Derik Badman's Journal

Back to work after a few days off for the holiday, with a few days off late this week too.

I ended up borrowing a guitar and buying an audio hookup for the computer as well as a small midi controller. I've not even unpacked either of the latter, but I've been trying to practice the guitar everyday. My fingers only sort of remember what to do, so it's just been a lot of scales to get used to fingering the frets and picking the strings again.

Worked a lot on my rpg-table-randomizer which I just released as a v1.0.0 finally after having release the first v0.1.0 version way back in September of 2016. That was not steady work, as version v0.7.0 was also from Sept 2016 but then v0.7.1 wasn't until April 2020, and then back in April of this year I finally started up refactoring it to modern javascript. Pretty happy with where it ended up but don't have much of an idea of how to get anyone to notice it exists and get feedback.

Not a lot of movies since earlier in the month (that I can remember)... I watched the documentary on Lydia Lunch which was pretty interesting, though very... fannish in its position to her. A bunch of tv shows either with Lianne or own my own. For All Mankind on Apple+ is an excellent alternate history sci-fi show from Ronald D. Moore (of DS9 and BSG fame). Finished my rewatch of DS9 too. Rewatched Star Trek Discovery's previous season in prep for the new season which has now started (and is pretty good so far). The new season of The Expanse started up, which is the last one, and I'm rather baffled on how they are going to wrap it all up. The Wheel of Time season 1 just ended and it was... ok, entertaining enough but not amazing. I don't think they managed to take their rather generic fantasy source and make it better (I haven't read any of those books since high school, but I recall they are not particularly inventive with their fantasy tropes). Still, you don't get a lot of that style of fantasy in tv/movies.

Finished up binging The Witcher season 2 this weekend too. Impressed with how the writers shift away from the source material in ways that feel thematically appropriate, while still making the plot end up back at various expected places. Though it does feel like it's making their adaptation a lot longer, which leads one to wonder if they will really be able to last long enough to finish. (That Netflix has already done a spin-off animation and has a spin-off live action show coming soon is at least a good sign in that respect.)

Do I even remember what I've been reading? I reread Kawabata's Sound of the Mountain for the third or fourth time. I made a second attempt at Le Guin's Always Coming Home and again failed to get too far into it, I'm just not into the fictional anthropological stuff (of which there is a lot). So I switched to rereading her Five Ways to Forgiveness.

Christmas was fairly quiet (though not nearly as much as last year). Spend some time with Lianne's family (including the new baby), and then with my parents and Tim's family. It was kind of nice to have a slightly smaller group, as I got to pay a little more attention to people. We never stay long, though, I'm just not built for extended socializing and by that point it's like 6 hours of that all in a row. There was concern about the virus, but we are all vaccinated, so hopefully we'll get a few more days out without finding out anyone got sick. Things do seem to be taking another downturn as far as the pandemic goes, though at this point, I'm not sure what else I can do to limit my interactions or increase my caution. Haven't been to a restaurant since summer, wear a mask whenever I go somewhere inside, mostly avoid going places at all.

My birthday is tomorrow, but I shifted my day off work to Thursday to avoid working only two non-consecutive days this week.