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Happy 2024!
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The moderate weather from last week continued into this week. That’s meant a fair bit of cloud and drizzle punctuated by perfect mornings or afternoons. I am perfectly content with this arrangement. Mum’s been able to take Emma and John down to the beach twice and, while Emma’s swimming lessons don’t appear to have had much effect, she seems more confident than I remember from last year.
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Rowan has struggled a bit more than I’d hoped he would. His speaking has continued to improve—which is good—but he has a hard time interacting with most people outside Eri, Emma, John and me. I don’t have much confidence that it’s really a phase at this point but remain hopeful it’s something that can be overcome with more social interaction.
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Emma, John and I did make it out to see Wish on Boxing Day (the day the film officially opened in Australia) in an otherwise completely empty theatre. I guess that shouldn’t have been a surprise given how hard it flopped in the U.S. (Variety) but as someone who still enjoys watching Disney animated films and wants them to succeed, I was a bit disappointed nevertheless. In terms of the film itself, my immediate reaction was to put it a touch below Moana in my personal rankings. Like a lot of mainstream blockbusters of late, I see potential but it’s mostly unrealised.
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Speaking of flops, I also watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (on Disney+). It’s… not as bad as Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? It does suffer from having too much (visible) CG and a story that feels as old and tired as Harrison Ford looks.
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I met up with Adrien and we got to talking about the Apple Watch. I expressed my frustration at how much of a regression watchOS 10 is and, in particular, my disappointment that Apple removed the ability to swipe between watch faces. Adrien is sure that his father swipes between watch faces despite running watchOS 10, goes home, looks it up and sure enough, in 10.2, Apple added a setting to turn that behaviour back on. How was I not aware of this before now? Thank you, Adrien! This alone has made the entire trip worth it (I kid).
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(Or do I?)
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My fiddling with Dad’s computing setup continues unabated. I got him to buy a 27” 4K display in the Boxing Day sales and have hooked that up to my old MacBook Pro. I recognised reality and gave up trying to direct him onto the Safari/Mail/iCloud happy path. Instead, it’s Chrome/Outlook/OneDrive. This really makes the most sense for him given how much he uses a Dell laptop I helped clean up for him last year. It also gave me the idea to erase his iPad and set it up for Mum instead. I’m not sure she’ll take to it for anything more than media playback but we’ll see.
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Did you know the U.S. federal government maintains a database of Dad jokes (of sorts)? You do now.
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Brandon hid an end-of-the-year retrospective on music in his penultimate weeknotes for 2023. I’ve added most of his suggestions to my library and am slowly working my way through them but if you’d like to get a heads up on what could be the next couple of weeks of music recommendations from me, you can check that out now.
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In the meantime, I’d be remiss not to link to my favourite song from the Wish soundtrack: ‘At All Costs’ (Apple Music). It represents what the movie could have been if it had been more daring. I guess they can’t all be Encanto.
