Thanks again for another place to put my stuff, ~ford. ]]> http://tilde.club/~schussat/#jan_4_endless http://tilde.club/~schussat/#jan_4_endless Mon, 05 Jan 2015 02:44:20 +0000 Over at Pretty Good Hat, I put up a rambling journal of my experience so far playing Endless Legend, my final game pickup of the too-short winter vacation. It's a great game, and it has been fun to use the journal as a way to focus my attention on what I'm doing. Check it out, eh?

Do you remember trying to solve a software problem without the Internet? Like really without the Internet?

We used to do this constantly. Like, constantly. A huge portion of my adolescence was composed entirely of confronting things like which brutally arcane permutation of AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS would allow a game to allocate enough memory to actually start, continue running, and play properly.

I remember studying, hard, the MS-DOS manual to understand batch files, and the thick instruction booklet detailing commands that came with my Everex 1200bps modem. Everything had a manual, printed and spiral-bound or in a fat three-ring hardcover binder --- or if it was really classy, multiple such binders. Those were the days.

Tilde club has slowed down, it seems. I sort of dropped out of IRC, but am still reading news, though there's not much there, lately. A few of us are halfway carrying on some conversations about food and recipes. Me, I think I'm still processing the past month and finding myself sort of empty most times I sit and think, "hey, maybe I'll write something down."

I'm listening to a lot of music lately, though. Still working out a lot; that feels good. Something has to get me up and going at 5am, after all.

It was cold outside, but not as cold as it has been some recent mornings. The sky was crystal clear, the Big Dipper overhead and not yet a spark of dawn through the ponderosa pines.

November has been a hard month, and this was to be a weekend to sort of ease our way past those difficulties. Looking at the sky that early morning I believed it. But our four-year-old was a four-year-old all weekend: Stubborn, fragile, boisterous, demanding, racing, sobbing, exclaiming, talking. And while a week ago I celebrated each of those as a return to form after two weeks of all-day and -night pain, try as I might I lost my calm and felt like I never got it back.

I’ve written and erased twice a more detailed explanation of that pain, now identified and understood, desiring to share here where I have this outlet, but unsure how much of that part of my life and my son’s I should leave in the open. Same with the other events of the past few weeks: Another family illness that scared us all and interrupted holiday plans; a death, too, and that’s not burying the lede, just going in chronological order through the month. “JESUS CHRIST, Alan,” a friend said to me yesterday. Yeah, it’s been kind of rough.

Then I caught up today with a friend who has been my friend nearly my entire life. We went to preschool together, but haven’t lived in the same city since high school. His son is about the same age as mine, and we are both feeling the same need to reconnect more conscientiously than we have over the past many years. It’s funny how easy it is to just talk again, as if we weren’t separated by a continent and diverging and converging life stories. His last week has been a bad one, too, and we connected in our separate sighing and turned this shitty time of things into an opportunity to spend some time talking and promising to do this more often.

So we do have lots of things to be thankful for —- in whatever ways we show thanks, and to whatever powers or fates. I’m holding on to that amid it all, will wake up before dawn again tomorrow to walk in the yard with the dogs and then make coffee and prepare for a work and school day.

Have seen the middle of the night way too often the past two weeks.

2014-11-16T01:29:16.656-0700

Today's weather forecast to bring us our first small bit of snow of the year, and a high temp only a bit above freezing.

2014-11-16T06:50:50.380-0700

Working on this year's Christmas cards.

2014-11-16T07:57:27.974-0700

Pancakes! With sunflower butter and pumpkin yogurt on top.

2014-11-16T08:31:33.186-0700

Went to make myself another coffee and realized I had forgotten to prime the steam boiler. Argh.

2014-11-16T09:23:00.490-0700

Made coffee then built a train track.

2014-11-16T10:06:16.652-0700

Played some more Shovel Knight today, and made it through the Treasure Knight and Plague Knight.

Making rice for dinner, then emptying the dishwasher. Domestic.

Son has been on edge almost all day, fragile and stubborn. This often portends not feeling well.

2014-11-16T17:32:02.215-0700

Having another beer. Probably had enough today, but it's cold out and we have been mostly hanging out inside; easy to sit in a nice chair and pour another.

2014-11-16T17:43:25.937-0700

Reading about the IFComp 2014 winners.

2014-11-16T18:18:59.686-0700

Man, if the vegetarian friend who gave us this slow cooker along with a veg recipes book knew how much meat we've cooked in it...

2014-11-16T19:01:13.697-0700

Stumbled across the Homer hot pepper vision quest episode.

2014-11-16T19:16:39.395-0700

Parking lot

Made a trip to target and got to workout a little early. So I'm listening to podcast in the car, relaxing a minute.

Dash says its 36°F. Seat warmers.

