Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2024 W52: On hold

December 23​–​29, 2024

Quick bits:

  • Merry Xmas for those who celebrate! I spent my time with friends, wasting spending a few hours on GeoGuessr pretending that every place name in the world is pronounced as if it’s Finnish. Savannah Perkele, am I right?!

    I am also reminded that, just like last year, I haven’t been to any Xmas markets this year.

  • Merry Ruby 3.4 release day for those who celebrate!

    I also haven’t been to any Ruby markets this year. Now wouldn’t that be something?!

  • It is still a few days until the start of 2025, but there already seems to be a low-key but constant stream of fireworks in Berlin. This morning, I got woken up at 5 AM by fireworks. Why?!

  • Isn’t it interesting how 3D film just sort of… disappeared? I’m not sure why I was thinking about that this week. I certainly don’t miss 3D films. Technically 3D films are still being made but I’m not sure they’re all that popular — I haven’t been in cinemas that screen 3D films lately.1

  • I reached a 500-day Duolingo streak! My Spanish is still, unfortunately, rather mierda.

  • I gave myself a haircut. My Braun hair clipper is on its last legs, but works just about enough for a single haircut.

  • My 2024 Year In Review is making slow progress. I’ve got a few more days!

  • I’ve signed up for continued acting classes. Up and to the right!

Shower thoughts:

  • Why can a notebook never finish a race? Because it’s stationery.2

I’ve put D★Scribe on hold for now.

  • Writing rich text editors is painful. I’ve played with both ProseMirror and Lexical, but none of them are satisfying to work with. HTML, CSS and JavaScript just don’t make for a good-enough platform for writing text editors or word processors in, especially not ones that are off the beaten path.

  • Making a JavaScript/Electron app work well on macOS is, to no-one’s surprise, a lot of work, and some things are just not quite possible. At least Electron is mature; Tauri and Wails are too limited to be an option.

  • Creating a tree view (akin to a NSOutlineView) is incredibly difficult, especially when considering drag-and-drop support. There aren’t any good pre-made libraries for this, surprisingly.

  • JavaScript applications are still remarkably slow, with visible loading delays — even on a high-performing MacBook Air M2, and even when being careful to implement things efficiently.

  • Electron started crashing on me regularly. I’ve given Xcode flak for being unstable, but Electron deserves it too.

I thought about restarting the project with AppKit (maybe with some parts in SwiftUI). But you know what? I don’t really need this project: Scrivener is just fine. I’ve got my gripes with it, and I think a structured prose editor alternative to Scrivener still makes sense, but I think it really isn’t worth my time investment.

I want to do the things that I was working on D★Scribe for. Write fiction! Continue with my interpreter book! I can do those things just fine with Scrivener.

It feels good to put D★Scribe on hold, actually. It now feels like this whole project was a detour3 from what I really wanted to do: write. So that is what I will do.

I’ve come to realize that plenty of the software I write is related to writing and publishing. Most famously, there is Nanoc, but also D★Mark and of course D★Scribe.

It makes me wonder whether it makes sense for me to properly lean into my writing-and-publishing interests, and see what other ideas I can come up with. The aforementioned projects are not end goals in and of themselves, but stepping stones to improving the way I write and publish (and edit, and collect ideas, and format, etc). There’s definitely more where that came from.

Entertainment:

  • I’ve dropped ELEX.4 It’s just not worth it. Not engaging enough by far, and I’ve got better ways to spend my time.

  • In my frustration to play an RPG with an engaging setting, relatable characters, and an interesting storyline, I once again picked up The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt5 in New Game + mode. But this would be my third playthrough, and I’m just not quite feeling it — so I abandoned it, too. I’m curious about the recent story mods, though.

  • Dead Ringers6 is haunting and has only a smidge of body horror in it.

  • Close7 is an interesting movie. It’s well directed and well acted, though it isn’t much more than a (rough) emotional journey. I feel the film doesn’t quite do justice to what grief really is. Having lost two friends on two separate occasions in high school, I know what teen grief is like: vast and deep and life-changing. There is only so much that you can show in a two-hour film, of course, but in my opinion, there needed to be more of an exploration of how grief is handled. Otherwise, it’s just emotional wankery.

Links:

Entertainment links:

Tech links:

  1. The same was true for 48fps too, I suppose, though it was far less of a Thing. ↩︎

  2. Yeah, this one definitely works better when said out loud rather than written down. ↩︎

  3. A yak shave! ↩︎

  4. ELEX (Piranha Bytes, 2017), published by THQ Nordic. ↩︎

  5. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red, 2015), published by CD Projekt. ↩︎

  6. Dead Ringers, directed by David Cronenberg, written by David Cronenberg, Norman Snider and Bari Wood (Téléfilm Canada, Mantle Clinic II, 1988). ↩︎

  7. Close, directed by Lukas Dhont, written by Lukas Dhont and Angelo Tijssens (Menuet bvba, Diaphana Distribution, Topkapi Films, 2022). ↩︎

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