Weeknotes 176

It’s warm enough to need the windows open, and the cooler air brings the wildlife in with it. During the afternoon my flat is toured by flies tracing a wonky star polygon in the middle of each room. They are all my enemies but they’ve got the numbers.

The other thing that comes in is sound. This week I learned that the awful busker on the street outside who only knows Wonderful Tonight on the guitar also only knows Hallelujah on the electronic keyboard.

I assume that for some reason it’s not illegal for him to wind me up whenever he wants to, and yet if I were to pour a cauldron of boiling oil out of my window I’d be the “criminal”. Call this a society?

Bring back tambourine man.

The Interesting conference was on Wednesday which created the rare opportunity for me to have breakfast with friends and dinner with Alice, even though unexpected circumstances meant I had to bail on the conference itself at the last minute. It sounds like I missed some good talks but I’m glad I still got some of the socialising bit.

I finished another chunk of work on my WebAssembly interpreter, this time a painstaking refactoring of the preprocessor to make it easier to modify. It’s really therapeutic to change code gradually and with confidence.

For now I intend to keep chipping away at the preprocessor by moving more desugaring out of the parser. Eventually I’d like to get to the point where I’m comfortable enough with the state of the implementation that I can actually start building more features without wincing. I think adding support for .wasm files would be a satisfying payoff.

Admittedly this isn’t the highest-velocity software project I’ve ever worked on. That’s fine. It’s just for fun.

I was determined not to be a whiny spoilsport about Tears of the Kingdom last week because it’s good to let people have their fun. But, in hindsight, it doesn’t matter what I think anyway so I might as well say it.

I came extremely close to giving up on the game because it took me so long to escape the tutorial area that I’d almost lost the will to play it afterwards. Breath of the Wild’s Great Plateau was pretty much perfect in scope, but Great Sky Island is way too frustrating and tedious as an introductory area. It didn’t give me the fun of exploration, only the annoyance of desperately wanting to get out of each section but not knowing how to do it without spending hours faffing about with the fiddly controls.

The island’s design communicates an arrogant confidence that the player will be so captivated by the new mechanics that they won’t mind being trapped for ages — as naff, underpowered Link, with no heart containers or paraglider or fast travel — until they’ve had a chance to practice each of them twenty times. Dude, I did the shrines! I fucking get it! Let me out of here!

It doesn’t help that, judging by the reviews, I’m the only person in the world who isn’t excited about making a car out of tree trunks or whatever.

Anyway, I’m past the tutorial and it’s fun again, but blimey.

I’m still enjoying Silo, even though the twist is obviously that they’re trapped in the argon pressure differential universe from Exhalation.

I watched Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania when it appeared on Disney+. It was an undignified enterprise for all concerned. I thought Katy O’Brian was good again and I’d like to see her in more things.

UPS “delivered” a package this week, which is to say they texted to tell me it had been delivered but didn’t actually bring it here. When I phoned them they revealed the following piece of frankly mindblowing information: “your package has been delivered to a Nexus point”.

Relatedly, I got my repaired joycon back. It looks and feels as good as new, but its serial number hasn’t changed so in some abstract sense it’s still the same one, like a ship made from brooms and crewed by the Sugababes. It’s hard to say who won this battle of man vs corporation because I don’t even want to use a joycon now that I’ve got the Pro Controller.

New new Knower! This is fortunate because it’s the only thing likely to dislodge I’m The President from my brain.