Now update

I began to update the Now page and realized that because it's ephemeral, I should put all of my transient thoughts in a post first.

Music I've listened to the last month:

• Max LL - Spiritfarer OST
• Trigg & Gusset - Blue Prince OST
• Cody Matthew Johnson - Songs from the Underworld (diagetic music from Star Wars Outlaws)
• Joey Valence & Brae - NO HANDS
• Between the Buried and Me - Colors II
• Rothadás - Töviskert... a kísértés örök érzete... lidércharang

Postcasts I'm listening to, most to least actively:

• Remap Radio
• Shelved by Genre
• A More Civilized Age
• Friends at the Table
• Side Story
• Pew Pew Bang
• 404 Media's podcast
• Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games

Video games I'm playing (tracked on backloggd):

• Star Wars Outlaws
  I finished the main campaign months ago but keep picking it up as my cool-down game. I'm slowly chipping away at all of the upgrades for the blaster and ship, I've got roughly 2 vaults left for Jet Kordova's Legacy, and then I'm gonna use a guide to find all of the trinkets.
• Need for Speed: Unbound
  I am very bad at this game but I'm getting better. The driving mechanics are much deeper than Burnout Paradise. Given that I'm not here for the quality of storytelling, it's hard to say how far along I am in the story, but I upgraded the initial vehicle to the top of Rank A (~200).
• Spiritfarer
  A beautiful game that has left me in tears multiple times. However, the save screen tells me I'm only 48% of the way through after 22 hours, and I don't think the game is worth that much time. Maybe it's also because I don't like any of the passengers right now, but while I'm having a good enough time, I feel myself running out of energy to keep playing it.
• Steamworld Heist
  I am really bad at this game, just deeply bad, so even tho I like it a lot and have been plugging away at it for months and months, I find myself hitting walls that are hard to surmount. I gotta stop playing tactics games lol.
• Floppy Knights
  I'm at 65%, hard to know if I'll keep going. I like the game enough but then I run out of energy on it when I have to grind a specific level and give up again.

Books I'm reading, current progress:

• Walter M Miller Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz: 85%
  I read the first two parts of Canticle back in the early 2010s sometime, so reading the final part now has been a trip. Some really wild stuff in this book, at times beautiful and weird and anachronistic.

• Dan Simmons - Hyperion: 40%
  A slow burn. Compelling but requires my full attention. I'm excited to see where it all goes, as each new pilgrim's story reveals another layer of mystery and complexity. I also love a Palestinian POV character in sci-fi!

• Brandon Sanderson - Mistborn: 25%
  It's hard to speak positively about this book. The prose are plodding, perfunctory. There's no subtlety, no craft. It reads like the transliteration of a tv show, writing down everything that happens on screen without thought. The "video game" magic system is dumb, the fights are masturbatory, and the character motivations are threadbare. I don't know if I can keep going, tbh, but I've been working on it for 5 years, so why not finish it now?

• E.M. Forster - A Room With A View: 20%
  Comparatively, this book is an absolute joy. Every page is full of funny lines, little insights into humanity and the characters. Forster is one of the GOAT writers, showcased here. His ability to weave in and out of conversations and scenes keeps the prose active and engaging, letting us focus only on what's important. From the first page, Lucy Honeychurch's character arc is prominent and yet it's never explicit, allowing the reader to pull on those threads at their own pace.

  I could write 10 pages on this book. Truly one of the greatest.

Software I'm working on:

• Splint
  Still plugging away at this as issues come up. I don't work in Clojure anymore so I'm not exposed to different styles or patterns regularly anymore. I'd hoped some adoption would help flesh out various use-cases but that's not happened yet.
• Lazytest
  Excepting a hook system (like in Kaocha), I consider this relatively feature-complete.
• Scram
  This is my newest project, a Clojure interpretation of Ocaml's ppx_expect: Capture the standard out of a call, compare it to a string literal, update in place. That functionality works well, but I've gotten mired in trying to write integrations for clojure.test and Lazytest, which I should probably drop.
• This site lol
  As seen by my inconsistent updates, I'm bad at blogging. oops