Archive: December, 2024

Long time readers know that I only write reviews for things that are either really bad or really great. While I've enjoyed a lot of games this year, the recently released Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a huge standout. It is stylistically inspired by the original trilogy, very story driven and mostly fun to play. The ending is epic and satisfying, and exactly what you expect out of an Indy movie.

First off, despite being published by Bethesda, it is not like the RPG's that they're known for. I'm not sure how much they influenced the studio, Machine Games (which appears to be Sweedish). It does lean on some of the conventions you'd find in Fallout or Starfield, like unlocking level-ups, and having a ton of side quests available, but it is not an RPG. It doesn't have any of the shooter components either, because you can't shoot your way out of things. In the few combat situations required, there are patterns you have to find so you can beat the bad guy with punches and whip cracks. There's a lot of sneaking around, and when you've reached a specific point, you encounter one of the many puzzles in the game. One similarity is that the producer is also the guy who did Fallout and Starfield.

Puzzle solving is a huge part of the game. Most of the puzzles are not super hard, but they are satisfying to solve. Some of it is the usual, take object, put object here, pull this lever, while other parts are just trying to figure out how to cross a chasm. All of these are set up in beautiful environments that are either real places or heavily inspired by real places. For example, Vatican City is actually a couple of parts of the real thing joined together, but you can absolutely spot the real-life buildings on a map. They also go to the Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq, which is real (but does not likely contain what's in the game!). Nothing is half-assed, and while there are duplicate objects to an extent, there are no repeat rooms. Did ancient civilizations really build all kinds of puzzles to hide things, with traps? No, but that's kinda the basis of the Indy universe.

Humans are starting to get very real in games. Teeth and eyes are still a little weird, but not to the point of being freakish like they were even a few years ago. Interestingly, the principles are all modeled after the actual voice actors. My first clue was recognizing Tony Todd, who is a very large man you've seen in a million things and likely heard in other games. (He unfortunately died just last month, and was only 69.) But then I wondered in a close up of the female lead, how does the designer decide where to put a mole on the neck of a character? Turns out, the actress has one, so that's how they decide. They even got Harrison Ford's scar right, though I imagine they had to figure that out from reference footage since he's at least 40 years older now.

The other striking thing to me was that there is very deliberate cinemaphotography going on in the cut scenes, and even in smaller transitions as you do stuff. The virtual camera work and lighting is not random or by accident. I seem to recall at least one rack focus, and a particularly great scene where Indy is talking to a bad guy through a partition, and as the guy walks away, they switch to an overhead shot that just looks great.

The controls and game play are mostly straight forward. There aren't many infuriating "OMG what do I do?" moments. When you're unsure about where to go, there are probably visual cues, like flowers or a streak of paint across a surface. There was one spot where I had to look up a solution, because I kept dying over and over inside of 20 seconds, and that was annoying. That also might be me, because coming out of a cut scene, I just want to keep moving the story forward, not look for some pattern that will keep me alive. There were a few points where I was walking around in disguise and some rando figures out who I am, with a dozen fascists or Nazis shooting me. Again, you're not going to spend a lot of time shooting or fighting, but once you understand how to block and read characters as they attempt to throw a punch, you'll figure it out.

My favorite action is the boat scene in Thailand (well, Siam at the time). You're fleeing fascists and Nazis again, and you've got a stack of ammo to shoot them. Things get nuts, and at one point the boat gets airborne and catches a guy on the front of the boat. In the video below, the player shoots him too quickly, but when I played, he made the most hilarious face before falling off. And yes, there is a Wilhelm Scream in the game.

I finished the main story, and now I'm going back to do the side quests. As it turns out, there are a ton of places that seemed curious to me earlier, but I didn't have the right things to even enter these places. I've found that there are in-game guides that you can buy with experience, to find all of the quests and items, but that seems like a thing of last resort. The quests are better than I expected, because even the characters in those are pretty well drawn.

My favorite thing though is that the game is filled with Indy-isms and conventions from the movie, right down to the last fedora gag. The dialog feels like the movies. The humor feels like the movies. Troy Baker sounds like he could be Harrison Ford. Nothing is phoned-in. It's a rare game where it feels like a movie but is still uniquely a game. The closest I can compare to is The Last of Us, which was actually a series based on the game, and pretty faithfully. This feels like a feature that could have been released between Raiders and Temple of Doom. I loved it.

Also, kudos to Microsoft for making this a day-one game on Game Pass. Best money you can spend on video games.

The whole replacement HVAC thing happened pretty fast, with it dying again Tuesday night and replaced by late Friday afternoon. Fortunately, I had litigated the pros and cons of various options when it died last year, so I kinda knew what to look for and what I was likely to want.

