All's well here at The Dispatch. The snails are all moving slower than normal and turning a weird greenish-blue color. They're all still in good spirits and mostly watching TV and playing cards with each other. But we're going to keep an eye on them and see what happens with their color. We're hoping it goes back to normal, but we're not sure what we'll do if not.

Game Boy 👾

• Making a MTG Cube with friends
  • One friend made the cube on Cube Cobra and he and I were able to draft it online with bot players for the other seats
  • Then we were able to copy the drafted cards into Archidekt to sideboard cards and build our final decks
  • Then we were able to import that into Tabletop Simulator using an MTG mod and play the decks against each other
  • It was a great way to try it out without having to actually print proxies or buy any cards
  • We're planning to make a paper version of the cube once it's been refined some more
• Introduced another friend to Magic
  • Went to a bar and had pizza and beer and played Magic with another friend who had never played before
  • It was sweet to get to explain to him why I was so into the game and he was a sport about learning all the rules
  • I think he's probably not going to get head over heals into it like I have, but he might play with me again some time

Coding Corner 👨🏻‍💻

• Working on a custom Magic card builder for making custom cards for our cube:
  • Here's the link
  • Using Vite and Vue 3 with Pinia and then deploying with Vercel (which is so fast, 12 second deployments consistently)
  • Experimented with hand-rolling a 3D card effect by setting css variables on mouse move and I think it turned out pretty neat
• Treasure Trove of Over 1700 Mechanical Animation
  • Super cool and impressive resource that I want to save to dig into some more later
• Chat-GPT is a blurry JPEG of the web
  • Interesting article from the Ted Chiang (who wrote the short story the movie Arrival was based on)
  • Saying these large language models are like a blurry JPEG in that they are a interface reproducing a compressed form of the internet, but the compression is lossy, so weird artifacts / hallucinations are produced as a result
  • Some interesting implications for the actual utility of these language models and swayed me a bit that these are more of a fun tool than a game-changer

Albums 🎧

• "Norm" by Andy Shauf
  • Another album that's like a little novel or short story in song form; more Christian imagery
• "Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming" by Pearla
  • Cool folksy singer but a little hit or miss on first listen; some genre-bending stuff that didn't land for me; maybe she hasn't found her sound
• "Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You" by Big Thief
  • A good long chunk of good music to work to; wearing in the grooves
• "Fate" by Dr. Dog
  • A little cheesy, shooting for a Sergeant Pepper's cabaret almost; but some familiar friendly songs
• "Any Shape You Take" by Indigo De Souza
  • The kind of female vocals I'm into and some excellent moments; need to revisit and listen more deeply
• "The Creek Drank the Cradle" by Iron & Wine
  • Work music
• "Norman Fucking Rockwell" by Lana Del Ray
  • I came at this with a more cynical listen, which made her feel like she was trying too hard to be cool / sexy, which maybe it is

Angel Olsen Concert 👼

• Went out to dinner beforehand at a great Indian food place, but pricey
• The venue was smallish and it was seated which was really nice, although a beer was $10
• Angel Olsen was incredible, her voice was flawless and so powerful; even though she seemed frayed at the end of tour
• The music was loud and the songs they played were cathartic and anthemic
• Highlight for me was This is How It Works, which was about mid-set and made me tear up

TV Shows 🍿

• The Last of Us - S1E5
  • Holy cow it's getting good; some crazy practical effects and they're not pulling any punches