Quick bits:

• This was a relaxed week. I didn’t end up doing much, and that is fine.

• It is not quite obvious, but Radiohead’s Pyramid Song and Daft Punk’s Doin’ It Right have the same rhythm. Just a random observation.

• My neighbors have a new door mat with a clown face on it, and I’m pondering whether or not it is morally correct to steal it and then burn it. There are no cameras that cover it, though I suppose following through with this plan would be a bad idea given that I’ve now written about it in my week­notes. Damn!

• A lifetime struggle of mine has been to get people to pronounce my name properly: Denis is pronounced /dəˈni/ and so the s is silent. For the longest time, I assumed this was because in English, there are no silent letters — but there absolutely are! The p is not pronounced in words like “psychology” and “pterodactyl.” So how come it can be so difficult to get people to pronounce my name correctly?

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I am back from my trip to London. A few random thoughts:

• I went to see the British Library, where Google recommended me that I check out the books. Books? At a library?!

• I unpacked my suitcase and did the laundry quite soon after coming back home. Usually, the suitcase keeps lying around for a day or two until I am tired of it being in the way — not this time though!

• I am the hero of my week­notes, and to follow the archetypical Hero’s Journey, I wish I had titled the three most recent week­notes entries Departure, Initiation, and Return.¹¹¹ Departure, Initiation, and Return are also the titles of the manuscripts in Alan Wake and its sequel.  Ahh well, too late to fix it now!

• It is odd how, after coming back from London, the smell of my flat in Berlin is different from what I remember. For a while, it did not smell like home anymore.

• I saw my first pelican ever, at St. James’s park. They are so pink!

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Coming back from London to Berlin, one thing that stood out as a difference is the quality in signage in public transit stations. London is so much better at this.

• Berlin Hauptbahnhof (main station) is mostly symmetric, and there is a 50% chance that I end up at the wrong side of the station. I usually want to be at the north side, where the trams are, rather than the south side. There is some signage pointing to either Europaplatz or Washingtonplatz, but there just isn’t nearly enough of it.

• At Alexanderplatz, the entrance to the U5 is not signposted well, and I often end up at the wrong side of the tracks. There is signage that is simply missing here: some of it says “U5” but it really should have included the direction (to Hauptbahnhof or to Hönow) as well.

I’ve lived in Berlin for more than a decade, and I still get lost at Hauptbahnhof and Alexanderplatz.

The signage in London is better, in part because there is more of it, but also because it distinguishes between north/southbound and east/westbound: knowing the general direction is, in my opinion, much more useful than knowing the destination.

At least the Berlin U-Bahn has dark mode for its screens now. That’s fancy.

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My tired brain is weird:

• I felt (but resisted) the urge to say “hello” to a train as it pulled into the station.

• I bought a pack of Mentos, then waved it like a magic wand before becoming very self conscious about what I was doing.

Kiddie brain.

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I gave parallelizing Nanoc some more thought. I’d love to make it use multiple cores/CPUs, as doing so would give a nice speed boost, but alas, the options in Ruby are quite limited.

Ruby has a global VM lock (“GVL”) which prevents multiple threads from running in parallel. You can get some benefit of using more than one thread for IO-bound operations, but Nanoc is quite CPU-bound.

I looked into using Ractor for the first time, but alas — it is still experimental. Running any Ractor code prints the following warning:

Ractor is experimental, and the behavior may change in future versions of Ruby!
Also there are many implementation issues.

Koichi Sasada ’s “Ractor reconsidered” talk at RubyKaigi 2023goes into more detail about the current Ractor implementation, but it seems like it might take a while before it is ready to be usable in Nanoc. That is unfortunate.

An alternative would be to use JRuby, which does not have a GVL, but JRuby isn’t great for short-running processes like Nanoc, and it doesn’t solve the problem for the primary Ruby implementation (CRuby).

Blah. I guess parallelizing Nanoc is still a long way away.

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I set up sponsorship on the Nanoc repository on GitHub. It looks like this now:

For a long time, I felt unsure about opening up sponsorship/donations, because I (usually) have a well-paying job already. But you know what? I have worked a lot on Nanoc, and it is absolutely fine to open up ways to financial support the project.

So yeah, you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi!

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Entertainment:

• Poor Things²²² Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, written by Tony McNamara and Alasdair Gray (Element Pictures, Film4, Fruit Tree, 2024).  is an excellent movie. Lanthimos has outdone himself. I became a fan of his work with The Lobster³³³ The Lobster, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, written by Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou (Film4, Bord Scannán na hÉireann / The Irish Film Board, Eurimages, 2015).  and I can’t wait to see what he’ll work on next.

• Only a few more chapters left in Doctor Sleep.⁴⁴⁴ Stephen King, Doctor Sleep (New York: Scribner, 2013). 

• Baldur’s Gate 3⁵⁵⁵ Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios, 2023), published by Larian Studios.  continues to be amazing. I am doing two concurrent play-throughs (one solo, one multiplayer), and both are vastly different.

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Links:

• Why We Can’t Build Better Cities (Philosophy Tube ft. Not Just Bikes)

• Sunken (Venjent): Aww D&B with kitty!

Tech links:

• Searls of Wisdom for January 2024 (Justin Sears). Quote: “And while I don’t regret sharing so much of my work per se, there were undoubtedly other things I could have been doing with my time that I didn’t consider when I first ran git push or npm publish. I’m just finally realizing that my propensity for freely sharing my work has often cost me more than I bargained for in the long run.”

• 100 things you can do on your personal website (James G.): Neat! Also read Robb Knight’s follow-up, More Things You Can Do on Your Website.