October 2026 Month Notes
Duolingo found a way of parting me from my gems. Costume quests! Finally something to spend those 16k little blue thingies on. I unlocked every costume in Junior’s toy quest - the boon being that for unlocking every costume, you do win a bonus 5k gems back again.
Now they’re doing a Halloween one (meh) and I noticed two things:
- You can only unlock 3 pieces per day by doing lessons, instead of 4, and
- The prize for unlocking all costumes is 3500 instead of 5000
So I get the impression there is some geniune gem-economy rebalancing going on here. Some product manager in Pittsburgh has a dashboard of median gems per player, and it doesn’t look good that they have a million players hoarding thousands of gems, reducing their perceived value. Costume quests are the answer!
Emo Dads
If you have heard the theme songs for Spidey and Friends or Hot Wheels! Let’s Race!, you may have thought “this is the same guy… and he sounds very familiar to me, a millenial”, and you’d be right! It’s the guy from Fallout Boy. The emos have entered their Dad eras, and I love it.
Eurovision Asia
There’s a Eurovision Asia! Is it contridiction in terms? No, for “Eurovision” has no true meaning, it has completed it’s journey to pure brand. I do low-key wish I could just say “Yeah, I’m going on a week’s break to Bangkok for Eurovision Asia”.
Bloggy blog
I wrote the other day about how you can expect more of This Kind of Thing
I also took a look at the raw, generated HTML of the stats page and noticed it had a tonne of whitespace. After a little stirring of Dr. Jekyll’s Liquids, I managed to get it down from about 3800 lines to 600 lines of HTML. No AI, I just learned something the old fashioned way and grew my beautiful squishy brain.
There is a documented way of doing “whitespace control” in Liquid and I didn’t find it worked that well.
I tried code that looked like this:
{%- assign counter = 0 -%}
{%- for post in site.posts -%}
{%- assign thisyear = post.date | date: "%Y" -%}
{%- assign prevyear = post.previous.date | date: "%Y" -%}
...
And while the trailing -%} bits were needed, I couldn’t get the leading {%- to work.
Eventually, I just got rid of all the leading whitespace so it’s flat to the left gutter while using -%} operators. Both fixes are needed or else errant newlines find their way into the generated output!
{% assign counter = 0 -%}
{% for post in site.posts -%}
{% assign thisyear = post.date | date: "%Y" -%}
{% assign prevyear = post.previous.date | date: "%Y" -%}
...
Werk
I like my new job, it’s good, thanks for asking. I have a super team that get on really well, and we’ve done a handful of strong sprints on work that we care about and I increasingly understand 😇
Life
The five of us went to Bala last week for half term.
Our bigger kids, Monkey and Niña, are getting on better all the time. They play together and make each other laugh. They go off on capers. It’s really lovely and a huge relief.
Going on holidays to forests and coasts always awoke my imagination as a kid. As a geek, I’d tread the forest paths with a big stick, pretending to be an RPG adventurer, gathering items and leveling up. And for each good memory of the outdoors, I have almost as many sitting in our camper van writing BASIC code or drawing mock-ups of video games in an empty maths exercise book.
Seeing my eldest playing the same sorts of games, explaining his adventure mechanics to us, it really made me smile inside and out. He’s 5 and he’s never played an RPG - he just likes the idea! When we got back to the cottage he wrote this note:
I love evrfng in vis wreld Such as a bunk bed and a forist and a kotij and food and exploring and I love my famlee and I love my elktronix kit
In other cute news, the other day we’re in church and the projector slide says “Mark 8”; Niña points up at the screen and exclaims, “Ocho!! My favourite number!!”
Other
The next post on here will be №300! Astounding. I might do a special about the shoebox me and Monkey decorated to keep Tamagotchi in.
Done a lot of seeing friends and going to other friends’ weddings, which has been lovely.
You know Dobbies, the garden centre? The one in Southport has a decent soft play which is a convenient parents hangout. We’re now Dobbies Club Plus members, which means you get money off the soft play, and two free drinks a month, but ALSO it turns out, they send you a voucher on your birthday for two more hot drinks and two cakes. I cashed this in, and the bill - which was £16.10 - went to zero!! This is a club that costs £16.50/year to join! (It was Helen’s birthday, not mine).
My new favourite KPop girl group is STAYC. “Bubble” has made it into our Friday playlist, and me and Niña love to dance to it - it’s a very special treat for me. They seem like wholesome girls… good role models for a while, I hope.
That’s the end of the post,
Ta-ra for now 🫧🫧