Posts on fournm

Music Stuff

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I keep finding a lot of stuff right as it gets posted that matches up with my music tastes! It’s been pretty great, always happy to find more bands to follow while I wait for the new Voxtrot album. Okay, so, I know not all of these are sleepers or anything, but this is just a sample of what all I’ve been running across lately. I’m not including the stuff that I just included on the links post a week or two ago.

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Links! Again for 2026

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One more time with feeling!

sleep

https://www.fastcompany.com/3057465/why-six-hours-of-sleep-is-as-bad-as-none-at-all

I do not like the implications of this even if I probably don’t disagree with them as much as I would like.

silliness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsFM1C78HIg

This is hilarious. A math teacher looking at what courses in Mario Kart DS could be done in a normal car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=as8s6QQcjp0

Escalator logistics!

electricity and engineering

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

Fantastic Technology Connections video about renewable energy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl3zHuih_CY

A friend of mine digging into a plasma toroid generator she made!

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Cooking Adventures - Blueberry Cheesecake Baked Oatmeal

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Okay! So, I was watching Internet Shaquille’s latest video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-hqFCLsydU) and immediately thought that it looked pretty good! So I tried it!

Here’s the actual recipe, to save you having to click into his video’s description: https://www.tablespoon.com/recipes/blueberry-cheesecake-baked-oatmeal/57a34622-3b26-43e3-b196-150ca8b879d6

Really easy to put together, but I should have stirred the oats more. I ended up with some really salty pockets by accident. I think the tweaks that the video calls for (leave out the brown sugar, wait to start preheating, etc) were pretty solid suggestions, but I wasn’t thinking and ended up making a mess of several more bowls than intended. Ah well.

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Things I Wish I Had

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:15:00 +0000

I’ll group them up, but none of these are “spec” quality thoughts or anything. I just want these to exist. Hit me up on some messenger or whatever if you know of one that I don’t.

Unrelated to anything, I reach for the word musing too much. Is it too late to make a resolution to be slightly less pretentious?

personal dashboard

I know that there are a few of these out there, and maybe I just need to try harder into looking at configuring them. I want something that I can easily host that lets me have multiple profiles (me, family members), a public facing page for family level notifications / calendar entries, and then separate personal pages. Something that would make for a really good home page of a browser. I know the APIs of a lot of things have fallen apart and that not nearly as many things as I’d like support RSS anymore, but I feel like at a glance email counts, calendar appointments, to do deadlines, new notifications on different platforms, and maybe the ability to set some quick link tiles would be the real goal here.

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2023 - A way late year in review post!

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alright! Let’s just get these all out of the way in one big post, shall we? No need to create a bunch of backdated entries for a few years ago, and by setting that precedent now I won’t feel the need to for the OTHER years I want to backdate as well.

books

I am ashamed to say I don’t have anything recorded? I know I was reading my usual webcomics, but most other series I had been following all ended and I hadn’t picked up new ones yet. I don’t think that it’s actually possible I went through the year without reading anything of note, even if it was only one or two books, but… I guess maybe?

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2025 - Year in Review, Books

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I hinted at this one, but for as much fun as I’ve had reading things this past year, the idea of writing about everything is… daunting, to say the least. It isn’t like I didn’t read a lot, once you factor in manga, in 2024. Like, I read the 107ish volumes of One Piece that were out at the time, I read all of Naruto, My Hero Academia, Frieren, The Case Study of Vanitas, and so on. On top of it, I got in the entire Imperial Radch main trilogy, The Locked Tomb series, started on The Expanse and Terra Ignota, and a few standalone novels. I mean, while the “list” only had 70 entries on it or so, those 70 entries represented like 200 books! I still wrote a lot about almost all of it, which was a great exercise in just parsing out my thoughts about all of those various books and making sure I still know how to retain anything, you know?

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2025 - Year in Review, Shows

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m bad at movies, but shows? I can watch an episode of a show while falling asleep, or while eating dinner, or … any number of other smaller tasks. Much easier! Even if you watch a movie-length number of episodes at once, well, that’s still easier to start and stop than pausing a movie and trying to not lose your place. I’m going to be a lot more loose with spoilers here than anywhere else, so if you see a series mentioned at the start of a paragraph and DO NOT WANT SPOILERS for it, skip that one.

