28 July 2024

Weeknotes 17

Links, Destiny, and lots of photos. And I designed a custom blog post layout for it, with a different font and everything.

Table of Contents

    It’s July, and the passage of time continues to be disorienting.

    If you’re reading this in your RSS reader, I must implore you to read it on my blog itself because I designed a nice new post layout just for this and I want you to look at it.

    Screenshot of the first few lines of this post, including an embedded screenshot of the post, which includes another screenshot of itself, implying recursion. The page design itself features white, light yellow, and blue.
    an approximation of what it looks like

    Reading list

    • AI Is Coming For Your Children

      by Robert Evans in Shatter Zone

      about AI-generated slop in the form of children’s books. how utterly depressing.

    • An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch

      by Keenan

      a fun account of the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of creating an 11ty site.

    • The Doc Web

      by Elan Ullendorff in escape the algorithm

      Google Docs as a publishing tool! A spreadsheet is a website!

      These public docs are web pages, but only barely — difficult to find, not optimized for shareability, lacking prestige.

    • Fast Crimes at Lambda School

      by Benjamin Sandofsky

    • Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

      by Maggie Appleton

    • I Paid $365.63 to Replace 404 Media With AI

      by Emanuel Maiberg for 404 Media

    • jeddacp.me

      a cool photo blog that makes me want to also make a photo blog (or at least, share more photos)

    • RegEx Poetry Machine

      by Katherine Yang

    • research as leisure activity

      by Celine Nguyen in personal canon

      I love this so much.

      The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play. It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on ideas.

      Sometimes I feel like collecting ‘research’ (links, unfinished thoughts) in my digital garden but am pulled back by self-imposed doubts of what ‘research’ is supposed to be and how my link-gathering is embarrassingly pedestrian. This post is such a wonderful articulation of how research can be informal and fun!!

      Research as leisure activity:

      • Is directed by passions and instincts.
      • Is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary.
      • Involves as much rigor as necessary.

      Also, Nguyen starts off by making a lovely destinction between a useful versus beautiful description of Are.na:

      It’s kind of like Pinterest for artists, researchers, and academics. This is a useful description, but not a beautiful one. The beautiful description was written by the librarian Karly Wildenhaus, who described it as: “Research as leisure activity.”

      Anyway, I’m obsessed with this.

    • Should this be a map or 500 maps?

      by Elan Ullendorff in escape the algorithm

      about 500 priests drawing 500 maps of their own part of Italy, which together form a mess rather than a cohesive map, but the individual maps are fascinating.

      When you see a slightly generic news story design, you’re seeing the solution to the problem: how do I make this work for any headline, any image, any tone, any audience? How do I make this as adaptable as possible? The question of “what does this story want?” becomes subsumed into the larger goal of malleability and efficiency. A template, not a story. A map, not 500 maps.

    • Weeknotes 17

      by anh in anhvn

      pretty mid but has some interesting links. some recurring themes like the rest of her weeknotes

      It’s July, and the passage of time c̶o̵n̴t̶i̶n̶u̸e̴s̵ ̶̛̘t̷͓͐o̴̠̾ ̷̮̃b̷̡̀e̶̫̚ ḋ̵̛̝͉͂̕͝ḯ̸̢̮͔̪̔̕̕ś̶̨̪̟̮̟̝o̵̡͚͌͗̌͠r̴̺̗̪̈́ĩ̶̳͌̚ẽ̶̗͎͓̤̋̐̍n̴̹͗ṱ̵͎̼̱̭̅i̷̳̇ń̶̬̼̄̈́̔̆͘g̵͔̠̝̰͚͗͠

    Destiny segue

    I’m sorry, I’ll shut the fuck up about Destiny once it stops being so interesting to me. Two of the links above—The Doc Web and Should this be a map or 500 maps?, both written by Elan Ullendorff in their newsletter escape the algorithm—are here because I was blathering on about Destiny and some friends sent me them. It went something like this:

    • semi-related gaming thot
    • need a name/description for the on-the-fly maps/diagrams people make during new raids
    • which are always hilariously chaotic and imbued with whatever lore is going on in voice chat at the time
    • but are also used as the definitive guide for x thing
    • like the anti-graphic design of it all
    • A hastily created MS Paint-type map, with labels written in comic sans.
    • (pictured here: a map of a 3x3 grid of rooms we made the other week)
    1. vidya maybe could be described as some kind of scrawl cartography that defies complete effectiveness and efficiency but has expressiveness + lore
    2. https://escapethealgorithm.substack.com/p/should-this-be-a-map-or-500-maps

    The Destiny context: raids are cooperative 6-player activities. This kind of on-the-fly map is common when there’s a new raid. You need to create it quickly, because your teammates are waiting. You have limited information, because the raid is new and no one knows how it works yet. You’re already conversing on a voice call, so you have prior shared knowledge. The map serves as a cheatsheet for names and mechanics that you might forget.

