Sam's L33t Journal

Some of my extended team was in town this week, so there were some team social things. Went to Flight Club in the Seaport, a darts place with bowling-alley-style computerized scoring. I'm probably better at darts than bowling, but pretty terrible at both. Still was fun, the food was quite good there, too.

The weather has been a little more overcast and foggy and cool, but reasonably nice.

This weekend, I did a bit of cooking on Saturday afternoon. Made homemade refried beans and seasoned beef and tortillas for tacos. The tortillas turned out as good as I wanted this time, I got the consistency right and prepared the pan right and didn't forget to add a little salt.

We decided to have a family movie outing, so we went to see Paddington in Peru at the Assembly AMC this afternoon. And we watched the previous installment in the series at home yesterday, which I paid half attention to while I cooked. Those movies are not at the top of my recommendation list, but they're okay.

The Halloween events continue. Friday, there was the Character Day parade at Erica's school (a K-3 event, so her last time participating). This evening, Julie took Erica to a haunted house at Harvard, which apparently Erica found more than a bit scary.

This afternoon, we all went to see The Wild Robot, which was pretty fun.

Work has been pretty busy, as my team has been ramping up on phase two of a big project. Speaking of which (belatedly, I missed mentioning this here earlier), the end of the first phase of that means a good chunk of our work has been publicly released, it's out in alpha on Android Jetpack (announcement blog post), the cross-platform C++ core is on GitHub here. I'm doing a lot more web graphics studying at work, spent some of my time last week on the WebGPU codelab here, which was pretty interesting, it's a powerful API.

Continues to be busy, but Julie's taking Erica today (after Erica swim lesson, they're going to watch some of the Head of the Charles Regatta and check out an acquaintance's art exhibit) so I have a few quiet moments to do laundry and write.

Last weekend was a long weekend. Saturday, Andrew and Min got married, the ceremony was at the Science Museum out back on the Charles River Promenade, and they got beautiful fall weather, too. On Saturday, we went to visit Xave, Sarah, and baby Adair (who's now mobile and rather communicative, though not talking and walking quite yet), was great to see them. Erica was really excited to get the chance to meet Adair for the first time.

On Monday, saw an early-afternoon showing of the Pharell Williams documentary Piece by Piece with the family. The movie's animated-in-Lego style brings a lot of creative verve and visual metaphor to what would otherwise be a rather straightforward interviews-and-archival-footage structure. Was really fun and interesting, Erica enjoyed it, too. Afterwards, I took Erica to the aquarium and we had a snack at Lakon Paris and spicy noodles at Yume Ga Arukara in the Seaport.

The short week went by real fast. Lots of work meetings and work social stuff with the new person a few levels up from my team.

I finished S a few weeks ago, it was interesting but it's not like there's some neat conclusion that brings it all together in a very satisfying way. I thought I'd enjoy deep-diving video essays about the content of the book after finishing it, but most of what I found was just people arguing about the best way to read it and discussing whether that worked well for them or not. So I guess tentatively recommended if you really like Lost or ergodic literature in general, and I definitely did appreciate the book for being an interesting example of the unusual sort of thing it is.

I also finished Scavengers Reign. It's masterful, recommended if you like animation or science fiction.

Summer isn't done with us yet.

I've got this Nest thermostat, and if you're not familiar with that sort of "smart" thermostat, it does two things re AC in the summer:

1. Try to learn what temperature you like it.

2. Set it to much warmer than that temperature to save you money.

The feature that sets it warmer when you're actually not in the house is fine, but the "rush hour" feature that sets it a little warmer at "peak" times (i.e. when you, too, most want your air well conditioned) is a bit more aggravating. This year especially. It seems to me like in past years it would set things a few degrees higher, but when my schedule says 73 and the thermostat is like "how about 79?" that seems a bit much.

