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I brought two chapsticks on a trip so that I'd be fine if I lost one. Which I thought I did because I only found one in my jacket pocket, but then later it looks like the chapsticks had migrated to be one per pocket.

I recently realized I can find a lot of games from Thinky Games' Detective tag that really hit the spot. I finished The Seance of Blake Manor, which was fantastic.

Tangentially, The Incident at Galley House was released; I don't know if I'll buy it since I already finished the game it was remastered from, but it's one of those games I wish I could selectively forget so I could re-experience playing it for the first time, it has some of the best mystery-solving moments I can remember.

Got the Mill-licious MtG Arena achievement from a random Jump In matchup where my opponent's board was way better but they just connived too much...

I had two dozen oysters in one sitting a few nights ago. Life is good

Update: It might also be time to vibecode my own personal static site generator...

I think it's time to redesign my personal website...

beat Regent ascension 2 with exactly 1 HP remaining, which doesn't bode well for the remaining ascensions

I want to support the spirit of people styling their own websites with abandon and keeping the web weird, but every so often I see a blog with a garish unreadable neon green background and unwrapped text that goes all the way across the screen and have doubts

Short music dump

By the way I still haven't gotten the hang of the "Song - Artist" or "Artist - Song" debate

Google Calendar is totally fine for work meetings, but I've never been able to get into the groove of using it for personal events. My personal events calendar is an Obsidian note called "Calendar" that just has one line for each thing and it works great.

I might have belted a C♯5 into my beltbox

  • Blackwater is a military contractor, employees of whom notoriously killed several Iraqi civilians
  • Blackstone is an investment management firm, among the top three private equity firms
  • BlackRock is an investment management firm, the world's largest asset manager
  • Bridgewater is an investment management firm, roughly the largest hedge fund by managed assets, featuring founder Ray Dalio and a controversial corporate culture sometimes described as cult-like
  • Bridgestone makes tires
  • Bridgerock is the name of a few real estate firms and similar, but none are as famous as the above

Remembering how in middle school I did many of my assignments in LaTeX, even for, like, English class. There was a recurring assignment where we had to make fill-in-the-blank worksheets for vocab words we were learning, as well as answer keys for them; and I built some macro system that allowed me to quickly toggle whether to show the answers in the blanks that I was quite proud of.

If you play Mythweaver Poq while you have Ashaya, Soul of the Wild, you get stuck in an infinite loop because Poq sees itself enter and copies itself, then the copy sees itself enter and copies itself, then the copy sees itself enter and copies itself, and so on (the legend rule cleans up all but one Poq at any given time, but this doesn't help)

¾

I asked Claude to add digraphs to the blogging textbox and it worked pretty well

It would be great if somebody built a music recommendation algorithm that just works for Me Specifically™

I guessed that there wouldn't be a Wirecutter recommendation for body pillows. I guessed wrong

Sometimes I wonder if I psy-opped myself into liking Earl Grey because of a throwaway line in an Artemis Fowl book I read when I was twelve or something

At a party a while back somebody told me their theory that math competitions prepare you well for software engineering because they teach you to write proofs, and the Curry–Howard correspondence runs deep. For example, choosing a good lemma is the "same action" as extracting a good subroutine

I think it's good for the soul to have at least one hobby that depends mostly on tacit knowledge

bookmarking: https://leavesubstack.com/

I feel like I've conceded the fight for RSS. Insofar as the fight is a winner-take-all situation where each person I know who isn't using it counts as a loss. In terms of being a technology I can quietly use myself, RSS is still Fine™.

Maybe it's a failure of my imagination that I can't understand how other people manage receiving newsletters/subscriptions in their email. I can barely deal with my inbox as it is.

Hyped for the rest of Game Changer S8!

Do people who write puzzles get mad when other people refer to the puzzles as "content"? Is this (the referring, not the getting mad) a thing that happens?

Rereading some of the "why blog" posts, I was reminded that it's allegedly supposed to help me form better friendships or something.

This wasn't that effective for me? Though I can quickly think of a lot of explanations:

  1. I socialize in a lot of groups pseudonymously so often hesitate to even mention any of these blogs
  2. I'm not proud enough of my blog to bring it up all that often (downstream of most posts not being that popular, which I've mostly gotten over, post soon, but it does reinforce that the stuff I most like posting about is pretty unsalvageably niche)
  3. I do too many other things to bring up the blog all that often
  4. I mostly haven't tried to actually form friendships through the blog because I currently have enough friends + social scenes — maybe more than enough — and actually I would not have that much trouble doing so if I prioritized it even a little bit
  5. The premise is false and I just haven't fully perceived the causality

I want somebody to write an updated, if not simply better, version of my Introduction to Puzzlehunts. The hobby has had seven years to evolve, not to mention, there's no way I made all the optimal pedagogical decisions back then.

I guess there's nothing stopping me from doing it myself...

This happens every few months: I look up some shading tutorial to figure out how to shade my image, it tells me to just imagine a light source in my head, and I'm like, bro, if I could imagine a light source in my head do you think I'd be looking up shading tutorials