Notes from August 2024
2024-08-01
Take notes of everything and as often as possible. This is a great tool that the evolution equipped us with, so don't waste it.
2024-08-02
Come August, we enter the heat of the jet engine exhaust where even the wind is hot and the water in the pool warm, so we, the people of the North, leave it to Spaniards from our comunidad. We'll reclaim it in September onwards. These are the conditions in which I thrive, as a desert bird.
2024-08-03
I realised I'm not interested in politics but rather current events.
2024-08-04
I was on a concert recently, and a couple of times I did not immediately recognise some songs due to different arrangements. I really liked that moment when it finally clicked, be it due to lyrics or something musically characteristic. This wow moment. And I think that's something that is lost with live recordings. You can have a look on a tracklist in advance and be robbed of it. And the next times you know songs. Live experience becomes repeatable.
2024-08-05
Expanding my note-making exercise, I started writing notes during meetings, so I can refer to them later and not have to remember them. After all, my memory is precious. It works, but now I discovered something else: I pay more attention to the meeting itself and notice things on the fly. So, there is a value even if I write and forget about the notes themselves. I am also training fast writing. It still collapses when I have to talk, but I only have begun.
A quote from Dune
"The man without emotions is the one to fear."
2024-08-07
There is a technique of playing games called save scumming. It's when the player saves as often as possible, so any death on the way takes next to no loss. It's not in the spirit of sportsmanship so it's not respected. But games should bring fun, so if that works for you, you should do it. And to not lose notes in a one-post-a-day approach, I write thoughts and I save them as drafts. I'm note-scumming. Seemed smart, but now I have a tonne of drafts I'm not interested in. I did not expect that.
2024-08-08
With the inevitably coming dusk of generative AIs, it might be a good moment to reflect on how much of a waste it was. I recently saw an interview with a linguist, and she said that computer analytical tools allowed searching for the same phrases in many languages, something that would take ages if people would have to do that. AI seems to be good at preliminary pattern recognition. All those endless resources went to some LLMs so they could "hallucinate" bullshit. Sad, but not surpising.
2024-08-09
Game engines are called engines because back in the 90s, John Romero and John Carmack were car aficionados.
New Doom remaster 🤘
I realised my posts are boring and I decided to improve them.
I'm afraid we'll need to radicalise.
Andrew Hulshult's "IDKFA" as a double CD would be pretty rad.
A post from Jason Gorman
"We tend to think of Big Tech as innovators, but in most cases, when that was genuinely true, they were Small Tech. Big Tech rarely innovates from within. It usually buys it."
2024-08-10
Nintendo should know now from games in my library that this family-friendly newsletter is a waste of bandwidth.
The thing about Steven Soderbergh is that no matter how many of his movies you see, there is still twice as much left. They pop in random places of all streaming services I have. One day, Steve, though. One day.
Nights as humid as I remember from Malta.
2024-08-12
After two decades with (G)ZDoom and over a decade with Doom Retro, I got used to non-infinitely-tall monsters, so KEXDoom reverting to the traditional approach is something I need to get accustomed to. On the bright sight, I can chainsaw them at ledges. Plus, which apparently is Boom-related, monsters can fall of the ledge and something that was meant to be a turret is now chasing me. :D
Also, saving and loading makes monsters lose their intention, so I save only between rooms/actions.
2024-08-13
Ah, ice coffee after walking my dogs.
Doom music in my headphones.
RxJS in the IDE window.
Now this is life.
(Actually, it's Visual Studio Code but it'll do too.)
The concept is really simple in theory but impossible to implement.
So, the more economically unequal the system you're in is, the harsher morally you'll be. It reminds me that it's believed that in the XVI century something like 3/4 90% of all the people in the world were living in poverty. Kind of clicks in.
2024-08-14
I accidentally discovered that Liminal Doom got a sequel: www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/j-l/ld2
Never enough time to play 'em all.
I was reading about "Legacy of Rust," the new official Doom episode, and someone complained about one level being almost unbeatable pistol-start on Ultra-Violence. To which someone else quoted one of the Cassali brothers, who were behind "The Plutonia Experiment," that he wouldn't respect a person who "chooses a higher difficulty level and then complains that it's too difficult." You chose it that hard. Thus, UV is the new Souls-like. You'll die a couple of times before succeeding.
There is this pipe dream that I would know upfront how my website or a timeline on o portal like here would be like. But it's impossible. And also that's not how things work. It's a constant process. I will find different topics and I will have changes of style (although, probably less now that I'm of respectable age), but that's a part of the appeal. Searching for the form might never end, but it's the road that counts. It's like those emergent narratives. An emergent character.
