<a href="https://smidgeo.com/notes/deathmtn">deathmtn</a>

10/9/2024, 8:22:52 PM

Pondered how much I hate having to fill my head with AWS garbage, then ran up and down the stairs ten times, did ten burpees, and ten pull-ups.
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10/9/2024, 1:35:27 PM

Florida Jail in Hurricane Milton Danger Zone Won't Evacuate Inmates

Well, that has a serious chance of not going well.
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10/9/2024, 11:38:50 AM

The Zachtronics podcast interviewed Chris Crawford. It was an interesting listen because I didn't expect his voice to sound like that and he talks for a while about early game dev on the Atari and Mac.

He's also...less impressive than I thought? He started the GDC and is often mentioned by prominent game developers, but he's mostly known for early war games and a lot of essays. I had assumed that he was somehow part of some game or other that I liked.

He also says that if a play test reveals something about the game design you hadn't thought about, then you have failed to think it through enough. OK, well, I don't think I'll ever be a perfect mental modeler of reality, so I'll have to live with that.
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10/9/2024, 9:48:43 AM

It is red Leaf season.
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10/8/2024, 4:18:18 PM

If you're on a normal-to-large screen, here's some incredibly detailed composite photos of the moon.
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10/8/2024, 2:59:05 PM

My guy’s friend just walked in the door and asked me if my game was done yet.

No, man, it is not.

Then, he said I should finish it up in the next couple of days and send it to the Nintendo Switch.
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10/8/2024, 2:12:09 PM

From a conversation/interview between Ben Orlin and Steve Strogatz on calculus and math education:
SS: I’m thinking of Finland—have you read Amanda Ripley’s book The Smartest Kids in the World? Finland made it so that only kids graduating in the top third of their college class could become teachers. They’re highly respected. And they turned around their country in math. So when we talk about pedagogical reform, I wonder if we’re really talking about getting different people to be teachers.

BO: That’s a third vision. Pipeline reform.
That is not a bad idea. If you can’t pay in money, maybe pay on prestige.

And in general, they are right about math education just being way too rote in the US. It’s gotten better; I like all the visualizations they use for compound multiplying. But I was talking to the guy yesterday about long division, and they still teach it at his school as an algorithm you just have to follow, so I had to tell him it was iterative division with divisors that decrease by an order of magnitude each step.

It sucks when you just have to follow a process and hope that it works. That’s like AWS CDK. Save that shit for downtrodden adult life!
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10/8/2024, 9:57:53 AM

Via this episode of Past, Present, Future, I learned that “eventuate” is a real word.

e.g. Me trying to show how to carry a person on your back with a bag of rice eventuated in a lot of rice on the living room floor.
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10/7/2024, 11:49:21 PM

There's a town named Bad Münstereifel. Seems to be doing pretty well for itself, despite the name. Then again, I haven't seen Good Münstereifel.
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10/7/2024, 11:33:48 PM

Jello Biafra playing Rock 'n' Roll McDonald's. It's delightful to hear a live band play the keyboard demo.
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10/7/2024, 10:42:45 PM

High organ notes alarm Wily.
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10/7/2024, 9:17:36 PM

Back workout. Did 3-rep and 4-rep slow motion sets of the reverse flies and bent over rows instead of 10. Tried to that with the kettlebell swings, too, but I do not have the strength to lift 30 lbs. with a straight arm without momentum.
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10/7/2024, 3:54:35 PM

I guess we're at the point at which people really believe the government created Hurricane Helene to wipe out Republican voters.
"Don’t worry guys, weather modification isn’t real! It’s just a coincidence that Hurricane Helene is one of the most devastating 'inland damage storms' in history and that hundreds of pro-Trump counties are being massively impacted during the most important election of our lifetimes," influencer Matt Wallace posted alongside video footage of flooding. The post received 11 million views.
There's no point in trying to logic at this kind of thing, but I would kind of like to know if these people really thought the government was that advanced and effective — but only when doing evil.
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10/6/2024, 9:52:54 PM

I haven't done the Disquiet Junto for a while because I've been spending my music time on a long project. Then, I took a break from that to work on a shorter project, but that turned out to be long, too.

