Notes from October 2024

2024-10-02

I went to a local manga/videogames convention on the weekend, and they had some older models of consoles. One of them was Nintendo WiiU. Now, Nintendo had no presence in Poland in 1990s, when I grew up, and until Switch, which I own, Nintendo was more of a footnote for me. So, I took a chance to play a bit on WiiU (Super Mario Karts). I am surprised how ergonomically good this console was, especially compared to Switch. Placement of buttons and sticks is perfect. Why did they mess that up later?

In the late 1990s, I watched "Ally McBeal" (I tried rewatching the show a decade later, but it was too cringy experience and I abandoned it). In one episode, Biscuit was using for some reason a word to relax himself or something. Who knows with this guy. The word was "Poughkeepsie." I had no idea what that was and learned only later it's a town. Whenever I see or hear this name anywhere, I immediately think of Ally McBeal. Sorry, Poughkeepsie, you're cursed like that.

"Would you support or oppose a pre-emptive strike by Isreal on Iran. You have 2 minutes."

The speed at which the host asked the question made it sound as if JD Vance had 2 minutes for a pre-emptive strike.

That's it. I just found a movie with 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. It's "Graveyard Shift" from 1990, which was based on Stephen King's short story. At some point, I might now be tempted to see it.

2024-10-03

An idea for a product: Rabbit-Hole-as-a-Service. You buy an article in one of a couple of categories that is spiked with links to other materials, like articles or videos, etc. (some might be hosted by the service but not necessarily). You spend between 10 to 40 hours with those materials and there is a chance that you continue with the topic on your own. Only legit topics and no AI content.

"Rebel Moon" in director's version is so long that I decided to make a series out of it.

2024-10-04

The problem with "Google it yourself" is that the crawling enshittification might push someone to websites that confirm their biases (even before 2021, due to profiling) or to some AI-generated crap that would do even more harm (post-AI).

2024-10-05

I cut enough pomegranates open to learn the proper way. And all because I once saw a video on the Internet. If I were into pineapples, I'd learn that art too.

The year I learned how hollowing a great large structure can be to a human being.

TIL that Gotham City is in the state of New Jersey. It doesn't change much for me, but I always had its location as more ambiguous (the East Coast).

2024-10-06

I wanted to see something with Vincent Gallo, so I reached for "L.A. Without a Map." Despite action being set in USA (Los Angeles and briefly Las Vegas), the movie is European AF, which must be due to the Finnish director, Mika Kaurismäki. Pacing and colour palette remind me heavily of *his younger brother's* Finland trilogy. The music and laid-back atmosphere of Wim Wenders' movies. And Vincent Gallo delivers, albeit he's a secondary character here.

I found a way to base the <ol> inner padding dependent on the number of items. I googled a solution, but it was JS-based, and I wasn't satisfied with it.

ol {
  line-height: 1.75rem;
  padding-left: 4ch;
  
  &:has(li:nth-child(10)) {
    padding-left: 5ch;
  }
  
  &:has(li:nth-child(100)) {
    padding-left: 6ch;
  }
  
  &:has(li:nth-child(1000)) {
    padding-left: 7ch;
  }

It's time to read a screenplay first and then see the movie, and observe how this plays out.

Turns out a backdoor turned out to be problematic.

A quote from Dune

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

2024-10-07

I begun to think that in case of those Americans fighting for their right to own guns, the guns have secondary meaning. They are merely a symbol of weirdly perceived freedom and independence. For some reason, guns became the tangible thing they're after. It doesn't validate having guns at all, but I cannot help to look at them with some sort of sympathy, even if I would disarm them all with the other hand. I suspect Bitcoin serve similar role in many cases. It's just a good story.

2024-10-08

Mustn't Don't Social

Due to cheapness of virtue signalling, there is this argument: "if you care so much about this [distant group of people], why don't you care about [the closer group of people]?" It's supposed to, I suppose, make the person reconsider and start caring about their proximity. But in works the opposite way in my case and I stop caring about the distant group. I don't know what does it tell about me as a person.

2024-10-09

Dead links. There is something poetic to it. Like a poem hiding in the title.

Once vibrant websites
Leading to the new worlds
Now gone forever

After reading about WordPress conundrum, I'm glad I went with a static website for myself this time.

2024-10-10

Take TailwindCSS to the deepest hole and bury it there.

2024-10-11

Whenever they ask me to use a special character in my password, I go with Noob Saibot.

I finished John Romero's "Doom Guy: Life In First Person" yesterday. I wasn't super excited for it, having read "Masters of Doom" earlier, but it turned out to be a really good reading. It added a lot of details and straightened out some stories from the other book. John Romero has a very good memory and he provided a lot of details about gaming development realities, especially in the 1980s. And the last paragraph of the acknowledgements was really touching.

Any word can be used as an insult. The structure of the language doesn't prevent that. There is certain beauty to it. Of course not when you're taking the insult.

