my heart's not .init

pump the brakes

it's been a weird autumn! and a weird april. everythings settled down a little and i think im start to rediscover my love for notekeeping and personal organisation. i simultaneously feel like a bit of a void in me and my life and am starting to id things i want to do more - do more art, see more music, organise more silly little events - but i now actually have the energy to make them happen! i've been appreciating the little things a bit more, spending more time with the tighter inner circle of friends, talking to my interstate pals more, playing more silly multiplayer videogames with the people who live a bit further from me, and i think it's working to level me out a bit. i'm focusing on kicking the grass is greener feelings and wanting the things that i don't have, rather appreciating the things that are right in front of me

on that note, some things i did this month (and a bit):

• continued to make progress on my music library cull. this was one of the bigger months for it and im about 3/4 of the way through. i've archived about 400 albums so far (💀)
• went to my first ever medieval fair! we saw blacksmiths, drank mead, watched horse trainers and armored fighters and i bought a big the-hobbit style green felted cloak
• started watching a friend's volleyball games! i haven't really watched team sports with genuine interest ever, frankly, but this has been a lot of fun. volleyball is a super fun sport to watch!
• made a vegan tiramisu for a friend's birthday. i'd never tried using aquafaba to make vegan whipped eggwhites and i was pretty impressed at how convincing they are

i've been rethinking my planning systems a bit recently - for the last month or two i've got huge value out of keeping a weekly notes page for work that goes over what i did, which tasks i worked on and what things i have to try to get done in the week. i also used to (and am trying to again) plan my expendable income purchases against a running list of things that i want to buy - this ensures that the things i need and want actually get bought, thus increasing my quality of life, instead of me buying yet another fucking secondhand laptop from a corporate action site. i also am trying to do a better job of keeping an eye on my ongoing projects. these converging ideas has led me towards some kind of fortnightly personal meeting where i refresh myself on all these concepts when i get paid so less things fall between the cracks. in lieu of this plan coming to fruition just yet, my current projects are:

• helping to put together a spring equinox event (giving ourselves a lot of lead time)
• helping to put together a pride party with my climbing group
• making a bike frame bag
• trying to upgrade an old shimano bike so that it's roadworthy again
• plan some new tattoos - i just got a couple new small ones and i want some bigger ones to start filling out my body
• make a korean style pojagi (patchwork) curtain
• start putting plans into actions for regular movie nights, regular bike rides and semi-regular dinner parties with friends
• get a better job

headspace

i've definitely realised how much mental energy i spend on protecting myself from a perceived harm, which i think is a negative, unhelpful thing, but also how im still mourning a more comfortable life that i used to have. this is not helped by kind of just getting older and feeling more sore all the time. people warn you about how your back starts hurting but no one communicated that you would sometimes not be able to move your head for a whole day for no reason. i need to talk to a psychologist and i need to talk to a physio

whenever i think about neocities i think about this blogpost i read where the writer was talking about their doctor (who they are in love with) and described their movements and expressions and the way they held their handsin agonising detail. i want to see the world that way. instead, ive been thinking about the news, bicycles, and linux

international news

this is going to be the least groundbreaking, least cutting edge commentary, but holy shit. the war and indescriminate bombing is horrific and i absolutely dont want to minimise it, but the absolute embarassment that trump and his lackies are to themselves is incredible. every morning i wake up and hear about some truth social post trying to convince us that every move by usamerica actually does make sense, despite its clear lack of forethought, or that every move by another country is just proof that theyre winning, even when it's clear that theyre not. don't get me wrong, i have no love for the vast, vast majority of politicians, but it's both more uncomfortable and more worrying when it's obvious that these particular ones are A. entirely driven by even more fragile egos than usual and B. the kinds of kids who would lie in the schoolyard about their uncle working for nintendo.

i started writing out a sentence commending a lot of politicians for magically growing a spine and refusing to take part in the war themselves, but that's hardly a big surprise given the optics of the whole thing. it hasnt stopped most countries from hosting american military sites and sharing intelligence, like we continue to be happy to do. thanks albo. big ups to spain though for actually putting their foot down and refusing access to air bases

on the petrol point, i'm thankfully blessed to live close enough to everything in my city to comfortably take public transport most places, and it's been a great opportunity to knuckle down on cycling more. i've been surprised by how far i can get at the moment with pretty minimal impact to my energy for the rest of the day! it doesn't take long, you've just gotta start taking it a little more seriously

bikes

i've been trying to get a little more into bike media, but i've found it difficult to find stuff that fits my specific area of interest. a lot of youtubers are either mountain / gravel bikers, hardcore carbon road cyclists or fixie riders. i watched an absolutely terrifying video of a fixie bombing down a san francisco hill so fast that his chain detached, meaning that he now had absolute zero way to brake. no thanks. the commuter-spec-who-still-wants-something-that-looks-kind-of-sleek-and-interesting demographic seems to be much smaller. it exists, but it's also easy for them to transition to one of the aforementioned hyper-concentrated styles and suddenly i'm far less interested

i rolled the dice on a cool old shimano 600 with a red and yellow paintjob on this fairly well kept lugged steel frame. i think the bike might actually be way too small for me, but i'm going to take the risk and get it back up to speed as cheaply as i possibly can.

linux

asahi fedora remix

i got a cartoonishly good deal on an m2 macbook pro a couple of months back, but never quite gelled with macos. so i went completely nuclear and installed asahi linux on it (disclaimer: installing asahi linux on a macbook is surprisingly safe and easy to install and also surprisingly easy to reverse). the real cool upside to this is that i got to do something i've never done before - build a visual linux install from a terminal and nothing else. it was honestly surprisingly easy and only required a few simple tweaks in the beginning, notably that a default user didnt get created and had to be set up manually. besides those, while i got a little caught up by some tweaking of printer drivers and trying to get hibernation working (i failed). anyway: my big thoughts on linux on macbooks:

• mbp displays have higher pixel density than i'm used to. this is nice, and niri handles this surprisingly painlessly, but i had to give up on my beloved bitmap fonts. terminus is the biggest pixel font i found that i didnt hate the look of but i still didnt look quite right. thankfully, the high resolution sort of renders the benefit of bitmap fonts on low resolutions null and void because the text is inherently cleaner and nicer
• how do mac users make do without navigation buttons. this process has singlehandedly started my (gradual and also not set in stone) transition toward vim keybinds, simply because the lack of pgup, pgdn, home and end keys makes using your computer way harder
• the touchbar works so fucking fast on linux. it doesn't have the fun custom tools that some software has on macos, but also most of the software doesn't have these tools so whatever. they've also made huge strides towards future customisability so new options might be there in the near future. anyway, the noticeable delay for the media keys on holding fn is completely gone, its basically instant. cool!
• the iosevka font is very nice, and is likely to be my go-to for non bitmap fonts in the future

im gonna do more chatter on this in the future, hopefully a full setup blogpost. in general my linux experience continues to be a great time, i havent really missed windows, except when reaper acts funny, but even then its more quirks than actual problems. the real issue is when you cross the hump of not understanding what's going on to getting a better idea, suddenly you realise just how much freedom you have and how you can sort of do anything, and then you start wanting to do anything and end up wasting a lot of time setting up scripts to automate away the most menial of tasks. i, for example, spent many hours picking the best system to manage my wallpaper, and many more trying to create a script for offline definitions and synonyms.

top 3 albums of the month!

bandcamp triple threat! fuck you youtube!

ookii gekkou - vanishing twin ookii gekkou by vanishing twin
portrait with firewood - djrum portrait with firewood by djrum
therapy - brendan eder ensemble therapy by brendan eder ensemble

if you didnt read my last blogpost, dont! it's depressing! and if you did, i still feel really bad and really scared about the future. what could make me feel good? my biannual mobile tab spring cleaning, of course. i hold on to tabs with things that i want to check later instead of writing them down, which is an awful habit, but when i do eventually clean them up i have a gold mine of cool things to revisit

music

woah! there are three good albums in my mobile browser tabs. how convenient!

angine de poitrine angine de poitrine

i feel like this kind of took the internet by storm and im not really pushing the limits of cool underground and unexpected albums, but if you havent heard this set then you really should. this band is seriously groovy and i'm really looking forward to their full release on bandcamp

la lom - la lom la lom by la lom

honestly, as i sit here writing and in a not amazing mood, this album feels a little bit too saccharine for me. i think i jumped on it because cafe tropical, the final track in the ep, reminds me a bit of chicha libre's album from last year which is extremely dear to me

art of noise - the seduction of claude debussy the seduction of claude debussy by art of noise

this one's a bit better. i caught one of these tracks at a venue and checked out the absolute breakneck experience of an album. it feels like it's courting the atmospheric dnb genre, but is really just an experiment from a bunch of really talented artists. also, the starts, stops, swings, thrumming tones, harps and keys remind me a bit of the final fantasy xiii soundtrack. shameful

books my lesbian experience with loneliness

i first read this at a comic meetup with some of my friends. its unbelievably raw and a bit soul crushing but also super genuine as a result. someone describing their fears and difficult experiences is an almost voyeuristic experience that i felt a bit guilty about, but theres simultaneously a sense of camaraderie with kabi and how she participates in our world. this series has 7 (!) issues, although the friend that shared it with me said that it just gets worse and worse for her

sever and pierce

link

i didn't immediately buy the artstyle of this webcomic, but i'm finding the story really intriguing, and the art is uniquely able to communicate everything it wants to while still being stylised and kinda tumblr-ey. its cool! the comic's only about a year old and takes maybe half an hour to get up to speed, but it's worth it so far!

golden kamuy

this manga has honestly been the only thing keeping me sane recently. i've found playing games and watching shows really hard recently for some reason, but i've been absolutely SMASHING through this comic. the main thrust of the story is following multiple groups of people on the hunt for an unbelievably large stash of gold in the early 20th century, but this comic is distinct from your normal manga slop for a couple of reasons. my favourite part is the attention to detail and the dedication to education that artist has. the comic has multiple characters that are part of the ainu ethnic group, a people indigenous to northern japan and islans in the southeast of russia, and the comic gives you loads of tidbits of how they lived their lives, their culture and their beliefs. it's super interesting, and no doubt a point of pride to ainu people still living today. the story and characters are winding and complex - many characters have depth to their motivations and personalities. people come and go from different groups depending on their goals and morals at any point in time - it honestly makes it sometimes a bit difficult to follow, but totally worth the effort. finally, its sometimes really fucking funny. noda loves making otherwise serious characters occasionally drop into a situation that is extremely silly, and it breaks up the seriousness perfectly

games orbitals orbitals announcement trailer

i uh, don't have switch 2. and i wont be buying one any time soon. but i am absolutely enamored with the aesthetics of this game. it's probably one of the first times ive seen the 3d to 2d effect look quite this convincing, and i'll bet sitting on a couch you really wouldnt be able to tell

panline

link

i spent probably three or four hours trying to get mirrors edge catalyst running on my fedora linux pc in the last month, but to no avail. ea linked the game to their stupid online origin service and while basically all modern games run fine through proton, that extra step just makes my pc shit itself. then, as if wished into existence, i got linked to the steam page for panline. like the scramble vice that steam page is kinda all we've gotten, and i'm absolutely itching for details. not counting my chickens before they've hatched, but hopeful

sin and punishment

this one's going to be really thin because i haven't dug too deeply into it, but i've been recommended this rail shooter from n64 era and its wii sequel. i'm currently figuring out how to use mugen64 because its really misbehaving on my pc

art luigi colani

i found out about this dude from the well there's your problem podcast because he 1. designed a bunch of honestly really nice looking trucks andc cars and stuff and 2. the guy was a german man pretending to be an italian man. anyway yeah i just think he's neat

food native and ancient pet nat pinot

link

i really really enjoy this pet nat. i dont know if that says something about me, but im heavily considering buying a whole case

allday goods knives

i normally don't fuck around with my knives too much - i'm of the opinion that buying a good knife and sharpening block is almost always the biggest improvement you can have to your kitchen experience (as long as you have the requiste basics of pots and pans and potato peelers and the like) and i dont always trust knives that are a bit too "fun", nor knives that are forged in the japanese style with english text where the maker's mark should be. but i'm willing to make an exception because these ones look so damn cool. the blade is made in germany which is a good start, and hopefully one day i'll snag one and be able to comment on its actualy quality

extra chop suey by torwai system of a down - chop suey [cover by torwai]

holy shit im a genius for setting up this new youtube tile system

disclaimer

if you're someone i know in real life, probably don't read this one. especially you LD and NB. sorry, but i'll fill you in on it some time in the future

i dont think ive been so motivated and simultaneously unmotivated to put something to (digital) paper. but i kind of have to? i hope this is something i can look back on and laugh, either because this was totally not an issue, or, you know. i don't know.

i just cycled 45 minutes each way to and from the beach. in between i sat on a bench, saw a dolphin, and had a bit of a cry. this weekend i got into a bit of a fight with my partner and the floodgates just opened. i was, as i described to my friends, a bit too honest. they professed to sleeping poorly because they were afraid i had doubts about the relationship. i told them that i've had doubts about every second of every relationship i've ever been in. they said that they were worried that their depression was becoming too much for me, and i told them that i've been anxious about them on and off for the last year. the discussion that led up to this had me really hurt, so i just reacted with pure, unchecked honesty

i then went on to go home and sleep for 16 hours. i was just fucking exhausted, and not wanting to be in my own head at the moment. i then woke up to my company's cto putting me on a project to automate changes to one of my favourite client's websites with an """agentic ai""". i've barely eaten in 48 hours. fuck my life

as i was riding through the suburbs i was filled bitterness and anger. anger at myself, at my selfishness, at my inability to make any allowances in my precious little life for anyone else. anger at whatever is in my head that makes me unable to slow down for a second, to constantly be doing so many things that there isnt any room to breathe. watching couples walking their dogs and wondering why i couldn't be like them, happy with an office job and a suburban home and 1.48 children and a big tv. angry that houses have doubled in price in the last five years and that, despite my okay job, i'm never going to own one if things don't improve

the worst part of relationship troubles are back from last time. 1: when you have relationship trouble you want emotional support from the person you've just alienated and 2: when you've just experienced the most soul shattering emotional turmoil, you still need to go to work on monday

addendum

the whinging about families probably came across more like jealousy, but its more a state of pure confusion and bewilderment. hwo do people get to a place in their relationships where theyre comfortable and secure enough to do something like that? i don't feel like i ever have been. how the FUCK do they have the finances with a house and a yard and two cars??? it feels like you're on another planet to me

also i was specifically angry about houses because i was riding through a beachfront suburb with 3 million aud houses on either side, but also like. it counts regardless

steam on fedora (2026-01-29)

steam continues to be a bit inconsistent and sometimes fails to start on my fedora wayland install, but so far the best results have come from updating the steam desktop file (which you can find with the command locate steam.desktop), changing the exec line to:

Exec=/usr/bin/steam --disable-gpu --disable-gpu-compositing --disable-gpu-sandbox --in-process-gpu %U

this stops hardware acceleration from kicking in, which can sometimes cause issues with amd drivers. hilariously, i'm yet to have any gpu issues with a game itself, just the program that runs the games

update!

i've also found that some xwayland weirdness from niri can also cause it to not start. try running wl-copy --clear if steam isn't starting. yep, it's that stupid

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drive format and proton quirks (2026-01-29)

i've set up quite a few multi-drive linux devices with home servers / backup servers, but i've found file permissions really annoying. your server is a media device and you just have a second drive to hold music and videos and the like, formatting it in ntfs is a great way to leapfrog the problem. it's less secure, but there isnt any code running on the drive, and if someone gets at your movies then who really cares

i learned pretty quickly that this line of thinking doesnt work for my home pc because my other drives are meant to be used for storing steam games, but wine looks at its config files (stored with the game) and confirms that theyre not owned by root before starting. ntfs just shows every file as owned by root but with 777 permissions, so wine (and therefore proton) will complain, just silently, with no error message

i figured this out using PROTON_LOGS=1 %command% in the launch options for the specific game, which is actually extremely useful for figuring out other bugs and led me to this precise error

the upshot is to just suck it up and learn how to deal with ext4 and file permissions on your secondary drives, unless you need to share that drive with a windows install

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cobalt-web (2025-10-08)

this sort of deserves to be in its own self-hosted section, but i want to get it out now instead of waiting for that to happen. cobalt is a very slick website that packages up a bunch of media download tools into a simple search-like interface. it's very convenient, and while they say they don't save any of your searches (and they probably don't) you can be certain of the fact by just self-hosting the thing. unfortunately, about a year ago (~ september 2024) they took the web-element of the self-hosted program offline, saying that you can just link your own api to their website, or self-host the website yourself with a reverse proxy. i've read through the discussion and i sort of get it, but i also don't know why they would say "there is a problem with the way the website is served via docker, but instead of fixing it, or highlighting that it's an issue, we're just going to undermine the point of self-hosting and remove the functionality altogether". bizarre. anyway, here's my current cobalt docker-compose. it uses cobalt 7, which still provides a webapp. i'm going to do some more digging and see if i can use the most recent version of the api with the old web container, but i haven't got that quite work yet. i also probably don't need to have watchtower on it anymore since i'm suppressing updateds, but i want to keep it there for when i get the aforementioned api working. also also, i'm shifting the port of the api because portainer uses 9000 by default. i should probably just get rid of portainer though. make sure to update the urls with your server's local ip!

services:
  cobalt-api:
    image: ghcr.io/imputnet/cobalt:7
    restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: cobalt-api
    init: true
    ports:
      - 9002:9000/tcp
    environment:
      API_URL: "http://192.168.0.2:9002"
      API_NAME: "api"
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.scope=cobalt
  cobalt-web:
    image: ghcr.io/imputnet/cobalt:7
    restart: unless-stopped
    container_name: cobalt-web
    init: true
    ports:
      - 9001:9001/tcp
    environment:
      WEB_URL: "192.168.0.2:9001"
      API_URL: "http://192.168.0.2:9002"
    labels:
      - com.centurylinklabs.watchtower.scope=cobalt
  watchtower:
    image: ghcr.io/containrrr/watchtower
    restart: unless-stopped
    command: --cleanup --scope cobalt --interval 900 --include-restarting
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock

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nobara configuration (2025-07-08)

i run nobara on a thinkcentre m710q and it works pretty well! but you need to do a little bit of configuration to make it behave on this specific hardware. first up, once you've completed installation you should reboot, jump into tty with ctrl + alt + f2. from here you can log in and check the boot journal with journalctl -b and look for errors. there will be some! my process was basically to skim the journal, fix the issues i could, reboot, check, rinse and repeat.

update

run a sudo dnf update first up to get all the packages up to date

enable ssh

openssh should already be installed, but if not grab it with sudo dnf install openssh-server.

sudo systemctl enable sshd
sudo systemctl start sshd

this'll let us check fix the computer if it starts acting up at boot time

weird locale issues

vconsole acts up if your config isn't set to US or has extra nonsense in it, so we need to wipe it and rebuild the boot image with dracut

sudo touch ~/vconsole.conf
echo 'KEYMAP="us"' > ~/vconsole.conf
sudo rm /etc/vconsole.conf
sudo mv ~/vconsole.conf /etc/vconsole.conf
sudo dracut -vf

falcond profile directory

falcond doesn't make a user directory for some reason, so do that here

sudo mkdir /usr/share/falcond/profiles/user

remove yumex

i simply could not get yumex to behave and it's only useful for installing software if you don't know how to use the terminal, which you clearly do.

sudo dnf remove yumex

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🚧👷‍♂️ this page is still in construction! watch this space! 👷‍♀️🚧

hello!

i won't sugarcoat it, february was a month of a lot of fear and discomfort. i've been looking for new jobs, new places to live, and i think associating my background level of normal anxiety to probably pretty minor experiences around me. but! i also had of a lot of cool little experiences:

this month i:

• climbed an outdoor lead wall for the first time in a year
• met an alpaca while having a picnic at the beach
• celebrated my 1 year anniversary with my partner
• went to a rocky horror picture show screening
• protested isaac herzog visiting australia
• watched zootopia 2 and nirvana the band the show the movie

i've talked about organisation on site before, and i've mostly kept to this same system since all the way back then, but i've swapped to taking journals on obsidian instead of on paper. my main reason for paper notes was that it forced me to keep things short, and it attached those notes to something small that was always on me, but i was feeling more and more friction with this system, and avoiding friction is the whole point. writing these things up digitally has its downsides, but it does make skimming over them a bit easier, such as for that handy dandy summary i just wrote

three albums

guys i got my hands on a local album and i love it so fucking much and i want to share it here but it would totally dox me by association 😭 anyway heres the other cool albums i listened to this month

gendema - sassy things sassy things by gendema

i've been on a bit of an atmospheric dnb kick the last month - this is my slick new modern one. like most modern electronic music it's kinda hard to describe what you like about the instrumentation / sampling because a lot of them dont really have names that the general public (me) really know. i will say that it doesn't lean on the tropes of the genre, and that it has really fun beat sequences. it also stays pretty consistent in mood throughout, which makes it great for putting in the background while working or playing straftat

trans central connection trans-central connection
this one is much older, (in the same age bracket as me) and much more varied because it's actually a compilation album. it's a really awesome look into the adnb from 30 years ago but also pretty interesting because its honestly not that different to a lot of the stuff coming out these days. this one is not immune to the aforementioned tropes of the genre (2010 uses the think break and i find it really annoying) but thats to be expected the meters - the meters the meters by the meters
this is not really an amazingly unique or underground find, but i found it this month and i really like it. cissy strut in particular is extremely popular (and with good reason) and its maybe a shame that they put it as the first track on the album, but the rest of the track also super mellow and / or super groovy 2010 as an aesthetic

i found this blog while noodling around this month in the activity feed. first and foremost, this is not a dunk on this blog - i've explored it a bit and also looked at the source, and it seems to me that this was the brainchild of a very committed web artist who has made something very tailored to their needs from scratch (read: they didnt make it with wobble web, i'm pretty certain). i'm mainly pretty interesting to see someone who is this enamored with the aesthetic of the 2010s while also being too young to interact with them. this is hardly a new take but it makes me curious to see whether people will be just as faux-nostalgic for the flat/metro design style or hell, maybe even corporate memphis. anyway this site is really sweet and really cute and i'm honestly (genuinely) kind of curious how this persion got into so many 2000s / 2010s games when they were only born in 2007. it's probably a really interesting story!

current art inspiration

sorry these are slightly nsfw but! im currently inspired by the simple colouring of this:


and the body forms of this:


