Entry 24
Not too much to update on this week; I’ll start with some of the blogs I enjoyed.
I’m still enjoying a lot of what I can get my hands on from Bryan Cantrill. I found his blog this week, and read Falling in love with Rust. He’s talked a lot about what he loves about the language, but this affords him the length to really get into it. This is definitely one of the best explanations about what makes Rust so attractive to so many people.
And while we’re on the Rust train, how about this long article on getting colors to work more robustly in the terminal. It starts out seeming simple, and very quickly devolves into syscalls and ttys and dynamically linked libc. Helped all along the way by Rust.
I finished Outer Wilds this week… finally. There’s absolutely no hand-holding in the game, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. When you make a discovery, it feels BIG and really earned. But sometimes you just exhaust everything you can think of. And when you feel like you’ve been everywhere and done everything and still aren’t getting anywhere, the game really sucks. I’m ashamed to admit that the game took me nearly 30 hours because I got into that situation a few times. But I pushed through and finally got there… kind of.
Ok I did cheat twice. I had to look up a hint. But I really suffered up to that point!
But I have to wholeheartedly recommend the game. A really magical experience when you’re on the right path. I nearly teared up at the end– in a game with no spoken dialog or moving characters. I absolutely loved it. There is some DLC that just got released, but I’m not sure if it will be worth it. Will it rob the ending of some of its magic?
And anyway, I just picked up Metroid Dread. I never finished Super Metroid, but I did really love it. And people are saying that this game is HARD. One of the hardest of the series. I mean… Super Metroid is REALLY hard, I’m intimidated by the idea that this would be more challenging. Excited to dive in.
This week I went and saw Titane. I really don’t know what to say about this movie other than JESUS CHRIST. It’s batshit crazy, and I’m not even sure if it’s good. I feel like I understand the emotional journey in the second half of the movie, but there’s just SO much going on there. This is a weird endorsement, I know, but I absolutely loved it. Go see it, but, uh, be forewarned.
Finally, I’m taking a break from Red Mars to read The Crying of Lot 49– a friend lent it to me, and it’s short enough that I feel like I can power through it without losing some of my context in Red Mars (Although that’s not going quite as well as I’d hoped– I’m only ~30 pages in after about a week).
I’m really fascinated with the prose. Some of it has me doubling back over sentences, trying to find the rhythm and logic. But it’s undeniably striking.
One of the funniest things I’ve noticed is that I can’t help hearing the novel in Joanna Newsom’s voice– she was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaption of Inherent Vice, and it’s become all the more impressive to me how well she articulates some of the twisting lines of the description and story. Whenever I can’t find my way in a passage, reading it the way I imagine she would say it usually makes the whole thing click into place.