Captain’s Log, 2025.10

• I got set up with AstroNvim, replacing Visual Studio Code. The garden walls have been closing in on VS Code for a while now. It’s been increasingly pushy with it’s AI tools, and feels increasingly gross to use. Correlation? Causation?

  • I hadn’t used vi since college. I was worried about picking up the keybindings again so it was freaky how quickly the muscle memory came back. I’m ramping up with Practical Vim, but I’m already nearly as fast as in VS Code. Brains are weird.
  • Already ❤️ the AstroCommunity. Adding Rust support was as simple as dropping { import = 'astrocommunity.pack.rust' } into the provided community.lua script. This is better than VS Code extensions. I am sick of GUIs. This is going to be a theme.
  • I also tried LazyVim but it just didn’t click for me. It felt uncomfortable, like a too scratchy sweater.
  • I also tried building my own configuration up from a stock Neovim but struggled to put together all the pieces for Rust support. Very happy to have the help of a community on things like that.
  • The only thing I added to my AstroNvim setup, other than language support, was leap.nvim for their “jump to visible match” feature. I love this and can no longer live without it.

• I kept going with Rust, replacing C# and .NET as part of my effort at decorporatizing. I’m working my way through Programming Rust, and things are starting to click. But I’m super impatient and it frustrates me to no end that I can’t just crank things out the way I do in other languages, but I’m committed and I’ll get there.

• I installed Bazzite on the GGC, replacing Windows 11. See decorporatizing. It’s working great! Playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and Brotato (yes really), Assetto Corsa and Art of Rally. It has been a non-event of an upgrade.

• I finally got Chromium and Selenium running on AWS Lambda. Don’t @ me, and don’t ask me how long that took. The fix was to move it outside of the VPC, but the error message—“Unable to discover open pages”—was obtuse, to say the least. I know this is the total opposite of my previous bullets, but it’s for my pay-the-bills work, and the customer picked the stack. It’s all Java too, ack. Max corporatization.

  • h/t to Sparticuz for doing the heavy lifting on the Chromium binaries

• I bought a rosemary plant. A terrible idea for my little apartment but she was so cute, and it’s stews and soups season. I named her “Rosie” of course, and now I have someone to talk to when Esme is sleeping.

• Finished watching Star Trek: Brave New Worlds S1. Really liked that one, the best since DS9 for me. Especially liked the Alien tribute episode (E5 maybe?).

  • …and Murderbot, that was fun
  • …and The China Syndrome
  • …and Initial D: Third Stage, I love this show

• I got out and did stuff, with actual people!

  • Met @kenna for lunch at Village Whiskey 🤤
  • Finally made it to Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens and Rosy’s and Marsha’s, a fun night!

Insights & Advice

• Follow inspiration when it comes. Not a new one, but I had forgotten. It’s always fun to have an idea and chase it around, it seems like the energy will never run out so long as the inspiration is flowing. Take advantage of that! There is always time to scribble something down and toss it into the inbox.

Random Links

• See Wired, The Long Boom. “The peak of human civilization.” (Agent Smith) 😂 😭
• I absolutely fucking adore Atkinson Hyperlegible.