2014-11-17T17:57:35.102-0700

Reading newsgroups via prompt on my iPhone, one-handed because my son has finally fallen asleep on the other arm. 2014.

2014-11-18T20:21:52.820-0700

This town went from one pretty shady pho place to having one pretty shady pho places and two pretty good Vietnamese joints in two months.

2014-11-19T06:37:14.005-0700

"Dad, maybe you could play Time to Run while I fall asleep so I'll have good dreams."

2014-11-19T21:05:31.519-0700

Geeze I love fantastical.

2014-11-21T16:02:04.053-0700

Another Saturday morning, another workout. 18°F this morning.

2014-11-22T07:22:21.493-0700

So I put it all into Drafts, primarily using the quick widget from the home screen. Just taking notes, mentioning things to myself, and thinking out loud. Later, I figure, I would annotate the entries. (You'll see how the day sort of took a turn.) I also cleaned up a few typos, but wasn't particularly disciplined about this part.

This gave me an opportunity to figure out a good way to get all this stuff out of Drafts, too (explained more below).

So here it is, my slow-blogged Saturday.

Click on over to read! I'd include more text here but don't think the annotations will translate into the formatting very well. -a

My thesis is that the modern Linux command line is a pretty good environment for working with English prose and prosody, and that maybe this will illuminate the ways it could be useful in your own work with a computer, whatever that work happens to be.

This is just a cool idea, and I love the approach. Elsewhere as a result of trying to finally, finally make some personal sense of vim, I’ve been learning from a few nice resources.

• Vim After 11 Years is a nicely approachable and practical startup guide.
• Learning Vim in 2014 is a whole series that’s more meaty and also therefore a little more intimidating. But I’m gradually picking up some things from it.

All this exploring and experimenting at Tilde Club has been neat not only because I’m doing more at the command line again and learning stuff like Vim, but I’m also plain using a lot of other tools in nice ways: Transmit on iOS, learning new bits of Javascript and R for my network graph, spending time in IRC. It’s a mixture of nostalgia-driven tooling around and state-of-the-art muscle-flexing with modern tools and apps. This is really fun, gang!

More reading around

I noted recently that the big single-column layout may not scale here, and that’s particularly true for things that I want to point out and be able to return to. Well, the pages that I’m returning to a lot lately are:

• ~hellbox: Martin McClellan has this great mix of personal stories and thoughts about writing and writers.

• ~minks writes

  I am going to use this space to learn. To try teaching myself, one more time. To try to learn to enjoy building little things on the web, even if they look terrible or work terribly or serve as little purpose as my gif reblogs. If you want to teach me things—kudos to the kind soul who already taught me how to log in to write this—I would be very grateful. I will otherwise continue to subtilde Paul, who maybe shouldn’t have given me an account.

• ~summeranne has a great picture of herself hackin’ web pages in 1999.

• ~_ Dave Rutledge has been taking apart ~ford’s social connections script as a vehicle to learn some shell programming. It’s a great idea! In the meantime, he’s talking about aging, voting, keeping a great reading list of his own, and continuing to think about the tilde club notion.
• ~jonathan has a list of tips for screen that makes me, again, wish I understood what screen really does.

• ~cortex just has a great blog thing going. In addition to blogging, he’s writing about writing an account of a fictional video game system. Yes:

  I started in on a writing project for an idea I had three years ago, of a biography/documentation/encyclopedia about a fictional video game console from the late 80s, a failure of an also-ran that noone really remembers today. The NES, and video game culture in general, was such a massive part of my childhood worldview growing up that this is something that I have a fair amount to say about personally and a lot of enthusiasm-in-principle for creating fictive sorta-parodic, sorta-serious world-building details around.

Okay, I think that lets me close some tabs, again.

So here's a picture of a nice glass of beer.

• Double-tap of ⌥ to run this workflow for finding and switching between browser tabs. I previously used another tab switching/finding bundle, but it seems to have become unreliable. I hope this one continues to work as well as it currently does.
• Double-tap ctrl (which I have mapped to caps-lock, because who uses caps-lock?) to immediately switch to twitter. I've been using Amethyst to manage my windows on OSX, and I really like it! I leave twitter as a floating window, so it's not tiled into the overall layout, and now I can swap to it immediately (such as when its menu bar icon goes blue) without any futzing around. I'm surprisingly pleased with this.

A few months ago I worked up some basic, functional support for webmentions over at my non-tilde blog. Yesterday I came across Webmention.io, a service to provide mentions support, which strikes me as a neat way to enable comments and discussion between tilde pages. Since the code driving webmention.io is available at github, it may be fun to spin up and try to apply it here. *Adds project to list.* (It's also lots more thorogh and flexible than my own implementation; so maybe I'll switch over to it there, too.)