Lars-Christian's website

Ocarina of Time came out a few years back, right?

2026-04-25T00:00:09+00:00

Jeremy in Finally Finishing Ocarina of Time:

Ocarina of Time is one of those games that gets talked about so much that I’ve sort of always felt like a fake gamer for never finishing it, even nearly 30 years after release.

I don't know why Jeremy needs to exaggerate (or, alternatively, make me feel so old) when opening this otherwise great post. Was great reading some thoughts — thirty years on, apparently — about the game that defined my youth. Jeremy points out that the combat experience has aged well. I would agree. Every battle in every 3D Zelda game since has felt like a natural evolution of the standard set by Ocarina of Time. It was groundbreaking at the time, and even three decades later it holds up well.

All you need to know about billionaires

2026-04-27T00:00:08+00:00

Noah Hawley in What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat for the Atlantic:

It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back.

Fascinating insights from someone who spent a weekend inside Bezos' private circus exhibition.

Try extremely offline instead

2026-04-28T00:00:07+00:00

Tommy Dixon in the end of our extremely online era.:

And I think we won't realize how sick we were, how sick and sad and confused it makes us, until after it's over. We will look back on these times with a compassionate sadness. Shake our heads at how ignorant and naive we all were, to give up so much for so little. And wonder why we ever cared so much about strangers on the Internet.

Came across this piercing piece of writing by way of Tommy's follow up, How to end your extremely online era. Start with the first, the follow his somewhat practical guide.

I'll do the same.

Designing websites

2026-04-30T00:00:06+00:00

Been thinking about redoing the front page for a while now. Want to incorporate recent workouts as well as books I'm reading. Perhaps even recent listens from my ListenBrainz profile.

Fiddled around with the inspector trying to land something. But nothing feels right. Yet. Could probably take to Figma or something to get a decent sketch, but ‘designing’ with HTML and CSS feels more like shaping clay or working wood, and that's the way I want to do it.

Apologise for the feed interruption

2026-05-02T00:00:05+00:00

While make some changes to the front page (I finally found a way to include the content I wanted!) I accidentally copied the settings file from my ‘dev’ directory to my actual website directory. The dev version only has a placeholder URL and site name in the settings.

Now I've gotten a reminder where I use those settings.

In addition to the header, the feeds rely on these. When I regenerated the site with the placeholder values in the settings file, every old post in the feeds were given a new URL and unique ID. This would result in your feed reader thinking these old posts were new posts. And a dead link to these posts.

Will try not to do that again! ^_^

Train Dreams

2026-05-02T00:00:04+00:00

Watched Train Dreams tonight.

Wow!

Another great film. Loved the quiet contemplation of it. The perseverance in the face on unbearable grief. Speaking of, I was, presumably like the protagonist, hoping that it didn't happen. That they simply moved on from the scorched earth, to start anew somewhere.

I still am.

Front page additions

2026-05-03T00:00:03+00:00

I mentioned in a recent note that I've been tinkering with the front page setup for a while. The previous iteration of the front page had been mostly identical since I relaunched the blog in late 2023. It showed recent posts and recent notes.

Since then, I've added a couple of content sections to the website. I add books to my reading log several times per month. The workout log is updated daily. The result is that the front page wasn't really reflecting the entirety of the activities that happen on this website. As new visitors tend to drop by the home page, I think it's a good idea to use that page to give them an idea of what's happening on this website.

To that end, I've tried several times the last year to find a way to incorporate updates from the reading and workout logs into the front page. Unsuccessfully! I've created and discarded at least five different mock-ups. Common for all of them is that I've begun with the approach of trying to lift the design elements from the two logs into the front page. As I'm happy with how both sections look, that felt like the natural approach.

The drawback is that every single time I tried this approach, the overall feel of the front page was disjointed. It came off as something haphazardly thrown together. When I tried once more to tackle this challenge the other day, the outcome was the same. But at that point, a lightbulb went off.

‘I don't have to bring the design elements from the logs to the front page. I can just bring the data from the logs and present them in the same way I do the other front page elements!’

The template was essentially already in place. Posts and notes are distinct types of content, and were already presented as such. Doing the same with two more types of content shouldn't be an issue. So I gave it a go. And, to my surprise, it worked just fine. It's not revolutionary or anything out of the ordinary. But that wasn't what I was aiming for. I just wanted to preserve the look and feel of the home page, while also showing the breadth of content I share on the site. And I think I achieved just that.

To spruce it up a little, I decided to reuse the icons from the workout log on the workout log entries. With that little visual in place, it was a short order to just reuse miniature versions of the book covers from the books I'm reading to add a little bit of colour there as well.

One unexpected result is that the posts and notes entries feel a bit flat by comparison without any visuals. But, as I want to err on avoiding anything akin to Apple's icons in menus everywhere, I think I'll leave it as it is for now.

The Blade Itself is 20 years old

2026-05-04T00:00:02+00:00

Joe Abercrombie in 20 Years:

One observation that blows my mind – The Blade Itself is now twice as old as A Game of Thrones was when The Blade Itself came out. GRRM felt like a long established pillar of the genre to me at that point. Truly I must be part of the fantasy furniture at this one…

That you are, Joe. That you are.

Just this weekend I was visiting a fantasy and science fiction book store with my seven year old son, with whom I'm currently reading Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets. As we stumbled upon the First Law books, I told him ‘just wait until you're old enough to read these ones, you'll have a blast’.

I guess The Blade Itself was about 10 years old when I read it. In another decade, he'll be the one reading it.

Wherever you go

2026-05-12T00:00:01+00:00

There you'll be

Tracking my workouts circa 2012

2026-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

A couple years before I got my first GPS watch, this was how I tracked my workouts:

This was a ‘10k’ (ish) run. Based on my understanding of what someone had told me was the course of a local 10k race.

To be honest, it worked just fine. I'm not sure adding GPS and other sensors for a multitude of advanced metrics has made me any fitter than I would've been if I'd just continued running with my old iPod Nano in hand. But it does make my workout log look a little better, so there's that.