Three weeks on the trot. Definitely calling that a win.

Also, Good Omens 2 is a delight. Still enough of Terry’s character hanging around it, and the new writers help it not feel too Neil-y.

Wednesday

After a bit of fiddling, I’ve worked out how to add helpers to the Emacs `C-x 8` keymap, so now I have shortcuts for typing ‘λ’, ‘🙂’ and various other characters that I type more or less frequently. Beats the crap out of doing `C-x 8 <ret>` and then typing out the name of the character I’m looking for.

In case you’re interested, here’s the code:

(general-define-key
  :keymaps 'iso-transl-ctl-x-8-map
  ". ," "…"
  ": )" "🙂"
  ": D" "😀"
  "; )" "😉"
  "\\"  "λ"
  "a ^" "↑"
  "a u" "↑"
  "a v" "↓"
  "a d" "↓"
  "a |" "↕")

If you’re not using `general`, but you’ve got `use-package` installed, you can do something similar with `bind-keys`:

(bind-keys
 :map 'iso-transl-ctl-x-8-map
 (". ," . "…")
 (": )" . "🙂")
 (": D" . "😀")
 (":|"  . "😐")
 ("; )" . "😉")
 ("\\"  . "λ")
 ("a ^" . "↑")
 ("a u" . "↑")
 ("a v" . "↓")
 ("a d" . "↓")
 ("a |" . "↕"))

You can no doubt use define-key as well, but I find `general` or `bind-keys` to be much nicer to work with. The latter has the advantage that it’s included in Emacs as part of `use-package` and plays nice with `which-key`, so I might go and redo my key bindings and get rid of `general`, nice as it is, since the real selling point of that library is how easy it is to bind stuff in `evil-mode` states.

Sunday

I still miss Twitch Sings. It’s how I started streaming—long before the Friday night Song Swaps and folk streams. I’d be happily belting out Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance, hamming it up to You Spin Me Round or giving it my best Johnny Cash on Hurt. It was just huge fun and a great way to make friends on Twitch.

Twitch ended up pulling the plug because it was a free app and… well, free apps and sync rights really don’t play well together.

You’ll still find people doing Karaoke on Twitch though, many of them the same faces I met back in Twitch Sings days. This morning, I woke up early and spotted some friends Karaoke-ing it up on a Discord, so I pulled on pyjamas and went and joined ’em for a few songs. These days, I just use Loopy Pro rather than searching YouTube for backing tracks. It’s great fun though, and definitely makes for a more enjoyable way to spend the occasional hour or so of early morning insomnia.

Singing in company, even virtual company is still the best thing you can do in public with your clothes on. I encourage you all to sing more. What’s the worst that could happen?