Recap | September 2025

Not the most interesting of months – my journal notes are mostly about errands, life-admin, and feeling a bit under the weather.

Fun

Games

For a couple of days I fell down a rabbit hole with Stonks-9800, and had much better luck than in the demo. My character is currently making ¥1 billion per month just on the dividends from their own company, plus hundreds of millions from rental income. So I’m throwing hundreds of millions at risky investments just because of their potential for 1000% returns, in a way that I feel morally weird about even though I’m entirely aware its fictional.

I started Borderlands 4 both in solo and co-op. For my co-op run with Danny, I’ve chosen Vex the Siren, mostly for her pet tiger. To explore solo, I’ve chosen Harlowe. I’m not expecting to finish my solo run, as I usually have a lot of trouble navigating around the maps in Borderlands. However, I have found the starting area of Kairos much easier to travel around than the starting areas of other games in the series, partly thanks to the green and sunny biome and partly thanks to being able to call up a glowing trail that points towards your pinned objective.

Destiny 2′s Ash and Iron update was … disappointing. The new activity, Reclaim, defaults to being a solo activity when launched directly from the quest, which is the worst way to play the activity. When me, Si, and Josh tried 4 of the “new” missions added into the default mission playlist, the “Portal”, only one of them worked well; the other missions had missing collectibles or time-limits that were impossibly short. The activities aren’t even new – they’re a mixture of recycled past missions and carved-out elements of old dungeons – so how can they come back broken?

Finally, I remembered that Splitgate had gone offline, so I launched it to check if anything was still left. Splitgate is less dead than most games that have their servers shut down, as the developers worked on ensuring create peer-to-peer matchmaking could run. (The article here about the server shutdown explicitly mentions the Stop Killing Games movement, which is cool). The core of the game is still there, stripped of the store, achievements, and any unlock criteria for items, and will be playable for as long as there are people who want to play.

Other

I’ve moved this site away from WordPress.com and onto BlueHost’s WordPress hosting. Eventually I’d like to have my own site in a more independent form, but I don’t know enough yet about how to do that, so my intention is to use WordPress-on-BlueHost as a transitional step.

I didn’t have the best first start, as I couldn’t view or access the site 3 days after sorting out my nameservers and DNS records. I asked for assistance in the support chat, and the support agent fixed the 403 error preventing me from accessing WordPress… which revealed that migrating my site in had not worked.

My options were to either contact WordPress support to get a full backup of the site database, or to just import my XML backup of posts at the cost of losing my website’s theme and media library. I hadn’t paid for a high enough level of hosted WordPress to have a database backup, and didn’t want to spend more time in their support chats, so went with the XML option. While the same theme is present, it has fewer options, so I spent more time than needed figuring out how to put my theme back exactly how it had been. For now, this stepping stone has led to more complexity and fewer options, which was not what I wanted, but it is motivation to figure out what methods would be better. (Also, if there are any wonky links or missing pictures, that’s why!).

Work

I had a couple of “wandering tech support” afternoons with no rota’ed tasks this month, which are always useful for catching up with requests and spotting potential improvements/questions to investigate another time. As a result of the project-chaos in July, my line manager is testing us having a short meeting each week to plan out the week ahead and make sure I have enough time fit in the tasks I’ve promised to do. This is helpful, but I keep only remembering some tasks after the meeting finishes!

I embarrassed myself at one point when I realised that a manager was accidentally misinforming some other staff about an incoming EMIS-access change; I short-circuited when trying to find a logical way to stop her so that I could give her the correct information, and instead just called out  “[Name]…. you’re wrong!” in front of multiple staff. Luckily, that manager is the kind of confident extrovert who can take a direct contradiction without wanting to sink into the floor. While I’m not embarrassed about preventing wrong information from being given out, I know that I would find being on the receiving end of a public correction very difficult, so felt bad about delivering one.

Family

From the 22nd, I had a week of annual leave. I didn’t really have any plans for it beyond relaxing, so I ended up spending a lot of it on life-admin and household errands. My nan is on the waiting list for a knee replacement, so she wanted to look at riser recliner chairs. Given that she dislikes spending money on herself, I was surprised by her deciding to buy one there and then.

Spent some of it doing planned house-tidying, then had to do some unplanned extras (including replacing most of the net curtains in the house as we both forgot that they are not supposed to be put in the washing machine). I also ordered a shelf unit to tame my CD collection, and was able to self-assemble it without injury. However, I should have bought a larger unit, as the current CD collection already fills ~95% of the space.

Miscellaneous

I finally booked a GP appointment about my own misbehaving knee, and my appointment was not particularly useful. I saw a physio who seemed to only hear the part about it being more of a problem over the last few weeks, and not hear the part about it being annoying intermittently for ~10 years. He concluded that I had probably somehow injured the tendons in my knee and hip at the same time, then said he would email over some exercises and that I should come back in a few weeks if doing them didn’t help. He did not email the exercises, however.

I then realised a few days later, during my last day of work before my leave, that my ear had been consistently painful and ringing for a few days, which is normally a sign that I have an ear infection. I had a straightforward experience with using NHS 111 to get it seen to on the weekend, and saw a pharmacist who talked to me for as much time as she needed to get the right answer even though the pharmacy was incredibly busy.