Sam's L33t Journal

Well, I got in a few days of regular writing before I dipped beneath the waves again.

Today is Halloween, and it's not even the scariest day in the next week. I really do want the madness to end. 2017-2020 was objectively nuts, and that was before the realignment within the Republican Party had really completed and Trump was still being arm-twisted into hiring people to important questions who resisted his dumbest ideas (a major restraint for someone so bad at in-person confrontation). Stuff like this is going to be hilarious if he loses (Four Seasons all over again), but for now I just can't deal with the fact that it's so close.

Took Erica trick-or-treating and she had a good time time, except for encountering someone in one of those stilt ghost costumes that she found completely terrifying. The weather was warm today, high of almost 80, so the evening was summery.

Work is very busy, and once again one of my more senior colleagues is changing teams. Too much churn this year.

It's been an unseasonably warm week, yesterday so warm that I was leaving my winter jacket at home.

I've been particularly happy to see all the people out and about. It's especially a joy to see people out with their dogs. (Even though I've never kept a dog myself and never felt up to it.) It's nice to see all the families and kids out and about. I was biking back home on Friday and the daycare on Gore Street was walking their toddlers to the playground when I passed (a kind of group I always think of as "the ducklings", all wearing their yellow vests and holding onto a line, it's too cute).

Yesterday, I took Erica to the library to meet a friend in the afternoon. We had lunch at S&S in Inman on the way, I hadn't been there in ages. Checked out some more books, though I haven't finished the ones I'm in the middle of yet. I've been reading Erica Bruce Coville's "Rod Allbright and the Galactic Patrol" series, the one that begins with Aliens Ate My Homework, and we're on the fourth (and final) book in that now. (While waiting for the next one to come in at the library, I've also been reading her chapters of The Jungle Book.) I got the first book of Garth Nix's "Keys to the Kingdom" series, which I remember liking and started rereading while hanging out at the library, but I'd forgotten basically all of the plot's details since I last read it ages ago. Maybe Erica will want to read it some day.

After, we went to pick out and assemble some valentines for Erica's class. Erica really took the lead on the plans there. She really does like holiday stuff. (And by coincidence we ran into a bunch of Erica's friends who were on their way to Gracie's so we all got ice cream together.) For dinner, got takeout sushi from Ebi.

Today, took Erica climbing, and she helped me get groceries. Later in the afternoon we went to a Valentines card-making get-together at the Culture House community center popup in Union. Then I made burritos at home for dinner. Erica helped, we made guacamole following a recipe she picked out from one of her cookbooks.

There's so much more on my mind, some of which I can't write about really and some of which I never seem to get around to putting to page.

It's definitely festive this week.

Last weekend I went to see "The Boy and the Heron" with Julie. Definitely beautiful, the plot and setting definitely lean into surreal dream logic so it's not as tightly constructed as, say, the fairy-tale structure of Spirited Away. It was good, though. We saw it at the new Alamo Drafthouse in the seaport and man I am stoked to have an Alamo in town. It's fun.

This evening we're flying to San Diego where Julie's brother lives for Christmas. Julie's parents and her sister's family are meeting us there. It's a bit of a chaotic plan, her brother's family is out of town for Christmas Day and will be joining us a few days after, but I'm glad to get everyone together, Boston / Dallas / San Diego is a big spread.

I've been on the tail end of a chain of colds for some time now. I feel pretty well today, but the last bit of residual congestion is still really annoying.

Thanksgiving break went well. The travel was pleasant, and it was great to see my parents and siblings. My nephew, Simon, is two now and talking quite a bit and seemed excited to see us. We all went to the children's museum and he had a blast.

I've been so, so busy at work and on the home-front, both with condo logistics (hassling people about getting snow removal figured out as winter disaster impends) and with the usual cleaning / organizing / planning for the household.

I know I had more to write but I'm too tired to recall.

I did get a post written on my essay blog (complexmeme_feed) the other week, about Effective Altruism. Maybe I'll get around to updating that more than once a year, or maybe not.

Trip to Texas for Christmas was pretty great. Managed to get there in reasonable time, flight delays in both directions but only a bit. Glad we weren't on Southwest. And the warm weather that followed that cold snap made Dallas quite summery for much of our stay.

Was wonderful to spend Christmas with Julie's family (her parents and sister's family). Plus New Year's and the twin cousins' birthday and Erica's. The twins are three now, and they've definitely grown up strong. They're talking in full sentences, there's so much they're interested in, they're great. Erica had a great time playing with the twins (it's always a delight to see her with younger kids, she really shows a lot of care and patience) and with her cousin Emilia, who she likes and admires so much.

