Now

Welcome to the first periodic blogpost of what I hope will be many. The aim is to, at minimum, post once a month.

This is not a novel idea, nor is the little mechanism I’m adding such that at any time, the now1 hyperlink will direct visitors to the most recent of these posts.

I don’t even expect to figure out what the rough format/content of these posts will be until maybe 6–7 in. I have reasonably low confidence that I’ll regularly be able to commit any thoughts that are of much note, but I still figure that sharing some thoughts is better than sharing nothing.

But yeah, I guess *this* is the headline for this month.

What I’ve Been Enjoying

  • TV
    • Severance Season 2 — Not as profound as some make it out to be but really compelling TV. The S2 finale for me didn’t quite have the potency of S1, but still some of the best TV around at the minute.
    • Would I Lie To You — Easily the best panel show format on TV with very few dud guests.
  • Music
    • Jack White (No Name) — Still revelling from seeing him live in London at the start of the month, his latest album is amazing, but I’ve been digging through his extensive catalogue too.
    • We Didn’t Know We Were Ready—Ólafur Arnalds & Talos — A sublime listen for late at night.
  • Games
    • Red Dead Redemption 2 — Started it years ago and lost interest with the slow pace but definitely have come to appreciate it on PC.
    • Split Fiction — Peak co-op platforming. Possibly the best thing I’ve played this year.
    • Two Point Museum — An impressively polished third entry into the Two Point franchise. Oozes charm while having a properly engaging really solid foundation of management gameplay.

What I’m Working On

Defending a World Constructors’ Championship. It’s not going too badly.

Extra Curricular

After seeing a couple of quite different musical performances over the past few weeks, Justice and then Jack White, I’m easing myself back into attempting to do something, anything vaguely musical.

Justice had me digging out my midi controller and DAW, and then Jack White pushed me to go out and buy a new modelling guitar amp. I’ve had a pretty reasonable modelling amp for some time, but it is much too big and too loud to use regularly. Much more inviting is the little bluetooth-speaker-sized Positive Grid Spark Go that should hopefully arrive soon and inspire some more regular playing in the process.

Health

A mere 9-or-so years after the initial injury, I’m finally feeling a bit more hopeful about sorting my shoulder out. I had a first consult with a physio at work who’s given a pretty convincing assessment of just what nonsense I managed to suffer with my shoulder in 2015.

I’ve had some vague attempts to fix it on-and-off since I was discharged from the NHS in 2017 with the suggestion of a few exercises I should continue habitually. I tailed off with these far earlier than ideal, so it’s good to have some strong expert guidance on what a productive approach actually is.

Aside

This month I got an email notifying me that AppleCare had expired on my M1 MacBook Pro. I’m well aware that M4 is the current vintage of Apple Silicon, and as such my personal machine is definitely entering middle age, but three years later it’s still a quite significant amount of computer and doesn’t feel remotely outgrown.

Footnotes

  1. This is a feature(?) that I stumbled upon via Sophie Koonin’s great ode to the personal website and individual internet ↩