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2025 - Year in Review, Movies

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t normally go super heavy on movies, and 2025 was no exception in that regard. The last time I was a regular in theaters was when Alamo Drafthouse was only a block or two away from my apartment back in Austin, which meant that it was a great date spot for dinner. As it is, I don’t really think many movies are coming out that justify current theater prices or putting up with audiences that tend to do a lot of loud phone use. Anyway, most of this was all rewatch instead of branching out into too many new films.

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2025 - Year in Review, Music

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I mostly had scrobbling working again this year! Mostly. It wasn’t perfect (like me actually remembering to upload this on the date I wrote it, cough cough), and my kids’ music tastes dramatically shifted what shows up here thanks to car listening (guess why there’s so many musicals on my list!), but yeah, I like having music stats again. I’ve been trying to make sure that I don’t get set into only listening to things from when I was a teenager, and according to ListenBrainz at least, the majority of what I went through this year was less than five years old.

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2025 - Year in Review, Games

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Alright! First post of the year in review, and it’s one of the easiest ones. I’ve also made a change to how I track things this year, which is that I broke it down by month. I like how it let me see a better idea of how my play habits changed over the year, but, well…

I didn’t play that much?

Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of fun with what I did play! I did a post about Necese, I did a post about Silksong, and I really should have done one about Monster Hunter Wilds. Short version? I legitimately think it might be the best game in the series. Is it a little easy? Sure, but at this point I’ve been playing games in the series for two decades and this isn’t the G-rank release yet. It has some of the best monster variety at launch that we’ve ever seen, some of the smoothest controls, and its gimmicks (unlike with Rise) don’t hurt the fundamentals of the series. Bringing back Little Miss Forge and Gore Magala? Fantastic. The story is a bit cheesy, but the experience of playing through it in multiplayer was incredibly smooth. Maybe the squad lobby system could be a bit more intuitive, but overall the connection and ability to drop in-and-out of hunts with friends has never been better.

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Short delay on the year in review posts...

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Happy new year!

Whew.

Well then. Glad I got all that writing out of the way early about all of the important series this year, I mean, I made individual posts about 3 separate things, so that clear-

I’m getting a message here that says that didn’t even start to scratch the surface, and with everything going on at the start of this year, it might be a little bit until I can properly write out all my thoughts on everything.

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2025 Links!

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been meaning to do this more and I just… haven’t. Oops. So I won’t have too many comments just so that I go ahead and post…

https://egoless.engineering/

Fantastic engineering culture writeup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2G_GaXpLiI

Silent film makeup! With recreation. I knew a lot of this about black-and-white film but I don’t think I had seen detail like this on it before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI

Noodle talking about pixel art and how it used to look! This is a really cool breakdown about how some of the techniques worked and the differences to modern pixel art.

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Please read Akane-banashi.

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Onward and upward with trying to save myself some pain at the end of December in regards to all of my feelings about stuff I’ve played and read this year! There’s been so much reading, putting that new Kobo I got to good use. I know this sounds a bit like a food blog with the lead in story on most posts, but well, I normally write these while I’m doing a light treadmill workout or waiting on an appointment somewhere just to get the boredom out of my fingers and talk about something I find interesting. The worst part of this one is going to be writing this without spoilers, as of chapter 182.

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Quick meta post

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sure tons of people have deep links to various posts on this site, and I’m sorry to say, I have just broken a lot of them.

I changed the format of how I name the files that make up this blog a year or two ago, but never went back and changed the old posts to match….

until now.

Yeah, that pause for dramatic effect is about how much I expect anyone will care. I also went through and updated/changed some tags, mostly clarifying (series) and making sure I numbered things the same way. Not much to say about it, but if you had a post saved for some reason and now it doesn’t work, uh, sorry.

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Thoughts on Necese

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m not sure why I feel the need to give Necese its own shoutout, since it isn’t like I’ve been a particularly prolific blogger this year. On the other hand, I’ve meant to be. I have a bunch of these that I want to write now that the year is winding down, because there’s a lot of stuff I’ve enjoyed this year that I want to give a bit more of a blurb than I feel like I should put into just my end of the year wrap-up posts.

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Thoughts on Hollow Knight: Silksong

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Well. I’m a bit late to commenting on the game, because … well, life has sure been life this year.

For context: I have not completely finished True Ending, but I have done a lot of everything else. I’m not going to try to spoil too much but if the notion that there is a true ending immediately makes you cringe to find out, well, that’s your sign to probably not read the rest of this.

