Quick bits:

• I felt under the weather near the end of the week, and had to skip some commitments, including my acting class. Bleh.

• My sourdough starter isn’t doing well. It’s barely bubbly. Did I kill it by accident?

• I overslept big time the other day, waking up around 10:30, having slept through my first work meeting. It’s very unusual for me to oversleep.

• As I was about to replace the lightbulb in my floor lamp which hadn’t been functioning for months, it occurred to me to check whether it was plugged in. It was not. Plugging it in made it work. Your boy Denis is an absolute genius.

• I have returned the broken Hario V60 Metal Drip Scale (which I wrote about last week) but the store, which is primarily a café, wasn’t quite able to get me a refund then and there. The saga continues for now.

• Fuck cancer.

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Shower thoughts:

• Did you know that male cats have nipples too — between 4 and 10, even? That’s a lot of nipples for male cats. The ideal number would be zero, because nipples are pointless, but hey, someone else did the design on these bodies.

• So much stuff in life is vegan. I wonder how much of a markup you could charge by branding random stuff as “vegan.” Vegan lightbulbs. Vegan apples. Vegan, erm, cardboard!

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In Germany, films get retitled, and the result is often not great. I recently found out that Mulholland Drive¹¹1 Mulholland Dr., written and directed by David Lynch (Les Films Alain Sarde, Asymmetrical Productions, Babbo Inc., 2001).  is titled Straße der Finsternis (lit. “Street of Darkness”), and Inland Empire²²2 Inland Empire, written and directed by David Lynch (StudioCanal, Camerimage Festival, Tumult Foundation, 2007).  is titled Eine Frau in Schwierigkeiten (lit “A Woman in Trouble”).

This bothers me a lot. Just imagine:

No.

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TomatenMark now has a well-tested, properly functioning parser. I’ve tested it out by converting one of my articles from D★Mark to TomatenMark and sticking it in Scrivener. It works like a charm, and so now I finally have a workflow to use Scrivener with a markup language that isn’t as limiting as Markdown.

The implementation of TomatenMark is still entirely in Ruby. I was considering using something else (Rust, Go, Zig, Crystal, …) but Ruby is still incredibly convenient, and I would’ve needed some sort of Ruby integration anyway, as this web site is built with Nanoc, which is a Ruby tool. A command-line tool wouldn’t quite work either; spinning up a separate process would be too slow.³³3 Adding concurrency or even parallelism to Nanoc would certainly help here, but it’s far from trivial: see Nanoc’s lack of parallelism slows down compilation for details. 

Next up could be releasing TomatenMark as a library, and perhaps creating a web site for it, with full documentation. There is no rush for any of that, though, as I’ve created TomatenMark primarily for myself, not for others.

Which brings me to the real point of having created TomatenMark: Writing the operator precedence parsing article. I can finally start putting thought into that.

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Entertainment:

• The expansions of The Witcher 3⁴⁴4 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt Red, 2015), published by CD Projekt.  are so worth it. In terms of storytelling and atmosphere, they are a distinct step up from the base game. Also: the fight with the Caretaker⁵⁵5 I (obviously) don’t mean James Leyland Kirby, though I am now curious who of us would win in a fight. Hmm! I think I’d yield within seconds because James Leyland Kirby is too awesome to fight.  has the most Dark Souls vibes of all boss fights.

  My installation of The Witcher 3 keeps getting corrupted, though. After a few hours it starts crashing again, and I have to use the “repair game files” functionality to get it to work properly.

• I’m about 20% through The Final Empire⁶⁶6 Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire: Mistborn Book One (London: Gollancz, 2009).  and I’m not hooked. I need something else; I’m bored with it.

  I am beginning to understand what my preference in stories is. I need stories to have a some sort of meaning. Stories with political or sociological commentary; stories that discuss morality and the complicated nature of good and evil, perhaps. Never on the nose, though; just enough to make you think and feel.

  The Final Empire has none of that. It’s pure escapism; a retreat from the real world into a much more straightforward fantasy. This isn’t necessarily bad, but it just doesn’t work for me. So I’m putting the book down.

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Links:

• Write newsletters like an email (Buttondown newsletter)

• Resist Authoritarianism by Refusing to Obey in Advance (Timothy Snyder)

• Atkinson Hyperlegible Font: It’s a good font, which has received an update in 2025, with more weights and a monospace version. Neat!

• The hardest working font in Manhattan (Marcin Wichary)

• As a nonsense phrase of shady provenance makes the rounds, Elsevier defends its use (Retraction Watch): Amazing!

Entertainment links:

• The State of Star Trek (Jessie Gender): It’s not looking very good.

• GameFontLibrary: Games! And fonts! Games and fonts!!!

• How To Fix the Harry Potter BOOKS (My Little Thought Tree): Insightful! A video essay of over three hours in length, but worth it.

Silly links:

• Star Trek TNG Theme but the theme is coming from the Enterprise-D (Craven In Outer Space)

• I Leaked Your Personal Data at NAMM 😬 (Benn Jordan)

Tech links:

• Tech continues to be political (Miriam Suzanne)

• We stay strong against hate and hatred (Codeberg): I’m considering using Codeberg as my default place to host my code. It’s a good place! GitHub has recently put Copilot front and center, and I’m so tired of it.

• The Beauty of Finished Software (Jose M. Gilgado): Yes!

• Fast Software, the Best Software (Craig Mod)