I knew we probably wanted to go up a half-ton in capacity, and our vendor confirmed that was the right thing given our square footage. Neighbors who have upgraded concurred, so we went from 3 to 3.5 tons. You don't want to go too big, because if it's running in short bursts, it's not good for the equipment, and does a poorer job at reducing humidity. The other option was to consider single or two stage, or variable speed. These operate how the names imply. Single stage works at one speed, two works at two speeds, and variable everywhere in between. Each is more expensive than the previous. Sort of. If we're only gonna be in this house another five to eight years, there's no universe where we ever make up the cost in energy savings. So despite my hippy energy efficiency fetish, variable speed was not gonna happen. Two was a little more expensive, but because it qualifies for a $2,000 tax credit, it was actually the least expensive option. Basically, when it only needs to cool or heat a degree or two, it runs at about 60% normal speed, which is more efficient. It's a lot quieter, too. So that's where we landed.

The physical differences in the equipment are interesting. The heat pump is taller and wider, with way more coil surface area than the old one. The air handler coil has three faces instead of two, and is taller. All of that makes sense given the difference in capacity, but I expected the size difference to be more subtle. The installer did a great job routing the pipes, in a cleaner way compared to what was there.

The one bummer was that my now very old Nest thermostat couldn't control two-stage heat and AC, you had to choose one or the other. Meh, whatever, I just bought the newer one. After being in for this much ($8,600), it is what it is. I wanted to stick with Nest so I could still control both from the same place, and their ability to use a remote sensor is necessary. Our upstairs thermostat is in the hallway near the two-story open area around our living room, so all of the downstairs heat lands there, and so it's not the same temperature as the bedrooms. I don't know why they didn't put the thermostat in the primary bedroom. We use the remote sensor in our room, which is as much as two or three degrees cooler in summer. The same phenomenon happens downstairs in my office, but I only use the sensor when I'm working, other wise the rest of the downstairs is too cold.

I saw a recent interview with Billie Eilish that covered a wide range of topics. As I watched, I kept thinking about how right out of the gate she scored Grammys and Oscars and a lot of attention as a teenager. Now turning 23, she has three albums, and each one has been better than the last. She's taking singing lessons. She's playing arenas without her brother or parents on tour. And mercifully, she seems to remain grounded, which seems to be tough for talented young people who get famous fast. The exciting thing is that, at the moment, it seems like her best days are ahead of her.

Yeah, it's another midlife topic.

When we think about our lives to date, and what may lie in the future, I know that a lot of people get nostalgic. Regardless of the quality of the days and years behind you, can you really imagine a time when your best isn't ahead of you? I suspect that a lot of people are miserable because they don't believe that to be true. If you can't believe it, the feelings in that hole are likely those of resentment, disappointment and anger. You know how people go to high school reunions and say things like, "They really peaked in high school?" It would suck to be that person. (I don't know what people say at reunions... I've not been to one, and don't really care to.)

I am firmly in the camp of believing that my best days are ahead of me. This isn't evidence-based, but it is based on intent. It's hard to define what constitutes a "good" life, and it certainly changes as we go, but by default I can't see how I would not see continuous improvement. We're always taking in new information, doing different things, and hopefully, retain a sense of curiosity and wonder about the world. How could the best days not be ahead?

This is, by the way, one of the reasons that the whole "make America great again" slogan is total nonsense. If we're not our greatest now, when were we? When we had slavery? When woman couldn't vote? People had less freedoms? (Apparently that last one is a "yes" for a lot of people.) If you're pining for a time when any of that was real, cool, but don't force your sad nostalgia on the rest of us.

Billie is gonna have even better days. Be like Billie.

If you're a Pitch Perfect fan like me, then you know the definition of good comfort food movies and you know this scene. In the second movie, the brilliant Keegan-Michael Key, as Becca's Boss, delivers the following in a staff meeting at his music studio when a video screen doesn't work:

Dax... did you call the tech guy? Do you understand that everything else in my life just works? So, I just need everything else here to work too, OK?

I'm not sure why, probably his delivery, but it cracks my shit up every single time. The exhaustion in his voice is relatable no matter what you do in life. And I've been feeling that sentiment a lot lately.

I don't think that anyone is wholly bad at anything. We all have wins and losses in life, parenting, work, etc. But there are times where it feels like the losses are emphasized while the wins are trivialized or disregarded. That's where I am right now, and it's exhausting.

