a busy pause

 i don't know what switch off meant yesterday when i wrote it, but i was still messing about (on and off) with my side project and a new minigame [stops writing to prompt the AI to improve rotation behavior]. 

most of yesterday evening is a blur to me now, but we watched a great episode of spider-noir over dinner, and after mr smear went to bed* i spent some time driving myself crazy playing cook, serve, delicious!...

* a process that began at a relatively reasonable hour, ended around midnight, and at some point when i went in to turn off the lights again and tuck him in he was offended because i didn't do the bedtime ritual and he'd forgotten that i'd already done so much earlier :P

i went to bed late, but not too late, and i guess i slept alright. on my way to bed i had a revelation about the change that came over me since last week's game meetup talk - i got so excited about the potential for making money with games that i lost focus, and i need that focus and excitement for the raw components of the game before i can start making something that's lucrative. every single thing i'm building, or failing at building, is a lesson, a dot to connect when i'm ready.

i woke up to the stress of reading a post i shouldn't have looked at before coffee, another oleh really struggling economically. one of the things i did after coffee was creating a facebook group to help olim network and build things.

my morning started quietly, a little meditative outside time followed by getting back into history of western art in comics, and then finally settling down and taking care of a bunch of admin that i've been putting off for about a week now. after mr smear completed his chores, he asked if we could play something together, but neither of us could agree on what. eventually he sat down to play valheim, and honestly, it did me good. first, because he made a point of chewing gum** the whole time, and second because he was playing something outdoorsy and really getting into it. it's like that "the children yearn for the mines" meme 😂

** "training": both exercising his jaw, and practicing dealing with the fact that it doesn't keep the taste for more than a couple of minutes.

our big adventure today was going to find some kitchen items and something we could use as a low coffee table for when we're sitting on the beanbags. on the bus, we encountered the old man who took a dump next to the bus stop a while back, and as soon as we recognized him we all quickly and quietly agreed to slide over to the back of the bus.

the sales lady at the kitchen store was stunned by gd's hilariously disorientating description of how normal it is for her to cut herself in the kitchen (or while cutting hair), she helped us figure out what we need to buy (it's a chain-link glove) but we've had to order it in gd's size. then we caught a bus to the hardware store, almost getting run over a few times by wolt drivers, where we found what we were looking for but everything felt like far too little value for money.

we walked up to the square with all the restaurants, and sat down to two delicious bowls of hummus, one with vegan shuwarma, and then headed down to osher ad to be amazed both by the prices and quality of their products, and by the lengths of their queues during the holidays. we'll go back there another day.

we were planning on coming home but ended up in azrieli mall instead. i had a coffee and mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd, crowded by surges of mall people, but fortunately not being pushed beyond my usual limit. i mean, it was exhausting, but it didn't put me into fight-and-flight mode like it usually does.

we found *exactly* the coffee tables we were looking for at the dollar store, very cheap and absolutely perfect. we caught the bus home, and halfway there i jumped off to take a call from the dermatologist i'd been waiting to hear from for two days - she's not concerned, she agrees with my assessment - and after having a bit of a rest (taking out one of the tables, lying down for a bit, then hearing gd out as she described how she's selling some of her childhood toys she's been carrying around because she's come to understand that she's holding on to nostalgia for really dark times, and then sitting down to edit the haircut recording from yesterday.

i've done very little development / AI whispering today, and that's okay. i've just had it out with mr smear over his piano practice (i wanted him to practice a new thing he's just learned before stopping), but otherwise things are good.

unremarkably successful

i didn't sleep long, but i slept alright. i woke up with stomach issues that lasted until the early afternoon, and i'm pretty confident it has something to do with the sheer quantity of suboptimal snacks i've been consuming over the course of the past week... my weight's been bouncing up and down accordingly, and i really, really need to start behaving with a little bit of discipline.

i cleaned the balcony floor this morning, but it was already too hot and sunny to sit outside. i spent a good chunk of the day resuscitating my social media side project, and it's looking good, and i've put some effort into a new minigame as well.

