Weeknotes #194

The weather has finally started to cool down.

Eri took Emma for a trial swimming lesson at the nearby sports club. Emma used to take swimming lessons but stopped during the pandemic and then we moved and she just never got back into it. After deciding that ice skating is a bit too much of a hassle, we thought we’d try swimming again. Emma said she had a good time so we’ve put her down for Sunday lessons.

I think I’ve mentioned before that I make the kids watch the evening news. I am 50 percent sure this is one of those silly parenting decisions that will backfire and cause precisely the opposite effect of what I’m going for but so be it. What’s the point of having children if you can’t be a tyrant at least some of the time? Anyway, all of this is an excruciatingly long introduction to me being disappointed when Mitsuki Uehara, the female host of Shutoken Nettowaaku (Wikipedia), announced suddenly on Friday that she’s going on maternity leave.

Look, it’s been a slow week.

Brandon said he’s taken the somewhat extreme step of resetting his Apple Watch to try to solve the battery issues he’s experienced since upgrading to watchOS 10. I haven’t gone to those lengths yet but I’m considering it. My watch used to last from when I got up til when I went to sleep without issue. Now I’m lucky if it can go 18 hours without going into low-power mode. This, together with the annoying decision to remove the ability to swipe between watch faces, has made the entire upgrade more of a… downgrade.

Two weeks ago I wrote about the ennui I feel towards video games. Rather than recognise that this means it would be a waste of money to purchase more games, I instead buy the two ‘new’ Wolfenstein games (they came out in 2014 and 2017), play the first one for about 30 minutes and immediately lose interest. Great job, me.

Speaking of ennui, is it just me or has it been a bit of a fallow period for video essays of late? Fortunately, Adam Neely came to the rescue by putting together a terrific one about Laufey, the Icelandic singer I recommended a couple of weeks back. Is she jazz? Is she mid-century pop? What’s the difference? Watch this to find out (and as a bonus you’ll know how to pronounce ‘Laufey’).

Maybe the solution to the dearth of good video essays is good old-fashioned written essays! I came across Jo Freeman’s classic the ‘Tyranny of Structurelessness’.

The previous paragraph had me questioning whether it should be ‘old-fashion’ or ‘old-fashioned’. It’s old-fashioned.

Eugenia and I have a love-hate relationship with Connections, the latest addition to the New York Times‘s collection of word games. The game requires you to put 16 words into 4-word groups. The words in each group have some kind of connection. When it’s good, it’s a lot of fun but when it’s bad—or more correctly lazy—it’s incredibly frustrating.

I was listening to a playlist of alternative songs from 2001 (as you do when you’re in your 40s) and the song that conjured up the most nostalgia was Sum 41’s ‘Fat Lip’ (Apple Music). Let’s not think too long about that.