Issue 1 - a work holiday, some games, and type-ahead search
A possibly weekly email on what's been going on in my brain
20-26 November 2022
It's been a tough brain week despite taking time off work, but a fox did decide to visit my garden during a very wet Wednesday.
Holiday
It seems whenever I take a vacation from work, I'm forced to come to terms with who I am outside of it. Usually my extra-work activities expand to fit the free time I have during evenings and weekends: Japanese language learning, GuessThatAnime content, trip planning etc. So a sudden surplus free time demands that I fill it, which for me triggers a deleterious spiral of introspection. Who am I outside of the team lead persona? I inevitably come out the other side, not really refreshed, but at least ready to create, and though the period is disruptive when it happens, I can recognise and accept it.
Video games
That time did give me the opportunity to dig into some games. I had high hopes for Somerville but within fifteen minutes I'd gotten stuck due to punishingly small interaction radii and gave up when that didn't improve in the subsequent forty five minutes.
Signalis on the other hand I had little to no expectations for and turned out to be one of the best games I've played for a long while. Most of that is down to the fractured story that is equal parts horror, sci-fi, and romance. Mechanically it's nothing special, and the scuzzy pixel-art and anime-inspired character designs are divisive, but it nails its atmosphere of creeping corruption and fatalistic dread. I saw someone on YouTube describe it as "Lovecraftian" which I guess sure? It has a quote from one of his little known short stories but, for better or worse, the little racist's shadow over horror fiction stretches long. For my money Signalis doesn't deal in the cosmic horror that typifies a lot of his work and it tends to wear its influences (Resident Evil, Silent Hill et. al.) a lot more obviously. It's burrowed deep in my brain so I expect a lot of my writing from now on to be influenced by it.
GuessThatAnime
It's been years since I've ever really advertised anything I've built beyond throwing a low-impact tweet up. But with Twitter melting like the Wicked Witch, I took a chance and fired the link out to GuessThatAnime on Reddit and MyAnimeList and, after a rapid retraction because I overedited the title of the post, went to bed. Turns out Meilisearch that powers the type-ahead ran out of memory at some point during the night and didn't come back up. All that anxiety for the gesture to end in technical difficulties. A quick modification of the Systemd service file should sort that going forward hopefully. A very nice tweet though did take some of the sting out of this.
Apart from that service, GTA is entirely client-side so the majority of the site is statically built. GuessThe.Game which I based GTA off handles type-ahead / search by blobbing a massive 600kb+ JSON of 25,000 game titles, this alongside the ~250kb functional JavaScript. That does enable it to be 100% static, however it's not only a lead weight on page-load, but search is more complicated with anime: you have the various English titles, then there's the Japanese as well as the Romanised Japanese titles (e.g. 凪のあすから -> Nagi no Asukara). This is why I went for an active service rather than building a big ol' JSON of titles that would no doubt stretch into the megabytes. That did have the knock on effect of making the type-ahead feel skittish as it has to scrub through a lot of series with very similar names. I cheat with the post-search sorting and bubble the "correct" answer closer to the top but it's fundamentally a hack. There was a thread on Hacker News about good search books that I've bookmarked for later, though in this case I think tweaking the ranking rules would probably go a long way.
Board games
I visited Treehouse last Sunday. Played Patchwork which was great fun, then The Fox and the Forest, which has great art but was basically just Hearts with a twist, then finished with Caper which has infuriatingly explained rules but might be good fun after a few more games.
YouTube watches
- Colin Furze builds out a workshop - definite tool envy despite not being a maker, I do wonder about security though
- Why Honma golf clubs are so expensive - that'll be the gold leaf, there's a whole series of "So Expensive" videos on Japanese items, all are well worth a watch
- Nuclear fusion update - really interesting tech, but odd to think of a "start up" footering around with plasma fusion. Reminds me of Relativity Space who are doing similar for space travel and are 3D printing rocket parts
- Nuclear weapons in space combat and Laser weapons in space combat - every Spacedock video is fab, and these cover a lot of ground both real and science fiction
- Making a £6000 heritage door - I love carpentry videos (see Ishitani Furniture for some superb ones) and while this one isn't great, it does mean I can link to this one by the same chap which is much better
This was hand-crafted by John.