Weeklog for Week 7: February 14 to February 20

Feb 20, 2022

Progress

Wow! Very work! Much progress!

No progress this week.

No progress this week.

On the Experience of Remote Meetings
Sci-Hub: database
Inside Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator 's deliberately designed friction: "Friction", as termed here, means that a game doesn't make it too easy for you to reach your task. While I agree that this can be a valuable way to "make life harder" for players, I tend to dislike these mechanisms, since they also introduce hectic-ness and panic. I tend to like slower, less frenzied games more.
Oh great, there's DRM in printer PAPER now – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow: There are so many good printers that don't do that disgusting stuff, for little more than the disgusting ones. There's really no reason to buy that shit.
The Ultimate Wine Tasting Event: Distinguishing Reds From Whites -- Elliott Morss: Do you think you can distinguish between red and white wine? I don't think I can, but I'll need to write more words and do more research on it.

The Hub of Heliopolis - Running C unit tests with pytest: Years and years and years ago, when I was but a lowly employee, a colleague asked in our group what a good test runner for python would be. We googled, as per usual, and found an an answer on stack overflow that simply said: "python unittest with struct". This is just more of that, and it's still true.
gobby/gobby: Gobby collaborative editor: "Gobby is a free collaborative editor. This means that it provides you with the possibility to edit files simultaneously with other users over a network. The platforms on which you could use Gobby are so far Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and other Unix-like ones. Developed with the GTK+ toolkit it integrates nicely into the GNOME desktop environment if you want it to."
This is fantastic, and if it were web-based, it would be even fantasticer.
Alexander Pruss's Blog: Game Boy Fiver (Wordle clone): How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes: While I don't care about the game, nice little hacks are always nice.
Why your mock still doesn’t work -- Ned Batchelder: Advice by @nedbat is always good advice.

Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot, finished: The only thing surprising about this book is how unsurprising it is. The good guys are unerringly good, the bad guys are bad in every way, all wounds heal instantly, everyone is surprised by revelations you can see a mile away, the factions are black-and-white caricatures of themselves and everyone is quite incompetent at everything, except of course the good guys when it counts. And also, the main character is a lesbian, which does absolutely nothing to the plot at all -- you could switch any of the genders of any of the three main characters and it wouldn't change a single thingI understand the argument that it's important to have LGBTQ+ literature. But if it's done without any difference to the plot, you could simply take any book and switch the characters' genders around and be done. So, I'm not saying that I dislike the characters' orientations, I'm saying I dislike that it's pointless.. In many ways, this book reminds me of Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, which bills itself as "young adult sci-fi". Bluebird, in my impression, is a YA-LGBTQ+-sci-fi book, with aspirations to something much higher.
In the end, the book is not bad, I just had different expectations given the breathless advertising copy.

Starbound with the gang: awesome, and much deeper than expected. Both literally and metaphorically.

Crème Brûlée again, getting better at this every time, but still more research is needed