Tag: personal

This month felt quite chaotic, like two different months awkwardly shoved together. I had a few days where my brain just would not switch off and I was still up at 4am. While I’m used to experiencing that occasionally, I had it a few times during the month, which threw me off enough that I then couldn’t respond to other annoyances sensibly. I returned to mostly normal by the end of the month, however,

Fun

Music/Podcasts

My friend Josh recommended that I listen to Fever Dream Radio by Sbassbear, not because he’d thought I’d love it, but because he thought I would find its aim and backstory interesting. Josh was correct, and I did also enjoy the album more than I expected to. Knowing the backstory of how this album came to be – that it was borne of the writer’s frustrations with how their ADHD affects their ability to create songs and that it was an attempt to “turn a weakness onto a strength” – almost certainly influenced my view, as the concept held my interest long enough to let the music, which would normally not be my style, grow on me.

I also upgraded my CD player to a D-191 Discman, which plays every CD I’ve tested without any surprise skipping. It has the bonus aesthetic advantage of being the same navy blue colour as my speakers.

Data

My MusicBrainz time this month was spent correcting the recording titles, artist credits, and release group names of the Lateral episodes before no.65. This means I’ve now corrected and re-linked everything from the incorrect release, so I can safely request for that release to be removed. While the MB community generally doesn’t like any information being removed, as it would break any outside links, I think this removal request will get some “Yes” votes as my original release was genuinely incorrect.

Games

I wasn’t able to game with friends much, as our other responsibilities (for some) and different work schedules (for others) got in the way.

The game I played most this month was again Disney Dreamlight Valley, which was sometimes annoying when I got stuck in a resource gathering loop. I only realised this month that the game intends for you to always have a companion with you to take advantage of their passive resource-collecting buffs, so I’ve been making quests take longer by not being sociable enough.

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.

Fun

Music

The band that resurfaced in my brain this month was The Spill Canvas. Two of their albums – “Sunsets and Car Crashes” and “Gestalt” – are in a strange place for me: while I really like both albums, they were also part of the soundtrack to a very complicated time of my life. Most of the time they are just good albums that I enjoy listening to, but occasionally they become a stronger reminder of that time and catch me off guard. Luckily “One Fell Swoop” was not in the dysfunction-soundtrack and so is always enjoyable.

My only new album this month was the new Three Days Grace album, Alienation. Having both singers working together seems to be going well for them, and I prefer the new album to their last few releases. (One-X is still my favourite though.)

Other

At the start of August I went to UWE with Danny so that he could say goodbye to it and I could have a nostalgia-trip. While there were a lot of new buildings, and we explored areas that I had never seen before, such as the cottage-styled music-building with its own orchard, much of UWE was still familiar to me. Our visit led to some thought-provoking conversations and gave us both a lot to think about afterwards.

Finally, this isn’t really “fun”, but I hadn’t prepared a heading for it, so it can live here. At the start of August I wrote a letter to my MP with my concerns about how the age-verification aspect of the Online Safety Act is being implemented. I’m not sure if it will achieve anything, or will even be read, but I might as well try. (As of a month later, I’ve not had a reply except for the automatic confirmation).

The middle of this month was more difficult than expected for me, as I became caught up in work-project-land and got too worried about things I couldn’t control and wasn’t supposed to be responsible for. This meant I spent a little too much time in my own head and so disconnected from the world a bit. For me that disconnection means my bad sense of time gets even worse, to the point of losing track of what day it is, or of what time I start/finish work even during that day. Giving reasonable estimates about tasks and deadlines around that is a bit of a challenge!.

Fun

Music

After thinking about it last month, I decided to order a CD player for more offline music listening, and chose a Discman (D131) due to my loyalty to Sony Walkman MP3 players. I had hoped to use it both with earphones and with my desktop speakers, but was concerned that it might make weird noises or lose volume control when plugged into my speakers. However, the Discman has the opposite problem; it works well with the speakers, but I cannot use it with earphones as the minimum possible volume is too loud.(Thanks, over-sensitive ears).

eBay also finally had a copy of a CD I had been looking for – Elva, by Unwritten Law. This album is not available digitally on Bandcamp or 7Digital, and every other time I’ve checked eBay there have been no UK-based copies available. My CD collection has now outgrown its storage in a slightly gravity-defying way, so I need to rethink where to store them, but that’s a problem for future-me.

Books

This month I re-read We Learn Nothing by Tim Krieder, and read The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green.
My favourite essay from We Learn Nothing is probably still the one which prompted me to buy the book in the first place, “The Busy Trap“, which talks about the way that many of us use being busy as a shield to guard against existential dread.

Explaining the premise of “The Anthropocene Reviewed” – author reviews various aspects of life and society on a 5-star scale – makes it sound like it will be shallow or flippant. That is not the case. Green’s essays are comforting and humanity-affirming, with the kind of warmth that reminds you that, despite everything, the world is full of pockets of beauty.

This month I spent more time in work-related rabbit-holes than I wanted to, thanks to working on projects that were … confusingly managed. On the plus side, I enjoyed playing some new games and listening to new music, and I spent more time reading books again rather than just articles.

