This week was a bit of a roller coaster, lots of fun and not-so-fun things happened but I’ve come out of the other end feeling good and that’s all that really matters.

Absolute Cinema

Yash and I finally managed to grab tickets for an IMAX screening of Project Hail Mary for Monday morning. Taking the half day off work felt worthwhile for how long we’ve had to wait for this, and by sheer coincidence I ran into Rahul Gonsalves at the theatre who also agreed that Monday mornings are the best show times :P

On Thursday I watched Dhurandhar 2 with Yash and Swapnil which was honestly quite a letdown. The first movie was obviously military and BJP propaganda, but the second one in so in-your-face about it that it really dampened my enjoyment of it. Since they were shot together, my complaints about the first movie’s CGI also apply to this one. The shock factor of the incredibly gory movie constantly getting interrupted by god awful CGI that fully breaks your immersion makes for a very lame viewing experience.

Personal stuff

Not a lot of things happened since I was so busy hopping from one thing to the next.

Anunay and Yash had bought me a mouse pad for my birthday that arrived this week, it’s super cute and pretty high quality.

A cyberpunk style image of a girl with white hair and a can of paint in her hand. She has a lot of temporary tattoos all over her visible arm and a cute black cat reaching for the paint can. My mouse is resting next to her face.
I fear the day I spill anything on this beauty.

Getting increasingly frustrated at OpenCode shipping showstopper bugs that go unfixed for weeks and months I decided to switch to using pi as my coding agent of choice. For the uninitiated, it’s a very robust but minimal coding agent that is also at the heart of OpenClaw. It is designed to be extended by the very LLMs that the harness manages, and users are encouraged to build their own custom UIs, extensions, commands and what not on top of this. I have started my custom distribution of pi where I’m mostly focusing to first implement features that I’ve come to rely on in OpenCode, then go from there as my imagination takes me.

People

The big highlight this week was RustIndia Conference on Saturday, which sadly overlapped with IndieWebClub so I had to ditch this week’s session :(

RustIndia was great, met a lot of people I’ve talked to online for years and generally had a pleasant time. Niko Matsakis’ keynote was very illuminating, he talked at length about Rust’s current limitations and the work they’re doing to address things not just with the language but at the ecosystem level itself. I’m excited to see how these things shake out over the next year or two!

There were a lot of quizzes and prizes going around at the stalls so I tried my hand at them but massively fumbled on the e6data booth manned by my friend Fenil by knowing enough Rust but being horrible at mathematics.

Work

As I mentioned last week, my manager Rohan Arthur is leaving the company which has, to put it mildly, caused some problems. I’ve spent the week figuring things out with him, planning next steps, and talking to our director Willi about the future of my team. Obviously can’t divulge much here, but things are looking as good as they can be in the circumstances. Rohan prepared us well in making himself redundant in our day to day work but it’s still quite a sad transition to navigate.

Games

With how much I was out gaming ended up being rather sparse, but I managed to eke out a Platinum rank up in Marvel Rivals with Akhil right before the season ended. I also tried Graveyard Keeper since it was free for a while on Steam but it doesn’t seem like something I’ll go back to. Genuinely just feels like a morbid Stardew Valley and I didn’t quite gel with that game either.

Food

At home

Anunay is still in Bengaluru which means we’ve been away more nights than not doing things (what can I say he’s just a fun loving guy), so we’ve only had one night where we really got to cook anything. Yash pitched that we make a chickpea salad and so that’s what we did. During cooking this somehow became an exercise in how much protein one can fit into a single salad, and that’s how we have this abomination of chicken, chickpeas, cottage cheese, and broccoli.

A chickpea salad bowl containing strips of air fried chicken, some impeccably blanched broccoli, cubes of cottage cheese, corn, onions, and tomatoes. All of this is coated in a greek yogurt based sauce which had some random spices added to it.
How much protein could this bowl possibly contain?

Away from home

Got to try lots of fun stuff at great restaurants during the week! On Tuesday we were at Burma Burma:

A glass of boba tea with a thick straw in it. The black boba is visible near the bottom, and the drink is a very faded cream color with some biscoff biscuit crumbs on top as a garnish.
Lotus Biscoff Boba Tea, still as good as ever.

A basket of pita bread next to a plate of a bowl of hummus that has some big chillies and a red colored seasoning for garnish.
Some hummus thing that I fully forgot the name of, all I know is that it was a banger.
A plate of small poppers that have a pile of cured papaya shreds on top.
Another papaya thing that I can't remember the name of.
A bowl of khowsuey next to a condiments platter. The gravy is a bright yellowish orange in color and has regular flour noodles in it.
A bowl of khowsuey which again I have forgotten the exact name of.

On Wednesday we had an impromptu company dinner at Amicii, where we mostly chatted around and picked at some starters.

A regular pepperoni pizza with a ball of burrata cheese in the middle.
This pizza was delicious.