Lifenotes #40: March 2024

✨ Highlights

• Caught up with a few friends I don’t see often over drinks 🍻
• Went to see Holly Humberstone in Leicester with my friends Nisha and Rachael, I didn’t really know her, but she was great live.
• My friend Rachael got us tickets to go to Arcade, an immersive audio experience. It was so goood! Would recommend it if it comes near you. It’s essentially a choose your own adventure audio only game, and you’re in complete darkness, so it feels really vivid. It was short, I would have totally gone back if I had time.
• Spent a few days in Bristol with my lovely sister 💛
  • We never get to hang out just the two of us, so it was nice to mooch around Bristol, have nice food, see the sights, and we even made it to a Jazz concert / Lindy Hop taster, which was really fun.
    • Some recs from our days there:
    • Ahh toots: excellent cakes.
    • Farro: everything was tasty, but I loved the cheese scones in particular.
    • Café Cuba: the food here was sooooo good! I had an avocado and tomato salad I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
      • Filthy XIII: great music and cocktails, and some good looking hot dogs I’d like to go back to try.

🎮 Played/Read/Watched

• This is how you lose the time war: it had been a while since I read science fiction, and I really loved this. It’s short, really creative and a great story.
• All of us strangers: this was so good, but so sad.
• The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend by Josh Collinsworth
• Dune: I rewatched this before seeing part 2, and it’s very pretty, but basically nothing happens.
• Dune part two: ok everything happens in this one 😂 It’s very well made, but it’s not the kind of things that calls to me.
• I think you should leave: a friend recommended this and I watched some, but it’s not really for me I’m afraid.
• Saturday Night Live: I started to watch some episodes from this year’s season, and ended up fallng into a massive rabbit hole and watching lots of it.
• Abbott Elementary series 3: I love this show, and am enjoying the new series too.
• Blackberry: this was so good! I knew Blackberry was big back in the day, but I never realised how big. Really interesting and well made.
• The growing backlash against AI by tante
• ‘I’m sorry to have to announce that my cancer situation has developed not necessarily to my advantage’ by Simon Boas
• Superbob: I love Brett Goldstein, so I dug out this film from a while back, and it was a really fun watch. It’s funny, short, and sweet.
• Madame Web: ok I watched this just to see if it was that bad. Yes. Yes, it is.
• Circe: I’d never read a historical fiction novel before, and I really enjoyed this! It was fun to connect the bits I knew to the rich story in the book. I enjoyed the genre.
• Broad City: I was on the market for a 30 minute comedy, and this was great! Really silly and fun, I zoomed through it all.
• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: I was pretty tired after work on a Friday and I fancied a fun action film so I rewatched this classic from my youth. I’d forgotten how fun it was! My 3 main takeaways:
  • It’s so faithful to the games, which I played a lot growing up, so obvs I love it.
  • If I was rich, I’d probably also spend it like a rich 10 year old.
  • How did I not realise then that I was bi? Honestly baffling.
• Lara Croft: Tomb Raider - The Cradle of Life: ok I obvs had to watch the second one the next day.
• Hello World by Hannah Fry: I got into listening to audiobooks for my non-fiction books, so I can listen when I’m cooking, tidying up, or walking Juno. This was a good read, a nice high level overview of where algorithms do well and where they don’t.
• Hackers: how had I never seen this?! So good! Good music, good old timey computer visuals, and just generally good fun.
• Tomb Raider I: rewatching the films made me do my semi periodic rummage to see if anyone remastered the old games for modern consoles, and guess what?! Some fantastic humans have now, so I started to play Tomb Raider I on my PS5. Initial thoughts: movement and camera controls back then were hard, y’all! I’m hoping I’ll get a good hold of the controls before I get to my fav, Tomb Raider II.

📸 Pics