i sat gd and mr smear down this morning (as soon as he was clear of his first two screen-free hours) to watch a fascinating video on jaw development, which unfortunately includes two incidents of animal cruelty so gd only made it through half. but mr smear appears to get the idea, which was the main intention.

he's busy playing the sims 4 right now, i can't tell if i'm an awesome dad or a terrible one :P

the big event of the day was gd fixing my haircut on camera, with mr smear serving as cameraman, and we're going to edit it and post it (and hope i don't get blacklisted from barber shops :P). i'm hoping this is the start of a hairdresser equivalent of kitchen nightmares, and that this builds gd's credibility towards becoming a consultant or mentor.

in the meanwhile, my hair's looking sooooo much better and gd's only a little bit injured from the effort... 🤷‍♂️

we all went for a short walk to the grocery store to pick up a few things, which was a corrective experience as gd was forced to admit, begrudgingly, that it's not the worst supermarket and that they do have stuff sometimes.

alright, i think i need to switch off for a bit.

all the epochs

 i'm using astra, and it's great, but it's still.. just another model, making just another model mistakes if you don't guide it. the playbooks we've been building these past months shouldn't be thrown out the window just yet, though i suspect jev will trigger a large part of them to be rewritten. but i will say that i've had the privilege of working as a software engineer for a quarter century, and during that time i had the privilege of working on systems based on 70's tech, and to be able to experience two different epochs of computing history and then be able to experience this new one as well?

what a time to be alive!

indecision

 well, here we are. past midnight on saturday night. between last night and tonight we have finished watching small prophets (brilliant, btw, completely unhinged and brilliant), and mr smear and i completed the jigsaw puzzle, and the day was generally quiet, indoorsy, and involved a lot of me working on, well, mostly on the bird game, with which i made plenty of progress in spite of the fact that most of it was dealing with the agents being slow and dumb.

that slowness also meant just watching a lot of stuff on youtube and doing minesweeper challenges and snacking heavily 🤷

in the evening i took mr smear out for a particularly long walk, it was a great evening for it and aside from strategizing about games, i also successfully conveyed to him what my social media side project should feel like and he was excited by the possibilities ^_^

and along the way, we sat in a sukkah and said the blessings and we got an amazing view of the enormous harvest moon.

after watching the first episode of season 2 of ludwig with gd, after mr smear had at least theoretically gone to bed, i played some aces of the luftwaffe and am now trying to decide whether to go to bed or not.

i'm having a little trouble decided what i actually want to do.

not up

 it hasn't been the greatest first-day-of-vacation-friday ever. it began alright, with some relaxed meditation (kind of) on the balcony, in spite of having woken up with a stiff neck and sore back after getting to bed *much* later than i'd intended.

then i watched in horror as the astra model crashed and burned, abysmally failing to understand my prompts and context, and making me understand that while outsourcing my developer brain to code that's inconsequential (like a video game) is one thing, but these new models are not significantly different from what came before and i still need to maintain the discipline of guiding, managing and keeping a close eye on the results.

then we went to the shops. but first we had a fight because misinterpretation on top of misinterpretation, and then we had back to back mall people and friday/erev chag shopping people and foreign workers on public transport with no sense of personal space people, although we did manage to pick up most of what we were looking for.

then we dropped mr smear off at home and did another run for the non-mall stuff, which was tedious but not as bad, and then we finally returned home.

which has mostly been okay, except for me losing my temper over mr smear doing something ugly while we recorded a greeting video for someone, and then much drama with gd have hidden something away that she needed, and now i'm sitting with chocolate halva and rum to stabilize while continuing to chip away at my projects.

i'm not really feeling the joy of the incoming holiday, but here we are...

perspective

 i'm loathe to put this in writing, but something about the last couple of weeks has made me more cognizant of the fact that we're getting older. gd's about to hit fifty, and i'm not that far behind. it's weird.

it's not terrible, it's not scary, it's just plain weird.

i'm not unhappy with my story so far - quite the contrary - in spite of how much anxiety i tend to experience on a good day and how messed up we both are health-wise. it's just that my story really hasn't gone in the direction i once thought it would, and i'm kinda hoping that the side projects i'm working on might help me shift things.

i honestly feel like they are already, even if just a little bit.

pushing on

i guess i'm on vacation for a week? i'm starting to write this just before 1am, while babysitting an agent working on my social media project and i *just* want to have a reasonably good result before i turn in for the night. also, i'm finally down to 6% of my weekly limit, which is good, i guess?