Fun

Music

As I had recently found a couple of corrupted/glitchy songs in my music library, I decided to re-digitise my CD collection using the incredibly nerdy software that is Exact Audio Copy. EAC is a CD audio grabber that focuses on getting the most accurate possible audio from the CD, even when there are errors or scratches on the disc. While I don’t need its more advanced options, I like using EAC because of its more old-school design; it feels very logical and like it will only change things when I ask them to be changed.

I considered getting a CD player but was unsure of whether to go with a portable player and deal with extra cables/batteries, or whether to find a small desktop player which would have to balance on top of/ underneath my speakers. I impulsively bid on a Fiio DM13 on eBay, but luckily didn’t win, as I haven’t decided what the best option for me would be yet.

Other

I had more Magic-with-friends sessions this month. Danny had bought all four of the Final Fantasy commander decks (before they dramatically rose in price, thankfully for him), so on one evening we abandoned our usual decks to test them out. I tried the Terra deck, which focused on sending creatures to my graveyard and bringing them back from both my and my opponents’ graveyards. I came second in both of our matches, which is better than usual. Given the cards I had, I could have won the first match, but I failed at tactically choosing where my attacks should go and so threw my lead away.

Games

I spent one afternoon playing the 20th Anniversary edition of Beyond Good and Evil. When I played the HD version years ago, I got completely stuck somewhere after defeating the first boss-type enemy and so gave up. However, I’ve had a much better experience this time! (From what I remember, I don’t think I found the room with the first electricity puzzle first time around, which explains why I wouldn’t have been able to progress.)

This month went much better overall, despite a few empty days where I don’t think I did anything of use.

Fun

Games

I’ve mostly played Two Point Museum or Solitaire Expeditions when solo this month then Destiny 2 when with friends, as the friends that I spend most time gaming with have been more available than normal. Two Point Museum is engaging in a “…oops, its now 1am” kind of way, despite it not being particularly difficult. Destiny 2 had its “Guardian Games”; a yearly event about completing a checklist of game experiences known as “Moments of Triumph”. While I completed some of these challenges naturally through playing, and others only required minor adjustments like making sure to bring certain types of weapons to activities, I specifically chose to not try to complete the set. I get caught up in feeling like I need to complete the full list and tick off everything in events like this, even when I won’t use the rewards at the end, so being able to say “no, I won’t get any practical use or fun from doing this” and stick to that statement was a relief.

Music/Podcasts

I’ve not discovered any new music this month but have spent time listening to a new podcast; Let’s Learn Everything!. I found this one through enjoying the many episodes of Lateral which have featured the presenters of Let’s Learn Everything! as contestants. In their own show, the trio’s chemistry and enthusiasm is even stronger than in their guest appearances: I expected to find this annoying, but their exuberance about everything they are learning is so genuine and sincere that it is endearing rather than obnoxious.

Other

I spent some time tinkering with a Fiio X1 that I bought on eBay. I’ve wanted to play with one of these for ages for hardware reasons, as they are basically the non-apple version of a classic spinny-wheel iPod. While it could never be my main take-to-work DAP – as 1) it doesn’t have bluetooth and 2) it apparently gets confused and slows down if more than 5,000 songs are on it – this one was advertised as having firmware issues, so I wondered if reinstalling the firmware might be enough. Then I could resell it after getting my gadget fix.

At first, I thought the confusing, inconsistent-seeming controls, which involved two buttons that seemed to never do anything, and one button that alternated between meaning “select” and “back”, were a result of the firmware issues. Then, after installing the right firmware and getting the X1 to load both with and without an SD card in place, it turned out that no, the UI is just that bad!

As you can tell from the publishing date, I’m still working on the “being on time” part of monthly recaps. February was mostly a good month except for the final few days, which were dysfunctional enough that I’m not going to talk about them on the internet. Let’s get on to the fun aspects instead!

Fun

Games

4th Feb – I’m still playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I now have the tailor’s shop and the expanded version of Nook’s Cranny, and I’m working on the quest for getting K.K Slider to visit the island. I’m starting to lose enthusiasm for the game though, especially after my experience of testing out the “dream” mechanic and getting surprisingly creeped out by being in a simulacrum-within-a-simulacrum full of appliances and objects that were purely for the impression of community and couldn’t actually be interacted with.

10th Feb – I’m trying out Inscryption on the strong recommendation of my friend Josh, who rated it as one of his favourite games of all time within a few hours of play. I’m less into both deckbuilders and horror than he is, so I wasn’t expecting to have a similar experience, but so far I am finding Inscryption compelling and intriguing. Given that my main card game is Yu-Gi-Oh!, the mechanics of the actual card game are obviously much simpler, and this really works in its favour. The constraints of the card game make it make sense in the game’s universe. Also, the count of times I have stopped to say “what the hell“? out loud as a result of something in the game is already 3, and I imagine many more times are on the way! The only thing I dislike about the game so far is the way the character moves in jumps and 90-degree camera snaps rather than freely – it’s kind of like how some VR games handle movement, and I find it quite disorienting.

18th Feb – I’ve hit the really interesting part of Inscryption, and the “what the hell” count has been upgraded to a “what the fuck” count. I want to write a full review of it, but don’t know how to do that without spoiling what makes it so interesting and effective.