Unlike Becca's Boss, my need isn't so much that everyone around me keep the ship running tip-top. What I need is for others to recognize my value and accomplishments. I need advocates (as I've written recently). I'm not perfect, but I get some great things done. It'd be nice to hear that once in awhile. Maybe not everything, but most things in my life that I'm responsible for are working. I just need to hear it.

One of my heroes once said in an interview that people want to be respected, valued and appreciated. That's not a revolutionary declaration, and it shouldn't be controversial. But how many people do it? I don't care if it's with people you interact with in retail or people you manage or coach. This has to be part of your social DNA. It's not that hard. If I can practice it, despite sometimes lacking the ability to read the room (#ASD), everyone can. This is 100x true for people who purport to be leaders.

When things are working, recognize.

We made the decision today to replace the upstairs HVAC system (there is one for each floor, because one for the whole house would be inefficient, especially in Central Florida). Last night, we turned the AC back on, and the outside unit did not work. It was last used for heat two days ago. This time, as was the case last year, the controller board failed. Over the years, we've sunk a few grand into fixing this thing, and that's not counting the warranty work performed in the first few years. Pulte installed the cheapest Lennox crap they could find, and there was even a class action over the quality of the coils.

The replacement is gonna be $8,600, an expense we were not planning for, but there is a $2,000 energy efficiency tax credit. We just got tired of putting money into something that breaks literally annually. We happen to be in a time of year where demand is much lower (good luck getting a service tech same-day in July), and we'll be just inside the window to not require a different refrigerant, as Congress has put an end to CFC use in these. The newer systems use something just slightly flammable, which requires more safety and makes everything a little more expensive starting in 2025. I know, you'd think I'd wait for the greener thing, but I already hate putting money into something like this.

The bummer is that we had that money earmarked to replace our carpet, another cheap-ass thing that Pulte installed. It has virtually no pad, is bunching up everywhere, and looks like a dozen people have lived here for decades, instead of three people over seven years. I was gonna say that we almost got through the year without a major unplanned expense, but I forgot about The Great Disney Car Crash. Still bitter about that one, and it's not actually resolved. We'd have one less car payment if that hadn't happened.

It's not lost on me that I'm fortunate that the birth lottery put me in a spot where this is not a life altering event. But it definitely messes with my mental health as yet another thing to create cognitive load. I'm so looking forward to the opportunity to turn my brain off in another week or so.

It's hard to believe, but Diana just reached her 10-year anniversary working at Dr. Phillips Center For The Performing Arts. She wasn't full-time until recently, but she has been a house manager for more time than she wasn't. Combined with years of being Broadway subscribers, and then founding donors in 2021, it's crazy how connected we are to that place. While it's certainly not puppies and rainbows every day at work for her, what a privilege to work in a place that so many people have an emotional attachment to, and have emotional experiences in.

Meanwhile, I'm just a few weeks away from hitting my third anniversary at my job, which will be a new record for me. As I'm sure people who are close to me know, working in technology can involve a strangely ephemeral job cycle. Part of that is because of contract work, which I think I've done for about four years out of my career. You know those gigs are finite in length. But I've also worked for countless smaller companies that are financial question marks, owned by private equity or otherwise fickle about retention. The other thing is that it's often difficult to advance in terms of career growth or salary in this line of work by staying put. At smaller companies, it's because there's nowhere to go, and at larger companies, well, they're just corporate machines that get rigid in structure.

While three years will be a new record for me, I'm not anxious to go elsewhere. Work is definitely challenging at times, and sometimes it's not. That's where I am in terms of career. I have ideas about what the "ideal" role for me might be, but they're positions that don't really exist in most places. I do know that I don't think I want to go up to a director level in a company this size, because it's too far from the technology. In a smaller company, I could be a "VP" but still involved in tech decisions, but that becomes less and less so as companies get bigger. For the size I'm at, I've got a solid balance of technology, leadership, mentorship and, sometimes, influence. It's satisfying. Some companies don't even use technical people in management positions (like Disney).

I can't predict how long it will last, but I hope the answer is "years." That's the other thing about technology, is that when things change, they tend to change quickly. A bad quarter, changes in investors, economic shifts, restructuring, etc., can happen at any time. But my former boss was with the company for a decade, through various mergers and changes, so you never know. I've been fortunate even to have most of the same team, and even more fortunate to enjoy working with them because they were not my hires. Here's hoping for more anniversaries.

"But isn't that what you do in your day job?" one may ask. Well, yes, I work in software engineering, but as a manager of people. Mind you, it's a technical management position, unlike what a lot of companies do when they hire people to "supervise" almost entirely in an HR capacity. So yes, my team ships stuff all of the time, but I'm not writing the code. When I ship, it's my open source stuff.

