July 2024 Part 2

31 July, 2024. 2,276 words.

The one where I just plain give up on trying to think of a unique title for a post containing a potpourri of radically-different subjects.

Blaugust

I signed up for Blaugust after all, and I’ll be trying something completely new. It might be a rousing success or a dismal failure, or, even worse, average and unmemorable. The future is unknowable. You can find all the details here.

For myself, I see it as a thin excuse to force myself to read some old writing again. (That’s a content creation tip for the newer folks: Find a reason to create that is unrelated to statistics or money and you have a much higher chance of success.)

If you follow the main RSS feed, you’ll get all that content automatically, but I didn’t put it on the front page because I didn’t want to have to find or create different pictures for 31 days straight.

Incidentally, I still see people who don’t read blogs using RSS feed readers, and I still find it shocking and incomprehensible. I fully expect–nay, demand!–that everyone read my blog through an RSS feed reader, because I use a very minimalist layout for the web site itself. Most likely a feed reader will format the posts better than my web site.

Gaming

I saw someone mention Dragon’s Dogma 2 recently. I found it fun for 10-15 hours, but then I abandoned it when it became clear it was just going to be continuous repetition from then onward, with punative weight-based inventory management on top of it.

Elden Ring DLC

Speaking of punative, I don’t know about anyone else, but I hated the Ancient Ruins of Rauh. Not only was it impossible to pronounce, but it was just so much empty space with nothing interactable inside. Two entire videos just completely wasted. Nothing to see, nothing to talk about. Just awful.

This is a common problem in Elden Ring from start to finish. It looks like there’s a lot to explore, but when you’re actually in it, there’s nothing there except useless crafting materials. But you still have to do a grid-by-grid search of every area, because occasionally, there’s a cool item hiding somewhere.

I persist in my general viewpoint that Elden Ring was a step backwards from Dark Souls 3 (but slightly better than Sekiro, which was a huge step backward from Dark Souls 3).

Anyway, I’ve defeated these bosses since my last missive (I’m consulting my own page to remind me):

Divine Beast Dancing Lion (legend)
Curseblade Libirith
Ralva the Great Red Bear
Golden Hippopotamus
Blackgaol Knight (Western Nameless Mausoleum)
Rellana, the Twin Moon Knight (legend)
Messmer the Impaler (demigod)
A couple of dragons
Black Knight (Northern Nameless Mausoleum)
Romina, Saint of the Bud (legend)
Commander Giaus (legend)
Midra Lord of Frenzied Flame (legend)
Putrescence Knight (legend)
A plain old Death Rite Bird
A gimmicky Lamenter in Lamenter’s Gaol
Dancer of Ranah (Southern Nameless Mausoleum)
A couple of Tree Sentinels in the Hinterlands
A Fallingstar Beast in the Hinterlands
Metyr, Mother of Fingers (legend)
Those four NPC allies of Miquella in Elir-Ilim

I got to the NPC Invader Fest in the Elir-Ilim and ran headlong into a difficulty barrier, so then I got some hints from a wiki and found some other areas to explore. Hopefully I can improve my character before returning to Elir-Ilim because yikes. (I’ve since learned that I broke the Thiollier quest so the difficulty barrier isn’t ever going to get any easier. I’ll have to rely on the old reliable Elden Ring boss fighting strategy: Repetition and Pure Luck.)

In late-breaking news, I did get past the NPC Invader Fest and ran into the next difficulty barrier, the boss fight at the end of the DLC. At least I assume it’s the end. It has a “final boss” sort of feel to it, in that it’s more impossible than any of the previous impossible bosses. It’s yet another Elden Ring boss that appears so impossible and random and unfair it hardly seems worth the effort. It’s not like there’s anything to do afterward.

Media Production

I had to ramp up a new media production workflow for next month’s Blaugust. It’s nothing too fancy, it’s just a REAPER project template to record a mini-podcast. I’ll be using the Rode PodMic I bought earlier this year, which I’ve been slowly working into my video recordings more and more. I have it setup on a mic arm at my gaming desk now. It’s literally made for podcasts, after all.

I’ve setup a modest set of effects to quickly get the output gain to the unofficial podcast LUFS of -16dB, and I even found a decent bit of royalty-free music for the intro from one of the thousands of royalty-free sounds I’ve gotten from Humble over the years. Hopefully I’ll be able to quickly churn out one audio file a day, write a brief title and a summary, and insert it into the blog feed.

Media Consumption

Regularly consuming: The Rest is Entertainment Podcast (on YouTube), The Daily Show (sometimes on YouTube, sometimes on Paramount+), The Weekly Show Podcast (on YouTube), the Blood of the Wild Podcast (subscription), The Dragon Show (on Max), The Boys season 4 (on Prime).

Television

I’ve been watching the second season of The Dragon Show. It’s a pale imitation of George R. R. Martin’s works, and the first three seasons of Game of Thrones, but it does sort-of-kind-of-vaguely resemble a fantasy show of political intrigue. The biggest problem is that none of the characters have much depth or likability or make sensible decisions, and there’s almost no context for anything that happens, and nothing matters and you couldn’t care less what happens to whom. Also, I still think the Targaryan wigs look dumb. There’s something about them that makes my brain constantly scream out “this is fake these are actors this isn’t real.” An uncanny valley thing, I think.

I tried to watch the Critical Role Downfall three-shot, but I couldn’t deal with all the dour seriousness. Brennan Lee Mulligan did a fantastic job with Calamity, but this one just felt like a direct injection of severe depression into the veins. It was like they were filming an episode of Breaking News for Dropout, where nobody was allowed to smile or laugh or they’d deduct points, but they actually never smiled or laughed. Seriously folks, there’s no Oscar category for actual play shows.

