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Seeing the numbers explode for COVID-19 cases in Tokyo has been tough (NHK). I didn’t realise quite how bought into the idea I was that this was the year COVID-19 would move into the rear-view mirror. I needed to take a photo for my passport application on the weekend and of course had to remove my mask. Sitting outside (albeit in a photo booth) was a strange sensation.
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It still seems as if our family hasn’t yet been infected but I wonder how long that will persist. I’ve definitely noticed a significant upswing in the number of creators that I follow (be they writers, podcasts, video essayists, etc) who’ve become infected in the past month or so. Most of those people are in the U.S. so there are other factors that are at play, but it does seem like we can only remain uninfected for so long.
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Speaking of which, I don’t think it’s COVID-19 but John came down with something on Sunday. Seems like it’s probably just a cold but then you know what else has symptoms similar to a cold?
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I mentioned the photos and I took the kids to the local camera shop to get their passport photos as well. Of course, I discovered afterwards that Australia does not want passport photographs with blue backgrounds and I had, when asked by the photographer, said that I wanted the blue background. In my defence, this information is not prominently displayed on the Australian Government’s webpage. In any case, we’ll have to make another trip before the actual application is lodged on Wednesday.
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Emma and John started their school holidays. Neither go back until the beginning of September which is… well, I don’t want to sound like I don’t enjoy having my kids around because I know I’m going to miss this in a few short years but, you know. Eri and I are using the opportunity of Emma being at home in the mornings to do more bicycle practice. I took her out on Sunday morning (which of course is completely independent of her being off from school) and it was nice. Maybe the problem is less with the kids being around and more with the lack of things to do.
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I’m generally keeping up with the food tracking but it’s not having the intended effect of actually reducing my caloric intake. As a result, despite an initial dip in my weight, things have pretty quickly plateaued. I need to be better at avoiding the snacking.
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I’m now up to Step 8 in the making a Lisp course so it definitely looks like I’ll at least get to the end this time. I’m less sure what I’ll do once I reach that point. I’m still not sure how I take what I’m building and translate it into something that I can use to actually write programs that run on the Ruby virtual machine (which is the loose goal that I have). In particular, do I rewrite parts of the interpreter in C so that they run faster? Is that a big problem?
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Episode 4 of Westworld was really good. I said after watching the first two that I wasn’t sure where this season was going but this episode took it somewhere new and interesting. We’re of course not close to season 1 but season 4 is already my second favourite season of the show.
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I tried watching Thor: The Dark World and fell asleep. I had thought that the original Thor was going to be the most difficult to get through but it at least had the virtue of having a more unusual story structure. The second film feels much more like a typical MCU film which, as I’m sure must be obvious, is not a good thing.
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Back to Westworld for a moment: my favourite recontextualised song so far has been ‘Enter Sandman’ (Apple Music). It’s not as inspired as season 2’s ‘Seven Nation Army’ but it’s good fun all the same. And the other side of the single is a cover of ‘Bad Guy’ which isn’t half bad either.
