mvu.one

Tech Thoughts: I like Bun

I've been doing this web-dev thing for about 12 years now. I'm primarily self-taught, so I wouldn't classify myself as any degree of "good programmer", but after 12 years that amounts to enough burned fingers that I know how to operate the oven pretty well.

It's always felt kinda illegal to run Javascript server-side. I know Node's been around for a thousand years at this point, but when I began writing websites in the jQuery days Javascript was dirty.

It still is, but I feel like after ES2015 things got a lot better. Also, since the declarative UI revolution I write wat more Javascript than I do other languages -- so much so that at some point it became my native tongue over the Python I was raised on.

And why not? Javascript is everywhere. No other language is so readily at your fingertips -- just open the web inspector of any browser and you're ready to sling code, transform some data, or test a Regex. Nowadays JS ships with a ludicrous amount of built-in functionality as well -- everything from MIDI to WebGPU to USB interactions. Look at all this stuff!

I've always been a Python-backend kinda person. Flask, FastAPI, Django with it's various fixings -- I've been using Python server-side my whole career. But for small stuff, the microservices and simple SPAs I frequently need to assemble for work, the static-site builder for my blog, for all the little scrapers and scripts that I write on a daily basis, I'm switching to Bun .

Book Thoughts: A Half-Built Garden

I had a minor crisis because of this book. Not because it was good, but because I felt it wasn't.

Spoilers ahead, but mostly about stuff that happens in the first couple chapters.

Game Thoughts: Tactics Ogre Reborn [DNF]

I've had a complicated relationship with Tactics Ogre.

My love of the Final Fantasy Tactics subseries drove me to buy the PSP version of this game over 10 years ago, and yet I never managed to get into it. I don't think I even managed to finish chapter 1 before now, pinning the game near the top of my backlog for over a decade.

It took so long that they remastered the remaster onto the Switch (which I promptly purchased a physical copy of).

I absolutely adore the visual style of these games. Something about the isometric sprites and serious character portraits scratches some kind of itch deep in my brain that nothing else comes close to. The character art for Reborn is absurdly good and blows its Final Fantasy cousins out of the water -- so much so that I purchased an artbook just to ogle the illustrations despite never having finished the game.

On Paper, Tactics Ogre is everything I want. Final Fantasy Tactics-style gameplay with a richer and more adult story -- in practice, however, it's something entirely different.

Thoughts: I need to get out more

Think about the last time you were with a group of people and didn't know everyone. Not a homogenous group, but people with different age ranges, interests, and lifestyles. What kinds of things did you talk about? What kinds of stories did you tell or hear?

It dawned on me today that despite spending so much of my time inside doing the things I love -- learning, exploring ideas, experimenting, -- the stories I fall back on are of things that happened outside of my home. Places I've been, foods I've tried, people I've spent time with, events I've been to. These are the things that build not only memories, but memories that can be universally shared and flower into discussions with people from any walk of life.

Yesterday I planned to stay home, watch a show, play a game, and tinker on my computer. Instead, my partner and I went outside.

We ended up in a neighboring city, found an art supply store, spent an hour speaking with the owners and bought some origami paper. We tried a new kind of coffee drink with egg cream in it. We explored a cool comic book shop and we discovered a local interesting restaurant with a blind tasting menu.

It was the best day I've had in a while.

I need to go outside more.

Book Thoughts: Little Brother

I first discovered Cory Doctrow on Mastodon -- he was a well-spoken guy who posted ridiculously long threads that would completely consume my feed. After actually reading one of those threads and learning he coined the term "Enshittification" I figured I'd give one of his books a read.

I picked Little Brother at random. It's a young-adult novel about a middle-class teenage hacker developing a deep grudge against the US government (or a branch of it) after they go too far following a terrorist attack.

There were a lot of bits that weren't for me. The goopy teenage romance, the immaturity of most of the characters, the angst -- but this is a YA novel, so criticizing those things would be like complaining a horror movie was too scary for my tastes.

What was fun was how author didn't shy away from going full nerd-out on details about encryption key-pairs and other technical jargon that, while I'm already well-versed in them as a grown-ass computer-adjacent human, I would have absolutely found interesting and useful when I was a "young adult" myself. I really liked the "edutainment" vibes here even when it was covering stuff I already knew.

The story also resonated with me quite a bit more than I expected. Not so much the "middle class white boy mad at government" bit -- though I'd be lying if that didn't do something to the inner teenage me shouting "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" along with my RATM CD driving my mom's car at 17 -- but the "privacy isn't a matter of hiding things, its a matter of privacy" bit.

There's a line in the book, I'm paraphrasing here, to the tune of "Everybody takes a shit but that doesn't mean you want to do it where everyone's watching," and it rang a big bell in my head. That, combined with the absolute wild shit going in the U.S. really inspired me to spend a bit of time taking stock of my digital life -- and I wasn't that impressed.

