Week ending 9th of December 2018
So, I was thinking about it, writing this stuff, even if nobody reads it, is probably a good thing, right? Like it's basically a diary and whatnot, and I feel like I read somewhere sometime that jotting down your thoughts was supposed to help, that obviously comes with a metric ton of salt.
One thing I will say though is I'm writing this a few days after the published date of this
Socialising
So the past week there wasn't really any proper socialising to speak of, like there was games night on Sunday, Savage Rifts is still on hiatus and we're playing Only War, it's been quite enjoyable so far, the last couple of sessions have been leading up to a mass battle so to speak, I feel like so far we've done relatively well, but I have no idea how many waves the GM is planning at throwing at us.
Other than that it's been mostly a quiet week.
Work
Work has been interesting, a lot of the current projects are getting into the proper swing of things now and managing them while working my tasks is a new experience for me, lately I feel like I've maybe been dedicating too much time to management type items rather than my major task on hand, but there's been a bunch of other jobs here and there eating up my time, all the jobs need to get done though so it's not a major issue currently. Ultimately I think I might need to take a little bit of time just to clear out and possibly deploy everything that I have in current development and reprioritise everything else so I have a clear action plan for the next couple of weeks.
Personal Development & Leisure
I didn't actually do much of anything I was planning on doing that I mentioned in my last blog. No Perl, no Lisp, but a tiny bit of C++. I think that was mostly a motivation thing this week, I did however look certification/training from places like Amazon and Microsoft etc. I'm still not sure if I'm actually going to do any of it, but it's something.
One of the reasons I didn't do as much PD as I was expecting to this week is I spent a good solid chunk of Saturday (when I usually do that kind of stuff) playing Axiom Verge, it's a game I've had for years, started up when I first bought it and then more or less never touched it again. It's a metroidvania, with not much of the "vania", I guess I'll write this for a general audience, "metroidvania" is a genre of video games which are a cross between the "Metroid" and "Castlevania" series. I've only ever played the first level of the first Castlevania game so I can't speak too much to that, and Super Metroid is the Metroid game I'm most familiar with.
At a basic level, in Super Metroid you start the game off quite "weak" and with only a few options in what you can do, as you progress through the game you pick up power ups which either make you able to take on stronger and stronger enemies or unlock new places to go in the game world, one of the big draws for me personally with this style of game is the backtracking through places you've already been and finding new paths/items you missed on your first (or latter) time through. Also, the feeling that as you get better as a player your character gets stronger which isn't exactly intended, it's just a side affect of the natural progression.
Back to Axiom Verge however, it feels very much like a homage to Super Metroid (almost to the point of being a clone), with a few bits and pieces added which do make it feel fresh and interesting. If I were to have one complaint, it's that mobility around the world feels less, I guess, fluid than it does in Super Metroid, the most recent powerup I got before I stopped playing on Saturday was a grappling hook, which while a welcome addition, feels more clunky and harder to use than the one in Super Metroid, admittedly, the one in Super Metroid can only be used in very specific locations while this one in Axiom Verge appears to be usable pretty much anywhere there's a ceiling. The ability to wall jump if you have good timing is something I also miss in Axiom Verge, I was never particularly good at wall jumping, but it often helped if I messed up a jump I wouldn't fall all the way down to the beginning. Now don't get me wrong, it's still been a very enjoyable game, and so far I'd reccommend it, but above it I'd reccommend Super Metroid itself or Ori and the Blind Forest (another Metroidvania, with an absolutely gorgious art style)
This Blog & Hot Takes
I didn't mention this in the personal development section because I felt it would fit better in this part here. I've started to redesign the theme of this blog, I've made minimal progress on it so far because it took me far longer than it should have to find where the default theme came from. (I quite like the default theme, so that's why I'm more going to make my own modifications to it, rather than start from scratch) I may of missed something but I got the default theme from the github repository for Pelican itself.
I don't think I could be an Australian, be involved in tech and not be staunchly against the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018. In short, it's basically the Australian Government implimenting a law which forces companies to assist law enforcement breaking users encryption on their data and messages. My major concerns with it are that the wording of the bill from what I understand doesn't actually mean that you need to be under investigation for anything, just tangentally involved in an investigation, I'll leave that to the reader to think of how far that could be stretched. If you are involved in an investigation, law enforcement can ask for access and the company could face financial penalties for refusing to assist. The second one which honestly worries me more is that the bill effectively allows the government to approach an individual developer and compel them to do effectively alter the software, and just letting their boss know what's going on is a crime which can result in jail time. I don't know how this works with rejected code reviews or anything along those lines, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. All of this also seems to have very little oversight on top of that as well, because of course. Sorry to end on a bit of a down note, but it's something that I needed to mention