January

After completing the half marathon in January, where I reached my goal and felt good enough to attend a party in the evening, things haven’t been great. When I took up running 4 days later I felt some pain in my right butt cheek. I didn’t think too much about it as I completed the run as normal, it was just weird. So I went for another run the next day. The pain was back, but worse, I had to walk back home. Stubborn as I am, I tried again the next day, but this time I didn’t even get 400 meters before the pain was too much to handle. I decided to visit my doctor. Of course, this was on a Friday so I had to wait until the following Monday.

I told my doctor about the pain and how it resembled something I had when I was around 14 years old and got hospitalized for. I also mentioned my recent running as I figured that might have triggered it all somehow. He decided to book me an MRI to check it out. I had to wait until the 1st of February for that scan.

February

The scan happened on a Sunday, I arrived 10 minutes before my time slot and was admitted just before my assigned time. After removing all the metal I had on me in a changing room I was led to the tube where I got some quick instructions about staying completely still^[1], got a headset for the noise, and a controller I could squeeze in an emergency. The scan itself was done in under 10 minutes. It was very relaxing to be forced to lie still without a screen to look at.

Then we got some sort of stomach flu^[2] at home. Sam and I got it really bad, Mats was not as bad. That was hard being an only parent. All I wanted to do was sleep, while my stomach wanted to turn itself inside out, Sam having the same thing and needing help, or Mats just being in need of a guardian as he was somewhat active.

I then had to wait until the 9th before the results were sent to my doctor and he had time to look at it and get back to me. There were signs of a fatigue fracture, but in a slightly different spot from where they had scanned, so I had to go back in for another one. Also, my D vitamin levels were probably low, so I had to do a blood test for that. I got a blood test the following day and results a few days after. They were indeed low so I bought some supplements. I got a new scan on the 16th.

As before, the session was very efficient, getting the results were not. I contacted my doctors office today, and learned that my doctor is on winter vacation leave. Can’t really complain about that, as I am as well. They sent me a cryptic message containing phrases like “ala sacralis” and “osteitis condensans ilii” from the clinic and with the help of an AI assistant I managed to decipher it and confirm that I indeed have a fatigue fracture. So nothing to do with whatever I had when I was 14 I believe. Just body fatigue from too much running.

Mental health

I haven’t been able to run in over a month now and I believe that is taking its toll. In my mind I managed to keep on top of things thanks to all the exercise I did. I suddenly got really tired all the time. Turns out that might have been the damage to my body and low vitamin levels. But my thoughts keep circling back on all the negatives. Why can’t I be healthy? Can I ever run again? Am I doing good parenting? Why do I eat so much? I’m also constantly hungry and crave comfort food.

Getting on the supplements helps though, and the brighter days can’t hurt either. I’m really hoping to turn this thing around to the good place I was at the start of the year. In my eagerness to continue in January I signed up for another half marathon in Sandnes the 21st of March. Not sure if I should^[3] try that, but part of me really wants to.

Recap

My mother came to watch Mats while I was running. I borrowed her car to go to her house where I met Frank and my sisters, Dina and Carmen. Carmen and Dina took us to Sola Beach Hotel where we could warm up a bit before the run. My initial idea was to join the 01:50 group, but I got slightly confused by the signs, left the group and when I found the right one they had already started. So I joined the 01:55 group instead. I think that might have been for the best as I didn't really manage to keep up.

It was -3° when we started running and some wind. I really regretted not wearing a buff to pull up over my face at times, especially when getting to the first drink station and drinking the nearly freezing water. I couldn't feel my lips. Guy next to me commented that he hoped for coffee on the next pit stop, which made me laugh at least. You don't really get much time to drink if you want to keep up. I started losing my group at around 11km, as people pushed up in front of me and then slacked off a bit which spread the group out, and I could feel some strain in my lower back. I pushed through and at 15km there is an up hill section where I actually managed to pass quite a few people. But after getting to the top at 16km I felt spent and didn't manage to keep my pace any longer, so people started passing me again.

I completed it in 01:57:07, 05:36 quicker than my previous record.

Picture time

A strava map showing the route, length and my time. Yet again I tracked more distance on my watch, but I've learned that is natural as when they measure they will cut every corner to make sure everyone is at least running the half marathon distance. You can't really do the same thing when there are other people present, and you end up running around some at times, adding distance.

Stavanger Aftenblad's picture of me striking a pose. They had a sign 50m up front so I had some time to prepare.

Dina took a picture of me at the finish line eating a dry and cold raisin bun.

Temporary single father

Ingvild got a temporary position in northern Norway and I am in Stavanger with my job and the kids. In the beginning of October she took the car and drove through Sweden up to Målselv where she is living in an apartment in my fathers new house. She has a one hour commute to her job in Balsfjord so she gets a lot of practice driving on snowy and icy roads through the dark. In addition to job experience of course. She’ll be there until Easter. Luckily we get to meet up once a month at least. Her coming here for some weekends, us going up there to celebrate Christmas, and the rest we haven’t figured out yet.

I am very much getting into a routine focused around the daily schedule of Mats. And I even find some time for Sam in between, but mostly after getting Mats to bed. I’m doing a fairly good job if I get to say so myself. I keep the kids alive. I work 80% with shorter days to make the logistics easier for me. I manage to keep the apartment in a somewhat tidy if not at all times clean state. And I exercise almost daily. I’ve signed up for my next half marathon in January to keep myself motivated to get out and run. I also get a couple of hours every evening for whatever, like playing video games or watching some TV shows.

Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley

This is a short and sweet game. I’ve been reading Tales from Moominvalley for Mats in the evenings before bedtime. I think he might still be too young to pay attention to the stories, but I enjoy reading for him, and we establish reading before bedtime as a routine for when he gets older. So it was quite fun to recognize some of the stories and characters in this game. It starts with The Spring Tune and characters from the other short stories turn up through the game. It reminds me a bit of A Short Hike in style and general feeling. The controls are a bit frustrating at times, but the game is never really hard, so I can accept that.

Hollow Knight

The news about Hollow Knight: Silksong dropped sometime after summer, which made me remember giving up on Hollow Knight because it was too hard. At the time I really couldn’t be bothered to learn it. I decided to give it another chance now and it is unsurprisingly great. The controls are so good when you get used to the timing. Every challenge goes from being incomprehensible to “oh, that’s how you’re supposed to do that” after a couple of tries. The world is interconnected in a lot of different ways and there might be several ways to make progress. The mood and music is magical. The boss fights are interesting. The power ups are paced in a good way even if you discover them in different order at different times. It is still really hard. I’ve completed 85% of the game and it is apparently possible to complete it to a logical 112%. I’m not going to do that, but I might get Silksong now, or in a couple of years.

Ølhunden Berit

This is a Norwegian show about an incel named Tom who threatens a celebrity named Live online with rape and then gets exposed for it, and his neighbour Audun who struggles with being a supportive husband and dad while suppressing his “masculinity”. Tom has to go into hiding as a woman because he can’t show himself publicly and he has access to clothes and wigs from his mothers store. He creates the persona Berit, makes some new friends, experience some new lows, and then gets into a position where she helps rape victims. Live, who regrets exposing Tom after seeing what happens to him, tries to get in touch and make amends with him while also starting a TV show about toxic masculinity. And Audun gets into a dark hole. It’s a really good but dark show.

Ingvild and I decided to watch this together, separately. So we both watch an episode and then we talk about it the next day. It’s like having a bookclub.

Ølhund translates to beer hound, but is just a term for someone who loves beer.

Quick recap

Feeling a bit optimistic I decided to join the 2 hour bracket, instead of the 2 hour, 10 minutes one I originally signed up for. I managed to complete it in 02:02:43. There were a lot of runners and the group spread out so I eventually lost sight of the rabbits keeping the 5 minutes, 41 seconds, pr. kilometer pace. Not sure I would have been able to keep up anyways as I started to feel tired at around 16km. I am however very pleased with completing, beating my previous record with almost 10 minutes, and how quickly I recovered after. My form must have gotten better. Also other than slight sore feet I feel totally fine which is a huge improvement on my previous attempt.

Picture time

A strava map showing the route, length and my time. My official time linked above was slightly quicker than what I captured on my watch.

Stavanger Aftenblad's picture of me very close to the finish line.