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2024 review: part 1, games

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I still do these! I’ve actually been keeping the records still, more or less, so I do intend to backdate the posts for the missing gap years. What missing gap years, future reader? Exactly. Concern yourself not. These are the games I played in 2024, ordered roughly by date of first play, except for when my notes sucked.

2024! Well, you sure weren’t a 2023 in terms of gaming. That’s not a slight against you–Armored Core 6 was rough competition. That’s probably one of my favorite games of all time now, and for something to reach that list these days is pretty imp-no, no, Fields of Mistria, wait your turn, I’m writing over here-ahem, difficult. Now for some brief thoughts!

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2024 review: part 2, books

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I should probably rename this section to “literature” or something, since it’s usually included webcomics and … ah well. Not changing it now.

It’s probably obvious, more than most of these lists, that I’ve been on a reading slump for a while. I still enjoy a good paper book, but I don’t like storing them, I don’t like carrying them, I don’t particularly love the lighting levels required to comfortably read them, etc. My Kindle Paperwhite, a first generation, hasn’t exactly kept up with the times either – micro charging instead of USB-C, gestures, etc. Comixology was a pretty big help, but then capitalism.

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2024 review: part 3, shows

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Moving right along! Shows. As a note, I did not reliably finish many! I could have absolutely done better about that, normally I did get at least a season or two.

One Piece is a delightful long running anime that I have already gushed about as a manga. I will elaborate a little bit on the filler – G-8 in particular is an arc that is so delightful I could have sworn it was canon on first watch. Not all of it is that quality, but One Piece’s structure (island to island, no direct power scaling) means that early in the series it was incredibly capable of just adding a few episodes of made up content here or there with few-to-no problems on overall pacing. As the series moves on, that stops and the more traditional “we slow down dialog and overextend run cycles” kicks in, but I still think it’s an enjoyable watch on a week-to-week basis. Megumi Ishitani, and anything she touched in regards to the show, are incredible. One Piece Fan Letter is probably my single favorite episode of anything that I saw this year, and that had some incredible competition. As far as which audio track to watch, it’s really hard to pick my favorite version of the Straw Hats. No disrespect to the incredible Yao (first Straw Hat to retire), but Franky’s English rendition is incredible, and Ian Sinclair as Brooke (or any other role he’s ever done for that matter) is unmatched. Jinbei’s Japanese voice carries more weight to it, adding to some of his already coolest scenes in the series. I really don’t think you can go wrong, but seeing as the English dub isn’t caught up, prepare to have to switch at some point.

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2024 review: part 4, movies

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Going to be honest, something had to give, and it was movies. I’m still not doing theaters (it’s not like there’s an Alamo Drafthouse around here) for a variety of reasons, and honestly, I don’t think anything came out to really make me feel like it anyway. Mostly rewatches abound.

The Clan’s Heir is a Trans Woman was … incredible. If you don’t mind some ~~well meaning~~ slurs in a very “his pronouns are she/her!” way, you’ll have a ton of fun with it.

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2024 review: part 5, music

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last but not least, music! Since I’m actually scrobbling again (or whatever you’d like to call it for ListenBrainz instead) the list actually has SOME data. I don’t do spotify, this is what you get.

Notable callouts: City Girl’s new album dropped in December, and so did a new people you meet outside of bars. One of them had enough time to make the top 10, the other did not, and that’s tragic, but both are great.

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Mid October links!

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Got a few more things!

covid

https://emilysdupree.substack.com/p/the-invention-of-memory

Oof. That’s.. entirely too relatable.

This is, I believe, at the heart of pandemic memory: it is a way we have rewritten the past so that we may continue rewriting the present.

I had surgery near the start of all of this. It meant that I needed to be extra cautious at the start, and then several people I know were some of the first wave of Long COVID cases, and… well, I’ve not stopped. Maybe if I could go a week or two without hearing someone I know is “unable to get out of bed” sick with it. Until then, well, I’m wearing a mask when I go out in public. It’s not like it’s particularly difficult for my life.

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Early October links!

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been holding off on posting this and I don’t have a good reason why! Here’s some links.

generative ai / software development (they’re linked this week)

https://www.wheresyoured.at/saaspocalypse-now/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/ https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again

Oh look it’s more .. everything about how the tech industry is currently eating itself alive. Sigh.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/10/githubs-copilot-lies-about-its-own-documentation-so-why-would-i-trust-it-with-my-code/

… including why I hate the idea that any of this will be useful for software. I have a few friends who keep sharing “look at the neat thing I did with ChatGPT” posts and the errors are blatant, just like this. I don’t understand it.

