2023-04-21                         from the editor of ~insom
   ------------------------------------------------------------

   I'm playing with Guile Scheme and I've generally spent more
   time writing code than usual lately, including some for fun.
   I currently have a computer hobby that makes me happy
   instead of filling me with dread, and that's good and I've
   sorely missed this. I've even fit in a healthy mix of
   actually playing video games instead of just collecting
   them.

   I spent some time getting a Quake 1 port working on Haiku
   (mostly Makefile and HaikuPorts stuff, because SDL is doing
   the lifting to make things _work_). Spending time with old
   computers is something I used to view as a bit of a
   psychohazard -- it'd pull me in and eventually I would feel
   frustrated at the time I had "wasted" on it. Armed with some
   new mental tools and outlooks, I think I'm able to do
   retrocomputing in a more healthy way.

   Also: I am interested in the future. Like, typically when I
   program for fun, recently, it's been with technology I'm
   very comfortable in (like C, microcontrollers, Unix) or that
   I'm picking up after a long break (like C++ and Python,
   FPGAs, Win32). Now I am interested in seeing what's possible
   in the low-latency but web-related world of Rust, io_uring
   and WASM.

   ---

   Originally I'd opened my text editor to write about Guinness
   Foreign Export Stout. In my memory, Guinness used to be
   brewed in other places, and then eventually its production
   was centralized in St. James' Gate in Dublin. I remember
   drinking Guinness imported from Nigeria (FES) during the
   brief period where I was old enough to drink legally, and
   while I lived in Ireland. I'd assumed this had disappeared,
   but it's still brewed in Lagos. It seemed perverse to import
   Guinness to Ireland, but it's a pretty different drink.

   Anyway, it turns out I was wrong: only UK and Ireland
   Guinness production moved to St. James' Gate -- it's brewed
   around the world, although a lot of the precursors (like
   flavoured wort) still come from Dublin. Its unlikely that
   these breweries could continue to produce proper stout if
   they were cut off from the motherland.