    Another hasty map of circles, triangles, and rectangles, and some flowchart connecting them.
    another example diagram, this time a flowchart of a puzzle encounter. by @ritzzcar on twitter

    Anyway, Should this be a map or 500 maps? touches on this topic. I wish someone smarter than me would write an essay about this as it pertains to Destiny (maps, guides, callouts (which is the ‘front’ vs ‘back’ of the room? (sorry oryx flashbacks)), names, chaos strats, etc.). Maybe I’ll start a garden post about it.

    Anyway

    The grind never ends!!! I am now a proud completer of the Salvation’s Edge raid and owner of the raid exotic. I even know how to dissect shapes, among other mechanics.

    My guardian statue in Verity, holding a triangle.
    it me. my favourite helmet (‘statue of liberty’) works well here
    My titan emoting in front of my corresponding titan statue, wearing a horned helmet.
    my titan fashion will never get better than this
    My warlock emoting with a cat on a pillar in the second encounter.
    the second encounter arena is so cool

    References

    I’ve started collecting links and writing my own reference material for stuff—I was reminiscing about gamefaqs.com a while back, which was the perfect website. I’m throwing it all into a neat little post in my digital garden, and it’s optimized for exactly what I need: brevity, quick to access and load, viewable on my narrow second monitor, and devoid of any information I don’t need myself, even if other people might need it. This is for me only.

    For example: Substratum

    I made a little page to act as a map for Substratum, the first raid encounter. The map is of a 3x3 grid of rooms, which each get a name to help with callouts. (This is what the goofy map above depicts.)

    A 3 by 3 grid of boxes, each labeled with a name. One box has its text outlined, indicating it can be edited.

    However, room names will vary across raid groups. Sometimes the names are common enough (e.g. the middle room is usually ‘mid’) but others can vary greatly. The names are editable, in case I need to use callouts I’m not used to and don’t otherwise have a good map reference.

    Another example: Verity

    I wrote out step-by-step instructions for Verity, the notorious fourth encounter puzzle. While I know the steps and understand why I’m doing each step, when things get chaotic it’s easy to forget what I need to do next.

    My instructions are written so I can look back and forth between my monitors in the middle of an encounter and actually read what I need to read in a split second. But, I also include brief descriptions of things for when I need to refer to this to refresh my memory.

    Screenshot of a bullet list of steps to follow for 'inside' mechanics.
    keywords are bolded; bullet points to help with hierarchy

    I’m constantly adjusting this as I use it. The other day, I realized my steps were too verbose and took up too much vertical space, because I also needed to fit another cheatsheet on my screen, so I shortened it even further.

    Anyway, it’s truly not much, but it’s nice to hyperoptimize something for myself.

    When I’m not raiding I’m overthrowing

    The nice thing about the Pale Heart is that it’s a good place to spend time when I don’t know what to do. I like mindlessly shooting stuff, opening chests, and collecting Ergo Sums. The downside is that I now spend too much time doing that instead of logging off like a responsible person.

    Nature (grass)

    Earlier this month, I went out of town for a few days with some friends and visited a lavender farm, touched grass, and pet some cats.

    A field of lavender during golden hour.
    A white patio set in a yard, surrounded by flowers and trees.
    A black cat sitting on a patio and gazing up at the viewer with yellow eyes.
    A bunch of small plants and pots on display at a store.
    A selfie of me, holding my hand up to my face to shield from the sun.
    A square window looking out at trees. On the window sill are dried flowers in small bottles.
    A bunch of lilypads in a pond.
    A small frog on the edge of a pond.

    The cat was very friendly and demanded many pets, which were enthusiastically given.

    A black cat curled up on a patio chair against a yellow pillow.
    The same black cat yawning.

    Nature (sea, sky)

    I also saw the sunset! I should go outside more often. My photos hardly do it justice.

    View of a body of water, framed by trees on either side.
    A park bench, trees, and water in the distance, during sunset.
    Water during sunset, with the sky turning pink and pale yellow. There's a tiny sliver of moon in the sky.
    Another sunset view, now with far way mountains past the water.
    A red glider against a purple sky.
    The sunset, with a yellow-orange sky, framed by trees and flowers.
    Some yellow flowers growing out of a stump of wood that serves as a fence post.
    Looking up at a utility pole with power lines extending from it.

    This website

    Not much else is going on here right now. I occasionally open it up and ponder making something new, because it feels like that’s something I should be doing (a woman in possession of a personal website must be in want of updating it) but all my nebulous ideas feel either too dull or too daunting.

    Etc.

    I am thinking about: playing The First Descendant; reading a book (lol); how hot it’s been these days; Chappell Roan; confronting my fridge/pantry; buying a standing desk; eating jalapeño chips; continuing my Destiny comic (lmao); ill-advised online shopping; other tasks I’m avoiding (or rather I’m not thinking about those).

    I also tidied up my normally horrendous desk to take this photo (cable management is my enemy):

    My computer desk setup, featuring two monitors, an ergonomic keyboard, and an abundance of messy cables everywhere. To the side are a docked Macbook and a PC.
    macbook airs not being able to support more than one external monitor is a crime