Bird

Fires up and down the Western US and so much bad air harming where the gires haven't themselves reached.

Hazel sniffed it and moved on.

Covid-19, Day 244

Latest numbers: dispensing with the state numbers now. US overall now over six million cases and more than 183,000 deaths. As "back to school" kicks in, new outbreaks, particularly at colleges are appearing. World wide cases are over 25 million and deaths stand over 844,000. In recent weeks some states have started to scale back testing, following Federal guidance that seems based on Trump's fewer tests will mean fewer cases fantasy. Rapid testing is still a burden to find in the US.

Increasingly I'm seeing bars and restaurants put in outdoor seating, using the "parklet" model San Francisco has. Basically this is the conversion of on-street parking to protected space for people.

Here three separate businesses have three parklets at one intersection. One is simply metal barriers for now. If it follows the practice seen elsehwere, the walled wood platform will be there soon.

Prior to covid-19 very few parklets were all wood construction, and some had very artistic designs. Consider the "Deepistan National Parklet" created in 2011, with a topiary dinosaur.

When it was created, Deepistan National Park(let) was the only parklet sponsored / in front of a residence.

But now rapid and cheap is the name of the game, and basic wood boxes are springing up around the city. This is all fine and well on good days, but rainy weather will be coming, and right now San Francisco is in the midsts of it's longest ever streak of "Spare the Air" days, where certain activities are discouraged and some are illegal due to bad air quality. (Discouraged: driving, at risk people spending time outdoors; illegal: wood fires including beach bonfiles.) The air is so bad because of blown in smoke from wildfires around the state.

It's a bad year for wildfires. The current batch was started by a rare series of August lightning strikes, months after the last rain. Many small fires started and grew until they combined into a few huge fires. Two out of the three largest wildfires in California history were burning simultaneously, and Covid-19 hindered both response and shelter options for people evacuated.

There have been a few days that the smoke layer sitting on the city has been very unpleasant for me. As I've gotten older, wood smoke causes my nasal passages and lungs more and more distress. When mask wearing started for Covid-19, I first began using my "Vog" brand N-95 mask which I had purchased for dealing with wildfire smoke in the city in previous years.

But more distressing than than the disruption of the disease or the suffocating smoke has been the politics. Trump's rejection of reality and outright stoking of racism, his obvious attempts to thwart voting, his destruction of norms and the US Postal Service, all of that is becoming a dispiriting drain on my mental health. Trump didn't accept the election results when he won, I have no illusions he'll accept a loss this time. And I have no stomach for imagining how it will shake out.

Game Tools

Here, some discussion of two game tool programs I have in game-tools on github.

asciimapper

In the mid-1990s, I knew an admin of the Tsunami MUD and played the game a bit. Fast-forward a decade and I decided to give it a try again. At (then) about fifteen years old (now closer to thirty), it was one of the older MUDs around, which meant it had a very long time to expand. There were vast areas of the game to explore, and I set out to see as much as I could.

Over the course of several months, I visited huge swaths of the game, and got myself on the explorer leaderboard, where I was one of the lowest level characters there. (Accounts automatically delete after time time if you don't log in, so I can't know if others had done better than me before then, and you won't be able to find me there now.) Eventually I started to run into time-to-new-area payoff diminishing returns and stopped playing.

While I was playing I drew myself a lot of maps. At first these were on paper, but eventually I developed an ASCII art short hand. This let me have text files I could grep for noteworthy items or places. From there, I wrote a tool that could take my ASCII art maps and convert them into nice printable maps. asciimapper worked by converting my ASCII art into config files for ifm the "Interactive Fiction Mapper", which was designed for Infocom and similar games. The crossover to MUD maps was trivial. Some of the maps I printed and would hand annotate for further details, but most I kept only in ASCII file form.

I have all my ASCII art maps for Tsunami somewhere, I could probably dig them out and put them on the web. I haven't played in at least a decade now, though, and there's more than zero chance some of them are obsolete. Some became inaccuate while I was playing. In particular I recall the entrance to Toyland moving, to be friendlier to low level players.

