Kara Brightwell

  • weeknotes #3: business horoscopes

    content warning: wild animal injury

    1. been watching the Fast & Furious films with friends

    • once a week, on a sunday afternoon
    • we sync up the films, hit play, and pretend we’re mst3k via Slack
    • they’re actually pretty good, even the bad ones
    • also i’m spotting how much of an influence they had on the Need For Speed franchise in the early 00s
    • speaking of which:

    2. i’ve been playing a lot of Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2005)

    Hi, I’m Josie Maran, and I play Mia in Need For Speed: Most Wanted. Make sure you do all your racing in the game. On the streets, drive safely and responsibly. And wear your seatbelt 😉

    • that unskippable opening video is burned into my brain
    • last time i played this game i didn’t let myself like pink, and cute things, for some reason. so this time i’m making my cars look as cute as possible

    3. i’ve also been playing a lot of Minecraft again

    • we (me and Rowan and Luke and Chris) did a multiplayer “speed"run on the latest snapshot version with the new cave generation datapack
      • turns out snapshot versions are not at all optimised and it was extremely laggy
    • to spice things up a bit we had secondary goals we could pick up, silly stuff like “place a live fish in the End”
    • i was racing ahead to get to the end first and do as many goals as i could while the others were doing pointless things like preparing for the dragon fight
    • but when i went through the portal the lag hit hard and i fell into the void and lost all my stuff
      • including my fish in a bucket i was going to free into the End. can i get an F in chat

    4. i went to a technical leadership workshop

    • it was okay. it was exhausting.
    • a lot of it was things like:
      • “if i wanted to be a good tech lead and still wanted to code, i would simply no longer want to code”
      • “here is how to lead an engineering team well: *list of engineering practices the Financial Times does anyway all the time*”
      • one hour of Business Horoscopes (“StrengthFinder 2.0”)
    • i’m glad i didn’t pay for it myself

    5. Kettricken (my cat) caught a bird

    • she’s never done that before
    • it was terrifying
    • i was getting dressed, i couldn’t do much about it
    • i could hear this awful screaming, getting louder
    • she walks in, i assume she’s injured or something, i look down and there’s this mess of feathers in her mouth. still screeching
    • she runs away from me into the living room and drops the bird. it’s a female blackbird
    • it plays dead but it’s still breathing, heavily
    • Sophie locks the cat in the bathroom
    • the internet says to take it to the vet so it can be put down humanely. there’s another option. it probably won’t survive itself.
    • it suddenly leaps up and scurries into the corner.
    • we can’t bring ourselves to do anything about it.
    • we let it go.
    • i’m not sure we did the right thing.

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