Weeknotes 115

Welcome to spring! 🌱

Yesterday’s brunch went well. It was nice to see friends, none of my baking went wrong and nobody got COVID. The cost was the social (and perhaps actual) hangover that I’ve been nursing today, but that’s okay. It’s all good practice for being normal.

The most tiring part of having guests was doing a proper spring clean after a year or so of not really bothering. My flat feels nice now that the junk has been tidied and the surfaces have been dusted and the robot vacuum has been allowed to robot vacuum, something which used to happen automatically twice a week while I was at work but now rarely happens because the flat is constantly in use.

We finished season two of Columbo. The charming thing about Lieutenant Columbo is that he plays a game with each murderer where, as soon as he correctly guesses how and why they dunnit, he wins and they politely surrender regardless of how flimsy and circumstantial his evidence is. Columbo, you bumbling scamp, you’ve seen through my charade and it would be frankly embarrassing to argue about it now! Lethal injection please.

The more I play Horizon Forbidden West, the more frustrated I get with traversal generally and climbing specifically. The climbing is just terrible. But the game is otherwise generally enjoyable and I’m still finding it diverting enough to wander around the giant map looking for robot punch-ups and occasionally skipping my way through the lengthy conversations of its main story.

Annoyingly it suffers from the same glaring design problem as the previous game: there’s often no indication that you’re about to enter a boss fight, but once you’ve initiated it, there’s no way to leave (and level up, and come back later) if you realise you’re unprepared. It really undermines the experience to trap the player in a mismatched encounter that can only be won by sheer luck on the twentieth try, respawning again and again with the same inadequate inventory and no opportunity to improve it. It seemed like a mistake last time so it’s weird that they’ve repeated it here.

However hard I try, and despite the patient efforts of my friends, I can’t bring myself to fully engage with the combat or role playing mechanics. But, to the game’s credit, that’s okay because it’s entirely possible to power through and make progress without paying attention to any of the overly complex bolted-on gameplay systems. If I scan an enemy and see that it’s vulnerable to a weapon I actually have, then I’ll use that weapon, I suppose; if not, I’ll just pummel it with arrows and keep retrying until I get lucky.

Video games are fun!

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bother with Elden Ring. Aside from the obvious gameplay reasons to avoid it, I don’t understand why nobody mentions how visually unappealing the gloomy fantasy aesthetic of all the FromSoftware games is. No thanks.

Two years ago I bought a Nintendo Switch Online subscription so I could visit friends’ Animal Crossing islands. Last year it renewed without me noticing and I got no use from it, but this year I’ve finally outsmarted Ian Nintendo by getting my shit together and cancelling it just in time.

To cut a long story short, I spent a while this week trying to work out how to tell Dependabot what Ruby version number to use when resolving dependencies, which is important for it to know because gems can constrain the versions of Ruby they support.

It turns out that Dependabot monkey patches Bundler to get this information from the Gemfile’s ruby line, and assumes Ruby 2.5.3 by default if that line’s not present. So make sure you set ruby in your Gemfile if you don’t want Dependabot to mess up your lockfile after you upgrade Ruby.

All of my meetings this week were a full discombobulating hour earlier than usual, next week they will be too, and then they’ll be back to normal.