...

i slept alright last night, and began my day on the balcony, writing. i actually wrote something i felt was worth sharing.

i helped gd make a couple of appointments this morning and did a little more work on the project and the bird game, and then i switched modes and started working. today was mainly about managing my dev environment, fine tuning and troubleshooting and rediscovering that intellij is horrible software even on an m4 pro with 48GB of RAM. i literally almost burned myself holding my laptop because of the indexing, which was my primary complaint for more than seven years now.

visual studio code with claude code is a much better deal, and so much more effective.

i got my first PR out, and by the end of the day i had the second one ready to go. i had a pleasant one on one with my lead, and although i almost kit-bag-questioned my way out of vacation he assured me that it makes no difference to how much pressure this project has whether i take the days this week or the next, so 🤷‍♂️

i'm particularly pleased with how well my devex (that's a thing now) is now that i'm getting a handle on all the tooling, and getting the tooling to play nicely together ^_^

while i worked, mr smear and gd seemed to have a pretty relaxed day, but mr smear did give gd a hebrew lesson from the madregot book my mom delivered a while back, second day in a row and i'm proud of both of them :)

he also got through (with a little encouragement from me, some positive reinforcement and some not so positive) a tough piano lesson based on these boots were made for walkin', and practiced afterwards, and did himself proud.

otherwise, i ate a LOT today. lots of healthy food, but also lots of less healthy food (i've got a problem and i know it). once i was done with the work day, mr smear and i strapped on our blades and went on a mission, we didn't find what we were looking for (reflectors) but we mostly had a good time and got some good exercise.

we got back to great sushi, the second episode of small prophets (painful to watch, but we're all invested), and mr smear and i made great progress on the puzzle together before bedtime.

...

i hope i'm going to bed soon. i'll probably crash soon regardless of my dev state...

redirect

i took horseman's recommendation to heart last night, and as a result i went to bed particularly late and invested a significant amount of my energy (and tokens) on three different projects, in parallel with burning my client's tokens on the project they're actually paying me for.

then i discovered that the "reset" wasn't going to happen automatically, that we've been given an additional one to use when we like. oooooooooooooh.

but i got a hell of a lot of stuff done today, including massive improvements to the game (mr smear was overjoyed) and reviving the stalled social media experiment i've barely touched since december. i used a lot of AI back then, too, but i've leveled up considerably in the past few months and the experience is now completely different. also, the new models are completely different as well.

...

i did manage to sleep last night, but instead of being kept up by the usual pain or discomfort, or just restlessness, it was a nightmare that i awoke from with adrenaline pumping through my veins, and it must have taken about half an hour to calm down enough to get back to sleep.

the nightmare: extremely vivid, with lots of grim parts, ending in a chase scene (i was in the back of a flatbed truck being shot at, and some of the bullets struck centimeters from my legs), followed by a narrow escape after being discovered (and abandoned by one of my "friends"), which involved a favor (some random guy deciding to look the other way) and then sneaking into a secret passage i was sure he didn't know about.

the morning dream: i woke up from another epic dream that ended in me cleaning an oven (and scratching it accidentally by using the wrong tool) then finding out i was covering for some kind of crime. the last person i encountered as my alarm went off was a cartoon daffy duck (à la who framed roger rabbit) but man-size, which was pretty intimidating.

