Week notes: dust

I appear to be writing these week notes every eight days. And why not? By the way, the events of “this week so far” are off limits, and from now on by “this week” I mean what most people would call “last week”. It’s definitely a solid idea, and definitely not going to end with me struggling to remember the events of increasingly long-ago weeks.

Like a microcosm of the “review of the year” content content producers produce around the ends of years – most of which is necessarily finished before the end of the year being reviewed – a lot of online people publish their week notes before the end of the week. I confess that I was among them two weeks ago. It irks me slightly – what if something important happens just before the end of the period of time? But people act as if it doesn’t really matter.

My other concern is that reviews of the year or week might focus unfairly on the most recent portion of the year or week, as its events are fresher in the memory. A solution to that would be to write notes gradually, over the course of the year or week. I would rather act as if it doesn’t really matter.

The most compelling notes of any week are bound to involve the rubbish I’ve found dumped at the side of the road. This week, I made the unprecedented find of a discarded bottle of Huel (“hipster gruel”), the nutritional powdered food some are calling the British Soylent. I suppose it follows that a consumer attracted to the convenience of Huel is also too busy to locate a bin. But does the product’s appearance on my local grass verge indicate a mainstreamification of meal replacement dust, a gentrification of the neighbourhood, or both?

I mustn’t be the first to observe that “Huel” sounds a bit like the sound of being sick. Soylent, meanwhile, really is named after the fictional Soylent Green, which was made out of fictional people. I remember enjoying the theory that Soylent was part of an unconventional marketing campaign for an upcoming Soylent Green film remake, but that theory has been discredited and there’s no sign of that film.

I did some work. There were some nice tweets about my work. I’m sure I’ll do some more work next week (this week).