We had some great food, home cooked and out on the town. And we visited the Fort Worth Water Gardens, which was a very cool and unusual park.

January is shaping up to be an exhausting month. Julie had a last-minute work thing this evening, and she's gone for conferences the bulk of next week and the following. I am trying to do some early spring cleaning and more work on optimizing our storage setup.

Thanksgiving holiday was beautiful if brief. Was great seeing my family, especially my baby nephew, Simon, who turned one on Thanksgiving day. There were flight delays in both directions, but nothing too painful. I got a date night out with Julie, which was nice.

DeepMind released a Stratego AI that does extremely well on games of partially hidden information. OpenAI released a large language model trained to do natural language response and creative writing tasks that would have seemed completely unbelievable for computers to manage a decade (maybe even just a few years) ago.

This week was very busy and next week looks to be tiring, too. I hurt my shoulder out of the blue last Thursday (literally tweaked a muscle just raising my arm without any load, like my shoulder just freaked out and decided to injure itself for no reason). It's not so bad now and getting gradually better, but it's the sort of injury that's always most aggravating when I'm trying to sleep.

Erica went to a friend's birthday yesterday. Today, Julie went out with Erica, and I went to the movies to see The Menu (plus the usual laundry etc.).

Still playing a lot of Arena with the latest new set, The Brother's War. Mostly been playing this deck, which unlike most of my decks is brewed from scratch instead of flagrantly net-decked. It's fun.

This week has been pretty crazy.

Halloween was on Monday, so there was lots of Halloween stuff all weekend. Julie took Erica to a Day of the Dead event at the Peabody Museum on Saturday. Somerville's last street festival of the year was on Sunday, and we went to a Halloween event at the Waterworks Museum near Chestnut Hill Reservoir Sunday morning.

This week at work I've been busy dealing with an important production issue. Unfortunately one that I caused. Trying to deal with technical debt is perilous in that you're extremely likely to get last-minute bit by the pitfalls you're trying to eliminate. So I've been very focused. It is, as always, a good opportunity to learn.

I've also been focused on the home side of things. Julie had a conference in Toronto on Wednesday. Was going to be a day-trip, but the outbound morning flight was cancelled, so she left early, on Thursday evening. Then the return flight was canceled, so she couldn't get home until late tonight.

I still managed to keep up with chores and cooking and fun with Erica. Mostly we had dinners at home, but we had dinner out at Saus tonight (vegetarian fast-food and fries), and Erica was awed by the Impossible nuggets. We're watching a bit of "Is It Cake?" on Netflix, it's fun.

Character Parade at Erica's school is tomorrow, she's dressing up as Chester the cat from Bunnicula.

There's other stuff I want to write about and I keep not making time to write.

We made it through our trip and haven't got sick yet. COVID cases are starting to take off at kid's school, though. Not super optimistic their containment will continue to hold, and even if it does, they're going to have a spike in cases due to community transmission more broadly. Kid's teacher was out sick this week, her family has COVID.

I started on my new team this week at work. I'm working on Ink, which isn't a particular front-end product but a system that provides freehand drawing features to a bunch of Android and Chrome things (Keep, Photos, Screenshots, YouTube Shorts, Duo, Cursive, etc.). On Monday we were traveling, on Tuesday Eris was home sick (not COVID, a 24-hour stomach bug), but Wednesday and Thursday I managed to get into the office. I have a new desk with the new team, the stuff at my previous desk was finally returned from long-term storage, and I got to see some of the newer Google space (in the former Akamai building at 8 Cambridge Center).

Mostly I wasn't onto my new team's work yet, though. Just setting up my new desk, dusting off my desktop setup, and getting through the last few items of handoff that either escaped my attention or had been intentionally left until after the switch. I'm really looking forward to getting back to the office, it's just so much better of a space for work than anything I can manage at home. And it will be nice to interact more with my new team in person. When we're all back in, anyways.

Friday was the first big snowstorm of the year, and it was a snow day. Though I suspect the school etc. closures (though it does seem the willingness to close school due to weather has gone up over the last decades) were due less to just snow and more to a combination of snow and COVID. Weather and illness have been causing disruptions to stuff all over. Including the snow removal service for our condo not getting to us in reasonable time.

Still having a small in-town birthday party for Eris today, though it's all friends who are in her kindergarten class. After that it's back to not having plans.

I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write...