Another quote from Dune
"A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel."
2024-08-15
I establish many cities.
Huh, Sandy Peterson was involved to some degree in the development of "Strife." Works on "Quake" were dragging, and he needed something.
A post from Jason Lefkowitz
"The CASSOWARY is NOT YOUR FRIEND. It will BEAT YOU UP and TAKE YOUR LUNCH MONEY. It is the bird YOUR GIRL told you NOT TO WORRY ABOUT"
2024-08-16
I'm playing "Back to Saturn X" (called "BTSX" as an official mod) and for the first time ever, I am enamored with the soundtrack. Some tracks heavily remind me of 80s gritty science-fiction movies, which goes very well with these rusty textures. *chef's kiss* I even found Jimmy Paddock's Bandcamp and listening to it as I type these words here.
I finished "The Boys," season 4, yesterday, and they take no prisoners with all the political references. Someone even dug up santorum.
But what impressed me the most was the shapeshifter character. Usually, they are played by a specific actor who morphs into others. But not here. Here the shapeshifter sheds their skin to reveal the new impersonated person, and we never get to see their original form. I really liked it. It's actually the second time I see a solution like that, the first being Chameleon from "Machete Kills." The proper way to show a shapeshifter.
I just found out that a mini-album that I always liked on Bandcamp has never been bought. I decided to change it.
lutra.bandcamp.com/album/descend
And another one from Dune
"Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind."
2024-08-16
Concrete. You can bet on it.
It's my first chance in 5 years to see all the movies from the "Halloween" franchise, and I'm going to take it. I've seen the first one, so I'll skip it. I am most interested in the 4-5-6 fork and this weird cult they developed there.
2024-08-17
I believe it is 18 years today [it was on August 11th, actually] that I returned from Scotland after a failed attempt at finding a job abroad. No plan, no skills, nothing more than a vague idea. It was still a valuable experience. I started writing memories of those 20 days twice, but couldn't quite find the right form.
2024-08-18
I saw "Linoleum" (2022) on Friday. It would be a shame to spoil it with any plot-related information, but in its vibe, it felt like what "Donnie Darko" was supposed to be but couldn't get there. There is certain eeriness of the late 1980s (or early 1990s) that reminds me of the visual side of "It Follows." And the music, albeit cheery, could actually be used in Halloween movies. So yeah. The movie has my recommendation.
"A friend gave me design advice once. He said to start with left-aligned black text on a white background, and to apply styling only to solve a specific problem."
2024-08-20
When my wife is away, I watch only bad movies. It always feels like a loss to a shared experience if I go with a good one. Thus, the Halloween series is a perfect choice. And even if some of the movies turn out to be good (or at least not bad), then she wasn't interested in them in the first place.
I just realised I prefer reading books to playing games, so I'll reduce titles played. This is once again where Doom excels because I can have weeks-long breaks and return to the game anytime. No forgotten quests, etc. You just need to remember to save at the beginning of the level. Somehow, an entry about reading books became an entry about Doom. *shakes head in disbelief* To that note, I swapped games on my wishlist to books. It's time for more ergodic literature.
Even more Dune quotes
"Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject."
2024-08-21
Crunching through Enigma's discography now. From the singles I knew, I didn't realise there was so much New Age sound to it. But there are also these beats, which I always liked, that did not survive 1990s.
2024-08-22
Back in 1999, I needed a name to Krazov (making it a surname), and I borrowed Jon from Jon Spencer. I even named my blog Jon Krazov Blog Explosion at some point. With the right kind of eyes, you can still see Jon Krazov in rare instances.
A toxic person on the Internet doesn't shake me emotionally or anything, but practically looking, they're just no partner to any discussion. That's not their goal on the Internet.
2024-08-24
I played "Liminal Doom 2," and got to an exit, but it seemed still a lot to do, so I decided to quick-save, go to the exit (to make sure), and then load again. But I had autosave on, and it overwrote my save. ðŸ˜
Now I have to play it again, but I am too pissed off, so I guess it'll wait a couple of weeks or something.
BTW there are some tight running sections which suck with gamepad. Also, WTF is the setup with Cyberdemon in map 2? I god-moded it.
I might like "Confessions on the Dance Floor" the most, but in the song deparment, "You'll See" wins when it comes to Madonna.
I think liminal spaces caught up not because they were these familiar places "but odd," although that is their defining eeriness, but because they reference old computer games that, due to technical reasons, were often "empty." Liminal spaces hit that string in our souls.
