Happenings

  • Looks like I’m going to be running an extra-curricular “advanced” maths club next year at school for some of my top students, something I did last year and really enjoyed. So I’ve started to prepare some notes and resources for that, this time experimenting with typst, an alternative to LaTeX. So far I’m really enjoying using it; the basic markup is quite markdown-like, and I love how much simpler a lot of the math symbols are to type (for example, you type a fraction with a/b and not \frac{a}{b}![1] And \mathbb{R} is just RR!). The package ecosystem seems like it has everything I’ll need.
  • Got some kind of chest infection, making me quite fatigued and waking up very chesty.
  • Pleasant weekend, spent time with friends and family.

Links

Not today I’m afraid, not browsed much except for reading about typst.

Playing

Plodding through Chrono Trigger and Shadow Of The Colossus. I want to like SotC more than I do. It’s beautiful, it’s bold in its design, the Colossi are stunning… but it’s frustrating. I don’t mind the long treks to find the Colossi (it’s usually enjoyable, only had one instance of being unable to find the way), but the actual encounters with the Colossi are sometimes very annoying. The controls can be frustrating, the swimming is tedious in the water-based encounters, and sometimes it’s just really not clear what you’re meant to be doing, or it looks like you’re meant to proceed in one way but it’s a dead end. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the encounters have been epic and had the intended effect, but just a few have been a pain in the butt and put a bit of a downer on the whole thing.

Reading

Same as before, bit of The Score here, bit Republic there.

  1. “But what about my quotient objects!?” cries the algebraic topologist. Chill out, it’s just G slash H, which okay it’s a few more keystrokes, but it’s very cognitively easy to type, and doesn’t require any use of the shift key. ↩︎