October Projects

Last Month's Projects:

  Physical make: CnC router.

This is a weird one.  I haven't been out to my workshop all month - it's full of 8-foot lengths of 2"x1" which I had picked up on Freecycle.  My intention was to make a frame to support some loganberry plants I have in the garden before the winter weather closed in.  The howling wind and hammering rain tell me I've kinda missed that boat.  But maybe there'll be a window of some clear weather in October when I can get that sorted.

To be fair, teaching Septembers are pretty tough going and the COVID measures are making routines (which would normally make things much easier) very hard to figure out.  So my energy levels have been pretty low.


  Coding make: Exploring DS Homebrew
 
This has actually made a great start!  Three of the students have decided to team up and make a project together!  So far we have only explored backgrounds and the beginnings of rendering sprites.  I want to make a simpler sprite demo than the ones that come with devkitpro - for students that are just out of their GCSEs, it's quite a leap to some of those examples.
 
  Reading: My Past & Thoughts by Alexander Herzen. 
 
Still going on this one, but I'm nearly there.  I think I've fallen off the wagon a bit with my reading - September has hit my brain pretty hard.  It was interesting to read about Herzen's spat with Marx though.  Marx seemed to have a big issue with the fact that Herzen was a Russian arisocrat (albeit a bastard), despite the fact that he'd been exiled and involved in revolutions himself.  It was also weird to read Herzen's critique of Mill's 'On Liberty' - quite a lot of disparate bits of learning I've done are being tied together in this trip through the 19th century.
 
 

October Projects:

  Physical make: Loganberry frame/trellis.  It won't be exciting, but it's getting in the way of my other projects.  I need to clear it.
 
   Coding make: Turning my Silkworm tribute into an entry for the DOS Games Fall Jam.  I have been really enjoying my DOS coding, and making a side-scrolling shooter that can work on a 386sx is a huge challenge that I'm really enjoying.
 
   Reading: My Past & Thoughts by Alexander Herzen.
 
I'm not too far from the end of this, so I intend to finish it and make a start on another book from my stack of crazy: The Fall of Yugoslavia by Misha Glenny.  
 
I had read about Glenny's book in Balkan Odyssey, which was an intriguing personal account of the diplomatic efforts.  I remember the news stories of the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia when I was growing up, and having since read Sacco's powerful and harrowing Safe Area Goražde, I am still intrigued and appalled by what happened.  By the fact that people who lived peacefully as neighbours ended up killing each other without mercy.  
 
I am hoping Glenny's book will help me understand just how things like this could happen.
 

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