Actually, there are a lot of ways I wish Nest was a bit smarter. There's no way for it to look at my calendar and pre-cool/warm the house when I get back from a vacation. Or even have me tell it when I'm getting back manually and have it take that into account. It doesn't adjust the schedule to my preferences that well. It supports multiple temperature sensors, but only supports looking at one at a time and only can switch between on a fixed schedule. It can't do anything based on the difference in temperatures (in particular, I'd like it to run the fan if only some of the sensors are as cool as I want). The fan can be run automatically if it wouldn't otherwise be on, but only on a fixed schedule.

All right, enough rambling on that topic. Summer is coming to an end one way or another. My mom brought Erica back to town, had a wonderful time doing stuff together, she got to go to school dropoff for Erica's first day of second grade. Then she got COVID after returning home. At least she's feeling better after a prompt course of Paxlovid. We haven't gotten sick yet, but school year's started and stuff is going around.

Had a good long weekend with some extra climbing and a trip to the Science Museum. Also took Erica to the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum (touristy, but educational, hadn't been in ages). Erica -acted very closed-off and shy, but then said she enjoyed it.

This week, some of the computer systems are down at kid's school after some sort of security issue (a ransomware attack, maybe, they haven't been real forthcoming with the details).

I had one of Erica's friends over on Tuesday and Erica's at his house today. Nice to have a break, but sometimes I get stressed out when I have a break. So much to do, so little time. (And yet I manage to get to some things, like hammering some words onto the virtual page here. It's good.)

I'm enjoying the new Magic set, though I feel like I haven't figured out a deck to do well in new Standard. Want to play some limited of the new set, haven't had the time.

Also been really enjoying the Netflix One Piece. I'm not real familiar with the anime or manga, but people more familiar seem to think it's a good adaptation in addition to being generally good. Amazing how well you can do with that sort of thing when the people doing the adapting clearly like the source material and understand why it's good.

I was up a bit late with Erica last night after Julie ducked out for early bed, and Erica was very upset about something about a game; big feelings about little problems. But eventually she helped me finish cooking a batch of beans (which I enjoy because I'm finally figuring out how to get those really good in the Instant Pot). I appreciate her help on that, she's the #1 fan of beans in this household, so I really want to be able to make them up to her standards. We had some good conversation about all sorts of things, including how to describe different kinds of spices and computer security.

The last two weeks, Erica's been on an epic road trip with her Grammy and Grumpy (Scott and Heather, Julie's parents) and her cousin Emilia. They took quite the journey up to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, back down along the Saint Lawrence to Quebec City, on to visit some extended family in Toronto, stopped at Niagara Falls, swung down to Cleveland for a consulting job for Scott and some tourism with all four grandparents. Then back to Boston. She just got back today. Two weeks out of town for Erica, and her first journey away from parents. (And I still didn't write the whole time.)

The two weeks were pretty uneventful work-weeks on the home-front, though did have quite an eventful weekend with Julie, we saw a play (Evita at the ART) and a movie (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, for the second time for me and I did not at all regret the rewatch) and got in line early for a delve into a high-concept cocktail bar (Hecate, not an everyday thing and the concept done possibly to the point of silliness, but still very interesting drinks). And some quiet time and cooking, too.

I've mostly fallen out of the habit of playing Magic Arena with the last set, a "Universes Beyond" set themed after Lord of the Rings, since that set doesn't go into the N-most-recent-normal-sets format, Standard, which is the one I mostly play. Instead, it's in Alchemy, which is Arena's Standard plus "rebalancing" (having slightly different versions of cards) plus whatever the opposite of rebalancing is (having wild digital-only-mechanics nonsense). And, of course, Limited, with the set just by itself. Which has been fun, but not enough to keep up the play-every-day (well, most days) sort of habit I had before. With longer before the next Standard set in (and even longer before the next out, with Wizards having widened the window for "rotation" just recently), that's started to feel more same-y, too.

I'm so terribly tired and not finding time to write. Household schedule is running me into the ground.

