September 3rd, 2020 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hi gopher, long time no see. Finally getting back into the swing of my online presence after being in a weird funk. Things in the abstract haven't been awful--I still have my health, a roof over my head, plenty of food, and the assurance of making rent for at least a bit longer. I still need to secure an income, but I'm not sweating too hard--at the very least I'll be able to get something to cover my modest bills, though I'm hoping to put some money away and start paying off a personal debt. My work on my RPG, HUSK, has pretty much ground to a halt. I'll be working soon on getting that back up and running--I really quite like most of the ideas in it, I just lost my momentum, which seems to be a recurring theme with my creative projects. One of the things that's been occupying my time lately is Plan 9-- specifically, the 9front edition. I procured a Thinkpad X301 a while back and successfully installed it, and have greatly enjoyed the learning and frustration that's come as a result of it. What excites me about it is that it seems, at its bones, straightforward and legible enough for one person to understand the whole system. That would take a ton of work, of course, but it's something I am interested in as a long-term project. I've also been learning C from the K&R book, which has been delightful, if a bit slow-going. I'm putting all of my implementations in Plan 9, which requires just a few tweaks to the syntax. My goal is to get through the book and do most of the exercises, then use C to write an assembler for the Nand to Tetris course (which is still on my backburner). I think one of my first from-scratch C projects will be to build some simple gopher tools for Plan 9, followed by a lightweight client. === I recently finished The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the first time. I grew up playing much of the series, though I missed both of the Nintendo 64 titles. The Wind Waker may be my favorite 3D Zelda title, though I quite liked Skyward Sword when I played through it for the first time. Other than some mild tedium stemming from the slow sailing sections, The Wind Waker is packed with things to love. The characters and environments are vibrant in both appearance and personality, the game is paced fantastically (especially in the first half), and the story feels like an old-school hero narrative without being too tired and tropey. The gameplay itself may be the smoothest of any Zelda title I've played; Link's motions are fluid and easy. Speaking of easy, the game is not particularly difficult, though since I don't associate the series with a satisfying level of challenge I did not find that particularly irksome. In short, I thought it was a joy to play and would recommend it to any fan of the series, or indeed video games more generally. === For mostly-inscrutable reasons, I've decided to give ed a stint as my go- to text editor. Mostly, I think I want to get familiar with it to give me a historical grounding for learning programs like awk, sed, grep, and sam. I'm enjoying it a good bit more than I thought I would! I'll likely have more thoughts on it later, but it seems to me that it encourages typing things correctly the first time. When programming, I find it encourages laying out the logic of one's program clearly beforehand, as it's a bit more onerous to edit large blocks of text than in a visual editor. If I continue to enjoy ed, I will likely try to move away from nano and towards using ed and sam (as well as acme, which I've begun to enjoy for very different reasons). === I think that's about all I've got for tonight. Good to be back, and I hope everyone is staying safe, healthy, and at least a little sane. ~slothbear .