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Weeknotes #/n

It’s been a few weeks since I posted one of these, and this certainly feels like a weird moment to try to pick up the habit, again. But while I sit with some truths perhaps it helps to mark a few other more quotidian things, from this week and the handful prior.

this month in Destiny?

  • After a couple of long sessions on opening weekend and then one final run at the boss the following week, I made it through the new dungeon with some pals. Since then, the grind of an hour here and there has been a nice diversion. The episodic story progression is a little thin right now, but the gameplay loops feel pretty solid.

R stuff

  • I’m doing some real-work package development for the first time, building some tools to make it easier to jump-start Quarto notebooks and presentations. Having experimented with my own utility packages, I’m happy how much I could get done in just a couple of hours, thanks to {devtools} and {use this}.
  • My Posit::conf talk from this year is online! I was lucky to be part of a session with some smart and thoughtful data folks, and I’m proud of contributing something I’m feel good about. You can find my talk in the full directory over at the Posit blog

reading

  • The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett
  • Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

other games

  • Metaphor: reFantazio — I’ve never played a Persona/Persona-like, so this is a new experience for me. I’m enjoying the storytelling, combat and banger soundtrack!
  • Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders — I had a great time with the downhill biker original, and this version of that game, but on skis, seems like a lot of fun. The demo is free on Steam and, so far, equally controller-breaking as the original.

misc

  • Ever go to the record store in search of a particular album, but they don’t have it so you come home with four different albums instead? No? Just me?
  • The weight of org-mode kind of accreted around my cognitive carapace once again, and so I’ve been trying out Obsidian. I may write up a little more later; I’m finding it to feel modern in ways that I like, flexible and effective at organizing some notes and to-dos while staying under the radar of my “constantly tinker” impulse.
  • RIP Ward Christiensen, one of the founders of the BBS.
  • RIP to Omnivore, too? Disappointing to see a solid read-later product go the way of AI huckster-chasing.

That’s what I have for now. it’s a rainy Seattle weekend and it’s nice to be inside and cozy — but still looking forward to a good walk, later.

An image from the completion screen of the Root of Nightmares raid, showing the emblem for the Conditional Finality exotic weapon appearing in bright yellow, indicating that it dropped for me at the end of the mission.

A table showing weapon kills by weapon for my character in the Root of Nightmares raid. Sunshot is at the top of the list with 428 kills.

I had a really nice time running a Destiny 2 raid with pals on Saturady. It’s fun to hang out with nice people for a few hours while wielding space magic. I started running Sunshot again recently, and it put in some work.

Whispers: and the exotic dropped for me, too!

(Game info from my own tool, D2Rstats.)

A scatterplot showing five days of game history. The plots for June 3 and 4 are dense, with lots of varying size dots representing games. About two thirds of the dots on the plot show winning games.

Destiny 2 talk: I had a good time in Iron Banner games this weekend. Most of my matches were fun. I didn’t have any long losing streaks like last season, and really liked the build I settled on. Maybe next time I’ll play my other characters, but it’s all for fun now that I completed the gilded title one more time!

A screenshot from Destiny 2 showing several player characters at the edge of a platform. It depicts the final scene after victory over Oryx in the Kings Fall raid. A player is emoting sitting in a luxurious chair swirling a wine glass.

I’m really happy to have found a group to more regularly run raids – fun and challenging endgame content – in Destiny 2. It’s particularly special because my kiddo is big enough now to regularly run with us and this group of friends is generous and welcoming to them. Last night we completed Kings Fall together, and this raid is a real nostalgia trip in D2, in addition to being a lot of fun. It was kiddo’s first completion of this one, so a memorable one for both us.

The launch of the new Destiny 2 expansion, Nightfall, adds a new subclass – Strand – and restructures the mod system that affects player stats gained from armor. I’m happy to report that it only took me a couple of hours to revise my Shiny tool to find optimal armor loadouts using the new mods and subclass fragments! I had to hunt a little through some old code, and next time it should be a simple and easy update due to having fixed how I work with the manifest.

An animated gif showing a set of growing bars measuring Destiny 2 weapon usage

I’ve had a really nice hobby R coding weekend, learning to use {gganimate} to make plots like this. I’ve been re-tooling all my old piles of fish scripts that I’ve used to gather my Destiny data from the game’s API. Now I have a useful pair of quarto notebooks that retrieve data using parallel processing and produce this kind of output. I’m super enthused by what I’ve learned!

Had a pretty good hobby coding weekend learning how to use purrr::pluck() to get specific nested fields from piles of json data rather than blowing out the whole series of nested lists.

Two windows from the RStudio profvis tool, showing the times of several procesess. The second window shows the same process being completed dramatically more quickly than the first.

I used the RStudio tool profvis this weekend to find speed improvement opportunities in Armorer. I suspected that I could rewrite a big operation that calculates the maximum of many columns across several thousand rows. Holy smokes: Using matrixStats::rowMaxs cuts processing time by an amazing amount!

Screenshot of a web application showing two items selected from a form field. They are circled in bright purple marker with an arrow pointing to them to draw the eye.

I finished a big update to Armorer this week, to enable inclusion of subclass fragments in stat calculations. I learned a ton with this release and laid good groundwork for additional mod management. I’m pretty pleased!