Julie watched Erica last Friday evening so I could catch Suzume in theaters, the latest work by Makoto Shinkai, one of Japan's most successful anime directors, one who a great essayist once described as a genius hack filmmaker. Suzume isn't so different from Shinkai's usual, but I liked the surrealist-fantasy road-trip.

The farmers market started up again for the year. Somerville Porchfest was last Saturday, a music festival like a city-wide party, that was a lot of fun. Went out for a very nice dinner at Juliet for Mothers Day on Sunday.

The news has been eventful. President Trump was found liable to the tune of $5M for defamation and sexual assault. It's turns out "that sounds like the sort of thing I could get away with doing" is not the best legal defense. Representative George Santos was also arrested for defrauding his supporters and related crimes. He won't be expelled from Congress because Republicans like that shit now.

What else? Probably a million things.

Erica's started building her own Magic decks somehow.

I've been playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and it is fantastic. Captures the joy of exploration as well as the original but with more to explore and more ways to do it, has a toolset that fits together so well that it's basically "wait you can do that!?" the game.

Erica has the week off, so we're visiting family.

For the first weekend, Julie arranged a last minute to visit her parents and sister's family in Dallas while her brother Sean was also visiting with his oldest, Owen. It was great to see everybody, we hadn't seen Sean and Owen in person in a long interval. Travel went reasonably well. Erica was a pretty good traveler, and I've managed to get together a reasonable setup where we can watch movies together on my phone on the plane. We watched Arietty on the way there (Ghibli's adaptation of The Borrowers is as charming as anything can be) and Belle on the way back (the pacing is inconsistent, and it probably could've been edited as short as the Disney adaptation it frequently references, but there's a lot that's compelling about it, so I see why Erica wanted to see it again).

On Saturday, we went out to brunch, then went to an all-you-can-play retro arcade in the afternoon. Was pretty fun, but definitely I enjoyed the DDR most of all (which, I guess, stood out as one of the less retro titles). Was glad that I hadn't totally lost my ability to read the charts. I really miss the MIT Arcade days.

Julie's dad was also showing off his new car, a Tesla Model Y, which was pretty cool, and a bit of a surreal experience. Seems like the beta version of some technology from the future. Very sleek and cutting-edge, but also rough around the edges in some surprising ways and suffused with Musk-esque humor.

I played some cribbage with Julie's dad, losing three close games in a row. And got in a little time to read and to play Magic on Arena, too, during the trip.

(Speaking of Magic, and something I should've mentioned in my last post, now that Erica's achieved enough sophistication about games to start getting interested in playing that for real, we've been playing some games together with decks from a Magic Game Night set I picked up a long while back with the thought of eventually using it for that purpose.)

We got home on Monday, and I had one day to look after Erica, get a bunch of laundry and household stuff done, and repack, before we head off tomorrow to visit Melissa and family in Baltimore. Should be fun. (The weather for that trip will range between 30 and 78 degrees. What a month.)

I'm writing this post on my new computer, a System 76 (again) Lemur Pro light-weight. My last laptop was seven years old at this point, and I'd basically stopped using it since I was more often on my work laptop. But figured my personal one was due for an update.

Last weekend I took Eris to the aquarium. Might do science museum when the Green Line Extension opening next week puts that two T stops away from our door.

I made a Saint Patrick's Day dinner of corned beef and veggies in the Instant Pot, which was fun and surprisingly easy. Baked some soda bread, too.

I keep meaning to write something about kid's idiosyncratic way of pronouncing some things. Not sure where she gets all of her Erisisms: "Intertresting", "rememories", "geanz". I'm forgetting a few funny ones, I think.

Today, the weather was beautiful and we got food from Littleburg and ate in the park. And then got ice cream from Gracie's afterwards.

Mask requirements have lifted at kid's school this week, though some of the parents (including us) are playing it cautious. There are still cases of COVID in the school. Fewer this week than last, so at least that's not immediately taking off. But another in kid's class.

