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This is scrawlspace. I scrawl in this space. Do not expect coherence or permanence here.
I got around to finishing Metroid Prime Remastered. I ended up sitting on the Ridley fight (this isnāt a spoiler; if itās a Metroid game, and Ridley shows up, thereās probably gonna be a Ridley fight) and the final-boss fight for several weekends, as one does when he has all sorts of other things competing for his time and attention on the weekend.
Iām really not the kind of person who seems to enjoy wandering around anymore. I got super duper mega lost in Metroid II: Return of Samus, even going as so wrong as to try backtracking to previous levels down the central tunnel, but these days Iām satisfied to just follow a walkthrough for most of the game. In-game time ended up being 20 hours or so, giving me a helmet-off ending. I most emphatically did not finish scanning every single enemy, so thereās an extra-good ending that Iām going to have to look up on the Internet that was recorded by someone whoās way better, or at least persistent, at video games than I am.
I wonder how Iāll end up playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I enjoyed wandering around Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, but I donāt think the new game will be quite as freeform as the previous one and I donāt have the free time that I used to to just wander around Hyrule and do stuff.
Iām still very much tempted to try and postpone getting into Tears of the Kingdom until some DLC comes out for it. Breath of the Wild had great DLC (many of the outfits and definitely the Travel Medallion), and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity had a number of great quality-of-life improvements in its DLC, including making baked apples purchasable and adding in extra-hard enemies that could be farmed for stuff. Oh, and that Ancient bo/nunchaku thing was just plain fun.
The only question is āwhat would I play until the DLC comes out?ā. Thereās a 2D Metroid out that was released on the Game Boy with the L and R buttons. I could play that. Because itās emulated, I could savescum my way through it and get the experience well enough, although after not completely falling in love with both Metroids Prime and Dread Iām not sure itāll capture my attention for that long.
All that said, I probably have 4ā³ of books that I want to go through, and a couple of them are at least as brain-bendy as _A Brief History of Time_, at least according to what I remember.
I was bored today and away from my usual sources of entertainment, so I decided to futz around with my phone.
I ended up going into the Health app to see if thereās anything I could usefully update in the Medical ID screen.
Age is automatically taken care of. Bumped my weight up a bit, since Iām getting fatter. Noticed that thereās a new-to-me āadd primary languageā option that I hadnāt set yet.
Letās see whatās in here, shall we?
āPreferred and regional languagesā include English and Spanish. I wonder if Iād get the same things if I lived closer to Quebec.
Now then. Now for the āAll spoken languagesā listā¦
Iāve heard of that one.
ā®
Huh. Didnāt remember this one being written in a script that looks like katakana.
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Looks familiar.
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OK, now this is getting pretty indie. I wonder if we can go indier.
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Probably just about as indie.
ā®
Perfect.
ā®
This is a step back from indieness but I figured the only not-Mandarin dialect Iād see in this list would be Cantonese. Not my best guess.
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I thought about setting the option to āLojbanā, but on second thought I donāt want to send paramedics on a snipe hunt for an interpreter when Iām unconscious and can barely manage anything more than ācoi rodoā anyway.
AirPods have an option on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS to automatically connect to playing devices. This means that if you stick your AirPods in, whatever gizmo youāre looking at will make your AirPods its default device, with other devices on standby. This sort of thing tends to work decently now that all my Apple gizmos seem to have an idea of which one Iām looking at.
At any rate, I wanted to have something playing while I took a fifteen-minute break to farm dust bunnies from underneath my bed, so I just stuck a pair of AirPods in my ears and squeezed to play.
The winner ended up being my iPad, and it played Mobyās āAloneā, on repeat-one, which was the last thing I was playing from Music on it.
Background information:
Apple Support, āSwitch your AirPods to another deviceā
Iāve been in the process of writing a Metroid Prime Remastered text-only Letās Play, but decided to throw it into the round file. Really, the only interesting thing about it is that the default controls are:
My first reaction, of course, was
AAAAAAAAAA
as this is the opposite, twice over, of what Iāve gotten myself used to playing Breath of the Wild and Splatoon. So I go into the gameās settings and look for a way to swap these and
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
because thereās no way to change this for the default controls (which I guess are tuned for modern-controller FPSs). After slowing down a bit and trying to use slow, deliberate movements to re-train my brain in not one, but two axes, and aim my get-info reticle, I
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
and then I saw a pterodactyl-type thing overhead and wanted to get a better look at it and
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
So yeah, hours of fun. Iām a lot less awful at it now that Iām fighting intact space pirates, but I went back to finish up Majoraās Mask a couple days ago and the controls were superlatively intuitive, like Iād been playing with controls like that for decades. Iām worried that the next time I go back to Tallon IV, Iām in for a lot more
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
because I was deacclimating to up-is-up-and-right-is-right while I was saving Termina from some annoying imp with a mask.
Itās often quite easy to register oneās displeasure with someone elseās idea, but oftentimes orders of magnitude more difficult to craft something that might help him see the error of his ways.
I wanted to update my CV a bit.
From my laptop.
Itās stored on my desktop.
Obviously, something I should be SSHing in for.
Whatād I call that fzf alias? The one I use for changing directories?
Why are all these subdirectories of .git directories showing up in the list?
Finally here.
I already use vim.
I should use something fancier.
Kakoune is a thing.
The text is past the right side because tabs are eight columns in this thing.
Hmm. Argh.
This config file format is inscrutable even with the completion popping up.
I canāt figure out how to set the tab width.
