Has it been two weeks already? Oh man, it’s all a blur. Anyway.
Chili crunch. 🤤 I’m not much of a foodie, so no apologies for being late to this trend. I’m hooked and have been eating way too much of this stuff (no regrets). Local supermarket has only two varieties, unfortunately. The only Asian food store is a bit of a drive, but now I have a compelling reason to make it. I’m also quite tempted to order the Momofuku variety pack.
I had my first major “production oopsie” at work: a stray && continue in a shell script I wrote resulted in deletion of all Prometheus alerts (some regrets). I think this was a gentle nudge from the universe not to try to sneak any quick PR merges on my days off, before having to leave for an appointment no less. Next stop on my Real Developer™ journey: dropping a DB table from my phone while at a dentist.
This advice:
focus on one big project at a time (or at most, one work project and one nonwork project) and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next. It’s alluring to try to alleviate the anxiety of having too many responsibilities or ambitions by getting started on them all at once, but you’ll make little progress that way; instead, train yourself to get incrementally better at tolerating that anxiety, by consciously postponing everything you possibly can, except for one thing.
Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks
I’ve been trying to follow it with mixed results. There are times when I keep steady at work and walk past things I’d typically react to, and do see quick progress on projects that would usually take months. Other times, the anxiety is toxic to any kind of focus. My ADHD brain steadily increases the volume on this background noise until it becomes the entire soundtrack of my day. Addressing the source of the anxiety is the only way forward.
God Mode in games. I’m not ashamed of using it sometimes. I remember IDDQD’ing through Doom, because I was more interested to spend my limited playtime seeing the variety of levels, monsters, weapons, etc. rather than getting better. But this isn’t a justification-for-using-god-mode kinda post.
I want to appreciate how cleverly it’s implemented in Hades. I didn’t even realize the game had this mode when I first played it a couple of years back. I think I had five clears or so before I set it aside. I recently picked it back up. At first I figured I would just resume my old playthrough, but I kinda forgot the mechanics and some of the story. The lack of a “catch up mode” in video games is a major pet peeve of mine, but that’s for another time. I thought maybe I could try a fresh save, but with God Mode. I was reluctant at first because I assumed it would mean that the character just wouldn’t take damage from enemies. This didn’t really make sense, as this is a game where you have to die to progress the story. The developers thought of that, of course. On top of a base +20% damage resistance, God Mode just gives you an additional stacking +2% every time you die in combat. This ensures that average players like me still get to experience all of the mechanics and story of the game, but the challenge gradually scales down over time. This is different from the traditional “easy mode”, which is often just a flat difficulty reduction across the whole game, or a dynamic assist kind of a feature, where the game offers you the option to skip a level you’re struggling with (or gives you an item that makes the level a lot easier). The +2% is hardly noticeable on its own, so you gotta die a few times before you even notice that the game’s easier. And you don’t get the +2% if you successfully complete a run, so the difficulty also “settles” at a level that’s empirically working for the player. Brilliant!
- I decided to setup dotfiles to make it easier to synchronize configs and apps across my work and personal Macs. The inspiration was this excellent repo by Alicia Sykes, which I stumbled upon by accident. It served as a base, but I trimmed it down to just what I need. Since I don’t actually set up new machines that often, using Syncthing with versioning instead of git has worked quite well so far.
- Rode with K to Orillia yesterday, which is a nice 60k roundtrip. Got a snack at The Lone Wolf Cafe and then checked out the Mariposa Market. Apart from some delectable baked goods, which I regrettably had no safe way to transport home, they also sell neat trinkets like these Pez dispensers.
- Still no luck on the housing front. Lost another place despite offering over asking with three extra months of rent upfront. 😭
- Only thing watched: The Veil S1E3-4.