(i dont know who made either of these i tried so many reverse image searches and got nothing)

saboteri

i'm in desperate love with some of these saboteri pokemon card artworks

never write a blogpost in a funk jesus christ ive tried to talk about my feelings like four times and im getting nowhere so im going to talk about the interesting things i found in january instead

i dont like modern lego

i visited a lego store this month and was pretty shocked at just how much of it caters directly to adults. the entire right wall, half of the store, were the black boxes of architectural sets, master builds and 🤢 hurk 🤢 lego flowers

look, if you like these that's fine, but i used to be an avid lego builder deep into my teenagerhood (and probably would still be if i lived in a place larger than nine square meters) and ive found this recent trend of targeting almost all lego options at middle aged people with six figure jobs fucking soul crushing. if you watch lego's own film about how good lego is, the VILLAIN of the film is a guy who just makes things once and never touches them again, thereby missing half of the value of the toy. and that is 100% what you see with most people my age who buy it - theyre being bought basically entirely for the nostalgia, to be seen as someone who's still youthful and playful, but entirely missing the point

this is an extremely unnuanced take and i have a million caveats to this personal rule (if you're displaying something you designed yourself then fuck yeah, awesome), but i have no caveats for those fucking flowers. if you're under 35 then get rid of them theyre ugly and you can get flowers by going for a walk down the street with a pocketknife

nora brown - sidetrack my engine sidetrack my engine by nora brown
i shamefully heard this and thought moonrise kingdom? nora brown is a distressingly young banjo player and vocalist, and is a favourite of my banjo player friend, which has got to be a good sign. her style allows her to mix in some melancholy themes to the album while still keeping it light and airy pseudonym jones's mum

this comic is short but its unbelievably sweet and somber and soul crushing. my relationship with my parents isn't bad per se but it did make me wish for one that was a little bit closer

also pseudonym jones' comics and aryt are so fucking beautiful please look at the rest of their artwork

fermata on the pithos

i spent a bunch of time looking into this game that used to maybe look like it was coming soon? i think i was following the original twitter page that was providing updates. my travels led me to this handy dandy youtube video that kind of goes through everything we know about the maybe-not-a-game. it seems like it was meant to be a 3d platformer about being a robot in a post apocalyptic drowned world, with a gameplay look conceptually similar to death stranding but with less focus on balancing boxes and even footing and more scooting around with jetpacks through old structures and coral reefs. its super nifty looking! and might not ever actually come out 😔

fermata on the pythos' - the greatest game you'll never play
talos principle 2

i enjoyed the talos principle 1 a lot and have had access to the second game for a while, but had kind of been putting it off because it ran terrible on my 2070 super. i've been out of my house for interesting reasons for the last week so my progress has hit a standstill, but im about 60% of the way through and im really enjoying it! its a combination of fun physics puzzles, interesting philosophical musings that dont hold your hand but also dont punish you for "thinking the wrong thing", and really, seriously, beautiful vistas. i'm actually holding off on showing you the super cool ones because the experience of seeing them for the first time was actually breathtaking and i want you to experience it yourself

i have a strong feeling that i'm going to do a big post on this like i did for the witness, so maybe watch this space

butchering a chicken stop wasting money on chicken

i started butchering chickens this month on the advice of this video. i've broken down roast chickens and turkeys before and that gives you a good legup for doing it on raw ones. your financial savings for meat, at least in australia, are maybe not quite as drastic as they make it seem in the video, but the leftovers for chicken stock and shmaltz make it totally worth it. i have noted that the thigh fillets from butchering your own birds tend to be smaller than the ones you would buy from the shops, but i also tend to trim the drumsticks and treat them as extra thighs so it kind of balances out. it's got me thinking about the process of actually properly slaughtering a chicken, just for that feeling of understanding where your food comes from, but im maybe a little far from that just yet

champagne.pages.dev

link
this site is nominally a guide for smart piracy, but it also aggregates a lot of useful little tools and sites in a way that's really easy to compare - their file hosting and storage page is great for this. give it a little skim, you'll see if there's something that's helpful for you pretty quickly

i'm actually kind of terrified by all the news coming out of the usa right now. a civilian gets shot by the country's own secret police. troops bomb a sovereign nation and kidnap their president before putting him to trial for breach of american law. donald trump will not shut up about invading greenland. what's the response from every other country on the planet? crickets. what is the point of representative democracy if people who represent us prioritise trade agreements and their own investments over the good of our country and the human race. the concept of world war 3 gets bandied about all the time but if the usa invades greenland that could really be it. either australia gets looped into an insane war, neither side being optimal, or worse, nothing happens, and the reality of international peace gets laid bare and suddenly everyone else has free reign to do whatever they want. taiwan and tibet are toast. usa's puppet war with russia probably continues indefinitely, or even gets worse. what happens if people my age get drafted, australia does the entirely predictable thing and beds down with the usa and suddenly i'm being told to shoot someone because a dementia riddled pedo needs distraction from the proof of his atrocities being made public. i hope i'm wrong about this, i hope. but if i'm right i really won't be surprised

id actually been thinking a lot about charlie kirk recently and had been writing light notes on the transgender """"debate"""" in the usa and austalia and worldwide but it feels trite right now. there are constant issues in my local community but it becomes harder and harder to focus on them with this hanging over you. my local bike kitchen needs a new location! they're wonderful people doing amazing good for my city and my community and it might be completely meaningless because this pedophile has realised that international law isn't really a real thing.

my only solace is that you can see this dude actively physically and mentally deteriorating. in his first term there was a lot of chatter about whether he would kick the bucket, and the response to that was that it wouldnt matter because his vp is just as bad. but i really dont think that jd vance has the ability to wrangle the cult of personality if trump dies or has to head off to a nursing home. the usa has always been a violent and imperialistic country and that never really stopped, but they have been (largely) run by people who didnt want to roll the dice on starting insane intercontinental wars for the chance of some oil at the risk of being summarily blacklisted by all their allies. we can hope

anyway im doing this as a little solo post because i dont want to put this up and have the next header be a deep dive into fermata on the pythos and how to butcher a whole chicken

getting off of spotify is finally trendy. there a couple of ways you can go about it - swap to tidal, swap to apple music, swap to the youtube premium account that you're forced to pay for to use youtube, buy a bunch of cds, dig up your ipod from high school (or god forbid, primary school (or god forbid, your parents' hand-me-downs)). these solutions are all fine, but what if you could spend a bunch of extra money and add loads more complexity to the process?

this is how i got off of streaming services, but not necessarily how you should get off of streaming services. my approach was fueled by:

1. understanding linux pretty well
2. having a home server already set up with convenient file access
3. being prepared to make some dumb financial decisions and wear the financial consequences
4. expecting the other privately owned companies that provide music to normal people to also continue down the slippery slope in the coming half-decade as shareholder pressure mounts

i'm going to avoid giving you a big meandering tale, but i want to give a little insight into each option i tried and the solution i'm currently using

the not so good streaming

i tried both apple music and tidal back in 2023 and didnt love them. apple music is potentially really good if you have an iphone, but it was laggy and buggy on android and also didnt have an incredible range. tidal also didnt super impress me, but my partner uses it now and seems to like it. if spotify got one thing right, it was dumping their money into ux designers to make an app that is really useable with great integration. when i was checking out the alternatives, they didnt feel anywhere close.

i already had a bunch of music on bandcamp, but i wanted all of my music to be in one place, and jumping to bandcamp exclusively would give me a fairly limited library. also not an amazing solution

devices

i've talked about my ipod classic gen 6 and walkman nw-a105 plenty before. neither were particularly great options. the walkman is a great idea but a terrible battery hog, and the ipod is fun to use but wasnt very responsive and is equipped with a less than optimal headphone jack. i might have had a better experience if i'd got the gen 7 ipod classic, but this was already such an incredibly expensive experience that i have no interest

software

i've tried every gui linux music player under the sun and ive been consistently shocked at how crap most of them are. i know these are open source and made by the community, but so is musicbee and that program is great. i actually still haven't tried out mpd despite it being considered the endgame solution by most linux people but im sure its swell

the good (which is to say, my current solution) a small computer that sits in the corner of my kitchen next to the router and runs 24/7

having a home server is so unbelievably core to my everyday life. even an extremely underpowered chip (in this case, the mobile version of the mid-tier cpu i bought for my second ever computer back in 2017) has enough juice to run a torrent client, a media server, multiple programs for tracking and encoding media, an smb file server and a multitude of random little scripts that run periodically without breaking a sweat. this computer runs three core pieces of software that we're going to talk about in a moment, but the main thing is that it has a folder that is pretty easy to connect to on any of my other computers, and that it runs all the time. the server uses tailscale to allow all of my out-of-house computers to connect to it, which for this use case is only my phone, and only as a backup. you could do this with a cloudflare tunnel or direct connection if you've got the guts to open your network to the clearnet

anyway, this computer hosts the "master" version of my music collection. it's literally just a folder on the 4tb sata ssd i plugged into the server, but it only uses an absolute fraction of that space (last time i checked, my ~1000 album collection is only about 80gb). a couple of programs plug into this folder to share it around where it's needed. more info incoming on these programs

legal music file acquisition

despite everything, tim sweeney seems to have not fucked bandcamp when they bought it a couple of years ago. i'm still keen for a truly musician owned music distribution website in the future, but for now, this is the best we've got. buying an artist's music via bandcamp gives them money equivalent to thousands of streams on a site like spotify, or infinity streams if theyre an up-and-coming artists who doesn't have much of a following yet (remember how spotify doesnt give you any money if your plays are under a certain threshold? do we think much about how fucked that is if you're trying to start out as a musician?)

local artists also sometimes sell cds at gigs and i like to grab them where possible and rip the audio for my colletion. i don't actually own a cd player of any kind, including the bargain bin radio head unit in my car

<LEGAL> music file acquisition

a lot of music is unfortunately not on bandcamp. this bizarrely includes a lot of the artists that i know in person, because it's pretty standard for people to just hand their albums off to distribution platforms who then hand them off to spotify, tidal, apple music etc. but not bandcamp? anyway. in these cases i've sometimes bought band members a round of drinks in exchange for files, but if theyre a big artist and theres simply no way of giving them money for their art, i <DO NOT> just resort to stealing

soulseek is a peer-to-peer sharing app that lets users advertise whatever files they want, but is basically entirely used for sharing music. i use slskd on my home server to keep the downloading directly attached to the "master" version of my music collection. speeds are also improved by this being a kind of dedicated task for the server and my server also being plugged into my router with a 10cm length of cat6e ethernet

i like the idea of buying cds as a way of tangibly having your music and giving you something you can see when deciding on an album, but i live in a 3x3m room and dont have the space to start another collection. i also don't ascribe to my parents hilariously evangelical view that acquiring media is morally sound if you exchange money for it - i don't see a difference between buying a cd off a secondhand store and ripping the files and getting them from soulseek. the artist already got the money and your money is just going to someone else. this isn't meant to be impenetrable ethical armour, but more realism about the fact that i cant give money to a lot of musicians for their work unless i decide to also give a significantly larger share to some asshole who's using it to research ai powered killbots

players

i've also talked about my hiby m300 in great length. these are a little pricey, unfortunately, and it really stings when you lose one, but theyve been really nice to use. the inclusion of a 3.5mm jack and an sd card slot is obviously a huge step up on your other options these days, but it being built on android means i can choose my player software, connect to file sharing platforms and stream over chromecast to my partner's housemate's wiim player or a chromecast audio. neat!

i also bought a samsung tablet from an auction house for fifty bucks - this device sits next to the stereo in my room and serves the aforementioned 3.5mm jack and sd card slot but with a more fisher-price-y interface. even a child could figure it out. this thing is so generic that i'm not going to even tell you the exact model because it really doesnt matter. i would say to make sure you get something that supports android 11 or higher, because android 10 doesn't play nice with our next star:

syncthing

yep, i'm really not using anything sophisticated to keep all of my devices in sync. syncthing is so ubiquitous that you can just pop it on all of your computers and all of your players and just let it figure everything out. you do absolutely need to go to the syncthing folder settings > advanced and turn on ignore permissions, otherwise your library will just get filled with sync conflict files

jellyfin

is not a marvelous solution for playing music on your tv or on your browser. in fact, it's pretty bad. however, it does provide a streaming protocol for sending music to other programs. the protocol is also kind of bad. thankfully, i use jellyfin primarily for streaming <PUBLIC DOMAIN MOVIES> from my server to my tv, and i only ever stream music to my phone as a worst case scenario. speaking of streaming music to phones,

end user software android streaming: symfonium

this one is unfortunately not free, but it has a trial period so you can figure out if you like it. it's also the best music streaming solution on android, hands down, with an interface that is classier than any of the free options for just a single time purchase. as i write this, i'm realising that it also does local files, so i should maybe test it against the following option:

android file-based: poweramp

this software is kind of considered the default android music player, and probably with good reason. its super customisable, letting you choose what you want to be displayed in terms of categories, images, text, player layout, etc. this is pretty useful for a device with a really small screen like the hiby. it does sometimes struggle with keeping the library up scanned, but that might be because its kind of an underpowered device and that tiny cpu can only go so far

windows: musicbee

i love musicbee. i love it so much. it's basically the perfect music player, in that it also has a million tools for keeping your music collection tidy and formatted correctly. go check the link if you want more details i suppose. it unfortunately is not available for linux, and the experience of using it with wine is, uh, bad

linux: quod libet

i can't confirm this, but i feel like quod libet was made by musicbee fans who were stranded on linux world and couldnt get back to windows island. there are loads of visual options for this program, a suite of plugins, tag editing built in (and done well). i'm missing the file conversion and the auto dj that musicbee flaunted, but its a great alternative, and its also available on windows and macos

local radio

i'm also fully in favour of finding out what your local radio stations are like. i have a borderline pirate radio station in my city that goes out of its way to play music by local and female / non binary artists (they have actual quotas, which i am in full support of) and that has basically solved my driving music decision paralysis. because they're run by passionate local people and funded by donations, they don't need to play the mass appeal drivel that you hear everywhere else, and instead consistently play interesting and fun music i've never heard in my life. i would give a pretty high odds that your town also has something similar, you've just gotta do a search for community radio in your area, or ask some local musicians

miscellaneous thoughts

• figuring out an organisation scheme is absolutely vital for keeping your library useable. i have artists at the base level, albums at the next (in the format <year> - <album name>) and music files in there. keep a cover.jpg for the album in the album folder, and a folder.jpg in the artist folder for a picture of the artist
• downsample to mp3 or opus. trust me. you can't hear the difference. if you can, you're not going to have read this far through this post
• musicbee tag searching / musicbrainz picard are really good for automatic tagging of albums, but be a little cautious. the musicbrainz database that these draw from has insane nonsensical genres a lot of the time - some being patently wrong, and some being patently nonsense. i actually use rate your music for genres because they have a limited set, and the genres are picked based on user suggestion. rym users are really anal so i find them to be trustworthy
• just use year tags, and ensure that all albums have a consistent album artist. these will make your albums way easier to search for and also ensure that they get bundled properly

what a year! i was an absolutely mopey wuss 365 days ago, and even with the benefit of hindsight i think i somewhat had a reason to. my favourite end of year realisation has been related to all these in/out lists and 2026 bingos that people have been doing. i uh. i don't really know what half the shit people are talking about is even in reference to. and i kind of like it that way! i've locked down my social media to only show me people and places in my real life, i listen to local radio and i block ads like there's no tomorrow. my only exceptions to this rule are computer shit, and art, which i almost entirely interface with on tumblr. i do still keep an eye on international news through the abc app, but i've kept most of it out of my periphery, and i think my general state of mind has improved as a result

i really like doing these top 5s, as they help me to reconsider the things i enjoyed in 2025 when viewed from above. it also turned out to be pretty useful for music, as i hadnt written a review for a bunch of these albums.

anyway, i suppose that's it for now. this thing has taken a while to do, so i might leave the rest of the personal musing to my february post ✌️😙

music tottomori - shoreline mistward shoreline mistward by tottomori

this isn't my first tottomori album, but its my favourite so far. i feel like it evokes such a wonderful feeling of exploration and playfulness, like it's express purpose is to give you weird childhood nostalgia. i love the simple piano chords, electronic bloops, field recordings and wavering flute, but i also just love how much the artist is willing to mess with their instruments. there's loads of variety and yet each track feels like its telling part of the same story. this album is extremely calming and i love it dearly

pezzi della sera - marco castello pezzi della sera by marco castello

describing this album is kinda difficult - i've got it categorised as jazz-pop, which maybe gets you some of the way to understanding its vibe, but not the full distance. it combines this heartfelt vocalist (marco, i assume), synth and a bass guitar the whole way through, in a way that feels kind of close and cosy, but as a lot of the songs continue they almost "open up", as orchestral elements blast through, making the intimate experience suddenly grand and impressive. i uh, don't speak italian, so i cant speak on the lyrics at all, but his performance is so lovely that i feel like you get a lot of out it regardless

chicha libre - sonido amazonica sonido amazonico by chicha libre

i spoke about this one briefly when i put it in my top 3, so i'll try not to repeat myself too much. as someone who listens to a fair bit of latin american music, this almost feels like a concentrated version of all its qualities - the bouncy beat, extremely synthy melodies, and a layer of artifact that comes from playing music out of a portable guitar speaker. in the process of writing this review i've come to learn that olivier conan, the band's creator, is a french man living in brooklyn, which does make me feel a little weird about the album's over the top, and maybe even charicature style, but a bit more reading seems to indicate that their south american audience likes it so 🤷

richard galliano - luz negra luz negra by richard galliano

again, spoke about this one at the start of the year, and this time in a bit more detail. i'll leave it to past me to give the nitty gritty of my feelings, and present me can just say that this album is fun! it's good!

animation cel - billiam animation cel by billiam

huh??? this album never ended up getting a review in 2025? i first grabbed it near the start of the year and have adored its frenetic style, bizarre and referential lyrics, and that damn, fucking synthesiser. i actually saw them live this year and they were amazing!

games silksong

one of my dear friends is an absolute diehard for hollow knight, and has spent the last couple of years bothering me every time the daintiest of silksong news morsels wandered in front of his face. i, on the other hand, played hollow knight back in 2018, beat it, thought it was pretty fun, and then moved on. i remember being uninterested to push through its extremely difficult post-endgame because the controls felt just a little too finnicky, and i completely ignored godhome because those boss rushes were simply out of my skillset. i also felt that the world didnt have too much impact or depth, and that the animation and design sometimes felt a little amateurish. i'm happy to say i was incorrect about the world, but i stand by my assessment on the animation and design. thankfully, team cherry gave themselves seven years to improve on basically everything hollow knight was, and that level of skill that you get from a lot of practice and extremely fine grained criticism from your incredibly popular game (not to mention a more or less blank cheque to spend all the time you need), results in something truly stellar. the world of silksong is incredibly well realised, and moving back and forth through the areas will allow you to naturally pick up connections between all the parts of the former society of pharloom. the music is great, the visuals are cohesive and polished, and the movement and combat is incredible. i would regularly be frustrated by the difficulty of some of the more difficult bosses, but i never felt like i was unequipped - either poor planning or a poor reaction had led to my demise. you can absolutely zip around arenas or, if you're a wuss, you can change up your loadout to rely on weird tools to the point that the game kinda plays itself. the freedom is what's important. anyway, not to belabour the poandint, silksong is amazing, and if a gun were put to my head i would probably say that it's my game of the year

loco motive

this lovely little point and click adventure served me extremely well on a warm autumn evening, not because it's that short, but because i was so utterly enraptured by it and had to finish it in one sitting. this game seems to take most of what is great about point and clicks, provides more of what works with some excellent humour, and a hint system that meant i never felt the need to look online. its hook is that you play three characters on a murder-on-the-orient-express-type setting, each trying to clear your own name. i've seen some complaints that the logic required to figure out some of the puzzles is a little nonsensical and i could maybe agree, but

peak

peak is a pretty simple game, but it's one of the first friendslop games that i've actually tried and really got into. i think a lot of its ilk kind of just involve you doing things around friends, but peak multiplayer really requires you to plan and strategise to get your whole group to the top. it will actually beat the shit out of you if you're not careful, which makes winning a game all the sweeter

animal well

this is yet another game that i mentioned in a previous blogpost, but the point still stands. i wasn't originally convinced by the trailer for this game, but giving it a go really opened my eyes to this mysterious little world and its intriguing puzzles. turns out that i really like puzzle metroidvanias, and also that dunkey knew what he was doing when he helped produce this game

ghost trick

this took me an entire year to finish because i kept leaving my dsi places and not turning it on, but i officially get why people still reference this game 15 years later. the experience feels pretty similar to something like ace attorney, but i only felt myself stumped once or twice, which makes for a far less embarassing experience. the story is meted out perfectly, and the over-the-top character designs and animations were an absolute gem. i did feel that i needed a break pretty regularly due to the mental requirements to work through the game's puzzles, but i always came back eventually. well worth it! also, buy a nintendo dsi! they're cheap and easy to crack and from there it's straightforward to <LEGALLY ACQUIRE> this title

films tampopo

how had i never seen this before? a japanese comedy western about a ramen shop intercut with insane non-sequiter cutaways? tampopo isn't the deepest drama and it doesn't have the most complicated characters, but it's hilarious all the way from the micro to the macro scale, and it's shot beautifully to boot

the shape of water

it's so nice to stumble into a modern fairytale without the slime associated with a disney or pixar film. i feel like this does a great job of almost being kind of grounded? like it's obviously a little magical but the broad strokes are all kind of make sense (besides the fish guy, of course). i think it also did such an incredible job of building a very realistic and believable, and its always lovely to see a bit of disability representation

life is beautiful

i absolutely did not expect to put a film about the fucking holocaust on my top 5, but after watching an absolute buttload of them in the past (for a reason that will be clear if you know me in person, or will continue to be unexplained if you don't) i've found myself increasingly unimpressed by each tired take on the horrific event. what was the answer? make it into a lighthearted comedy-drama, of course! i wasn't really convinced when i first heard the concept explained, but by keeping the core of the story about the relationship between a husband and his family, it gives you that little bit of extra punch when the story occasionally gets real. this is the only holocaust film i will ever recommend

conclave

i definitely got sucked into the hype with this one, and my bias for ralph fiennes and stanley tucci is also tragically showing. all this said, i was absolutely enraptured by the mystery and drama of the whole deal, all the catholic pomp and circumstance, and the costuming and set design. the score is simple but extremely fucking effective, and also did you know that that big staircase is the same one that was in star wars: the phantom menace?

song of the sea

this one was a recommendation from my partner - an animated film from cartoon saloon, who made the award winning wolfwalkers a couple of years back, as well as other animation teams from luxembourg, belgium, denmark and france. while it's a children's movie for sure, the story is far more in-depth than i might have expected, and it does a lot of lovely digging into its characters and the world of irish folklore. the illustration has this extremely charming childlike quality to it, where (for example) the top of a table is depicted as round, but the bottom as flat, emulating how a child might represent the things around them if they were drawing it themselves. loads of texture is squeezed into to these sophisticated forms, and the music and voice performances are top notch and absolutely tear jerking at times

(update, i found that the style of art i was describing is called naive art. how nifty!)

