Oatmeal

We found a big mushroom.

Am I allowed to call them “week notes” if I don’t do them weekly?

I went in for what was supposed to be my final brain scan, a diagnostic angiogram (don’t look that up). The good news is that the repair has officially cured my brain bleed! The bad news is that they saw another vessel that looks primed to bleed; I’m due for another repair procedure sometime in October. I’m pretty bummed to not be done with this ordeal, but trying to remain optimistic that this new one was caught before it bled and because the surgeon says this one seems easier to repair than the first.

I’m still struggling to focus long enough to pick up major programming tasks at hobby time (I desperately wanna make this game that I’ve been noodling over and over for months now). Sorry if I’ve promised you something, or a fix, or anything, and haven’t made that happen yet.

That said, I’ve enjoyed re-building my VPS. This time an OpenBSD box. I’ve got a few personal utilities running on it, but am also using it as a programming language playground.

Looking back over my link logging from the last few weeks, there isn’t much of note that isn’t boring computer-stuff. The stand-out item is a recent find: Mycorrhizae, A songbook of fungal myths, a gorgeous zine.

Since my brain injury (which I’ve since learned can be called an “ABI” or “acquired brain injury”) I’ve noticed that I have trouble focusing on programming tasks; I’m able to do what I need to do for work and family but, when it comes time for hobby projects I’m just gloop. Totally oozy.

Because of that I’ve been drawn to do more reading and game playing, but also still wanna code…I’ve found that it is easier to use more “batteries included” kinda languages, namely scheme, over what I’d normally gravitate towards, like Forth.

This has lead me to some interesting thoughts of the “accessibility” of programming languages.

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I’ve been reading a lot. As of today, I’m 34 books deep into this year. I’m really pleased with my choice to revive my reading habit. I’ve read a smattering of fiction, new-to-me, and re-reads, as well as a number of nonfiction books — mostly programming books.

Maybe I’ll do a round up post at the end of the year? In the meantime some standouts include:

• The entire Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers, especially Record of a Spaceborn Few
• This is how you Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• Circe by Madeline Miller (the audiobook for this is phenomenal! One of the best I’ve ever listened to)

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My VPS suffered a wonderfully catastrophic failure during an upgrade, you may notice some of my web presence is currently down while I re-configure some things over the next few…weeks?

…probably months.

Blog will keep trucking, though!

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Some recent discoveries

• strse, an incredible string DSL for scheme
• ~dozens gives a tour of ed, the standard editor
• a totally feature complete “ECS,” entity component system, for lua, and some more on entity component systems
• 4-Die Chess: A New Kind of Chess, from Erin Bern
• A Zen Guide to Paper and Pen Games
• keeping the theme alive, hexapawn
• A nice overview on the accessibility of QR codes

👋 Oh hai!

I was interviewed on a podcast!

This is also something people keep getting wrong about Markdown as originally presented. Markdown isn’t a format. It’s a convenience tool that helps you write some of the boringest and commonest parts of HTML easier, and you can easily drop into more wonky HTML at any time.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes!

Markdown isn’t supposed to be a markup language unto itself. It is an intermediary format that usually targets HTML as it’s final form.

I remember the days when Kicks Condor used to update regularly. I miss those days.

For a while every post seemed to unearth some new, yet weirder corner of the little internet (maybe not yet the smol web).

There are folks doing similar web archeology…I do some of it myself…but no one does it like Kicks was doing it; there was often a feeling of unknown, but ulterior motive behind the curation — bits building towards a cohesive something.

Perhaps Kicks got lost in the web — out there still?

🌱🦛

After giving my brain bleed time to heal the neurosurgeon called me back in to hospital; the plan was to reassess, attempt to fix it using the minimally invasive technique that they tried once before, and if that didn’t work, do something a bit more squidgy directly in my brain.

I’ll be honest, the last option sounded totally and completely horrific to me and I was very much not wanting to have to go with the big ol’ brain surgery. While the doctors seemed confident with that option, they were upfront about the extra risks and that it was sort of the option of last resort.

Last week I went back in and, great news, they think they’ve totally repaired my brain bleed using the minimally invasive method! I’m slated for a diagnostic scan in the fall to double check, but, so far, everything is looking great. I spent a few more nights in ICU and was discharged directly to home where I’ve been chillin’.

All in all I’m feeling super duper lucky, and, while this entire experience has been … let’s say a drag … I know that it could have been far worse, and I hope to have it completely behind me soon. So far the main symptoms I’ve faced are ringing ears, fatigue, a bit of difficulty focusing and multi-tasking, occasional low grade headaches, and, since the repair, I’ve developed a lisp. The lisp is a result of the repair itself, and the neurosurgeon thinks that it will probably pass within a few months.

There are too many people to thank directly here, but to all those who’ve supported me and my family throughout this bananas unexpected experience — for realizes — thank you so much. The words of support, well wishes, meals, help with kids and everything have been so deeply felt, and I honestly can’t imagine how I would have navigated this without ya’ll.

Hopefully this is my last health update for a long time, and I can go back to posting about forth now!

A secret pleasure of mine in high school was getting home before my parents and watching 30 - 60 minutes of TV. I technically wasn’t allowed to do it, but I suspect they knew I snuck this time whenever I could.

My favorite show to watch in this secreted me-time was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Of all the episodes 3 have stuck with me the longest — the musical one…because of course…and the pair of episodes: “I Was Made to Love You,” and the immediately following episode, “The Body.”

These two episodes follow the show’s core characters as they navigate the death of Joyce Summers, Buffy and Dawn’s mom, who is found to have died from a brain aneurysm.

Perhaps because of these episodes I’ve always been weirdly terrified of brain aneurysms and strokes despite having 0 risk factors, and no family history of either…well, do I have news for you!?

