i'm still playing blasphemous, trying to finish it, and it's a grind in part because there's no quest markers or log or anything. i don't remember characters, i don't know what i'm supposed to be doing, i'm just going around trying to unlock new portions of the map, and exploring old stuff.

it's frustrating to climb to the highest point in the map, see that i'm supposed to going further up but that it's blocked off, and see no way to progress.

i looked up a guide, and i'm in the second or third to last area, but all of the exploration stuff has been done, and none of the characters in supposed to talk to are where they said to be, so what now? lol

but it feels incredible to play. movement is precise, dodging and blocking feel good, the art is some of the best, the music is haunting. i remember enjoying it but i don't remember enjoying it this much. I did play it immediately after playing Ori and the Blind Forest so many maybe that was my problem. i almost want to restart just so i can remember what the hell is going on in the story.

i'm up to 19 hours in a week and I won't stop until i've liberated the whole galaxy. i am bursting with enthusiasm about it but idk how to write about it without falling into cliche. the available tools allow for unparalleled artistry when executing a plan or recovering from an alarm.

idk it's great. it was opaque and dense and hard as hell at first but now i'm pulling off tricks, clearing a room in a second without second thought.

4 year old, interrupting my bed time song: cows are made of meat. are humans made of meat?
me: yes, we are made of meat.
her: do we eat human meat?
me: no.
her: why not?
me: well, it's complicated, but there are 3 primary reasons...

i ended on telling her about prions and how scary they are and she was like "i'm not gonna eat human meat" and i was like "that's smart, please don't"

NoahTheDuke

reviewed Elden Ring

★★★★★

★★★★★

Shelved

Retired at 75 hours

I might have put this at 4.5, but I took a full star off for every 15 hours past where this game was worth continuing to play. Limgrave was excellent, 10/10, and then the rest of the game was a steady decline of interesting or compelling stuff to do, and by the time I quit in the final area, I was so over it that I only feel annoyed and disappointed.

Almost no game is worth the time I put into this one, and I wish I hadn't tried.

Reviewed on Sep 16, 2024

I've written a converter to translate a selected number of my posts from the now-defunct blogging platform and social media website https://cohost.org. They're poorly converted to markdown and I don't plan on doing much with them except host them for personal posterity. A few will appear in my main feed, most will not. They can be viewed here.

I have decided to remove this and purely rely on moving specific posts over. I don't need to carry the baggage of all that forward. I have it for my personal usage and that's good enough. Let eggbug sleep, she deserves it.

Big feature: Safety and Autocorrection

Every rule has been marked as safe or unsafe. Safe rules don't generate false positives and any suggested alternatives can be used directly. Unsafe rules may generate false positives or their suggested alternatives may contain errors.

Rules that are safe may also perform autocorrection, which is tracked in defrule with :autocorrect. Rules may only perform autocorrection if they're safe.

https://clojure.org/news/2024/09/05/clojure-1-12-0

I'm excited as hell for this one. The qualified method syntax along with treating Java methods as first-class values means that writing interop will be much nicer. :param-tags letting you differentiate between overloads is killer too. The longer I've spent in Clojure, the more Java I've had to wrangle, and these have been big pain points.

Started playing Jedi Survivor after burning out on Elden Ring again.

This game is a blast. The grappling hook feels great, the writing is fun, Cameron Monaghan's voice acting is a little subdued for my tastes but that's okay. new force powers are odd, still getting used to them, but the split blade is sick.

there's freaking battle droids in this one, so we get their chatter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10/10 game

NoahTheDuke

reviewed Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Remastered

★★★★★

★★★★★

Completed

on

PlayStation 4

A perfectly fine way to spend some evenings. The action/adventure sequences are fun, the set pieces are still beautiful, the occasional funny quip, but the rest is forgettable.

Mushy controls, worse combat, threadbare stealth, along with another Nathan Drake story that didn't hold much weight. I played it on easy because I don't think this is worth any effort especially if you've played The Last of Us which is better in almost every way. (I will say that Nathan Drake sucks less than Joel, the worst human alive.)

I love Elena tho, she's my ride or die.

Reviewed on Aug 25, 2024

me when i have a job: i think i'm just naturally happy. i don't get sad often or for long periods and i easily roll with the punches of day to day life.

me when i don't have a job: maybe i should kill myself.

On twitter, someone asked: "But seriously, what changes would you make to OCaml which would worth it to break backward compatibility?"

I replied with: "Borrow from Clojure! 1) Make (=) / polymorphic equality work on values (not structure). 2) Make "functional updates" of records nicer. 3) Change ref to work like clj atoms, add swap! as a built-in function. 4) Remove the mutable keyword, make ref the only mutating interface."

Our very own @prophet responded ([1], [2], [3], [4]):

after drink the sea (nearly perfect), i went in with such high hopes and yet even 10 years later, love death immortality just fucking sucks dude. not a single good song, almost none of the things that made me love drink the sea, just a complete abdication of their sound and style.

The --only cli flag is one I've been meaning to implement for a while but just hadn't gotten around to. It's really only helpful when you're zeroing in on a problem rule, but there will always be uses.

The rule lint/duplicate-case-test is already checked by case's expansion, but I think it's good for static analysis tools to verify that stuff too. And lint/locking-object should help uncover subtle bugs, especially in concurrent situations.

Honestly, having been fired, I just don't have the strong drive to work on this like I did. I no longer have a 140k sloc project to test against, so there's less for me to look at and find inspiration from. I'm trying to keep up with it tho, it's helpful to not get rusty.

I know it's not the style, but I like to think of Ocaml like a Clojure that has more syntax, and just wrap everything in parentheses. Every function call, every assignment, every if block, everything.

module Cli = Chatlib.Cli

let main () =
  (let options = (Cli.parse Sys.argv) in
    (Cli.OptionBag.pp options))

let () = (main ())

I played and beat Lacuna this week. Incredible little game. I guessed the big revelation during the prologue so that didn't hit so hard, but the rest was a delight. The way the cases and sheets are filled out was at first really hard and then much easier and more fun as the game went on. I thought i'd gotten everything right and then learned that I missed whole branches because i'd some early mistakes. Feels pretty great, especially for such a short and punchy game.

Excellent music and soundtrack, beautiful pixel art, compelling universe. I was sad to finish the game, I want to spend more time here.

i dropped my iphone nearly a week ago, busted the screen just enough that it no longer registers touches. so i swapped the sim into a flip phone and have been living an offline life.

lemme tell you what, it's a pretty sick life. i'm slowly losing the sense of "i'm bored for 2 seconds, lemme look at my phone" which has been the bane of my adhd-riddled existence for 15 years.

the flip phone uses KaiOS which is based on the firefox os lol, so it has no good apps and runs like shit, but honestly, having more friction means that i can't/won't load it up with a bunch of stuff. all i do is text my wife and make calls to places, which is ideal.

(I wrote the below in a comment on the original post)

I work in enterprise and hobby Clojure, so I have some experience with this question.

This is probably the primary issue with Clojure at scale. You have to either be strict in what kind of objects you create (peer review, extensive testing), or you mimic a type system in the runtime with assertions and validation checks. Both of these can be cumbersome and lead to issues which are hard to notice ahead of time and harder to debug.

watched the final season after taking a year off. what a good fuckin show.

this is the best show matt groening has ever done, by far.