Now: 27 January - 2 February 2025

This year is quickly turning into a series of weekends where I do fun stuff and weekdays where I sit around and try to stay on top of everything else.

We spent the better part of our free time during the week watching Severance, which puts us in the one-half of the world who only started watching after Apple did a big marketing offensive, including a weird bit where Tim Cook pretends to have been severed and stares blankly into the middle distance, as if he’s not one of the wax figurines in the Perpetuity Wing. I really like Severance. I like shows where the audience gets to hold a bunch of narrative strands together and work to remember which characters know what. And they told me that I wouldn’t need to remember what dramatic irony is!

I also started listening to a new podcast called “Never Post” (should podcasts be quoted, or italicised?); it’s “about the internet”, which is what it feels like maybe 1 in 3 new podcasts in 2024 is about. Anyway this week’s episode about Cameo (the App) and some navel-gazing about cameras but had this interval in the middle about TikTok going down for like three hours that gave me chills. I try not to get involved in moral panics but listening to all these young folks being like, “keep scrolling—don’t eat don’t sleep just keep scrolling,” and “I refuse to read my posts—I’m not going to rewire my brain to read,” spooked me pretty bad. Lots of pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net good, and a few pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net bad—and for my part I think about TikTok nearly not at all—but I’m the teensiest bit concerned that shortform video seems to have replaced media as a monolith for a whole demographic cohort, and that this demographic cohort is about to inherit the earth while I continue to lose relevance. Ehhhhh

At the weekend I replaced the spark plugs in the Skoda in the hope that it would resolve our dwindling fuel economy woes (ChatGPT told me to—how’s that for a moral panic!). It didn’t. But I did find that the outgoing spark plugs were wildly overgapped, so I must have fixed something, right? Anyway ChatGPT says that the next thing I need to learn to replace are the O2 sensors pre- and post-catalytic converter.

Then on Sunday we dropped in to Durham to buy a pair of road running (!) shoes ahead of the Boston Marathon (not that one) in April. I’ve never had a pair of road shoes but I’m keen to see how I get on.

Then we went up to South Shields for the Temple Park cross-country running fixture. It was a really lovely day and not too tough going. There were a couple of steeplechase-style puddles to splodge through, which roused the spirit and got me good and clarty, and maybe even got some dirt in my competitors’ eyes. Finally breaking my Dry January Alcoholic Fast the night before probably didn’t do me any favours, but I finished in decent time.

Very few pictures this week; I should have taken pictures at Temple Park or while changing the spark plugs—but I didn’t!