If you ever have a really bad headache totally out of the blue, boy howdy, go doctor!

On Wednesday May 18th I was just starting to lead a meeting over zoom when I was hit with a bananas headache out of absolutely nowhere. Real 0 - 160 kinda shit. I was able to make it through the meeting, at the time I thought the headache was maybe brought on by my staring at a computer for too long or something, but when after a few hours it hadn’t subsided at all I couldn’t stop thinking about Joyce Summers.

tl;dr — I went to the ER where they did a CT scan and found that I had a brain bleed. From there I was taken straight to the ICU and what followed were a whole bunch of scans and really miserable nights in the ICU and ultimately a weee little bit of brain surgery.

Right now — Unfortunately they weren’t able to repair my bleed during surgery because it was too small to reach. I’ve been discharged from the ICU, though, and am home with orders to go about my business but to take it easy. The plan is to reassess in 2 weeks’ time and go from there.

So, yeah…not really what I’d anticipated for the start of my 33rd year, but, here I am. It could have certainly been faaaaar worse. As of right now I’ve walked away from this thing with some soreness, a low-key persistent headache, and tinnitus. All in all, 0/10, do not recommend. But also, do not muss, if you’ve got a wicked bad headache outta the blue go hospital!

I’m toying with the idea of becoming a full time Mac OS System 7 developer.

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Edited to add that I’ve had so much fun playing with this implementation of Forth on Mac OS System 7 that I quickly built a little microsite to help archive the info I’ve found about it.

While I wouldn’t say I’m wicked adept at any one language, I’ve dipped my toes into many different languages. Here, I try to roughly recreate my programming language journey.

I can make websitez gud; HTML, CSS/SASS, JavaScript > CoffeeScript > TypeScript, and PHP

The web. A marvel, a terror. I started here, more out of ease of access than necessity, but was able to get far enough to make a career out of web dev. I should also add SQL to this list.

Elm is something I’d like to dip my toes into.

Want make thingz go brrrr; Common Lisp

I don’t honestly know how I first came to Common Lisp, I think through a blog post, or maybe a cute book. While I don’t use it much these days, I still carry a torch for it in my heart.

Want lovely tooling; SmallTalk

I sort of wish I’d never played with SmallTalk. It broke me. SmallTalk opened my eyes to a really integrated development environment.

Oh snap! Parenthesis are rad!; Clojure

Clojure remains my white whale. On paper it is the perfect language for me:

• lots of parenthesis
• good at web stuff
• fine for game dev
• friendly with emacs

But I’ve never felt cozy in it.

The JVM is hard, but scheme is rad!; a million flavors of scheme and scheme-like languages, (Chicken Gerbil s7 Racket Guile Chibi)

Parentheses baaaby! If I was forced to stick to a single language and never touch another, I’d probably pick a scheme…the question is then which scheme!?

Racket isn’t strictly a “pure” scheme, but who cares and it can be…and has a bananas gigantic library.

Chibi is adorably tiny and the most fully featured R7RS scheme I’ve found.

Chicken has some great docs…and is called “chicken,” I mean, come on!? That is lovely.

What about games though? I wanna make games!; Lua (especially using PICO-8 or Love2d)

I have in recent years become pretty jaded about the state of software and what most software is used for…but I love games, so, Lua is pretty rad for making games. Lua is also a really great teaching/learning language.

But I missing the parenthesis; Fennel

Yeah, but what if Lua was a lisp-like language?

I’ve found that many programming languages are made or broken by their community. Fennel has one of the friendliest, most supportive communities I’ve ever witnessed in a programming language.

This is neat, but what if I wanted weirder?; Janet

Janet would be another contender for a forever language — it is weird, sort of a Clojure clone, sort of a Lisp, but totally its own thing at the same time. It is tiny, portable, and fits into similar spaces that C does…but also not really. Janet is a beast utterly of its own…also the name of my grandma.

Hold up now! I said weirder!; BQN, APL, K

Alright, this was probably me going off the deep end…

Okay, too0ooo weird and my brain is goo; gforth, pforth, and lbforth

I adore languages that I can hold entirely in my head. A big thing that helps me hold a language in my head is limited semantics. You don’t get much more limited than Forth!

The ethos at the heart of Forth is clearly articulated by its inventor,

The concept that programming is something that you need special education to do is not right. It is something that is promoted by the priesthood.

— Chuck Moore

Hold those horses…I’m in love!; RetroForth

Readers of this blog will have seen me talk about Retro before…while it makes no sense as a forever language…here I am…I’m stricken…I’m totally lovesick for it. It is tiny, it is portable, it is well documented, it assumes literate programming as the norm!

That’s a mighty nice little vm you’ve got there; Uxntal

Like Forth, this is another system that strives to be pretty much completely understandable. A system that can be held in 1 person’s head…it also offers everything you need to make little graphical programs and games.

But what if assembly?; 6502 and z80 assembly

Again, this was me going off the deep end a little bit.

What if I wanted a job though?; C, C++, Go, Java, Kotlin, and Swift

Blergh — remember when I said that SmallTalk broke me? Yeah, that broken-ness really comes to rear its head when I try to use these gigantic enterprise languages that have terrible tooling (Go, C, and C++ are almost passable, but Kotlin and Swift are laughable).

I also once upon a time tried Rust but it literally melted a component on my laptop so I gave up.

Fuck it! Those are no fun! Go go gadget make your own programming language!; Guava

I mean…did I really make my own programming language? No. But, Guava does carry with it a lot of what I’ve liked about other languages along the way.

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So, where next? What next? I’m a habitual breadth over depth kinda person. I wanna say it is time to go deep on one language…but…who knows!?