Quick bits:

• The Infection is still not getting better. Is it getting worse? I can’t even tell.

• Our first Blades in the Dark session ended with us scoundrels taking home quite a nice score, though with accidentally far too much death. Oopsie!

• A thought about AI for software development: the people that claim that AI makes them 10× or even 100× faster… are these developer just incredibly slow at writing software in the first place?

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I got laid off on Wednesday. Oof.

I did not quite come as a surprise. I’ve been in plenty of bad corporate situations before, and the writing was on the wall. This is the first time, however, that I am on the receiving end. I’ve previously only been a “survivor” (if you can even call it that).

In any case: Get me a job in 2025. Refer me to your excellent jobs.

Financially, I am in a safe spot for now, and am applying once more for unemployment benefit. There is a severance package, too, though I am still undecided on whether or not accepting it is a good idea.

The market appears to be more in favor of candidates these days. That’s good news. Hiring seems to be on an upwards trend.

I am so, so tired though. There is the emotional impact of being laid off, for starters. On top of that, there is quite a lot of paperwork, having to deal with the unemployment office, and of course the energy that goes into the job search. (And to think that one of my first reactions was “oh, what am I going to do with all this free time?”)

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There are multiple offices of the Bundesagentur für Arbeit,¹¹1 Federal Employment Agency  and I accidentally went to the wrong one. You would expect the “Agentur für Arbeit Berlin Mitte” to service the Mitte district, but no; it serves only Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. If you live in Mitte, you cannot go to the Mitte office; you have to go to Beuthstraße.

Naming things correctly: always a challenge.

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I have been toying with some visual enhancements to my Solitaire game. Take a look at the new scene transitions:

Smooth. Powered by GLSL. I think I’ve made good progress in understanding shaders.

I still want to rework the entire graphical design of the game. Design literally everything from the ground up. Make something that is visually distinctively me.²²2 Most of the assets come from Kenney’s assets. They are good assets, and without them, I would have not been able to make this game. Kenney: you are a legend for providing so much for free. (I donated!) 

I have put the source code of the game engine up on GitHub. There is no documentation, and it’s not intended as a ready-to-use thing, but I’m publishing it because I myself love to look through other people’s source code.³³3 The source code of any LÖVE game is easy to extract. A LÖVE game is a zip file of the source code and assets, after all. But I think it still makes sense to “officially” publish the source for my engine anyway, so people don’t need to be sneaky about it.  I hope it’s of use to some!

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Entertainment:

• I bought Outer Wilds⁴⁴4 Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital, 2019), published by Annapurna Interactive.  but have not played it yet.

• Slow progress in Twin Peaks.⁵⁵5 Twin Peaks, written by David Lynch and Mark Frost (Lynch/Frost Productions, Propaganda Films, Spelling Entertainment, 1990).  My mind was elsewhere this week. I am also strangely watching it out of order, having started Twin Peaks: The Return⁶⁶6 Twin Peaks: The Return, written by David Lynch and Mark Frost (Showtime Networks, Rancho Rosa Partnership, Twin Peaks Productions, 2017).  while still watching season 2. I don’t know why I am doing this.

  It’s probably quite niche, but check out my Twin Peaks shitposts on Mas­to­don: 1, 2, 3.

• Mubi does not have Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me⁷⁷7 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, directed by David Lynch, written by David Lynch, Robert Engels and Mark Frost (New Line Cinema, CiBy 2000, Lynch/Frost Productions, 1992).  in its catalogue at the moment. How annoying.

• I finally started playing Wasteland 3⁸⁸8 Wasteland 3 (inXile Entertainment, 2020), published by Deep Silver.  but I am struggling to get into it. I think I am facing quest-breaking bugs.

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Links:

• AI Slop (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver)

• Women and the Men Who Write Them (Door Monster)

• Bear 2.4.5: Introducing Callouts: Nice! The markup for these callouts is quite commonplace and I think I’ll replace some of the callouts on my site with this syntax soon too. (A lot of the content on my site is sourced from my Bear setup.)

• The Magnetic Shadow Effect (minutephysics): I have wondered about that myself too!

• Huge model train set discovered under Melbourne house of train engineer: Choo choo!

• Paul Tol’s Notes: Nice color scheme stuff here!

Tech links:

• Fanaka: A handbook for African success in the international software industry

• The Kelp Commons License: I like this a lot. I have been using the Hippocratic License for my own work lately (like ddwww and ddenv) but this might be a good fit, too.