Stavanger Aftenblad's picture of me around Mosvannet I believe. It looks like I'm having a zen moment, but I was really tired at this point.

Stavanger Aftenblad's picture of me in a small crowd.

A selfie I took after completing the race on a bench behind Forum Expo for my Snapchat stories.

The bike trailer

I bring Mats to daycare using a kids bike trailer. It is attached to the bike with a nut on a bolt sticking out from the rear wheel axle. There is also a security strap to thread around the frame of the bike. On Thursday the nut disappeared after I picked him up at daycare. Not sure what happened, but I probably didn’t tighten it properly. The trailer was still attached with the strap and Mats didn’t seem to notice anything. I went home with the bike and trailer and went on to search for the nut but it was nowhere to be found.

Maxbo

There is a building supplies store right next to the road I take to work so I decided to stop by the next morning. For some reason these always open really early. So I went up to the counter and asked if they sold singular nuts. The guy just looked weirdly at me and asked “what?”. “You know, nuts and bolt, that sort of thing?”, I said. “How do you spell it?”, he asked. And then proceeded to search their system for it. I was a bit flabbergasted by this. He then took me to where they had these in the store. I was about to ask him about the right sizes and what I might need, but he seemed so confused about all this. They also only sold these in packs of 50, so I abandoned at this point

Ahlsell

When arriving at work I spent a couple of minutes searching for where I could buy singular nuts, because I just assumed that had to be a thing somewhere. It is. I found Ahlsell which I’ve never heard about before.. They are located about 7km from where I work and I decided to leave a bit earlier from work to go there. It turns out I really needed that extra time. After a 20-something minutes bike ride I got there. And the woman behind the counter knew what a nut was and pointed out where I could find them. I should have brought my bike into this store, but I foolishly assumed that a nut is a nut and that they only differ in size. They don’t. I bought a 10mm and a 12mm one for 16,- NOK and headed out to my bike. Neither fit, so I went back in again and asked about if they had an 11mm one, and apparently there is no such thing.

Spinn

I thought that maybe since this is a bike thing and not really building material it might be a special item. There is a Spinn bicycle shop not far from Ahlsell so I went there. The guy behind the counter was really helpful. He went out and looked at the bike, had some measuring equipment and found out that this bolt has a 1 graded rise as if that was supposed to mean something to me. Unfortunately they didn’t have a nut in stock for this size and grade. As I said I just came from Ahlsell he suggested I should bring my bike inside and show them the bolt so they could help me get a nut and directed me to …

Würth

Another store I’ve never heard about. And located right next to Ahlsell. So back I went. Brought my bike inside and explained my problem. The woman working there was also really helpful. She measured the bolt and ran away somewhere in the shop and came back with a couple of boxes. She tried the bolts she had but none of them would fit. I mentioned the 1 grade thing, and she said that their nuts were probably too coarse then. I asked if she had a suggestion on other shops I might check at. Luckily she did.

Skruegården Industrisalg

That translates to something like “Screw farm Industrial sales”. Another store I’ve never heard about. Guess I’m revealing just how hopeless I am when it comes to handyman stuff. This was 9km away, but I was on a mission and figured I would try that or order a new axle with the bolt from the internet if they didn’t have it. So off I went. Half an hour later I arrived there and they were still open. I brought my bike inside and showed the bolt and explained my problem. This is very much a professional shop, so there was only a small room with a counter and a huge warehouse visible in the background. The guy behind the counter came out with the same type of measuring tool the guy at spinn had. “10mm, 1 grade. Do you want stainless steel or corrosion resistant?”, he said. “Ehm, err, what do you think is best?”, I asked, and then he ran off while conferring with another guy in the background. He jumped into some sort of cart where he could adjust his height to the shelves and came back from another side just a few seconds later. “This should do”, he said, handed me the nut and wrote something on a form. “Just bring this to the office and you can pay there”, and then pointed to a door. So I did, went into a corridor, then another, saw some empty offices, proceeded further, and finally found someone. He grabbed the sheet from me, and said “ah, this is a rare type, so it is a bit expensive”. He grabbed a bank terminal and handed it to me. The price was 75,- NOK. That was more than I expected. “Well, it beats buying a new axle for 800,-”, I said, and paid.

Home

Close to 2 hours after leaving work I was home with my brand new nut. The price really was more than I expected, both in time and money. But this was something I needed and if I had tried to order this online I would have gotten the incorrect type just with a couple of days added to the time. I’m fascinated that we have special shops like Skruegården in the area and if I had known about them, or they had turned up in my initial search, I would have just gone there immediately.

Ancient history

In secondary school we did a running exercise called the Cooper test where you check how far you can run in 12 minutes. I can’t really remember how well I did at the time, but probably not better than average, which is 2500 meters for the age group 17-19. At the time I don’t think I ever expected to run that far in one go ever again. This was in 2005.

After that my focus on exercise was sporadic at best. I did join a gym for some time periods, did some group sessions, or lifted weights with friends. Occasionally we’d warm up with a run, but rarely more than a couple of minutes on a treadmill. I was way more interested in doing casual sports like squash, but it can be hard to coordinate those sessions on a regular basis. It is also costly.

Classical antiquity

After university I started working at an ad agency in 2011 where I met Eivind. He was, and probably still is, really into running, He managed to drag me up to Sørmarka for a run around Ullandshaugtårnet. It was hard and put me off running at the time. I’m pretty sure a seed for running got planted in my brain, though. Eivind talked about how quickly you improve if you just keep at it and how satisfying that is.

Post classical history

In 2014 I moved to Oslo with Ingvild, Sam was born, and with a baby long walks with a stroller became a thing. I got really into putting on a podcast and going for long walks while he slept in the wagon. For the next couple of years I never focused much on exercise, but did a couple of rounds of weight loss as I knew my health wasn’t great.

In 2018 Videxio signed up for the Holmenkollen relay race. I decided to join and selected a 600 meter section. I didn’t have long to prepare and was just barely able to run that distance in one go. But I completed it.

In 2019 I had some more time to prepare and used a gym room at the office to prepare. Eventually I got outside for some test runs to confirm that I could do the race again. For some reason I never tried again, other than completing my section of the race.

Modern history

In 2020 covid happened. Yeah, as I’ve said before, not really a great time. However, a couple of global trends spread, like sourdough^[1] baking, gardening, and running. Social distancing was important and one of the easy and safe things we could do was go for walks or run. The first time was painful. I hadn’t run properly in years. I was too heavy. I don’t think I lasted a full kilometer. But somehow I got out a couple of days later and did it again. This time I got further. Within a couple of weeks I was able to run for 3-4 kilometers in one go. I continued pushing myself every week, after doing a couple of shorter sessions I would try for another record. Within half a year I ran 14 kilometers in one go.

I kept running, but couldn’t really beat my record. I stagnated and eventually lost motivation. But at least I knew I was able to run for a while if I pushed myself.

I did join the Holmenkollen relay race again for Pexip and was able to warm up by running from Stabekk to Frognerparken (about 6.5 km) before going to my start position.

Contemporary history

My step father Frank suddenly challenged me around Christmas last year. He was planning to run the Farsund half marathon and asked if I wanted to join. I was sceptical at first, but got around to the idea. It also got me motivated to lose some weight. In February I got Mycoplasma pneumonia which set me back a bit, but I got right back on my goals in March. Through April and May I was able to push myself to a single 16km run and was hoping that I had prepared enough. I bought new running shoes and a belt to carry some energy gel in the marathon.

May 31st, Frank, my brother Adrian, sister Dina, and myself completed the half marathon. I was so tired after that. But I'm also really happy with myself for doing it. The new shoes were maybe a mistake as I got quite sore feet. I mean, I needed new shoes, but maybe I should have bought them earlier to get my feet adjusted to them.

I completed in 2:12:32

Future Speculation

Been there, done that. Or so I thought. I felt it wasn’t worth the pain and strain on my body to run for that long again. But my motivation for running started dwindling, so I signed up for 3sjøers, a half marathon around Stavanger’s 3 lakes, Stokkavannet, Hålandsvannet, and Mosvannet. This time I’m not starting completely from scratch and I still have a couple of weeks until the race. I’ve done a session for 17.5km just to see how I fare, and that was OK. I know I have room for improvement, though. Wish me luck!

