Half-term has begun, but whether it'll be much of a break remains to be seen.

Happenings

  • My intro is an allusion simply to parenting being exhausting at the moment. Mr One has been getting us up every night for weeks, and is currently sick. It's just a cold, but so much so that the amount of mucus he swallows is causing him to vomit each night. It's been so long since we've had a full night's sleep.
  • I was also sick last week, which has added to the general exhaustion.
  • On a more positive note, the folks at Cryptic Sunday and friends released their first issue of Unch, a new cryptic crossword magazine. Mine arrived yesterday, and the quality is great.
  • My main laptop's case is starting to fall apart, which is super annoying because it was not cheap (as it's pretty powerful) and I've not had it that long. It was marketed as a laptop for Linux, yet the compatibility for suspend and audio sucks. All-in-all, not impressed by this company. Not that it's worth naming and shaming — they went out of business soon after I bought it. Anyway, I'm wondering about the viability of building a desktop PC and keeping the Pocket Reform as my only laptop. The alternative is to pick up a refurbished enterprise ThinkPad, I guess — they have great compatibility and durability.
  • Mr Three had his first go on the computer with me. We looked at planets using the free and open source astronomy software Gaia Sky. He loved it, and also found it hysterically funny that we could speed up the simulation and watch the planets spin multiple times a second.

Links

  • Interesting recent podcasts (#425 and #427) from This Machine Kills about extractive industry.
  • I'm amused that after all their high-minded rhetoric about building the future of humanity, OpenAI, running scared that this is all a bubble, have announced a pivot to PornGPT.
  • Well-presented showcase of three spooky indies — perhaps I'll treat myself this Halloween.

Reading

The Mechanic and the Luddite by Jathan Sadowski.

Watching

My wife and I are enjoying Celebrity Traitors. If you don't have this show in your country, imagine the game Werewolf, but dragged out over many episodes, interwoven with team tasks and social downtime, to give plenty of opportunities for intrigue. It's super camp (everything is kind of gothic horror themed), but a lot of fun.

Playing

In Silksong I've only got the actual final boss to go.