Weeknotes 95

Halloween weeknotes. Spooky. 👻

Earlier in the week the mornings became instantly dark. We’re thundering down the steep bit of the day length rollercoaster so this shouldn’t be surprising, but wow, time has gone fast this year.

As of today the clocks have gone back in the UK so we’ll get a bit more light in the mornings again, but as I write this it’s pitch black outside despite being only teatime. I’m sleepy. 🌃

I’d been feeling slightly crestfallen about RubyConf since they announced all remote talks would be viewable on-demand rather than scheduled at a specific time. I think that’s a reasonable choice, but without a timeslot I was anticipating a gradual trickle of individual people maybe occasionally watching my talk by themselves, which isn’t quite the audience experience I hope for as a speaker.

I didn’t mention it here because it felt like a minor and egotistical thing for me to complain about, but I bring it up now because this week they said they’re going to stream them on a schedule after all. So I’m now looking forward to at least a few people watching it together and doing a Q&A afterwards if there’s any demand.

Now I just have to write the blog post and clean up the repo in time, neither of which I appear to be keen to do.

Will this be my last conference talk? I hope not, but it also doesn’t seem impossible.

Nat & I have been playing more Baba Is You. One of the game’s most fiendish puzzles is a feature of my TV called “Automatic Static Brightness Limiting” which dims stationary images to prevent burn-in. Not a terrible idea, except Baba Is You gameplay is visually uneventful enough to trigger the ASBL, so after about a minute it becomes almost too dark to see comfortably.

I nearly ordered a service remote to turn ASBL off but chickened out because it didn’t seem worth the risk. Instead I just trained myself to ritually pause and unpause the game every few minutes, thus causing enough visible change to bump the brightness back up into the realm of human perception. Puzzle solved! This is fine.

I’ve played Baba Is You on and off since it came out, and it’s taken me until now to realise an essential principle of its level design: there are no red herrings. If there’s an object you haven’t used, or a rule whose consequences don’t seem relevant, you haven’t solved the puzzle yet. This information makes a lot of the puzzles easier by narrowing the possibility space. It would’ve been helpful to notice it sooner.

We’ve also started playing Return of the Obra Dinn because the Cracking The Cryptic men have been streaming it and I’m dangerously impressionable. I first played this game when it came out and didn’t really enjoy it, mainly because I had to sit at my computer by myself to do it, so I lost interest and didn’t reach the end. But it’s since been ported to the Switch so now we can play it together from the sofa and share the deduction workload.

It’s actually pretty fun! It’s certainly more enjoyable to play with someone else, and (like all video games) much better on a sofa & TV than a chair & monitor. Unfortunately it continues the trend of first-person games which give me motion sickness after an hour or so, so we’re having to do it in short sessions to avoid death.

We’ve been rewatching the second season of Succession to get warmed up for the third one. It’s very good. Succession always makes me feel weird because I idly tried the first episode on a flight to Australia and ended up watching the entire first season back-to-back in the dark, soaking in white noise and turbulence. The memory of it gives me a woozy trapped jetlagged feeling that probably makes the show seem more emotionally affecting than it really is.

More Elements of Computing Systems excitement at work recently, this time because we got the entire VM translator working. The two VM chapters form a fairly large project overall but it’s been really enjoyable to work through it again at a gentle yet steady pace. Now we’ve moved on to the Jack compiler.

Dune (2021) review: looks incredible; sounds fantastic; is boring.