Gear

I found my way to löplabbet, and bought some really nice shoes in 2020. They let you do a running test, and based on your style they’ll recommend some shoes that you get to try running in. I ended up buying a brand called Topo. They have thick soles which makes them fairly comfortable when running on asphalt. The new pair I bought right before the marathon was also Topo. I was hoping to get the exact same model but there are slight variations to form and feel. I’m used to those now.

I bought a Garmin Fenix 8, one month before the Farsund half marathon. It’s a really good watch and it helps me keep track of pace and pulse while running. It comes with a built-in GPS and music apps, so I can sync my headset to the watch and can go running without my phone. Which is really freeing in some sense. The GPS is also really accurate compared to my phone.

I currently use some Sony WF-1000XM5 Wireless In-ear headphones. They are quite good, but I liked Jabra better, however they stopped making that type of headset. I never seem to keep a full headset for more than a year so I get to test a new type eventually I suppose.

I’ll usually wear shorts and loose t-shirts during the summer. During spring and fall I wear running tights, loose t-shirts, and probably a wind jacket. The times I’ve tried running during winter I’ll wear long wool underwear under the tights and wind jacket, along with mittens and a beanie.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

It's a 2D metroidvania. It's a good one too, as far as I can tell. I haven't played too many games in the genre. By exploring the map you power up your character to get to new areas and fight bigger bosses. Before you get to the main game area there is of course some tutorial and story setup.

Sargon, the guy you play as is the best fighter in a group of fighters named the immortals. Or at least they say so. And they prove this to you by serving a simple tutorial to beat. Everybody gathers back at the palace to celebrate the victory. The immortals can't say enough good things about Sargon. And all the characters turn out to be boring assholes. Some asshole betrays all the other assholes by kidnapping prince Ghassan. They take him to the cursed city Mount Qaf.

This takes far too long, and there is no gameplay. These other characters and their motivation carries little weight. And for some reason they all hate Sargon now. All the dialogs are still images of the characters facing each other. It feels like those horrible mobile games that lure you in with a cool action trailer. Then they make you build bases and listen to dialog between scantily clad characters. Does anyone actually enjoy that?

When the game finally gives you permission to play it, it is fun. However, you are quite weak in the beginning, so it's sort of funny compared to the praise you got earlier. And whenever you meet the other fighters they are really good. One of them is even impossible to beat as the fight ends with a cutscene. So it is fun, until you step into an area where there is more story. And the only thing it does for me is hold me away from the fun stuff. Exploring the giant city, finding the next cool power up, defeating interesting enemies.

Is playing the game too much to ask for? It could have been a great game, if the story didn't hold it back. It's still a good game, so check it out on Steam, or Nintendo (I played it on the Switch).

Bayonetta 3

Dumb stupid awesome fun action. Epic set pieces. Inventive and fun game play. But there are so many cut scenes. And I find that I don't care for it. At least not up front, before the game has even started. You play for a couple of minutes, and then another 5 minute cutscene happens. To be honest, I didn’t get too far at all in this game.

I remember how disappointing the second game was too. It fell flat compared to the first game. The first game concludes with you going to space by riding a motorcycle on the outside of a rocket. Then finally you roundhouse kicked a god into the sun. I suppose it's hard to top that.

Neon White

Indie game with incredible game feel and a fun game loop. Short levels where you run, shoot demons, and pass obstacles. You use several different power ups presented as playing cards. And you compete on time.

For some reason they've added a dating simulator on top of this. And I don't get it. Luckily they let you fast forward these scenes, but even then it takes a while.

This is also presented in that silly mobile game storytelling mode I mentioned. Is this something people enjoy? I wanted this to be a podcast game I suppose.

It's so fun when hitting the correct timing on jumps and power ups. Neon White on Steam

Mario Party Jamboree

Mario Party is fun. It's a digital board game and mini game collection. A usual game is 10 rounds of board games with a mini game between each round. The one with the most stars at the end is the winner. It also takes a while, like an hour or so.

In Jamboree, instead of looking at ways to maybe speed this up, they've added a bunch more rules. Which they have to explain. Stopping the game to have everyone read instructions is a party pooper. They've also added other events making it take even longer.

There are more frequent mini games. And while the games are fun, I can’t help but feel like they are side quests. I haven't played this enough to judge yet. And I will keep playing. Because it's Mario Party and so many fun mini games. Mario Party Jamboree on Nintendo

Let me play, please?

Is that too much to ask for? I never used to skip the story parts of any game. Recently I find that I don’t have the patience for cut scenes and other noise. Am I playing the worst offenders or has something changed with me?

I have indeed played some fun games as well the last couple of years. Games that let me, you know, play them.

A short hike

Explore a campsite and Island while gathering feathers to jump higher and get all the way to the Summit. This was a relaxing and beautiful game that I completed in a couple of hours.

There was more to explore and collect but I was quite pleased when I got to the Summit and back down again. A short hike on Steam.

Braid: Anniversary edition

This is the same game as released on Xbox arcade way back when with improved graphics. You manipulate time in different ways to solve puzzle platforming. It's still a very inventive game. The puzzles are challenging and fun to figure out. The music is beautiful.

When you complete the game commentary tracks are unlocked on the maps. The creator, Jonathan Blow (along with different guests), talks about how he came up with the various puzzles. I love that.

Braid: Anniversary edition on Steam.

Superliminal

Change perspective to solve puzzles. This is clever. By grabbing objects and moving around, you can alter the size of things based on your perspective. Using that ability you solve various puzzles. Like removing obstructions or building stairs and bridges to get further.

It goes a bit dark, but never gets scary. Superliminal on Steam.

What Remains of Edith Finch

A walking simulator. But the stories within are so fun. This one is also easy to complete in one sitting. What Remains of Edith Finch on Steam.

Cute looking kid, if I get to say so myself. Lots of smiles and an eagerness to get up and look around, though he is not able to just yet. He regurgitates^[1] a lot, which is annoying, but he is also so visibly relieved and happy after, that it is hard to be too annoyed about it.

We have been trying for another baby for several years, one even getting to week 17 before we lost it. Each attempt taking its toll on Ingvild. After several miscarriages Ingvild was finally sent to Haugesund May of last year as the hospital there have a clinic specializing in women's health. They found scar tissue after the first birth^[2], to likely be a reason for complications in the pregnancies. There was not much they could do though, and scheduled an appointment for her at Ullevål hospital in Oslo the following October

Then in September, Ingvild realized she was pregnant again. We kept the appointment and went to Oslo for our fall vacation, but they wouldn't do anything with the growing fetus in there. No operation needed, as you can see up top, this one stuck around to be born.

At the sonogram / ultrasound examination we learned that it was a boy, disappointing a lot of family members^[3] hoping for a girl. We had also landed on a girls name^[4], but spent a lot of time discussing boy names.

In the end of February we went to Oslo again as we inherited a lot of baby gear from my half brother^[5] who happens to turn 5 this year. Easter this year we didn't do much, more or less just waiting for the baby. And by end of April, two days before his due date, at 7:14 he was helped out of the mother. Finally drawing his first breath after turning slightly blue-ish and not breathing while I also held my breath for a small eternity. I was not prepared for that part.

After only two days in the hospital hotel we got to go home and I had 2 weeks leave from work to help out at home. May in Norway also has a lot of public holidays, so we could very much ease into it all.

For summer this year we decided to travel a bit of Norway again. We didn't want to bring a baby on a plane and opted for boat and train. As we've always wanted to go by train between Bergen and Oslo we took a boat from Stavanger to Bergen and spent a couple of nights there. We wanted to visit Flåm by train and added a stop in Myrdal, but that train is all too popular and we were late booking this trip.

We did spend a night up there and got to push the baby stroller around in the mountains in no more than 8° celsius. After a few days in Oslo we took the train back to Stavanger.

We also spent a couple of days in Suldal^[6] and Farsund^[7] visiting family. Sam and I got to spend a day in Dyreparken water park.

