Weeknotes 303

It’s getting pleasantly cold outside. No heating yet. 🍂

My notes say “I love this time of year” but I already mentioned that so I won’t bang on about it.

Seven times at the gym. I did not, in fact, get a grip; I just keep waking up early and I’d rather spend that time mindlessly exercising than lie awake fretting.

I still appreciated the extra hour of leisure time I got this morning, and it felt good to see daylight when I went outside. Presumably tonight I’ll be horrified by how early it gets dark and the cycle will continue.

I had a phone call with a doctor about my wrist pain and now I need to schedule an in-person appointment with a physio, so unfortunately the ball’s in my court.

Last Sunday I met Matt and Chris for afternoon beers and chat. It was a pleasant surprise to do this in my part of town so fortunately I didn’t have to ride my bike too far in the rain.

Matt explained why I’m finding Neon Genesis Evangelion such a struggle: I should’ve watched the reboot films instead of the original TV series! I dunno whether I’m actually going to do that but I’m curious at least.

In the meantime I’ve finished the TV series, whose closing episodes finally achieved its goal of becoming fully incomprehensible. I realise there were production problems but a failure’s a failure. Not recommended at all.

Project Hail Mary is, like The Martian, kind of sophomoric but otherwise a fun and exciting adventure which never crosses the line into Ready Player One levels of embarrassment. It’s engaging enough that I easily got through seven hours of it this week, so there’s at least a chance I’ll finish it before Christmas.

It turns out the text has some parts which can’t be straightforwardly read out by a narrator, and I like how they’ve been creatively adapted for the audiobook.

I enjoyed this overview of some of Ghost of Yōtei’s technical aspects. It’s impressive how much effort they put into making nature look as good as possible, and it definitely pays off in the game. There’s no substitute for caring about the quality of the work.

I’d originally intended to say a little more about Phil’s post last week but was too lazy in the end, so you’re getting it now instead.

In hindsight it’s remarkable how much more diversity in protocols & clients there was back then. Off the top of my head, I regularly used a Usenet (NNTP) client, an email (SMTP & POP3) client, a telnet client, an IRC client, a Gopher client, a WAIS client, an FTP client and a web browser (HTTP) on my Macintosh LC 475 as part of the normal daily business of surfing the information superhighway. It didn’t feel at all strange at the time: different tools for different jobs, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Whereas these days, with the exception of the email client (now IMAP), everything else has effectively been replaced by the web browser (now HTTPS), which is absolutely wild. I love the web but I’m increasingly unsure that the consolidation has been technologically healthy.

If you upgrade to Rails 8.1, don’t forget to run db:schema:dump to reorder the columns in your database schema, otherwise you’ll get an unwelcome surprise the next time you run a migration.

I ran out of M&S bran sticks. The Sainsbos ones aren’t bad actually. Nobody’s told me about any other brands so I assume this is it for now.