Weeknotes 2022 W11: Skull book

March 14​–​20, 2022
800 words

This week, my larger team went on an offsite, which I decided not to attend; COVID-19 cases in Germany are at an all-time high, thus attending an in-person event in Germany with close to 100 people seemed unwise. This made work this week particularly slow, as there were few people around to collaborate with on ongoing projects.

Bizarrely, with COVID-19 cases at an all-time high and no significant decline in deaths, the German government dropped COVID-19 measures. I’m lost for words.

I made a loaf of sourdough bread for Tom and Alicia. It’s one of the prettiest loaves I’ve made to date. Tom said it was “very very good.”

As I’ve been tweeting about NFTs and crypto a bit, my Twitter ads have made a strong pivot towards all things crypto. I get scammy ads for new coins like ApeCoin (which apparently immediately tanked in price after it launched) and super dodgy Bored Ape NFTs from accounts with less than a dozen followers.

I’ve drafted up an article that explains the concept of modal lexers. Such lexers are useful for dealing with nested comments and interpolated strings, like println("total: ${numbers.sum}"). Writing a lexer for that isn’t trivial, but not too difficult either. Hopefully, this article won’t end up in draft limbo, like so many other of my articles have.

The article on implementing equality in Ruby hasn’t made progress, as I’m waiting for feedback still.

I rewatched The Hard Parts of Open Source (Evan Czaplicki, 2018). It tackles the (tough) topic of patterns of conflict in online communities. I watched this soon after it came out. It’s still relevant — in fact, it might more relevant than ever.

In the last few years, online communities have shifted even more towards synchronous communication. Slack and Discord dominate. Responses need first and foremost to be quick, or the conversation moves on.

I miss old-school message boards. They were good. You’d write a coherent post or reply, in full sentences, with a quick bit of proofreading before posting. They had threaded conversations way before Slack re-invented them. Moderation was far more effective, being able to lock threads, or move them between topics.

Old-school message boards still exist. Nanoc still has an old-school mailing list. GitHub’s Discussions feature is the reincarnation of an old-school message board, even though I’ve barely seen it in use.

I picked up The Witcher 3, played it for 10 minutes, got bored, went back to, uh, playing Cyberpunk 2077. This probably sounds strange given that I’ve complained a lot about Cyberpunk 2077 being terribly buggy and lacking immersion. I don’t understand myself.

It would be out of character for me to mention Cyberpunk 2077 without complaining about it, so let me fix that. Cyberpunk 2077 is unrealistic because you can buy multiple apartments. What kind of utopia is this?!

I also picked up some new content for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. The new content ties the two games together, albeit very loosely. Odyssey is still by far my favorite in the series. And oh look, it’s Assassin‘s Creed Odyssey is 75% off on Steam right now! I don’t even get paid for writing this!

My Wordle streak ended twice this week, after failing to guess cater and allow. Both words had too many options, which is hard to recover from on hard mode.

I bought a hardcover copy of the Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James. It’s available for free at Standard Ebooks, but I wanted a physical copy. Last week (see Week­notes 2022 W10: Distress), I wrote about my struggle to find good books to read, but this collection of short stories is satisfying my need so far. I picked up the writing of M. R. James after Jonathan Sims mentioned James being one of his favorite writers in the Q&A for The Magnus Archives season 1. Now my coffee table has a book with a skull on it. It is delightfully classy.

Here are some links to noteworthy articles and videos:

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