I've mainly been adding additional info in parenthesis directly in the text, but I think footnotes might be a cleaner way in some cases. I've been using an asterisk^[1] with a <sup>^[2] element below the paragraph as a hacky footnote system in some of my recent posts. Of course, there is a better way, the footnotes extension for markdown. That lets me insert a [^unique-id] anywhere in the text. I can then reference that tag in the bottom^[3] of the document to add additional information. With the inline_notes extension I can even insert a footnote right in the text if I want to. It looks something like this:

…just as I defenestrated^[defenestrate means throwing someone out the window] the guy.

And it'll render like this: …just as I defenestrated^[4] the guy. Remarkable, which I use to parse markdown and render the HTML, will keep track and add numbered links to the footnotes, with links back to the footnote reference in the text. I find that to be quite neat.

I'm also quite fond of footnote previews I've seen on various sites. Browsing with a computer it is nice to just hover the footnote reference with the mouse and see it immediately. So I added some javascript to do just that. It'll clone the footnote and insert it next to the reference tag and add event listeners for mouse events to show and hide the footnote on hover. I found some code on stackoverflow to calculate text width. That way I can size the box of the footnote previews to be no bigger than needed on small footnotes with a max width for longer notes. I think it looks nice.

While I was there I decided to modernize my scripts a bit:

• Using const and let to declare variables^[5].
• function shorthand, () => {} instead of function() {} which is nice for inlined functions.
• Promises and readystatechange event for document being loaded^[6].

I think all of these features have been supported for several years in all the relevant browsers now. The scripts are just nice to have, and won't break the site if they don't work for whatever reason, so I'm not too worried^[7].

Saturday

I wake up early Saturday morning with pain in the upper right side of my mouth. Pain in general is not great, in the face maybe even less so. I get up, find some painkillers, decide to brush my teeth and use dental floss. I fall asleep again and don't think much about it when I wake up. My hope is probably that I'll be able to clean up well and that will keep any problems at bay. The plan was to find a new dentist for a general checkup after we moved, after the summer vacation. I buy some mouth wash and do a really good job cleaning my teeth in the evening, and the next morning, and the next evening.

Monday

I wake up early again. More pain. So that didn't work. Painkillers. They work. For half a day. The pain is worse now. I need a dentist. I need painkillers. I need netflix. I need my couch. Luckily my mother in law picked up Sam earlier to play with his cousin so I get all that, except the dentist. They don't have an available slot until the next day.

Tuesday

I wake up at 07:20, not sure why, the alarm was set for 07:30. Is this an age thing? Or is it the body anticipating that I need to get up at a given time and the internal clock is fairly good in this case? I take some painkillers, and a shower, get dressed, and walk to the dentist. The weather is great and the dentist is a 15 minutes walk away. Told you I moved to a good place. I get the pleasure of practicing my penmanship by filling out a form with personal and medical history. Not sure why that isn't a digital thing since ipads exists (or my phone). My penmanship sucks and it was not a pleasure, but I'm happy to report that I got through it all.

Dead tooth

Friendly assistant. Dentist chair. Sterile, white room. Pop music playing too loudly. A hard rectangle is put into my mouth which I bite into. Edges cutting into the roof of my mouth. Hard to breath. Gag reflex kicking in. I manage to keep calm and not puke. Bonus points for me.

• Assistant: You did well with that, it's the large kind and I fumbled a bit. Let's see if we got the right area.
• She leaves the room briefly.
• Cue, the dentist.
• Dentist: I'll turn this down a bit.
• She turns down the volume on the radio.
• Dentist: I can see why you are here. You have a dead tooth. And an infection above that.
• Me: uhm
• Dentist: Trine. ("Trine" is a somewhat common Norwegian female name: 10 015 / 2 687 938)
• She extends her arm, I shake it.
• Me: Even. (While I was there, I found out that my name is less common than Trine. 7 803 / 2 737 332)
• Dentist (cheerfully): You need a root canal.
• Me: Yikes. (That was what came out of my mouth at the time, it's not a translation)
• Dentist (still quite cheerful): Don't worry.
• I worry.
• Dentist: Do you play any contact sports?
• Me: No.
• Dentist: Had any accidents? someone hit you?
• Me: Nope, not that I can remember at least.
• Dentist: Weird, the tooth seems whole and fine, it's just dead. And if nothing happened to you I can't say why it's dead, it's usually because of contact sports. I'll have to drill into it, do you want any anesthesia? You won't need it, the tooth is dead, you won't feel a thing.
• Me: Let's try without it then.
• She starts drilling, I can't feel a thing.
• Assistant: Let us know if it's painful at all, and we can always continue with anesthesia.
• Dentist: We'll need it, we have to setup a shield around the tooth, expect a small sting.
• It hurts, luckily the effect is immediate so I can't feel it after a very short while. They rig up a full cover of things over my mouth and put protective eye gear on me.
• Assistant: We use a strong alcohol if you're wondering about that smell, maybe you'd want some in you as well.
• Me: hoo earhy foh a hrink, I hink (It's hard to talk with anything in the mouth, at this point I had half a clinic in there)
• Assistant: Too early for a root canal as well, I suppose.
• I laugh, or try to, at least.
• Dentist: You must have been in a lot of pain. there is a lot in here.
• They continue to drain for 20 minutes, I start to worry about the contents of my head. They chat for a bit, ask me a couple of yes/no questions, and some that requires a detailed response, I can only shrug to those.
• Dentist: Looks empty, I'm putting in something that'll kill any infection and then I'll create a temporary cover for your tooth, and you'll have to come back in for the rest. You'll need some penicillin, we'll fight this thing from the inside and the outside. The cure is for 7 days. You can drink alcohol, that is totally fine, it won't affect the cure, I mean, if you drink at all that is, you can.
• Maybe I look like the type of person who drinks and at the time like I really needed to. She finishes the work.
• Dentist: This session wasn't too bad, was it?
• It wasn't.

Stroll

I got a prescription for a penicillin cure. There is a pharmacy at the other side of the road. I buy the tablets and something to drink. My mouth feels weird after the anesthesia. The "Awake Wellness Water" I bought isn't really doing much for me. I take the path along the coast home. It's warm and peaceful.

The old place

I've lived right outside of Oslo next to a train station and area called Stabekk for the last 8 years. In a fairly old brick building with probably not the greatest air quality or even a balcony. The bathroom was really small and was the place we did our laundry. We didn't have room for a tumble dryer, so there was pretty much always a clothes drying rack in our living room.

The location was great for me and Ingvild, right next to public transport and a bakery. I had a really short commute to work, but we did have to drive Sam to school, it was too far for him to walk. Or really visit any friends on his own, which was sad.

The new place

Ingvild and I have talked a lot about what we wanted in a new place. We've created lists, drawn floor plans, and looked at countless house ads. The new place has:

• a Hallway
• 2 bedrooms
• Another bedroom I use as an office, I'm working fully remote now
• Bathroom with a bathtub and an attached laundry room
• Kitchen with a dining area
• Terrace
• Living room
• Another bathroom with a shower

This ticks of all our boxes, where the most important were 2 bathrooms (queues are no fun), terrace, and an office. On our nice-to-have-list we have a laundry room (we paid to change the floor plan to achieve this), and bathtub. We also really wanted something new-ish as neither one of us is keen on renovating/redecorating.

It is so nice living in a completely new apartment with a lot of space. I can move about without crashing into stuff. Ingvild and I can use the kitchen/bathroom together without crashing into stuff or each other. Everything is new, shiny, and practical.

And for the area. Sam can walk to school, which he did already for 2 weeks, for their after school activities. Hopefully he'll get some friends nearby. There is a mall, restaurants and convenience stores within walking distance. We're also within walking distance to a train station with regional and local trains. It is nice to walk 10 minutes, get on the train, and jump off in either Kristiansand or Oslo, or any of the places between (like Kongsberg). The very same train also stops at Lysaker, 5 minutes walk from the Pexip office in Oslo. With an 8 hour train ride that won't be a frequent commute, but it's a viable option for when I need to go there. I'm adjusting to working remotely, but at least the commute to the home office is unbeatable.

The actual move

There ended up being 3 parts to this process. At first we had the takeover, which was at June 1st. I filled a van with our wardrobe, forcing us to keep our clothes in suitcases for a couple of weeks. I also had 8 boxes filled with random none-essential stuff that we want to keep and a bunch of other stuff. I drove by myself on May 31st, got the apartment the next morning, and had my brother Adrian help unload the van in the evening. I headed back to Oslo the next day.