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Another quick site update.

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Alright!

hugo version bump from 115 to 135, which meant fixing a lot of weird deprecations and updating my config file and….
finally getting my tags to show up on RSS posts!

I had to actually make my own RSS template, but I added the category handling to it in a way that should make it so that RSS readers pick up my tags, which means you can filter things!

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Small theme tweaks, ideas

Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Consider this a changelog – since the main social media I use is going away, well, I figured I should fix the place up a bit more.

Added :empty blockquote handling to cover pages without a description.
Added aria-label to the external links, because I … honestly can’t believe I forgot, considering how much I focus on doing that right at work. It was even on the RSS link already, so I’m not sure how I missed it.

I’m considering making use of some of the new details accordion element capabilities, but I would like this site to stay as Javascript-free as possible. As far as my view is concerned, it’s a collection of Markdown files, a few basic HTML templates, and a css file.

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Links roundup for some time around September 14

Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The main social media platform I’ve been using is going away, so unfortunately I won’t be linking the neat posts I’ve found on it of late. Instead here’s some other stuff.

generative ai

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/random-finds-ai-image-upscale-collapse

Oops. Upscalers bad, it turns out. Well. They work great initially, until…

https://redeem-tomorrow.com/llms-wont-save-labor-when-you-use-them-like-this

As I’ve said many, many times – code review is the hardest part of writing software. I cannot imagine using an LLM to generate a benchmark, something where you need to be incredibly aware that you are testing the same thing. Perhaps this is why I’m not pulling in VC Startup Money.

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August 2024: Life and links

Sun, 11 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well. So, that whole “my friend died” thing… kind of put me into more of a daze than I expected, especially as my cat’s health declined and she passed away recently as well. Oddly enough (if you’ve played through it this will make sense maybe), Dawntrail… kinda helped with digging out of the hole from that. Good expansion, it has some flaws (I played Astrologian), but the encounters are stunning. Love the characters and setting.

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Controlling Your Own Media Consumption: RSS

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

So, almost a decade ago I wrote an original post on tumblr (please don’t go looking for it) about how RSS feeds are not a dead technology. For a new decade and an increasingly awful landscape of the web, in the style of everything else lately, here’s a remaster of that original guide – because it’s as important as ever if we’ve got any hope of having a usable web going forward. I’ve been tweaking this slowly for a few months, and if I update it again I’ll post or something.

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December 2023: Life and links

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Been a minute, hasn’t it? I’m going ahead and putting out the RSS guide, which has been sitting 95% done for ages. I hope it’s helpful to someone. Health’s been a bit wonky, been busy with work, so on, so forth. A friend died, which… I’m going to be honest, everything’s a bit of a blur in the aftermath of that, which is why this is actually going live… quite a while after I wrote it. We started playing Final Fantasy XI as a friend group in addition to XIV, a game I’ve missed dearly. I’ve done a lot of informal writing about why I think it works so well, and I should collect that and post it here, which I’ll probably get around to…

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Minor theme update.

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Github removed their actually useful notification feed, so I removed my Github account. We don’t use Github at work, and I don’t really need an account on a source control site that wants to become social media.

Anyway, it’s no longer linked on the sidebar.

Thoughts on Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing a wide variety of games this year and, after a number of high profile releases, thinking critically about games has been on my mind more than it has in years. I saw someone talk about how one of the interesting things in gaming is that sometimes you can see the designer’s vision, sometimes it doesn’t seem like there was a cohesive one, sometimes it lines up with yours for what the game is, sometimes it doesn’t. Reviewing ~~games~~ media is hard, but the interactivity of games adds layers to art critique and “accessibility” that aren’t there in other formats, and, well, one of the things that’s come with having (minorly) injured myself this year is wanting to write about those games and their experiences more.

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Video games... good actually?

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Well then.

So we picked up Diablo 4 to play with a friend, and… I’ve got a post about that I need to clean up, because the frustration there got me back into playing Diablo 2 and also Diablo 3.

You know what? Give Diablo 3 another shot, if you last played it at launch. Preferably on console. It’s dramatically better – inventory makes more sense, button limitations make more sense, and they’ve cleaned up a lot. The story’s still… what it is, but at least it doesn’t feel like corporate-design-by-committee slop that’s designed to be as palatable to as many regions as possible. The areas are vibrant and pretty. It’s ended up as a pretty solid game, really. Couch co-op definitely improves it.

