KelsonV @KelsonV@wandering.shop

the phrasing "Light eruptions continued during the day" just sounds weird to me, like a weather report about light rain showers.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-01-07/indonesia-merapi-volcano-spews-hot-clouds-thousands-evacuated

Left for a 30-minute walk before lunch (Pacific time), when the latest news out of DC was just Ted Cruz being an ass as usual. Got back, wife cornered me and whispered, "Did you look at the news before you left?"

Been doomscrolling news of the coup attempt for the last 3 hours. She's stress-baking, I'm stress-eating, kid's stress-watching youtube game play-throughs.

Realized that with a minimal html template and simple stylesheet, the posts are just as slim as an AMP page would be - plus no issues with ownership, redirects, duplicate content, etc.

Looking for a non-Kindle place to link to a couple of #LesMiserables translations opened up a can of worms because (1) eBook stores generally don't tell you which translation is in the book and (2) they're *flooded* with editions using the public-domain 1862 Wilbour & 1887 Hapgood translations.

I decided to sort it out myself and make a page of links to each English translation at Project Gutenberg & 6 different eBook stores.

https://www.hyperborea.org/les-mis/about/translations/

Good on them for releasing the rest of the finished-but-unreleased content, discounting what's there, and giving us time to play the new stuff before shutting down. Plus transferring purchases and character items to Minecraft proper.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-earth-coming-end

Build plates are a cool idea, but the space is very limited, and actually building them in AR is awkward. Sometimes I think it would've been nice to be able to build in standard Minecraft UI, then play them in AR. Plus when the pandemic hit, that ruined the plan to let you share the build with other players.

I ended up mainly using build plates to farm. It's cool that you can, though! Crops and trees grow, you can milk cows, shear sheep, etc. All on your dining table!

Adventuring in AR is the obvious highlight. The main problems are that (1) it requires space, which not everyone has right now, and (2) you can't choose the *type* of adventure when you activate one, only the complexity. So you're never sure if you're going to get a puzzle, a battle, or just a lot of blocks to mine.

I like #MinecraftEarth, but it didn't quite hit its stride before the pandemic, and didn't adapt as well as Pokemon Go has *to* the pandemic. I mostly stopped playing after I hit the level cap because gameplay was still too awkward, and it wasn't *enough* fun to overcome that when I didn't have a goal to work toward.

So while I'm sad that it's shutting down later this year, it's more "what could have been" than wishing I could keep playing it.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/5/22215253/minecraft-earth-closing-down-june-2021-microsoft

Rom, in ST:DS9: "Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation. We want to find a way to become the exploiters."

I think about that quote a lot.

Years ago I saw a mention of Les Misérables being popular with Confederate soldiers, who were nicknamed "Lee's Miserables."

Even though the book is about why you shouldn't treat people horribly even if they're on the lower rungs of society.

Even stranger, the rare times America is mentioned, it's to condemn slavery.

It turns out there was an 1863 edition published in Richmond that "fixed" the "Yankee" translation from the year before.

JFC

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3040282?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

First day back at online school for the kid, who kept refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour over the last few days and insisted on not getting out of bed for, like, an hour this morning.

It's been "fun"...

Probably going to polish it a bit more over the next week. Find better places to link to specific editions than Amazon, for instance. Adjust image sizes, that sort of thing.

But since I was building the layout from scratch I was able to make it super minimalist. I can't get over how fast it loads even on a phone.

Finally converted my rarely-updated Les Miserables blog from WordPress to a static site generator. Went with Eleventy. Unlike Jekyll & Hugo, which I had problems with the last time I tried this, I got far enough in less than a day that I decided to finish converting it.

No more needing to maintain an extra WP instance for something that's only going to change once a year or so.

https://www.hyperborea.org/les-mis/

https://www.11ty.dev/

"Why is it called 'Oof this sword still sucks' if it's awesome?"

"I should rename it."