Updates and links in this one, hooray.

Happenings

  • Despite my moaning in a previous post, I did manage to get my Christmas shopping done relatively painlessly in the end.
  • More family illness. I went down with another cold, and my littlest has diarrhoea, so that’s been swell. I’m pretty much recovered now though.
  • Despite his illness, my littlest found his dancing feet today, to the sounds of the Beatles. He was absolutely delighted, and so were we.
  • My old man came round for some more FF7 action, after not having played for a few months. It was pretty good. We wandered around the deck of the cargo ship for a long time before figuring out how to trigger the first battle with Jenova. Considering his age and the fact he hadn’t played for months he did pretty well against Jenova!
  • Trying to figure out what to do with my KOreader highlights, which get highlighted and then often never seen again. The obvious thing would be Readwise, which KOreader can upload to. But that costs money, and IDK, highlights can be pretty personal; I don’t really want to upload them to a third-party service. More tempting is to just output the highlights to Markdown. This should make them immediately available on my computer thanks to having Syncthing on my ereader. Then I can look at perhaps sending myself a daily email with a random highlight or something.
  • I’ve been tweaking my Neovim configuration, which I can happily say I rarely do now. I added the aerial.nvim plugin, which gives a handy outline of the file (for markdown, that’s headings, for code it’s functions and classes etc), updated a few plugins, removed a few, and tweaked my lazy loading. I also added hardtime, a plugin that scolds you for inefficient vim habits, which is fun. And annoying.
  • It’s data week, which means a glut of marking and data entry. I don’t mind the task of marking, because I do actually care how my students are doing. I just don’t like how much time it eats up. Could be worse though — I could be an English teacher.

Links

  • Mani Was The Sound Of Solidarity. Stone Roses and Primal Scream bassist Mani died this weak aged 63. The Stone Roses’ eponymous debut album is one of my all-time favourites, and I learned many of Mani’s great basslines from it. Incredible player.
  • Speaking of bass, I was delighted today to find that studybass.com, the site where I learned the fundamentals of bass playing and music theory, is still going 18 years later and still free.
  • A shrine to Elite, a core game from my childhood, which I used to play on Acorn. Fully documented source code, over 130 in-depth articles about every aspect of its design and engineering, and several versions of the game fully playable in the browser. This <200kb space trading game featured 8 galaxies, each with 256 unique star systems. How did they do it? They generated the game’s universe at runtime rather than storing it on disk! A real technical marvel for its day.
  • I ordered this book from the extremely niche genre of “supplementary materials for video games that don’t actually exist in any form”.
  • Chomsky Is A Scumbag. Noam Chomsky revolutionised linguistics and taught lots of us how US imperialism and liberal propaganda function (I’m also aware he has at times been dead wrong, often too sceptical of Western media’s accounts of enemy atrocities). Unfortunately, he seems to have been buddies with a whole bunch of creeps and sex offenders, most notably Jeffrey fucking Epstein.

Reading

Started reading the novel of Metro 2033 having enjoyed the game based upon it. So far so good; there’s a lot of “As you know…” exposition but the world-building is fantastic.