Another post with a look back at the past week — can I make a habit out of this?

Work Stuff

I spent a lot of last week wrapping up the budget — so much paperwork! I got some nice books, and wrote about one of them yesterday. I also wrote a short text for the next Alife Newsletter, and reviewed GECCO papers. This year GECCO and Alife will be back to back, I wonder how that will turn out.

Talking about Alife, I helped my students to write their Alife papers. I’m kinda worried on whether they will make it by the deadline next week. I’m finding it really difficult figure out the right balance of helping them out with the writing more directly and letting them find their own voice. When I think about back when I was a student, my advisor was that kind of absentee advisor — I had to figure out almost everything by myself… I don’t want to be like that, but sometimes I’m afraid of meddling too much with their ideas.

Game Stuff

This week I bought Caves of Qud, a modern roguelike that tries to stay close to the roots of the genre. The game is really weird, with a somewhat scifi aesthetic in it. I’m still getting used to stuff and learning, though, so I can’t say much about it.

By the way, I learned how to quickly sell all those trading cards that you get on Steam, and after selling all the cards that I had accumulated over the years, I got almost 1000 yen, which felt nice (but is not that much in the grand scheme of things).

Talking about roguelikes, I’m still working on my pico-8 photography based roguelike, but progress has been slow. Probably because I have been feeling really anxious about my trip next week.

Finally I’ve been playing a bit of ONI as well.

Media Stuff

After 69 episodes, we’ve finished watching “Yakitate Japan!”, which is the most enjoyable mindless anime I’ve seen in a while. The anime is a shonen anime about cooking battles, where half of the battle is the judge having over-the-top reactions to the food the contestants made. The anime relies on puns and 4th wall breaking jokes to carry it over, and while it wears thin at times, it never takes itself too seriously, and is light-hearted enough to have earned my good will to follow it to the end. I’m not sure how strongly I would recommend it to other people, but it is not bad, per se.

If we are talking about bad stuff, I also saw the 2021 remake of Cube. The original cube was one of my favorite movies back when I was in university, and I felt this remake really did it dirty. The original movie was about the mystery and the gruesome traps, the remake seems to toss these aside to put the spotlight on the celebrities in the movie… people will only die on appropriately dramatic moments, and not out of nowhere like in the original.

I’ve now started watching “Junji Ito Maniac”, and I’m liking a lot, but I’m only in the second episode.

Next week

Next two weeks I’m going to be traveling to Brazil and Peru to participate in several student fairs. It will be a 10 day trip, and almost half of it will be spend moving around in planes… I am hoping that I can spend some of that time working on my roguelike, and catching up on reading. But I guess I’m just avoiding thinking too hard about it… I need some true vacations!