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Links roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

writing

https://theeditorsblog.net/2017/01/23/restraining-accents/

I’ve seen a few things around this in the past, but it’s writing advice around accents.

the web

https://www.patrickweaver.net/blog/a-blog-post-with-every-html-element/

Every HTML element! Neat!

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/the-future-of-the-web-is-vnc/

Less neat! Google really is screwing everything up again.

https://coolguy.website/basic-html-competency-is-the-new-punk-folk-explosion/

What it says on the label – love this.

generative ai

https://fortune.com/2023/08/01/can-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-be-fixed-experts-doubt-altman-openai/

Oh, would you look at that – “hallucinations are foundational to this style of generative model” isn’t exactly surprising.

grifting

https://nebula.tv/videos/tomnicholas-griftonomics-why-scams-are-everywhere-now/

Tom Nicholas breaking down why it seems like scams are even more on the rise.

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Links roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Not a lot that I’ve really seen that caught my eye this week, but here’s a bit.

llms

https://nebula.tv/videos/patrickhwillems-ai-filmmaking-is-not-the-future-its-a-grift

Does anyone other than me always remember that old “What if Wes Anderson made X-Men” video? Well, the guy who did it put down his thoughts on the generative AI trend of “Wes Anderson” videos, which are… bland.

games

https://cohost.org/matthewseiji/post/2183727-thinking-about-game

Interesting thoughts on game difficulty, indirectly via Zachtronics.

https://cohost.org/lizbushouse/post/2269622-yet-another-example

Context is important in localization, and Final Fantasy XIV is doing a great job at it.

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Links roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

gaming

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/game-tutorials-should-be-easily-skipped-why-is-that-so-hard/

This makes me so angry. There’s been a lot of good and bad examples of it in recent memory, some of which I should really talk about in their own blog posts. Monster Hunter Rise? Horrible, I actually can’t maintain the attention to play the game further. Jedi Survivor? Fantastic, well integrated, nice controls reminder.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/17/23798368/neopets-relaunch-website-flash-games

NEOPETS RELAUNCH. Sad to hear that it comes from the remnants of Math Blaster yet again shutting down, but good in terms of the fact that it has confused me for about a decade on how you mismanage something like Neopets so heavily.

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Links roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

Sat, 15 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Here we are again with some more links of interest! If you saw the original description that I forgot to update off the draft, no you didn’t!

handwriting

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/how-the-ballpoint-pen-killed-cursive

Oh, this made something click for me. I’ve never held a pen “correctly” because it hurt to use like that, and.. well. Thanks, younger me, you weren’t wrong.

llms

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/fruit-of-the-poisonous-llama/

Yeah this is probably going to be a regular aspect of these. Up first, we’ve got a Terence Eden post about lawsuits going on against some of these model makers, which seem to have whitepapers openly admitting that the models are using pirated books as a source.

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Hugo version update!

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

So, if you were looking closely at the page source, you might have noticed that I was still using hugo 53.

The current version of hugo, at time of writing, is 115.

I had previously experimented with 79 and a few other newer versions, but because I was using someone else’s theme that hadn’t updated, there was… something… broken that I never quite figured out and didn’t feel like debugging their code.

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Links roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

Sat, 08 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Links roundup! A new feature! Maybe regularly recurring! We’ll see! Articles, videos, etc of interest that I find that I felt like sharing. My Newsblur feed technically has sharing abilities, but, this seems more permanent. Well, it’s likely to eventually, potentially rapidly linkrot these days. Ah well.

cursed computer hardware

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5M0TwnkWUM

Gravis goes through the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in computer hardware. What the absolute hell.

activitypub vs rss

https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/2535-ActivityPub-hot-take

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New theme!

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 15:55:31 -0700

Look! It’s a new theme! And deranged rambling in the description!

I’m wanting to take a bit more of an active role in posting things to here, which I know I’ve said many a time when social media wasn’t on fire, but that was then and this is the hellscape of the enshittification era. I’ve added a “Sources” tab for things that I rely on for information and entertainment, though it’s not an exact copy of my OPML on Newsblur. I also went through and put a bunch of my Youtube follows into Newsblur, so that I could actually follow them! It turns out I’d been using social media as a way to get notified of lower volume channels actually updating, and, perhaps shocking no one, that means that their uploads would get completely drowned out in a flood of all the shorts that everyone uploads now. Sigh.