Good thing I use Prettier on this thing anyway.
OK, this seems to help. I couldāve used it fifteen minutes ago:
āThe first two hours of Kakoune in two minutesā
OK, this isnāt awful. Maybe.
Letās try Helix.
Oh right, its themes pretty much all require 24-bit color, so I need to switch to iTerm2.
ā¦Iām already in iTerm2. But over SSH.
OK, ayu isnāt bad.
Right, this thing doesnāt support soft wrapping.
I canāt get it to automatically load the file after I run Prettier in the whole directory.
Whatever, I made the change I was going to make. `git commit -m`, baby.
Which post-Vim editor was the one that showed me lines that were changed in my working copy, again?
(This post was authored in Visual Studio Code.)
Prior reading:
Solderpunk, āDo you even compute, bro?ā
Probably everyone in Geminispace has heard Sturgeonās Law and most can probably recall most of it just from seeing the phrase āSturgeonās Lawā. While ā90% of everything is crapā is the part that everyone knows, whatās lesser known is that heās claimed, rightfully in my view, that the remaining 10% makes science fiction a genre worth the time and attention that it gets.
I think the same is true of computers and bicycle-for-the-mind computing. Most of the time, computers arenāt used for augmenting humans and instead are used for communication tasks of varying levels of importance. However, the times when I pull out the actual mind bicycle ā oftentimes Excel, but not infrequently Ulysses (many people swear by Obsidian instead) ā Iām struck by how these sorts of tasks would break my brain with their difficulty if I were thrown back into the technology level of the early 80s before spreadsheets and āF became common technologies.
So when I read the following in the above-linked article, I could only marvel by how utterly false it was:
But we have to realise and accept that when considering the destructive ecological footprint of the modern computing landscape, *that* kind of personal computing is a tiny fraction of a percent of the whole. To a first order approximation, nobody on Earth does that kind of computing.
Is most computing a distraction from more worthwhile hobbies? Almost certainly. On the other hand, I posit that all independent adults use their computers as bicycles for the mind at least some of the time, and that many independent adults (and more than a few dependents of varying ages) use their computers as bicycles for the mind for most of their workdays and a not-insignificant part of their non-work days where theyāre busy managing their households with tools that are way better than a desk calculator from 1985 and a paper double-entry ledger.
References:
Somehow, I got three issues of CondĆ© Nast Traveler. The first issue is for December 2022, the second is for January/February 2023, and the third is āAn Insiderās Guide to Qatar 2023ā. Not all at once, mind; they dribbled in over the course of months.
The two normal issues turn out to be roughly half ads, by page count. The Qatar issue is either all ad with extra ads, or mostly not-ads, depending on your point of view.
The Editorās Letter for the December 2022 issue was nicely touching. Hereās how it ended:
Wherever you choose to be, I hope you can find a party to your likingāand if thereās none to be had, I encourage you to make your own.
All the normal articles manage to present travel as a flowing, effortless, dreamlike state. Even, to a limited degree, the one about skiing on liftless mountains in Norway (hike up, ski down).
80 pages in, I am struck by the second occurrence of a phrase ā āwhere to see and be seenā. āWhere to go to be seenā is not something I think about much, if at all.
86 pages in, the circulation numbers are listed. Thereās a column for the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding 12 months. In that column, it says there are 702,781 copies in total. 538,105 are paid, while 130,718 were given out free, like this one. On row (i) it says that 80% were paid for.
The January/February 2023 issue has āadvertisementā on the front cover. Iām quite sure how this differs from all the other issues, but I suppose weāll see.
Oh. This front cover is actually fake. Itās attached to the real cover with rubber cement. This underlying cover does not have āadvertisementā on it, so I suppose the whole thing contains the normal amount of advertising in it.
I had thought that advertisements with lots of body copy were a dead art form, but advertorials still survive in magazines like this.
Page 46 describes a spa that specializes in fasting. The authoress is put on a diet consisting of vegetable broth only, with a rice cake to keep on her person at all times to keep her from passing out if she gets dizzy. In sharp contrast to my own experiences fasting, she spends three days, mostly sleeping, after which she is better than normal and goes on bike rides. Maybe I should consider using Epsom salts as a pre-fast laxative and back-engineer an alkaline powder to get the results that she did. Usually, a whole day of not eating wrecks my sleep and I wake up after a maximum of five hours even though my body needs at least 7Ā½ to function properly.
On page 94, another alien phrase waves to get my attention:
Sants-MontjuĆÆc, [ā¦] which still feels like a genuine, un-Instagrammed community going about its daily business.
I can only wonder what a thoroughly Instagrammed community is like. Maybe itās one where all the shops sell too-fancy-by-half milkshakes with half of a candy store mounted on top, or similar culinary visual spectacles.
Finally, the Qatar issue. I hear they had a bunch of soccer games there recently. This entire issue is sponsored by Visit Qatar.
They mention putting saffron and cardamom in your coffee. I suppose itās worth trying once. The saffron probably doesnāt work all that well with the instant cold-brew crystals I keep in the pantry, though. At any rate, I only keep the cold-brew crystals around for when both microwaved tea and Starbucks drive-through are both too slow.
Eighty-eight pages later, they have managed to convince me that I would not be totally crazy to vacation in Qatar. Iām not sure if that counts as mission accomplished, but itās not nothing.
I told you people to not expect permanence. Hereās where I moved older scrawls to:
If you want to stay abreast of updates, have a look at this capsuleās colophon. It has JSON Feed and Atom feeds on it.
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