aside from work - one of my biggest achievements being getting my client's environment playing nicely with my personal skills and sandboxed playground - and all of the token burning, i feel like a large part of my day was spent snacking, and trying to help gd get through all the food she's made (we both decided, spontaneously and simultaneously, that she should have frozen half of it), and in the evening she accompanied me to my haircut.

she's *not* happy with my haircut. neither am i...

dinner and the wonder years and me and mr smear working on the puzzle together until late, followed by this post and a cup of tea, and now i'm trying to decide whether it's bed time or more work time. my brain's feeling a bit fuzzy...

from fasting to hardcore hiccups

 the fast... went by quickly. i made it, albeit is very lethargically and with a caffeine headache. 

i listened to a bit of the shul service, but after the rabbi began waxing political i shut it down and took mr smear out rollerblading. it was awesome, we had a good ride, good chatter (in particular a quiet break on a bench staring at the stars and having a serious talk about something that was bothering him), and his biggest concern was that not all the highway roads are completely smooth.

i showered, but i didn't hydrate. we went to bed soon after.

i woke up pretty early yesterday morning, and i was sad and anxious to see a surprising number of vehicles on the roads. i can't imagine what could be so important as to be driving on yom kippur, but apparently tel aviv isn't the only city that saw a sharp increase in this happening, which is disappointing, and feels ominous.

my day was primarily spent napping, reading comics, and working on the jigsaw puzzle (we got quite far!), and the absolute highlights of my day were playing a full game of pokémon with mr smear (he beat me with a surprisingly good strategy) and him participating heavily in the puzzle ^_^

sadly, gd wasn't interested in it and barely so much as looked at it, which i'm trying not to read into too much...

i broke my fast on chili and dill rice (a fresh, better batch), and then sat with mr smear - regretfully not recording - as he playtested our bird game with absolute, unadulterated full joy for about forty five minutes straight.

i managed to sleep last night, even though i woke up multiple times i was able to get back to sleep relatively easily.

this morning saw me starting my day on the balcony, writing in my notebook, and what was intended to be another comic script turned into a journal entry that was slightly more prosaic than this one. my fingers are too tired to transcribe, though, so 🤷‍♂️

i went to the acupuncturist, the session didn't feel quite as productive as the previous ones and i struggled to not snore during the treatment. fortunately, i didn't have any problems getting home this time. i shipped off to the office, where my work day was essentially a lot of social interactions punctuated by investigation, and i think i've got a proper handle on using claude the way my client intends without losing access to my user skills.

i came home early, had an early supper (disappointed to be eating alone), then took mr smear to the comics library to return some books. i said goodbye to him before he got on the bus home, but he clearly didn't understand what was happening and ran out of the bus when he realized i wasn't on it with him, and in the time it took to re-explain and turn him around the bus driver had already closed the doors... fortunately, he let him on again.

i made my way to the game dev meetup, which was again quite constructive. i met some nice people, got some extremely good tips from an entire talk built around a single slide, and had some interesting conversations. then i came home, not expecting to find my family having just watched the daredevil movie without me (i haven't seen it! [oh, wait, i have. i guess i had better things to bother remembering]), 

i played a bit of aces of the luftwaffe - squadron while mr smear ate his late dinner as slowly as possible in order to watch me [stops writing to write down some ideas that game him, look up the binding of isaac and wishlist rebirth, learn from horseman that i should be burning codex tokens before tomorrow's reset, and develop a weird and particularly intense case of the hiccups]

i had a weird argument with mr smear over him wanting to write something down, but not enough to do so with pen and paper (he wanted to use google docs, and it was late), and then i told him he was being a schmuck and he responded with "no, you're being a schmuck" so he's down an hour of screen time tomorrow and i'm questioning whether i did the right thing or not. at least the next time i tried to talk to him about what happened (a few minutes later) went well, he got the upper hand by deliberately answering my rhetorical question in a way that was so incorrect that i had to stop for both of us to laugh, and then regroup, and then think up a different approach 😅

after putting him to bed, i sorted out some minor things on my work laptop, agreed to what appears to be the go-ahead for my project's action plan, read some news articles and then began posting this.

