Diary 2019-01-09

By Max Woerner Chase

Yesterday's entry went up an hour after I finished it, because somehow or other I ended up with Pelican upgraded through a major version, and Sass replaced with an entirely different implementation. Fixing the fallout of this required editing my theme, my blog config, some of my posts, and the publisher script. Besides the theme changes, which were for the Pelican upgrade, the majority of the changes focused around editing the blog config to disable or remove functionality from the webassets package that Sass no longer supported. This was not a pleasant experience, and I did not take it well, or gracefully. Two big complaints: webassets seemed really opaque, and I'm not clear how actively people are using it, since I couldn't find the issue I hit; and Pelican doesn't seem to emit tracebacks by default. I should rework my publisher script to pass --debug, I think, and file the bug against webassets. Later.

Work is, not great, but it hasn't gotten as bad as I worried it might. I'm still an abyss domain expert, which is a, ah, hole that I'd like to dig myself out of.

I did a little more reading. I haven't totally stopped myself from analyzing things, so I'm noticing stuff like apparent callbacks to stuff that wasn't shown but seems like it would have been; not sure if intentional. Also, a lot of the male lead's dialogue is way over the top. It keeps reminding me of when my wife quotes meme remixes of gay porn. However, I do keep losing track of the fact that I'm pretty sure these characters are supposed to be in their late teens and early(?) twenties, so I shouldn't really be expecting them to react to things more proportionately than I did in college. ... They're fine. Stuff I'd want in my own writing: characters older and less wealthy than this. This is useful data. I do appreciate the fact that I haven't gotten any precise numbers or measurements; that kind of thing is clunky, and I should avoid it, or at least avoid frontloading it.

Oh also, I snagged a copy of Hyperlapse Pro, and I'm thinking I'll try it out on Minecraft footage because I don't have meatspace footage that would work well with it. That's a few days out because I'm not managing time well enough to play during the week any more.

I think I need to take inventory of all of the stuff I'm trying to work on, because it seems to have ballooned out of control. For now, good night.