selja@hepta

opening: solstice

later today it's the northern hemisphere summer solstice, and correspondingly the southern hemisphere winter solstice. for me this means that soon the night will start making a return soon

it's sometimes hard to remember that a lot of people - most people, even - don't live at latitudes this high. not at the arctic circle, no, but close enough that the midsummer day ends up being closer to 20 hours long. there's essentially no darkness, you could characterise it as continuous twilight from dusk to dawn.

sometimes i wonder if this is why i keep weird sleeping hours.

progress

when a week ago i said the python post would hopefully come out that week, i wasn't lying. i just didn't get around to doing it. i actually wrote most of the draft before that post, it's just as unfinished as it was then.

no solid timelines on this - if i feel inspired i'll post it. the fact i have a draft means it's already in a better state than usual when i just pop in like "whooo i sure haven't posted in a month, anyway here's my new special interest i haven't mentioned". the theme is still going to be python typing and testing, the series name is currently "python thoughts" but i might want to make it more narrow than that. and, to be clear, it might end up being a one-post series if i don't feel like writing the other parts

summer

i will have summer vacation, eventually, but not yet. i've been working more than usual and it's... not making me feel happy, i guess. i don't feel great about working full time, and the reasons i don't feel great intersect with a lot of other things in my life that make it unlikely i'll ever feel great about working full time. but i'll have to, because econony and rent and whatnot

bwueh

but i will have a summer vacation. this is a positive. i'll likely spend it doing not much, so perhaps i'll get around to writing more here. perhaps? maybe like last august?

anywho, the heat is coming back too and i live in a concrete cube with no air conditioning. this means that when i'm not doing anything more specific i will be Melting and taking four showers a day just to dump heat. so i guess in that sense i do know one of the things i'll be doing in the summer. my last summer in this particular cube, though, in all likelihood!

vibeogames

what i've been doing recently is uhhh playing destiny 2. you may have heard that it's got a new expansion, and initially i thought i wasn't interested but turns out i'm a sucker for the coolest shit i've ever seen and the destiny 2 team, after huge layoffs and faced with a rumoured situation of "if this doesn't sell the most copies we've ever sold we're blowing up the whole studio with dynamite immediately" will crank out the coolest shit i've ever seen.

it's the games industry, so i will not be surprised if i learn that this was done by squeezing every drop of life out of their remaining staff in the most unhinged crunch known to man, but like yeah i'm just a sucker. i will give money to companies not worth my trust, evidently.

the legendary campaign feels less bullshit than the lightfall one, though that's kinda hard to compare because they've put in a lot more mechanically interesting encounters but also a lot of them are of a type where you defeat a wave, pick up a mechanical item, use it and then accidentally get oneshot by an ultra and have to start again. i don't feel particularly frustrated, but then i've been pacing myself with maybe one or two encounters a day if i get stuck on any particular one

so yeah i've been enjoying the game so far. my review is that you absolutely should not buy destiny 2 and all of its expansions unless you're already into the game because it will cost you something like One Hundred And Sixty Dollars and i don't think the game is worth that much. i wouldn't even advise just buying the current expansion, because even if you do buy all those previous ones you'll still miss out on all the story so far because bungie insist on deleting all seasonal stories from the game after they're done. it's a constant fomo machine. but it's a constant fomo machine with very engaging fps mechanics.

(i've also played other video games, and considered playing anthology of the killer in particular, but that'll have to wait until july probably)

other hobbies

i'm still keeping up with my photography hobby even if i haven't seen very many things to photograph recently. it's just good to have a camera with me, there's always a gull or something at least.

most recent new thing is that i've ben doing small-scale painting, again, still using posca pens. this time though it's not cards but instead me painting, like, geometric shapes and cool patterns on some bookmarks i have.

see, back before amazon killed it for no reason, i used to order a lot of books from the book depository, and those always came with bookmarks. some of those bookmarks are atrocious, i hate the "problems only readers have" series with my life in particular. but what i realised was that since i'm using a bunch of bookmarks anyway, and i have so many of them... why not just paint something of my own over the ones i don't like? they're cardboard, the posca paint is pretty opaque over the print.

and now i have a bunch of bookmarks with bright colours on them that i don't hate, and i didn't have to spend any fresh cardstock on it.

now if i only read anything from my book pile - i'm still a year behind on the poetry magazine and like one and a half years behind on the other one...

in conclusion

this was a bit of a status update, i guess. the python post is still coming, soon as i get around to it. i'm losing my mind a little bit from working, but only a little bit, and it's not too long till i can take my mind off that for a while.

that's... about it for now. see you next time, hopefully soon, hopefully for the python series.