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I turned 41. I said last year that I felt disconnected from my own body when I thought about my age. I don’t feel that way right now. I feel intensely aware of my body; almost to a painful degree. Occasionally I think I’ve done something wrong and the wound has reopened but Eri’s not noticed anything. I’m sure it’s just inside my head.
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Apple announced the new iPhones early Wednesday morning (Tokyo time) and I was mostly disappointed. The performance improvements I was expecting from the move to 3-nanometre chips don’t appear to have materialised. The Pro Max does have a telephoto lens with a longer optical zoom but Apple didn’t say much about improvements to the main lens and I was left wondering if it’d be much of an improvement over the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Worse than all of that, the 128GB iPhone Pro Max has been retired, thereby increasing the entry price by more than ¥10,000. I half-heartedly tried to order one when pre-orders opened on Friday evening but by the time I’d got through, deliveries had blown out to mid-October and I decided it wasn’t worth it. I’ll take a look if anything has become available for pick-up on Friday morning but it looks like I might be waiting until next year before upgrading.
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A storm hit Tokyo on Friday and for a brief moment the power went out in the building. It came back almost straightaway but not before the sudden outage damaged the SD cards in one of the Raspberry Pis. I fixed them with a format but am now partway through the time-consuming process of setting the Pi back to the way it was. I’m very tempted to invest in some kind of uninterrupted power supply to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
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I wish I had better news about my Japanese study but it’s ground to a complete halt. It’s not true that I have no time to do it but it feels true that if I prioritised it, I’d have very little time to do anything relaxing. Maybe that’s just how it is when you’re in your 40s with young children.
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Then again, one might well ask what ‘relaxing’ activities I want to prioritise. Video games? Tom Stuart wrote in last week’s weeknotes about the gap between his ideal of what games represent as a medium and the reality when he plays them. It struck a chord and gets at a similar feeling I’ve felt for years now.
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Relatedly, I installed Mirror’s Edge Catalyst again.
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Marginally less relatedly, the kids were asking about the games I played when I was young and I mentioned Dig Dug. This not being a game featuring Mario, John looked at me with a completely blank expression. I almost waved a hand and snarled ‘Kids’ before remembering that this being the year of our Lord 2023 I could show him the game. As I searched, I realised the game I call ‘Dig Dug’ is not in fact Dig Dug (Wikipedia). It is instead Digger (Wikipedia)! And you can play it online! John was interested for about 10 minutes before he moved on to other things.
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I was booking a car for the drive to the airport in December and was shocked to discover the price is more than three times what it cost last year. I’m not sure what explains this but it was the impetus I needed to investigate the practicality of booking a taxi to get to the airport. Eri found nearMe and we’ve got a booking with an estimated cost of ¥10,000. That’s about the price of the car last year but will take us all the way to the terminal rather than needing me to drop the car off at a shop that may or may not be open.
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I saw that Brandon had been listening to an album called Bewitched (Apple Music). I didn’t recognise the name of the artist, Laufey (I’m 41), but hurriedly pressed play as soon as I read that she’s Icelandic. I half-expected her to sound like Björk and, while she has a far more conventional jazz voice, that’s not a bad thing.
