I started playing Balatro and, alas, it’s such a good game! I don’t care much either way about poker, and Balatro adds a fun, challenging layer of modifiers and risk that makes it awfully hard to to put down.

I didn’t know that Lucinda Williams had a couple of rollicking cover albums, of The Beatles and Tom Petty. Man, I’m a cryer for Wildflowers.

The “Christmas ships” tour stopped by the neighborhood beach tonight. I love that there’s a neighborhood beach here.

I’ve been hosting my little set of domains with Pair.com for nearly ten years (!), through a handful of small price increases; eight bucks a month to put my random junk online has always been fine. Now Pair is increasing my shared hosting plan to $14, nearly doubling it! Hmm.

Apple, I’m practically begging you to implement a multi-select editor in the viewer for activity data. When the Peloton app on my watch goes haywire and decides that I’m exercising from midnight to 3am – reader, I was not exercising – it would be nice to be able to selectively delete all those records instead of nuking the entire day.

I’m starting on some of my end of year data projects. First up, a bit of output from the summary visuals I’m building of my workout data! I know, I know, polar plots are bad data representations, but I really like the clock-like image for this depiction of workout times.

I hit this Turkey Burn ride pretty hard this morning and am resting deep in post-ride endorphins, now. Time to sip on my coffee and think on some thanks. I’m glad I get to do this.

I really like Garrick’s method of adding Bluesky comments to a Quarto-based blog. I’m already wired up to use Bridgy at my personal blog and Quarto datablog, and enabling it to connect to Bluesky was just a matter of adding the connection with an app-specific password. The difference between using webmentions versus the direct point-to-point link that Garrick and others have implemented is something to consider: it looks like the direct feed from Bluesky, at least, preserves a lot more of the continuity of a thread, while the webmentions approach (especially using Bridgy) potentially makes gathering comments a little more seamless in the POSSE sense by not requiring the link back to the original post.

At prettygoodhat, I needed one template change to insert the bluesky syndication link if specified in the post’s front matter. In single.html:

{{ if (isset .Params "blueskylink") }}
<a class="u-syndication" style="display: none" href="{{ .Params.blueskylink}}">{{ .Params.blueskylink}}</a>
{{ end }}

This adds the stub for the syndication link if one is found with the blueskylink id in the post’s header, and that should be all it takes for Bridgy to collect replies associated with the corresponding post.

Garrick’s extension gives me a thought on improving my own hookup of Bridgy to Quarto, too; that may be the right way to go over at the ol’ datablog.

I had such a good experience playing Ashen last night that I want to share. (I mentioned playing Ashen in my week notes.) It has an inventive multiplayer mechanic that pairs the player with another player at approximately the same place, if one is available. If one isn’t available, you get an NPC companion, who is often quite competent but sometimes prone to disappearing or falling off ledges.

Last night in a new area – a dark, winding, flooded canyon – I was matched with another player¹. Even with fast travel, the game does such a good job with art and environments to create a sense of being somewhere new, dangerous, and far from home. My new companion appeared at just the right time, as I approached a small camp of several strong marauders by myself. Together we handily took them out, and then we carefully moved along gangways from platform to platform high over the water, fighting enemies and finding quest items and treasures nearly in unison. They went down once and I revived them; later they returned the aid when I was surprised and overwhelmed, appearing with a flurry of heavy blows to finish off the enemies swarming me.²

We progressed for a long time, maybe 30 minutes, silent companions leapfrogging from small patches of light and safety back into skirmishes. At a chokepoint in the route, far into the uphill journey, I was long out of health renewal items and getting nervous. We faced one final cluster of tough enemies and then pressed up a very long corridor, to emerge finally into bright daylight, in a brand new environment, in sight of a fast travel monument. We were safe! This was a really cool semi-social adventure that perfectly showed off the game’s theme of finding hope – and help – in a dark place.

Matt Dray has found that Shiny apps can run at itch.io! This is very cool. It would be really fun to have a kind of Shiny game jam.