Week of 6 May
- This week's update comes to you from a park bench on a (what has turned in to) stellar autumn day in Canberra. The sky is clear, and I'm surrounded by trees slowly turning their once-green leaves in to a carpet of crunchy gold. A++, early-mid autumn continues to be one of my favourite times of year.
- It has been an intense couple of days at work this last week. Our team is finally attempting to break through some of the hardest work we've had on the horizon. It largely involves moving a few hundred GB of data from one data store to another, cleaning it up and structuring it along the way. Now you might be saying to yourself "Dan, I ship hundreds of GB around the internet daily what could be so hard?". The difficulty really lies in 2 places. One, the totality of the data we need to move is in tens of millions of tiny bits. So any otherwise-insignificant amount of latency is multiplied greatly! A few seconds here and there can quickly lead to days, weeks or months of overhead. Second, each one of those tiny bits of data is being validated as we go β because we could never guarantee validity in the old data store, and any time we hit invalid data, we do the equivalent of stopping the production line so that we can address it. This makes feedback loops and measuring progress somewhat slow going, but, we persevere.
- I picked up "Animal Well" this weekend on a whim. I jumped in to the PS App to see how much it would cost and was surprised to see it was a day-one addition to PS Plus! I had just installed "Tunic" to give that another run through on a system without a save, but "Animal Well" very much scratches the same itch. It's a delightful little puzzle / exploration game with some dark-but-not-horror, unsettling elements. The primary part of the game can pretty much be mainlined, as you explore and gather new tools to progress. But there are also a tonne of secrets to uncover in the form of "eggs". This part has totally sucked me in the same way that "Tunic" did, and now I want to solve all of the puzzles and find all of the eggs! You get some tools similar to those in "Tunic" that can be used both to progress through areas just following the game's stated mechanics, but can also be used to trigger secrets and find eggs. All told, I'm about 6 hours in, finished the main story, and by the looks of things, only 1/4 of the way through all of the secrets! Normally, I would hold off on tearing through a game this good like this, but I always found that I would forget where I was at when I returned, or would otherwise get side-tracked, and so in my efforts to prolong my experience with a quality title, I would inadvertently cut it incredibly short.
- I picked up a couple new Magic cards this weekend from our local game store, I've really been enjoying one of the more recent commander decks β "Blame Game" but there were just a handful of cards that didn't quite work or a couple of areas of the deck's toolkit that were lacking a bit. So I picked up Maze of Ith, Mother of Runes, Skullclamp, Generous Gift and Nevinyrral's Disk and managed to give the deck a spin last night. Unfortunately I drew all of 5 mana the whole game, so didn't really get to do much before I was decimated, but, I did get to Deflecting Palm my opponent for a tonne of damage π
Movies watched for the first time this week
This week, years ago
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