Weeknotes #16

This is a bit delayed because Golden Week has started in Japan and I’ve spent the morning wrangling with Janet. I wrote about it a little last week and spent more time exploring it this week.

Part of that exploration is now up in my first public Janet repository: bencodobi. It’s intended to be an encoding and decoding library for bencode. This is the format used by the nREPL protocol and a means for programming editors to talk to various Lisp REPLs. I’d really like there to be support for doing this with Janet’s REPL and making a bencode library felt like the simplest step towards that goal.

We remain in self-isolation and, as a result, it’s been difficult to remember the week’s happenings. Wednesday being a public holiday didn’t help in that regard. I went out once or twice with Emma and John to nearby parks for a little recreation. The rest of the time was spent inside.

The number of detected cases in Japan began to dip this week and while that should be good news, I fear it will result in people quickly disregarding social distancing measures. This isn’t helped by the Golden Week break which means everyone is at home with oodles of time to kill. They say that warmer weather might be helpful at preventing infections but I’m worried it’ll be the opposite: more encouragement for people to go out and mix.

Spurred on by a recent episode of The Rewatchables podcast, I watched both the 1990 version of Total Recall and the 2012 remake. I mentioned this in my short Letterboxd review but the remake is kind of incredible in the way its every departure from the original makes the finished film worse. The 1990 version isn’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination but everything they do differently in 2012 is terrible.

I’m going to be disappointed when this season of Westworld ends: it’s been a marked improvement over season two. I do wish they’d spent more time with Bernard. His paranoia about being hacked by Dolores was set up in a really intriguing way in the first episode and then it went nowhere. It’s all the more frustrating because this season is only eight episodes. If they’d made ten, there’d have been ample time to explore that (as well as the morality of his control of Stubbs).

Speaking of ten-episode series (what a segue), I’ve enjoyed the first few episodes of the basketball documentary, the Last Dance, about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. It’s got its flaws but in the dearth of basketball I find myself in it’s been a welcome relief.

I thought about spending some time learning the basics of the piano now we have the keyboard in the house. Other than finding the most basic of tutorials on ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, I haven’t done anything. The story of my musical education in a microcosm.

I’ve been really tempted to buy a Nintendo Switch. (Un)fortunately, it’s sold out in Japan and the models you can buy online have markups of 60% or more. I’ve been diligently checking the Amazon listing but to no avail. I’d assume that a combination of (1) quarantine-induced boredom; and (2) disruptions in the Asian supply chain has ruined the ability of supply to meet demand.

It’s a little depressing this is 16 years old but how can you go wrong with ‘Jacqueline’ (Apple Music)?