I don’t know why I’m still watching The Boys. The first season was the only good one. Every season afterward has just been a random assortment of childish fantasies for Twitter doom-scrollers, and the fourth season is leaning into that harder than ever. Still, sometimes there’s a good joke or two.

Late in the July I stumbled onto the sketch comedy of Mitchell and Webb on YouTube, and I now have some new catch phrases to commit to memory. That’s Numberwang! (I had seen David Mitchell on a million panel shows, but I’ve never seen him actually perform before.)

There’s been another premium subscription video service sighting: Viva La Dirt League has created VIVA+. This joins other content creators Dropout, Critical Role, and Glass Cannon (that I know off the top of my head) in being content creator media empires who have gotten big enough to try to shift their business models off of Twitch and YouTube. Not sure what I think of these trends. It’s undeniably good for their business to detangle themselves from third-party platforms, but it’s kind of a drag for me as the consumer.

Movies

Did I mention this already? I watched Civil War. It wasn’t the action blockbuster I thought it was going to be. It was more of a cerebral indie-ish film. Not bad, but whenever they tried to make it look like real-life politics it comes off fairly laughable.

Audiobooks

The Dragon Show got me thinking about George R. R. Martin books, so I listened to Fire & Blood, the book on which the series is based, read by Simon Vance, who has a very predictable cadence. It’s what I expected: Not really a novel, but more of an encyclopedic history book, somewhat like The Silmarillion. (I say that, having not read The Silmarillion in over 40 years and possibly not ever actually finishing it at all.)

That led me to start listening to A Game of Thrones again, read by Roy Dotrice, the late great actor who sounds like he’s got a perpetual case of tuberculosis and possibly even died immediately after finishing recording these audiobooks. I was surprised how much of the historical information from Fire & Blood is right there in the early chapters of A Game of Thrones.

Home Development

With Blaugust starting up again, I briefly considered starting up my Next.js blog project again, which still lies unfinished from the end of 2023, but I’ve successfully avoided falling down that rabbit hole for the time being.

Day Job

Recently we’ve gotten a requirement from our engineering overlords that all production source code should have 80% test coverage. They have dashboards to measure that sort of thing, and anyone that doesn’t have an “80” on their dashboard for any particular git repository is going to get pinged.

This has resulted in a lot of teams and a lot of engineers writing unit tests for older code solely for the sake of getting the numbers up, including my team.

Strangely enough, I actually like writing unit tests. I think I’m one of the only software developers who does. I find it a very interesting problem to solve and I’ve learned, especially in the last year or so that I’ve put a particular focus on this particular subject, that writing good unit tests with good coverage usually results in better-organized and more readable code.

So writing unit tests on new code is no big deal. If you write any unit tests at all, you can get to 60-70% coverage almost automatically. Getting to 70-80% on new code is also no big deal. In the last year, I’ve personally reached 90-100% coverage on new code.

But going back to old disorganized code and adding unit tests is a major chore. You have two choices: You can either try to refactor the problems in the old code so it’s easier to test, or you can try to add tests to the old code without making changes. I usually choose the latter, and it’s a tedious, thankless, oftentimes pointless job.

Anyway, I’ve been working on pointless unit tests for old Java code that’s in maintenance mode this past sprint. And I had to use JUnit 4 instead of JUnit 5, to boot.

The unit tests I’ve been adding are classic, textbook cases of unit tests that provide good code coverage numbers, but, in fact, do not test the code much at all. Which is why most software developers tend to complain about having to meet arbitrary code coverage numbers set by management.

Health and Wellness

I got poison ivy on my arms again. Arg. I was trying to clear out some weeds and tree seedlings from a front flower bed area which I normally just leave wild but figured maybe I should make it look like somebody actually lives here. Unfortunately there’s some poison ivy growing up the side of the house near the garage that I can’t get near, and I didn’t, but some of it still snuck in and touched my arms. I can’t be within 20 feet of poison ivy apparently without getting it on my skin. Just the barest touch is all it takes, the tiniest touch or scratch from any plant or animal that has been in contact with that stupid poison ivy urushiol oil. And, of course, I thought that I was far enough away from it that I didn’t need to wear long sleeves for protection. What a dummy I am. (And yes I took an immediate shower afterward and thoroughly washed off my arms and it didn’t help.)

It’s particularly irritating because when it gets on my inner arms (which is where it always gets), it really affects my ability to use a computer, because then I can’t rest my arms on anything while I’m typing.

World Context

I’m finally starting to realize that I don’t really need Tweetdeck or Twitter to find out the important news every day.

The inevitable has happened: Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris will be the Democractic nominee for president. A surprising development in the Democratic Party’s determined eight-year campaign to ensure all 9 Supreme Court justices are conservatives. Still, I personally wouldn’t put money on a change in the election outcome just yet. Democrats have only gone from having no chance whatsoever to having maybe just a tiny chance. Kamala Harris hasn’t been what you’d call a wildly popular (or even known) figure in American politics for the last four years.
The Summer Olympics began in Paris, causing most media outlets to begin their quadrennial desperatation campaigns of trying to get people to care about Olympic sports, in order to justify the billions they spend on coverage rights.
More than one item of scary news from the region of Israel that could escalate the conflict there.
brat
Ongoing Trainwrecks of the Year: 2024 Presidential Election, War in Israel (since 10/2023), Nigerian Coup (since 7/2023), Sudanese Civil War (since 4/2023), War in Ukraine (since 2/2022).
Celebrity Deaths: Bob Newhart (one of the best deadpan comedians). Some I missed last time: Richard Simmons (fitness coach), Shannon Doherty (actress).

“I stand with two thousand years of darkness and hunger and bafflement behind me!” -Mitchell and Webb

Bye!