I've said before that I try to ship POP Forums at least once a year, typically at or around the latest release of .Net, which is Microsoft's open source platform/tools later in the year. This is another year where what I'm shipping is not big on user-facing stuff, but v21 is not without bug fixes and a lot of refactoring in the background. It also updates to all of the latest libraries that it depends on, in order to prevent the "rot" that I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Meanwhile, I added "dark mode" to my personal music cloud service, which is the thing where if you have your phone or computer set to render stuff with black backgrounds instead of white. This sounds trivial, probably, but I use it every single day, typically when sitting in bed at the end of the day. I don't need to light up the room and waking up Diana when choosing tunes. How important is this app to me? Well, since I wrote it in late 2020, with my family, we've listened to 70,000 tracks. That's no joke. I've never done a formal release with that app, because there are some little things that are wonky here and there. Maybe eventually.

Shipping stuff is satisfying.

I'm often surprised by the way I can draw parallels between Simon and I, as far as tendencies related to autism and ADHD. My observations on motivation yesterday are an example of that. The bits about being overwhelmed land very squarely on me right now, because life is going to be like that for the next two weeks, until the semester is over and I have 13 straight days of non-work.

The parallels come with a lot of empathy, but also acknowledgment that we are different in many ways. I think the big themes of the way he interacts and interprets the world are similar, though the intensity differs. He's always been far more sound sensitive than I was, but we both had issues walking in sand when we were very little. We definitely have a lot of common experience already socially, and that's heartbreaking. We find it easy to retreat in electronic bliss, though our game preferences are different. We both find comfort in the foods that we like, though he actually will eat more than I would at his age, though it's still limited. (And sidebar... we won't force him to eat things... I think that fucked up my relationship with food permanently.) And of course, we both struggle with scenarios that simply can't be logically reconciled.

So the good news is that I generally feel his pain and his joy as if it were my own. The bad news is that this only goes so far toward making me parent "good." While the empathy runs deep, and I often know exactly where he is emotionally, I don't always react well. And sure, I have my own shit, but sometimes his actions trigger a lot of anger. Some of it is just fear based, because when he says that he can't do something, I rage a bit. I want him to problem solve and self-advocate. Technically I suppose my fear induced rage is a twisted kind of love, but it's not good for either of us. My other big trigger is when he seems oblivious to the impact he's having on our time, even though I know that the amphetamines have long since worn off and a hundred things are competing for his attention.

I have so much anxiety about how he'll do as an adult, and I have to remind myself that a lot of the things that seem like deficiencies have come around, just a little later than what is typical. And I know that his written composition ability can improve, but he needs specific, targeted instruction for that, and I don't think that he's getting it, and I don't even know how to ask for it. I can't even hire experts because there are so few people trained in this area. I'm biased because I'm a writer, and I view the world's opportunity through that lens.

To my credit, I'm getting better about how I interact with him, because it wears on me to do it poorly. A lot of it isn't even about him, it's about my frustration over not knowing how to help him, even though I can empathize. The one thing that I can be confident of though, is that I am at least present. I guess some of my damage is useful.

I hate how much power Google has, and I'm thrilled that they were found to be a monopoly in the ad and search market. I'm skeptical that any resolution will help me as an independent publisher, but dare to dream, I guess.

That said, I have to admit that I'm actually insanely satisfied with their hardware support. When we got hit with lightning (the second time), I inquired on the Twitter to Google directly if you could buy replacement bases for our Nest thermostats, because they got fried. Google thought this was interesting, and replaced them for free, despite being more than four years old. When I had my original A-Series Pixel Buds, and one stopped holding a charge, they replaced them under warranty (unfortunately one broke more than a year after that). Now one of Simon's buds stopped putting out most of the sound (as if it has a woofer and tweeter, and the woofer died), and again they offered a prompt replacement under warranty. After a Nexus phone and four iterations of Pixel phones, plus a Nexus and three phones for Diana, and one for Simon, we've not had any issues with any of those. We have a bunch of smart speakers that were all free or won, and don't use most of them, but they're solid. Last year we added a Pixel Tablet, with the cool speaker stand/charger, to our living room to drive audio via Bluetooth to the receiver, and it's fantastic. Diana got a Pixel Watch free with my phone, and she loves it.

They seem to be totally hosing the Fitbit line, which is unfortunate, but I haven't needed one of those in awhile. For everything that we've purchased, or scored free, we've been totally satisfied. We even use their phone service, Google Fi (referral link for $20 off), which gives us a $25 credit per line every time there's a hurricane.

Google is a lot of things, some of them evil, some of them not. I think their hardware is top notch.