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Getting Windows 11 to Not Be Awful

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 21:45:36 -0700

This is to keep a record for setting up any new machines I get that happen to be unfortunate enough to have to deal with Windows 11 for some reason on. This’ll probably need an update as they force more generative AI nonsense into the OS, but for now, this more or less covers it.

why

So, so many reasons. Look, I’ve used a lot of versions of Windows. It’s normally my daily driver OS because of gaming and compatibility at large, but damn, have they made the worst version since Millenium Edition of late.

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Still alive, need to write things

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 13:55:31 -0700

Okay, so, anyway. Sure didn’t see every single major platform exploding in the last year, but here we are. Geez, even having to move some of my stuff to a different registrar, seriously, didn’t expect that one.

At some point in the not too distant future I suppose I’ll be updating social media links, and I’m also going to put together actual descriptions on how to run a static site generator and maybe something about RSS as well. I’ve had a good RSS post in the past, so I should be able to just update that…

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Some assorted links

Mon, 02 May 2022 11:19:31 -0700

So it sure has been a neverending pandemic, huh. Sure hope that it’s possible for it to actually end. It has not, to be clear.

Instead of actually bringing myself to write anything (though I will be! I’m going to be writing up a Spring Security 2 to 5 migration post), I have some great posts I read that I wanted to share instead.

https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2020/01/19/no-dynamic-type-systems-are-not-inherently-more-open/

Type systems and lies people tell themselves. This is fantastic, completely recommend it.

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How I Work - May 2021

Tue, 25 May 2021 11:19:31 -0700

I posted one of these a few years back and started to update it back in 2020, right before the pandemic lockdowns truly kicked off in earnest. As someone fully remote to start, most of my tools and practices haven’t really changed – despite this not being a year of typical remote work at all. While this might have been more helpful at the start, well, all I can say is “oops” and there have been some higher priority things in my life, and at least now these are all much more heavily tested in a stressful time.

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music, in review

Fri, 25 Dec 2020 14:14:22 -0800

Okay, so–I’ve been a Google Play Music user for the past 7 years or so, which has meant that unlike most people, I’ve not had a Spotify Wrapped. I’ve tried to use Last.fm reliably over the years, but it just takes one “I reset my phone and forgot to scrobble” to leave my trends messed up for most of the year.

But someone put together a script that builds a list based on your play music activity! This is really neat! That only goes back so far, and the 2020 numbers are just fucked (technical term) between the GPM shutdown and the pandemic. However, I’ve got a working ListenBrainz setup (and mostly local playback) going so I should be able to get good numbers for next year. I might switch to Maloja instead, since it looks pretty cool and I’m into the self-hosting thing, but finding some easy ways to make a python server accessible for as little cost as possible is… not trivial. Sigh.

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(Revisit for ShB) Musings on the Design of Final Fantasy XIV

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 11:19:31 -0500

So, between the last post and now, there’s been a lot going on – COVID, medical trip, work, working on design of our own project with my wife – but also, I finished Shadowbringers (5.0, at least) and can update these articles for it.

Credit where credit is due – ShB’s work on having a living and breathing world brought me to actual tears. I will be going over major spoilers for Shadowbringers over this article, so if you care, please do not read further. I’m still going to try and not go over major emotional beats in detail, so if you think just general plot direction spoilers are fine, this hopefully won’t ruin your experience.

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2019 books

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:54:22 -0800

So… Die is absolutely amazing and the end of the Wicked and the Divine was perfect and I couldn’t have pictured anything better.

Reading Homestuck again to introduce Elle to it was bizarre. Not complaining, but wow that was weird.

The Ravnica book wasn’t terrible, but ugh, the follow ups certainly were and I’m so disappointed in the direction Magic story has taken.

Going through this list though just reminds me of how many things I was reading last year have ended, which is part of why my 2020 list is looking to be so sparse so far. I’ve picked up a few books I’m really excited about, so I’ll get the opportunity to fill it out a bit more, but there’s some bittersweet feelings about it.

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2019 games

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:43:22 -0800

Like most years, gaming kind of was one of the main things I went through this year. In particular, though, I got on a great kick for visual novels that I found through Itch and that was a blast. Angela He’s work in particular stood out over and over, but I have to give credit for Heaven Will Be Mine starting the trend in the first place.