miscellaneous niri window manager

i've gone extremely hard on linux this year and almost completely purged windows from my life (except when i need it for work)! the thing that really pushed me over the edge was initially hyprland - a bit of a trendy window manager, but one that is deeply, deeply flawed. it did really introduce me to the joy of building your setup more or less from scratch, picking and configuring each piece of software you want, leading you to being intimately familiar with everything that's going on under the hood, and giving you a really fucking efficient system to boot. hyprland was good, but not good enough to change over my desktop pc, but two things changed at about the same mind that pushed me over the edge: openai / nvidia's insane memory orders destroyed memory prices and i panic bought an amd gpu, and my discovery of the niri window manager. every decision with niri's design just makes sense to me. your windows opening on an infinitely tiling row overcomes the shitfest that is window management on a conventional tiling wm. in general, yalter seems to be in touch with what his users wants and makes an effort to implement them when they make sense, instead of doggedly dragging the corpse of i3 around. overview menus are amazingly helpful, dragging and snapping windows works with the mouse if you want to do that, and they implemented alt-tab behaviour. it's pulled me into the 21st linux century and finally allowed me to get rid of windows as my main os

the locked tomb

i somehow managed to read all three locked tomb books this year, and boy, what an experience. first and foremost, yeah, this is basically a y.a. series. but! theres enough going on under the scenes that i think it's well and truly worth a read for old fucks like you or me. i think the series really does the concept of necromancy justice compared to something like the sabriel/old kingdom series. the problem of necromancy being kind of icky and almost morally reprehensibly is inherently a big part of the themes of the books and the world. because the characters involved are masters of the art, they approach necromancy from an almost scientific perspective, which gives you lots of opportunities for non-awkward exposition. the setting being in space gives it an amazing scale, and also allows tamsyn muir to sort of peel back the layers book by book in a way that almost feels entirely intentional from the beginning. i also adore the heavy perspective shifts given to each book - harrow the ninth is potentially the best sequel to a book ever written, and nona the ninth completely shakes up the formula by putting it from the perspective of a child. it's great

whisper in the wind

i talked about this one back in august, but i still stick by putting it in my misc top 5 - i love this series, it continues to build and build despite being the fourth book of at least 5, it's gritty, it's interesting, the protagonist is such a textbook noir detective it makes me kick my little legs with glee

immich

if you're going to cut yourself off from the big 4 online tech giants, you're going to want a way to manage all your photos. you've already been using google photos, haven't you? what if you just... installed google photos at home? i'm giving immich a spot in my top 5 for being the most cartoonishly easy to install and use self-hosted program i've ever used. it just fucking works, and it works so well

bike

i love this thing, i love this thing so much. i unfortunately live a little too far from my main city to make this my primary mode of transport, but when coupled with trains it becomes an amazing way to get around. navigating the cbd is incredible on one of these, and so is checking out the beautiful bike tracks out in the country. my only complaint is that i am absolutely fucking whacked when im done using it, but its starting to improve my cardio and my leg strength, which is awesome. i've also done a bunch of fixes on it thanks to my local bike kitchen, and the feeling of accomplishment when you resolve a problem in an hour or so for an absolute pittance is hard to beat

welcome

i come to you like a slug, crawling on my belly and dripping slime. covid has brought me low and removed my capacity for writing, reading, listening to music and cognisant thought. it did cause me to get some really good rest though. this has become a bit of a massive post, even after shooting two sub-thoughts into their own posts. the thinking and writing part of the brain stopped working but the observing part didnt and has basically just given present me a bunch of annoying extra tasks to complete

summer is finally starting to swing in in australia and im pretty mad about it. even 30c is enough to piss me off after such a long lovely winter, and i'm not looking forward to the game of hokie pokie where you have to open your windows at night to bring in the cool air but god forbid you forget to close all of them again by 9am and undo all of your hard work. it's also likely to make cycling much harder, which sucks because i'm really starting to enjoy it

i have two pagan celebration events in the works that i'm helping to organise with some pals, one for litha and one for lemmas (remember that the dates are flipped because i'm in the southern hemisphere). on top of this, my partner has three art exhibitions at the start of 2026 so i'm helping them out with moving pottery and paper and furniture. it's all getting quite busy, even for me. one of my really good friends is in the states and i miss her, and a bunch of my other friends headed to the rising tide protests last week and only just got back

this might sound like i'm in a bad mood, but i'm not. i think i'm mostly just bracing myself for the shitfest that christmas and new years are threatening to be and how all this shit is impacting my ability to work on the stupid little things that i love to do. and i also don't like the heat

music dig it - down to the bone down to the bone by dig it

this is just PURE acid jazz, the kind that i haven't found in a while. i'm kind of mixed on the tracks with the vocals, but the rest of it is really high energy and synthy

chicha libre - sonido amazonico sonido amazonico by chicha libre

i've been loving this album for MONTHS and somehow forgot to put it on a previous top 3 albums. i've become completey enamoured with south american music in the last 12 months or so and this one integrates a weird kind of surfy angle to the whole deal. it makes me dance every time i listen to it, which is awesome and also kind of embarassing

jonny nash & suzanne kraft - passive aggressive passive aggressive by jonny nash and suzanne kraft

i've listened to loads of jonny nash before, but this one balances a bizarre spooky, hypnotic ambient feeling with something a bit more jazzy

electro update

i did it! i put my electro on hold this month. i'd actually been getting a bit worried that my skin was scarring where the electro was being performed, so i'm going to give it a break and see if it chills out. if not, i might just do laser on my face every month for the rest of my life. i guess

ratshot

link
the developer of this game caught me hook, line and sinker with a nifty little devlog youtube video discussing them iterating over their design process. they not-so-subtly spruiked the game's demo on itchi (linked above) and i proceeded to play it to 100% completion. the gameplay has an extremely gorgeous flow that is easy to fall into, and an artstyle that felt really inspired but also like a delightful homage to the trope of making a character that looks a little bit demented and (cartoonishly) warped. it seems like the game itself has a while to go yet while the developer designs new levels and makes new characters and assets, but i'll be watching it with bated breath

zims

when the uk announced that they would be restricting access to wikipedia for minors, i immediately hopped online to figure out how to back up websites for local viewing. the zim storage technology, paired with a software package called kiwix lets you do exactly this! a lot of sites are pre-packaged to be far smaller (wikipedia is under 10gb, for example) but there are also tools to make your own packages. i grabbed the excellent android arts because the site tends to go down every couple of months, but any similarly static site (like someones neocities page, perhaps?) can be backed up equally easily. i want to set up some automated system to update a site on a semi-regular basis, but i'd have to figure out how to simultaneously be considerate of small sites bandwidth limits

niri

i'd heard whisperings about niri among the linux circles for ages now, but i'd held off on touching it because it's very easy to get caught in the trap of chasing whatever new thing is on hacker news and end up customising your computer more than you actually use it. this was until i learned that niri uses a gnome-style workspace system (one of my biggest complaints with hyprland, as it makes working with multiple screens an absolute nightmare) - i finally caved and gave it a swing and caved fucking immediately. it's so much easier to use than standard tiling window managers, like, it's no contest. i had to use my laptop for serious work briefly an'd jumped back into something more familiar while i was setting the system up, but it took less than 48 hours to fully switch over and i havent looked back since. scrolling window managers fix the neverending window shuffling required by their tiling counterparts. i feel like navigating is more natural, as you spend the bulk of your time moving the viewport instead of moving windows. i've actually left animations on, (they're really helpful for placing myself in the virtual space) and ive found the configuration pretty straightforward. it is definitely missing a couple of visual features - i'm missing being able to dim unfocused windows - but functionality speaking its almost completely there

macbook

another programmer friend just bought a new macbook air and sold me their m2 macbook pro for a comfortable discount! i didn't have a specific interest in trying macos but with the opportunity thrust upon me it made sense to see what all the fuss is about on the other side of the fence

the good

i've been trying to move away from microsoft and google more given their recent obsession with ai, data collection and forcing new products on you that you're not interested in using. it's super nice that the macbook lets you go "nah, i don't really want an online account" and just move on, and it doesnt really bother you to get on any of their other products (except for icloud storage, but i disabled notifications for that years ago). the interface is obviously nice and visually cohesive (except for the dmg installation page which is a true lawless wasteland)

apple silicon is many things, some of them less impressive than others, but the battery life on these devices is truly crazy. they absolutely sip power when idling (you can count on it to be close to full if you leave the lid shut for a couple of days) and they keep this efficiency up while actually running. you can faff on about all the features that a laptop has, but being ready to go at a moments notice and able to keep that charge going for more than a day's use is super helpful for keeping it portable

spotlight search is snappy and allows me to bring whatever apps i want up nice and quickly. you can also turn off web searching, which is super fucking hard to do on windows. the unix base of the operating system makes getting up and running as a "power" user uber quick. basically all of the built in tools that you would expect to be there are there. z shell is also pretty slick

a lot of settings are surprisingly configurable. swapping caps lock to another ctrl (or command in this case) is a weird fuck about in windows, and while it's supported in a lot of desktop environments and window managers, macos goes a step further and lets you swap as many of the modifiers as your heart desires. this kind of smart customisability is all throughout the system, and it doesnt feel like it's making your jump through hoops to find the more specific stuff

in many ways, the trackpad is an improvement on what i'm familiar with as a thinkpad user. the whole thing clicks, instead of pivoting at the top, the click force is customisable, and the glass surface doesnt get that horrible shine you see on plastic ones. talking about this with a macbook friend actually made me realise that i've stopped pressing on the trackpad, and instead just tap it, because this is enabled by default on both windows and every linux distro that i've used. kind of interesting! in any case, i don't really care too much about the click force of the trackpad because i find it kind of unintuitive, and tapping to click feels much faster to me. ymmv

the bad

there's a lot of general weirdness that i assume is just baked into the system from decades of iterative design that users are used to but is wholly unfamiliar to a newbie like me. finder both has a lot of potential and a lot of horrid quirks. by default it wants to act like a phone, seemingly relying entirely on recent files and searching - this is cute if your only files are photos and documents and also you don't give a fuck, but if you want to program something or even just figure out what the layout of the file system is, you need to jump through a million hoops to get the settings you want. finder also can't be closed completely, and always shows up in your command-tab popup. i also found this weird scaling thing it does when displayed below a certain size (below). there's another folder completely hidden off to the right, for reference

window management is HORRENDOUS. i need to give ms windows props for how well it does this, even if their solution isn't perfect. windows 11 especially lets you combine windows in some honestly weird layouts, with different trio layouts being extremely easy to construct by just dragging windows around. it also remembers grouped layouts and the displays that they were originally made on, and will pop them back in place if you disconnect and then reconnect to a dock, for example. linux has an absolute multitude of options, including my beloved scrolling layout, but most importantly, it's up to you. you can choose what you want. macos by comparison feels a decade behind. it seems that a lot of people use windows in true fullscreen, something that i find absolutely deranged. yeah sure, i want to move the mouse to bring up a toolbar option or check the time. awesome. your floating tiling options are sort of there, but i found the fn + ctrl shortcut really clunky compared to super, and to resize two windows that are touching at the same time you need to click on a tiny white grab bar. using these shortcuts also doesnt try to fit your moved window to slot in with other windows like it does in ms windows, and you can't fit windows to the corners. it all feels a bit half-baked to me and really hard to multitask with

this is more of a matter of familiarity, but the bottom row continues to be a bit of a pain in the ass. a friend of mine espoused the benefit of ctrl and command being separate as it allows you to cmd+c and cmd+v in terminal instead of using the clunky ctrl+alt, which is hard to disagree with, but other shortcuts feels like they're randomly assigned to one of the four modifier keys. the aforementioned fn+ctrl for window management is a good example, and it seems that option is used pretty infrequently. i think it actually sort of works more like alt-g?

i mentioned apple silicon's efficiency earlier and while it does do well with its battery, the accounts of the mac fans had led me to assume the responsiveness of the whole system would be this godlike, instantaneous snappy experience, where it's only just fine. it's better than windows on laptop, but that's not really saying much, and it's noticeably less responsive than fedora on my markedly cheaper thinkpads that were sold about the same time

i don't love this keyboard. it's fine, sure, but it feels thin and rattly and the keys have almost no travel. thinkpads just have them beat in every way.

screen scale is extremely confusing to me. i normally go for really small text and ui element sizes to fit as much as possible on screen, but the settings page left me kind of stunned:

huh??? my initial assumption was that the display is 2560x1600 and running at a lower resolution, perhaps to give a faster framerate? the truth, however, was even more horrible: the screen is 1440x900, and the resolutions you can pick here are a demented abstraction for the display scale. first and foremost, this pro-grade device that cost like three grand on release only has a 900p display? okay. but also i'm not sure how much more arbitrary this could be. in what universe is defining a pixel as not a pixel easier to understand than 50%, 100%, 150% scaling? with how fine grained a lot of the settings are in this system, this was a weird bit of friction

the prognosis

it's a resounding eh from me. if i never wanted to play videogames on a computer and i had to choose between a macbook and a windows laptop, i would probably pick the macbook. it's also worth noting that i am not the target audience for these things. managing a dozen windows simultaneously and structuring my directories myself and wanting to do everything through the keyboard are not common features of macbook users (or frankly, the majority of windows users) so its sort of like complaining that my public transport is shit in an american town. this just a fundamental disconnect between the priorities of the service and my needs. in a way im kind of glad that it didnt completely blow me away and change my whole perspective on computing and interconnectivity, because ive used an iphone before and i fucking hated it

vxe r1 dragonfly

my glorious mouse i bought back in june kept giving me the shits, and while /r/mousereview is one of the least helpful subreddits ive ever visited for reviewing mice or giving people any degree of help in mouse selection, a bit of digging led me to the r1 dragonfly, a mouse that goes for about fifty bucks from aliexpress and is honestly one of the best ive used in my life. the software runs through a chrome browser, which means you don't have to install it ever, and the settings are all saved to the device. it's going to be my recommended mouse from here out and

xteink x4

my other new doodad is this little e-reader. it's extremely pocketable which i've found super handy for reading on the train or just during a quiet moment where i would normally reach for my phone. it's also really cheap, about 80aud, with a nice feeling build quality and decent screen (i say, as someone with no experience with other e-readers). it has some quirks, including having to flash an english firmware using esptool and loading fonts as binary files, but for the price and the size i'm really not too fussed

sapphire pulse 9070 xt

ahhh fuck!! i got spooked by memory prices and panic bought a new gpu! oops! in my defence, i'd been meaning to swap from my now fairly elderly 2070 super, and this did coincide with one of the first times these cards have dropped below 1000 aud. i also had some amazon gift cards i had to use up so the financial hit wasnt as intense as it could have been

this is the first time i've owned an amd gpu, and it's honestly been a really nice experience! the compatibility with linux is way cleaner and less of a headache to set up, and the amd adrenaline software makes tweaking really fucking nice. since the card is kind of jammed in there the heat coming out of my pc case is pretty noticeable, but the adrenaline software lets you control undervolts, overclocks, fan speeds, frequency targets and power limits without having to dig for a vendor specific program. it's really nice. the card also handles having its power limited to 70% of maximum (about 200w) and a 100mv undervolt just fine - a pretty nice thing considering how much heat it was pumping out directly after i installed it. fuck nvidia! buy its ever so slightly less shitty competitor!

keyboard

my keyboards have all been kinda dying recently - i spilled soju on one and gummed up the (now unavailable) alps switches, multiple keycaps broke on my hhkb, the usb port on one of my alice boards is flakey. i grabbed a w60-c kate pcb, made by the titular kate and an australian industrial designer called wilba (ive met both of them and they are absolutely lovely). the thing is surprisingly cheap, with the caveat that it only supports a 7 unit spacebar layout. not a big deal for me. the case was laser cut at my local hacker space, which was an honestly awesome experience! the cutter they have there is huge (i think a bit bigger than a 2a0 sheet of paper?) and really fucking fast. i've been meaning to do a little writeup on how these cases are made, so maybe this is what will make me pull the trigger

spring has sprung!

lets do a meditation exercise. find a quiet spot. close your eyes. imagine you're in the mid-suburbs of an australian city. it's 10pm. the air is crisp enough that you need to a light jacket, but not so cold that you can't smell the jasmine tree three houses over. you're getting out of your piece of shit 1999 toyota starlet. you got too busy writing an unbelievably massive blogpost that you forgot to get something out of the fridge for dinner, and you have turned this dilemma to your advantage by using it as an excuse to try out kfc's sweet tokyo burger box. it is not very good. you will use the combined power of three chicken thighs, a hawaiian roll, a medium sized potato and a mountain dew to blog for another three hours.

(that was a bit of a silly bit but going outside at night right now is actually so so nice)

hello! i've had an absolutely crazy two months and keep getting torn away from my computer screen in favour of something more outside flavoured. i'm reaping all the rewards of this time of the year in the southern hemisphere - walking and riding outside is super lovely both temperature-wise and sense-wise. i suspect that the increase in sunlight is partly to blame for my improved mood as well. both my partner and i had birthdays since the last blogpost and we had a cute joint party with a load of our friends!

it feels like my relationship has really hit its stride this last couple of months. the birthday party is a good example because we were on the same page about most of the things that we wanted to do and the whole process was incredibly painless. i've started to really unlearn some of the weird fears i acquired from my last relationship, which took a while but is making me feel like way less of a lunatic. i've been riding the high of getting past the initial dating uncertainty and feeling like our lives really gel now. it's awesome! it's fucking awesome!

laser and electro

my body hair endgoal, fyi

i've done quite a lot of laser hair removal over the last couple of years, but since my facial hair is still quite stubborn i've been getting electrolysis for four or five months. for those unaware, while laser lets you hit an area the size of a 20 cent piece with a single flash, electrolysis goes hair by hair, and each hair takes about 5 seconds to fully scorch. it can be unbelievably painful, and because there are far fewer techs trained to use the machines, it also costs a tidy premium. on the other hand, it is (per my research) the only technique that can properly permanently remove hairs due to it burning the absolute shit out of the individual hair follicle. i've been trucking along with this painful and slow process and it may in fact be wearing me down. the results are slow (i've had eight sessions and only the absolute point of my chin is now hair-free) and the impact on my already suffering bank account is pretty noticeable. comparatively, i can get a package deal on laser hair removal which gets prices down to around 30 bucks a month, and the sessions are short and significantly less painful.

i'm not necessarily going anywhere with this, but i thought someone else considering the same treatment might appreciate the insight. it kind of feels like my conclusion after fixing up the ceiling of my last apartment - can you do this? yes! should you do this? maybe just consider the whole picture first lol

video games

i feel like i've played almost nothing all year, and then september hit me with an absolute barrage of new stuff and it's thrown my schedule on its head

cloverpit

this one is very reminiscent of balatro, with a bit more of a focus on chance (and controlling it) than its contemporaries. it also has a (light) progression and (light) story and (light) lore. like with all these games its a great time to spend a couple of hours figuring out all of the weird strategies, but i did lose a bit interest after i got the "true" ending for the first time. still! it's got an awesome aesthetic and a very spooky general vibe that i found quite effective

skate. (aka skate 4)

this one also kind of came out of nowhere - i wasnt initially interested because of the awful free to play stink that's smeared across it, but compared to the rest of the industry skate 4 actually handles the money side fairly well - there are lootboxes but the randomness is minimised and you cant waste money on duplicates, and paying doesn’t seem to influence the gameplay in any way. which is good! because the gameplay is very fun! i think you know the game is doing it right when i realised i'd just been skating around and practising tricks for an hour without any goals or directions. it just feels good! the music is also a really fun collection of tracks that fit the skater vibe immensely and i went and grabbed them after my first couple of sessions to listen to them more intentionally

super mario galaxy 1+2 on switch

i never played this one because i didn't have a wii when it came out, and i also skipped the super mario 3d all stars version because i heard some pretty negative reviews. i have always been intrigued by these games though, and i was slightly more confident this time after watching some trailer breakdowns showing the improvements that had been made for the switch (notably the texture upgrades, touch controls and other quality of life changes). in some ways i think we're kind of spoiled by the new breed of high speed movement 3d platformers, and heading back to something a bit more simple like galaxy feels pretty odd. the game is still really fun though - the concept is wildly unique and the settings and music are excellent. the difficulty seems to be balanced pretty well for an experience which is just "fun", which is fine by me

silksong

here's the big one baby!!! i played and finished hollow knight to quite a high percentage years ago, and while i do believe it to be an absolute masterwork and extremely fun, i never quite got that level of rabid fan begging for the new release. i think i was applying my normal mentality of "if a piece of art is really good, it doesn't need a sequel" and while i still stand by that, this is definitely one of those situations where they learned everything they could from the original and addressed every complaint and shortcoming. silksong's story is easier to approach, i like its characters more and its challenge feels more fair. there are more movement options and the game makes full use of it by continuing to open up the map as you learn new skills. its so fun to head back to an early game area, open a previously unopenable door and discover a whole hidden area with new (appropriately levelled) mysteries and challenge. the music and visuals are incredible as always, and you can tell that they've made the most of the development time to iterate them to a razor's edge. the same has also occurred for the gameplay in general which feels extremely well thought out, especially in the beginning where you have a more limited set of skills and are less likely to have got completely overpowered by finding hidden upgrades. its great! im having a load of fun, and its so cheap that you honestly should be too

albums album cull

i've been doing not that much new music stuff the last couple of months, mostly because ive been trying to trim down my music library. there are just too many albums that i only sort of care for. i've gone through 233 of my collection of approximately 1100, and of them, close to half have been culled! it's really fucking slow going but i think it's going to give me a really good end result

i do still have some top albums though!

baby pop - france gall baby pop by france gall

i'm not going to lie to you about this one - i found about this album from the credits sequence of dragon pilot: hisone to masotan. the album is sort of exactly what it says on the tin: very upbeat and airy pop music from a single vocalist, but with a strange kind of sombre vibe to it. it's nice!

swagger - flogging molly swagger by flogging molly

the pogues is a bit of a mainstay in my friendgroup, and i branched out a little while looking at celtic punk as a genre. i grabbed the mary wallopers self titled album and the meanest of times by dropkick murphys, but this one stood out for being the loudest and fastest of the bunch. it's a belter album, to use some australian parlance, and is definitely gonna be a roadtrip mainstay

downtime ep - dojo cuts downtime ep by dojo cuts

this one is a local australian funk band that came on the radio and my partner and i totally jived with. it's unbelievably groovy and great for throwing on in the kitchen with some drinks, although it is a little bit short

olympus pen ee-3

this isn't actually mine, but mine has my real human name on it so heres a stock image instead"

i got this camera yonks ago! but i never actually developed the film until last month and i honestly made a huge mistake by waiting so long. the first nifty little features are its automatic exposure setting, meaning it runs battery free and without any fiddly settings. absolutely great for a point and shoot that i don't want to think about. the second interesting bit is that it's a half exposure camera, meaning that it gets two landscape shots for every portrait section on a piece of film. this has the dual benefit of doubling the number of shots you get per roll, but also pairing shots in these really cute doubles that can almost tell a little story if you're clever about it

pentax pc-330

after the success story that was the pen ee-3 i dug up my other old film camera that had been languishing in a box for years. the flash sets the pentax apart from the olympus, and i tend to bring both with me to events these days to be prepared for any light situation. it also takes excellent photos! i'm truly flabbergasted at just how good some hand me downs can be

knights of guinevere knights of guinevere: pilot

i shamefully sort of like glitch's other well known project, the amazing digital circus, and now they've released the pilot for their first 2d animated series. and it looks really good! the story is pretty intriguing, i love the design in the titular guinevere, and the animation in general is really well executed. i'm curious to see if they can keep up this level of detail for an entire season. but i'm happy to find out!

stickers

i found a bright red sticker stuck to a traffic light when i was in melbourne in july, attached with a clever tearaway tab so i could still remove the backing and stick it on my laptop. further inspection revealed a url and a sign up form for a mail only sticker drop. i obviously signed up. i then thought very little of it for a couple of months

lo and behold an absolutely stuffed letter showed up in my mailbox in late october. there were a bunch of stickers, some artwork, a couple of magnets with my legal fucking name engraved in it, and a hand written note!