I've been thinking about asciimapper again as I play "Andor's Trail"; (previously dicussed about a month ago here). In "Andor's Trail", there are perhaps 520ish visitable areas, most of which show up on the World Map, but about 20% are indoors, underground, or otherwise not visible there. How to get to those plus the inventories of stores in particular spots has been something I've been mulling over. The ASCII art needed for the World Map would be doable, but something of a challenge.

The maps are text form already though, just not very clear text form. Here's an excerpt from AndorsTrail/res/xml/woodsettlement0.tmx, an XML file apparently created by Tiled:

 <objectgroup name="Mapevents">
  <object name="east" type="mapchange" x="928" y="224" width="32" height="64">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="roadbeforecrossroads2"/>
    <property name="place" value="west"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="woodhouse1" type="mapchange" x="608" y="288" width="32" height="32">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="woodhouse1"/>
    <property name="place" value="south"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="woodhouse2" type="mapchange" x="640" y="128" width="32" height="32">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="woodhouse2"/>
    <property name="place" value="south"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="woodhouse0" type="mapchange" x="224" y="256" width="32" height="32">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="woodhouse0"/>
    <property name="place" value="south"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="sign_wdsetl0" type="sign" x="800" y="256" width="32" height="32"/>
  <object name="sign_wdsetl0_grave1" type="sign" x="128" y="160" width="32" height="32"/>
  <object name="sign_wdsetl0_grave2" type="sign" x="128" y="224" width="32" height="32"/>
 </objectgroup>

You can easily see how the map pieces connect together, including ones like woodhouse0, woodhouse1, and woodhouse2 that don't show up on the World Map. In woodhouse2.tmx we find Lowyna:

<objectgroup name="Spawn">
  <object height="96" name="smuggler1" type="spawn" width="96" x="32" y="96"/>
  <object height="128" name="smuggler2" type="spawn" width="96" x="128" y="96"/>
  <object height="32" name="lowyna" type="spawn" width="96" x="288" y="96"/>
[...]

Which with a little bit of work we can connect that the shop "droplist", in this case in AndorsTrail/res/raw/droplists_v070_shops.json, to get items she stocks.

A map.tmx to IFM format converter might be handy, but I haven't put any serious thought into it.

asciimapper

I have thought about game play efficiency with "Andor's Trail". In particular while playing I thought it would be useful to have a way to see how fast I'm earning in-game rewards like XP, game currency, item drops, and how fast I'm using consumables while doing so. I imagined a tool that I could tell what I have at a particular time and it would work out how much that changes over time.

Those imaginings lead to stat-timer, a CLI with a very old school interogation interface. You can use the command line to give it starting stats or just start it and it will ask for stats. Then you can update as many or as few stats as you want each round and it gives updates. The design requires that you name stats for the initial state, and then if in same order, you can omit names. Thus the most important things being measured should be first, and least important last. Or least changing last.

In practice this means I've been putting XP first, then common area item drop and/or gold, then health potion count, and then rare drops, and finally — sometimes — constants I want for annotations. As I play, I update XP frequently and other columns less frequently. To update just the first two columns is a matter of just entering the first two numbers. To update first and third requires labeling the number for the third column. After each entry it gives a snapshot of how things are doing on a per-second basis. When done, I can <ctrl-d> out or put a ! at the end of the numbers to indicate final update. It then gives a final update with total changes, per-hour and per-second rate of changes. This makes it easier to compare play style one to play style two even if they are on different days and for different lengths of play.

If I update it further, things I've been thinking about for improving it include: a curses interface with data at particular screen locations, sophisticated "pause timer while entering data", realtime per-second updates, and perhaps a more sophisticated state model for the command line, for better continuation after an intertuption.

We Work?