Ingvild's parents rented a van in Stavanger and drove to Oslo the 16th of June. We planned to fill that with everything we had and drive to Stavanger on the 18th. On the 17th we went to Ingvild's graduation ceremony with her parents. Ingvild and I had been filling boxes in preparation of this move day, and thought we were mostly done. Turned out we needed an additional 15 boxes to get most of everything packed. We spent 8 hours on Friday (14:30-23:00) and 6.5 hours on Saturday (06:00-12:30) before we were ready to drive (around 7 hours). With the help of additional family and some friends we emptied the van in 40 minutes^[1] Saturday evening and spent our first night in the apartment. Some of them also helped us assemble the beds while we got stuff unloaded to mostly the correct spot.

We had to leave some stuff behind because we were out of room in the van and our car. So the third part was Ingvild and I renting a car trailer and driving to Oslo to get it all. I really wish I rented a van instead, like I did the first time and Ingvild's parents did for the second run. For one thing there is a max speed limit at 80km/h when driving with a trailer, which I'd forgotten completely about. Our car is really not powerful enough for a trailer so acceleration was horrible. But it turned out to be a fruitful trip. We bought some chairs in Drammen and I bought some acuostic panels for my home office. We filled the trailer in a couple of hours and completely emptied the apartment. Ingvild and I went out for a dinner on June 25th to celebrate her birthday at Nodee sky, which was really nice.

Stuff

I knew that it would be more work and more things than we anticipated. Yet I was surprised about just how true that turned out to be. We sold a bunch of stuff and gave away more. Still, just so much stuff. And we need more, at least lamps and curtains. Hoping for at least another 8 years before I have to consider moving.

They are also my favorite books of recent memory. I really like his writing style, the positive vibes, his nerdy humour, and his attention to detail most sci-fi authors seem to gloss over. I read The Martian years ago and has also re-read that as I enjoyed it so much. A hacker news comment (some mild spoilers in the replies) got me to pick up Project Hail Mary and after reading that I somewhat randomly^[1] came across Artemis at the library and read that.

The Martian

Summary: In 2035 a manned mission to Mars for a month long stay goes wrong. They have to evacuate and astronaut Mark doesn't make the escape rocket. Using his botanist and engineering skills he manages to survive, establish communication with earth, and attempt an escape.

My thoughts: This book is mostly written as journal entries by Mark himself. He documents what he has been up to and how that went. Despite this style, that you know he has written the entry, it is still quite exciting to follow the events as they unfold. The book jumps between his part and what happens on earth once they start discovering that he is in fact alive and stuck on Mars. How they troubleshoot his problems locally to help him out and how they plan to try and save him. Both parts are good, but to me the journal part is usually more entertaining. I doubt it would have worked as well without breaking it up though.

Artemis

Summary: Following Jazz, a porter and part-time-smuggler, trying to survive on the expensive and only city on the moon. She gets an offer that is too good to refuse and ends up in a conspiracy to control the oxygen flow to the city.

My thoughts: I love the description of how the city works and the economics of this world. The parts about moon tourism and how expensive and hard everything would be when you have limited resources. I don't really like the characters though. Jazz and the local bad guys/business people doesn't seem to care about anything other than earning money. The local government, guilds, and police are just there as minor hassles for Jazz to deal with. The major threat is not really present in the moon city. While the action is exciting and Jazz vs. the moon surface is great I do struggle a bit to care about any of it. It redeems itself a bit towards the end of the book where it turns out the locals do care, after all.

Project Hail Mary

Summary: Ryland Grace awakes from a coma with no memory and 2 dead companions on a space ship pretty far from earth. He is on a mission to save the Sun from a star eating organism by exploring the star system where they think the organism originated. As the mission progresses he starts remembering the events leading up to the mission and the story swaps between ongoing events and what happened before launch.

My thoughts: This was fun. I was about to claim that Ryland is a bit of a Mary Sue, but when reading that page I'm not sure I had the definition correct, or that there even is a definition. Anyways, he seems to always immediately know what to do and how to do it. In the before-launch-days he was a high school teacher and therefore knows a lot about many different scientific fields. But there is some disconnect between what he was and who we follow on this mission. I really don't want to say much more and would recommend to keep away from spoilers. I knew a tiny bit before I started reading and was a bit distracted until I caught up to that event in the story.

Common themes

Humans cooperate: In all of these books, humanity itself, or just a smaller section, come together and easily cooperate without any problems. I find that refreshing when there are so many Battle Royal stories trying to pit humans against each other. All trying to prove that humans will stop at nothing to save just themselves. Usually those stories have a setup to provoke that behavior and that is not present in these books. It's humanity saving a single human (The Martian). All the humans on the Moon protecting their way of life (Artemis). Humanity saving the solar system (Project Hail Mary).

Human versus environment: Most of the action comes from the protagonist struggling with equipment, circumstances, and the physics of the environment. This is where Andy Weir's attention to detail shines, as he'll point out to the reader what makes it all problematic before letting the character have a go at solving it. I never find any of this boring, usually both fun and funny. Artemis has a lot of this as well, but there are more characters present so there is also some Character vs. Character.

It's never easy: When a lot of things can go wrong they tend to. Despite all the positivity in these books the struggle is real. Harsh environments and equipment used in ways they maybe haven't been designed for. All of this makes it exciting to find out how the protagonist will overcome this new problem.

Near future Sci-Fi: His stories are set in the close future (within 100 years) and he usually sticks to technology we are familiar with. You get an induced coma instead of suspended animation (Project Hail Mary). There is never a "magic" technical solution to any problem that I can think of. While imaging these magical solutions are a lot of fun I really like the situations that comes up with "given this problem, how do we solve that with what we have".

At some point I broke the markdown parsing for image files (probably changed parser?). To fix that I needed to escape underscores (ie. sed 's/_/\\_/') as underscores are used to italicize text in markdown. So I did a search and replace Sun Jan 20 17:44:05 2019 +0100 and saved my changes. The problem with that was that I didn't need to escape the strings inside HTML, like URI's to audio and video files. In fact I shouldn't have, because now my links there contained the escape characters, linking to non-existent files. I just discovered that.

Posters

While I was doing that I also added posters to the video elements. Poster being a place holder image the browser can load inside the player while waiting for the download. To get a poster I found a nifty ffmpeg command to grab the first frame from an mp4 file. The loop will run through every path find locates using the glob *.mp4.

#!/bin/bash

for file in $(find '_/' -name "*.mp4")
do
    echo $file
    ffmpeg -i $file -vf "scale=iw*sar:ih,setsar=1" -vframes 1 ${file%%.mp4}.png
done

Preload metadata

I had to look up the attribute for poster and discovered at the same time that preload should be changed as well. I had it set to none but think metadata might be better as that does give some indication on load state as well as how long the clip is.

The default value is different for each browser. The spec advises it to be set to metadata. ― mdn, <video>

Audio posts

• Fine day
• WZ
• Warm Echo

Video posts

• Noroff 3DDA
• 206
• Trustbuddy
• Fume tests

Auto formatting

I'm still having some trouble with this since prettier will sometimes try to escape for me. Wondering if the overall solution is to not use any of markdown's special characters in my filenames. I do however like using underscores to substitute space in links as the space escape character looks horrible in URI's, like%20this.

Maybe the form didn't work properly? I tried sending a couple of test emails to myself and those got through at least. Maybe the service had some aggressive spam filtering enabled for me? It at least seems to require you to click on a "I'm not a robot" check box.

More likely this site is just an unnoticed corner of the web that will never be discovered beyond the few friends I send links to.

This is how it looked and it might just be the placeholder text I used, but it does look quite messy as well. I tried to make it tie into the post, somehow, but it also looks a bit like I'm begging for feedback. So that didn't work.

While removing that I also found some other things to tweak.

Other changes

I changed the date format to a date and time format beneath the title of the posts and removed my name. I'm the only writer on this site and that is indicated in the footer.

I adjusted the font and margin styles some. I wanted fewer fonts to fall back to, making for a more consistent look on different devices. Hopefully I didn't cut too many, as the sans-serif is a bit of a wild card.

Meta data for updated posts. I thought I had at least a concept of last change, but must have removed that at one point. Probably when changing how I built this site. I've created a changelog format I can use like when I forgot to add a TV show.

