Weeknotes 244

I was woken by a thunderstorm during the night. Nice and cool today.

I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT I: went to see my parents last weekend. It was a nice peaceful train ride down to the coast and back. On the return journey I pulled my hood up, stuck on some white noise and dozed contentedly all the way to London Bridge.

I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT II: exfiltrated the video of my RSpec talk from Glacier last week. It’s too brief to be comprehensive but, despite the passage of ten years, I think it’s still a reasonable overview of the pieces of RSpec 3 and how they fit together, which is why I wanted to refer back to it in the first place. (Whither RSpec 4?)

RSS MASSIVE COCKUP: I did some idle consolidation of domain names this morning and accidentally broke an old Atom feed which isn’t supposed to contain weeknotes but, for a brief yet terrifying moment, did. I hadn’t noticed anything was wrong until Alice texted me the bone-chilling message “Uh oh tom”.

I’ve fixed it now but the damage is done. I apologise if an avalanche of reheated banalities poured into your feed reader. Nobody needs that. (Phil: “That new bread pan looks good, bread looks lovely. Glad your RubyConf talk went well.”)

I’ve been chipping away at the pile of packaging, sneaking it out to the bins in dribs and drabs, like Andy Dufresne escaping Shawshank. It’s all gone now. 🚮

After work on Monday I met Ufuk for beers & food while he was in town.

After work on Tuesday I met Tyler for beers & food while he was in town.

After work on Friday I met Aleks & Reema for beers & food while Aleks is still in town.

Those evenings were all restorative and absolutely lovely. Also, I’m pooped.

So I spent most of Saturday playing Astro Bot. Like its predecessor it’s pretty close to the platonic ideal of a video game: so joyful and optimised for fun, with extremely legible environments and a million tiny details cramming charm and humour into every corner. I absolutely love it.

At times it’s extremely Super Mario-like in the best way. It manages to create a sense of wonder and exploration reminiscent of Galaxy & Odyssey while avoiding the one-note gameplay of Bros. Wonder. It’s mostly easy and lighthearted platforming but I’ve already found some of the challenge levels surprisingly, erm, challenging.

Every level’s bursting with graphical detail that shows what the hardware’s capable of, and the sound design, music and haptic feedback are fantastic. In a world awash with mediocre LLM slop it’s enough to restore your faith in the technology industry’s ability to produce something genuinely creative. Finally a PS5 exclusive worth buying a PS5 for! Just a brilliant game.

Connections #454 took a life and broke the streak. Curses.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that Stewart Lee’s latest show, Basic Lee, was already being recommended to me on YouTube. I watched and enjoyed it; his “imagine your jazz now, Salford” bit made me laugh. I’d intended to link to it here but I see it’s since been taken down, so I suppose it wasn’t meant to be there after all.