In September 2017 I was hired by a company that used Wework for office space. On the day I started, they had a tiny glass fishbowl meant to hold three people, and four people there. By October we had moved to a larger space on a different floor, meant for five people. It was a much nicer spot, with two openenable windows. (To the outside. Not just the glass walls with sliding doors on the other spot.)

The building was (is) on 2nd St in San Francisco's Soma (South of Market) neighborhood. An older six story building with a single elevator, wood stairs in the single internal staircase, and an exterior fire escape reachable through the sash window in one of the offices. I don't know if the people in that office were required to not lock their door, it is something I thought about in my time there.

I don't recall exactly when, but somewhere around December 2017 to February 2018 that company shut the Wework office down and I was expected to work from home. For about a month before then, I was usually the only person in the office. The San Francisco branch manager, Andrew, had been laid off in early December 2017, leaving just three employees in SF. And absent the manager insisting otherwise, the other two preferred to work from home.

On day one with that company, I had showed up at the Wework office and as part of signing in to meet Andrew, I had to provide an email address. I used my resume email address, since I didn't yet know what my new work address would be. Wework added that address to their building mailing list, and I got weekly announcements about things happening in the building. Emails with a text/plain part that was wildly different from the text/html part.

Those weekly newsletters stopped, without my intervention, when the company stopped the Wework lease. Until today. Some circa eighteen to twenty months later, I got one this morning. Still wildly different plain text and html parts, but also this time, a crazy From line. This from header is an address for a NYC (Hudson Yards) Wework office. Not exactly close to San Francisco.

From: WeWork Community team at 368 9th Ave <WE-US-58829@wework.com>

text/plain part:

What's happening at WeWork 156 2nd St this week?

(then three placeholder events all dated "June 28" with no year, eg

Exclusive 1 Title

Sunday, June 28 | 3:00 pm - 5:00pm | 19A

Enter the descriptive text for the exclusive item here. Please try to keep all descriptions 3 lines or shorter. If you don't need to include a link, you can delete the link below, but be careful, once deleted you can't undo it.

)

text/html part:

What's happening at WeWork 156 2nd St this week?

(then one event on August 13th and one on June 28th, both with actual details, but nothing happening in the week of August 3rd to 9th, 2020.)

I used the "list unsubscribe" link in the message headers (and got a confirmation of unsubscription just using lynx; always nice to see that websites work in text browsers).

But it prompted me to think about this company that had such a spectacular failure to IPO last year. An at-the-time description: 2019/9/23 Wework mess explained.

About a month after that story, Wework laid off 2,400 employees of 12,500 (according to SEC filings in June 2019). The news broke on Thanksgiving day: 2019/11/21 Wework lays off 2400.

Searching Reuters today, the most recent news story about Wework is almost a month old: Wework expects positive cash flow in 2021.

WeWork Executive Chairman Marcelo Claure said the office-sharing company was on course to have positive cash flow in 2021, a year earlier than a target the company set in February, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

Claure, in an interview with the newspaper, said WeWork has seen strong demand for its office spaces since the start of the coronavirus outbreak.

The SoftBank-controlled company has also reduced its workforce by more than 8,000 people, renegotiated leases and sold off assets to reduce its cash burn and shed costs, FT said.

Eight thousand people is 64% of 12,500, assuming the lay-off count is from height of employment, and not some more recent smaller number. I'm a bit surprised that even with those third paragraph changes Wework still has hope. I'm also a bit surprised by the "strong demand" mentioned. In the face of massive work-from-home pushes, people want to work in glass cells?

As of today, there's vacancy for five people on the sixth floor of 156 2nd St, judging by the floor plan I think it's the same one I was in (looking at room 611; I don't remember the office numbers, just the floors). They want $5,250 a month for that. And there is a third floor vacancy for three people, for $2,710. It's not the one I was in, but adjacent.

Overall, I'm not sure 156 2nd St is showing "strong demand" based on the available units I can find. Maybe SF is not representative of that demand?

I really thought they'd be a goner when "quarantine" hit. Whatever the rental demand, whoever is doing their email newsletters seems surplus to requirements.