Wrote a blog post on Alan Wake 2 this past week, in case you missed it.
Made a small navigation-related tweak; when you hover over the minimalist return arrow at the top of each page on my website, you’ll now see some text to the right of the arrow telling you where you’re going.
On my weeknotes archive, hovering over each title (if you’re using a mouse or tabbing through on a keyboard) should now reveal the subject matter I discussed in each weeknote. This is mostly for my own benefit, just in case I ever want to go back and re-read old weeknotes on specific topics at a later date, but I suppose it could be of some use to visitors as well. 🙂
Life, the Universe, and Everything
Happy to report that I’ve finally been prescribed a sleep aid that works for me.
I have awful situational insomnia on nights before I’m scheduled to work; if I make a mistake at my job, I could literally kill someone, so the pressure to get an adequate amount of sleep is something that weighs on my mind, leading to a lot of anxious tossing and turning.
Tried a bunch of different prescription/OTC medications over the years that either didn’t work, or left me feeling too groggy the next day. Good “sleep hygiene” habits and all non-pharmacological anxiety reduction techniques were also completely useless.
My GP recently decided to try me on a newer medication, lemborexant, and it has been working really well so far; I fall asleep within 10-15 minutes of taking a single 5 mg pill, and have no grogginess at all the next day. Best of all? It doesn’t necessarily have to be taken every night and works for me on an as-needed basis, so my risk of becoming dependent upon it for all sleep (not just sleep on nights before I work) is very low.
Less happy to report that my annual autumn-induced melancholy is already in full swing, as our brief, last gasp of summer has given way to rain, wind, and sub-20°C temperatures (that will soon be sub-10°C temperatures…)
As I write this, our whole house is enveloped in darkness, and it’s raining far too much for me to even consider going out for a walk. Thus begins another nine months of longing for warm, sunny weather… 😔
Which reminds me: time to start looking into getting a SAD lamp for my home office. Last year, I moved my office into a pokey little south-facing room in the house (previously used as a closet) to get more natural light; it helps a bit, but it’s not enough.
Around the Small Web
Was really sad to see that Xaselgio’s Knowledge Hoard had to shut down, thanks to relentless, site-breaking LLM crawlers. It’s a shame, because I found some really interesting links there in the past.
This reminded me that I really need to get back into sharing links on my bookmarks page; my website mercifully has not been bombarded by LLM crawlers (yet), so I should take advantage of that fact while I still can.
Speaking of LLMs, I followed a little bit of drama on Mastodon/GitHub earlier this week when @Brennan rightly raised a GitHub issue on the “IndieWeb is Punk” site that has been making the rounds recently. Claude is a co-author on every single commit, and the diction on the site itself sounds very stereotypically “AI.”
The human who runs the website is doubling down on his insistence that Claude had nothing to do with it beyond performing “the repo init, commit, and push to Github after I created the pages.”
I’m trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s hard to do that when the site is riddled with stuff generative AI loves doing, like talking about “permission to X” and things that are not “X” but rather “Y.” If the author did indeed code and write everything on the site himself, his word choice has obviously been influenced by his day-to-day use of Claude. Either way, not all that “punk.”
Shows I Watched
Since the next season of Slow Horses starts soon, my husband decided to restart our Apple TV+ subscription this week.
We got a little over halfway into the third season of Silo. To be completely honest, I’ve been lukewarm on it so far; the pacing of the two storylines feels really off, compared to the novels (which I enjoyed).
The last two episodes we watched (5 & 6) were a little better, so hopefully that bodes well for the rest of the season.
Books I Read
Still slowly working my way through Real Tigers by Mick Herron, finished part one yesterday. I expect the reading pace will pick up a bit once we start watching the sixth season of Slow Horses!
Games I Played
Only devoted a few hours to gaming this week, jumping back and forth between Hades, Crash Bandicoot 2, and Spyro the Dragon. I last played the latter two games circa 1998-2000, so it has been pleasant to revisit them!
Hades, on the other hand, has been frustrating. Steam’s controller mode doesn’t work well with the game on MacOS, for some reason, so I have to use M&K. It’s very finicky, and I can’t get past the first boss. I haven’t tried turning on god mode yet, as that feels like cheating, but I might have to if I want to finish the game…