Weeknotes 96

I’ve spent all day trying to get my RubyConf talk’s accompanying blog post & code repo ready before the conference starts tomorrow. I’m nowhere near finished yet so these notes are going to be cursory and irritable.

In a semi-desperate attempt to generate any interest at all in my talk, I uploaded the video to YouTube and scheduled a premiere:

I’ve never done this before so have no idea whether it’ll work. I’ll be in the chat when it goes live on Thursday (8pm UTC) and maybe it’ll be fun. 🤷‍♂️

Uh, like and subscribe!

Most of my teammates are already in Denver ready to hang out and have fun. I’m sad to be missing that, but I also feel so worn down by the process of preparing my talk that I’m kind of relieved I’ll be able to just sit quietly on a sofa and watch the conference remotely without having to blink or smile. If I’d had to deal with international travel logistics and zero-to-sixty group socialising on top of the talk prep it might’ve broken me.

I’m hopeful I’ll get another chance to meet everyone in Canada early next year, when everything should be much less stressful so I can actually relax and enjoy it.

In the meantime, after months of not having seen anyone socially, I met up with two friends called Chris (Lowis & Seaton) in unrelated Chris incidents within hours of each other on Wednesday, which was nice.

It reminded me that I should be making a mild effort to get out of the house occasionally and live a more normal life. I may or may not do this once RubyConf is over and I’m no longer spending every free moment shackled to my laptop.

For decades I’ve been a daily user of GNU Screen, which is like tmux for the elderly. Somehow I’ve only just learned about the :sessionname command which lets you give the current session a name so that you have something other than meaningless process IDs to choose from when you run screen -list.

This is a handy feature and it would’ve helped me to know about it years ago but at least I know about it now. At some point I may even learn to start my sessions with screen -S so they get named at the point of creation. To be honest that feels like it’s probably going to take another few decades to sink in.

After last week’s brief flicker of positivity I’m back to being unhappy with Return of the Obra Dinn. I now remember what I actually didn’t like about it the first time: once you’ve unlocked all of the memories, you’re just left to wander around the ship with no real goal or guidance.

I don’t mind a bit of freedom but the combination of unnecessarily obstructive UI and zero sense of what to prioritise is deadly for my enthusiasm, even given the fun of playing with someone else. Want to exhaustively review every memory yet again just in case you missed something? Hope you enjoy spending ages unnecessarily walking around to reactivate them!

People praise it as a deduction game but I don’t think we’ve made any deduction more insightful than “these two people with the same surname are probably related” or “this person who’s speaking Swedish is probably Swedish”, which isn’t exactly taxing our logical faculties.

As with Outer Wilds, I acknowledge the possibility that there’s something more interesting hidden just beyond the limits of my patience and understanding. Despite having almost-completed the game twice I still have no idea what’s meant to be going on in its story, which perhaps suggests I’m too dim for this entire enterprise. Obra Dim.

We finished rewatching season two of Succession. I’m glad we did it because a) it’s really good and b) it ends on a massive cliffhanger which I’d completely forgotten about, and being reminded of all the details made the first episode of season three much easier to get into. I don’t know whether to have high hopes for this new season but it’s started well.