deathmtn

I can’t play prog, but if I could, my prog metal band would named Intensive Purposes.

Had to send a message to Steam support today:

Hi, I bought Samorost 2 over a year ago. My son and I have been playing it on Linux for months. I just opened Steam so we could continue, and now, Steam not only says that it is not installed, but also that it cannot be installed on our computer anymore.

How can we get back the version of Samorost or Steam that we were using a few months ago so that we can continue playing?

I think I'm gonna avoid Steam in favor of GOG when I can. I know this is the way the world is going but having a game working one day, then having it just disappear the next is too much for me.

I think there’s a common belief that action games appeal to kids more than tactics games, but today, the guy bailed on Rogue Legacy because of the fine motor coordination needed to serial downthrust, but he had a great time with Into the Breach because you get all this time to think about what you want to do, and then do it without having to be great at timing.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off, picked up.
- Did more Photoshopping on the guy's school photo. Sent a combination-photo-order taking/holiday-greetings email. Two birds with one email!
- Emailed another family about pooling transportation resources after putting it off for…months?
- Emailed a friend.
- Got the logged carrier signal blocks to line up almost exactly in both vocoders, which eliminates quite a bit of uncertainty. The next point of suspicion is the inverse square root operation on the carrier, which comes up with order of magnitude larger values on the C++ side. I need to think a bit more about why the rsqrt of near-0 yields wildly varying things on both sides.
- Two hours of Client B work.
- Wrapped presents.
- Got my add-on podcast feed generator generating xml.

- Wrapped some presents.
- Fixed a thing where the inverse square root of a 0 was coming up differently from all of the other 0s in the signal. (I add a tiny number to each 0 so that the inverse sq. root is 10¹⁰ instead of infinity.) So, now the end result does actually resemble the input speech, but doesn't really resemble the carrier signal at all. Next suspect: The Rube Goldberg machine that takes the sqrts and rsqrts and smashes them together. This is so complicated that I basically threw my hands up when it was time to name the variables that came out of them.
- Called Mass Health Connector to make sure that my guess about their confusing letter was right. Looked up health insurance plans, put them in the spreadsheet (glad I had this from last year), almost picked one, then realized the guy's PCP didn't take it. Enrolled in a different one. We're set for next year, I think? It all took only an hour and 40 minutes today.
- Photoshopped the background out of the guy's school photo and found some other backgrounds. I meant to do this weeks ago, but completely forgot.
- Did some yoga. My lower back is a twisted and gnarled ancient forest.

Pini's Pizzeria in Somerville Is Apparently Moving to Medford

Dang, the Woody's-Pini's-Wang's row on Broadway is breaking up.

I listened to some of this Heavy Hole episode with Mourned — yet another death metal band with members that have fond memories of listening to Linkin Park and Slipknot as kids! This is another metaphorical plane skywriting YOU ARE OLD in the sky.

At the beginning of my run, I started a Daily episode about test shortages, and then I saw the a bunch of people lined up a block from my house. It turned out to wind for five blocks to the Covid testing site.

35-minute run, 12 pull-ups.

In late 1700s France, the government did a lot of things to avoid rudely asking exactly how much money someone made:

For instance, the contribution sur les portes etfinétres, or “doors and windows tax,” was based on the number of doors and windows in the taxpayer’s principal residence, an index of wealth that, from the taxpayer’s point of view, had the great merit of allowing the tax collector to determine the amount due without entering the taxpayer’s home, much less peering into his account books.

From Piketty.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Got groceries.
- Client A communication.
- Did some laundry.
- Scheduled a meeting with the social academy.
- Got somewhere on logging the same block in both vocoder version, or at least blocks that look similar in Audacity. So, I'm a little more confident in comparing transformed signals beyond the raw input and the Hann window.
- Added a high-pass filter back in in the C++ side and added logblock objects in the test signal subpatch in pd. The current suspicious area is the inverse square root, which yield orders of magnitude higher values on the C++ side.

Also, it's not Spanish.

Update: It's spelled Gaël, not "Guyelle". My ignorance is multilayered!

Guile's Theme Goes with Worf Saying Guile

Someone posted that in a Slack, and it reminded me:

"Guyelle" is a real Spanish name. We know a kid with that name.

For two years, I thought it was "Guile."

I'd see him and think, wow, those parents really love the Street Fighter or something. SONIC BOOM

12 pull-ups.

The Inner Belt was a proposed eight-lane highway that would have connected U.S. Route I-93 to U.S. Route I-90 and I-95 through a ring road through Somerville and Central Square and across the B.U. Bridge and beyond through Boston to the Southeast Expressway.

This is very shitty timeline we're in, but I guess there's ways it could have been shittier.

This sentence in Matt Levine's newsletter made me actually LOL:

I feel like the really interesting financial innovation of Web3 is its pyramid-scheme-like nature.

That totally nails what's so weird about all of this. But in another sense, it's not that weird. People have always loved pyramid schemes.

I was listening to the new Cannibal Corpse album at the grocery store so I wouldn’t have to hear the Christmas music, but I had earbuds (I would have felt weird wearing cans), so the Christmas music still bled through. It was an environmental mashup!

The album was interesting. I generally think Cannibal Corpse is OK, but Erik Rutan is in the band now, so I thought I’d check it out. (Their previous lead guitarist has severe mental health problems.)

There’s not that much Erik Rutan in this album, but there is a surprising amount of slow grooving. I remember them trying to get away from that because of the shadow of their big hit, Hammer Smashed Face, but I guess they feel confident in their ability to write complex songs at this point, and maybe now it’s OK to do that? It does make the first half of the album sound good, whatever the reason.

- Picked up, dropped off, picked up.
- Tried to plan the last two weeks of December. It was brutal. I hate choosing to not do things. Though the plan for today turned out sorta close to the Actual for today.
- Called the water dept. about the high water bill. Someone there is going to send up toilet tester tablets, and I'm to call him back when I know where the water meters are.
- Did laundry.
- Called back someone from the social skills school. Missed them, left a message.
- Returned library books.
- Fixed a y-scale limitation in the graphing tool that made the pd hann results look wrong.
- Made dinner.
- Fixed mislabeled logs in the vocoder. Got the C++ side to log a specific block that I can see in Audacity. No such luck on the pd side. The "raw" signal is always quiet over there. There is more going on in the sample loading patch than I thought.
- Evaluated, then applied for new health insurance.

The guy told me about a lockdown drill they did at school today, which is in case "an unsafe person got inside the building." He said it was exciting.

A weird thing about telling second-graders about lockdowns is that you can tell them that they're serious and for dangerous situations, but you can't tell them that they're about avoiding being shot to death.

I realized last weekend that actually going somewhere that's not your apartment goes a long way toward making it feel actually fun and not just something to get through. Which, adoy, I guess.

Now that the guy is vaccinated, we were able to go on the train and at least walk around the Public Garden, and that felt like some kind of adventure. I'm sure it'll wear off with repetition, but it's something!