Hey REDACTED!
you have been the first stranger that
has signed up to the mailing list. Such
a surprise, thank you so much and for
the kind words I have included extra stickers
for you! I started this list to keep things
excitin when sharing my artwork. Hope
you enjoy the updates. keen to share more :)!

Welcome to the second official mailout!
Since the last update I have continued
work on the prouction. On the reverse
of this page is thefirst look into
the world of the band. if its not
FUN, WET, HEAVY or HOT we
reserve no place for it!
cant wait to share
more from
REDACTED
38 of 65

i have gone and anonymised the whole thing because im not certain how much they'd like a bunch of random international chucklenuts to apply to their mailing list out of nowhere, but i'm also going to send them some artwork back and ask whether they'd like me to keep gatekeeping the project, and if they want me to open it up i will

anyway! this was just super cool and i wanted to share it. it completely made my month!

nona the ninth

this one's been a long time coming! for those not in the loop, this is the third book in a series of four about a bunch of spacefaring necromancers in a far future feudal society. the world that tamsyn muir describes is vast and complicated and full of secrets, and its characters are written with so much depth and personality - i never question their decisions or interactions because they just feel so real to me! i finished harrow (book 2) earlier this year and borrowed my friend's copy of nona. while its main gimmick is maybe not as good as harrow's it takes the very interesting angle of looking at the conflict of the series and its very complicated intricacies through the eyes of a (functional) child. it's really good! i'm super looking forward to the fourth and probably final book in the series, but we have absolutely no idea when that's coming out

post nona resources

i found this post super good for explaining the epilogue of the book because it is extremely confusing. spoilers! obviously

i've also started listening to this podcast now that i'm up to date and not at risk of spoilers. amy and mel are turbo nerds about this book series and have the whole thing committed to memory, so its a great experience for getting up to speed with some of the more obscure elements of the series. i've absolutely blasted through it and enjoy the two hosts dynamic immensely

epilogue

i had a bunch of dotpoints of miserable things i'd thought throughout the two months that i was going to dig into, but i'm just gonna summarise the more positive ones quickly. i've gotten a lot of value out of the saying that "it's everyone's first time on earth too" recently. not as a way of excusing bad behaviour, but to give your peers (and your parents, honestly) some grace when they do things you disagree with or mess up. it's really helpful in grounding yourself in the fact that most people are just trying their best with the information that's given to them. except the capitalist class! they're making life worse for the rest of the planet and have simply decided that their bank account is more important :)

i need to apply this grace to myself as well. i have felt like i've gone and made the wrong decisions a lot in the last little while despite trusting myself and taking in all the intel available to me, which is demoralising (i promise this isnt insidious by the way, but it is slightly dramatic. i've just been looking at the direction of my life as a whole)

i've also been exposed to quite a few online "witch hunts" on tumblr recently and they've been bumming me out. for ref, the people involved are definitely acting poorly! one is probably a pedophile and has a incest kink that seems less and less innocent the more they talk about it. but the more other people talk about it, the less productive it seems and the more it feels like just more gossip and entertainment. i dont know how you deal with these kinds of people in your online spaces, but this doesnt seem like it

ive also been thinking about my life philosophy of always exploring new things and new places. the note i wrote was "make sure to cut through the park and find out what the other side of the rainwater tank looks like" because i did just that in a park while cycling home one day and found some cool graffiti. neat!

and finally, i have a bunch of other posts in the works that are all half finished. i've fallen into a horrid rabbithole for automating linux colour scheming, i have a post about bitmap fonts i like, and i have two recipes almost ready to go. keep an eye out!

maker coffee

i started my trip to melbourne with the best coffee i would have all week! while i want to hate some of these fru-fru upmarket joints, their coffee always feels considered instead of a cafe afterthought. the toasted sandwich was also really lovely - i'm not sure the coffee rub for the beef was necessary or even that noticeable, but the smoked mayo was a delightful touch

1x small long black
1x toasted sandwich (coffee rubbed beef, smoked anchovy mayo, fontina)
- $22.86 aud

rooks return

i poked my head in here at a friend's recommendation. wednesday night is when the house jazz band play (the rookies)! i didnt know anyone and was honestly too wiped to get into socialisation so i just camped behind the bar and doodled the crowd. the house lager was delicous and the overall vibe of the location was great, although the night definitely attracts more randos, many of whom were explaining the fundamental of jazz to each other lol. the staff were awesome and watching them chat with the regulars was homely, and the music was top notch

1x pint rookies lager ($14.35)
1x negroni ($16.40)
- $30.75 aud

rocket burgers

i got this on the way home - the spot is right out the front of flinders st station. it was potentially the most default burger i've ever eaten, but i was kind of drunk at this point so it was exactly what i needed

1x rocket classic
- $12.00 aud

mr. summit

i was drawn into this place by its cool branding, and while it wasnt the best joint i visited in melbourne it was still very sweet. the coffee i got was perfectly fine but the almont chocolate croissant was a perfect breakfast

1x long black
1x almond chocolate croissant
- $10.50 aud

ol mate's

the staff here were very cool, and the fitout had those melbournean green tiles that i love so much. the fried chicken sandwich was perfectly cooked and spiced, and the apple in the coleslaw was absolutely next level. the coffee i bought wasn't too fruity or interesting but i was surprised at how pleasant its bitterness was. i normally prefer acidic coffees because the harshness of something really bitter isn't my style, but this managed to walk the line without tipping over the edge

1x long black
1x fried chicken sandwich
- $10.50 aud

arnold's

i went here to catch up with a friend and we got totally carried away! we got the "a little bit of everything" menu, which had a selection of really lovely south american fusion food, including this extremely poorly photographed trout. we got a sparkling wine to open and a chilled red, both of which were excellent. the experience here was lovely as long as you're willing to spend a little moolah, but i would recommend skipping the meal and just picking the items you want - our napkin maths said we might have actually had a worse deal than if we'd bought the items individually

2x wines
1x a little bit of everything menu
- ~$120.00 aud

the premises

this place has an extremely strong "suburban cafe vibe" - the fitout was clearly fairly new and hypnotically caucasian. not my style in general but not offensive. i did love the deep forest green highlights on everything and it is on busy intersection so it did at least feel really lively. the food unfortunately was just fine; the rhubarb danish was clearly yesterday's batch and had an overwhelming nutellex flavour, and the coffee was uncomfortably bitter - a far cry from yesterday's offerings

1x small long black
1x rhubarb danish
- $12.00 aud

keki milk bar

this north cbd location was sunk below the ground floor, which was a surprisingly cosy spot, and had a twee, if a little well loved, fitout. the music was unbearably saccharine and involved a lot of covers of love songs. my souffle pancake was impressively fluffy - i bought one back in osaka and this was definitely lighter and fluffier. the matcha latte was also very nice but disagreed with my stomach for some reason

1x matcha souffle pancake
1x strawberry matcha latte
- $23.85 aud

the helenic museum

this location is surprisingly easy to miss - it's in the old treasury building but it's off the street, and also in the northeast of the cbd. it was an absolute gem though! the ground floor had an exhibition about tributes people would give to the gods of ancient greece, and the upstairs had some military garb, traditional greek costume and jewelry, as well as a bunch of marble statues and a featurette on an ancient greek inspired videogame made in melbourne! i told loads of local melbourneans about this spot and none of them had actually heard of it which i found funny, but i thought it was 110% worth checking out!

1x standard entry
- $16.00 aud

fortune alley

i unfortunately don't have a great photo of this place, but i went here with a friend after eating very little all day and absolutely stacked a plate with noodles and stir fry. if you need an insertion of protein and calories at a (proportionally) low price and high speed, this joint is a good place to go. it was also delicious!

1x large plate
- $17.56

monforte viennoiserie

i made a fuss of lune on my last trip, and i got this recommended as a local competitor. where lune was a tourist trap concrete bound well oiled machine with seven staff working nonstop for an entire day, monforte viennoiserie is a hole in the wall in the suburb of carlton run by a single person. i kind of wanted to try out their coffee but i didn't want to hold up the people behind me - luckily the weird little honey soda i bought was really refreshing and a great counterpart to my croissants. as for the croissants - the chocolate and peanut butter was a bit gimmicky and not an everyday classic, but still incredible. the peanut butter filling was salty to contrast the dark chocolate topping. on the other hand, the plain croissant was lovely and fresh and flakey - not as tooth rattlingly crisp as a lune equivalent, but that's more a matter of taste as far as i'm concerned. if i lived in carlton i would be visiting this place very regularly

1x croissant
1x chocolate and peanut butter croissant
1x honey soda
- $22.00 aud

pauli

i spent about an hour in goodbyes before this - nothing notable happened and i didn't buy any clothing, but i noticed this ceramic store on the way back and couldn't stop myself. they'd just had a bit exhibition with somewhere in the range of fifteen artists, so the varietywas out of this world. each piece was pretty expensive, but they were all handmade by a local artisan and each had a bit of a story, which is exactly what i go for

2x cups
1x small vase
- $120.00 aud

eat pierogi make love

i poked my head in here out of pure curiosity, instantly clocked that it was a bit of a wanky pricey place but decided to treat myself. the pierogi was delicious and the salad refreshing, but the price tag was pretty eye watering. a nice date spot perhaps, but not one for regular lunching

1x kielbasa pierogi
1x sauerkraut salad
1x glass of sparkling wine (i forget which sorry)
- $42.10 aud

capitano

this pizza place looked extremely cosy but was also completly full up, so we got takeaway and ate it in a park. im of the opinion that theres a sort of quality plateau to neapolitan style pizza where past a point it's all "good" - debating the smaller differences is largely unproductive. and this pizza was good! aforementioned fence-sitting aside, one of the pizzas was a beef tongue option that was actually fucking delicious and just a bit of an interesting option that you don't see to often. they also didnt skimp on the sausage for the pepperoni pizza, which is always appreciated

(my friends bought the pizzas so i have no idea what they cost)

readings

after drinking a bunch of silly beers and eating a bunch of silly pizza we head into this book shop in order to immediately and terrifyingly realise just how drunk we were. the range at this spot was really nice, lots of nifty art books and intriguing non-fictions. i wish i'd been here sober

jungle juice bar

the naming of this spot is absolutely insane - i'm not sure that they even sold juice. their crockery was really lovely and colourful and their menus were in old hardback childrens books, which i found extremely cute. they had a load of different bagels on offer (i stuck to the classic salmon, cream cheese and capers) and they had a collection of interesting dring choices - my cafe cubano was a lovely pick me up, and a nice treat to try for the first time

1x salmon bagel
1x cafe cubano
- $18.50 aud

agathe patisserie petite

this spot is squeezed into a side room in a (shopping) arcade, and i think is just a resale location for a larger bakery. there definitely wasn't space for a whole bakery back there. the flan patissier scratched a bit of a portugese tart itch, while the croissant was just okay. not bad for the price and the location though!

1x flan pâtissier
1x croissant
- $10.16 aud

wunderkammer

a little curiosities store in the northwest of the cbd, i give this one a decent chance of containing real human remains. i didn't buy anything, but it was an interesting spot to look at for half an hour or so

ngv

my hometown's gallery pales in comparison to this the national gallery of victoria. we were there for three or so hours and only saw half of it. and i saw a rothko!

acmi

i was fair less time-limited when i came here so i kinda got my money's worth out of the experience (the whole thing is free btw). the first third or so of the museum is all early film history, which is interesting but, the main attraction is all the little behind the scenes items they have, followed by the more recent and abstract artworks. they had a bunch of sets from memoir of a snail and a lot of writing about considerations, concepting and design work for various australian (and international) films, as well as a bunch of lovely slow short films. one of my favourites followed an impossible victorian trainline that jumped between different places in the state

code black

i grabbed a little long black here and sat out the front to write this blog in an hour of downtime i had. the coffee was really nice (i've had code black shipped to me before and their beans are extremely good) but the interior was playing thumping house music? a really bizarre choice. i far prefer a weird bench on the street anyway

1x small long black
- $6.15 aud

mr ramen san

this is maybe one of the most authentic feeling ramen places i've been to in australia. lovely timber panelling, weird posters on the walls, everything a little rough around the edges. the food was delicious, if a touch expensive and a touch small, but you take what you can get. i'm definitely going to be back here next time

2x charsu ramen
2x orion cocktail beer
- $74.10 aud

nimbo

as a last little hurrah for my trip, we poked our heads into this dessert place. their main selling point is bingsu, a dish i don't really care for, but they also sold a variety of french toast stuffed with a chewy mochi paste on the inside. i've had a bunch of mochi-adjacent dishes before but nothing quite like this - the ube added a fun tang and the corn flakes amped up the crunch on an otherwise pretty soft dish

1x ube mochi toast
- $22.50

three albums ii by ben von wildenhaus ii by ben von wildenhaus

it's a little hard to put a nice neat description on this album. the picture of ben on the cover definitely gets you in the right headspace - it's a very guitar-forward experience with these slow melodies, sometimes haunting, sometimes somber, sometimes with a bit of a strange western-style drive. the album also has this weird mirror effect in its setlist, two songs are presented as sequels of their namesakes and the songs tu and two are obviously linked. in general i think the tone means i might not listen to this song much more under my own steam, but i really enjoyed the experience

stone crazy by buddy guy stone crazy by buddy guy

i don't have a huge frame of reference for blues music, but this one is big out of the gate and keeps on trucking for the full forty minutes. buddy guy is clearly an incredible guitarist - he absolutely thrashes out in each solo throughout the album. i'm keen to check more blues out next month!

flourishing views by martin gauffin flourishing views by martin gauffin
Martin Gauffin · Flourishing Views

i've actually listened this album loads in the past, but it's been given a new lease on life this month. this album has this kind of simmering positivity that creeps up on you, until you're awash in an almost overwhelming feeling of calm and warmth. each track is built up from layers of plucky strings and backed by keys and a bowed instrument (i assume a double bass? a viola?). it's absolutely delightful

agony26

i got an entirely unprompted email from clover about its spin on my already very stupid keyboard. the pure unadulterated joy i received from this moment is pretty hard to top honestly. a lot of people who have remixed the board have gone and "fixed" it, which is diametrically opposed to the point, but clover has the joke on lock. clover is no doubt reading this, so thank you again for this incredible project, you made my entire week!

hyprland

i've also been dumping a frankly embarassing amount of time into setting up a new linux environment. i've started with fedora, the distribution i'm most familiar with, taken the sway spin and installed hpyrland over the top of it

the upside to this kind of installation is an immense level of control and efficiency, but that's also kind of the downside. there's been a recent swing in some online spaces (partly driven by pewdiepie, of all people) to use this kind of system and i personally don't think that it's a good move for a linux newbie, but if you've been messing around with it for five or so years you probably know enough to get yourself out of the problems you will inevitably get yourself in.

if you are a linux dork though, this is a huge opportunity to set up a system where every piece of software and almost every piece of general computer functionality is something that you've configured for yourself. this makes the whole thing an immense time waster as you sift through five alternate options for any little menu or popup or other on-screen doodad (i spent five hours the other day configuring and styling the notifications that pop up in the corner of the screen), but when it all works properly the effect is extremely satisfying

i've fallen in love with the everforest theme, although picking a wallpaper that i felt fit it took a little while (i went for this one by simon stalenhag). most big apps have premade themes, although ive found the matches haven't been amazing straight out of the box and have needed tweaking. i've also done away with all of hyprlands flashy effects - i find them to be a bit tacky and a waste of screen real estate. i've instead gone for something more flat and square and aliased, which plays nicely with my beloved unifont and proggy fonts, and saves a bit of battery power to boot.

for those interested, my dotfiles are on my github. i also thought i'd shout out a couple of discoveries that have really impressed me:

micro text editor

link

i refuse to learn vim, but nano is a bit too limited, and has a lot of annoying quirks. micro has everything i've wanted from a text editor so far, and its quite mature to boot. it hasn't been quite enough to boot me off of zed yet, but they keep spruiking ai features and i wouldnt mind to give them the flick eventually

dunst media control

link

this is a little script that lets you use the dunst notification manager as your on-screen-display for brightness and volume. it's really snappy, and most importantly just works. i struggled with so many osd options before this one and none of them behaved for me, but this was a single file i just dumped in my binary directory

bemoji

link

in a similar way to dunst media control, i'd fiddled with so many different emoji picker options and none of them had really behaved. bemoji did require a tiny bit of tweaking to support tofi, my picker of choice, but once i had it set up it worked a charm

also, i know i made a big deal of nobara couple of weeks ago but i've recently just been plugging my laptop in to a usb c dock attached to my tv and running off of that directly and its honestly perfectly fine. the problem with those little micro pcs is the wireless cards in them tend to be kind of crap and laptops tend to have much better ones. if i move somewhere with ethernet in the walls i'll probably change back, but this works for now

video games! loco motive

i mentioned this one in last month's post but didn't really extrapolate. loco motive is a point and click mystery adventure heavily inspired by the classic sierra and lucas arts point and clicks of the 90s and 00s, and it nails the whole experience as far as i'm concerned. the pixel art is extremely expressive, the foley and music sell the atmosphere, and the writing is extremely funny. it suffers from weird pacing and a little bit of bizarre puzzle logic, but i did say it nailed the experience. the game does have a hint system built in with a pretty nice in-game explanation for its existence, and i didn't feel too much guilt using it. i wrestled through the thing in an afternoon and an evening and felt very satisfied by the whole deal

animal well

i very clearly remember dunkey spruiking this game a year or so back and being desperately unconvinced by the trailers and the aesthetic. i almost think that aesthetic is an overall detriment to the game, because, while i have actually come around to it and think it's pretty nice now, i feel it distracts in a way from the depth of gameplay hidden within. animal well is fucking great. it's pretty comfortably in my top three metroidvanias of all time, and probably my favourite puzzle metroidvania (although not many others come to mind).

whisper in the wind book

i've been reading this luke arnold series since the beginning and i swear, they just keep getting better. the conceit of a noir mystery set in a post-magic fantasy world, depicting the effects of a decaying population of elves, dwarves, wizards and the like and integrating it deeply with the aforementioned mysteries is great. the episodic nature of the books make them great to pick up and put down, but the overarching story and development / redemption of the main character is really rewarding of long term readers (like myself). plus it's written by an australian! bonus!

sgtcharlynne

link
this website's style is fucking awesome! the blogpost about how you can shift from youtube to your own personal video hosting site is alse really good! if i could critique it a little, i don't think it thinks about how people would discover new video creators in a post-youtube world, but we did do it before, and we could probably do it again. maybe someone could start some kind of neocities-style website that sort of pseudo-centralises an otherwise pretty decentralised (at least structure-wise) website system?

me

for a nice change of pace, i've been feeling slightly mentally out of sorts the last couple of weeks. i've identified it as a feeling of my world shrinking and expanding simultaneously.

shrinking

i touched on some weirdness with a friend that happened at the start of the year, and the results have continued to propogate this year. said friend has two bands and many of the band members are good friends of mine, but he has asked me to not come to their shows. this fuels a fair bit of fomo when seeing clips from their shows online

i spent a lot of time over the last couple of years with the local queer climbing group, but two key members were dating and have had a bit of a nasty break up, meaning neither of them attend anymore. this hasn't really splintered the group, but it feels like the cool group of friends has been a bit impacted by the whole experience, and we don't have the same level of contact anymore

i've also definitely become somewhat less driven to meet people and go to gigs now that i'm no longer single. it's definitely nowhere near as dramatic a change as the one previously mentioned, but i feel like my outgoing-ness and willingness to take conversation risks has shrunk slightly and i kind of don't like it

expanding

i've met a bunch of awesome people through dating my partner! their housemate is extremely funny and fun to be around, and i've had more exposure to some of their really cool friends and the artists they work with through going to their events

i've also sort of just stumbled into some closer friendships than i expected. i know a lot of people who i thought were a bit too cool for me, but they actually went out of their way to talk to me directly and invite me to things? huhh?? a morale booster to be sure

and of course my partner is fucking awesome. it's been really fun to get to know them better and discover more cool things that i like about them, as well as offering my support in their life

i'm still frazzled! i'm kind of always frazzled and honstly probably need therapy, but things could be a whole lot worse

this is going to be a bit of a short one, for reasons that will hopefully be clear. i don't really have a good excuse for the lateness though, sorry!

the month that never was

july was a bit of an unintentional experiment on myself. i somehow managed to lose my common book and bullet journal, found my bullet journal, then lost my (new) common book and bullet journal again! the immediate effect of this comedy of errors was that a huge slice of my note taking system that i rely on so heavily was missing for most of the month, and the immediate effect of that wasn't immediate. but it was interesting!

my clearest memory was of a weekend where i was bullet-journal-less and therefore task-less. this coincided with a weekend that was extremely quiet, and instead of freaking the fuck out i played the point and click mystery game loco motive

and it was wonderful! i literally haven't slept this well in potentially years. this of course got me thinking about the benefits and hindrances of my system and wondering whether it's the best for the way i like to live my life. i've talked about my organisation system here before, but the short version is that i stick any thoughts in my bullet journal as soon as possible. this keeps thoughts that aren't necessary from sitting in the back of my mind, and gives me a sense of calm knowing that there isn't a task that i've forgotten. i did definitely still have a bit of stress about forgetting about little jobs during the month so i think the system still works, but perhaps it could have some tweaking.

one big thing that i indentified was the way that having "big" projects hanging over my head makes me feel anxious in general, and is probably one of the big things that i should focus on, maybe by moving them to another system or breaking them up more effectively. on the other hand, the trouble that i had with the books missing did help to cement their effectiveness in my mind.

music

i don't really have a "top three" this month, but here are some interesting albums that i found!

elektel - space travel with teddybear space travel with teddybear by elektel
tottomori - shoreline mistward shoreline mistward by tottomori
proc fiskal - siren spine systex siren spine sysex by proc fiskal

sorry for the somewhat limp update, but i have a massive blogpost about my latest trip to melbourne in the works, so keep your eye open for that one!

fuck it! posting this one slightly early in the hopes that it motivates me to update my linux and cooking pages in the spare time i've carved out

three albums / more mp3 player blathering

this has been the first month with some decent musical discovery in a little while, which makes no sense because i've been unbelievably busy. it was definitely encouraged by the arrival of a new hiby m300. i lost my last one in japan and replaced it with a sony walkman nw-a105 - when i first got it i was excited to have something fairly cheap (~120 aud secondhand), slightly smaller, with a nominally sleeker design and ever so slightly classier android stock setup. it was also the only thing i had during my holiday because i lost my m300, as mentioned previously. it unfortunately experienced a crack in its 3.5mm jack (somehow?) meaning that the plug would lean away from the pins and cause you to lose audio in one ear. nw-a105s are fairly easy to open up and the 3.5mm port is thankfully not soldered to the circuitboard, which would make it an easy replacement if the part was actually something you can buy, which it appears not to be. i gave in and coughed up the 230 aud for a new m300 direct from hiby's store on aliexpress, and i can now give a very direct A/B comparison of the two devices.

the thing that hit me immediately is the battery life. the nw-a105's battery is impressively small and its android 10 operating system chews through power even when the device is completely idle, in airplane mode, with all non-essential services forcefully removed from the system. we're talking about 15% of the battery every hour, with the device doing absolutely nothing. the stock workaround is to have the walkman turn itself off if it's been idle for an hour, which is cute, but the device takes more than a minute to start up again and even longer for all of its services to open. comparatively, the hiby sat in my pocket with wireless communications turned on for three hours with nothing playing and lost 0% of its battery capacity. cool!

