deathmtn

Children of Slaves turns out to be excellent music for driving in the rain. The rain makes a good complement.

It feels a lot like the surface of Zebes in Super Metroid.

I made a stir-fry with just carrots and celery because those are the vegetables we have left. It was actually good, though. Ginger, garlic, sherry, and oyster sauce will work on anything, I guess.

I finished reading Moving Higher Ground. Most of what I learned from it is the narrative that “the planet was going to warm up anyway; we’re just accelerating it” is completely false. We actually would be in a cooling, glacier-growing part of the cycle if it weren’t for humans.

The rest of it is various iterations of “the sea level will rise” and “move to higher ground” over and over again. There’s forays into ideas like building massive dams and living on house boats, but none of it is firm ground to stand on, so to speak, by the author’s own admission.

I’ve closed out a lot of things lately! Today, I finally got enough people from our condo to head down to the bank so that we could open a bank account. The bank account we were using up until now had one name on it, and it was the name of an owner that had sold their unit several years ago.

We wrapped up a D&D adventure yesterday. To save time several sessions ago, I picked a dungeon module I found online to fill in a hex on the area map. However, I soon found that it wasn’t a great fit for the players, and I found it awkward to alter.

It was a dungeon built around magical Escher/Pac-Man style architecture which looked really cool on paper. The thing is, “the map” isn’t the primary focus of most players, so a lot of what’s interesting about it doesn’t really land with them. Many of the rooms were left empty, but if you fill too many of them in, then I feel you make it ever harder for the players to develop a feel for the map because they stop thinking about it for a long time every time they come to a new room. The quirky architecture also makes it hard to modify physically because the internal consistency is so delicate.

There’s also a path-based puzzle that could be fun if you were moving around pieces on a board with no fog of way, but that’s not how D&D works, at least how we play it. The puzzle involves unlocking the climactic location by going to 23 locations in a certain order. That’s just way too much.

I added in a bunch of explicit drops about how the dungeon works. I also added some “Deus Ex Get Outta Here” forcing events, but those were actually unneeded. The PCs got up to the climactic location and made their choices about the fate of the local residents, then worked out some fun “getting down from a high place” logistics with semi-tragic/hilarious results.

I think people were having fun with it, but nonetheless, I’m glad we can move on to another location.

And finally, I got my web audio channel vocoder which I was working on for the better part of two weeks at the Recurse Center (but physically at home) working. It does not sound great (and neither did the original channel vocoder), but it does sound like a musical signal modulated by a voice. Sometimes, through no fault of your own, you try to make something only to find out that it’s not possible to make that in a reasonable amount of time. Theoretically, if you’ve put in the work, you should feel good whether it works out or not. Practically, you don’t usually feel good if it doesn’t. So, I’m relieved that it did.

I thought of a good way to make running into someone awkward: As soon as you see them, say "Awkward!"

I’m going to admit that I have this scheme in which I made amp modelers for a living, but based on my efforts this week, that’s probably years off at best.

I’m tired, but my head’s not gonna explode.

13 pull-ups.

Toward the end of his life, Terry Davis said, "It's good to be king. Wait, maybe. I think maybe I'm just like a little bizarre little person who walks back and forth. Whatever, you know, but..."

Maybe we are all bizarre little people who walk back and forth.

Today's old school revisitation: Symphonies of Sickness. I never realized how great Ken Owens's drumming was, even this early on. Just such a good feel and texture variety.

Civil forfeiture in Worcester.

Where that money goes is notable. In almost all cases, the proceeds are split 50/50 between the Worcester County district attorney’s office and the local or state police department that handled the seizure. That’s legal in Massachusetts, but it’s a system rife with conflicts of interest because the offices confiscating the money also stand to benefit from it, lawyers and civil rights advocates say.

Thug life.

22-minute run, 13 pull-ups.

13 pull-ups.

Entertaining Spotify teardown by Remy Sharp. He did it to get rid of the recommended podcasts shelf.

He wrote this in the wrap-up:

Ultimately though, I'd like Spotify to keep doing a good job of music and just leave podcasts alone - stay in their lane as a friend put it to me. Or certainly provide a UI option to turn this off, since it's clearly baked into the API in the first place.

He would be disappointed if he read about their overall strategy. They desperately want to get out of their lane because it doesn't have enough growth potential (according to the executives).

New Zealand enters nationwide lockdown over one Covid case

They've got almost no Covid, despite not having much vaccine access. They operate on vastly different scale that the US does, but I'm still impressed.

I typo'd "elegont", but I feel that could be a useful term for something.

36-minute run, 12 pull-ups. Treasuring non-brutal weather while I can.