grindstone with an anime backdrop.
    • We started watching The World According to Jeff Goldblum on Disney+ and the first episode covered sneaker culture. I guess I knew people spent thousands on rare sneakers but I hadn’t really thought about the psychology of it; the rush of chasing, anticipating, and then unboxing something. They could easily be swapped out for any other scarce collectible like NFTs or Pokémon cards, or lootboxes that promise them.
    • I’ve always envied people who find the hobbies/obsessions just for them (damage to finances and relationships aside). I’ve never met a game I loved so much that I would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on buying its in-app purchases. Or shoes, bicycles, etc. I know people who do, though. They seem to buy almost thoughtlessly and without regret. Which is not at all like me with headphones and cameras. Those hurt long before and after the unboxing. I probably just have an opposite disorder of not allowing myself to fully anticipate and enjoy anything.
    • We went out to eat just once (it was enough) upon the lifting of lockdown restrictions this week. It was one of those all you can eat Korean barbecue places. We sprang for the better stuff, and we’re fatter people for it.
    • The last project I worked on has gone live in its first iteration, and it’s looking alright. Whenever I remember, I like to go look at user reviews to see if we improved anything for the better.
    • I spent most of Sunday afternoon watching live performances from the Later… with Jools Holland archives on YouTube.
    • A.G. Cook released a massive amount of material last year across two albums (7G and Apple), and I only just found out. Listening to those coincidentally put me in the mood for local singer Cayenne’s new solo EP, which is kinda PC Music-ish hyperpop.
    • That reminded me to look if Hannah Diamond had anything new, and so I found this brilliant music video from last September. The foundation of its 9-minute runtime is a screen recording of her photoshopping a self portrait.

  • Week 25.21: Spacing out

    • I noticed once again that my AirPods Max battery was draining faster than normal while not in use. Coupled with intermittent stuttering/connections issues, I decided to call it a hardware fault and contact Apple support for a replacement. One came via courier within two days and I am now listening problem free.
    • After several months of distracted 10-minute reading sessions, I finally finished Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age in one concerted go. I read Snow Crash in 2019, Cryptonomicon in 2020, and this makes three. I’d really like to just chain them and keep going but/because the density and brilliance of ideas in his work is staggering. If the stuff he was writing 15 years ago is just beginning to look like our future at present, I can’t imagine what he’s thinking about today. I could read one of his newer books and find out, but first, a break.
    • I decided to pick up Andy Weir’s new book, Project Hail Mary, after seeing some positive reviews, and it’s a return to the formula of a science-based, plausible, AND interesting life-threatening problem solved in the first person that worked so well in The Martian. I barely enjoyed his last book, Artemis, but I’m halfway through this now and can’t put it down. It’s about another guy in space, slightly adrift, needing to ‘science the shit out’ of a crisis.
    • I finished the Eizouken anime series on Netflix and can recommend it although it’s not so bingeable. It works well as an episode or two a week. What’s it about? A trio of high schoolers learning to produce anime. I thought it would be like Shirobako, but that one’s set in the real world of running a business, whereas this one is not grounded in reality and just works as a deconstruction cum demonstration of animation and filmmaking techniques you may not normally notice. It must have been so gratifying to work on this as an animation artist; it literally screams ‘appreciate me!’
    • Videogames: Played a bit more Persona 5 Strikers but am not really feeling it. It’s an example of the game getting in the way of the story. As a beat-em-up, it’s just not much fun especially after coming from Yakuza and Judgment. Started and finished Coffee Talk which is an indie game where you act as barista to a cast of cafe regulars and see their stories and relationships unfold. That’s it, you just make coffee and click through dialogue. A nice little afternoon killer. Went back to the Doom reboot on PS4 for a bit of mindless FPS action. That one’s an example of story getting in the way of the game.
    • Speaking of backstory in games, Mythic Quest’s second season is coming to an end on Apple TV+, and it’s a half-hour sitcom I’ve really enjoyed as a person who hates half-hour sitcoms. Both seasons play with a single flashback/world-building episode in the middle, which sounds like a bloody annoyance but the resulting achievement is art.
    • I also finished watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier which looks like a lot of tight movie money but plays out like a lump of TV fat. It’s often corny and disrespectful of the viewer’s time. But it does raise the bar for action sequences and production design. I haven’t seen Loki yet, but if it doesn’t deliver then I may just burn through the rest of The Mandalorian in fast forward and cancel our Disney+ subscription.

    Meta-sabbatical observation: This was the first week where I’ve felt the days start to blend together. When we went to meet some friends on Saturday evening and someone said they’d come from somewhere other than the office, I asked, “oh did you have the day off?” thinking it was Friday. That wasn’t the first time I’d lost track of time. Perhaps I need more milestones and structure for the weekdays. I’ve started a to-do list of things to get done or try out.