While I’m normally lucky enough to avoid most bugs and illnesses, that luck was not present this month. I picked up some kind of respiratory virus which resulted in me not being able to do much with my annual leave, and then in a week of reduced hours and enforced WFH. It sort of felt like the middle of the month got lost in a void.

Miscellaneous

My nan finally had her pre-op appointment for her knee replacement, after waiting two months later than her last letter suggested she would need to. While having the incorrect estimate was annoying for her, the experience of the hospital and the appointment itself was good enough to make up for that.

We also switched to a new internet provider, after spending years paying objectively too much just because my nan did not want to risk losing her landline phone or having its number changed. We went with YouFibre, as they offered a contract that included both Fibre and a landline, and now our broadband is 2-3x its previous speed.

Also, it was my birthday this month. I have now been alive for nearly 1/3 of a century, which does not seem right! (For context, people usually assume from my appearance and (lack-of) dress sense that I’m in my early twenties). I had a meal out with friends on the evening of my birthday, and another the next day with my nan and aunt.

Fun

Music/Podcasts

After realising that 7Digital had removed my access to, and ability to re-download, a handful of albums that I had bought, I bought those albums on CD so that I had a physical backup. 7Digital was already my second choice for buying new albums, after Bandcamp, but I think the order is now Bandcamp > CD > 7Digital.

Listening to Story of the Year’s single, Gasoline, made me hopeful that their new album would be back up to their usual quality (while Tear Me To Pieces had a couple of really good songs, it’s not a great overall album for me). I’ve now listened to the new album a handful of times and enjoyed it; the album feels like a good blend of both the melodic and heavier sides of SOTY.

Books

The only book I finished this month was Animal, Vegetable, Criminal. Roach’s writing style is engaging and I liked how she conveyed the personalities of everyone she accompanied for her research. I also appreciated that the book is a tour of examples, across different countries, situations, and perspectives, rather than an argument for a single blanket answer.

I also started This Way Up, and am enjoying it so far – the degree to which it carries over the voice and character of the authors’ YouTube channel is impressive.

(Book-adjacent aside; I reached the final page of a notebook rather than finding it 50% complete a few years later, which is rare. My next notebook looks like an original Playstation, my childhood-nostalgia-console.)

Games

Josh and Si offered to do the most recent Destiny 2 campaign with me as a team, as I had not been motivated to play it solo. We completed the campaign over a few sessions and, while I was initially skeptical of the idea of Destiny 2 borrowing from the Star Wars universe rather than building on new parts of its own universe, I was pleasantly surprised by the campaign still feeling like it belonged in Destiny 2 rather than feeling like awkwardly-transplanted Star Wars. Plus I have to admit that the Praxic Blade (aka lightsaber) is both a versatile weapon and a really fun one.

I attempted to play Rocket League once this month, but it went so badly that I could tell I disappointed the friends I was playing it with. Every so often the stars align and a match is incredibly fun, but 99% of the time I come away feeling like I shouldn’t be trusted with an Xbox controller. So the question of whether to even keep Rocket League installed reappears most times that I try to play it!

I also went back to Forza Horizon 4 for a few days. I think I’m approaching the end of my time with the game, but in a satisfied and natural way rather than from any negative feelings towards it. There are a few achievements that I would like to complete as I am very close to reaching them, such as the achievement for driving down every road in the game (where I only have 3 roads left to find) and some Lego-DLC challenges. However, on one evening I did fall down a rabbit hole of speed camera challenges and stayed attempting the challenges for a much longer time than was sensible, so was then put off from returning to the game for a bit.

Last year, I played and reviewed a demo called Dead Pets Unleashed, which was then cancelled as the studio went bankrupt. I left it on my wishlist, just in case it was revived. While checking Steam on the 8th to decide what to spend my birthday gift card on, I saw that the game, now just named Dead Pets, had been not only revived but released, so it is now in my library.

Finally, I got far more into Cookie Clicker than I expected to. I ascended (prestiged) when I reached prestige level 3,000, and then suddenly understood just how exponential the game’s numbers get. In that ascension, I reached prestige level ~40,000 before deciding to try the achievements which require activating the game’s Born Again mode. In this mode, the game systems return to appearing as they did on your initial run, with no legacy benefits or meta-game perks. (You can reset this and return to the previous ascension progress, by ascending again). I decided to go for doing both Neverclick achievements at once – i.e. reaching a million cookies without ever clicking on the titular cookie. Once this succeeded, I then tried the other achievement that requires Born Again, which is for making a billion cookies without buying any upgrades. That one was definitely a “leave the game running while I do something else” kind of challenge.

Work

This month was fine overall, but a couple of issues stayed in my brain just because of how illogical or avoidable they were. I also made more than my fair share of errors, which was extra annoying!

The one that mattered most started innocuously, from being asked to make updates to a spreadsheet. This was technically trivial, but the challenge was in accessing the document in the first place: another tab of this spreadsheet is heavily relied upon by a specific team, and is used non-stop from 8am-6:20pm every day, so the spreadsheet is locked down for everyone except for that day’s designated person during those times. So the only time I could make changes was during an evening shift, while being the only admin in the office, while doing the regular evening tasks. I thought I could split my attention enough ways, but discovered at the end of the month that I couldn’t – I had failed to process a patient referral that evening, so the patient didn’t get their bloods taken when they were supposed to. (I made sure they were allocated an urgent visit for the next day, so no harm was done in the end, but the “what if I’d caused harm to a patient?” guilt was strong.)

However, I did later get to detect two different parts of another issue – the cause of the problem and the reason why that problem wasn’t appearing to show up on data quality reporting – with well-placed hunches, which felt pretty cool.