Normalcy?
Before the events of the past two years, my weekends would basically consist of me packing up my bag and heading downtown. I had a specific spot in a specific cafe that I frequented, and I rarely deviated from my drink order.
Of course, this stopped during the first few waves of COVID, as cafes and restaurants closed across the city. I started going back a few months ago, but the fact that I still didn’t enjoy getting into a packed train, as well as the nearly incessant protests in the downtown core meant that I stopped again. Yesterday, I was downtown near the art gallery and decided to visit. As I suspected, not much has changed. Same coffee, same tables, same chairs, same dimly-lit barely-subterranean cafe. It felt good, even comforting to be back, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to change my routine yet again to frequent it as I had before.
On Friday night, I went to Landmark Cinemas in New Westminster to watch The Batman (2022). I had been looking forward to this film for a long time, and bought tickets for it about a month ago. I didn’t realize the film would be so long (176min), and by the time I left the theatre, it was late evening. Superhero films are not my favourite genre, but Robert Pattinson has been doing some good work (Twilight memes aside). I especially liked his performance in Tenet. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the moviegoing experience was yet again sullied by folks who can’t turn off their phones or stop checking it during the movie, bathing my peripheral vision in a blinding flash of light. There were also people who loved to offer their own commentary on what was happening on the screen, which would’ve been helpful if what was happening on the screen wasn’t so blatantly obvious already. That said, it was still one of the better experiences I’ve had recently, and I’ll probably watch the film again once it starts to stream.
Last week, I took a bit of a detour from school and research and did some open-source development. I made a contribution to the Scala Package Index (scaladex). It was nice to write some code that wasn’t related to research.
Today, I think I finished finalizing the related work section of my thesis. This basically leaves the tool implementation/user studies/discussion session to be finished – how hard could that be?