I do not honestly know why I was playing Pac Land. I must have lost a dare while setting up MAME. I can think of no other explanation.

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2019 movies

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:14:22 -0800

Similarly delayed, oh well.

Despite watching basically every other Star Wars movie during 2019 and that the end of the Skywalker Trilogy released, we’ve actually still not seen it. Last Jedi currently remains my favorite, followed by Rogue One, so from what I hear I’m very unlikely to enjoy the ending – I know Last Jedi has its problems, but I’m not up for the idea of effectively unwriting the movie out.

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2019 shows

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 10:10:22 -0800

Oops. There’s just been a lot going on so I haven’t gotten around to these, and I know they only mean much to me, but I like having them shared.

Not a whole lot of anything to comment on here, we re-watched a lot of things with the kids primarily, but Dragon Prince (which had some of the same backing as Avatar) was a delight. I’m really looking forward to seeing more of it as the story continues to develop. The new Carmen Sandiego was also fairly enjoyable, as someone who loved the old show as a kid, though our kids got a bit bored of it?

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Quest Design -- Musings on the Design of Final Fantasy XIV

Tue, 19 May 2020 22:40:31 -0800

As mentioned in the description, heavy spoilers for A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, and Stormblood follow. If you are interested in the story of any of these and not finished with it, you should really wait to read this post.

Okay, this is the second of the posts about Final Fantasy XIV and this time around we’re going to be going over the lessons they’ve learned over the course of the expansions and then also a bit of what they could still stand to learn in regards to quest design. The developers have learned from a lot of their own mistakes, and, to their credit, Square is actually going back and redoing the main storyline for XIV to streamline A Realm Reborn’s content to be less of a slog. In addition to the main storyline, though, there are plenty of additional side quests and side storylines that have improved in their execution with time as well.

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Living Worlds -- Musings on the Design of Final Fantasy XIV

Sun, 10 May 2020 16:19:31 -0800

The evolution of Final Fantasy XIV over its various expansions shows some truly learned lessons and fascinating choices about the stories we tell and how we tell them. There a few aspects of this I want to talk about, so I’m going to have a series of posts about the design of Final Fantasy XIV and some of the lessons that I think other MMOs (and games in general!) could stand to learn from it. I wish I could incorporate details from Shadowbringers into these, but I am not yet through its content and don’t particularly feel like spoiling it for myself.

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Update to the Dwarf Fortress mods...

Wed, 06 May 2020 17:25:53 -0800

Thanks to the wonderful Kat, I feel like playing Dwarf Fortress again and I noticed that version 47.x has released. Because of this, well, all of my mods needed to be updated. I’ve gone through and updated them all, along with finally creating a post for “clay dirt” which I’ll absolutely admit is a bit on the cheating side.

I also edited my hugo theme a bit to provide better support for my mods, in both giving them a better summary view and giving me a way to link bitbucket repositories instead of direct downloads only. See, look at me, making it up to my poor neglected website. Two whole posts in one day.

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Life in 2020...

Wed, 06 May 2020 11:19:31 -0800

So it goes something like this.

me, end of last year: I’ll try to write more this year.

2020: has a global pandemic

me: has a hard drive failure that causes frustrating data loss of my most backed up drive and makes getting a replacement drive far more difficult than it should be

me: … oh come on!

Whew.

Basically, I didn’t have one of my mass storage drives backed up because “everything on it is in cloud storage” – which it turns out isn’t a strategy that works when you forget to commit a post or two to your repo, don’t actually have all of your game saves sync’d to cloud storage, and a few other frustrating corner cases. End result, I’ve finally taken the plunge and made a Backblaze account since their terms seem to be the most favorable for what I need, the cost is reasonable, and thanks to symmetric gigabit internet, backup times weren’t absolutely horrible on more than 3 TB of data. My replacement drive is 8TB, and it’ll get mirrored eventually, but until then, I’m at 13TB usable in my main machine compared to the prior 8TB total.

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Torture Testing

Thu, 26 Dec 2019 16:19:31 -0800

I haven’t posted anything about testing (or.. anything, for that matter) in a while, despite trying to make a lot of progress at work in that department.

