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Weeknotes #10

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  • Not a great week for writing. The novel has largely languished. Progress on the story has been weak, too. (A few personal/family things have been eating up my headspace. Turns out headspace is important when writing, at least for me.)
  • I’ve finished preparing my presentation for class. Also decided to shelve the procedural modeling idea and instead do either procedural textures (reaction-diffusion, that kind of thing) or 3D paint simulation. Two months to finish this.
  • We voted, via drop box. Feels like an election more important than most.
  • Over the years the CSS on here had gotten a little crufty, with accumulations left over from long-excised features of the site. This week I rewrote it all from scratch. Shaved it from 45k down to 15k (a large chunk of which is comments). I’m still using Sass, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I really need it anymore — is the nesting actually worth it? Time will tell.
  • I’m also currently JavaScript-free on this site, but I’m planning to add a user-controllable dark mode sometime soon. (And stay jQuery-free, now that vanilla JS can do the things I was using jQuery for. The fewer dependencies, the better.)
  • Nonfiction reading: still plugging away on A Distant Mirror and Arthur’s Britain. With everything else going on, it’s been more of a fiction week, for unwinding. Hard to get into the right mental state for medieval history. But I did learn that curfew comes from Old French cuevrefeu, which comes from cuvrir “to cover” and feu “fire.”
  • Fiction reading: I finished The Physics of the Dead. A bit sweary (which is what Scrub is for). Overall, I think I liked it? Hard to say. I do still plan to read some of Smitherd’s other books, so probably yes.
  • I’m halfway through Glen Cook’s The Black Company and really like it. Great voice. It’s leaving me with an itch to get back into Malazan (I’ve read the first two, liked them).
  • I’m also a third of the way into Dennis E. Taylor’s We Are Legion (We Are Bob). Quite fun, very much enjoying it and looking forward to plowing through the rest of the series.