What Am I Doing Instead Of Writing?

I haven't published anything on Gemini in weeks. This is not an apology post, though I have to say that I do *wish* I had been writing more. This is a post about what I've been doing instead.

$DAYJOB at Home

My dayjob has been pretty busy over the last month, and I'm still working from home. The kids have been getting pretty bored, not being able to see friends face to face, and the library being closed, and so on. So naturally, they come bother me for entertainment, which makes it harder to work, which makes work take longer. So I'm spending more time "at work" in practice than I had been during the first few months of the quarantine.

Driving eldest child around

So, everything is still closed, but my eldest's swim team has started back up. The city pool they usually practice at is closed, but they found a pool they could rent. They have a pretty good social distancing protocol (masks on deck, only two children per lane, starting at opposite ends), and practice is shorter to accommodate dividing up the team into smaller groups. But the net result is that I have half an hour more driving in each day – until now, I had almost completely stopped driving for months. And I have a "waiting around" time that's not really long enough to accomplish anything in, even if I bring a computer. So I'm...

Playing Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

There's a new version of dcss out, and I have been playing it during swim practice, and sometimes in the evenings. It's a pretty addictive game, and I'm sure it's stopped me from writing and working on Germinal, and other stuff that would actually make me happier than playing dcss.

Reading

I had been reading theory, trying not to be a lib, but I've just gotten burned out and have read a few things just for entertainment. I read "War Lord", a licensed John Constantine novel by the guy who did the novelization of the Keanu Reeves movie in which our blond, British, and bisexual antihero was none of those things. The novel I read was very good though, very in-character. There's another one that I'll get to soon.

I read the new Dresden Files book, "Peace Talks", and let me just say that John Constantine > Harry Dresden. But furthermore, this wasn't even a good Dresden Files book. I understand there was some editorial meddling and a last-minute demand that an over-long book be split into two and the halves be padded out, but it just wasn't good. I'm generally one to cut Jim Butcher slack, but it feels like he was really tired of writing this series and had to be forced into grinding another one out by his publisher.

The book I'm currently reading is a bit more serious than either of those, but still genre fiction: "Lovecraft Country" by Matt Ruff. It's a story about anti-Black racism in the US, about Lovecraft's own racism, and about being a Black Lovecraft fan (and a Black Lovecraftian protagonist). I'm only about a quarter of the way through, but I'm really enjoying it. It's being made into a miniseries that will be on HBO later this month; planning on finishing it by then and trying to watch it.

A little work on Germinal

I haven't worked on Germinal a tenth as much as I'd like to, but I just don't have uninterrupted stretches of time when I can concentrate the way that it seems to take to write Lisp. I did add support for custom route handlers as Lisp functions. It's a bit lower-level than CGI scripting, and Lisp-only, but it feels like the right way for me.

I've also written a little weather app for Gemini, but it's not very good yet, and I'm not going to put it live until I have it polished up a bit. Currently, it fetches from wttr.in[1], passing a path argument, reads the response, strips out terminal escapes, and sticks it in a ``` block to return. I want to do something a little more creative, reading JSON data and giving a three-day forecast in ASCII art and a tabular hourly forecast for the current day, but that's going to take a while.

I haven't cut a Germinal release because I need to spend some time thinking about deployment, now that there is configuration that really has to be done in Lisp (the routes table).

Thanks for bearing with me. I'm still reading everything on CAPCOM and most stuff on Spacewalk almost every day. I'm just not replying.

Addendum: I also need to add logging to Germinal! I never added it, even just basic IP logging (or even error logging), because I'm not really interested in server statistics, and all my errors happen in SLIME (as far as I know). But last weekend a bunch of people were hit by a badly behaved Gemini spider bot. I didn't even notice, because I was AFK, but it did motivate me a little to add logging. So another thing that has to happen before I cut a release.