In the afternoon I went to finally order my glasses. Due to my high prescription I need to get quite small glasses, which don’t seem to be all that common these days, so the final shortlist came down to a couple of adult pairs that looked as close to my old pair (thick black plastic frames, small and rectangular) as possible, and a child’s Star Wars frame. I eventually chose one of the adult frames since it was a tad more comfortable and didn’t have pictures of jedis along the arms (the arms are always the weak point of frames), plus it was more comfortable. So yes, new glasses soon.
A lot of present shopping and a bright notion for the most difficult person to buy for (someone with extremely expensive tastes and who rarely considers expense or inconvenience for others when it comes to gifts), so did lots of online ordering. My credit card will not be pleased.
In the evening the Gentleman Friend and I had to set up the television with all the online connections. This house has something I really like, which is a TV in a separate room. Unfortunately the room is at the other end of the house from the wifi, and moreover it’s an old, slightly rickety sort of place so there is no signal here. Some years ago I set up a powerline extender to get wifi here, but returned last year to find it had disappeared. This time, again there was nothing. As we tried to work out what had happened we found not one, not two, but three powerline systems set up around the house. We gradually worked out that at some point the internet provider had been changed. The new provider had added a different powerline. This had not worked. The GF’s parents had called in their friendly (and I suspect crooked) computer man to fix the internet and he had sold them a third, this one without a wifi capability at all, only wired through an Ethernet cable. This Ethernet cable ran across the floor and had a hideous kink in it. Moreover, the wiring of the house is old enough for children or grandchildren. So, between these, there was no internet in the TV room, and without it no TV.
Eventually, after figuring this out, and finding the three boxes (electronics boxes being the sort of thing people don’t throw out) we set up the wired system. This was unreliable due to the broken wire and kept cutting out. Then we looked for the wifi-enabled system installed by the internet provider. Only one of the two units could be found. Then we tried with ours. I pressed a button on the router to pair them and the internet cut out completely. We tried a factory reset, no change. Eventually I connected a cable to my laptop to find the wifi had been turned off and a bit of online investigation revealed that on this model, if you press the button quickly you get a WPS pairing and if you press it for a few seconds it turns the wifi off. Ridiculous. Anyway, we finally set it up, feeling that we’d been on a long detective hunt at midnight.
The reason for all this was to watch the new His Dark Materials series. It was a mixed bag, inevitable after all the hype, I suppose. Lyra was extremely well cast, but for all the flaws of the film, Ruth Wilson could not top Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter. Kidman really is the perfect Mrs Coulter. Lord Asriel was very poorly cast, as a lightweight adventurer without any of the inherent power that he has in the books. Other than that – there were barely any daemons (budget??), the exposition was a bit confused (daemons becoming fixed at adulthood was described twice, while the alethioemeter being given to Lyra seemed inexplicable) and the whole aesthetic was very tinny. Then, the credit sequence and the music was so Game of Thrones inspired it was laughable (though not as laughable as the scene with Lyra making shadow birds flying over the map of the north) and there was a stupidly long and detailed Next Time On.. trailer that made me wonder if the showrunners were just nervous no one had understood what the hell was going on.