This is the 666th Junto prompt, so I felt I had to make time for this.

I noticed that "six" backwards sounds like "skisk", so I recorded myself saying "skisk", then reversed the recording to confirm this.

Then, I wrote some riffs. I was able to play the triplet one backward, but the other one would take some time to learn, so I skipped reversing that in the interest of making sure the piece got finished. So, the triplet riff is played forward on one guitar, but I play the notes in reverse order for the other guitar. The effect is kind of underwhelming, but hey, I tried.

I did one take of everything, though in a way, I did like ten takes because I stopped as soon as I made a mistake and didn't finish the take. For the second guitar, I even played a riff one time too many instead of moving onto the next one, but it still sounded "OK" timing-wise, so I let it go into the mix.

Vocals-wise, I really did do one take each of the forward and reverse parts. It turns out it's really hard to say "six" as eighth note triplets at 110 bpm. I struggled and gassed out, but I did not try a second time. (I was afraid that I wouldn't get any better and get tricked into doing some other more time-consuming idea.)

The song is called Skisk Skisk Skisk, which you can try saying skisk times fast.
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10/6/2024, 8:01:34 PM

Just started Uurnog Uurnlimited. Looks like it has something for everyone.
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10/6/2024, 4:24:38 PM

The guy went 2-1 and took first place in his bracket. Winning in a mostly in-dojo tournament (though kids from two other dojos competed) isn't a huge thing, but it is still unexpected!

I've mostly hoped that he'd stay interested in judo so that we wouldn't have to find another physical thing for him to do. He went all the way to being legit, though!

He did way better at acting first in the scrambles (situations in which the players hit the ground but with no one in a clearly dominant position) and was able to skip having to fight off pins entirely. And he has several backward throws (throws that send an opponent backward instead of forward) down well enough that he's able to improvise variations on them. He could use more work on the big forward throws, though.
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10/6/2024, 12:52:59 PM

The guy won his first match with sasae (I had no idea he knew that well enough to throw with in randori, much less competition!), then yoko shiho gatame. Again, I kind of assumed his ground game wasn’t going to win stuff yet.
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10/6/2024, 11:33:56 AM

Best DJ name
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10/5/2024, 11:16:10 PM

We started rewatching Flight of the Conchords.

Aging report: Murray now looks young to me.
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10/5/2024, 6:34:15 PM

Learn early why the electoral college sucks
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10/5/2024, 6:33:08 PM

If you prepare this many things, you have to take a picture of it.
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10/5/2024, 4:24:34 PM

I don’t want to spend money on a new mic, but I’m finally getting tired of the SM-57. It’s great at capturing highs and gets rid of a lot of lows, which I’m sure is helpful when you’re recording huge Marshall stacks. My Micro Cube actually does produce a lot of good bass, which I think needs to be capture by more of a room-style sort of mic.
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10/5/2024, 3:06:18 PM

Hey, if you says "skiss" then play it backwards, you get "six."
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10/4/2024, 10:26:37 AM

Welp, I ordered a judogi (this, BTW, is another thing for which shopping involves a jillion choices) for myself. I guess I really gotta go back now.
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10/4/2024, 9:28:31 AM

Last year, the trains were honking, and they shouldn’t be in this area. So I emailed the mayor, and she asked me to get video. I looked into ways to record with my cheap old webcam and some old GoPros I got from Goodwill, but both the motion detection and getting recordings off the cameras was too hard.

Then, they started honking less, so I let it go.

But they seem to have started up again! So I put up a Tapo camera, previously used as our cat cam while we were out, outside an upstairs window.

While I was up there, I noticed our window trim is made out of really rough wood and had gaps in the joints. At this point in time, it’s still good to just have a house, but I’m amazed how seemingly every corner of it is just kind of off.
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