Weekly digest 40
Sunday, September 21, 2025Happenings
- Mr One is now walking at home as well, hooray.
- Work is feeling a bit overwhelming at the moment, mainly due to the number of classes I'm teaching this year... I'm trying to limit how much of it I do at home, though.
- Last night my wife and I started making a scarecrow for our town's annual scarecrow festival. This is the first time we've entered (and thus the first time in or lives we've ever made a scarecrow), but we're having a lot of fun.
- Tomorrow I'm running a haiku club at school — no idea how many will turn up, but we'll see!
Links
- Getting Ready for the Winter. Part 1, Switching Technology — great read about Simone's quest to get software for an old MacBook Pro.
- A Pattern Language — a web version of Christopher Alexander's classic text on the design of buildings and neighbourhoods. I have this book and it's wonderful. In the book, every pattern is linked to several other patterns, so it is perfect for a website!
- Resisting Self-Flanderisation — in the world of TVTropes, Flanderization is where the writers of a series over time exaggerate the quirks of a character until they become 1-dimensional (Ned Flanders' religiosity is the namesake). Social media content algorithms push us to do the same thing to ourselves.
- Why do some gamers invert their controls? Scientists now have answers, but they’re not what you think — fascinating! I always knew the reason I invert is that the earliest games I played were the space-trading game Elite and the WW1-era dogfighting game Chocks Away. But the findings of this study are that it is like handedness, in that everyone has a natural preference. However, it might not be the way you first learned! In other words, after a few weeks of adjusting to non-inverted controls, I might find it even easier than I do now.
- Dark patterns killed my wife’s Windows 11 installation — totally wild read about how fucked up Microsoft's coercive software ecosystem can be.
That's all for today.
Playing
The Silksong update. I'm still in Act 2, but revealing loads of the map and exploring everything before I try to progress. I have all the simple keys, I've found loads of secret areas, beat lots of optional bosses, having a great time. Currently working on the Courier's Rasher... IYKYK...