Mattie and John came for a lovely visit a couple weeks back. John left part way through the week and Mattie stayed on till Saturday. Had all sorts of fun, and it was great just working in my part of the place, Mattie working in hers, coming together so Mattie could cook us something delicious.
Stopped by James and Karen’s place for Sunday dinner. 
Mattie and John tried and failed to watch Hidalgo with me. 
Random checkers board in a garden on Whidbey Island. 
After dropping Mattie off at the airport on Saturday morning, I headed down to the drop zone for a couple jumps. Met a couple interesting characters. One conversation went like this:
“So what do you do?”
“Oh I do some filming, I run a fashion store as well.”
“Oh is that the name of your company on your hat?”
“No, that’s my buddy’s company name. Do you like <weird sex act>? My girlfriend loves it, haha. Anyways you search that name on Instagram, lotta good stuff there.”
“Mmmk.”
“Guess we just crossed a milestone there, huh? Gettin’ all personal :)”
“Guess so!”
Another went like this:
“So I heard someone died here a month and a half ago, diving too close to the ground? Crazy.”
“Oh yeah, I jumped with him a couple times. Stuff happens.”
This week at work was pretty fun, got to give a presentation to a large industry audience on what we do in Google and some proposals we’re pushing to help get the industry on par with us (so we can be in a position to buy their hardware if we want). Probably my best work yet as far as presentations and slides go.
Permit me to nerd out a bit, in a direction that most of this blog’s readers will not fully appreciate but that’s just fine. Every six or seven months I go hunting for this old fan-made Attack on Titan game I used to play way too much back in circa 2015. Unfortunately it was primarily distributed through (a) a Windows executable, and (b) a website that relied on a Unity plugin that finally stopped being supported on any major browser back in 2017 or so. Not even using an old browser seemed to work properly.
Yesterday I heard a song that reminded me of what I used to listen to when playing the game and I had to give it another shot. And I struck pay dirt! Someone had put together a native Mac app that ran the game exactly how I remember it. And not only that, the multiplayer servers were still humming along, with plenty of players. I’m having so much fun.
But wait. There’s more. There’s a team of indie developers that, at this moment, are putting together a sequel game based on the original, with updated graphics, music, and gameplay. Just over a week ago they posted this update:
See also this lighting demo:
And this list of new features on the roadmap.
Ermaghersh.