Markdown and Code blocks

I'm building this site using metalsmith, a system to create static websites using javascript. I have changed to using the CLI version, so that post is a bit out of date, as well. Anyways, this is a plugins based system relying heavily on user space plugins. Software created and maintained by individuals. The problem with that is how people will only maintain these things as long as they use them and they either stop or just doesn't use it that often. I'm also guilty of that.

The problem is that I might need a new feature or bugfix which is upgraded in a dependency of a plugin, but the plugin itself is not updated and doesn't use the latest version. Options might have changed in external libraries and this might also not be forwarded correctly by the plugin. This leaves me with a couple of options.

• Fork the plugin and make my changes. I can then try to submit those changes to the original author and/or just use my fork.
• Inline the plugin in my codebase, do those changes and refer to that.
• Look at what I actually need to solve and create my own plugin. Usually these plugins are only wrappers to call other javascript libraries and I can use those dependencies directly. The benefit of this is that it makes it a lot clearer what my actual dependencies are.

I've done a bit of all up until now. I haven't submitted any of my own plugins to the ecosystem though.

This time I found it easiest to create my own plugin to call Remarkable and highlight.js directly instead of two plugins that didn't want to cooperate properly and used outdated versions of those libraries. I think that fixed a couple of weird things I've seen with code blocks on this site.

I might have watched even more than what I list here, but if it wasn't on Netflix I would have to remember it (or locate view history for other services). And I don't really remember what I watched one year ago. I also know that I've watched a lot of movies, but usually from other sources than Netflix as I never seem to find movies I want to watch there. And there would probably be too many for me to summarize anyways, so I'm focusing mainly on TV serials here.

The services

Netflix is the one service I'm consistently willing to pay for. They are actually quite decent on movies for kids, so in addition to my son watching it for various kids shows, it is also were we'll find family movies.

I also have Viaplay through my actual TV service which is were I'll usually watch new-ish movies. Since November I've had HBO Max as they sold it for a life time 50%-off kind of deal. As long as I keep watching a movie a month it'll be worth it to me.

In December my TV supplier lost a deal with Norwegian channel TV2. As we were in the middle of Lego Masters at the time I found myself forced to pay for their service, TV2 Play, for a month as well. When signing up for that I chose the "no commercials" package for a slightly higher price. The first thing I got to see when watching Lego Masters was a short splash of "this show is sponsored by". I did feel slightly betrayed by that and canceled immediately (we got to complete Lego Masters).

Anyways…

On Netflix

The office (US): A sitcom focused on everyday shenanigans at an office for a paper supplier with a dysfunctional boss. I came across an article about office archetypes. Having seen small clips and memes from the show before the article spurred me on to dive into it and I ended up watching 6 out of 9 seasons. It's fun to discover the origins of tons of internet humor and not hard to understand why this show is still being referenced. That said, after 6 seasons I didn't really feel any urge to continue watching. I do still want to see the UK version though, but that is not available on any streaming service as far as I can tell.

Love, Death, Robots: Volume 2: Short animation movies with fantasy and/or sci-fi settings. This volume was smaller than the first one, but the overall quality was better for me (the films might have been longer as well, not sure). I really like these bite size stories with unique styles. The animations are usually stunning and was something I sometimes dreamed of being able to create. I still do actually, but have mostly put my animation days behind me.

Ragnarok: A modern take on retelling the end-of-the-world story from Norse mythology. This was the second season. I've been watching the Norwegian version, but there is an English version. Not dubbed, but filmed at the same time. I want to excuse this as being good considering it is a Norwegian thing, but I did actually enjoy this. Partly because Norse mythology and the characters are fascinating. Partly because the actors make me root for and/or hate them. Partly because it looks cinematic with nice settings and visual effects. I also enjoy the trend of Netflix producing shows in different countries.

Lupin: The French gentleman thief of which I was not aware being a thing at all. They drag this character into the modern age by having the main guy being a huge fan of the books, mimicking the stories, and somehow pulling it off. I really liked this show. The action is fast paced. The (illegal) operations are smart and fun. You root for the bad guy, because there are even worse guys. I watched the French version as I believe the English one was dubbed.

Alice in Borderland: A Japanese show based on a manga loosely based on Alice in Wonderland (mostly character names and use of playing cards). A group of friends is somehow transported to an alternate reality Tokyo where they have to compete in games designed to kill them. It is a page turner of a show, but somewhat gruesome. I'm annoyed about an unfair setup in one of the games, poor use of physics in another, and how no one saw the (to me) obvious solution in the final game.

Final Space: Space prisoner Gary Goodspeed accidentally saves the universe. This was really fun at times, yet dull at others. I sort of imagine a different art style might have helped, because I kept thinking of Futurama. I only watched 1 season out of 2 at the time, and I believe there is a third season now.

Nailed It: Amateur bakers compete in replicating fancy baked goods in a short time with often hilarious results. They are set up to fail and aware of that so no seems to be offended. Most participants probably learn something and the one who fails the least takes home a cash prize. After having seen a handful of episodes it does become somewhat repetitive, but I find it totally worth it to watch a couple of episodes.

Sexy Beasts: People dress up in special effects makeup to get to know each other without the focus on how they look. Not sure why I started watching this, but it was really fun for like three episodes. And then I got tired of it. There is this one scene where the woman hints on it being cold outside, the guy takes of his jacket, drops it on the floor, and show of his muscles. That was hilarious.

Tattoo Redo: People get their tattoo mistakes covered by a huge, but nicer tattoo. On somewhat of a "reality show" streak Netflix continued recommending such shows for me, hence these entries. If you enjoy people watching, you'll like this. It is part hilarious and part amazing. A schtick of the show is that the participants doesn't get to chose their own tattoo, but whomever brought them there does. This sets up a bit of tension, but luckily that never becomes the main focus.

Baking Impossible: Teams composed of an engineer and a baker compete to create engineered baked goods. Stuff like robots, bridges, Rube Goldberg machines, and such, made from edible parts. These are then stress tested before being judged on design and taste. The combination of everything makes this really fun as far as "reality" shows go.

Squid Game: A Korean show that seems to have hit it big time last year. Poor people are invited to play children's games for a grand cash prize or be killed if they lose. Part of the online discussions I've read has been on how fair this was for the contestants. They were told they would be eliminated, but it was not clear that eliminated meant death. Anyways, another exciting watch, but also somewhat gruesome. As with Alice in Borderland this ends up putting contestants up against each other where it might have been better to cooperate. It's like the creators of the shows construct a straw man argument to then visually tear it down. Look how selfish people are. They might be right, of course. As opposed to Alice in Borderland, this seems plausible to actually pull off. Maybe not for as many years as they imply this has been happening, though.

On HBO Max

Made for Love: A woman gets a chip implant allowing her husband to monitor everything she sees, hears, and says. It's the ultimate in controlling-spouse-technology. It is also technology that probably very few people would actually want to exist. Luckily, it doesn't, as far as I know. In the show this is presented as technology allowing for 2 people to deeply connect and avoid miscommunication. Not sure it would actually work. The show feels like a Black Mirror episode being explored more deeply. As I did like Black Mirror, I also liked this, and now I want more Black Mirror. It is part funny, part absurd, and part creepy.

On TV2 Play

Lego Masters: Teams of 2 compete to create spectacular Lego creations. We happened to start watching this with Sam one Friday evening and it was compelling enough to keep watching. Lego's are quite versatile as a building material and the sculptures and scenes they create are truly stunning at times. You also end up getting to know and root for the various contestants, as is usually the case in these competitions.

Norges Nye Megahit: Norwegian celebrities create a new song each week, trying to make it a new hit. I hoped for more insight into how they created the songs, but they mostly focus on the competition part of it. And the competition part seems to be more of which one of these celebrities gathered most fans to watch them. They did create quite a few fun and catchy songs that also Sam could sing along to. I did not however, feel like the proudest parent when he started singing one of the "drinking" songs in public.

In conclusion

Doing this summary I'm quite surprised to see the amount of "reality" shows I've watched. I mean, they are mostly competitions of some sort, but still. I've usually tried to distance myself from that whole category of TV, with a few exceptions over the years. Like RuPaul's Drag Race, which is just crazy (after a couple of seasons you feel like you've seen it all though).

