What I was up to

An overview of stuff I was working on or other stuff that kept me occupied in September 2021. Inspired by the movement of /now pages.

This month mostly was a return to normal after about month of seeing parents and in-laws again, and travelling to three countries during that time. Among other things, we stayed in the Alsace region in France, which is beautiful and quaint (being one of the main inspirations for the pseudo-europeans settings of some Studio Ghibli movies).

colmar — The town of Colmar, centre of the Alsace region, and having been part of both Germany and France in the last 100 years. It's very charming.

At Boords we’re finishing off some big features and preparing for some other big things for in the next half year or so, it’s exciting. Part of this involves taking a look at our CSS, and I’ve been looking at Tailwind as a natural evolution of Boord’s current Tachyons-based approach³. It’s exciting.

On the side, I’ve been spending more time on the subject of Sound Design for film and games. I’m serious about this. I’m following a course and otherwise studying, and I’m practicing by creating sounds myself. It’s a lot of fun.

Entertainment

We’ve got about two months of stuff to catch up on here, so let’s get to it!

We started watching Star Wars: Rebels, and we’ve been enjoying the heck out of it. We’re happy we gave it a shot. It’s not as polished as any full-blown movie, but it’s always nice to see shows going a bit deeper on some of the Star Wars lore and explore other types of stories than “there is another death star-like thing”. Plus, the characters are cool.

The final season of Brooklyn 99 was released, and although it was a good one, it really leaves behind a bit of a hole. It was one of those good shows. Lightning in a bottle.

Then there’s What We Do In The Shadows. It’s great. We were big fans of the movie, and the series has been a delight as well. Everyone of the main actors is perfect and the show is generally just hilarious.

What We Do In The Shadows TV cast — Part of the cast of What We Do In The Shadows. They're all great. Yes, it has Matt Berry in it.

We also enjoyed watched Amphibia’s third season, Ted Lasso’s 2nd season (which is still really good and more wholesome).

Books

During my time off I’ve been reading the last two Becky chambers books, The Galaxy, and the Ground Within — which is a sweet and rich end to the Wayfarers series — and A Psalm for the Wild-Built, which is among other things a nice reflection on the shortcomings of modern life through the lens of a sci-fi story (I don’t like describing books). It’s in a Solarpunk ², setting, which also makes it a bit rare. Anyway, this one resonated strongly with me, and I’m looking forward to part two.

Then finally, we’ve been listening to audiobook of The Hobbit, as read by Andy Serkis. It’s very well narrated, and as someone who’s only seen the movies, it’s also nice to see how the book and movies differ.

Whereas Cyberpunk is very pessimistic and usually dystopian, Solarpunk is kind of the opposite. In many ways it tries to imagine a future in which society has overcome many of the problems in Cyberpunk: solar and other renewable power sources, green cities and settlements, post-scarcity, and those sorts of things.↩