Baldur Bjarnason

Weeknote 13 - The weight of deadlines

– Baldur Bjarnason

It looms. It looms.

Work #

The end of June deadline looms over my project at work. On the one hand, if we don’t do this properly we have no chance of success. On the other hand if we don’t actually ship while we still have money, we also have no chance of success.

The good news is that we’ve found a development approach that works, a design that I think works, and a structure that works. The only question is getting it all together early enough for us to start selling it before we run out of money.

So, in addition to French classes, I’ve been spending the evenings working. Which took its toll and resulted in me spending a lot of Sunday just sleeping.

Guess I’m getting too old for this sort of thing.

Reading #

I’ve been spending a little bit too much time working for me to read. Only managed to read one book in the past week.

Well, one and a half. I gave up halfway through a sci-fi novel that just wasn’t holding my interest. (I’m not going to name it because I prefer not to focus too much on the negative here.)

It suffered from too many of the typical sci-fi novel problems: no strong central plot, flat characters, world-building detail at the expense of story or character detail, too much emphasis of ‘clever’ ideas that aren’t that clever.

It wasn’t awful. Just not particularly good either. Roughly on par with a Star Trek: Enterprise episode or one of Frank Herbert’s non-Dune novels that you’ve never heard of. A little bit more progressive than traditional sci-fi but tonally, stylistically, and structurally very much traditional sci-fi. Pass.

The fun read in an otherwise trying week was Viscount Vagabond by Loretta Chase. It’s interesting to see how Chase was clearly chafing at the limitations of the traditional, Georgette Heyer style, Regency novel. It’s even more interesting to see how much she has improved over the years. The difference between the first six books she wrote, which border on being Heyer pastiches, and her later work is honestly quite impressive.

My obsessiveness has kicked in and I’m almost certainly going to power through the remaining two books of hers that I haven’t read yet.

Media #

I’ve been powering through TV series and movies over the past few days, largely because I can have them running in the background while I’m working.

Re-watched:

Watched:

That last series deserves a call-out. I had lost interest in Doctor Who during the Moffat era. It had just become too repetitively same-y and self-involved. But this new series with Jodie Whittaker as the new Doctor is both a breath of fresh air and, honestly, more faithful to the traditional Doctor Who series than most of the other post-revival series. Larger group of companions. Decent mix of sci-fi and historical adventures, with the latter being overall more accurate to history than most of Moffat’s era.

And the episode with Rosa Parks worked quite well. All in all, a pleasant surprise.