cherry blossom
i'm thankful for the concept of time travel in animal crossing, which is so interesting to me, the idea that something essential to this game is a representation of daily life in a small town and it's explicitly tied to your actual time of day and year such that there are time limited seasonal events, like the relatively short period during which the cherry trees were blossoming and then one day the blossoms fell into the little cartoon river and then they were gone
EXCEPT, even though it would be very easy for the designers to implement a check against time travel (it's just checking whether one number representing a date is smaller than the previous number representing a date, in which case you know that the laws of spacetime have been broken), they do not do that, so if you want to keep going back and reexperiencing cherry blossom season, that is an option available to you. in a way that's absurd, but i think it's also beautiful; a road not taken, a way of making the technology retain something of the aura of magic, to let you bend reality
one thing we talk about at work that i really like is the concept of a product feature being a "delighter," something small but meaningful that surprises you nicely. i'm thankful to remember my boss at my last job saying he "didn't really believe we were in a position to make people feel delighted" and i understood the point he was making, but i also just don't agree, that opportunity is always available to some degree and if it's always available to some degree, it's always available, possible in our own time.
i was working with a customer today to try to reproduce some errors they had been seeing with some embedded code and the customer said that the error occurred intermittently, maybe two in every 10 refreshes, and provided a screenshot of the console log messages, which were helpful, but limited as artifacts, since i couldn't browse the stack trace or get more context about the circumstances in which the error was originating, and so with this tidbit of a hint and gnomic screenshot i started refreshing and i refreshed 10 times, checking in between each time, and it didn't happen and then i refreshed 10 more times, and it didn't happen, and then i refreshed 10 more times and it still didn't happen and i noticed another error than the one he'd reported and described why it was happening and he wrote back and told me the one i'd mentioned was an "expected" error and that the other one should happen if i visited and so then i went through the stations again and still could not conjure the spirit but tomorrow is another day
the bit of smooth skin on the tip of my index finger from where i burned it on a hot pan handle
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