Derik Badman's Journal

A long painful week at work where some unexpected performance issues came the same week as releasing code and then a bug that took a lot of our servers offline for about an hour yesterday afternoon. Worked more than 12 hours on Thursday, and then the server issues arrived just in time to ruin my plans to take Friday afternoon off.

A few books arrived in the mail, so I started reading Jordan Stump's translations of essays by Queneau Letters, Numbers, Forms: Essays 1928-1970, which mostly collects two of his books of essays. Interesting coming upon quotes that I've only ever seen out of the original context, like the famous one about poets never being inspired:

Faced with such pretensions, we must state, we must affirm, that the poet is never "inspired," if by inspiration we mean something that comes about as a function of the poet's mood, the temperature, the political situation, subjective accidents, or the subconscious.

The poet is never inspired because he is the master of what others assume to be inspiration. He doesn't wait for inspiration to drop from the heavens like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt, and puts into action the errefutable proverb "Heaven helps those who help themselves." He's never inspired because he's always inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposal, obedient to his will, receptive to his guidance. He doesn't have to seek the source of genius in soporifics. He is no way dependent on surprises, happy accidents, or flights of fancy.

I'm not too far into the book yet. Looking forward to the essay on Bouvard and Pecuchet, which I am not totally sure I've read before (maybe?).

Wrote a bunch of haiku this week inspired by Barthes discussion of them (see previous entries), and posted them as just screenshots of text to Instagram. I kind of like posting things that are only barely "images" or "photos." It's the only social media I make any use of anymore, mostly following people I actually know, the noise is low, though it feels like the advertisements increase steadily over time.

Today I watched Rohmer's The Sign of Leo which popped up on Mubi this week. I subscribed to it to watch a bunch of Hong Sang-Soo films they were showing and now as my month is almost up they have a bunch of Rohmer films (ones I haven't seen) coming up. It's like they planned to trap me into keeping the subscription going longer. This particular film was Rohmer's first. I can't say I loved it. It follows a poor musician who thinks he has gotten an inheritance from his aunt who died, but then doesn't. He goes into debt and then ends up homeless and penniless. A lot of scenes of him walking around Paris. Despite following the character for most of the movie, you never really get a sense of him as a person. It's more about the situation, than anything particular about him. I wasn't expecting to love it and watched it mostly as a curiosity.

Seemed to have finished Cyberpunk 2077 until there is some dlc content to play. Hard to tell but I'm pretty sure I did all the main/side missions, leaving only a bunch of little "events" around the city. Enjoyable game, but also not one I'm itching to replay or that I feel I will want to replay later.