Hi Web Surfer! And welcome to my newsletter.

This is the place you’ll find all of this month’s Ava Vu news. Regrettably, there is only so much Ava Vu news, so this monthly email will mostly be filled with things for you. That’ll include a curated list of curious things I find online, music recommendations, and more, as well as my thoughts and feelings about said things.

I'm also going to be using this newsletter as a motivator for me to write more. I'm hoping each newsletter will come attached with an essay. There won't be an essay this month, but if all goes well, there will be next month.

Today's newsletter has come out especially nerdy, as I detail my weird little side hustle and some technical things about the magic of email.

The News

This month, I was very lucky to work for RMIT's Future Play Lab for Open House Melbourne. I've had a great deal of trouble explaining what exactly I did for the Future Play Lab, so I thought it would be best if I tried explaining it once, succinctly here. Open House tends to host architectural tours, and this was kind of like that, except rather than walking through an opened house, participants walked around Melbourne's CBD as a game master led them through narrative and game play, meeting actors along the journey.

My job was to carry around a wheelbarrow with a speaker strapped in to it, partly to amplify the game master's voice, but mainly to play sounds from an iPad for the players to react to. For example: there was a water splashing noise that meant players needed to run as fast as they could on to higher ground – effectively a game of The Floor is Lava. If they failed to do so, I would then deduct Health Points from them, represented by marbles they were given in a small pouch. The other events were high wind where players needed to grab on to a solid object, and extreme heat where players needed to get under cover.

These events were unscripted, and I was given the freedom to launch one of these events whenever I saw fit. I realised part way through the first session that the main game mechanic was players being able to recognise which sound was which, and what action they needed to do. If they, for example, grabbed on to a wall when they were meant to get up on to a surface, they would lose a marble.

Troy Innocent, who was the game master, had asked me to make sure I had 360 by Charli xcx on the iPad. I'm not sure I ever got a complete explanation as to why. At one point we were passing by a noisy construction site, and he gave me a wordless signal that I knew meant to start playing 360. This project had the added benefit of being like social anxiety exposure therapy. By the fourth session, I didn't even flinch as brat blared from my wheelbarrow.

This was quite a bit of fun, and also quite exhausting, given the heavy wheelbarrow I was lugging around the CBD, and the double session we ran on Saturday. Every group was different and a completely random assortment of people, sometimes with kids but mostly older types. There was one group that was completley exhausting, comprised of mostly men aged 30 plus. I think it would be worth me doing a full postmortem on my experience with the project, as there were some really interesting challenges, and unique experiences.

If you're interested in future events, there are some sessions running throughout August in Dandenong.

Other News

I've been getting back in to music! I don't want to announce anything prematurely, but I've been playing guitar and writing songs every week in July with my friend James.

I'm going back to school! I'm studying Computer Science at the University of Melbourne for a year as a graduate diploma. I am fully realising that I've bitten off way more than I can chew, but I #believeinmyself.

How this email found you

Hi! I hope this email found you well, I thought I should write a little something for the technical freaks who want to know just exactly how this email found you. If you are not a dork, feel free to skip to the next section.

There was a sensible way of starting a newsletter, which was using one of the many mailing list services that exist, but I thought that would be too expensive. In that case, the next best thing would be self-hosting an open source mailing service on a web server. That would be too boring. This email was beamed to you through AWS’s Simple Emailing Service (SES), via some Rust code hosted on AWS Lambda, with data stored on a DynamoDB database.

Aside from a brief run-in with Rust, I had not used any of those technologies before starting this project. To say that it’s a miracle that this email found you at all is an understatement. The Rust code is hobbled together with nuts, bolts, and willpower. That's not Rust's fault by the way. Just about everyone who touches that language becomes an evangelist, and I can completely understand why. It does a lot to nudge you in the direction of good code, but that doesn't mean you can't right some exceptionally bad code.

Here’s my current workflow:

• Markdown file written with Obsidian
• Uploaded to my website
• Bash script → AWS Lambda function to download Markdown from an API endpoint
• Rust generates HTML and uploads template to AWS SES
• Bash script → AWS Lambda function to send emails
• The email finds you! (hopefully)

You might notice something strange in this workflow: Rust is generating the HTML, rather than my front end website. It is true that a mirror of the newsletter is being hosted online, but the actual email that is recieved in your inbox comes purely from Rust. There was a time when my website (written in Astro) was hosting the HTML that got sent out, but there were just too many complications with that. As much as it sounds like the quickest, and maybe dirtiest, solution, there are just too many differences between the version of HTML and CSS supported by web browsers and the version supported by email clients.