Years ago, I read that anything placed in parentheses can be omitted from the text without any harm to the rest and that made me generally avoid parentheses. I do use them while I write something, but to revisit them later if I should rather incorporate these additions in the main text or remove completely. But sometimes some of them survive the last edit.
"I really njoy just existing in hotels. The Long Identical Hallways. The Soulless Abstract art, the Weird noises the air conditioner makes. Strange City Lights in The Window. Six Stories off the ground. Strangers chatting in the hall: Nothing in the dresser. No past, but an infinite present."
"If you're not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you."
(Both quotes from a YouTube's essay, "Horror in Impossible Places: Liminal Spaces and The Backrooms.")
Michael Myers would be classified as a terrorist in these times.
The everything.
We are twelve billion light years from the edge.
This will be linked in a text I'm writing, but I wanted to share my finding immediately, especially, because it's hidden in an obscure remark in the text itself.
I was wondering why does the default styling looks the same or almost the same in all the browsers. They could go creative with it if they wanted. And yet, they didn't. Turns out, there is an official suggested styling in the specs. And browsers implement that.
html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/rendering.html
2024-08-25
In the night, I walk around the house in the darkness, but when I go up the stairs, I usually light them with my fit band. The light is very dim but sufficient. It always reminds me of the opening shot from Michael Mann's "Manhunter," along with the soundtrack.
Testing @zenbrowser, and the first impression is really good.
2024-08-26
With all due respect, but Pet Shop Boys is a band that I'm satisfied with the best of album only. Make it 2 CD, sure, but that's enough for me.
They say you can't kill an idea, but how would we know it? If there are ideas that were killed, then we don't have a clue they existed in the first place.
2024-08-28
I read today that there will be a release of the "Blair Witch Project" definitive cut. Apparently, the original one was done technically wrong and didn't look "right." This reminded me of David Lynch's "Inland Empire," which was shot with a digital camera and which I saw in cinema and I was less than impressed with the quality. But later, I saw it on a computer and it looked good. Same with Michael Mann's "Collateral." It's as if (early) digital movies didn't translate well to big screen.
Donald Pleasence accepted a role in "Halloween" after Christopher Lee rejected it (he regretted it years later) because his daughter was a guitarist and she liked the soundtrack to "Assault on Precinct 13," a previous movie by John Carpenter. Funny how you can win people in so many unexpected ways.
I stopped asking LLMs anything long ago. From the bits and pieces, I can see it's same old, same old.
Even Tumblr switches to WordPress.
I was just reading about the Terminator franchise, and lo and behold, tomorrow an animated series will be released on Netflix. I hope it will be better than "Suicide Squad Isekai" (although, it's not terribly wrong; the setting actually befits Suicide Squad, which was never serious in the movies or "Peacemaker" series).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Zero
A quote from Naomi Klein
"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.""
-- Naomi Klein, "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate."
2024-08-29
With all these AIs copying voices of people, I just don't pick up calls from anyone.
"Quiet Public," Mastodon's response to introverts' needs.
"I can be public, but only a little." (John, an introvert)
The soundtrack to "Halloween: Resurrection" reminds me at times of Christopher Young's score to the first "Hellraiser," of all things. But without the Lament configuration.
I had no idea that "Scourge of Armagon," the first mission pack to "Quake," was done by people who gave us "Duke Nukem 3D."
2024-08-30
Let's say E2EE is banned because "terrorists use it." What's stopping them from using an illegal app that offers E2EE? In the end, this hits just a regular user.
Monospace font encourages brevity.
Monospace font gives the same voice to all the characters in the set.
Post to specific people but mark no one, thus, making your posts discoverable only in case of leaked database or your account hacked, with a risk that your Mastodon instance goes down before that. A true art, like a short story hidden in comments of a code of an obscure app with zero stars on Github.
Halloween soundtracks' tracklists can be read like a prose.
"Halloween: Resurrection": Michael is in the shadows, nobody believes Jan, Rudy fights Michael, Rudy gets hung up, Michael chases Sara, Sara runs, the end is near, the worst is over.
"Halloween" (2018): Michael kills, Michael kills again, The Shape returns, the boogeyman, The Shape kills, Laurie sees The Shape.
The end is near, the worst is over. That's somewhat optimistic.
Function: 1 minute
Unit tests: 2 minutes
TypeScript: 90 minutes (and still failing)
I don't even
A post from Chronomyst LLC
"All of my teachers failed me."