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Saturday was Christmas and the kids had a wonderful time. They’d been getting progressively more excited as the day approached and on the morning itself were almost beside themselves. I set up my phone to record the opening of the presents but pressed the wrong button somehow and ended up not recording anything which was a huge disappointment.
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What could have been a huge disappointment was the present I bought for Emma. She’d said that she wanted a clothes wardrobe for one of her dolls and I was pleasantly surprised how inexpensive it was when I ordered it earlier in the month. I should have known better. As it was, it wasn’t until she opened it that I realised why: the clothes are all sold separately. What saved the day was a generous collection of presents that had arrived two days earlier from a friend of Eri’s who lives in Australia. That included an excellent Lego Friends set that Emma was immediately excited to open and build and which distracted her from the fact the wardrobe is all but useless at the moment.
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The present I was most looking forward to was Super Mario Maker 2 on the Switch. On paper, it sounds like the ideal game for John. He started creating his own Mario levels out of Duplo a couple of months back so what better game than one in which you create your own Mario levels? On the other hand, he is four years old and perhaps not quite ready to be a platforming level designer. So far, it’s looking like the latter was the correct expectation but then Luigi’s Mansion 3 seemed like a complete dud when I bought it for Christmas last year and it turned into one of his favourite games after he’d watched me play it a few times. Maybe the same will be true here.
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I also finally got my act together and/or caved due to my friend Adrien’s yearslong peer pressure campaign and reserved a KFC Christmas lunch for pickup on the day. The barbeque chicken wasn’t bad and the ordinary KFC food was what you’d expect. Definitely didn’t feel worth the ¥5,000 or so it cost but fun to have done once.
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I suppose I shouldn’t be so so sure it will be the only time I’ll do it. At this point, I’m still hopeful that we’ll be in Australia for Christmas next year but who knows? I thought we’d be there this year and that turned out not to be the case.
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I’m still watching The Beatles: Get Back but have already found the perfect companion video on YouTube: Elliott Roberts’ ‘How “The Beatles: Get Back” reshapes history’. Roberts is a gigantic Beatles fan and he does an excellent job explaining over 40 minutes why the movie is so important.
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I also squeezed in some time to watch The Matrix: Resurrections. Overall, I was disappointed. David Chen’s reaction video does a better job than I can of explaining what makes the movie a letdown. And he does it in 11 minutes! A veritable blink of an eye!
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I didn’t feel like I got much programming done. Some of that was because I spent time thinking about implementing a Lisp in one of Go, Rust or Swift. In the end, I don’t think any have broad enough support for dynamic programming to support runtime library loading and function calling. So all of that time was spent mostly for nought although I do better understand the various approaches to generic programming after reading this great blog post by Tristan Hume.
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No Beatles this week but it is movie that prompted the selection. In this case, the movie is The Matrix: Resurrections and the song is ‘White Rabbit’ by Jefferson Airplane (Apple Music).