(it also has just enough juice to play balatro)

the hiby is slightly larger, which is technically a matter of taste but practically makes it actually useable, it comes with android 13 which means i can make podcast apps save to the sd card, and it is actually kind of crap free, software wise! on that note i've started using niagara as the launcher app which works great with this kind of device - it only shows the apps that you want on the front screen and a now playing widget. i'm using poweramp as my player - it has quirks but works pretty seamlessly - and audiobookshelf. the latter is a bit less seamless and doesnt have a "download all" button for my podcasts, so i have spent a fair bit of time manually selecting episodes to download. i would love to use lissen as my player because it is much slicker, but the creator doesn't want to support library location selection. ah well

anyway, apologies for the ramble. here's my lastfm report, my playlist (in text form) and some albums that i thought were cool

lastfm report

playlist

• musik genom fyra sekler by jan johansson
• funeral folk by maria w horn and sara parkman
• huvva! - svensk folkmusik på beat by merit hemmingson
• hedningarna by hedningarna
• sola by sola
• bayside by obskür
• luz negra by richard galliano
• percepticide: the death of reality by pixel grip
• not tight by domi & jd beck
• the new sound by geordie greep
• jimmy & wes: the dynamic duo by wes montgomery and jimmy smith
• the game by mos
• stomach book's discography
• fem&m's discography
• slow attack ensemble's discography
• endlessness by nala sinephro

luz negra by richard galliano luz negra by richard galliano

(sorry i don't have a non-spotify version of this, but the official one got taken off youtube and it's not on bandcamp)

this album is frankly amazing - it's a combo of richard galliano on accordion and a string quartet and despite him being the first billing, and the accordion having the potential to take centre stage due to its novelty, it's a really balanced final product. the violin tends to play as a the main melody with the bass thrumming along behind, and the accordion kicking in to harmonise when it feels right

hedningarna by hedningarna hedningarna by hedningarna

i threw this on while making laxpudding with my partner (along with a bunch of other weird swedish folk) and i was pretty surprised at A. how universal some of these sounds are between different cultures and B. how much this reminds me of both the witcher and unraveled soundtracks. the sound is dominated by the swedish bagpipes which give a really harsh droning sound, and is complimented by a huge list of strange stringed instruments. the fiddle plays a big part (and i learned that the hardanger fiddle is actually sweden's national instrument!) as well as the hurdy gurdy which i was super excited about. it's unfortunately not the most amazing background music due to just how cutting the bagpipes are, but it's a fun experience nevertheless

addherall by fem&m addherall by fem&m

it's pretty hard to not make a comparison between this artist and femtanyl, but there is still enough of a difference for it to be a unique experience. fem&m is a bit less harsh in general and i think they suit the "happy hardcore" genre a little more than femtanyl's breakbeat. the basslines and drums are bouncier and it feels more inspired by older electronic / techno works. the first song, its a vibe, reminded me of anamanaguchi and boot me up sounded just like the random soundcloud tracks i would find in high school

other music thoughts

i grabbed a boatload of music this month including a good variety of jazzy and funky stuff, the discographies of slow attack ensemble, fem&m and stomach book, and some swedish folk music. i also finally got around to the new sound by geordie greep, which really had me torn; one of the core parts of the albums is the characters it builds for its lyrics. the song holy, holy is a great example of this where it depicts a depraved and insecure man bragging about being a womaniser in a way that is altogether uncomfortable. it's a really hard experience to sit through, which is a shame, because the instrumental elements are incredible, as is greep's vocal ability. it's also kind of the point, but that doesn't mean i want to listen to it any more

i also checked out percepticide by pixel grip, which has some tracks that gave me a huge crystal castles vibe, and not tight by domi and jd beck, the title song of which gave me really fun nintendo wii vibes. unfortunately neither of these albums quite had the chops to stand out on their own so i'm talking about them here instead. oh well!

degoogling

i've been trying to get away from using google (and other big tech multinationals) in my everyday life for a while now - this is a big of a big job because a lot of these systems are so well designed or play together super well (google maps and the gmail + google contacts + google calendar suites are both quite hard to drop) but i've been steadily moving in the right direction.

this months degoogles have been google translate, which i replaced with deepl, and google photos, which i replaced with immich. i also shifted over to librewolf!

the former is pretty straightforward and works surprisingly well. i'm gonna have to do some more fiddling to work out where i can integrate it more cleanly with apps and browsers and the like, but for now its good when i just need to translate something quickly

immich was a move to jump away from google photos, which i've become more and more suspicious of as google continues to roll the ai hype train. self hosted software can sometimes be a fiddle but i was incredibly pleasantly surprised that immich is one of the most straightforward pieces of software i've set up on my server. i added the storage locations to the docker compose file and it literally just worked. on a similar note, it's amazingly straightforward to pick up because they've literally just copied the interface of google photos. if photos can do it, immich can do it, and the buttons are probably in the same place. one of the most future-feeling functions of google photos was its context recognition (allowing you to search images based on their contents) and facial recognition and grouping. one would assume this would take immense resources from googles vast server farms, but my single server with an i5-7500T was able to process about 10 000 photos in about an hour, and most of that process was just recognising the location of faces in frame - the machine learning takes just minutes. massive 10/10 for immich

the final changeup was librewolf. i've known about mozilla's slow and quiet corporatisation that's been happening over the last couple of years - the firefox project is funded by google, which seems counterintuitive, and mozilla has been introducing more tracking and callbacks into the default browser of basically every linux distribution. librewolf provides a really simple option to install firefox with all the nonsense taken out and some smart privacy settings on by default - a couple of them go a bit far and make the system harder to use for privacy reasons that seem a little paranoid to me, but they can be disabled pretty easily. all in all, the transition from firefox has been smooth and the new browser does the trick! i just wish it didnt have a blue logo. i'm definitely gonna make a post about how i have it set up

doodads

i gave my m300 insights in the music section, but i also grabbed a new mouse because my last one got busted in my most recent house move. i found the glorious o2 pro forge really nice and the only reason i wanted to replace it was that i had broken it in a dropped bag, so i decided to take the easy move and get the regular o2 pro (the forge versions are no longer sold). it works pretty well but is giving me a handful of gripes - the buttons aren't as nice as the forge version being the first, and probably something i'll get use to. my bigger issue was with the software. i originally got the o2 pro forge because i was sick of mouse software that had to be running in the background and he o2 was recommended due to its ability to hold all settings on-device (this honestly should be the standard). i was then horrified to find that the o2 non-forge seemed to misbehave with the software turned off, and also would magically lose its settings if you decided to plug it in to charge. great. version 1 solves all these issues and is thankfully still available on the website but it does make me wish i'd done some more research when making my replacement

i also put this keyboard together! it's an aeboards praxis that i got for a sweet deal close to a year ago and left in its box until last week. i had these big plans of waiting to find the perfect matching purple keycaps, but i decided to slap some cheap (but still extremely good) jwick 67g tactile switches in there, and put on my universal set of pbtfans white on black keycaps. i knew that spacebar set would come in handy one day! i'm not absolutely crazy about the placement of the super keys and i wish they were placed near the middle hhkb-style, but getting the muscle memory hasn't been too difficult. getting the muscle memory for the three bonus switches on the top left, however, was too difficult and i gave up very early. i should find something funny to put in the spaces

this cool blogpost

link

a friend in an art discord server that i frequent made this blogpost and i think it's really fucking cool! super in-depth breakdown of how road systems work and how cyberpunk 2077 uses its roads to communicate its world (and where it kinda messes it up)

cooking

i started putting recipes on my website this month! i'm still working out a lot of the kinks, such as the best way to standardise the layouts and how to deal with the fact that home cooking photos tend to look a little ugly. i'll figure it out though!

i've also been making a cooking journal list! this is basically just a record of the things i made and on what days, with notes of the recipe, modifications i made, and the overall success. it's amazing for going back and checking what worked and what didn't and avoiding losing recipes. i might talk about this technique in some kind of cooking masterpost!

for this month though my highlight was probably the laxpudding i made with my partner

i wrote about it in the recipe post itself, but this was super homely and fun. it did also make me somewhat understand why my european mother enjoys quiche so much, though that is still a sentiment i'm unlikely to share in the near future

müjin how to not diy your concrete floor by müjin

i've been watching a lot of this dude this month - he's a great entertainer, and also does a huge variety of interesting things. i happily stood and watched in silence as he spent days pouring concrete in his basement, sucked wasps out of his house and scraped paint off his old fireplace. his new stuff is awesome but i picked this one because it's his most eyecatching thumbnail and most watched video - how could it not be with that photo

gender

i remember when i was early in on tumblr and beginning to learn about transgender identity and genderfluidity and not really getting it. it was the mid 2010s and the modern concepts of transgender people were only just beginning to hit the "mainstream" - toilet-pearls-clutching was in its infancy, and jk rowling hadn't shown all of her cards yet. around this time i was introduced to the concept of "ftf" and "mtm" trans people, a concept that seemed insane back then, but has seemed more and more reasonable as i've continued figuring out my own gender and being surrounded by other lovely genderqueer people

this moment came back to me during the first session with my new electrolysis tech - when i described how i wanted a full removal of my facial hair she asked if i was "changing my gender" and the gulf between how i used to think about being transgender and how i think now became incredibly clear. i think to the uninitiated it seems like someone has been one gender for all of their life and they suddenly realised that they want to try something else, like the other option seems like a better one. for me, as my internal identity began to crystalise, it also became clear that my external identity didn't match. it wasn't like i became non-binary per se, it was more that i realised the feelings i'd had on the inside the whole time had a name, and once i'd figured that i wanted the rest of my life to match (i hope that makes sense lol)

i also went to an artists talk by a really cool enby about their gender-focused exhibition - it was awesome, for reference - but it made me think about how a lot of visual representations of genderqueer-ness seem to focus on fluffy shapes and pastel rainbow forms. i'm suddenly kind of interested in artistic gender expression that is somewhat the opposite - can i show my feelings with a drawing that's dark and spikey and not at all ethereal? i think i could do some super cool human forms with this idea, but also something more somber - perhaps like someone moving through a dark misty mire a-la middle earth?

i also watched the silence of the lambs this month and hoo boy that is a can of worms. the concept that a character feels like they're a woman but isn't because of trauma is a bit weird and doesnt really hold up by modern standards. id be pretty confident that this film was an inciting incident for a lot of people associating transgender people, especially transfemmes, with sexual violence which, uh, is uncool

(this is more ironic than anything i promise)

i'm kind of uniquely placed financially speaking; i work as a programmer, but most of my friends are artists, teachers or working in healthcare (not as doctors). i prioritise my personal life over my professional one, which is bound to bite me in the ass in the long term, but means that i have a comfortable enough life in the short term. the summary of all this is i get paid more than most of my friends and less than most of my peers. i top off this fun combo with living in australia where houses are considered an investment opportunity instead of a human necessity, and where our distance from the usa and small population means that things are Just More Expensive here. as an upshot owning a house one day is tantalisingly close but simultaneously practically out of reach. i set out a budget plan this year that would have maybe put me in the running, with the condition that my car and phone kept trucking along long enough that they dont pose a financial pressure. anyway, my car's required a month of saving's worth of repairs, and my phone is getting distressingly fritzy. it stopped charging completely partly through may and i was terrified that i would have to replace it, but a complete drain and charge via wireless fixed it. for some reason. anyway it has slightly felt like the world is against me this may, but things are also coming back to equilibrium. the car acting up led to me buying a bicycle, which is awesome, and the phone acting up has cemented my rejection of it as a multitool. i'm going to keep my walkman, camera, notebooks and physical cards on me like a perfect little trend-following digital minimalist, but it's nice to know that i wasnt acting like a prepper for an apocalypse that will never come

i continue to walk the tightrope of doing too little and doing too much. my art output (?? gross) isn't where i'd like it to be, i've got a bunch of fun stuff i want to write about here, a bunch of books i want to read, exercise and training i'd like to do, and i've fallen back on hosting events after moving further from the centre of town. all the while, my weekly schedule looks like this:

harrow the ninth

i finally finished the second book from the locked tomb series this month! this is the kind of book that your friends will recommend with a kind of smug, knowing grin. one of the standout features is that it's probably the only book that i've read that has large tracts written in a second person perspective, as well as it being placed in the shoes of a secondary character from the first book. it's definitely more winding and harder to follow than gideon with its introduction of alien and complex concepts of the series' greater universe, and the book goes out of its way to confuse you in general, but it handily balances and metes out its revelations to keep your engaged. my absolute favourite part, and the reason that i've branded this book as my favourite sequel of all time, is that (very minor spoiler alert) the aforementioned second person perspective scenes are recollections of the first book, but completely wrong. i would love to give more detail than that, and also discuss why, but this is definitely one of those books that suffers immensely from being spoiled.

in general it keeps a lot of what was good about gideon the ninth - the charm, the humour, the drama and action - but adds exploration into its intricate sci-fantasy world and a masterfully built piece of prose. a friend lent me their hardback copy of nona the ninth and i'm excited to get into it!

the very bad not good month

this month was a bit of a rollercoaster. i got hit with a massive case of the winter sads which ruined some otherwise lovely experiences. i might have to be realistic and rebrand myself from being a winter lover. this weird unexplained numbness was supplemented by a series of events in my personal and work life where i felt like i was criticised without due cause - the work one was particularly hair raising because the thought of getting fired snuck into my brain, which is never fun. that one has at least been resolved, but in the moment it really brought back a huge rush of self doubt and insecurity. for a couple of days i was reading into every little thing too hard; thinking that people were sick of me because they took a bit longer to respond to messages, that kind of nonsense

the very bad not good half decade

i've been thinking about how covid was the harbinger to an extremely depressing modern political landscape. before then it felt (to me at least) that there was a degree of shunning the truly regressive characters in our society, but suddenly a bunch of people felt emboldened by their mutual hatred of *checks notes* following the pretty straightforward best practices to do the best for others when asked to endure extremely minor discomfort. suddenly it feels like all bets are off with what felt like the agreed upon rules of engagement in both national and international politics. the ukraine war continues to truck along, israel is dropping anti-warship bombs on hospitals, and conflict between china and taiwan seems inevitable. you can protest and donate and call your representatives but it all feels so horribly futile. in the same way as elon musk and trumps stupid bullshit, its been made incredibly clear that a very very small number of people are actually in control, and ability and mental acuity dont seem to be requirements. the australian labor party just got voted in with a huge majority and immediately blew their goodwill by approving a massive oil drilling plan on the north coast of australia. it all makes you feel very small sometimes

three albums recordings from the åland islands - jeremiah chiu and marta sofia honer recordings from the åland islands by jeremiah chiu and marta sofia honer

a lovely slow little ambient album with a progressive sort of style - simple melodies are built upon and developed as the songs and album progress

phosgore - domination domination by phosgore

i was super into techno in high school but it sort of fell to the wayside when i needed something a little bit lower key to let me focus on assignments and the like. an art friend recommended me phosgore recently and its been so refreshing to jump into something that is unapologetically heavy and loud

green-house - music for living spaces music for living space by green-house

this bizarrely gave me the vibes of the night in the woods soundtrack? i think mostly based on the layered melodies and the energy of those melodies themselves. it has the samely homely vibe, and makes me think of sitting in a nice sunlit reading room back in your home town

ghormeh sabzi

the recipe

i learned this one from my darling persian friend('s mum), but i haven't got around to making it for quite a while. this specific recipe calls for leeks which i personally ommitted, but the dried limes are non-negotiable. i have a middle eastern grocer down the road from me who sell them pretty cheap (im trying the recipe with black lemons instead as well; they're a bit more accessible for me specifically and they have a bit less of an ammonia smell, but they're also a distinct flavour - might be a choice thats dependent on the situation). it's fairly unique, especially if you're more used to indian and pakistani curries because it doesn't contains any spices, relying instead on green herbs, lime, pepper and the flavour of beef that's been stewed for a couple of hours. the resulting dish is the definition of hearty and the herbiness gives you a tiny glimpse of the far distant spring from the frigid winter.

forgive the white rice in the bowl and also the bowl itself, this was actually leftovers from the day after

hello :-)

the weather's been getting colder, and my sense of smell is getting worse - partly because of the temperature, partly because the plants arent as fragrant, and partly because of the onset of my annual six-month perma-cold. i blissfully missed a huge chunk of australia's hideous summer this year, but i did get a lot of value out of impromptu late night beach trips and i'll definitely miss them. my partner and i hopped into the ocean on the night of the last 28 degree day of the season, trying to fool ourselves that the now frigid water would be pleasantly cool instead of painfully teeth-chatteringly cold

still! i love the cold. i enjoy layering up my clothes and light rain, and braving full on thunderstorms under a ten dollar ikea umbrella. i'm excited to head out of the city and go on some drizzly hikes over running streams and hopefully not slip on rocks and crack my head open

this month i went to multiple gallery openings, multiple poetry nights, a live irish punk gig at a garage sale, bought a load of cute ceramics and made a linocut bookplate (i really want to share this because i'm super proud of the final result, but it also has my legal name on it). i'm helping to plan a yule / winter solstice party (the scope of which is getting rapidly out of hand) and making a bunch of posters / images for social media posts. despite all this, it's felt like a pretty quiet month

my music exploration has been both really good and pretty hard to document this april. i've found musicbee's autodj feature allows you to queue up whole albums instead of individual songs, so i've been letting it step through my collection and play albums that i sometimes haven't listened to in years. it's been awesome! but it's made picking out individual albums as discoveries of the month somewhat difficult

top 3 albums two for the road - herb ellis and joe pass two for the road by herb ellis and joe pass

this is a lovely cruisy jazz guitar pairing between two greats. it handily dodges being too "old timey" and feels like the perfect album to bop around while doing some afternoon baking with a friend.

i love my girl she's my boy - between friends i love my girl, she's my boy by between friends

i scanned my site and i've somehow never talked about this album? it was an absolute mainstay of 2024, starting super high with stalker before taking you on a bit of a mood journey. it feels like a bit of a romantic exploration - fear, excitement, comfort or frustration - paired with some super boppy beats. prime late night driving fodder

the power out - electrelane the power out by electrelane

i grabbed this album ages ago - i'm not sure who told me about it or where i found it. the band themselves british indie rock group who were only really active from 2000 - 2010 (give or take a couple of years) and this album is considered one of their more experimental. there's less of a cohesive energy than a cohesive lack of cohesion - that can annoy me in some genres, but there's enough commonality in the instrumentation to tie the thing together where it counts. my personal favourite track is The Valleys which features an american a capella troupe singing a british war poem

BONUS!! godhead dub - born_blpy godhead dub by born_blpy

nothing productive to say about this one, it's just a catchy lil dnb track

cooking blog?

i've been cooking some interesting stuff with my partner and it's got me A. experimenting with and developing recipes and B. wanting a good record of all the recipes that i think are good. i've found keeping lists of references on my blog actually super useful - something about having it super easily accessible through any browser i suppose? i'm thinking of putting recipes that i've stolen or ones that i've modified in their own subsection, similar to the misc posts i currently have, and maybe funnel them into a big masterpost somewhere. i think my initial trepidation on doing something like this was being afraid of being a "food blogger" but like, it's my blog. i get to figure out what it looks like. so i just wont make it like the food blogs that i hate?

heres a little teaser: i'd been dutifully destroying herbs in my fridge for years now, letting them go bad and buying a new bunch in shame. i'd heard of people cleaning and drying bunches when they get them from the store and then storing them in a jar of water and a bag, but i'd never actually given it a go. turns out it totally works! i've had a bunch of dill in there for like three weeks now and it still looks incredible

self hosting updates

ive gone and stressed myself out by deciding to self-host my podcasts, books and comics on top of the other crap that i already have running on my home servers. i've expanded my system to podcasts because theyre easy to acquire and not that large (when your device is a computer instead of a phone), and to comics because i use mihon as a reader and the sites that i download from are starting to get more secure and hard to scrape. i also added books for completeness - i have copies of books on my phone and ipad, might as well have a more permanent library.

audiobookshelf has been good for podcasts, which is to say that it's just about the only self-hosted program that doesnt absolutely stink. it still doesnt really serve podcasts quite how i would like - it was originally designed for audiobooks and it treats episodes as chapters, which is annoying, but it lets you slam content hosts for a show's entire backlog all at once. maybe i'll find a better player some time in the future.

comics / manga are a bit more of a fiddle. i tried suwayomi for a while - it's basically a home server version of the previously mentioned mihon app, which is cool because that app has a lot of good support for downloaders, and bad because those downloaders keep getting broken by new anti-scraping changes to sites. i eventually gave up and just jumped to bulk downloading from . that introduced its own weird complications because those sites tend to provide volumes instead of chapters, which then cause tracking apps like anilist to misbehave. i did fix this, but thats eighty lines of python and we're already completely out in the weeds.

the two heavy hitters in this sphere are komita and komga, and while i think komita is a little prettier and is slightly more user friendly and has better documentation, they charge a premium membership to connect to mihon on my phone while komga is free so, y'know. i went with the free one. the komga discord was super quick to respond to questions i had and made the setup process pretty straightforward. keep an eye out for the upcoming uuupah nerdfest where i explain it to everyone who cares and provide a nice skippable post for the people who dont

it's been a crazy almost two months since my last blogpost! i've been up to an immense amount of stuff - ran a weird comedy show with a friend, did a load of introspection, saw a bunch of music and cabaret. the art situation has ground to an absolute halt but! ive still been thinking things! i've also been listening to music! but my brain is mush so im not gonna give any thoughts on these albums. just trust me! theyre good!

pezzi della sera - marco castello pezzi della sera by marco castello
moondial - pat metheny moondial by pat metheny
saya - saya gray saya by saya grey

(side thought - it's kind of a fucking pain in the ass to find players that don't require authentication if an album isn't on bandcamp or soundcloud. youtube works for now but youtube embeds are really resource intensive and this blogpost is already inherently a bit of a youtube trashpile)

moving

i moved houses a bit over a month ago! i think i always forget how shit the experience of having all my shit disorganised and in boxes makes me feel, but ive done it three times in the last 12 months. layer that with realising that, despite being pretty vigilant about clutter and unnecessary possessions, i should get rid of 30% of my books and 50% of my clothes, and the headache of changing your address with your bank and work and drivers license.

