deathmtn

13 pull-ups.

Surprisingly heartwarming moment from this Heavy Hole interview with Skullshitter, a grindcore band, at around the 1:20:00 mark. The drummer broke his arm in a motorcycle accident, and afterward, the band agreed to play only slow songs for as long as the drummer needed to relearn the drums.

Went to the library and park, and thought, I like mid-Cambridge. Then: it’s too bad you have to be a millionaire to live there.

We use the Death’s Door rule in D&D, which lets PCs be unconscious instead of dead at 0 to -9 hp.

This lets the players take more risks, but the downside is that when a PC is unconscious, the player has nothing to do. Yesterday, two players were unconscious for most of the game, which sucked. If we hadn’t been using Death’s Door, their characters would be dead, but they’d be rolling up new characters and would be back in the game.

One way to mitigate the problem of extended unconsciousness is to provide lots of means of revival, but then that ends up being a form of insuring immortality.

I guess another way to address this is to always have less deadlier encounters. When encounters are always perfectly scaled, though, they become foregone conclusions and players end up realizing there’s no risk in engaging in every single one. Perfect fairness isn’t interesting when I’m playing, but I do think it is valuable to some.

That said, the risk should always be to the PCs, not to the players. There shouldn’t be a consideration that if an action is taken, a player will end up not being able to play.

So in the end, I have no conclusions, other than maybe Death’s Door is bad? It’s like paralysis, scaled up.

I had two dreams last night about discovering people I knew living in a secret apartment behind hidden panels in basements.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Did a lot of Client B work.
- Interviewed with a company that was open to part-time work. Seemed like a cool company, but I'm probably not the best person to do what they're looking to do, which is very mobile-centric.
- Wrote a contract. I thought it wouldn't take very long once I started, but it kinda did. I was right about it not really requiring any hard thinking, though. I already did that when I made estimates.
- Wrote a bare bones D&D recap, mostly so I could calculate XP. That also took longer than I thought, though waaay less than a recap that reads as a narrative.

35-minute run, 13 pull-ups.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Did some Client B work. Wanted to more, but there just wasn't that much available today.
- Recorded a new part with the guitar as input for a track that I consider to be almost done. Felt good! The part was bad, though. I feel I have momentum on this nevertheless.
- Ran some high-pass output from the pd vocoder through the Hann window step of the C++ vocoder. The result seemed on track with the pd version. It's a baby step, but it's a step.
- Took a box of toys that I think would be non-controversial to give away to Goodwill.
- Cleared the train table, which was daunting. It's been covered in toys for years.
- Started adding walls to my game.
- Went to the music promotion group. Did not get a lot of deep insights but had fun talking about projects anyway.
- Looked up how much houses have sold for around here in the last year.

The guy has had some issues with getting stuff written in time at school. (We've tried to tell him to just write with worse handwriting and just write the first thing you think of, but he's not willing to do that.) So, we've tried to get him to write at home so that he gets faster at his preferred handwriting quality.

Generally, he's not motivated to do extra writing even when offered a generous amount of pom-poms. (When the pom-poms hit certain levels in the jar, he gets rewards.)

Today, though, he was offered an extra episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender if he summarized the one he just watched. He got right on that, so maybe we'll be good until we run out of episodes.

Nine-minute run. I think I’m gonna leave it at that I hope that my limbs de-stiffen.

Today's audio Wordle: In this video, when he says "We throw down a _______ map", what's the word he's saying in the blank?

It took me three guesses, even with closed captions and Duck Duck Go.

- Dropped off, picked up, dropped off.
- Client B work.
- Researched more about the weird house I pass on the way to school. There's no land records that say who the owner is, as far as I can find, but there are about the building next to it, which at one point was owned by the family associated with the weird house.
- Started restructuring the vocoder so that every step can be run independently, using an input signal from a text file. So far, one step works that way. Fifteen more to go.

vim keybinding support in CLion seems really comprehensive so far. I was expecting something full of holes like Visual Studio Code.

10-4-4-4-4-13. Have not done that workout in a while. Hoping my legs aren't dead tomorrow.

Was depressed by reading about families in Ukraine, so I put on a podcast episode about songwriters. 60% of it was about Desmond Child who's responsible for a massive amount of musical atrocities, which made me angry about how self-satisfied he was. So, it kind of worked!

- Did some Client B work. Unexpectedly got an increased rate from them.
- Emailed some schools here in Cambridge to get a baseline about teacher distribution. One of them replied, which is enough.
- Emailed a principal back.
- Emailed a potential client back about logistics.
- Emailed a former colleague back.
- Emailed a recruiter back.
- Emailed a friend back.
- Got my vocoder converted from a Projucer build to a Cmake/Ninja one, and as a result, "go to definition", etc. finally work in CLion. For JS/TS stuff, vim is most efficient for me, but with C++ and very involved APIs, I have to admit that a JetBrains product is probably going make things way easier, the way it does for Java.
- Made dinner.