Last Friday my partner and I had the opportunity to go out to dinner for a welcome “date night.” The problem with a date night is that it is really easy to fall into talking about kids, schedules, or work. But we talk about those things plenty day to day.
I can fix that with Glitch!
Colin Furze makes this comment about halfway through his build, and then keeps building. I love that.
When your hobbies overlap with your work, like writing software for instance, it can start to make your hobbies feel like work. But if you build something that no one needs than you’re completely free to have fun.
Even useless things can be high quality, and that’s the most fun stuff to make.
Mindfulness and mediation are great tools to manage stress and anxiety. They can help to lower your baseline level of stress, which makes it much easier to deal with stressful situation and makes non-stressful situations more enjoyable. I’ve been practicing these skills for a year or two now. And I do mean “practice” and I do mean “skills.” These techniques are simple, but not easy. And it takes practice to build the skill required.
I was very uncomfortable when I walked out of The Last Jedi. It wasn’t the movie I wanted at all. None of the stuff I was looking forward to had happened. And I couldn’t wrap my head around the stuff that had.
Thanks in large part to my understanding partner I was able to go see it again, free of expectation, the next night. I liked it a lot more, and some of the ideas and sequences are some of the best ever in Star Wars. I take issue with some stuff, but I can say I’m already planning to see it again.
After two viewings, here are my thoughts.
On Friday the poster and teaser trailer for The Last Jedi were released. I love the trailer, but I keep coming back to the poster.
Star Wars posters are famous for their Drew Struzan designs, where he fit all of the characters into one epic mural. No knock on those works, but I love how little there is on this poster.
If you’re not aware of Firewatch yet, head over to firewatchgame.com for an introduction. But here’s the short of it:
Firewatch is a mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness, where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio.
Firewatch is a narrative game that plays as a short story you’re inside of rather than something you beat. There aren’t scores or failure states. Instead, the focus is on beautiful environments, interactive conversations, and a central mystery.
Lately I’ve been working on a prototype in HTML5 Canvas that isn’t going anywhere. I’ve decided to call it and move on to something else. But, this is a good opportunity to review the experience.
From the beginning, this felt like a good project to try with CoffeeScript. In my past prototypes, good class hierarchies have been especially important and while that may sound silly to point out, it’s worth mentioning when talking about JavaScript. Normally I use a solution pulled from “JavaScript: The Good Parts” that works really well, but it comes with boilerplate I always have to look up. CS’s implementation was appealing, as was its list processing techniques.