Quick bits:

• A man was murdered a short walk from where I live. Yikes.

• In better news, the pair of swans that often hang out in my area have a cygnet now. So adorable!

• My mom got the gutter at her house cleaned. It is probably confirmation bias, but literally everyone is cleaning their gutters these days! I have no gutter and I’m missing out.

• I installed some custom software packages on my Kobo Libra 2, then realized I didn’t like any of them. When I went back to the built-in software, I found everything reset. All my reading stats gone. Ugh. Why did I do this?

• I am so used to writing footnotes (or sidenotes) that I’ve started using them in my WhatsApp messages.¹¹1 Not sorry.  There is no helping me anymore.

• I accidentally uninstalled restic two months ago, and have thus not had working restic backups since. The thing about automated tools is that it’s not always clear when they stop working. I’ve now updated my backup script to alert me when backups fail consistently for a while.

• Early last year, I wrote about my weird official address according to the Belgian government: Denis Defreyne, Germany, 1202 Berlin. Despite that being a nonsensical address (no street, wrong post code, country before city), I received physical mail at that address yesterday. Wild that that works.²²2 I’ll accept post cards, if anyone’s willing to test how reliable the delivery to this bizarre address is. 

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I’ve got a job! I have signed an employment contract, and will be starting on August 1st.

Despite that date being over two weeks away, I find myself wondering whether it is worth starting any new creative projects. Of course there are plenty of things that I can still do in this in-between time.

I’ve got high hopes for my new employment opportunity. Zero red flags — unlike so many other companies I’ve interviewed at. Could this genuinely be the job I’ve been looking for, for years?

This is a fully remote role, and that fact is written properly and extensively into the employment contract. This is unlike that other potential employer whose contract I refused to sign because it required me to be full-time on-site, and not even in Berlin. It is refreshing to see an employment contract that is written with remote work in mind.

As an aside —  remember how job interviews used to be in person? I am so glad that that is a thing of the past.

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In less good news, I had a bike crash on Wednesday. I was cycling next to a car, and the driver was about to turn right as I was going straight ahead. The driver did not see me, and I braked and slipped on the wet ground, and landed on the asphalt.

I’m physically mostly fine — bruises and scrapes, but nothing broken. The ambulance and police arrived, and a dozen of bystanders were at the scene of the accident. It looked a lot worse than it was, especially when the paramedics put me on the spinal board.

The bystanders (wisely) told me not to move as I was lying on the ground, because the shock of the crash makes one unable to properly assess the situation, and so I was taken to the hospital perhaps more as a precaution or due diligence. And sure enough, even though I at first felt fine apart from the nasty scrape on my elbow, after an hour or so I started to notice the pain from the bruises elsewhere: elbow, shoulder, hip, and ankle.

Ironically, the hospital’s A&E department is about 200m from the crash site, which made for a very short ambulance ride.

All in all, I got very lucky; this could have ended far worse, especially considering I ended up in front of the car.

My trusty Brompton bike is entirely fine, too. But I wonder whether the brakes are in need of adjusting: the brakes work extraordinarily well, and even with tires only a few months old, I tend to slip when I brake hard. That is how I crashed my bike when I narrowly avoided a police car earlier this year.

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I did not let this accident stop me, and the next day I was on my bike again, but on the way to the embassy to pick up my new ID card, I had a second traffic accident: a van turned right as I was going straight, and I ended up smashing into the side of the van. Uurrgghhh.

I had a panic attack in the middle of the intersection. A few people came to help and led me to the sidewalk and sat with me for a while.³³3 When I started to feel better, a person who had been helping me out, a Black woman, suggested that she walk with me for a while, and so we walked to the embassy together. I can’t overstate how helpful it was to not be alone in that situation. On the microscopic chance that you are reading this, dear person who walked with me: you are a truly magnificent human being. 

There is a big question that I need to properly figure out: how does one properly avoid the blind spots of cars and vans? I overheard the drivers of both the car and the van say that they did not see me. I am struggling to understand why — the van driver should’ve seen me in the side mirror, and the car driver should’ve seen me as I was cycling right next to the car.

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The next day, on a walk in my area, I stopped by a bakery to grab lunch. As I stepped out, a cyclist going at full speed on the sidewalk slammed into my shoulder. Didn’t even brake.

It is just a bruise, but still — what the heck is going on? Am I fucking invisible this week?!

It annoys me when people cycle on the sidewalk. It is not permitted, and you will get fined for it. But it is a whole other level to be going at full speed on a sidewalk with people on it and thereby endangering⁴⁴4 As a pedestrian, being hit by a bicycle can lead to severe injuries. Death is rare, but possible, and I unfortunately know a case with that most dreadful outcome.  others. It is profoundly irresponsible.

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I’ve shifted my creative energy towards fiction writing once again, putting aside game development for now. Dividing my focus is counterproductive.

When it comes to fiction writing, I struggle with two things in particular.

First, I find it difficult to write larger stories. The longest piece I’ve written is a few thousand words at most. My fiction writing tends to resemble scenes taken from a larger whole, but I can never get to that larger whole. Any attempt at writing larger stories fails, where the plot just becomes incongruent and nonsensical.

I am a fount of inspiration, but the ideas that come out of it are just that — ideas, not stories. Those ideas need to be refined and fleshed out before they become proper stories, and this is something I very much struggle with. The problem isn’t so much with writing as it is with storytelling.

Secondly, I am a visual thinker and I like worldbuilding a great deal. Regular old fiction writing occasionally feels like the wrong medium for the stories I want to tell.

I am continually tempted by scriptwriting, but that has its drawbacks too. A script is never the end result, and it is quite tough to get something made into a film.⁵⁵5 Scriptwriting also feels like a profession that isn’t generally well respected. Case in point: I responded to a call for scripts on Reddit, but my response got downvoted into the negative, while the “just use ChatGPT” comments got the votes.  On the other hand, I have in the past written a short screenplay that was well received, and I think I can do that again.

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Entertainment:

• I finally finished Dishonored 2,⁶⁶6 Dishonored 2 (Arkane Lyon, 2016), published by Bethesda Softworks.  for the second time. The story is a little bland, but the worldbuilding is top notch.

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Links:

• Severance — Season 2 Date Announcement: On January 17th I am going to resubscribe to Apple TV+, I suppose.

• Creativity is the byproduct of work (Robin Rendle)

• Orientalism: Desert Level Music vs Actual Middle-Eastern Music (Farya Faraji)

• Shopify Executive’s Right-Wing Media Website Rails Against Immigrants While Defending a Legally Designated Terrorist Group: Shopify’s right-wing alignment, and especially that of now-COO Nejatian, is one of the reasons why I could not in good conscience stay at that company.⁷⁷7 At onboarding, new employees are instructed to “hold the tension” — in other words, accept what is on the the platform and don’t speak up.  They haven’t improved.

• Why the right is so obsessed with DEI (Garrison Hayes)

Game design links:

• Balatro & Auto Chess (Matthew Gallant)

• How I made a 3D Level in a 2D Game (Spu7Nix): This person is mad.

Tech links:

• Google Chrome makes extra services available to code running on *.google.com (Simon Willison): I am glad that I don’t use Chrome.

• Why do remote meetings suck so much? (Chelsea Troy): Relatable.

• open-and-shut: Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut (Jesse Li): Unhinged.

• Maybe you should store passwords in plaintext (qword): Strangely relatable.