this lack of stability is pretty new to me, although im starting to get a lot better at at feeling less attached to a singular spot, which is probably good. home is where the heart is, like they said in episode 4, season 1 of madeline (the animation about the french boarding school). i'm also living further from the cbd which makes seeing shows and gettting to work a bigger pain in the ass. that said, living with new people for the first time in like five years has definitely been great for my development as a human being. i stayed on a couple of couches after the breakup and am now living in my second semi-permanent share of the last 12 months, and its been a huge learning experience for how different people live. that maybe sounds a bit alien-living-amongst-the-humans but it's cool! most importantly, i think it makes my expectations for living with others way more realistic. the novelty of the whole thing is also a lot of fun.

youtube shakeup

i work from home, so i end up watching a lot of youtube while just noodling around. i'm mostly pretty clean when it comes to social media slop - my instagram is only following people i know in real life and i don't have tiktok or twitter - but youtube has a terrible habit of providing the same thing if you let it (i love you northernlion, but most of your stream captures are kind of brainless). ive combatted this by reinstating a time limit on my mobile youtube watching, but also by trying to get into videos that feel a bit more productive; interior design and fashion videos, cutesy little slice of life vlogs and stream of thought conversation-type videos. these are some of my favourites from the last couple months!

why i don't worry about getting married... design tips + quitting tech by caroline winkler
sunny spring days, oh my (a slice of life vlog) by ida's corner
healed my shame. became an orb by savannah brown
oops. i got older. but it's not so bad

these have also got me kind of thinking about myself a bit more. i have a bit of an eating disorder - i (somewhat unintentionally) taught myself to ignore my need to eat five or six years ago after finding out that hunger is incited based on hormones that wear off after a while. i was in the middle of uni at the time, unbelievably busy, and had got in my head that i needed to drop the four or five kilos i had picked up when moving from my early twenties to my late twenties (i absolutely did not). in any case, this habit has stuck around, and has been exacerbated by the general rise in the price of food. i am buying less food at the moment just because it's so expensive, and i'm quite large so i generally need more than i'm giving myself. anyway, watching self-helpy videos and people talking about their own struggles with eating has maybe been enough of a wakeup call that i need to figure out how to eat more so that i dont feel so fucking hungry all the time. i'm writing this on the bus and i'm starving! god! i should start bringing cashews in my bag

doodads gameboy camera

i got this in japan! its in very good condition, but is only in japanese, which makes the menus absolutely fucking unintelligible. it's a super fun thing to mess about with and has got me a couple of really sweet photos and like fifteen times as many terrible ones. it behaves best with single subjects that are well lit but not super reflective (ignore my examples below that are both super reflective). there's loads of interesting modifications you can do to them liek the 2bittoy shell which i am kind of keen on, but only if i could minimise the cost

digicam

i knew i wanted to get a digicam in japan and this was one of the first ones i found for less than a hundred bucks. it takes pretty crappy photos, which is sort of the point, but it most importantly fills a bit of a gap / annoyance i've had with my pixel 6 pro - despite all of google's riches, the low light performance on these phones is still a bit crap, and they lean on some pretty nasty post-processing to try and bring in contrast to the detriment of detail and an even dynamic range. the digicam gets around this by being intentionally crap (ive cranked the iso and pushed the white balance to a warmer shade) and having a flash that will fix shots in extreme dark while adding a bit more character. it's nice!

dsi

jokes on you! i actually got this years ago! it turns out you can buy a nintendo dsi in australia for like a hundred bucks with very little trouble - this one was basically new and has never given me any trouble. internet people talk a lot about how easy it is to mod a 3ds but the dsi is just as easy and, in my opinion, has a better game library. i started playing ghost trick while i was overseas and it was incredible, and the dinky little camera also snagged this photo for me

walkman

i lost my m300 on a train in japan! fucking whoops!! two hundred bucks down the drain right there. luckily, id picked this little character up at a hard off a couple of days prior for a measly 12000 yen, and i had a spare sd card preloaded with music because, come on. look at me (i don't actually remember why, but i still dont think it's that surprising). these walkmans are awesome, and primarily improve on the m300 by having better buttons (the m300 bizarrely uses rocker switches for play and back, and doesnt come with a forward button) but its battery life is noticeably worse, its just small enough that its a bit of a pain to use with my bigass hands and it only goes up to android 10, which leaves an annoying bug that means you can't use syncthing to keep your library in sync over wifi. all this said, it was cheap, and its cute

love letter to musicbee

i've talked about shifting to downloaded audio for a while now but i realised the other day that i hadn't used spotify in a week or so. my ex recently took themselves off our joint spotify account and i was going to have to change it anyway, so i decided this was the moment to can my subscription. the process was pretty painless due to my prior planning and all the hardware i've bought - i wouldnt recommend it to anyone on a complete whim. all this faff aside, i really want to talk about the massive amount of appreciation it's given me for one piece of software:

musicbee is simultaneously a barebones no-nonsense music player and an extremely powerful music organisation tool. the interface is excellent for me: i'm a chronic album listener so i can get a full feed of all my album art (with easy to recognise album art) and i can filter by artist using the list on the left. i can then drag full albums into the queue on the right and then not think about music for multiple hours. the whole interface is really clean and straightforward and isn't trying to be something slick and classy - it's just a simple and easy to understand tool! and the whole thing is only 9.2MB?

talking about tools, musicbee gives you a bunch of little functions to make organising locally downloaded music hilariously straightforward. i have albums sorted by date added, so new albums flow to the top. i can select each album and auto-tag it based on musicbrainz's database, downsample lossless files to mp3s, and use the bulk rename tool to move albums from the input directory in my music folder to one sorted by its artist and album. it's unbelievably painless. my one thought on this is that i would recommend using a different source for your genre - musicbrainz tends to be inconsistnet or have literal nonsense in its genre fields. i personally use rateyourmusic because they have a limited set of genres and the genres are voted on by users. this allows you to sort game and movie score by their actual style instead of just being "soundtrack" and helps avoid hyper-separation of different sub-genres

i will say that the convenience of spotify as a music archive is hard to pass up on. i do still have a free account for finding out the most popular albums from a particular artist and for looking up the names of songs i forgotten, but thats currently about it. if i need to check out a song on short notice youtube and bandcamp do the trick

little things nobara linux

i've had nobara linux running in a micro pc for a couple of months about it but haven't gotten to writing on it. nobara is a linux distribution based on fedora that tricks the computer its installed on into thinking it's a steamdeck (my favourite part of this is the first time startup where your tv will tell you that its power button is on the top and that you can return to the steam menu using the button on the left - something my tv absolutely cannot do). this is awesome for using steam streaming on your tv, and means that you can use something extremely low power, as long as it has a nice enough hdmi output. i use nobara instead of bazzite for a couple of reasons - it has better out of the box compatibility with my hardware and required functionally no configuration, and i already use fedora (which nobara is based on) so that isn't an extra hurdle to jump through

on a related note, if you're going to play games like this i would recommend you have a hardline connection between your desktop pc and your router. optimally you would also have a hardline connection between your router and the micro pc but in my experience it's not as necessary. my current configuration just has the host pc wired via ethernet and it makes latency almost unnoticeable. networking technology has come a really long way

this is how you lose the time war

i was at a dymocks with a friend a couple of months back and grabbed time war because it was on special. i had no idea what it was about, but i knew it had made waves when it came out and the name was intriguing. anyway, hot damn! first and foremost, it's hilarious that i accidentally grabbed a new lesbian sci-fi after finishing gideon the ninth. secondly, this book is absolutely lovely. the prose is super poetic and despite it being set amongst a time-and-space-spanning interdimensional cyber war, a huge chunk of it is secretive letters between two warriors on either side, and you get to understand the growth of their relationship through these alone. the ending is amazingly satisfying and the whole thing was an amazing way to start the year

superliminal

this was another cute surprise! i remember reading about this when it first came out and it being on my list of modern puzzle games to play after the talos principle, but that game took it out of me and i needed a break. thankfully it's super short, and while it initially seems like it's aping on the chell and glados dynamic yet again, it develops into an ending that is WAY better than almost any of the puzzle games ive played. the whole thing actually has some weight and was blissfully unique.

relationships

this post has been slightly delayed because i'm dating someone! this follows on from the february musings where i said i met someone who was then trouble with another person. we saw each other a couple more times and decided that we gelled and we wanted to see where it would go, regardless of how this other friend felt they'd been wronged. aforementioned friend hasn't really taken attempts to reach out gracefully (and was honestly quite hurtful to both of us) so we kind of hit the point of, well, if you're not gonna be happy with us regardless of whether we're apart or together, we might as well be together.

this all sounds kind of dire and maybe not an amazing start to a relationship, but basically everyone appears to be on our side in the whole thing, and we've just been focusing on each other which has been great. we have lots in common and tick a load of each other's boxes. they also have adhd, which i was initially a bit worried about given the history of being a bit of a caretaker with my ex, but the communication has been great and we've been able to talk frankly about our anxieties and histories. it's awesome! and not really something i've experienced before

✒️editors note: let the record note that i posted this five days before the surprise trailer drop for tron: ares. i like to think that i was the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back

i first watched this film in a car trip back from a scout camp with a boy i had a crush on, so, y'know, it's gonna be somewhat difficult to separate myself from the childhood nostalgia of the movie. all this said, i put this on on a complete whim while doing some writing and was honestly kind of shocked at how much i liked it fifteen years later. i'd seen some negative reviews beforehand and had steeled myself for a crushing reminder that your childhood is fleeting and leaves a rosey lens over all of your memories, but i think there's plenty worth talking about in tron: legacy

let's dive straight into the good stuff. any time a character uses a terminal in this film (which i think is only like two or three times) they're doing honest to god real posix commands that make sense in context. is this necessary to make a "good" movie? no. did i get super excited, pause the film, rewind and check everything they wrote? yes. you could make an argument that it's indicative of a level of care and excitement in the production and you'd probably be right, but i also just think it's nifty. kane2026 wrote this short spiel on the commands and what they do which was very nice of them, and it also mentions that there was a third film in production, which clearly never came to pass

i was struck by the acting more than i expected to be. jeff bridges in particular kills it with both hard hitting moments and silly the-dude-style quips that still entirely fit with his character - kevin flynn has given up, but obscures this hopelessness behind an air of yogi master spiritualism. this feels like it is quickly dissolved as sam begins to see through the charade, but is then built up again as kevin demonstrates his mastery over the world. his character is the dude but with actual expertise to back it up

talking about kevin, the scene where he is reunited with sam is potentially my favourite (and one of the few scenes where garrett hedlund actually acts with a bit of character instead of just being generic sexy action movie man). kevin is elated and is coming to terms with his grown up son but is also trying to figure out who called him into the system without alarming him, while sam is overjoyed but confused why his dad suddenly turns cold but doesnt want to show it, and quorra is trying to parse it all through the limited lens of everything she knows about human behaviour. it almost feels like a western-style shootout in a way, where everyone knows something is a little bit up, but no-one is willing to make the first move

related: i think the romance is a bit disney channel and feels unnecessary, but i love quorra's balanced cool confidence and genuine curiosity and how she flits around the room showing off things she likes and thinks are interesting and then totally shows her hand by asking what jules verne is like. i also love that shot of her sitting sideways on the couch like it's the most normal thing in the world; a more cynical viewer might call it directing for the male gaze but i like to think she's just a little weird like that

another amazing angle to this film is how it's a bit of a time capsule into what was considered cyber-cool in 2010. the black gloss and matte surfaces and the rubbery materials of everyone's suits. the glow strips on everything and the extremely video-gamey way that they change between white and orange depending on the moral alignment of the person or vehicle. the liquid feel of the lightcycle beams and the way the lightcycles themselves apparate by splitting the handlebars in half and holding them at the right angles - the absolute cool confidence every character has as they jump into the air and let their vehicle form underneath them. the satisfying way the discs latch and unlatch from the slot on a user's back. the immense scale of some of the vehicles and structures against the permanent night sky. the concept art for this film is an absolute treasure trove

also, i know the jeff bridges de-aging doesn't hold up, but i feel thats mostly because i know to look for it? it looks off if you focus on him when he's in motion, and it does have that slight smooth rubbery look to it, but it only really stinks in the scenes where he's taking up the whole frame, which only happen a couple of times in the third act. it didn't bother me when i watched it the first time and it's honestly pretty incredible when you consider how old the film is

anyway, if nothing else, this film is interesting! and a lot of fun! the score fucking kills, i love the visual and design aesthetic, and i honestly love how the story is kind of simple and straightforward. it definitely had delusions of grandeur / delusions of another sequel, but it doesn't overwhelm the purity of the experience, rather letting you enjoy a fun jaunt with some (somewhat predictable) twists and turns and a satisfying and sweet ending. i like it! fuck you!

(im using this post to tide over the fact that im still not done this months blogpost lol)

royal milk tea

this was one of the first things i grabbed and felt pretty indicative of the Standard Default milk coffee that you can get from a vending machine for 110 yen. it did introduce me to the concept of hot vending machine drinks, something that australia is sorely missing
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

suiyobi no neko

this was the first of many two dollar convenience store beers grabbed at 11pm. i grabbed it entirely based on the art (which will become a running theme) but it was a surprisingly nice little belgian wheat beer! cool!
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

melting cafe au lait

i grabbed this in the middle of a random suburb in the northeast corner of osaka (near the otani cemetary). the whole creme brulee vibe seems like it might be marketing but i think it was honestly pretty successful! again, hot out of the vending machine, again, really nice on a 3 degree day
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

sangaria special milkshake

one of my favourite things that i drank in japan, this was a custard flavoured drink with just the right texture to imply custard without actually being custard. i should have brought some back to australia with me
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

kyoto lemonade

entirely normal lemonade. tasted particularly good while trucking our way through some forests out in osaka
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

go good corn soup

i was extremely wary about this one, but having a hot corn soup while in a tiny little unmanned train station at the end of a beautiful hike was unbelievably cosy
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

nippon premium furano melon

hoooooly shit this beer was so delicious. i drank it on a balcony in osaka with a grape crush ball cigarette and then promptly tossed the box of cigarettes because if there was a way that i would get addicted it would be these. i love japans appreciation for fruits that no one seems to care about in australia, rockmelon in particular
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕

mellow yellow

as with the kyoto lemonde, this was just very normal. if i had to pit them each other i think the kyoto was very slightly better with a bit more tartness and less sugar
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

nama x yoasobi

i bought this one entirely for the design, which was cool. the beer itself was normal draft beer, no complaints
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

kirin koiwa cocoa

i grabbed one of these after a handful of trips down the ski slope - i'd already came off the skis a couple of times by now and my temperature had dropped considerably. as a drink, perfectly reasonable, nothing to write home about
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

kirin salty lychee

this is the last thing i had before i busted my shoulder. i think it was some kind of electrolyte drink but it tasted pretty good! the salts may also not have stuck out to me too much because i probably needed the hydration a that point
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

cheerio grape lifeguard

this was some kind of energy drink? yet another one that i bought for the design. it didnt taste amazing
🌕🌕🌕🌑🌑

cheap mojito

this thing was five bucks (which would be good in australia) but it was a deathly green and tasted like toothpaste. the mint was also not an amazingly good match for the questionable nepalese food we paired it with
🌕🌑🌑🌑🌑

coopers pale ale

i drank an australian beer in japan which was kind of fucking crazy. i had a headache and a blocked sinus so i unfortunately couldn't really taste it
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑

welcome back to australia, me! i have started the year by having the most hair raising set of interactions and events. i should probably stop drinking coffee.

dating

im in my late 20s, but because im not married with children and because my work is pretty low stress most of the time, im freely able to experience The Live Arts pretty regularly in my city. i love going to gigs and gallery openings, poetry nights and high octane house parties. as a result, some of my closest friends are also the kinds of people that haunt these spaces, and they fit an age range that spans the whole of the twenties (and some a little into their thirties). i'm closest with the ones closest to me age-wise because we're at a similar point in our lives, but i also have awesome friendships with some people who are much younger. i dont see how this could possibly bite me in the ass as a single person

i recently got hit up out of nowhere by someone on instagram. they had about ten mutual friends and seemed pretty nice - i asked them if we'd met at a live show and they said briefly and that they wanted to get to know me better. sweet! we were chatting a bit and i mentioned a mutual friend. they say "oh, i love <mutual friend>, we went to the same high school!". the mutual friend is 22. i held onto faint hope that they were maybe a couple of grades separated from each other, but after talking to the mutual friend, they were indeed in the same class. i had to cut that one off

i met someone else at a recent poetry night! they seemed really nice and were a full time programmer, so they can't be that young, i thought. they asked me for my instagram and their page had a lot of cool art on it as well. professional and creative? what a score! we hung out the other night and a tertiary friend of theirs asked both our ages to give context to a story. there was an eight year difference. sigh. at least with this person we both seemed to realise that yeah that was probably a bit much and we just had a mellow platonic night

jumping into dating in my late 20s has taught me that, to some degree, age is just a number, and that life experience and your life stage is generally more important, but despite my late bloomer status dating someone quite that young feels pretty icky. in any case, that's the last of the (recent) early 20-ers having a go that i've had to navigate. but what's this? theres one more paragraph in this section! i wonder what that means?

the day after valentines i headed to a massive party with a bunch of friends and people i know from around town. the inherent vibe of the night was pretty horny but i was happy to just take it easy, meet some new people and just get drunk with my friends. i plopped myself down next to someone i'd seen around once or twice and had a really good chat, and found out they were also genderqueer! and my age! and really attractive! we decided we should catch up again next week and went our separate ways into the party. by the time it hit 2.30 i'd sobered up pretty cleanly and was talking to a friend (friend x) who reminded me why this person was familiar - theyd had a couple of dates with another friend (friend y) and had only broken it off a couple of weeks ago. great. i cant find friend y at the party, so i give the new person a lift home so i can clear the air. i drop them off, and they say friend y was just a couple of dates and it wasnt really anything from their perspective. friend y doesnt agree, and the next day informs me that im barred from visiting their house or going to their gigs. stellar. can a bitch get a fucking break??

mental health

at the end of january i had my last session with my psychologist - i've struggled with rumination for years now, and i really wanted to get a grip on it. my japan trip for it was particularly bad, where i had two big spells, the first triggered by a conversation with my ex, and the second me simply overthinking where i even fit in the world as a single person. this should not be a surprise to anyone who's read my last couple of monthly blogs

my psych told me that while these suck, she thinks i have good coping mechanisms and a good support network and that i shouldnt be worried. she sent me away with not quite a clean bill of health, but more a statement that she wasn't the person who would be able to fix my obsessive issues. i'm thinking that, well, i don't think im fixed, but a medical professional thinks my mental state isnt a big enough issue and i should be able to handle it for now

then comes the events of the last month. discussing the most recent incident has been super interesting. one friend said that they somewhat forgive my interpersonal blunders because theyre pretty sure i am at least somewhat autistic - great, news to me! another friend said that they've identified that i tend to make social decisions based more on how i'm perceived than how it will affect other people which honestly makes me sound kind of sociopathic. jesus

im person who was extremely shut in for the first 24 or so years of their life and had to force myself to step out of my comfort zone and meet people after uni has finished. i've made leaps and bounds in my ability to be a normal person, and i've learned to quell my anxieties by looking at the material truths of my life - my friends do go out of their ways to hang out with me, to talk to me and invite me to things. theyre clearly not just humouring me and must actually like me, and whatever weird behaviour i think i have must be either the result of anxious overthinking, or is obviously not a dealbreaker. im starting to second guess that assessment now, and am kind of wishing people told me off more (now that feels autistic of me)

im ruminating like crazy but that shouldnt be a surprise. im kind of giving myself grace to be stressed for a bit because the potential ramifications of such a big friendship kerfuffle are huge. i feel like its okay to stress about it

mysteries

i was thinking a couple weeks ago about how crazy it must of been to look at the world even as recently as a couple hundred years ago. where do diseases come from? how did mountains and valleys form? what the hell are the bright lights in the sky? we live in a time where just about any question you could have about the world has an answer, as long as you're not looking too small or too big

how much of this did they not even understand that they didn't understand? how much stuff do we not even understand that we don't understand?

every now and then i'll have a bit of a moment where i find myself thinking it's almost unfair that i'll probably never know the answer to what happened before the birth of the universe as we know it, or how big the universe is, or whether it even has limits. if it has limits, what sits outside them? if it doesn't have limits, how does that even work? cosmic scale in general has also been an interesting thing to grapple with - its unlikely that i'll ever go to space, despite the speculative "non fiction" books i read as a kid, and even if i do, the insane distances between everything in the universe means that i definitely won't be visiting another planet. idk, is it reasonable to be disappointed by that?

growing up

i've complained a bunch about how i feel a little out of step with my peers, both the people in my age group and the people i tend to mix with on a daily basis. i did have a big realisation however that i am enjoying teetering on the edge of 30 for a couple of reasons:

1. i'm more self confident than i've ever been. this is partly due to being successful in putting myself out there, and partly coming to terms with a lot of realities about myself as an animated meat bag. talking and seeing more people has made me aware that a lot of things i was self conscious about are actually kind of normal, and ignoring a lot of social media helps with that

2. i haven't given up. i strive to do try new things, to work on projects, to actively better myself. i haven't moved into the suburbs and had 2.15 children and decided that watching the big bang theory is a reasonable pasttime. this is pretty picky and kinda mean to a lot of other people in my age group, and if that life works for you then good for you! but i'm glad that i'm on a path to continue exploring and it makes me hopeful about my future

3. i have a real job that earns real money. this one's pretty straightforward. the beers are on me guys

4. experience is underrated. i was on a call with some friends and someone gave me a prompt for something i thought would be interesting to draw. i pulled out my ipad, did my usual process, shunted the file to my computer and did some final edits in affinity. i more or less did this on autopilot and then was kinda shocked at myself and how much i can just do unconsciously. i can conceive of new recipes and tweak existing ones when theyre not quite working or dont taste quite right. i can do (minor) electrical work, plaster and paint a room, hang new fixtures. i'm acquiring the level of familiarity with the world that made me look up to my parents and their apparent bountiful wealth of knowledge when i was a primary schooler

30 is coming pretty soon. when i was 23 the concept terrified me. now that it's closer, it just feels like another arbitrary threshold

reasons to get up in the morning

there is always a nice alt person at bunnings warehouse who will complement me on my outfit and who i can complement in turn. this is a universal constant for all bunnings warehouses in australia

i've been in japan since boxing day 2024 and i'm about to head off tomorrow - i really wanted to do something equivalent to my melbourne trip report from earlier this year, but i wasn't anywhere near as particular when it came to taking photos and recording prices over the last three weeks, so this is more of a highlight list of the things that i thought were really cool. it also has some general musings as someone who hadn't been to japan before! my trip went from osaka to kyoto, then to madarao (for skiing) matsumoto and kofu for a couple of nights, nikko once we got a car, then tokyo and back to osaka. getting into the country towns is really really worthwhile for a bunch of reasons - you avoid touristy nonsense, the secondhand market is way better (except for clothes) and you can actually check out some of the fun interesting cultural locations. the cities are best for retail therapy and going to live music, so i'd recommend slapping it on the back of your trip so you're not lugging 40 kilos of books around for too long

also! a lot of these photos kind of stink, i was focusing more on taking photos of myself and my friends but as i like to keep this site more or less anonymous that cuts out quite a few photo options. sorry!

