Vampire Survivors, again 🔗
I used to play this tower defense game on the Mac called Hordes of Orcs. Orcs would enter a maze, you’d build towers of all kinds to murder them. After playing for a while, I came to pick out a certain aural signature. As you built more and more elaborate orc-murdering capabilities, you could begin to hear a rhythm emerge – the sound of a tower spraying hot death, the sounds the orcs made. It was not a rhythm game, but it invoked a similar feeling. I came to think of a session of HoO as “firing up the murder factory.”
Well, Vampire Survivors sort of does that, too. I didn’t really notice until I turned the music off, but as a level progresses and gets more intense and your character is surrounded by a number of orbiting weapons (boomerang axes, a lethal garlic aura, puddles of holy water dropping from the sky, two orbiting birds that rain death, etc.) you can hear the rhythm of all those things interacting.
It also occurred to me that Vampire Survivors reminds me a lot of Robotron: 2084.
Anyhow, it’s an awful lot of fun for such a simple game.
kitty and denote 🔗
Okay.
- Emacs as a systemd service? Check.
- Launching useful stuff in kitty? Check.
- Making a quick Denote note in kitty … ?
Sure.
Make an org capture template like this:
(with-eval-after-load 'org-capture
(add-to-list 'org-capture-templates
'("n" "New note (with Denote)" plain
(file denote-last-path)
#'denote-org-capture
:no-save t
:immediate-finish nil
:kill-buffer t
:jump-to-captured t)))
… then add this to kitty.conf:
map kitty_mod+d launch emacsclient -t "org-protocol:///capture?template=n"
That launches an emacsclient instance in a new kitty window teed up to enter the title and tags for a denote note.
There’s another way to do this, using kitty’s startup sessions capabilities.
You can make a session file with something like this in your config directory:
launch emacsclient -t "org-protocol:///capture?template=n"
focus_os_window`
… name it something like denote.conf
… and launch it with kitty --session denote.conf.
Which isn’t really what you want to do. You really want to use that for a custom keybinding out in your window manager.
terminal maximalism? 🔗
Seeing my agenda for the day in a terminal … getting my upcoming todos in a terminal … denote notes in a terminal …
Is this all some sort of terminal maximalism thing?
Maybe, I guess?
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but I go through moods with this stuff. Some days I feel supremely unfussed about the assorted UIs imposed on us by web app designers. Some days I feel very resistant to messing around with a browser or mouse. It’s nice to sit down to a text editor in a terminal, start writing, and be able to quickly orient on where I’m at in the day with a glance at my agenda or the day’s todos. There are some days I don’t feel put upon doing that in a browser window.
Looking at nb is what got me thinking about doing more in a text shell, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to solve for the mobile use case and I didn’t want to live in it as my task manager. Sometimes it is handy to be able to manage or just review todos with a GUI. Its notes tool is fine, but I spent a lot of time setting up Denote and really appreciate it, plus I have a way to review my Denote notes via the web and create them on the go with Drafts.
And when I think about my little 11" MacBook Air, that’s a machine that would benefit from not having a lot of GUI clutter and not having a lot of open apps. It’s a great candidate for spending more time in a terminal.
So … less terminal maximalism and more terminal optionality. For days when pointy-clicky feels really burdensome.
Anyhow, I did find a few good collections of CLI app links:
I think my favorite discovery from both of them at this point is probably autojump, which watches where you visit and lets you go there from anywhere else, rather than having to descend and ascend a directory hierarchy. If you want to give it a try, the documentation is missing one key thing, at least if you pull it down from Fedora: You need to source a file it sticks in /usr/share/autojump in your shell’s .rc file. The core package in Fedora supplies that file for bash, and you have to install the autojump-zsh package to get it for zsh.
the working world 🔗
Today I feel very annoyed with what I have come to think of as “Businessing,” which is to say “all the things people do in the course of working in a business, but especially the ones that involve things nobody will say and rules nobody will articulate.”
I don’t think I have much more to say about it than that, so consider this me quietly whispering discontent into a hole in the side of a stump in the middle of an empty field under a new moon at midnight.
Okay. I have a little more to say.
Years and years ago I read Paul Fussel’s Class. I was at something of a personal low point: Recently out of the army, a very different person on the other side of the experience, and feeling exiled in a small southern university town. Class gave me a lens for observing other people that my feelings of unbelonging and insecurity hadn’t ever allowed through. It’s a light, biting book that would pair nicely with Barbara Ehreneich’s Fear of Falling.
Once I saw the thing Class calls out when it’s at its most empathetic – the constant and pervasive atmosphere of insecurity middle class people occupy and perpetuate – it made some things about work a little easier. But just a little.