Week of 15 April |

The weather has been ace in Canberra this week, and especially this weekend! Even though it's been cold in the morning and evenings, we're getting those awesome Autumn days that get to around 19-20 degrees by lunch time, and cool right off again as soon as the sun goes down — which is annoying early at the moment.
We watched a couple of movies this weekend. "Life", an "Alien"-like that was incredibly underwhelming right up until the ending. "Life" really needed to make me care about the people crewing the space ship a bit more before killing them off, not as they're being killed off. By then it's too late and we're already on to the next thing. I did, however, enjoy Amazon Video asking me if I "liked Life?", with the options "👍 Like" or "👎 Not for me" — feels like this was the long play of making a film with such a title.
Speaking of ulterior motives for making a film, we also watched "My big fat Greek wedding 3" to try and lighten the mood a bit post "Life". But instead we got a "Mama Mia"-like, that was incredibly cringeworthy for all the leaning in to being Greek. The first movie was fun and light-hearted and had some plot and drama. This one was more akin to the modern Adam Sandler films where the entire cast is really here for a holiday, and the film is incidental. There was also this weird maybe-attempt at symbolism, by having the family (upon seeing a beach for the first time in an early scene), run fully-clothed in to the surf on a crowded beach out of excitement to see the ocean. Then, in one of the closing scenes, the family finds themselves on a nude beach and have to strip off to go swimming. I have no freaking idea why either of these scenes were in the film, neither of them add anything to the plot or development of the characters, so there must be some other meaning behind them that absolutely whooshed over my head.
We took a trip to IKEA this weekend to take a look at some kitchen cabinets and fittings for the new place, and only spend $30 on some food containers (to replace some that we had broken over the years) — so that was a wild success.
We watched the first episode of "Fargo" season 5 this week. I've loved every season of that darn show over the years, and I am so glad it's produced the way it is. I definitely would have lost interest if it were on a yearly schedule with 10 seasons and the same set of cast members. This season definitely feels much more reminiscent of the Coen brothers' film on which the series is based.
I've been chipping away at getting a Nurikabe puzzle up on to this site. I think most of the functionality is in place now to solve the puzzles, but the puzzle generation piece is still missing. While out walking the dogs the other morning, I think I came up with an elegant way to generate a puzzle for square grids. So I'll be trying to implement that next week and see how that goes. Most of my current frontend code is also pretty crappy, hardcoded variables everywhere to deal with a single board representation and liberal use of any types. So I'll also be cleaning that up. In terms of testing, that has also been pretty manual. My plan there is to come up with a bunch of seed data in the form of solved boards to try and catch all of the edge cases that might arise in my assumptions about what a valid board state looks like.
I've been re-visiting Wario land this week as well on account of Delta being released to the app store. I still have the old cartridge in my desk drawer, but have had no way of playing it on a hand-held until now! I was a bit skeptical of the touch controls on iPhone, but haptics go a long way to letting me know if I have successfully moved my finger in to the right spot to register a button press. Similarly, I was unsure how reactive the controls would actually be, but turns out, they're really good. My muscle memory of pressing "B" to charge and rolling my thumb on to "A" to jump to cover longer distances works perfectly. What also works perfectly are the cheats that I still somehow remember 😂 — that moon-ending will be mine. One of the things I had forgotten about was the replayability of some of the levels. Wario's actions in a world or a stage, will have impacts on other stages (such as flooding them, or draining their water). When this happens, a new path through old levels becomes available, and usually contains the treasure needed to get the "good" ending.
I usually struggle to remember what to write about by the end of the week, and usually have thoughts during the week that I say to myself "remember that for Sunday". But I don't always remember that thing. So I have made a new append to note shortcut that appends to a new note for each week to hopefully act as my off-board brain for these little details.
We had a couple visitors in our yard this morning. First, a neighbour's cat (which should not be out, and we have tried many a time to work out which neighbour it belongs to). The dogs lost their minds at this one as it sat right in the doorway waiting to get in the house. The other was a freakin Kangaroo. Now, hopefully this isn't one of our neighbours'. We called the folks at Access Canberra to come take care of it, but it had gotten out the way it came in by the time we got on the phone to them. Apparently there were people in the area dealing with another kangaroo that had come down from the nearby ridge, so hopefully this one came down with it and they find their way back OK.

Daniel Nitsikopoulos

Week of 15 April

Movies watched for the first time this week

This week, years ago