I took the initiative to do a little bit of de-googling and switching up some of my dependency chain. I signed up for a secure email address and moved my web hosting to a paid plan with a small web hosting company. I made backups of my important shit and passwords, and I moved whatever friend chats were willing to over to Signal. With everything going on, I think everyone should take the time to educate themselves a little about digital privacy, regardless of your political beliefs or technical competency level. Install signal, get it installed for your loved ones. Figure out how to use a VPN and how to get back into your life if you get locked out of a service.

We're entering a weird age, and the billionaires that the people that control our maps, our phones, our entertainment, and every form of modern communication are banding together to do stuff. I suspect only those with net worths well beyond 50 million will be benefitting from that stuff.

If their masks are off, it's our collective responsibility to put ours on. Protect yourself and your loved ones. Maybe read a young-adult novel or two if you need a little help getting radicalized.

(Book was O.K. probably won't read the second one but I'll check out his other works)

Game Thoughts: Arco

How much hatred can you stuff into a handful of pixels? That's the question Arco tries to ask as you control a handful of characters through Mesoamerica to kill the "Newcomers" who are murdering your people for the gold and oil in your lands.

It's an absolute blast. The story is dark, but lined with quirky humour. The vistas are pixel-art masterpieces, and the characters are somehow still discernable despite being made up of only a couple pixels themselves.

The battle system's where the game shines the brightest. It's a very fresh-feeling tactics-style RPG where you plan out each character's action in freeze-time, then everyone on the screen moves at once. There's lots of skills in each characters' tree, and while there's really not a tonne of room for diversification (each character stays in their niche), the game's short enough that it didn't matter much.

There was one thing I very much didn't like about the game. The Ghosts. If you rack up too much "guilt" by making shit choices, ghosts will show up in battle. Unlike everything else on the screen they do not respect the time-freeze portions of battle and instead slowly approach while you're trying to make decisions.

When there's only one character in your party this isn't too bad, but since there's often times with more than one character you need to pick an action for before everyone moves these ghosts can be crazy stressful to be floating around.

As a result I ended up playing the "low-guilt" storyline. I have no regrets! I watched some youtube playthroughs and there's definitely more content if you go full-guilt, but I'll live having beaten the game myself once.

Great little game. Do recommend.

Comic Thoughts: Cutting Edge

I was in a random comic store the other day and found a hard-cover standalone comic titled Cuttting Edge by Dimitri Alberti for 50% off. I like standalone comics, and I certainly like 50% off, so I picked it up.

The cover states proudly "The Italian Neil Gaiman" which is probably why it was 50% off, but I assume the comparison was with comics like Sandman, and not an open admission of sexual assault (but Italian).

The story follows a team of rich and famous people joining an international scavenger hunt for the secretive company "Leviathan". They dig in and uncover secrets and dangers, and it was honestly pretty good spy-movie stuff up until the half-way mark. After that there's a time skip and the story completely fell apart. They add in some time travel silliness and a vague antagonist and it was honestly impossible to follow what the hell was going on. I had zero attachment to the story or any of the characters by the end.

I don't know if this was a case of "this was originally going to be a whole series but we cut it short", or just a disjointed mess from inception, but I can't recommend it.

Book Thoughts: A Darker Shade of Magic

This one's a bit odd as I usually carefully pick my audiobook choices. Instead, I got A Darker Shade of Magic as the second half of a two-for-one deal.

It's a light fantasy read without much umph to it. It was nice enough; the narrator was good and gave the main characters a lot of British cheek that matched the setting. The overlapped Londons of varying magical capacity was a fantastic idea, but the world-building was poorly executed.

Light spoilers ahead.

Thoughts: I've Become Illiterate

Obviously I don't mean literally illiterate as I'm clearly maintaining a blog. I read a lot every day of my life: Emails, messages, articles, posts, blogs, documentation, code. But I don't read books.

I do listen to a lot of books. I got through 20+ audiobooks last year, including the entire Lord of the Rings and several other monster novels... yet every time I pick up a book I fall asleep or lose interest.

I can still read manga just fine; I recently blasted through all of Chainsaw Man in 13 hours straight... But I pick up a novel and my focus is lost in under 5 minutes.

I can only assume this is a side-effect of the internet. My attention span has shrunk and I crave constant stimulation. Even with audiobooks I only listen to while doing something else -- walking the dogs, cleaning dishes. It's less of something I do for the sake of reading, and more something I do because I need stimulation firing on all cylinders all the time. I can't sit alone in the car and drive, I must have books narrated to me to all my senses are being occupied at any given moment -- something that words on paper simply will not give me.

I'm going to try to pick it back up. I'll start with easy thrills and high-fructose corn syrup fantasy to hold my attention and work my way up, but damnit I'm going to learn to read again.

Book Thoughts: Seveneves

Despite really not enjoying Snow Crash due to the sheer amount of cheese involved, I was convinced to try out some other Neil Stephenson works and picked up the audiobook for Seveneves.

I'm glad I gave the author a second chance as this work is definitely of a different make and model than Snow Crash.. though it wasn't without it's own different kind of absurd issues.

The premise of the book is very interesting: The moon's exploded and the earth will end -- what does humanity do? The story tries to follow that question and we watch, from the perspectives of several scientist-types, as humanity scrambles to save what it can of itself.

There's going to be a lot of spoilers in this one.