All's well here at The Dispatch. The snails are all asleep and have been sleeping for a full day. We're thinking that they were tuckered out from another secret project that they were working on. They kept working in shifts on something in the guest room and wouldn't let us come in to see what it was. Apparently it was a very involved project that needed 24/7 attention. But they finally finished it yesterday and then put on rainforest noises and have been sleeping with that going ever since. We're excited to see what it was they were working on so hard.

Game Boy 👾

• Same as usual
  • DnD with friends in person
  • Magic Arena a lot
  • Destiny 2 a bit

Coding Corner 👨🏻‍💻

• Talk: Video Games and the Future of Education
  • Super interesting talk from the guy who made Braid and The Witness
  • Made the point that what we think of as gamification is really just reward systems that certain types of games took from other existing systems (like military or academia)
  • The true value of games comes from the tacit, experiential knowledge that you get from interactivity
  • Games can teach people how systems work, and how specific types of systems feel (which is knowledge that can't be directly assessed but is super valuable, particularly for engineering careers but really for anyone)
• Signed up for a Rust course on Udemy
  • One of my coworkers had a code to get it for free
  • Haven't started it yet, we'll see when I do
• Coworker showed off Midjourney and how you can use their Discord as a service to create AI images
  • Shower thought: usually with art you put the constraints first and work around them, but with AI generated art, you can put the constraints on after the fact
• Continuing to work on the cube builder app
  • Added a backend with supabase which let me configure auth, assets storage, and a database and interact with all of those with a js client library

Albums 🎧

• "The Suburbs" by Arcade Fire
  • Album-oriented rock (which is a term I just learned this week); disco 2010s
• "Fanatic Voyage" by Chivalrous Amoekons
  • Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Angel Olsen covering The Mekons; some highlights but pretty rough sounding in places
• "In Rainbows" by Radiohead
  • Internet rock; streamlined
• "boygenius" by boygenius
  • Like a morning cup of coffee hold me over to lunch
• "Blonde" by Frank Ocean
  • Dreamscape soul
• "Dawn" by Mount Eerie
  • Complete sketches adding to the lore of his catalogue
• "The Neon Skyline" by Andy Shauf
  • Intersections in storytelling within the constraints of pop rock
• "City Sun Eater in the River of Light" by Woods
  • Vibey and cinematic

TV Shows 🍿

• Attack on Titan
  • I kept seeing that the final episodes of the series are coming out soon, and I remembered really liking the episodes I'd watched a while back, so I started rewatching season 1
  • Cool storytelling, the world-building is a little weird, but cool that there is this huge overarching mystery that is being slowly revealed and seems like the story could go in any direction
  • Visuals are crazy and violent and stick with you
  • Lots of frank talk and discussion about what makes someone a good leader (which seems like it might be an anime thing)