mid-2018 update

Alli Grant Est. 3 minutes (604 words)
personal ideas games books
Mid-2018 life update.

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.

Reading has been great–I’m excited to actually have a good list in place for the year so far. I’ve caught back up on The Wicked and the Divine, which continues to be probably my favorite comic in print. I also found out through Twitter about The Witch Boy, Princess Princess Ever After, and The Prince and the Dressmaker–a lovely trio of queer graphic novels aimed towards kids/teens. Becoming Dangerous was an intense read that helped keep me grounded despite current events.

On the games front, I’ve finally picked up Splatoon 2 along with the rest of the household–turf war is a great game mode that actually makes a console FPS pretty fun. I’ve also been putting together a few new Commander decks for Magic the Gathering, including additional tweaks of my deck for Oviya Pashiri. I’ve been into token-heavy decks with two different main themes. One of them uses a few combinations to go very big and very wide, the other uses life and creatures as resources to generate mana and other fun combinations.

As far as home technology goes, plans are in motion to rebuild the router. I had built a pfSense box to take over for our provider’s box, though the motherboard started to give me trouble. It’s unfortunate, because running an x86 router apparently results in about 200Mbps up/down of additional consistency for us. The provided router struggles at speeds above 750 down and about 825 up. Going along with that are the ubiquity access point and a few various switches, providing solid wireless and wired connections throughout most of the house at higher speeds than is really reasonable in an average house. I might convert the Raspberry PI into being a Mozilla Things gateway to provide more local management of our Hue bulbs, especially with some recent outages on Google Home and our internet connection.

Side projects aplenty. I’ve started working on a few Android games for the kids (goals: simple, replayable, no microtransactions), some character sheet software for my roleplaying habit, and about forty other things that I’ve written out but not gotten around to the code for yet, including but not limited to:

Hopefully, I’ll have some more updates soon. If any of those coding projects sound interesting though, by all means, try it! I’m realistic about getting around to them or finishing them, and even if I do, I would love to see more of those in the world.