What is it

It's an adventure game without fighting, a platformer with imprecise controls, and a bird simulator with few complaints. There is a story about gods that is losing connection with the human world and a void like creature to fill that space. You control a shape shifter that can transform to a bird at will, but only when out in the open. Some text sends you out on a spiritual pilgrimage and for everywhere you end up going is indoors and you can't fly. There is some platforming, and you stand on some squares and push a button at times.

My turn to fly

At the moment you lift off the ground a beat and melody starts playing on top of the ambient music. It's super nice. There are floating islands. Only once do you actually need to fly through some structures to solve a bit of the game. And I find that to be such a shame. Flying in this game feels good, and when shifting to human form you can dive through the clouds at speed. And the music is sort of nice. But it is threated like a loading screen to the next section. Before you know it the music abruptly changes or disappears as you enter a new area. And you have to land, wait for an actual loading screen, and run around indoors.

What it could be

At it simplest it could just have been an exploration game. You just go flying between the areas. The music should just be a playlist of the nice songs, no need to alter the mood too much. It could be a game about taking great pictures, maybe some collectibles. That would be my pitch if you weren't changing it too much.

Then the epic sceneries from the temples could have been corners of the land or something. And the indoor temple space could have been more islands in the sky.

But I feel like there is more to do with movement. Say you could grind on some rails on the island to build momentum, then transform to a bird, hit some rings or something for speed ups. There could be timed races and tricks to do for style points, as well as hitting targets precisely. Occasionally I daydream about creating my own game, and this sounds like a game I would very much like to play. Now, if I get around to actually make something is rather more doubtful. But it is nice to dream.

Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

I had just returned from a trip to Edinburgh. The virus from Asia had already arrived in southern Europe. Italy had travel restrictions, they got it bad, but I can't remember any official guidelines discouraging travel in general. Some people, I'm sure, chose not to travel. We used a lot of hand sanitizer on that trip, but other than that everything seemed normal.

Then it hit us here in Norway, in March 2020. Quite exactly 1 year and 2 months ago today. I mean, the virus was probably here already by then, but that is when the government decided to close everything down. In the start we all had to isolate, keep at home, only leave the house for the bare essentials. People panicked and bought toilet paper. The kindergarten closed.

This lasted for a month and things slowly returned to normal. I could return to the office. The kindergarten opened, but with restrictions. Good hygiene and social distancing was encouraged. People were optimistic, we'd pulled through it. Or so we thought. While it was more open, social distancing was / and is encouraged. Face masks became a requirement where social distancing was hard to keep. Hand sanitizer got available at the entrance of every store.

Traveling to Europe did open, but a lot of people, my family included, vacationed in Norway. We had a nice road trip going to Hafjell (Hunderfossen family park), Lom, Lærdalsøyri, Voss, Bergen, and Stavanger. Ingvild and I got to go to a wedding in Stavanger. They'd planned to have it in Romania, but for obvious reasons that got cancelled.

Sam started school with restrictions. For the most part I think that was a good thing and made for a mild introduction to school for Sam. The teachers had to follow up the class all the time, and was / still is probably exhausting for the teachers. But comforting for me as a parent.

And then it hit us again. The virus was at large. It had mutated and the variants got named by where they were discovered. The UK variant, the Danish, and probably a lot more I can't remember (was there a California one?).

Oslo closed down in November. We had to start tracking who was in the office, and those who could should work from home. If only we could pull through November, we could celebrate a normal Christmas, or so we were told. We didn't really celebrate christmas like normal. It was nice, my uncle Rolf and his wife Sunita visited, and with my father, his wife Aunchana and their son Daniel (my 33 year younger brother) we celebrated christmas. But it didn't feel quite like normal.

Tired

We decided to buy an apartment in Stavanger. I'm excited about moving there and the project. It looks really nice and is in an area right between Stavanger and Sandnes with good and frequent bus and train connections. It will be done by next summer, hopefully.

Unfortunately it has taken them ages to follow up on our wanted changes and additions. They don't respond unless I prod them. We're spending a lot of money. We have to move a some point (I hate the physical part of moving). This is a huge thing for us, but we're only 1 of 98 customers. That leaves me thinking a lot about something I can't do anything about, other than wait.

I got into some arguments at work about how we should shape our code base. The arguments are mostly good to have, as the team is bigger it is required that we're all pulling in the same direction. Hopefully it left the code base in a better shape than me, who also experienced a lot of guilt over maintaining the old code base at the same time, splitting my priorities.

And then it is the self imposed and sometimes real restrictions on going places, doing things, experience things. I'm tired. The recent xkcd resonated with me. Sometime it feels like we haven't left March 2020. I'm still waiting for a vaccine, and probably won't get it until after summer, so in my case I need an extended edition of that comic.

2019

I'm not sure why I never published the post on 2019. It is possible I had more I wanted to write, but since I can't remember what that would be I might as well post it now.

Mode

Most of this year at work I've spent time putting a project into maintenance mode. Meaning it won't see any new features, just the occasional bug fix and such. I've spent many years on the project. Putting it into maintenance mode is a bit sad, but it also did a lot of good things for the code base. And I've learned a thing or two about maintainable code. Learnings I hope to take with me into the future.

This site is sort of in maintenance, I occasionally write something, but I'm mostly just keeping it running. And it doesn't take much, luckily. I've managed to not change tech stack for this page for quite a long time now. Sort of an achievement for me.

Håvard suddenly had a flurry of posts on his website, and that prompted me to dust of the good old iameven.com folder.

Tweaks

I went down the post list and started reading. I enjoy that, it is why I keep writing here. Doing that I discovered quite a few spelling mistakes and code block formatting errors. So I fixed those. I guess there are more, since I didn't go through everything, but small fixes help.

I discovered that some of my dependencies to build this page needed upgrades. And Prettier was for some reason not doing its thing to my HTML. So I fixed that as well. Inspect source for pretty printed HTML. One down side is that my inlined CSS takes up a huge vertical block now. But other than that it is very readable I find.

IO

February 2019 I stated some goals for my self. I did participate in that relay race, and did OK. I planned to that this year as well, but, oh well.

I completed goal number 1 from that list. In April, this year. But I got there, in like 60 weeks or so. Maybe it is dangerous to state your goals if you want to reach them. At the same time, quite a lot ended up happening that year at work (it's always easy to find excuses).

I'm still going strong on this now, even though I haven't made any progress on that hand stand. And my weight has been somewhat in flux since before this summer. But I'm running, mostly every week, some times more than once a week (pat on own back).

I guess I'm at step 3 now, at the very least I have some excess weight to lose, I'll maybe not be so strict about a time line and partial goals. I still can't do a pull up. Guess I'll just die if I end up hanging by the edge of a cliff.

School kid

My kid, Sam, started school this year. That is sort of a big deal. It's a drag getting him to do his home work, I get it, but once we actually sit down with it he is very driven and eager to do his best.

He got slightly sick and had to stay home for a week due to the Covid guidelines (He did not have Covid). He told us that he should probably stay at home for at least 50 days. But once he got back to school the following week he again seemed very eager about it.

Reading back on my posts on this site I haven't written much about him. I didn't even announce his birth in 2014. On one side I've been really conscious about exposing him on the Internet. On the other, I might have taken that a bit to far. I want to celebrate him and I want to remember the good times. Maybe I'll do better. Maybe I'll find a balance.

Start of year

I started strongly and announced I would blog more frequently. Spoiler alert: after a short while I failed that, hence this post. I mention the company merger that happened at the start of the year. That is actually still a bit of an ongoing process, but we're getting there. I boldly announce how easy it is to lose weight. Spoiler alert: I failed at that as well. At least I'm trendy and got dark mode enabled on this site.

Travels

Looking back at a year I'm usually positively surprised by the amount of travel I get to do. We had a hackaton with the company at Hafjell in February. Not that I did see much of the outside world then. The company Kick-off was in April, we held it in Oslo and I got to be a bit of a tourist in my own town. We stayed at Scandic Edderkoppen, which is a nice hotel. After easter I joined a couple of colleagues to Reading outside London to sync up with the UK team. The same day I got back from London I went with the family to Stavanger for my sisters christian confirmation. A couple of days later in May, we took a family trip to Copenhagen with DFDS. We spent a whole day in Tivoli which was a lot of fun.

