At work, it’s performance review week, and I have realized I am extremely good at procrastinating. On paper, it might look like it would only take maybe an hour to complete all the reviews assigned to me, but I must have spent hours and hours doing anything but writing performance reviews.

I don’t know why this happens. I genuinely have good intentions. I don’t even know what happened in those hours of not writing performance reviews. Those hours just… disappear. They’re gone. I have no memory of what happened. All I remember is that time passes instantly and I feel exhausted and thoroughly unsatisfied.

Perhaps I have invented a very strange, a very bad, and very useless one-directional time traveling method.

It is, of course, hilariously ironic that my own performance has hit an all-time low during performance week.

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At work, I’ve shared some excerpts from a handbook for how to work together effectively:

Oh sorry, did I say working together effectively? I meant ineffectively — this is, after all, an excerpt from the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual. It’s from the 1940s, but I’ve worked at a company or two that seemed to use it a little too much as a guidebook.

Perhaps it is because we’re still at war with the nazis.

Also, the manual taught me a new word: Quisling.

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I’ve had almost no time for any side project work this week. My emails are piling up. Help.

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I planned to attend the Berlin Writers’ Stammtisch for the first time, but it was late in the day and the weather was cold and I was tired (etc), so I skipped.

I’m hoping that when the weather is better, I’ll manage to convince myself to go.

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Justine nerd-sniped us into figuring out the shape created by the intersection of three perpendicular cylinders. It’s not a trivial shape, but we managed to get a good idea without looking it up on The Internet, and only when I got home I recreated the shape in Blender. Here’s what it looks like:

Blender crashed eight times while creating that, and it was around midnight, so that’s my excuse for it not looking any better.

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I posted my latest article on dev.to. I think dev.to might be a decent place to post stuff so that it gains a bit of a wider audience outside of my personal web site. We’ll see!

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Did Wikipedia get a slight redesign? Consider me a fan! The always-present table of contents looks great.

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I’ve been buying a few books the last few weeks, and I’ve got opinions on everything but the content:

• Two of those books are from Apress. When I picked up the first book, I was struck by how ugly the interior design is. Describing it as “an awkward book size” and “inconsistent font faces, font shapes, and font sizes” doesn’t quite explain how ugly the design actually is. The second book is exactly the same, from which I can only conclude that Apress’ book design simply is consistently ugly — ugly to the point that I struggle to bring myself to read the books at all.

• I also bought a physical copy of the Staff Engineer book. The bizarre thing about the physical copy is that the even page numbers are the recto pages, and the verso pages are the odd page numbers. As a result, chapters confusingly and unconventionally start on the verso page, rather than the recto page. Additionally, the page headings don’t include chapter or section titles, which makes the book even more difficult to read.

All this makes me appreciate good book design, and makes me realize how good book design is remarkably nontrivial.

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Entertainment:

• I picked up Fallout New Vegas again. I played through it twice, but felt so compelled to pick up this excellent game again. For my character, I picked the name “Alain Peeters” which is about the most random Belgian name I could come up.

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Links:

• Encouraging the Young to Die - The Most Toxic Site I’ve Ever Seen (Tantacrul): Content warning for suicide and online abuse. This was tough to watch, but eye-opening. Consider skipping this video if you’re unsure.

• Interpreting Superheroes as Monsters (Sophie from Mars)

• Team America World Police: MCU / Copaganda Episode 6 (Skip Intro)