For the last couple of months, I’ve been into board games. I mean, I’ve been into board games for almost a decade at this point, but for the time being it’s taken over my main hobby spot, much to my wife’s (occasional) chagrin. I’ve also been in something of a writing mood, so I figured I’d write about a few of the games I’ve been playing recently. Once upon a time, presumably in a very similar mood, I posted a few reviews at unrulyreviews, but right now I’m not sure I still like that format, so here’s a small review of a very small game instead.

Almost exactly a year ago, I started learning to draw. I’d been trying to learn to paint for a few months, and whilst I was having a lot of fun I was starting to feel pretty held back by my lack of drawing fundamentals. Drawing was something I’d been (theoretically) interested in for a while but, with no real aptitude or prior experience, wasn’t something I’d really considered doing properly.

Three years after the start of the pandemic, I’ve finally caught covid. It’s funny how being ill can make swallowing, normally well below the level of conscious thought, into a small but frequent challenge that makes it hard to sleep. I’m pretty tired.

Pre-pandemic, I worked occasional days remote. Since March 2020, I’ve been into the office once. All things considered, I find remote work pretty much strictly better.

I’ve recently returned from my second trip to India. Aside from the wedding festivities (I got married), the people, the architecture, the food, and the ever present mosquitoes, perhaps what stood out the most is the way indian traffic works.

It’s too damn good. It’s bottled focus in hot, liquid form, and it’s a balm for slow days, busy days, cold days, and hot ones (when drunk cold). If that sounds like it’s good pretty much every day, I’d be inclined to agree - and that’s where the problems start.

I’ve increasingly noticed a clear bisection in how I think about writing software. On the one hand there is a broad ‘system level’ of thinking, used for architectural work, sketching out infrastructure and deployment plans, structuring APIs, finding root causes for wider problems, etc. On the other, there is a detailed ‘low level’ mode of thought - how to name variables, where to split up functions, when to make a new class, what needs what kind of documentation and what to put in it, when to make a commit and what to call it, and so on.

I have a very small worm in my ear. I feel the pops and crackles as it shifts sometimes and the pressure changes, or the very tiny bones creak under its very tiny weight. I feel little tickling sensations, even when there is no wind. I’ve yet to see it - whenever I try, in the mirror, it pulls back. Quick movements cannot take it by surprise, and it cannot be tricked by slowly sneaking up on it, though I get the feeling it always waits until the last moment. Sometimes if I put my finger in my ear I can feel its light touch on the tip; I’m not sure if this is because it has no further place to withdraw, or if it is a purposeful choice, exploratory, or maybe tormenting.

edit (19/03/2021): It has come to my attention that there is a famous book, Salt Fat Acid Heat, which says much the same thing as this post, but with much more acutal information. This post is therefore either an extremely concise summary, or an unresearched, pointless rehashing of a much better piece of work, depending on how charitable you’re feeling.

I love cooking. It’s one of the few things in life that naturally offers a positive feedback loop - the more you do it, the better your food gets, the worst other food seems in comparison, the more you want to cook. I was lucky enough to be sucked in during my second year at uni, and have been happily frying, boiling, roasting, and chopping ever since.

With the coronoavirus sweeping across the planet like a… well, plague, news headlines are full of basically nothing else. Every time a new country is infected, or statistics on its spread and mortality rates are compiled, or new actions are implemented to combat the disease, we are presented with BREAKING NEWS on untold thousands of media channels.

I’ve worked with bash and unix on and off for a few years now, and generally feel comfortable working in a terminal. Recently, however, I’ve joined a project that involves lots of both writing, and running code over ssh, and have had to learn a lot of things in the process. And it crystallized for me today - shell scripting is weird.

When we get hungry, a little, prehistoric, part of our brains becomes completely convinced that we are about to die, which tends to send it into a bit of a panic. This was a vital instinct to get us out and about when obtaining food meant grabbing a spear and heading into the wilds to hunt, but now that it instead means a ten minute trip to the supermarket that instinct has become not only obsolete, but also often detrimental to the many of us more concerned with keeping our weight down than gaining it.

As I left the supermarket (which are amongst the greatest achievements of mankind), it ocurred to me that the amount we pay for some types of food, from certain places, makes very little sense. Amongst my purchases was a pizza (an invention which is probably even better than the supermarket) - a fancy, end-of-week treat pizza. It cost £3, which is somewhere between a quarter and a half the price of ordering something similar from a takeaway, which are immensely popular the world over, and, from a rational perspective, cost way too damn much to have remained so.

This was a question I was recently asked, and to which I failed to give much of an answer, being rather engrossed in using of one at the time. Thinking about it later, however, it is a question worth answering, especially for people looking at programming from the outside, for whom it often seems to be a rather mysterious and ill understood subject. This article begins with just a little context as to what a programming language really is, before outlining a few of the things that differentiate them in an attempt to answer the question. Not every detail will be included to keep this at a reasonable length (definitely not anything to do with me not knowing), but enough to hopefully get a feel for the ideas.