god damn these hiccups.

the opening gates

 we never got to pokémon yesterday, but we did make great progress with our bird game, it was a great experience both as a father-son bonding session and as a building-something-good session. then we washed the floors, which took a while but is always less work than i expect it to be, by which time it was getting dark and we hadn't been outside all day, so we strapped on our blades and went for a night blade.

overall, the evening was excellent. there were a couple of shit moments, though, the primary one being almost being crashed into by an idiot kid on an electric scooter.

we had a good, but late, dinner and watched random videos from mr smear's playlist, and then it was bedtime.

i guess i slept alright, if not enough. i began the day with the other ant-man comic, then did some random stuff, then tried to get some actual work done - my employer expects us to work on holiday eves, but not my clients :P - and the first hour or so was spent migrating from helium to brave and upgrading software. then i settled in to write up some notes about my project and put AI to work investigating the current state and poking around to surface the risks, and i think i have enough to have a sync with the team's product lead when we're back in the office to determine how much effort this is going to require.

from there, i went out with an already irritable gd and our already irritating son to do some shopping, and while she let me win the argument about which grocery store to go to first, she turned out to be right that they wouldn't have any vegetables and then she was doubly pissed that we had to walk much further to get what we needed...

at least the rest of the shopping expedition was somewhat successful.

when we returned, i sat mr smear down to play pokémon, but gd turned it into a family meeting first. then we resorted the cards and ran through the tutorial, and we both had a good time. then we moved to the computer and got back to work on the bird game, and although the AI has been dragging its metaphorical feet the game itself is at least fun to play.

now it's about to be yom kippur, and gd mistimed dinner so it looks like i might be starting the fast a bit late... and taking mr smear our rollerblading, so i'll probably be drinking some water too :/

but i've eaten plenty today, carbo-loaded, in fact, so i'll probably be fine. two bowls of rice, and pancakes, and gd's failed experimental baked potato chips, and choc-chickpea fudge... i'll probably be fine.

catching 'em all

 it's after noon on a saturday, and i'm writing this because i feel compelled to press ctrl+s on my life (just like when editing a doc that isn't autosaved). i'm currently taking a break from doing a lot of busywork that got triggered by me wanting to begin working on a game with mr smear, and then finding myself studying how to shave the yak of terrain map import.

[stopped here to write down the trophies design details from my conversation with horseman earlier]

yesterday:

i eventually gave up with helium and migrated back to brave. hello, brave. you're annoying, but you're alright. that took a lot of energy, both effort and psychological, and it was pretty draining.

after mr smear went off to school, gd and i went to the pharmacy, me with my little notebook and an intention to spent gd's waiting-in-line time writing down some stuff, more-than-loosely inspired by inside moebius. i'm pretty satisfied with the results, it was a good idea.

so gd took care of her meds for the long weekend, and we did a quick grocery shopping, and then we returned home.

oh, i should mention that gd and i were both struggling with post-nasal drip and coughs, but it was relatively manageable.

i spent way too much time trying to make a comic about something that happened at the mall, eventually giving up because notebook / gemini just kept failing and failing and failing to capture anything remotely like what i'd scripted. at some point it decided to DEI the comic and make gd black, which was super weird.

in the afternoon, our upstairs neighbors paid us a visit, and i flooded big data with my opinions and ideas on gaming, and introduced him to the israeli version of jones in the fast lane, which he played through completely :)

while we both enjoyed gd's marzipan and choc-chickpea fudge. that stuffs growing on me 🙄

i helped (as usual, now) with the challahpeño, then mr smear and i went upstairs to join them and their kids for a couple of games of fluxx - marvel and star. mr smear won both rounds! then we took our leave and went to the store to pick up wine for gd, with me become enraged along the way by a cycling who (apparently deliberately) almost ran into me even after we left him enough room, and then lost trying to find the wine gd was looking for...