musings

i started doing duolingo four or five months out from the trip. lots of people warned me that it isn't super useful for learning the language compared to some alternatives and while i mostly agree, it does still give you a perfectly fine foundation for the general syntax of the language, reading hiragana and katakana, and for the absolute basic phrases

despite english being taught in schools and theoretically understood by most people under the age of 40, in practice most people know almost none. this is totally fine, since most retail interactions are lubricated by people wanting your money, so you can get away with pointing and holding fingers up if the object doesnt have a loanword name. people not knowing the language doesnt really get worse as you go further into the country - either that, or we just didnt go far enough

two things that you might find missing on the streets are bins and benches. the missing bins is apparently because of trashcan bombings a couple of decades back, which is a reason, although it seems like its been long enough that they could fix it. the missing benches, on the other hands, is a complete mystery. maybe they don't want pepole to sit in pedestrian thoroughfares, but it never looked it would be much of an issue to me? i suppose its not a problem for non-tourists as they all have somewhere to be, but if you've been trotting around on foot in kyoto for six hours sometimes you just want a break while you figure out where the hell your friends ended up

osaka aquarium

this is one of the first places that i went to in osaka. the building is absolutely massive and has a nice 3d model of its layout which was basically just designed to facilitate a bunch of multistorey tanks. the central one is particularly impressive as there are two (2) (!) whale sharks alongside a couple of hundred other fish. the whale sharks love getting right up next to the windows which is a pretty incredible sight. i do feel slightly sad about the dolphins, penguins, otters and octopi in enclosures here - i'm not the biggest fan of zoos for smarter creatures and their spaces are pretty small, but they did look pretty happy as far as zoo creatures go. the massive schools of sardines are probably fine though

osaka ferris wheels

osaka has two ferris wheels, one right outside the aquarium and one attached to the don quijote in dotonbori. the first one is massive and gives you a good view of the city, while the second is more of a pure novelty as the whole thing is pill shaped instead of circular and the capsules rotate to stay level.

tea square morihan kura cafe (matcha cafe)

my very australian experience with matcha is that horrible greenish-brown stuff that takes an annoying amount of time to make, or aforementioned greenish-brown powder mixed with latte foam. it's fine, but has never particularly jived with me. uji is a pretty iconic tea location in japan, housing the oldest tea shop in japan (and potentially the world) and making some really good tea as a result. we went to a cute little tea cafe - tea square morihan kura cafe - and had some locally made matcha, which i was pleasantly surprised to find actually has a lot of umami flavour to it. it was an experience i haven't really got from any other kind of tea, although you dont need to travel all the way to uji to get it - i had proper matcha at a couple of other times in my trip and it seems to be a pretty universal

2nd street

2nd street fills a neat gap between op shop and consignment store in japan. while they do sell some braindead designer shit, it's normally at the front while all the real goodies are at the back. i visited a couple of 2nd streets while in japan and consistently had a good time with their range and prices, with my highlight being this awesome elephant sweater

walden woods kyoto

this coffee shop had a vibe that was hilariously melbourne - the whole thing was all unfinished concrete at harsh angles and a white paintjob over everything else. this is topped off with baristas that desperately wish you hadn't walked in and will definitely let you know with your expressions. the effect is very complete. i bought a silly filter coffee which was pretty nice, and we sat in this art gallery style first floor room as we all sort of blinked ourselves awake

nintendo store

kyoto is home to nintendo (the whole ass company) as well as (what i believe is) their flagship nintendo store. this space is immediately overwhelming and loud, but i was super buzzed to see just how much space was dedicated to splatoon. truly, an enlightened culture. the animal crossing stuff was also really cool, and i grabbed a bunch of it for my friend back home (say a prayer for my suitcase capacity). there's a photo opportunity spot on the roof with a bunch of life sized mario blocks which is a cute touch

tsutaya books

there are a bunch of these all over japan, but the one in kyoto was far and away the best. tsutaya is a somewhat fancy bookstore that stocks a lot of larger pieces - art books, cookbooks, photo collections etc. i went absolutely wild here and picked up like five kilos of books in one hit

otani cemetary

one of the really cool things about kyoto is that if your accomodation is near the city center you can basically point yourself in any direction and find a lot of cool stuff. a friend and i did just that and after finding a bunch of very empty back-suburb shrines, we stumbled upon what is easily the biggest cemetary that i've ever seen. this joint is massive and wraps around the mountainside on the east side of kyoto, and is super quiet to boot. it leads through to kiyomizu-dera, a shrine that is comparatively super not quiet, so hopefully the tranquility of the cemetary will give you the mental reset you need to brave the crowds

nagoya new years

i rang in the new year in nagoya with a visit to osu kannon (kitanosan shinpuku-ji hoshoin), a buddhist shrine in the centre of town. as a solo endeavour i think it's nice enough - i support leaning in to elements of a culture that you're just not going to be able to experience elsewhere, but it was also just for the novelty. the bulk of the experience was waiting in the cold with a buttload of people - could have been improved with some friends, and if it was an english speaking country i might have made some, but my travel buddies all fell asleep at 11.30

madarao

uh oh!! i went skiing for the first time here - i wasnt initially very interested, but hire is so cheap i thought i'd just go in for a day. i should have listened to my gut because i hit a massive bit of powder and went head over heels, dislocating my shoulder. oops! for a brief look behind the curtain, i have dutch heritage and i climb very regularly, so i am almost two metres tall, and i have pretty big arm muscles. this is all cool and good, but if you do manage to pop your humerus out of its socket, your tiny japanese doctor is going to need to push his foot under your armpit in order to get enough leverage. this hurt like hell but also got me one of my favourite photos of the trip

⭐ sioribi 栞日 (matsumoto coffee shop)

now this is the platonic ideal of cute coffee shop. the upstairs is a bookstore for cute local publications with tons of natural light and some of the better coffee i had on the trip. i was getting pretty tired pretty quick with my arm injury so this was a delightful spot to recuperate midway through the day

hard off

these secondhand stores are EVERYWHERE in japan, especially further out in the country, and theyre an absolute treasure trove of weird electronics at crazy prices - i got a gameboy color with a busted screen for 40 bucks and a psp for 100, and my friends bought a million cameras and records. i even got a gameboy camera! again, the country ones are where the hidden gems are, so get out of the cities if you can

fuji

when my friends started talking about mount fuji i didnt really understand the immediate draw. i've seen mountains before and they're cool, but what's so special about this one? turns out that fuji is absolutely gigantic, almost to a cthuluan horror degree. it is markedly bigger than any mountain ive seen in australia and truly blankets your periphery, especially in the towns closest to it

oya quarry

this subterranean quarry in utsunomiya was a pretty impressive sight to behold. the mining operation is all underground, and also huge, which leaves you with these massive geometric stone corridors. it's definitely not a whole day affair, but its pretty cool to check out on the way to something else

e-earphones

this joint is so cool as someone with a passing interest in audio gear. the one in tokyo was six stories high (which, side note, if you've never been to japan before someone might refer to a store as X stories of Y and the image in your head is like four stacked walmarts, but that usually just means that the store has the footprint of a three bedroom apartment). in any case, each story was dedicated to a specific type of audio gear, meaning there was this awesome room with rows of headphones and people plugging their digital audio players into them to test them out - truly a level of nerdiness that you wouldnt see in australia. tech prices in japan are more or less at parity with tech prices in japan so i didnt buy anything, but honestly that was probably for the best

bolbol persian

this was an extremely nifty find near shinjuku. i found getting fresh vegetables was sometimes a bit hard in japan, so we went absolutely crazy for the salads on offer. the owner had a delightful little budgie and the food was up to the standard that i've found from other persian restaurants in australia

pokemon center

this had a pretty similar vibe to the nintendo store, but i was honestly a little disappointed that they didnt commit to the bit a little bit harder. there is a massive semicircular shelf with plushes on it that was definitely emulating a pokeball, but is it too much to ask for the cashier's counter to look like it would in a pokemon center in the games? and for the cashiers to all be dressed up like nurse joy? is that really too much to ask?

cibi tokyo

i was honestly a little disappointed by cibi in tokyo! i was pretty excited to try it after going to the australian counterpart in melbourne, and while the food was pretty good there wasnt much of a commitment to the cultural exchange bit. the knick-knacks were mostly japanese and the coffee was just fine (although i gather that darker filter coffee is more in vogue in japan, but isn't really my personal taste). they did sell coopers pale ales though, which was cool

⭐ spread shimokitazawa

i was sick for a big bit of my japan trip and missed a bunch of the gigs that i wanted to see, but i did manage to get into an interesting variety-type shot at spread in shimokitazawa. the location is a basement level concrete cube full of smoke and the most eclectic gamut of people id seen in japan thus far - i felt very at home. the three sets i saw were an indie rock band, a noise set that transitioned into a more mellow techno show, and an ambient / drone set by the lovely dreamcrease

keyboard store

i went in here quietly hoping they had a pain27 so i could flex some internet clout points, but no such luck. seeing a physical keyboard store was still super cool as it let you try the option out before you buy it, as well as letting you skip the postage and handling. i grabbed a split keyboard that i am yet to build, but i'll make a big fuss about it when i do

⭐ brooklyn coffee roaster

im writing this post from here!! its a super cute waterfront spot, their coffee tastes good, they serve cortados, they're open late and the server said they liked my outfit. a lovely experience!

⭐ taqueria la fonda

it feels extremely shameful to say so, but this osaka mexican restaurant this was one of the most memorable eating experiences i had in japan. japanese food is done perfectly well in australia because actual japanese people will move here and just do what they were doing over there, but there aren't quite so many mexican people in australia. to be fair, these guys also weren't mexican, but they'd done their research, as well as the very japanese thing of focusing on doing only one thing and doing it well. i accidentally spent 40 bucks here, which is really saying something in a country where most meals are 15 aud at the very most

conclusion

my main takeaway is that japan didn't feel anywhere near as foreign of a place as i expected. there's obviously loads of quirks - i'm glad to be back in a country that doesnt require the use of paper currency - but the people are nice, and the same flavours of dork exist in both australia and japan.

every now and then i'll be halfway through one of these and go "damn, this blog feels like a little bit of a shrine to consumerism". talking about media is kind of odd because in person, if i havent experienced what something is but my friends think i should check it out myself, i just want to know 1. is it good and 2. are there any content warnings for it (is it scary or gorey or does it cover some really heavy topics). i'll then check it out; if i like it i'll finish it, if i don't i will generally give up on it, unless its a movie. the really fun media analysis part then comes when you sit down for a cup of tea or wine or something and talk about it with your friend and other people who have seen it. the actual conversation part of it i think is where the value lies (as well as the piece of media itself, or course). talking about stuff in this kind of non-conversational manner is super different to that and honestly just feels self indulgent sometimes, which i suppose it is. it is frankly really fun to just put my thoughts down and construct a page that i think looks cool to read through and reflects my personality in a strange way. i like general journalling stuff but i do strive to keep myself pretty anonymous here, and besides that i think sharing art and projects are some of the only other big ways to get yourself out there. i could put up musings on world events or financial advice but i dont want to do that

i'm not really going anywhere with this i suppose! maybe im just trying to work through how i kind of feel like a dork blogging like this. in any case, i wanted to make a big post of some of the stuff i really liked this year! i feel like the spotify wrapped is kind of soulless and also not particularly helpful because i barely use spotify anymore, and then i was like huh, i guess i should talk about everything else as well

top 5 albums no dogs allowed sidney gish no dogs allowed by sidney gish on bandcamp

it's been a weird year for me! and this has very quickly become one of my go-to albums for when i'm feeling a bit shit. the sound of the album is warm and twee but the lyrics sometimes fall into something a bit more depressed and fatalistic - i don't subscribe to the move of listening to sad music when you're feeling sad, but listening to happy music with melancholic lyrics does make me feel a bit of camaraderie (or empathy, or something of that nature)

imaginal disk - magdalena bay imaginal disk by magdalena bay on bandcamp

i think my review of this album back in september sums up my main feelings about it. even after listening to it another ten or so times i still get that "oh man, i love this track" feeling with every song on the album and it (as well as that one kesha single) have been pretty instrumental to turning me around to pop music, something im super excited to check out further in 2025

a greater bliss - wordclock a greater bliss by wordclock

i've gone over this one a couple of times while writing this blogpost, and it's honestly a bit hard to put a finger on why a greater bliss is so good. their sound reminds me of four tet in terms of instrumentation but its general vibe is a little more dreamlike. in any case, it quickly became my go-to "ambient but not too droney" album of the year

the skyrim soundtrack - jeremy soule the elder scrolls v: skyrim: original game soundtrack by jeremy soule

i've previously been a bit embarassed by just how much i've listened to this album, but i've gotta be honest to myself - this album is excellent. i dont really care for the combat tracks, but the environmental ones, which make up the vast majority, are some of the best bits of compositional ambient that i've ever heard. the specific styles vary between tracks to better reflect the untamed wilds, the hustle and bustle of towns, or the spooky and desolate feelings of caves and the frigid north, and i think it was a great introduction for me into the different flavours of ambient music. i still have a particular soft spot for arctic ambient subgenre because of this album

reactor - femtanyl reactory by femtanyl

femtanyl currently makes eps that are more like compilations of the last ten of their tracks - it's my main complaint with their works. i would love something more cohesive because i really believe they're one of the best people making breakbeat / hardcore music in 2024, but i suppose all we can really do is cross our fingers and hope for the best. danny brown's track is absolutely incredible and i would love to see the two collaborate more, but the rest of the album is clearly both an extremely high energy fun experience and also a clear improvement on their previous work

games disco elysium

i finished it! finally! this game is rightfully considered an absolute classic by a lot of people, but its (initial) slow pacing and lack of explicit direction stopped me from getting through it the first time. that is, however, my only real complaint with the game. it's an extremely interesting group of characters interacting in an extremely interesting world. the setting slowly opens up as you play - it initially looks really familiar, but more layers appear the deeper you look - it's an echo of our industrial revolution, but with some changes made to suit the more physical differences to the world. i liked the strange and esoteric computing systems they use and the vehicles that seem to sit squarely between a ford model t and a car more at home in cyberpunk 2077. every element of the game has been very intentionally thought out to integrate with the overall experience, and its pretty happily one of the best things ive played in recent memory

mutazione

i stumbled onto mutazione by complete accident some time last year and did the exact same thing as i did with disco elysium: downloaded and played a pirated copy for a couple of hours, forgot it existed because it wasn't in my steam library, reinstalled windows and lost the save, remembered it, bought it on steam, and then powered through in the space of a week. i dont think disco elysium and mutazione would be a fair fight in terms of writing and story structure, but mutazione still succeeded at sucking me into the lives of a lovely little community of interesting little characters with interpersonal complexity and mysterious pasts.

you do unfortunately spend a lot of time walking back and forth in fairly linear paths from the kind of town hub, which isnt amazingly engaging, and each segment day tends to be a bit of a checklist of checking in on each character and seeing how theyre going, but that's also not necessarily the required experience, and i honestly thought that missing some of the context might make the whole thing a bit more absorbing

alba

what a shock! i'd seen this one recommended a couple of times before but thought the whole thing looked a little bit too twee and tumblr to be actually enjoyable (more about my general feelings on media that can be described as "twee" and "tumblr" as someone who is both very twee and very tumblr in the near future). to my surprise, the story part of the game didnt feel like it was beating you over the head with a highschooler's conservation essay, and the game part of the game took an extremely simple exploration template and spiced it up with a birdwatching mechanic to carry you when the curiosity for whats around the corner isn't quite enough. the story is short and simple but totally works with the positive vibe the game was going with, and the nod / shake head mechanic is perhaps one of my favourites of the year.

jusant

i originally jumped on this because the climbing mechanic looked interesting, and it mostly is, but what kept me around was the drip feed of mysterious and intriguing worldbuilding tidbits. for those unaware, jusant is about ascending a giant tower that used to be home to a weird climbing-based society. the environmental storytelling is lovely as you begin to piece together how they made their lives worked and their integration with the strange flora and fauna of the tower. the gameplay is also really cool! it strikes a good balance between interesting minute-by-minute feel without becoming a climbing simulation (although i am pretty interested in cairn, which leans way more in the simulation direction). the final result is a comfortable puzzle, broken up with gorgeous vistas and sifting through an extremely intersting world. i super enjoyed my time with it!

the big catch: tacklebox

god, what can i say about the big catch: tacklebox that i havent said already? i have a pretty sizeable summary of my thoughts on this site, but the short version is that this is one of the most engaging and slickest movement platformers i've ever played. i played it for 1-2 hours every day until i'd completed the game - which is, i remind you, a demo for a game that isn't out yet. i'm unbelievably excited for the full release of the big catch, hopefully some time in 2025 🤞

movies humanist vampire

i'll be honest, humanist vampire seeking consenting suicidal person was a film i initially watched for the name, but i was surprised at how much fun it actually was! the whole thing is a bit quiet and the interactions feel slow and considered, which makes a lot of sense for a film about two young and introverted people. the score by pilou is excellent! and the visuals are all dark and moody without being oppressive

i saw the tv glow

i saw a live screening of this and jesus christ it was the queerest event i've been to in a while. deep analysis on the themes and metaphor of the film aside, i saw the tv glow is visually gorgeous and the way that the story unfolds had me on the edge of my seat. the queer angle to it mostly resonated with me and resonated very heavily with my capital T friends, and i loved

the wild robot

a friend invited me to this fairly unprompted and i was initially a bit sceptical, but it seems that dreamworks is keeping the pressure up with the 3d animation revival in 2024! the wild robot is based on a childrens series of the same name about a home assistant robot from the future that accidentally washes up on a deserted island and learns to care for the wild animals that live there. i felt like the overall plot was pretty easy to guess, but the animation was full of so many lovely little style decisions and bits of incredible choreography and i couldnt stop bothering my friend about it for the next couple of days. if you see it for yourself, keep a good eye on the scene where the fox crawls down into their warren - the way the camera and character weave through the undergrowth and roots had me stunned

arrietty

arrietty is commonly considered one of the lesser ghibli films, but i really appreciated how its considered and simple story let the animation and illustration decisions shine. the tiny people trope is always a goldmine of creative opportunities, and ghibli (unsurprisingly) commits to it super well. my favoure touch was the way that the tiny teapot pours out a single blob of tea because of the surface tension at that scale. it would be an easy detail to overlook but they nailed it

the sweet east

the sweet east is this super interesting discussion of a bunch of different angles of american culture in our current year. the main character lillian strikes off from a school excursion to washington dc and stumbles her way into punks, white supremacists, film writers and an incel compound. the film displays a satirical but otherwise fairly (textually) uncritical version of all of these groups, focusing instead on the absurdity of each. i gather some people were critical of its not explicitly condemning the neo-nazis it depicts, as well as its kind of breakneck surreal feeling, but i absolutely adored it

books dune - frank herbert

yeah okay, i get it. frank herbert's space feudalism universe is absolutely incredible and despite it dwelling on the details quite a bit (tolkien style), and also being kind of weird, the story had me super locked in from the first third or so. my watch / read sequence was dune part 1 -> dune the book -> dune part 2 (the two films cover the entirety of the film's plot, for reference), and it was honestly a kind of awesome way to do it. a lot of the stranger elements were in the second half, so getting to read frank's original vision and then see how denis villeneuve made them a bit more palatable was super cool. i did read dune messiah and am about halfway through children of dune, but theyre much more obtuse political dramas and much less my speed, unfortunately

activation degradation - marina j lostetter

activation degradation is this super interesting exploration into non binary and agender identity through the lens of a lab-grown organic robot in the far flung sci-fi future. it does feel a little tumblr-ey every now and then in the ways that it draws attention to some characters queerness, but i found it pretty minimal and easy to look past. the whole thing felt like a pretty excellent deep dive from a unique perspective (i dont really consider myself agender) and it got me thinking about finding books to better get an idea of what it's like to be polyamorous or ftm transgender!

the stars now unclaimed - drew williams

i got a chain across the dawn (the second book in this series) last year from a pop up book shop and absolutey LOVED it, so i ordered in its prequel in 2024. drew makes these wonderfully self-indulgent space operas which are a great break from the heady, philosophical stuff that you can get lost in as a fan of sci-fi, but they also build wonderfully interesting worlds, depicting a universe of aliens coexisting and merging cultures. it's super great stuff and i'm excited to read the firmament of flame next year!

retrospective

i try to avoid going too crazy on personal stuff here, but god 2024 was a mixed bag. i broke up with my partner of 11 years, which has been well documented on this blog lol

the feeling of simultaneously loving someone for being super fun to be around and having a wealth of shared experience together, but also feeling like a you're a weird footnote in their life was truly eating me alive. on top of that, they had little interest in working towards making things better, despite plenty of effort on my part, which makes it feel even worse when it appears that theyre totally fine somehow and in another relationship already. it's insane to go from being in a couple your entire adult life to suddenly being single in your late 20s, and honestly my biggest shock of the year is finding out that i am someone that people find attractive and want to spend time with. the concept had become completely foreign to me.

okay all that whingy shit aside, 2024 was also an amazing year for meeting new people and experiencing new things. i've been the kind of person who jumps at any opportunity to do something unique or interesting for a while, but needing to get out of my own head more than ever kicked that shit into complete overdrive. i started doing gig posters for friends, i went to a movie night in a sewer, i dressed as a priest to a rave and i headed to japan for my first international trip in five years! i met so many lovely and incredible new people this year, made art that i was proud of, and tried my best to not sweat the small stuff.

i'm currently writing this from an inter-city train between nagano and iiyama with a suitcase full of art books and a stomach full of onigiri. i hope your 2025 is starting equally well!

three albums

i straight up listened to almost no new music this month. i did add a bunch of new albums to my monthly playlist but most of them were kind of disappointing after a listen or two. im giving myself a break! vacation! if you really desperately need something, heres a sonic 3d / jet set radio vibes track i found on soundcloud:

shangri-la by hydraa on soundcloud
halloween

i have a terrible habit of only getting my best halloween costume ideas on the 20th of october, but i also have a terrible habit of following through with whatever stupid project that's popped into my head. some friends had gone to a gig wearing wizard outfits and the concept of making one of the giant 100 gecs cloaks appeared before me, brought down from above and heralded by a choir of angels. "that shouldnt take that long", i thought, incorrectly.

