What's Up: October 2024

I got COVID right at the end of September^[1], putting me out of commission for about a week. COVID infection and isolation means I’ve been reading less, coding less, going outside less, touching less grass, and being less social.

Now that I’m starting to recover, I’ve been dedicating most of my productive energy towards the final stages of my job search. Outside of the job search I’ve mostly looked at posts; unfortunately my premiere source of posts is no longer in business. I’m not having a very good autumn so far! It stinks because autumn is my favorite season.

Links

• HTML For People: A from-scratch tutorial for how to write HTML. I haven’t read the whole thing but I love what I did read, and I think it’s very approachable for folks looking to start understanding the web.
• DOOM in the iOS Photos App: This is a disgusting, amazing hack to run DOOM via iOS Shortcuts.
• Reblogging posts with h-entry: I love the idea of h-entry, an extremely simple way to make the contents of a post legible and rebloggable. I’ve added support for h-entry and h-card to this site, and will probably build out my own reblog/embed implementation based on Natalie’s.
• Thoughts on Learning: I appreciate Robbie’s perspective on his students using ChatGPT, because it puts some my feeling into words without me having to.

Books

• The Siege of Burning Grass: I found the first act intriguing, most of the book haunting and effecting, and the last stretch flat and stale. If there’s a sequel I’ll probably read it, but I think losing the last 10% or so would make the novel stronger overall.
• Children of Memory: Of Tchaikovsky’s trilogy this is my least favorite (I think each book is slightly less compelling than its predecessor). This is still top-shelf sf though; it feels rare to hit both “compelling hard sci-fi” and “compelling character drama”. If you like spaceships and can stand to read about bugs, I strongly recommend picking up Children of Time and reading the sequels if it hooks you.
• Magic’s Pawn: Gay Wizards are gonna get me through the 2024 Election. I get why people are wild about romantasy, even if this is just “fantasy that has romance.”
• Magic’s Promise: I’m starting to think that it’s not going to go well for the gay wizards.

Comics

• Dragon Ball: The first arc of Dragon Ball has a shocking amount of sexual harassment, which continues as background radiation throughout. Honestly I can’t recommend reading it, even though I loved Toriyama’s art. I’m unsure if I’ll go on to Z, which seems to be the portion that captured pop culture.
• Hunter × Hunter: I’m halfway through the Chimera Ant arc of the anime with my roommate, but I’m isolating with COVID so I can’t watch it with him. I’ve been reading the manga instead and I’ve made it up to Greed Island. Some choppy season 1 anime pacing goes much smoother on the page, but overall I think I might prefer the anime?
• Akane Banashi: Great art, extremely cute, love to see the tropes of a battle manga applied to traditional Japanese theater. The best manga recommendation I’ve gotten since I entered my comics era this year.

TV

• Armored Trooper VOTOMS: I watched the final arc of VOTOMS the first day of my COVID isolation and it did not impress me.
• Haibane Renmei: The first half is a cute angelgirl slice-of-life in an interestingly low-key fantasy setting. My partner and I paused this one because we got COVID, but it seems like the second half is going to have higher stakes and more “plot.” Next time I’ll probably have finished it and can give actual impressions.
• The Haunting of Hill House: We watched this dubbed in French for my partner’s language practice. Sometimes I would start lip-reading the original English using the subtitles which gave me a weird vertigo-like sensation.
  The show itself was fine, good pacing and scary effects. Thematically it almost works, but there are a few major swings missed in the last two episodes. Definitely clears the “better than laying sick in bed” bar.
• Slow Horses, season 1: Brief digression first. Last year my partner and I watched the first three and a half seasons of Person of Interest. I had previously watched just seasons 4 and 5. The politics of that show are honestly disgusting; “anti-terrorist” stories from the 2010s hold up extremely poorly. The events of the last year have probably rendered Person of Interest permanently unwatchable. In contrast, I was pleasantly surprised that Slow Horses is a spy story without being a racist fever dream; instead it’s mostly a workplace drama about having incompetent coworkers and unlikeable bosses.
• Madoka Magika: The lack of spoiler support in semantic HTML or in my blog’s styles will make this one hard to talk about. We’ve watched through episode 7 (though my partner has seen it before), and I’m surprised how obviously sinister Kyubey is from the beginning. I’m also surprised at how slow the pacing is in the first half.

Games

• Tactical Breach Wizards: I started this one right before I got sick. It’s good! For some reason it makes my desktop chug; I think my GPU is dying? The desktop is in a shared space in the apartment so I haven’t been using it for the past two weeks.
• Final Fantasy VI Advance: The only game I’ve been playing because it runs on my laptop and doesn’t require much brainpower. I’m playing on an emulator with the color and sound restoration patches, at the recommendation of a friend with more Final Fantasy experience. ATB is a fun system, it gives more spice to RPG combat than I expected.

Podcasts

• The Prisoner’s Dilemma: A rewatch podcast of The Prisoner. Only one episode out so far, but it’s a good episode.
• Media Club Plus: The cast of Friends at the Table watch/rewatch Hunter × Hunter (2011).
• Blowback Season 5: Blowback is well-produced, well-researched, and universally harrowing. Season 5, which focuses on Cambodia, is no exception.
• Shelved by Genre: Cameron Kunzelman, Michael Lutz, and Austin Walker talking about gay wizards is going to get me through COVID.

Projects

• This website: I’ve revamped the home page and added some slight friendly touches, now that this is my main home on the web. Also, I now have h-entry support! Hell yeah! My next major step will be embed cards so these linkposts will be a little richer.
  • I’m not 100% sure: do I want to use the HTML embeds provided by Mastodon and BlueSky, or do I want to do my own? Their HTML embeds produce very messy markup and rely on injected Javascript for styling. I would probably prefer to have one uniform embed style on my blog…
  • Comments are coming soon™. The options that seem reasonable to me:
    • Use something like CommentBox or Komments. Comments would be injected entirely by scripts, and run by a third party service
    • Include a mailto link for a new email (like comments@) and build some scripts to manage it. Or even just do it manually; I don’t expect to have that much traffic.
    • No comments here, only on Mastodon and BlueSky (this would require cross-posting my blog to the protocol microbloggers, which I feel iffy about).
    • Please do email me at [email protected] if you have an opinion on site comments! Especially if you’ve tried one of my options already!
• Some Obsidian plugins: one to help me with my weekly journal reflection, and one to help me log books as I finish them. They’re on my Github but not at all documented or suitable for other people to use.
• Drowned Isles: The job search pressure has eased somewhat so I’ve been writing again. Nothing I want to show off publicly yet, but enough that I let my friends have a peak.

COVID Rambles

• The receptionist at the urgent care where I got prescribed Paxlovid wasn’t wearing a mask (even though she knew I had COVID). For once I was more worried for the unmasked people around me than I was for myself; I think the KN95 I was wearing protected them adequately though.
• The COVID vaccine bridge program to allow uninsured people to get the vax ended this August. Healthcare policy in the US remains disgusting.
• I dodged both Paxlovid mouth and Paxlovid rebound; my partner got hit by both.