Quick bits:

• The iPhone vehicle motion cues turned itself on while I was on the train the other day. The vehicle motion cues are useless, and I got the feeling they made matters worse for me.

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Shower thoughts:

• Whenever I pour detergent into the washing machine’s dedicated slot, I feel like I’m a laundry bartender.

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I got hit by a car while cycling the other day. The driver said she did not see me,¹¹1 It is always the same fucking thing. They say “I did not see you” when what they really mean is “I did not look” — but saying that would be incriminating.  and told me to shut up and stop acting out. Never in my life have I met such a condescending driver. Urrghhhh.

I hated the situation so much that I wanted to get out of it ASAP, and so I did not take the driver’s details. This was a mistake, as my Brompton bike got damaged when I crashed onto the asphalt.

A few days later, I got very nearly right-hooked by a car whose driver did not bother to use their turning signal. I was definitely not in the car’s blind spot, either.

Later that day, as I was walking through the green pedestrian light, a motorcycle ran the red light, flew through the intersection and slammed the brakes shut to stop right in front of me. This was on a road with a 30km/h (20mph) speed limit, too — but that’s mostly theoretical, as many drivers go twice the permitted speed.

I hate the traffic in this city.²²2 Berlin, Germany, in case you were wondering. 

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I created a prose editor prototype. This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a while. Here are a few ways that I envisioned marking up different element types:

Unfortunately, in ProseMirror, nested marks aren’t converted to HTML the way I would like, which means I can e.g. either support nesting links inside emphasis or the other way around, but not both. I think this is a deal breaker. I might play around with Lexical and see whether I can create a prototype with that.

I am reminded that a few years ago (before I started writing my week­notes), I was working on an alternative concept to traditional spreadsheets. Before that, I had an alternative concept for a presentation program in mind. Perhaps I am destined to rethink all Microsoft Office³³3 It’s called “Microsoft 365” these days, I suppose. Makes me wonder about leap years — “Microsoft 366,” anyone? Though I suppose you could always use Microsoft Office at home, too, and “Microsoft Home” sounds rather dystopian.  products.

Still, creating GUI prototypes is a lot of work. Creating production-ready GUI programs is even worse; reliable, long-lived and mature JavaScript-based frameworks are hard to come by. I could use native GUI frameworks, perhaps, but I am not super keen on using AppKit and/or SwiftUI.⁴⁴4 SwiftUI is too new and not powerful enough, and AppKit seems to be on its way out. What is the way forward with macOS GUI development? 

In the mean time, I’ve been giving Solid a try. Here’s a mockup of some sort of word processor running in Firefox:

I’m not sure whether I’ll continue with it. The thought of having to figure out how to implement drag-and-drop in the tree list in the sidebar fills me with dread.

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Entertainment:

• I finished Half Life 2⁵⁵5 Half Life 2 (Valve, 2004), published by Valve.  episode 2. That ending is quite the cliffhanger! All I have to do now is wait for episode 3 to come out, right? Right?!

• I went to see Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe⁶⁶6 Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe, directed by Robert Lepage (2024).  with J and I found it to be severely lacking.

  Its problems stem from remarkably bad writing. There is no subtlety, no subtext. The characters are flat and unrelatable. There are setups without payoffs, and payoffs that fall flat because they’re not earned.

  For example: The play opens at monastery in the 1950 in West Germany. A Black baby girl is abandoned at a baby hatch by an unknown man. It is definitely a compelling opening — a premise rife with potential.

  And yet, there is barely anything of interest that happens to this character. She grows up, moves to France where she is discovered by a photographer and ends up on the catwalk as a model. We never learn anything about her hopes and dreams, her wants and needs. She does not make meaningful life choices herself, and the path of her life is chosen by the people around her.⁷⁷7 The white people around her, in case you had any doubts.  She has no agency, and the play suggests that her only value is her good exotic looks for others to gawk at on the catwalk — a development that is, at best, uncomfortable.

  As a grown woman, she eventually ends up running a charity to collect money for orphaned children. This made for such a boring story. It is also problematic: this story reinforces the archaic and sexist notion that the burden of care needs to fall onto women.

  Also problematic is the scene of a psychotherapist with their patient. The therapist in this scene is remarkably cold and unprofessional; if I had gotten such a therapist in real life, I would probably walk right out.⁸⁸8 It is true that in reality, there are such cold and unprofessional therapists. But it behooves us as entertainers to — at the very least — not mock taboo topics.  Trauma and homosexuality is also used as the butt of a joke, in stilted, cringey dialogue that exists only for the comedic effect on the audience. Not okay.

  This whole play seemed to be so afraid of being even remotely perceived as transgressive that it stuck strictly to the most well-trodden paths, using the most stereotypical characters and story events. It was easy watching, with nothing even remotely challenging for the audience. And, because it chose such a traditional path, it ended up (no doubt unintentionally by the creators) as low-key sexist, racist, and homophobic.

  At least it was visually very well executed. The staging and choreography was top notch.

  But that is just not enough.

  Verdict: ★★☆☆☆ — Impressive staging and choreography fails to compensate for frustratingly bad writing.

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Links:

• How much thrust does a ceiling fan produce? (Technology Connections): Asking the important questions.

• [V2] Windows 95 startup sound pitched over surrealist landscapes (Sapphire): Delightful!

• This Is The Largest Vehicle On Earth. But Why Was It Built? (The Tim Traveler): It is very big.

• LED Christmas lights which don’t hurt the eyes: it finally happened! (Technology Connections): I am so happy for Alec!

Entertainment links:

• How speedrunners beat Half-Life 2 in under 38 minutes (SPEEDRUN EXPLAINED - Any% No Voidclip) (tomatoanus): Amazing.

• Why does everyone sing it like THAT? (Adam Neely): Cod in the minnow, indeed.

Tech links:

• Mixed-type arithmetic in C (Luna’s Blog): Cursed. It took me a while to figure out why that second one worked.

• Full-bleed layout with modern CSS (Temani Afif, CSS Tip): Neat!

• Beyond Bcrypt (Soatok): I too thought that bcrypt was the state of the art still. Technology evolves!

• An Obvious Statement About Open Source (Christopher Neugebauer)

• Why Can’t We Make Simple Software? (Peter van Hardenberg): It is a simple question, with a complex answer that I keep forgetting is complex.

• If Not React, Then What? (Alex Russell)