#games

weeknotes 12: savage garden

choir games music sportsball weeknotes

let’s just pretend I’ve been doing these the whole time and don’t have to recap the last checks notes two years

after a disastrous few weeks at the choir trying to learn No More Tears (Enough Is Enough) by Donna Summer feat Barbra Streisand (weird disco key changes, stupidly wide range, way too much funk rhythm) we moved onto To The Moon And Back by Savage Garden. it’s a lot of fun! we got through most of it in one session, we’ll probably finish tonight?

i’m really starting to get comfortable with my singing voice, it’s a great feeling. even just warming up and singing something once a week makes a huge difference. ASYMPTOTES vocals when

thursday was the father in law’s 60th birthday party, at a Very Fancy Restaurant in Orpington. i’d been completely dreading it, i’m not close at all with that side of Sophie’s family, and i knew there'd be a bunch of people i'd met 1 (one) time, a decade ago. but it was actually super lovely! i ate too much and burnt my tongue on the chocolate fondant but somehow avoided both a physical hangover and an anxiety hangover.

my regular board game group are five sessions into The King's Dilemma, a cool legacy-ish game where you're playing as the king's advisors in Definitely Not Westeros. it does some really interesting things with limited game mechanics, and (unlike Seafall, the last legacy game we played) the rules are really well explained. almost too well explained tbh, for a game mostly built around just voting, they're 25 pages long and pretty verbose. but i prefer that over the several index cards of houserules we had to maintain for Seafall where it simply didn't explain how a bunch of its separate systems interacted.

after that, Piers (a very much non-sportsball person) hosted the sportsball final. before the match everyone agreed with the prediction it would be 2-1 to Spain after ninety minutes of England's usual "pass it around a bit, get crowded out, lose possession to unforced errors, occasionally get lucky". and hey what do you know

https://open.spotify.com/album/0nnANnYmbdEh7J6LdRQoIV?si=I8Ui-GoWQLqcnm9YBF5ESA

okay maybe a little recap, as a treat. i've got a new album out! when i released IN PROGRESS i felt completely musically spent and didn't make anything new for eighteen months. but after SYNCRETISM i still somehow had fresh ideas?

it's extremely hype, i learnt a lot of hyperpop/future garage/progressive house production techniques. the whole thing came together mostly over one weekend (#humblebrag). chee says it's my best work and i'm inclined to agree with them.

you can listen now on all good streaming services and Spotify but please consider buying it on Bandcamp because that actually gives me money

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weeknotes #3: business horoscopes

films games kettricken minecraft need for speed tech lead weeknotes

content warning: wild animal injury

1. been watching the Fast & Furious films with friends

  • once a week, on a sunday afternoon
  • we sync up the films, hit play, and pretend we're mst3k via Slack
  • they're actually pretty good, even the bad ones
  • also i'm spotting how much of an influence they had on the Need For Speed franchise in the early 00s
  • speaking of which:

2. i've been playing a lot of Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)

Hi, I'm Josie Maran, and I play Mia in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Make sure you do all your racing in the game. On the streets, drive safely and responsibly. And wear your seatbelt 😉
  • that unskippable opening video is burned into my brain
  • last time i played this game i didn't let myself like pink, and cute things, for some reason. so this time i'm making my cars look as cute as possible

3. i've also been playing a lot of Minecraft again

  • we (me and Rowan and Luke and Chris) did a multiplayer "speed"run on the latest snapshot version with the new cave generation datapack
    • turns out snapshot versions are not at all optimised and it was extremely laggy
  • to spice things up a bit we had secondary goals we could pick up, silly stuff like "place a live fish in the End"
  • i was racing ahead to get to the end first and do as many goals as i could while the others were doing pointless things like preparing for the dragon fight
  • but when i went through the portal the lag hit hard and i fell into the void and lost all my stuff
    • including my fish in a bucket i was going to free into the End. can i get an F in chat

4. i went to a technical leadership workshop

  • it was okay. it was exhausting.
  • a lot of it was things like:
    • "if i wanted to be a good tech lead and still wanted to code, i would simply no longer want to code"
    • "here is how to lead an engineering team well: *list of engineering practices the Financial Times does anyway all the time*"
    • one hour of Business Horoscopes ("StrengthFinder 2.0")
  • i'm glad i didn't pay for it myself

5. Kettricken (my cat) caught a bird

  • she's never done that before
  • it was terrifying
  • i was getting dressed, i couldn't do much about it
  • i could hear this awful screaming, getting louder
  • she walks in, i assume she's injured or something, i look down and there's this mess of feathers in her mouth. still screeching
  • she runs away from me into the living room and drops the bird. it's a female blackbird
  • it plays dead but it's still breathing, heavily
  • Sophie locks the cat in the bathroom
  • the internet says to take it to the vet so it can be put down humanely. there's another option. it probably won't survive itself.
  • it suddenly leaps up and scurries into the corner.
  • we can't bring ourselves to do anything about it.
  • we let it go.
  • i'm not sure we did the right thing.

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