I was having a conversation about Simon and school work, and the other person suggested that he wasn't motivated to do it. For a few years, I also thought that this was the problem, until it was explained that ADHD has a nasty habit of causing the brain to constantly try and decide what to pay attention to. Motivation isn't the problem, it's locking down on the thing that you have to do.

And of course, I know exactly how that works. Acknowledging my "thought spirals" is a fairly recent development, but I deeply understand it from experience. I remember my senior year of college in particular how difficult it was. I remember having to read in American Literature, and write about it, and I can tell you that I was motivated because without it I'd be one credit short to graduate (and also not establish the double major). But I was constantly bogged down in things large and small, whether it be gaming out my next career moves after graduation, or figuring out what the hell I was gonna eat because I was so poor and living off-campus. That book couldn't compete.

This seems abstract and foreign to people who don't experience it. Some people even claim to have no internal dialog, which seems impossible. I can only imagine how well I would sleep if I didn't have that. But it's real, and it affects everything that I do.

Where Simon and I differ is that I've had decades to develop coping strategies, and he has not. These are not deliberate plans, mind you, but rather behavioral action that largely comes out of necessity. High school and college, it was bad. Work requires you to, uh, work, so you can keep your job and get paid. The stakes are different, so you internally find ways to focus on the things. When I was actively writing code, I was not turning out work as fast as my peers, and it was partly because the work happens on a computer connected to the Internet, and also because my skill level made it harder to get to the desired outcomes. Motivation had nothing to do with it. I had an iPhone back then when it first came out, but fortunately you couldn't really do anything with it. I didn't really develop coping mechanisms until I managed more people.

I have two things fueling some degree of focus, my coping strategies, though it's certainly not the hyperfocus I enjoy on certain things. The first thing is that my general empathy for others means I feel a responsibility to them. At work, this means that filling out some simple form for some administrative purpose could be slow going, but a task that benefits a colleague I try to get done as quickly as possible. The second thing is that my anxiety doesn't like me to be overwhelmed, because then I just stop doing everything. The key to combat that is get it done as quickly as possible. That's why I'm inbox-zero most of the time. This translates to home life sometimes, too. When I cook, I wash dishes as I go because I can't deal with the pile. Conversely, I haven't cut my documentary because I don't owe it to anyone, and frankly I'm already overwhelmed by the volume of footage. Motivation isn't the issue.

The point is that you can't assume that someone with ADHD isn't motivated, because there's more going on than you can obviously see. Unfortunately, people still don't like to acknowledge it or get tested as an adult, so you may default to thinking a person is unmotivated. We've gotta change that.

As has been the case since I landed my console in April, I've had a lot of start-stop action in learning all the things. I have my half-dozen physical lights on a truss in my office (because who doesn't do that?), and I can put everything away pretty quickly so I'm not crowded in. It's not as clean as having the non-PC version, but I didn't have to mortgage the house to buy it. I'm fairly comfortable now with basic programming. Theatrical style, cue-based stuff I could do in my sleep. Broader effects I'm OK doing, and the thing that I really love is the use of recipes. Basically you can create components of looks (positions, colors, etc.) and save those to presets, then use a recipe to make up cue or effect. That's great because, if you were on a tour for example, and the singer's position was for some reason not where it should be, you could just correct that position preset, and not have to mess with an overall effect.

But programming stuff isn't the same as designing it, and I want to be good at both. After looking at some of the design tools, it appears that the vast majority of pros are using either Vectorworks or Capture. The latter is made specifically for lighting design, and can do basic scenic stuff as well. Vectorworks is CAD software that has a number of specialty variations, including straight up architecture, but also landscape design and entertainment stuff that includes lighting and scene design. While both can output MVR files ("my virtual rig") for use in consoles, and both can visualize output from consoles, Vectorworks is far more capable. It's also more complicated, but their education stuff is pretty extensive. The pricing models vary, where Capture costs more up front with cheap annual upgrades, while Vectorworks is an annual subscription, and is 50% off right now. Neither is cheap, but good tools rarely are.

So I've started to work through the intro classes online. My hope is that I can absorb enough quickly and quite literally model my office and the six lights on a truss. Making real things is the way that I learn best. I figure once I've got that, I'll create some kind of basic stage and rig. That's kind of fun, because I can use the most expensive fixtures possible since they're not real. I'm kind of obsessed with the MagicBlade FX from Ayrton. They're $3,800 each, so I won't be getting any of those for home use.

I still can't say where this will lead in the long run, but it brings me joy. I can't tell you how badly teenage me wanted to be able to do this sort of thing, and back then, I suspect the people who did were in the dozens at most. Things sure have changed!