Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2025 W09: Barbara & Kenneth

February 24​–​March 2, 2025

Quick bits:

  • Ramadan Mubarak.

  • I asked Fastmail, my email provider, whether they had plans to set up a data center outside of the US. There are no plans for that, they replied. This is unfortunate. Do I stick with Fastmail, or move elsewhere?

  • At work, the test data for my unit tests now includes the names “Barbara Millicent Roberts” and “Kenneth Sean Carson Jr.” How long will it take for my coworkers to catch on?1

  • I’ve been increasing my coffee intake — I got some nice specialty coffee — but now I find that my skin smells of coffee. Is this normal? Not that I think it’s a problem — just a little… odd?!

My current acting course has come to an end.

I had picked up a new monologue for class about two weeks ago (quite soon before the end of the course) because I felt I was getting diminishing returns working on the previous monologue which worked rather well. This new monologue, though, is considerable trickier, and I wish I had a few more classes to iterate on it. (My goal wasn’t to perform it, by the way — just have it as practice material.)

One thing that I have integrated lately: in a text, every single word matters. Each word needs to be real, as does every sentence and sentence fragment. It can be a ton of work: there is a huge difference between reading a text plus memorizing the words, and to truly understand it. There are no shortcuts.

I don’t have anything else lined up just yet! More classes would be good. But perhaps a little break first?

There really is no substitute for acting classes. You can’t learn acting by practicing by yourself, or learning from a book. Maybe the only book that has really been worth it is The Power of the Actor,2 but even that one needs to be put into practice.

Eventually, I’d like to put something on the stage for an audience. But who knows where or when?

Entertainment:

  • I’ve finally made it to the end of the Blood And Wine expansion of The Witcher 33 and achieved the best possible ending. I had to go back and redo the boss fight at Tesham Mutna, which I strangely enough beat quite quickly last time around, but now took me forever. I admit I cheated in the end. But hey, I beat him fair and square the first time around.

  • Slow progress with The Man in the High Castle4 but it’s still a good book.

  • I watched Lost Highway5 for the first time in the theatre. This film might be starting to make sense. Dick Laurent is truly dead now.

    The audience was bizarrely disruptive though — the lowlight being twenty minutes in, some woman in the audience shouted “Don’t be frightened! There will be a murder!”

  • I bought the Space Age DLC for Factorio.6 I’ll try not to let it take over my life.

Links:

Writing links:

Tech links:

  1. Those are Barbie and Ken’s official names! ↩︎

  2. Ivana Chubbuck, The Power of the Actor (East Rutherford: Penguin Publishing Group, 2005). ↩︎

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

  4. Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (New York: Putnam, 1962). ↩︎

  5. Lost Highway, directed by David Lynch, written by David Lynch and Barry Gifford (CiBy 2000, Asymmetrical Productions, Lost Highway Productions, 1997). ↩︎

  6. Factorio (Wube Software, 2020), published by Wube Software. ↩︎

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