Week 193: Election

A week of landslides, visiting sisters, Minecraft RPGs, all-nighters, morning shots, fictional pandemics, and reusable workflows.

Posted on by Rowan Manning.
Tagged with PoliticsFamilyGamesMinecraftBooksKittensJägerbomb

  • What a week! I’ve been able to vote for 18 years, 14 of those with the Tories in power, it’s felt pretty disenfranchising. I’m really pleased, I’m under no illusion that Starmer is going to be perfect but, for now, I’m celebrating a long-overdue change.

  • Before the election fully took over all my brain space, my sister finally came over to meet the cats. We went for some excellent Ethiopian food nearby and caught up a bit. The lads were well-behaved obvs.

  • My board game group is experimenting a little with video games and this week we set up Drehmal Apotheosis. It’s a Minecraft-based RPG and it was fun! It’s a little less free-form than regular Minecraft but the added story elements are great and it’s a beautiful custom map.

  • OK back to the election: I volunteered to be on tech support overnight on Thursday. I was down for the 5–11 pm slot but I decided to just push through and pull an all-nighter. It was a lot of fun! The site held up nicely aside from a few minor blips so it was mostly chatting and doing little bits of low-risk work.

    It was also exhausting, there were several moments where I wondered whether I should just go home to bed but I’m glad I didn’t; the atmosphere in the newsroom was quite buzzing and loads of other engineers stayed for the whole night.

  • A table slowly filling with empty glasses at 7 am, post-election

    At 6:30 am, tired and wired, a few of us went to the Market Porter for opening time. I had some champagne and I had some jägerbombs. Then we wandered over to a nearby Wetherspoons for breakfast at 9 am. We got home around midday after quite a lot of shots and passed out immediately. It’s weird to be celebrating something happening in politics.

  • The weekend has been very lazy; we’ve barely left the bed but I think I’m about back to normal now sleep-wise.

  • I used some of my waking hours to finish Station 11 which I enjoyed a lot. The jumping of perspective between the before times and post-apocalypse was great and helped invest me in the characters. It’s quite interesting reading pre-2019 books that include epidemics/pandemics (this one and Doomsday Book).

  • Oh, I also did a really cool thing (IMO) after learning about GitHub Actions Reusable Workflows. I now have a single actions repo where I keep shared workflows and actions; these are then pulled into my individual Open Source projects. This means I can make changes in one place and each of the repos is reduced in size and complexity considerably!

    I also used the opportunity to get myself back down to zero dependency PRs 💪