So instead, today I’m going to link to a great blog post I read about it that inspires me to try this approach, since we have a similar problem at Dayjob in regards to the in-depth tests.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/12/16/how-randomly-skipping-tests-made-them-better/

The idea of only running some of your “worst” tests on each run is fascinating and I can see easily leading to actually having more developers run the test suite involved if it cuts off enough time. We already have what we call the “fastbuild” which skips all integration tests and cuts off 30 minutes of execution time, but this could be an interesting middle ground.

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Mass Token Gen

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:53 -0800

My favorite format of Magic the Gathering is Commander, formally known as EDH. For a quick rundown, in normal Magic the Gathering, you can typically play up to four of any card (outside of some specific restrictions) and your deck is typically 60 cards. In Commander, you have a 100 card deck that may only have one of each individual card. In addition, it has one (again, specific exceptions) special card known as your commander, and you can only play cards that share a color identity with your commander.

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2018 shows

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:19 -0800

Shows!

Lego Elves was surprisingly good. Little Witch Academia was adorable. She-Ra was AMAZING AMAZING AMAZING, Noelle Stevenson worked absolute magic with that reboot. Hilda was fantastic and full of Gravity Falls feelings. The Dragon Prince was a great spiritual successor to Avatar?

Look, we all know I’m lying if I say that I mostly started watching any of those with the kids. I did not.

I didn’t track web series this year, but if I had, they would have mostly been Katherine of Sky’s let plays.

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2018 movies

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:08 -0800

I want to say I didn’t watch much in the way of new movies this year, and I suppose that’s mostly true, but the year just felt so long that most of the first time watch or new movies … well, they stopped feeling that way.

Black Panther was incredible. I can’t believe it took me this long to see Only Lovers Left Alive. Oops.

terry pratchett’s going postal
partly cloudy
jak jak attack
piper
pirates of the caribbean dead men tell no tales
star wars a new hope
mulan
black panther
kiki’s delivery service
star wars the last jedi
kingsman the secret service
kingsman the golden circle
atlantis
deadpool
only lovers left alive
the forbidden kingdom
crouching tiger, hidden dragon
space jam
moana
dirty computer
hercules
pacific rim
teenage mutant ninja turtles
thor ragnarok
muppet treasure island
sherlock holmes
ponyo
porco rosso
howl’s moving castle
the sword in the stone
the foreigner
mary and the witch’s flower
castle in the sky
muppet christmas carol

2018 games

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:03 -0800

Next up, we have games. Whew, there were some really good releases in this year in addition to all the older games I finally made it around to playing (and sometimes even finishing!).

Disgaea 5 is hands down my favorite entry in the series now, at least from a mechanical standpoint. The story and characters.. well, they’ve grown on me. I did complete basically all of it other than the Baal fight, so I’m counting it as complete.

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2018 books

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 14:01:00 -0800

Here we go! To kick off the series this time, we’ve got books.

It’s a fairly short list, but also, in the past week I’ve picked up about 30 more things that I would like to read after my first trip to Powell’s City of Books.

Yes, I’m disappointed that it took me three years of living in Portland to make it there as well, but here we are.

Tales from Earthsea was my introduction to Le Guin outside of her blog, which was perhaps a strange choice. We’re entering the final year of Wicked and the Divine, and there were a lot of other good comics that I didn’t entirely get to as well.

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mobile development

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’ve been trying for a while to make a few quick and relatively basic Android games for our kids to have on their tablets that are completely free of microtransactions. I write Java regularly, I’ve done Android before, hell, I’ve even made some of these before, so it seemed like a fairly easy process to just fire up Android Studio and get these going.

That’s where I was wrong.

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mid-2018 update

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick update on things since I’ve been a bit sparse on the posts. Work and other life things have been eating up most of my time (in ways that I can’t really publicly write about), but there’s been a few things worth an update.

I’ve (as of this week) got a 500 day streak on Duolingo. I’m feeling more and more comfortable with Esperanto, I do need to get back to working on my Spanish, and I would also like to get back into the process of picking up Japanese and Swedish. I suppose a “better” fourth language to pick up would be German, though my understanding is that wouldn’t be that difficult coming from English and Esperanto.

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migrating old spring apps

Mon, 02 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Here we go again, with another writeup of dragging Enteprise Java into the modern world. This time, we’re going to be tackling bringing Spring 2.5-based, method-name-resolver controllers and routing into the modern world by removing a dependency on MultiActionController. MultiActionController last exists in Spring 3.2.18, which means you’re out of luck if you’re trying to bring an older application forward and it’s heavily dependent on old XML configuration of controllers.

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2017 books