So here comes a flood of unrelated things.

Thanksgiving came and went. I made ~seven meals worth of food for the occasion. Bought gravy, green bean casserole, a stuffed turkey breast roast (to cook at home), small pies (pumpkin, apple, and pecan from Mariposa), and ice cream (cinnamon and maple walnut from Gracie's). My parents sent some cranberry chutney (my Thanksgiving fave). I made mashed potatoes (with buttermilk and celeriac puree), sweet potato casserole (with chopped dates and pecans and cultured butter and egg, topped with brown sugar and more pecans and marshmallows), buttermilk biscuits, honey-butter, cranberry sauce, and maple whipped cream. I did most of the food prep in advance so that the day of was just cooking the turkey and making sure things were ready at approximately the same time. Start cooking after breakfast, have a relaxing midday dinner, put off dessert until the late afternoon to the point where you're basically having a full dinner's worth of pie, that's the way to go! Then 3-5 days of leftovers, adding items as necessary to round things out (no soup this year, but I did make leftovers sandwiches and a sort of turkey stroganoff).

I spent some time this week watching various bits of testimony and the prosecution's closing statements from the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial, and the thing that struck me was what a relatively straightforward application of the law to the facts the verdict seemed to be. The felony assault statute in question didn't require intent or injury, just action that would reasonably cause someone to fear serious injury. The self-defense law and jurisprudence in question didn't allow someone to claim self-defensive in the midst of committing a felony. And the citizen's arrest statute that was in place at the time required "immediate knowledge" of someone committing a crime (not just vague suspicion that they'd maybe done something at some point) to justify detaining them by force (and even then only reasonable force).

Striking to compare that to what a convoluted process it was to actually get the law to be applied. (The first of three prosecutors to look at the case has now been criminally indicted for obstructing it, which is really unusual!)

And then in the news this week there's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the case that's going to overturn Roe, catapulting the country into a new political era that's going to be weirder than people expect (even given the expectation that it's going to be weirder etc.). I guess I can't rule out the whole range of outcomes, but I don't think "approximately uphold the central etc. of Roe/Casey etc." has the votes. "Zygotes have the same suite of constitutional rights as human adults" probably doesn't either (maybe three). But I think there's a really broad set of plausible outcomes in between. History in the making. :-/

Kid got her second COVID vaccine. Was much more crowded at the vaccine center than for the first one, we had to wait in line for about 90 minutes. The new variant will surely be here soon. We're looking forward to traveling for the holidays for the first time in a long time. We'll see we'll see we'll see.

On my mind today: This video essay about MrBeast's latest large-scale YouTube production. The guy is an entertainer of note for sure, a bit of a marketing genius.

Eristic improvements: Recognizing more words by sight, improved arithmetic skills, sounding out words some (in both directions).

The weekend wasn't bad, objectively, but I still felt pretty down. Got some good cooking done, at least. We would be going to Sandy Island at this time most years. Feel bad about missing it this year, though I'm not sure it would have been good to go, and definitely didn't know enough to commit to it when it was time to make a decision. (And my parents decided not to go this year anyways.) Maybe it would have been fine, maybe it's still a bad idea. I am hoping that we don't end up with a COVID variant that children are much less resilient against. The numbers at least continue to be locally good for now.

We could see some fireworks from our house, which Eris found exciting.

Monday was a bit better. I spent a lot of the day watching some of the SGDQ streams on the TV (put the Twitch app up on the XBox). Eris really enjoyed that, too, she was really excited to see speedrunners play games that she's played herself (like Mario Odyssey) or older games that are just visually interesting (like Shadow of the Colossus).

I also had today off, and was able to do relaxing things while Eris was at daycare. Though there was the usual feeling that time was passing quickly, more relaxing things I want to do than I have time, and the time goes so fast. But of course stressing about that would really defeat the point. Was able to get out while it was nice, if a bit hot. Everyone else was able to get home in the interlude before the evening rainstorms started.

Magic Arena has been too much of a timesink. I made it to Mythic three months ago on mono-blue control and two months ago on Winota, but last month I wasn't able to struggle my way to it, and since I've tried out a few different things that don't quite work. The new set (this one specifically based on D&D's forgotten Realms setting) in a few days will surely bring new possibilities. But I probably should balance that with taking a bit of a break.

I have been doing some other things. Played some Hades, watched some anime. Finished Odd Taxi, which was a great surreal subdued mystery drama with great characters. And I started Deca-Dence, a sci-fi action show with the sort of convoluted premise that I love.