Have you ever been forced, by circumstance, to spend time with someone you're convinced doesn't like you, who seems committed to convincing you you're friends?

I have and I can tell you it makes me feel like a character in my own life. Sometimes I feel like all of human history is nothing more than a waste of time.

Do you ever get this, where you look at the things you love and you feel such overwhelming joy that you couldn't possibly feel more full, more successful, more contented than you do? And then you look at those same things and you feel like a complete charlatan; so undeserving, like an impostor walked into someone else's life unnoticed, and you're waiting for someone to detect your unwelcome presence and all that's left is to watch everything you know you don't deserve come crashing down at your feet. It seems unfair that you can swing from one to the other so easily, without even noticing that anything happened. Especially as frequently as this. This is maybe not the best outlet for this.

I have had an unpleasant week. Everything that could have gone wrong, has gone wrong. Even some things that had no business going wrong went wrong. Every day it was something different. By this morning I felt like I was going to have a panic attack.

I hate when life makes me feel like I suck at what I'm doing. I know I'm OK at it, just sometimes the world gangs up on you.

So I spent this evening making something to remind myself that I can do this and I do enjoy it.

Something we struggle with at my Wednesday night badminton, is who's going to play matches. You add a club (in case you play at multiple), you add all that club's members (and mark them as absent if they're away that session), then you're ready to create your matchups. Enter 2 for Singles or 4 for doubles and it'll generate a game for you. If someone sits out, you can mark them as absent for that selection round, and maybe you can change to singles.

This is going to require a fairly modern browser. It's only tested in Chrome and Mobile Safari and that's really the only intended users for it, so either use one of those or don't use this! Everything is stored in your browser's local storage so nothing you enter is sent to my server, and it never will be.

There's a couple of things missing:

• The first player in a game is chosen at random from all available players. Their opposition is also chosen at random. It would be nice if your opposition was chosen from players who had never shared a court.
• It would be nice if you could manually set x number of players in a match, then opt to automatically fill them in. That's potentially a lot of UI, though, so I want to make sure I do it in a minimalist way that is also usable.

By the way I love React. I know it's not what people use now but I'm always a late adopter for this stuff.

I've been watching Mad Men a lot. It's really incredibly beautiful. I know you're supposed to identify with Don Draper, but I wasn't prepared for how much I would identify with him. Life has changed since the 1960s, but in many ways it really hasn't.

I'm just finished with season 4. One thing that strikes me is how people have always used other people's lives to figure out how they're doing. It's so depressing. I often feel tempted to talk to Charlotte about this show as if these are people I really know, and as if this is something that's relevant right now. "Charlotte, you'll never guess Don is engaged. I know."

That's the mark of a truly exceptional piece of art, in my opinion. It's one thing for reality TV to present real lives to us, but it's something very separate to present fiction so convincing, so real on a meta level, that it's almost disappointing that it's not real.

I'm not an ad man. I'm not a salesman of any kind like Don. But I am Don. The episode I watched today, someone said "I hope she realises that you only like the beginning of things" and god I felt so attacked. Who doesn't like the beginning of things? Everything is so pure and uncomplicated (I refuse to use the phrase "pure and simple" in earnest).

I don't feel like I can honestly describe why I love Mad Men so much without offending someone in my life. It is a truly beautiful, and timeless commentary on society, masculinity, femininity, love, culture, work, family. This is art made by people who can communicate more exposition with a single frozen frame, than many can with seasons of TV. This is something expertly designed to make you feel something, and to question how you treat people, and your attitude to everyone who isn't you. It's designed to show you things that you do, and then show you how stupid those things are. It's really one of the most elegant and compelling pieces of storytelling that I think I've ever seen in my life.

And just quickly in closing. This is a TV show that runs for 7 seasons, about one doomed man and how he almost pathologically hammers nails into his own coffin. The number of times I've said "are you kidding me with this" whilst watching this show, is ridiculous. But also, the number of times I've cried, as Don sabotages his own life, or really profoundly hurts the people around him, exceeds maybe anything I've ever watched.

This is one of those shows I don't think I will ever stop watching, pondering, and learning from. I know everyone has already seen it but it's so incredibly perfect in every way that I feel like I want to tell you to watch it again.