I spent some more time playing around with Zellij this morning. I’ve gone from “cautiously interested” to “wow, this is pretty nice.” The nano-style help text in the bottom of the window, the simple navigation between panes/tabs, and the mouse-clickable tabs are all great if you are torn between different kinds of muscle memory.

I made a three-pane layout that keeps Emacs handy in a tall pane, plus two smaller stacked panes for my agenda and today’s todo list. I run the two lists with watch in their respective panes so they’re updating as things change, and I gave the Zellij session a specific name so I can easily rejoin from my laptop.

Having my task list and daily agenda in such a simple, bare-bones, always-there format works a lot better for me than going to web pages or opening apps. I know that stuff is in a named tab in my single terminal window. Because it’s all plain text, it’s much easier to take a glance and learn what I need because there’s not much extra going on.

As much as I like having the on-screen help I can see turning off the help menu at some point once I’ve got a little better muscle memory. Training wheels. Zellij has a lot of visual cues, and they can all be disabled once you’re ready.

I haven’t done a ton to configure it at this point. I did find the theme directory in the repo, which includes a few old stand-bys. For configuration stuff pane_frames false turns off the frame treatment around each pane, which makes for less visual clutter.

Stardew Valley and Vampire Survivors

I think I prefer this to the usurious raccoons of Animal Crossing. I’ve just about gotten tired of my inevitably bad, painted-into-corners-of-my-own-devising first character, so over the weekend it’ll be time to start a serious run.

Still playing Vampire Survivors but it dampened my own enthusiasm a little when I realized you can get the Garlic powerup and baically spend the first ten ranks of any level just standing there watching the bad guys self-immolate in your garlicky aura. I got one character to last for 29 minutes and 95 levels never straying more than a screen’s width or two away from the starting point.

Just as good as Todoist for my purposes, and with a little more personal affection toward it, is definitely Remember the Milk. It also has a CLI that allows for task manipulation, etc. It also uses RTM’s advanced search syntax, so you don’t have to have a preexisting filter, as you would in Todoist, to query upcoming todos with due dates only:

rtm lsd -d 4 NOT due:never

(List due items no more than 4 days out, exclude things without due dates)

Its output also includes index numbers, so once I invoke my near-term todos, I can act on them from the command line, e.g.

rtm due 07 tomorrow

… which changes the due date of item 7 from the list to tomorrow.

I think this may have put to bed my interest in exploring nb. I spent some time poking at it, but the question, as always, comes down to “how does this thing handle mobile use cases?” For todos, I need a little more than the sort of web publishing lashup I made for my Denote notes.

Vampire Survivors

I am not sure what compelled me besides maybe the sale price, but I gave Vampire Survivors a go and I’m hooked. It’s a rogue-like bullet hell thing where you’re running around being chased by hordes of undead, slowly acquiring weapons and powerups that eventually turn you into a killing machine.

It was disorienting at first, because you don’t do anything besides move around. All your weapons fire or deploy themselves, and your only real input into the process is the direction you face the character. Live long enough and you’re eventually emitting magical energies or deploying roaming weapons of mass destruction, killing the oncoming demonic hordes by the score. Sometimes there’s a turkey you can eat to get life back.

It’s an intense game, but it’s not really fast. I think that’s what I like about it. Your character doesn’t move at a very high speed. You just sort of walk around, trying not to be touched by the monsters. If you’re lucky you happen across one of the aura weapons that just passively kill anything that gets close. When you die, you can spend your gold on incremental improvements to your character that allow you move a little faster, regenerate health, widen the radius of your weapons, do more damage, etc.

It’s very simple to play and very easy to put down and pick back up.

Substack

I wish people that I appreciate and who are not Nazis, or interested in helping Nazis, and who are also on Substack, would get off of it. The company did itself a favor paying the advances it did at its founding, because I know of a few writers who have been very transparent about how much space that gave them to branch out on their own, establish or rebuild writing careers, and find an audience.

I always wondered how long it would take for attention to turn to it, and what it would take. Honestly, I think it is a refutation of the Woke Apocalypse Doomsaying Community that it took this long and such an odious provocation to finally generate that kind of awareness. There has always been complaining, because left libs were never going to be okay with a platform that provided a home for the likes of Bari Weiss, Matt Taibi, and assorted other “heterodox” types, but it took honest-to-God Nazis – and the fact that Substack has decided their money spends just fine – to draw prolonged attention.

A while back, fresh out of years and years doing online content, I gave a thought to providing something Substack-like: I had the technical know-how for a lot of it, had done some time putting together newsletters and turnkey premium content, and had a good idea of what would work for content types. I didn’t have any idea how to scale it all, or how to draw the line between “good enough” and “feature rich” in a way that would make much money. I’m just noting that because the quandary facing people who signed up and are now making a living from their work on Substack is real. There are parts and pieces laying around that they could pick up and use to cobble together a similar suite of blog, newsletter, and podcast tools; but the discovery part – the marketing problem, especially given the current realignment going on with social media – is going to be fraught even if one does have the wherewithal to rummage around in the parts bin of publishing platforms, payment processing, etc.

This is a tougher situation than, I dunno, a well-off tech worker who just can’t kick their X habit. It is hard to make a go of it as a writer. It would be hard to pull up stakes and move on.

I wouldn’t mind being a little more current and capable than I am today, because there would be some social utility and satisfaction in helping people get out of this situation.