November 2017

Music

After a couple Spotify Discovers that didn’t really turn up anything I liked, I decided to start my annual “pick a playlist from all the stuff I listened to this year” early. That involves listening to all 500 songs I saved throughout the previous 10 months carefully enough to decide whether they make the cut or nah (which took two weeks), and then going through the resulting set to carve a theme that makes the mess a whole and remove the extra. I’m still going through that part.

This year it’s looking like a mix and weave around tunes of the fabulous Norah Jones, beautiful contemporary instrumental pieces by swedish composers August Wilhelmsson and Martin Gauffin, Lorde’s latest, and the enchanting and engaged vocals of Vienna Tang. It’ll probably reach slightly less than 200 tracks. As usual, I pick a name that is both a celestial reference and has subtle personal significance. This year it’s Atarau.

Rogare

With hours to spare, I completed the final piece of Cogitare and preparation for this year’s NaNoWriMo IRC chat room. Rogare is old made new, a simple bot framework to support our writers. The name generator is ready and faster than ever, more than a hundred prompts and writing seeds are filed into Dicere ready for consumption through website and !prompt.

And at the end of november I’ll pack it back up, not completely hidden away, but safe and secure and regularly tested so it’ll be ready to be dusted off for next year. Onwards!

Deckhack

I was invited to the Deckhack community, a happy ronde of devs and subversors who build Better Tweetdeck and other related projects.

Rotonde

I briefly started a Rotonde client but it didn’t go anywhere, mostly because all my other priorities and projects reared up and yelled that I didn’t have time.

NaNoWriMo

The first ten days of NaNoWriMo have been going a lot better than I thought (I reached 25k words on the 9th!) and it has been very nice to reconnect with the NZ community. I’ll probably drive down to Auckland in the second part of November to take part in in-person events, too.