w/e 2021-12-19
A short week, and one that felt shorter because I’ve felt slow all week.
Physically slow because a fortnight of no working out meant that a single workout left me struggling in and out of chairs for a few days with complaining hamstrings. Mentally slow for no good reason, feeling like everything was taking longer than it should. And slow at getting up in the silent and dark mornings. Throw in a couple of bad headaches and the week has disappeared with little achieved.
In personal coding, I started upgrading this site to Django 4.0, which isn’t in itself a big deal. Except this meant making sure that django-ditto and django-spectator worked on Django 4.0. And that meant ensuring the packages that they rely on worked on Django 4.0. And, while some have been updated, others haven’t quite. So this ridiculous tower of code is now waiting for updates to be released. Don’t write your own complicated website!
§ This week we watched Money Heist season two (on Netflix) which was OK, as a continuation from the cliffhanger ending of season one. But, despite several good twists, it did feel a bit drawn out. Thankfully this particular heist ended at the end of the season, which was reasonably satisfying. Friends said the following three seasons are decreasingly good so maybe we’ll leave it here, given we’re not short of viewing.
We also watched Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021, also on Netflix despite being a BBC Film production in some way). That was… fine? I’d have thought a slow, ambiguous Western would be right up my street but I wasn’t wowed. Maybe I’d have liked it more in the cinema, where there are fewer potential distractions for a slow film.
Also, I’m always distracted by well-known British actors playing Americans, because I keep trying to work out how good their accent is.
§ Every December I look forward to Said the Gramophone’s 100 Best Songs of the year post. The blog, a survivor from the heyday of MP3 Blogs, doesn’t update often these days but every year Sean Michaels compiles a list of tunes, at least 95% of which are new to me, and most of which I like. Writing about music is hard but I always enjoy his similes and metaphors, attempting to capture something that’s not capturable.
I love a long-running annual internet thing like this. One that isn’t created as part of a marketing scheme, to be “shareable on the socials”, to increase Monthly Active Users. Just a personal undertaking to share pleasure, for the seventeenth year in a row.
§ That’s all. Christmas appears to be almost here. Probably. Good luck 🤞 😷 🎁