One of the things where social media harmed us was showing us that a lot of atrocities and generally bad things happen with absolutely no consequences. Long-term, this has to have terrible consequences.

Fun fact. A pizza with pineapple on it is called Hawaiian, however, it was invented in Canada. Canadians, probably the least violent nation in the world, came up with something like that.

I decided to try DSDA Doom, which is getting whole lot of recommendations, and my, oh my, isn't it smooth experience. There's only a handful of settings, but I got all like I wanted. My favourite new thing (kind of, it was in PrBoom+) is the crosshair locking on a target, which allows me to see who am I shooting. It's also helpful in the darkness. I will miss some of Doom Retro climatic improvements, though.

A post from Nire Bryce

"the age of Move Fast and Break Things is over, and we now enter an age of Move Slow Within Broken Things"

/source

2024-10-13

Long names have higher redundancy and work better when shouting out at someone to get their attention.

Too much dust inside my computer and the graphic card overheats when I try playing Doom. It's time for compressed-air time.

2024-10-14

I like languages: I learn them, I follow etymologies, I compare rules of known ones, etc., and I suspect that allowed me to see through the LLM bullshit. It's obvious to me that it's an empty shell, but somehow a lot of people who I have for intelligent fell for that. It's a bit debilitating to watch this unfolding.

2024-10-16

"Under the Shadow" (2016) is balancing a thing line with its setting in my view. Horrors happening during the war are not my favourite ones because the war increases the horror part, but the horror diminishes the war part. War is horrible on its own and it doesn't need any horror added. And yet, here, Tehran in the 1980s is more of a background for the actual story that mostly plays on adult fears (parenthood, etc.).

I read an article recently (from the year 2000), and there, it was written that if you ask any developer about their codebase, they'll tell you that it needs a rewrite. So I take my codebases easy.

A post from Dgar

How to write good.

1. Avoid alliteration. Always.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
4. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
5. One should never generalize.
6. Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Sentence fragments? Eliminate.
9. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
10. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
11. Who needs rhetorical questions?

/source

2024-10-17

Let's see if I dusted the computer off properly.

The operation succeeded. DSDA Doom is no longer overheating the graphic card.

2024-10-18

Why are they covering the whole Mars colonisation as if it was realistic?

The director of "Versus" (2000) didn't know if he'd get a chance to make another movie, so he put all he could have into his feature debut: samurais, gangsters, zombies, wizards, magic forests, and some more. The plot was, conveniently, omitted. I'm kidding, but I would say there is no real plot until 40 to 60 minutes into the movie. Earlier it's just action. Probably a thing for connoisseurs. The soundtrack, which is instrumental hip-hop, is very good, though, and it's on Spotify.

Every time I use word "connoisseur," I either use the phone's dictionary or google it. A very counter-intuitive word. Or a French word, in other words.

I had "Kitchen Stories" (2003) on my list for very long. But finally, I saw it. The only thing I knew about it was that it's a Norwegian movie. It's a mix of drama and comedy, with drama being the main flavour. A slow-burning story about friendship and loneliness. After the movie, I learned that the director (Bent Hamer) did one of my favourite movies two years later, "Factotum." And then I saw how un-American movie that was.

2024-10-20

I love the rewind functionality in DSDA Doom. All those monster lockers don't piss me off any more. Neither small errors of judgement. Instead of saving between fights, which I often forget, I just rewind. And exploration is less endangering for the level's progress. It's like Doom but with time-travel.

With the rewind option, you can be Nicholas Cage from "Next."

*going through Mastodon's visibility options before posting* I wanna go public with this information.

The biggest challenge is to remain calm.

That killed me. 💀

2024-10-21

Let's not forget that time when I accidentally learned playing Doom on a keyboard with a built-in trackball.

I hereby reject all the cookies.

One thing I hate, to the point of abandoning the videos, is the sound of keyboard clacking during the gameplay videos. I get it, mechanical keyboards are cool, but thanks, no. I always hold my gamepad under the desk to minimise it (this 6 times when I recorded something).

2024-10-22

I just saw an old video of George Bush Jr., and the strangest thing: he seemed different than I remembered him. I haven't seen anything with him for ages, so I had this facade-like memory of him. But seeing it now, it felt like a different person than I had somewhere in the back of my head. Funny how memory works.

I think I've seen enough mistakes with implementing translations to speak about it freely. All the solutions are painful, but some are wrong.

I saw "Call Me By Your Name" (2017) because I was curious about the whole predatory-gap controversy. It's a generally pleasant story, set in a pleasant setting, and only the conversation with father at the end seems a bit off or even cringy. As if they gave away their son to an adult man? What the hell. Then, I learned that 17-year-old and 24-year-old characters from the book were played by 22-year-old and 29-year-old actors. The same difference in age, yet, changing a lot in their dynamics.