gd almost ruined the rice by following the recipe... i made a suggestion that actually rescued it and we were both surprised ^_^

we went upstairs for dinner, and we all had a good time (mr smear doing a minimal amount of trolling, and encouraging their kids to fight over the piano by sitting down and playing quite nicely). after dinner, big data handed me a folder full of really interesting pokémon cards! somebody appears to have left it on our neighborhood's giving bench, and according to what he saw online it's probably worth a fair amount of money, but i'm taking it as a sign that i should sit mr smear down and get into it again :P

everyone was tired by the time we left, and i went to bed soon after helping gd put everything away (impressing her with my packing skills, we didn't have to toss anything) and clean up the kitchen, and aside from waking up in the middle of the night for an hour or so of very uncomfortable indigestion, i slept really well.

i began my day cleaning and then sitting on the balcony, with my notebook, working on an idea inspired by a conversation with big data's wife (who's not convinced that one can use games to teach social skills), and then moving inside when the sun streamed onto me directly (we get direct sunlight in the winter months, and we're protected during the worst of the summer, that's pretty cool) to do some research into writing mysteries.

i thought about swordschool, who i haven't heard from in a long time, and i sent him an email because i suspect he's changed numbers again. also, i discovered his actual surname, i believe for the very first time.

i had a long chat with horseman about trophies, then invested an hour into burning the last of my week's token allowance before the refresh on the app i've been working on all week, unfortunately hitting the reset with an annoying issue unresolved after everything else worked out beautifully.

then i took a nap, and then fell into the busywork, and now that i've got everything written down i need to decided whether it's pokémon time or game dev time with mr smear.

things that bother me in the middle of the night

 dawn is breaking, i've been up since about 4am (gd claims 4.30) and while some of it was because of gd struggling to clear her lungs (thank god we got her prescription sorted out yesterday!) a fair amount was due to a combination of worrying about how my teammates are supposed to deal with their kids when the other parents aren't on board, and how mr smear's friend's mother - who's a psychologist, if i recall correctly - sent me an article about peter gray, who may have a sound theory regarding self-directed play but who is clearly very, very wrong about how that applies to the internet and gaming (especially roblox), and AI, and also schooling.

and then i made the mistake of updating my browser, and learned that the weird anomaly that happened at work a couple of weeks ago is a known bug in helium (or chromium in general?), and i got signed out of *all* of my accounts and had to reinstall and reconnect *all* of my extensions. that's not what i wanted to be doing when i sat down at my desk in the middle of the night.

...

i slept awfully "last" night (wednesday night), i was struggling with my sinuses / post-nasal drip / sore throat, and i needed a lot of caffeine to get me through the day. lots of green tea punctuating my coffees. i managed to clear a bunch of things off my desk, though, although that did include discovering that we're going to need to borrow money to pay rent this month again. hopefully my bonus will come in with my next salary. hopefully it'll be at least half as much as the stated amount 🙏

my drip & cough got worse as the day wore on, then magically cleared up around the second half of the afternoon. this is the general pattern of this week. aside from the clear advantage of not being in a office with other people while going through it, i had access to the really hot jalapeño kettle fries (which helped clear me up, temporarily) and got to taste gd's first marzipan, which came out really well!

the majority of my work-from-home day was spent in meetings, i learned a lot and i encountered some of the trickier logic this company has to deal with, which really isn't easy to wrap my head around. my biggest stress was troubleshooting my dev environment, which mysteriously broke down on wednesday, but by the time i had my last meeting (a very friendly and positive 1:1 with my manager) i'd managed to get everything green ^_^

during one of my meetings, i heard a yell from the kitchen: gd managed to slice herself cleaning the "mandolin" 🤦‍♂️

when i was done with my day, the three of us walked across the bridge into ramat gan, paying a visit to the hardware store and the stationery store, and, after a confusing talk with the knick-knacks guy next door, to the pharmacy after learning that cloth diapers really can be used as a stand-in for cheese cloth.

we watched the first episode of small prophets over dinner last night, and after (eventually) getting mr smear to bed i sat on the couch reading medium articles until i passed out.