Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2025 W07: Street of Darkness

February 10​–​16, 2025

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.

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!

In Germany, films get retitled, and the result is often not great. I recently found out that Mulholland Drive1 is titled Straße der Finsternis (lit. “Street of Darkness”), and Inland Empire2 is titled Eine Frau in Schwierigkeiten (lit “A Woman in Trouble”).

This bothers me a lot. Just imagine:

The poster for the film Mulholland Drive, but the title has been replaced by “Street of Darkness.”

No.

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.3

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.

Entertainment:

  • The expansions of The Witcher 34 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 Caretaker5 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 Empire6 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.

Links:

Entertainment links:

Silly links:

Tech links:

  1. Mulholland Dr., written and directed by David Lynch (Les Films Alain Sarde, Asymmetrical Productions, Babbo Inc., 2001). ↩︎

  2. Inland Empire, written and directed by David Lynch (StudioCanal, Camerimage Festival, Tumult Foundation, 2007). ↩︎

  3. 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. ↩︎

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

  5. 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. ↩︎

  6. Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire: Mistborn Book One (London: Gollancz, 2009). ↩︎

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