One could really see Christmas coming in, as there were few things going on. At work, we’re looking where I can move in this changed economy, I just hope that I don’t get Peter-Principled…
I’m generally still quite enthused about a lot of the computing themes that I’ve always been into, but it seems the Venn diagram where this overlaps with the currently hot “money-making” items has grown a lot smaller. At first I thought it’s aging out, but it’s not like musical tastes where one might get stuck to what they listened in their “prime”. It’s not like the younger devs are all into setting up cloud-native microservices and adding whitespace to their UIs.
I think I just got very luck for a long while, where my particular view of “hobby-level” computing was close enough (I mean, I’m not doing Java for fun, but it’s closer than doing YAML). A lot of hobbyists errored out earlier, if you’re all into electrical engineering, assembly and 2D gamedev, there wasn’t a lot for you in the last 20 years already. I’m not that much of an one-trick pony, so it will be an interesting journey…
But hey, at least I managed to write a small blog article here, which is progress. While writing about social media, I got quite fascinated about the topic of web fora again, maybe that’s something I’ll look more deeply into.
Health #
Hey, we globally agreed that the holiday period is basically a extended cheat day.
Media #
I watched two seasons of that Jack Ryan TV series featuring Jim from the Office. I’d say it’s a bit more right-wing than 24 was, and I don’t remember Ryan being that much of a Special Ops super-agent from the 90s movies. But it’s good background material.
Also re-watching Arcane, as the second season is supposed to be good. But boy, I’m getting quite stressed when that “Skip Intro” button comes one, as it means I really have to hunt my remote control to skip that awful, awful Imagine Dragons song. And the textured animation is still a bit odd to me…
A bit of book-reading, paused the two political books I’m currently “working” on, and got a good way through Senlin Ascends, a fantasy novel with a weird Victorion pseudo-steampunk setup that centers around the Tower of Babel, where each level is weirder than the one before. Feels like an almost Vancian world, but with a detached main character/narrator. I like it this far, and apparently there are a few more novels in that series.
Gaming #
Nothing going on in the tabletop RPG area, as everyone’s on vacation, and I haven’t turned on my gaming computers either. I’ve got a hankering about playing a bit of Fallout 4 again, though, so maybe that’s in the near future.
Consumerism #
Well, Christmas gifts arrived. I’ve splurged a bit this year.
Also bought the new Acorn, as it was discounted and I was in the need for a decent Mac-based image editor that didn’t require a subscription.
Side Projects #
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Pastoral High Fantasy is getting a few neat details due to that ongoing Mastodon “advent calendar” of prompts.
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Working through Rust. Still waiting for the joy to kick in, right now I’m still fighting the furniture.
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My at-work side project is sidelined, as I was finally onboarded to something existing there. And boy, that needs a lot of work…
Links #
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Using Word’s Outline View Properly – This used to be one of the “secret tips” for Word users, and some people really swore by it. Outliners used to be a big thing, but these days I mostly see the TODO-list versions still used (plenty of web apps there), even the Emacs org-mode fiends mostly used it for agendas or the occasional blog post.
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Kanata, a cross-platform keyboard remapper – I still wonder whether I can get a more unified keyboard feel across devices, so this would seem like a good building block. Probably still will fail by Macs doing the CUA keys with Command, while Linux and Windows have to make do with overloading Control for that.