I like the Caltech approach over MIT's.

I've been watching more movies with the kid lately. Digging into the Ghibli catalog: My Neighbor Totoro, Ponyo, Kiki's Delivery Service, The Secret World of Arrietty. And also Cartoon Saloon's Song of the Sea.

Eris got her first COIVD-19 vaccine on Monday.

Your Local Epidemiologist had an interesting post about rubella, as a case-study of a disease that's been suppressed through widespread vaccination for the sake of a particularly vulnerable group (pregnant women), even though it's mild for most (less severe than COVID-19).

The lack of quiet leisure has been driving me mad. Eris is anything but quiet. Julie did finally get her out of the house today to play some of Niantic's new Pikmin walkabout.

I did get some time for media etc. I finished Beastars, which was pretty good. I watched Weathering with You, which is for sure one of Shinkai's best, and very much captures an aspect of the present mood. The new Magic set is out, and it's pretty fun (for the first time in a long time it shares a common setting with the last; after last set's warewolf Halloween, this one centers around a vampire wedding). I've been really enjoying the webcomic Sleepless Domain, though it has the usual hazard of narrative webcomics, as you start getting invested in the story you start to notice how much the pace of publication is glacially slow. (Still, it's a good one and the first collection is out in print now if you like that sort of thing).

My indie TTRPG group finished a run of Urban Shadows. Don't know what we'll do next. Maybe Dreampunk, now that it's out.

Maybe I should watch the new Dune movie?

Have some cooking plans for this weekend, and getting ready for Thanksgiving at home next week.

Last weekend, we went to see the caterpillar lab at Arnold Arboretum on Saturday. That was pretty cool, more interesting than I expected. The most interesting sight was watching a hickory horned devil caterpillar pupate into a regal moth pupa live under magnification. Metamorphosis is a really interesting adaptation, the tradeoffs involved are so extreme. To undergo metamorphosis means dedicating a huge amount of resources and being vulnerable for some time. But the advantage of being able to adapt to particular parts of the life-cycle with radical changes in morphology is apparently worth it.

Last Sunday, we had brunch with my cousins Amy and Josh, at their (relatively) new place in Watertown. Was very nice to see them again, their new home is lovely.

Friday, I saw The Matrix in its 20th anniversary theatrical re-release. Thought it was definitely worth seeing on the big screen, and the effects, stunt choreography, and cinematography hold up really well. Amazing how well-crafted the movie is, and it's really striking just how influential it's been on action cinema and popular culture in general. (Plus after running a game based on this bit of a Nobilis meets The Matrix story, the parallels are all the more striking. The cultural influence of The Matrix is not to be underestimated.)

Yesterday, I took Eris to the park in the afternoon. We chalked on the sidewalk and she practiced dropping down from the monkey bars, among many other things. She's very active, keeping up with her is quite a workout.

She's been interested in ballet lately. Picked out this book from the bookstore. Apparently she's been very influenced by one of her daycare peers who is sharing some of what they learned in ballet class. (Probably got some of that interest from her cousin Emilia, too?)

Tomorrow, have the day off, will take Eris to the museum? Or something.

Aside from that... well, do things happen not on the weekends? Work happens. Tabletop gaming group (still playing Glitch) continues to be good and interesting.

I mostly talk about the good times here, but I'm still exhausted. Eris is very high-energy. I knew getting into parenting that I'd have to deal with a lot of poop and screaming (a synecdoche in both cases), but the screaming is definitely way worse. Kids are loud, and for someone with some degree of sensitivity to that, it's a lot to deal with day after day. (Also, toilet training is happening (has been happening, has largely happened), and there are definitely some aspects of that which make things temporarily (for fairly large values of "temporary") more chaotic.)

Eristic improvements: Dropping from the high bar, climbing, more self-management, more independent imaginative play, more capability when helping with chores.