2024-10-23

It's a bit peculiar, but a game loses some points when the character does nothing with their hands while running. I get it, it's easier to animate, and I would probably be tempted to go down this path myself had I been implementing any game. But still.

Due to old muscle memory, I started typing "tw[itter]" in the omnibox instead of "ms[tdn]." But it's been almost 2 years already.

I was reading about "Too Old To Die Young" on Wiki, and there was warning to not mistake it with "Too Late To Die Young" (2018), so I decided to clear out the confusion. It's an Argentinian movie telling a coming-out-of-age story set in eco commune back in 1990 near Santiago in Argentina. Nice music from the epoch. But what I liked the most is a slow beginning where I almost thought it's gonna be plotless. It wasn't. Vaguely reminding me style of Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine, and Werner Herzog.

The older I get, the more I see Dune as an accurate depiction of how states actually operate.

2024-10-24

I saw this pattern a couple of times: we start a project using a lot of libraries because it's fast, but as time flies by, a lot of dependencies are abandoned, blocking an update of the main libraries, thus, halting progress in the project because there is no budget for that. One could write a lot of these themselves, but that takes more time ahead, and it was supposed to be fast. Actually, I saw it in every project I worked on. :D

2024-10-25

I get the impression that just as "boomer" started mean someone old enough to be beyond understanding of contemporary things, "millennial" came to mean the opposite--someone forever young and just entering the marketplace.

A millennial

Forever young
Forever entitled
A bane of the economic order

"The White Lotus" seemed to me to be a sitcom for some reason, so I was postponing it. Wrong. It starts like a family drama, albeit, set in a timeless space of a hotel/spa, then gets comedic, then suddenly gets serious in a manner that reminded me of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." There is a fantastic gallery of characters who interact with each other in all manners of speaking, and that is what makes the show here. Can't wait to continue my adventure.

The press is not doing well, so I expect them to cut more deals with AI entities because there is simply money in it. To quote Raymond Reddington from "The Blacklist": "Life over ethics. You first survive, then you take care of your values."

2024-10-26

Ah, good ol' flame war, like in the Twitter days. A bit refreshing, but I need to avoid these situations. Still, as an incident, it was okay.

Methinks, I could try doing a Mastodon web client, just to code a project the way I like. I'm tired of pointless todo lists at this point. I was thinking about Nostr at first, and it could even pay some sats, but it's better to be the change you wanna see in the Internet. Nostr just isn't it.

"Dead Cells" were on discount, so I took 'em. Controls with a gamepad are definitely better. I like the rudimentary plot, which is a carryover from my Doom background. Give me environmental storytelling which is not crucial to the gameplay, then I can play it on and off for years.

I heard a lot of harsh words about the difficulty, but after "Narita Boy," "Blasphemous," "Metroid Dread," "Ori 1," and "Blasphemous 2," it's pretty manageable. I die a lot, but that's the trade.

Speaking of difficulty in "Blasphemous 2," the semi-final boss is like a 10-time difficulty spike, which I can understand as a concept, but I don't feel like grinding for days with a maxed-out character. The sword barely damages the bastard. I'll give it a shot but might end up watching it on YouTube.

A couple of months ago, I had an idea to create an account on Fediverse (most likely Mastodon) and post there as if I was blogging in 2002. It was about capturing a certain sense or vibe of posting back then, not pretending it's 2002. I had an idea for a name, etc., but eventually, didn't proceed with it. I realised recently that my note-taking here is that very thing I had in mind.

Especially that I am copying them over to my website by the end of the month. Years from now, Mastodon origin will not matter.

My memory is not what it used to be. I just found a full article about "The Matrix's" screenplay which I finished 20 days ago (it still needs redacting). I completely forgot I was writing it.

It's funny how conservatives don't conserve nature or climate. But it's not actually funny.

We're missing out so much with CSS-in-JS.

blockquote {
  padding-inline-start: 8ch;
  
  blockquote {
    padding-inline-start: 4ch;
    
    blockquote {
      padding-inline-start: 2ch;
    }
  }
  
  h1 + & {
    padding-inline-start: max(8ch, calc(100% - var(--container-width) * .75));
  }
}

The cold is here. Sandals and shorts are done for the year.

2024-10-29

Strangest thing. Due to third-party reasons, I didn't drink any coffee yesterday. Then, I wasn't sleepy nor tired by the end of the day. I skipped my morning coffee today as well. A large cup of tea is fine too.

"Uzumaki" is a 4-episode anime based on a manga. It tells a story of a small town going crazy due to its tenants' obsession about spirals. I really liked how the story goes off the bat almost immediately and continues on this path, with some disturbingly interesting ideas. I am not a fan of black-and-white mangas, but it was executed very well, with blurring of things out of focus, etc. Now I'm considering getting the manga.

2024-10-30

The smell of cigarette smoke is so rare these days that when I smell it, I think of my younger years. Nothing in particular, just different times.