For summer vacation in July we went on a road trip. This is something we've ended up doing the last couple of years as we get to experience a lot of things in a short span of time. This time we traveled to Farsund to stay at my mothers cabin for several days. On the way there we stopped in Bø in Telemark to visit Sommerland, an outside water park in Norway. After Farsund we went to Kristiansand for a couple of days and got a full day in Dyreparken, a zoo-, theme- and amusement park. We took a ferry to Denmark and Søderomme were we got to stay with one of my wife's friends. A full day was spent in Legoland, and another almost full day in Givskud zoo, a drive through zoo. After that we went to Stavanger for a week. All in all a great summer outing with amazingly good weather.

In August I went to Sørskår in Rogaland for a yearly cabin gathering with friends. It was our eight year doing that. We play a ton of board games, drink our fair share of alcohol, and joke around. The remarkable thing this year was the amount of flies at the cabin.

In September I had another work trip, this time to Malaga in Spain for an engineering summit. We got to discuss what is important for us as an engineering team to solve. And then party in beautiful Malaga at night.

We had two more trips to Stavanger. One in October for a friends birthday party. And as have become tradition, we celebrated Christmas with my mother and siblings.

Learnings

I did not invest a lot of time in new technologies last year, but through work I got more responsibility for the hiring process. Learning to know a person and their abilities in a couple of hours (in a screening, a home work assignment and pair programming session) and judge their capability is hard. During the year I found, tweaked and wrote a bunch of questions to try and find how capable people are. I'm still tweaking that as I go. I have learned a lot about how to take and hold control in the interview, and not let the candidate ramble on about irrelevant stuff. I'm also pretty sure I'm more confident doing that now, compared to what I used to be.

Entertainment

I read The Other Kind of Life in January, which is an entertaining mystery novel set in near future with AI technology comparable to our current level AI, and implications of that. It is written in present tense, which takes some getting used to, but other than that I really enjoyed it. Maybe I just enjoy Shamus' writing, as it is one of few blogs I follow closely these days.

After that I wanted to read through a small collection of dead tree books I had gathering dust. I started on A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick, but just couldn't get into it. Partly because of the inferior (to me) reading experience of the physical book, but most likely also because it is not a very approachable story. And that killed my reading joy, and that small stack of books is still collecting dust.

I bought a Nintendo Switch in June. I love this console. It being designed around portability means everything works around it being put into suspend at any time. This makes it easy to pick up at any time for a short amount of play. For longer sessions, just hook it up to the TV.

I got Super Smash Bros included on the console. It is sort of why I bought it, since we kept playing small tournaments around lunch time at work. It is stupid fun to play several people in front of a TV. Later I bought Zelda - Breath of the Wild. That is the Zelda game I feel Ocarina of Time promised to be (but couldn't technically deliver). Great game play, pushing you to explore stunning vistas and atmospheric ruins. A somewhat cheesy story, but great lore. Fun enough missions, dungeons and shrines. But the main driver is just exploring the lands.

A city of fun and danger

In this game there is only one city left in the world that prosper, as there has been a global blackout. The Agency goes in to investigate but is shot down when approaching and everyone is killed. Luckily the Agency can restore a person from DNA, which is nifty, letting you go in to "investigate" what is happening in the city. Investigate in the previous sentence means blow shit up, essentially. TerraNova, this game's Evil corp, is using a fictional resource called Chimera for bad shit, and exploiting the islands citizens as slave labor to mine Chimera. It's highly explosive which comes to your advantage when turning it on the enemy.

As in the first game there are three factions, though they are all within the same company here. Taking them out makes the other parts of the game easier as you remove TerraNova's security-, logistics- and industry division. The difficulty seems to ramp up by missions done, so it doesn't matter too much which way you try to go about this. There are however some more heavily armed units in the security faction.

Game play

Since the agent you controlled was rebuilt you have to build up every skill from scratch, something that is not the case when you die during game play. The skills are:

• Agility: jump height and speed
• Strength: How far you can fling enemies
• Firearms: accuracy, hit damage
• Explosives: size/power thereof
• Driving: I actually don't know, and I notice I don't care too much.

3 of these you upgrade by doing them, but agility is only improved by collecting orbs or doing races, and driving by jumping through stunt rings and completing races. The orbs and other indicators are explained in game as showing up due to augmented reality, which is sort of cool, but also not necessary. It's by far not the least realistic thing in this world. And who needs realism? I'd much rather have automatic rocket launchers, which this game has. Or the weapon called Oblivion which creates a small black hole to suck enemies into before it blows up doing massive damage.

When upgrading a skill some new feature will also be unlocked, like double jumping or dashing in-air. This makes it very fun to move around in the city. The balance between making you feel powerful while still presenting a challenge is really well done.

My take

It truly is fun, maybe partly for the nostalgia factor, but also explosions. It never feels dull to me. I decided to play through on Super Agent difficulty, which made it challenging at times. The missions are quite hard and there are many enemies around you at most times. The levels are interesting, but somewhat hard to navigate at times. The enemies are varied and you need different techniques and firepower to take them out.

It looks really nice. The world is colorful, bright at day, and neon lit by night. Håvard convinced me to get a 4K monitor and my old PC monitor really needed a replacement by now. The old one had DVI and VGA inputs only, for god's sake. Not sure if its good looks are thanks to the monitor, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

The music and sound effects can be summed up with the word "bass".

My problems with it

The aim button doesn't always register clicks for me, which made me lose some fights.

Same with the map button, but that isn't as critical.

The draw distance for Orbs is quite short, so you can't scout for them, best found by sound.

There are a lot of blue and green neon lights, which makes orbs harder to find. I understand it for the secret orbs which are blue, that you would want to misdirect the player a bit, but for the agility orbs it is only annoying. Yet again, orbs are easiest to locate by sound.

The areas that aren't boss areas are similar. It's either shanty town or high rise block districts. I could swear I had visited some places by their look, but there were tons of agility orbs for me to pick up, which I would have done already. It's either that or the design is such that new orbs will be placed after you've visited an area (putting on tinfoil hat).

There are a lot of other enemies in boss fights. I decided to ignore them most of the time, but indicators were flashing left and right. I think the boss fights could have been more interesting than just adding goons. They ended up being the almost same type of mech most of the time with some unique weapons and attack patterns.

The story could have been different. It's as straight as it gets, there are enemies which are caricature evil, and then they die. There is apparently some unknown enemy behind this enemy, but meh, I guess. When Håvard and I played through we were questioning if we were the baddies. You come into this peaceful island society and start blowing shit up like a terrorist. We expected a twist in the end that said that you are a bad guy and has been brainwashed into believing you are doing good. Since I started thinking about it I got disappointed when this wasn't the case. I probably shouldn't blame the game for not telling my story, but what I got served was just so, meh.

When taking out the final bad guy (or woman), they blow off the top of the tower, so you can never get to the highest point again. That is slightly disappointing.

I don't know why I should drive cars in this game as it doesn't do much for me, but the narrator is nagging you about doing it.

The narrator is also quite repetitive, I'm not sure how many times I was told that I could go to supply points to get more ammo. It's probably helpful for new players to get reminders, but this could maybe have been reduced a bit if they just looked at the difficulty level I decided to play at. They will also tell you that you got much needed skill points after having maxed out the skill.

The game world doesn't reflect the changes enough. The buildings you've been at are blown up and all that, they tell you that backup enforcers and air support is removed after taking out a boss, yet when you go to the next one there are plenty of reinforcements and drones in the air. Nothing in the game world or how the narrator talks to you changes much after you take out the final boss.

Criticizing critiques

I looked briefly at reviews of the game and a common pattern among them looked to be that it is too much like the original and has a design that is dated by 12 years. Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention to what has happened in gaming, but I really can't say what is so much more intuitive in new games. I could pretty much do everything I expected to do at the times I expected to do them. The controls feel really good (except when they don't register a click of course) and the movement in game is liberating (like it was in the original). I, for one, am happy about a sequel being more of the same idea with basically new weapons and enemy types, a new setting and some designs pushed further than the last time. I just have too much fun navigating this city to notice if something is dated.