The Witcher 3
There’s a line from the recent Avengers movie going around: Hero: “You took everything from me!” Villain: “I don’t even know who you are”. This reminded me I’d experienced a moment just like that when playing The Witcher 3.
It’s a moment which I think gives a good summary of what the overall experience of playing The Witcher 3 [...]
Hitman 2 and its Difficulty Curve
I’ve been playing the recent Hitman 2 quite a bit. I never played the earlier Hitman games, but from comments I’ve seen in YouTube videos, it seems the situation is a bit analogous to the Tomb Raider series: for one, the recent games re-use the same titles as earlier games. (There’s a “Hitman 2” which was released in 2002; which [...]
Netflix's Dark is Great
Most of my blob-around time goes to YouTube rather than to Netflix. Before I had Netflix, I was worried that it would suck up all my spare time. Like how Netflix’s “Dark” sucked up all my time. “Dark” is a show which was written for the kind of people who love modelling things with graphs, and KT45 modal logic. I [...]
You Might Like "Anne with an E" If...
You might like Netflix’s “Anne with an E” if: - You value current-year progressive ideals, unlike the stupid, ignorant and bad people who hold values you find gross. - You hate close-minded people. - You can’t understand why late 19th century rural farmers don’t hold modern urban bourgeois moral values. - You watched the 10-hour YouTube video of “Gillette commercial”. [...]
Comparing Cucumber vs All-in-Code BDD Specs
A couple of years ago I added a couple of Cucumber specs to a side-project of mine.
I did this because I was learning to use Cucumber since I was being hired as a Software Engineer in Test. (Their existing automated acceptance tests used Cucumber). I recently picked the project up again to do some maintenance on it, and [...]
"Patch Grid" Sounds Like a Useful Editor Technique
I came across a link to Austin Henley’s dissertation “Human Centric Tools for Code Navigation”. There are three interesting tools discussed Henley discusses for navigating code: navigating code you’re working on now navigating through the history of code you’re working on
(though his tool is for visual dataflow languages) navigating the structure of the code you’re working on “Ribbon” [...]
"What I've Been Up To" Ramble
I haven’t published anything on this blog for some time. I’ll break that absense with a bit of a ramble. I’ve just relocated to Vietnam, to live with my girlfriend.
Currently, I’m on a “personal sabbatical”. The first part of this ‘sabbatical’ has been spent on relocating, and on catching up on some of my Steam backlog.
(I [...]
StackOverflow, Elitism, and Community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942. StackOverflow’s discussion that it ought to do more to be more welcoming. Some of the points highlighted: Dickish behaviour on StackOverflow comes from the perverse incentives of its reputation system.
e.g. one way to be rewarded with reputation is to ‘edit’ an answer. This leads to frivolous editing, such as removing “thanks” from a question. There’s also a [...]
Employment Interactions are a Mix of Market and Social
One of the kindof interesting parts of Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” is where he points out some interactions between people are ‘social’, some are ‘market-oriented’; these two kinds of interactions have different protocols and don’t mix well. The most striking example of this is something like lawyers who are willing to do pro-bono work; but not willing to do the [...]
Playing Videogames with my Girlfriend
My girlfriend and I have had a bunch of fun playing videogames together. Layton’s Mysteries I had bought this for the Nintendo 2DS.
I didn’t realise it was available on Android phones, and I’d heard good things about the Layton series.
Unfortunately, many reviews suggest that other games in the series are better. In any case, we found [...]