the cloaks in question

my initial thought was to do laura's (purple) cloak because cutting stars to sew to the cloak would be markedly easier than the music notes. my brother (a professional costume designer) thankfully told me i was being stupid and to just use fabric paint for the designs. i switched over the dylan's (yellow) cloak because it would behave better with paint and also give me a good excuse to make the iconic star hat

the cloaks in question

people recommended this pretty simple (and very cheap) simplicity pattern for the cloak. it's apparently a bit of a universal pattern and has a lot of use as a jedi costume alongside the tunic that's also in the bag. i haven't actually sewn anything in years but i found it pretty easy to pick up again. i also don't own an iron at the moment so don't judge my creased ass fabric

the whole garment was close to six metres of fabric which initially surprised me, but made a lot of sense when i saw the whole thing put together. the construction itself took five to six hours, but i haven't sewn in a couple of years so a not insubstantial element of the time was relearning how the machine worked and general inefficiency in my technique

next up, the music notes. i made a couple of cardboard templates and outlined them with sharpie. i initially filled them with a tulip fabric paint pen but the amount of bleed was pretty intense, and those pens do not hold very much ink, so i swapped to tulip soft fabric paint instead. thus began a 10h+ journey of painting at the dining table late into the night, but i think it was worth it

last up was the hat! i got the biggest pieces of yellow paper that spotlight sells and glued them to a really big piece of cardboard. my compass doesnt go the full 25cm radius so i picked a centre point, marked about fifteen points per quarter revolution, then sketched in the gaps. i also put 14 even points on the inside with a cute lil X=(πD)/14, extended every second point out to the outside of the brim, then joined the dots

and here's the whole thing put together! the photo sucks immense ass and the cloak is incredibly creased but yknow, you get the idea. i'd probably put some kind of clasp and even consider adding a lining if i was to wear the costume again, but i got my two nights out of it and thats what's most important. the whole thing folds up super small which is an extra bonus. it'll probably get dragged out again at some future event

metaphor refantazio

atlus's new not-persona game came out last month! my satisfactory obsession has unfortunately impeded my play time, but at least on an aesthetic front they have absolutely knocked it out of the park again. The changes to the persona / smt formula also seem hopeful so far - each player turn is split into three "actions" which can be used by each character in the player's team. skipping a turn only uses half of an action, as does a successful super effective strike. personas are swapped out for "archetypes" which just work like a classic jrpg job system. theres also an overworld combat system similar to the insta-kill from persona 5 but with more depth for encountering stronger enemies (and available from the beginning of the game)

straftat

i absolutely despise how the player characters look in this game, but you're thankfully going so quick that it's rarely an issue. straftat is a cute little 1v1 arena game with titanfall style slidehopping and wallriding, as well as an extremely quick time to kill. the game is somewhat intentionally visually unappealing in a y2k way and theres a (small) atmospheric dnb soundtrack which blends amazingly. oh, and the game is free, with a $7 map pack as a one time purchase. i've had an extremely good time slotting straftat into the end of a night on voicechat with some friends and i'm glad the movement shooter still seems to be going strong

dandadan

yeah look, this was always going to be good. science saru love making cool out-there animation and dandadan is an out there story. almost every episode has left me absolutely buzzed, and i've also loved swampjawn's breakdowns on all the little extra details that i might have missed

negaposi angler

i describe this one to my friends as "ikiru but about fishing instead of civil service" which isn't entirely correct, but does cover the broad strokes. i expected to watch two or three episodes of this show and then give up, but it has been surprisingly engaging and i've been on top of each weekly release as its come out! the show's main character is debt ridden and recently diagnosed with brain cancer, but instead of moping around and continuing his sedentary life, a lucky encounter introduces him to a group of friendly fishers and the convenience store they all work at. the story so far has mostly been deep dives into each secondary characters' lives / personalities and there hasnt been loads in the way of core plot movement, but i'm completely bought in nevertheless

make it yourself ebook

https://makeityourself.org/

this is just kinda nifty! the guy who put it together, NODE, is a continuous source of interesting tech ideas, but this book extends past that to all kinds of diy projects including fashion, furniture and games. it's totally worth having a look over, if nothing more than to just explore the world of online makers

kill six billion demons

(link to the comic)

holy shiiiiit! tom bloom makes the extremely nifty ttrpg lancer and started writing a sci-fantasy comic back in 2013. tom's art style has heavy linework in a way that felt a little almost slightly unappealling to begin with, but it gives detail to their designs that is refreshing after your average manga or western webcomic. the world of k6bd is rich and complicated and absolutely pulls you in, along with some masterful action and breathtaking location spreads. there are six "books" in total, with the sixth close to completion, and i blasted through the last four in a 24 hour span. ive found a lot of webcomics hard to get into recently but this is not that

tinderkell

(link to the comic)

i also stumbled onto this cute little comic the other day! it's got a big prequel vibe which i enjoy, and while it doesnt have the same feeling as k6bd i think it also has potentialy to be a fun little romp!

hiby m300

new audio stuff! these little hiby mp3 players are 250 aud on aliexpress, aka cheap enough that i can get one out of curiosity as my little silly purchase for the month. i love my ipod but its been acting up a little these days, randomly crashing about once a day. it also is pretty particular about the files that you give it - the custom firmware technically supports all kinds of lossless filetypes, it's basically a small phone with no camera or sim tray, and sporting a headphone jack and sd card slot. the player running android means you have loads of control of how you use it - i'm using poweramp as my player and pocketcasts for podcasts, and i can sync music wirelessly with syncthing and scrobble automatically when i turn the networking back on. ive only had it for a couple of weeks so i don't want to make a hard recommendation, but it's treating me pretty well so far!

youtube speed round when we ran away together by atenahena on youtube

this cute little animation is absolutely gorgeous! i think they used blender / some other 3d tool to handle some of the more complicated shots, but a huge amount of hand effort has been put into the lovely painterly feel. i also appreciate that theres implications of a deeper story here, but they leave some of it to the viewers imagination

boys night in sidera institute on youtube

i feel like ive really cultivated a recent obsession with drawing hands, brobably from bangtanghan and this animation totally tickles that same itch. it's also super long for an indie project! and makes that absolute most of it. i found it legitimately intriguing how these boys were gonna get out of it, and i really enjoyed all the little illustration touches (like using different styles of screen tone to depict different levels of shadow). it's fun! watch it!

things i no longer believe in on youtube

this flavour of video becoming a fast favourite of mine; theres either more people making these less produced, more open and genuine thoughts on the internet, or theres been some kind of algorithmic shift causing youtube to recommend them more often. regardless, this video really helped me when i was having a crappy week to remind me what i'm worth and the things i should value in my life

trick or treat 2024 by alec west on youtube

the psx style continues to be really cool! i'd love to mess with it one day!

i made headphones with a built in casette deck on youtube

pudjam667 has a youtube channel now!!! they've been posting their eccentric audio experiments on reddit for a long time, but getting to watch them step through their process is incredible (and surprisingly well produced)

i optimized my game (in more ways than one) on youtube

this is less a reference to an individual video that i'm super into and more just general excitement for an upcoming game that looks extremely cool. 3d puzzle platformers are pretty neat in general and i love the gravity manipulation angle here - the developer's use of community feedback will hopefully create an experience that is legitimately challenging without being overwhelming

twitter artist speed round chee fong

link

chee fong's grasp on lighting is seriously understated, i love the diffused lighting coming from the screens and the way that the pipes start to pale out as they stretch up into the fog

link

i'm endeavouring to do more intentional fundamentals study in 2025, and this is one of the things that really inspired me to move down that direction. birds are super cool! and id love to be able to draw them well

link

i literally just said i want to focus on fundamentals two lines ago, but another big goal of mine is to be able to doodle a bunch of ocs without having to expend immense amounts of brain power and chew up an entire afternoon! so maybe i can call this kind of loose drawing a secondary goal for 2025

🧑‍🔬 NERD CORNER 🧑‍🔬

youtube's been doing some sneaky shit! i normally mess with embeds quite a bit for size, styling and rss functionality, but ive started making some changes to the src itself. check the raw untouched code for the pud makes headphones embed:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Ts-gPltdFi4?si=KS2xvi3nR6QB21cy" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

note the ?si=KS2xvi3nR6QB21cy on the end of the src. this is a source identifier, which lets youtube make links between users that clicked on this video and users that are trying to share it (me). this is a pretty annoying breach of privacy after requesting a nocookie link, but its thankfully easy to remove

my three (?) favourite albums of october 2024!

i swear to god im not doubling up on last months cop out, the first three are albums and the last two are singles that i would have felt guilty including as full fledged entries

the data

shinbangumi - ginger root shinbangumi by ginger root on bandcamp

i might not have much to say about this album because i purely gravitated to this album for the unbridled upbeat positivity. 2024 is really my year for diving into pop music. does that say something about my mental state? (yes)

mg ultra - machine girl mg ultra by machine girl on bandcamp

id had this one on my radar since its announcement, to the degree that i (foolishly) preordered the vinyl. the album is thankfully really good, and runs a great balance between the more electronic feeling of the neon white soundtrack and super freq, and the heavier, more industrial feel of u-void synthesiser and the ugly art. the album works pretty damn well as a complete experience, with my only complaint that motherfather feels a bit jarring and off theme. i was honestly a little surprised that it was picked as one of the prerelease singles but to each their own i suppose

bewitched - laufey bewitched by laufey on spotify

i was recommended this one by my good pal flynn (hello flynn, you're probably not reading this) who described her as "a really good legitimately talented jazz singer doing vocals for bossa nova that somehow became really popular with straight gen z women". her song "from the start" blew the fuck up on tiktok (and is on this album) and i am not at all cynical about it. this album is so unbelievably lovely and laufey's voice is absolutely enchanting. it kind of makes me think of lana del ray but what if her songs weren't about seeking out relationships with borderline abusive power dynamics. my favourite track is california and me, the sorrowful but very genuine lyrics really hit me in the gut

m3 n min3 - femtanyl feat. danny brown m3 n min3 by femtanyl and danny brown on bandcamp

how did i not see a femtanyl and danny brown collab happening? danny's voice is a perfect match for femtanyl's musical and lyrical pace and i will probably sit here begging for a full album with the two for the foreseeable future

six desperate ballads - the garden six desperate ballads by the garden on spotify

i might have talked about my interesting relationship with the garden before - i like quite a lot of their music, but they have a bad habit of sticking meme songs in their albums, making them hard to listen to all the way through. six desperate ballads fixes this by squishing the experience down to ten minutes and showcasing pure the garden vibes, doing the styles they do best. i actually had a friend ask me what song spoke to me the most and i had to think about it for a serious amount of time because i think the whole experience is so solid, it's almost like it's one really long really sick track that i couldnt imagine splitting up

im begging you make this eggplant parm the greatest eggplant parmigiana by not a cooking show on youtube

holy shit i mostly hate eggplant for its tendency to turn into unappealing mush but this is truly one of the best things ive made all year i swear you need to try it. my only modification would be to peel the skins completely, theres just no way to make them texturally edible, and also cut them into rounds instead of slices - the rounds are way more tender

me

although in my defence my ex tends to follow up any really nice catch ups with a bit of a gut punch of news from their end. i did sign up for a psychologist though! no reason

⚠ watch this space ⚠

i have this huge list of other stuff i want to talk about but i might move it to another blogpost just so this one doesnt come out too late

i had a lot of music i really liked this month but didnt stew on singular albums as much as i would have liked, so heres a cop out bumper crop of albums i really enjoyed, with maybe slightly thinner analysis than normal

my september 2024 plays

black one - sun o))) black one by sun o))) on bandcamp

i got recommended this band after sagely nodding along to an ambient noise gig - they're apparently pretty well known by those in the metal circles, maybe because of their darker tones? i really enjoy the general arctic / droney vibes, with all their rumbles, screeches, and weird demonic chanting, but also how analog most of it feels, with very clear bass and guitar being used to build the melody

cross the street - junior varsity cross the street by junior varsity on youtube

i really like the vibe of this song, and the themes of two people who like each other a lot but arent quite right for each other. it's very telling, however, that theres a lot of money behind this band, because they showed me a SHITLOAD of ads on instagram, and they also dont have a bandcamp, which is very out of the ordinary for a small indie production. whatever, i won't gatekeep

kitten burst ost - jam2g0 kitten burst original soundtrack by jam2go on bandcamp

i found this album after watching this video and going "whoa, that music is fucking awesome, i wonder where it's from?" turns out that not only is jam2go exquisitely skilled at putting together videos about video shaders that i barely understand, but they also making some extremely fun music. as one somewhat might expect from a game about flying a cat through a y2k dreamscape, the overall vibe is quite varied and upbeat, but some tracks are also stunningly heavy in a way that i adore. my favourite tracks are probably fall forever and zero day

smilewound - múm smilewound by múm on bandcamp

this one was just super interesting, a lot of the tracks have a general poppy vibe, but "eternity is the wait between breaths" reminded me of the wakfu soundtrack, of all things, and a bunch of the rest of album reminds me of the scary jokes? really enjoyable

imaginal disk - magdalena bay imaginal disk by magdalena bay on bandcamp

they say a good parent doesnt choose between their kids, but imaginal disk was my favourite album of the month. it's pretty uncommon that i listen to an album and have every track make me think "oh boy! i love this track!" but thats totally what imaginal disk does. i loved the lyrics, which is a rarity, as they kind of felt like the musings of someone in their mid-late 20s (which i can empathise with), kind of reassessing yourself and life in general with the short bit of adulthood that you've experienced so far. also, the album cover is kind of a jojo reference

other stuff

yeah baby! tell me about media! who else loves consuming products???

sorry we're closed sorry we're closed demo trailer

i know almost nothing about this game and honestly the resident evil style gameplay would potentially turn me off of the whole affair but the ps1 aesthetic and the general modelling / texturing decisions and character design have got me so intrigued. i'll try and grab the demo before next month

fotografia

stupid nerdy computer shit

i got two of these probably questionable mdd refurbished drives for 190 aud each and used them to kick my truenas nas into gear which has been pretty fun to mess with! i much prefer the fine grained control of running a raw headless linux server and i'm probably going to continue using a combo of the two computers, but at the very minimum having this much storage on hand is a great time. i'm probably going to grab some more white label drives next month

talking about my main server, i needed to move it to some new hardware and after having some drive incompatibility issues, i decided to start over, using docker this time. i've previously stuck my nose up at it after having issues with portainer but i just used docker-compose this time and yeah, i get it. it's nice. there is extra annoyance with setting up storage and network routing, but you do remove the annoyance of setting up service accounts, so its probably a net zero (except the majority of server programs use docker, so you save yourself some trouble in that aspect)

i also installed lakka on one of my spare dell optiplex micros and nobara steam-htpc on the other, which lets me run emulators and a clean steam streaming platform on my tv, respectively. both were a minor fiddle to set up but the value of having a dedicated (small) pc for each of these tasks is wonderful. i also grabbed an 8bitdo ultimate controller to plug into them and then leave docked next to the tv when i'm not using it and yeah, the hype is there for a reason. theyre really nice controllers

bro bought a horse 'bro bought a horse' animation on youtube

i should honestly try doing some animation in this style. i love the worthikids inspiration, but also how expressive they can be with such (frankly) janky lines - the perspective used on the horse during the backflip scene is amazingW

satisfactory

the 1.0 update came out this month. look at my turbofuel factory boy

me

don't have loads of personal updates this month. im maybe doing better? a little bit? i had another big breakdown but my housemate continues to be a beacon through my frayed emotional state. im good now but i'll probably spiral again next time i hang out with my ex - a bit of a running theme. im pretty certain on the fact that i'm not going to go seeking out dates until 2025, and that i think i also need therapy for my self-image issues 👍

all this bitching aside i think ive lined up a share house with some friends of friends which is a huge relief, and might even mean that i'll be able to afford a house in maybe the next five years. i also got up to loads of things irl, watched a shitload of movies with friends and even rekindled a buried love of getting shitfaced, going dancing at the local underground alt bar and giving myself a serious amyl headache

this is a big one! strap in!

my august 2024 plays!

no hands - joey valence & brae no hands by joey valence and brae on bandcamp

⚠️october update!⚠️ these guys took their music off of bandcamp which is kind of a dick move!

i honestly thought this was a joke album when i first heard it, but no hands is a love letter to / modern interpretation of 80s east coast hip-hop. the album both pays heartfelt homage to the original style (my favourite detail is that all of the swearing is bleeped) but also brings in distinctly modern elements where it makes sense - "where u from" includes a tv-girl style chipmunk call and response, millenial whoops sprinkled throughout, and an atmospheric dnb break at the end of bussit, to note just a few. i thought the lyric mentioning "double xp weekend" was cute

oncle jazz - men i trust oncle jazz by men i trust on bandcamp

my friend kye actually introduced the album to me a year or so ago, but i rediscovered it again recently and it has been a mainstay of my morning routine ever since. the whole vibe is extremely dreamlike and emmanuelle proulx's vocals can easily blend into the larger composition if you dont have the mental faculties to focus on them (this is a complement, if it was unclear), but are beautifully heartfelt if you are able to sit and really appreciate them. instrumentally, the whole thing is super simple; the drums and bass guitar are quite conventional, acting as a foundation for the airy synth, electric guitar and vocal performance. this allows for tracks to vary in intensity, like the more upbeat "say can you hear" and "slap pie", while still being cohesive with the rest of the album

melkweg - jameszoo, metropole orkest, jules buckley melkweg by jameszoo and metropole orkest on bandcamp

another month, and uuupah is recommending another album combining an experimental electronic artist with a heavy emphasis on keys and a full orchestra 🙄🙄🙄 this one starts incredible and keeps the quality high throughout. the contrast between lovely, sometimes jarring synth sections, moments of lilting brass or strings, and then absolutely slamming you with the full force of every instrument in the room all at once gives me chills every time. the absolute genre bending between jazzy, electronic, and classical made this one a must-listen that i enjoyed immensely

links baby!!!

the extra stuff this month is going to be extremely unfocused and higgeldy piggeldy because i did a massive cleanup of my 200+ (!) phone tabs and took notes of the interesting ones. they are being archived here for my future reference and your viewing pleasure:

games mutazione

this flavour of game where you walk around a town and get to know everyone's weird business and have interesting interpersonal moments are totally my jam (night in the woods is probably my favourite game ever) and this provides that same energy with its own super unique paper cut-out visual style. i think the opening couple of hours maybe don't grab the average player as well as they could, and the whole thing is very much a visual novel without much need for problem solving, but the overall experience is really lovely and intriguing. i will 100% overlook all kinds of sins if you let me explore a visually interesting world and dig into some weird kinda mundane soap opera level stories. mutazione absolutely scratched my night in the woods itch and i'm now on the hunt for another game to fill that gap

disco elysium

disco elysium also (nominally) fits in the walk-around-a-town genre of game, but frames it as a detective mystery instead. you play as a cop in a familiar but alternate reality who has drunk themselves into almost total amnesia and must figure out what's going on in the world before they can figure out who committed the crime at hand. disco has an absolutely gorgeous smeary oil painting look to the entire game and each character has their own unique portrait that is full of charm (and a little bit unsettling, sometimes). the core system that sets this game apart is your skills being separated into a sort of greek chorus that, depending on your skill in each one, will check in on the situation at hand depending on your proficiency. this creates a perfect thematic move where you feel like you are going slightly crazy and talking to yourself. the game is also structured in a way where taking the weird or "wrong" move is somewhat encouraged due to your character being a bit of a fuck-up, which gives you more freedom to roleplay than ive seen in a lot of other game experiences - it feels like a little thing, but i think it helps disco to stand out as one of the best of its style in recent years

disco elysium gb

www.csbrannan.itch.io/disco-elysium-game-boy-edition
outwardly this one totally looks like a bit of a goof, but theyve done an honestly impressive job at simplifying disco elysium's systems without losing the original vibe. the visuals are also a hidden gem here: i love the tiny little character portraits and how recognisable they are despite their size

food the best corn tortilla recipe ive found yet

link
this is the only corn tortilla i've ever had any real success with. the advice this youtuber gives is all about on detecting issues and adjusting the recipe yourself which i think is really key with cooking. he unfortunately doesnt allow for video embedding, but trust me, this one is good. even if you don't get the perfect puff, getting close will still yield an extremely good tortilla

chicken karahi chicken karahi recipe by imran ali

this recipe did result in me spending an hour going to three (3) separate indian grocers looking for fenugreek leaves / methi, but the end result was incredible. if you stumble onto a bunch of fresh tomatoes the flavour of this dish is out of this world and while the recipe is somehow unbelieveably simple. the 35 minute number promised in the title isn't hyperbole

pesto calabrese pesto calabrese recipe by not another cooking show

www.notanothercookingshow.tv/post/spicy-red-pepper-pasta
finally, this recipe is a little bit of effort, but is totally worthwhile. keep an eye out for cavatappi specifically because it truly heightens the whole experience

webdev zed editor

i'm writing this post in the zed code editor for linux! i grabbed it on a whim a week or so ago and have (mostly) been pleasantly surprised by the experience. it's pretty pared down compared to vscode but it starts way faster and has a bit less impact on my system. i'm into the fact that it's truly open source and seems to have some mostly pretty logical defaults built in. my only complaint is the inclusion of a couple of unnecessary collaboration and ai tools, but the following settings in your settings.json file (which you can open by pressing ctrl-p and typing in "settings") will hide them:

"features": {
  "copilot": false,
  "inline_completion_provider": "none"
},
"collaboration_panel": {
  "button": false
},
"chat_panel": {
  "button": false
},
"assistant": {
  "enabled": false,
  "version": "2",
  "button": false
},
"assistant_v2": {
  "enabled": false
}

11ty sitemap generator

www.belter.io/eleventy-sitemap/
this is a lil one but i like this tutorial for making an auto generated sitemap.xml file for search engines to grab. i'm not necessarily chasing seo on this site but it's nice for it to be indexed so people can search for my posts if they want to

ladybird browser

ladybird.org/
this is a project that i'm super excited about, and one that is also not desperately interesting to the average human being. i'm quite passionate about google's monopoly over the browser space and the negative effects it has on the internet at large. even as a hardcore firefox user i'm very aware of googles own investment in mozilla and the deal it has to ship google as the default search engine on its competitor's browser. ladybird is the first true competitor in a long while, running off of completely new code to provide a browsing experience that is decoupled from a lot of the issues with the modern browser space. the main issue is that it is still very in development, and while you can build it yourself on your own system (and the team should be given props for how insanely easy this actually is), it is missing creature comforts like loading images and css3. in any case, the first alpha release is schedules for "summer 2026" on linux and macos, so watch me completely reactivate in 24 months and drop a 5000 word tome about it

art digital painting

link
a lot of big developments in my art journey have centred around finding a topic i want to dig into and sifting through thirty or so dogshit youtube tutorials until i find the diamond in the rough that works for me specifically, and this video was that for monochrome, realistic digital painting. i found the technique simple and the process for the first image easy to follow, but also the whole concept could be easily transferred to different references

ayeeops brushes

ayeoops.gumroad.com
i have gone absolutely fucking crazy on these brushes the last couple of weeks like with this piece - the texture on the "crunkly" brush makes it feel really natural to use and allows for a bit of a carefree drawing experience which has kicked my ass into gear with actually knuckling down and finishing things

golemm how untouchable was made by golemm

hazardous bubble basics by golemm was my top album of 2024, so i was super pleased to find out that he's done some rundowns of how his tracks have come together. i uh, don't actually know how a lot of this stuff works, but it is exquisitely interesting nevertheless

blogs dustbunnybedroom

dustbunnybedroom.neocities.org/blog
i stumbled onto this site in the neocities activity page and i adore how genuine and personal it feels. it's inspired me a little and also given me a bit of a boost because i feel like we write in a similar kind of manner. plus, they have all these cute little uplifting affirmations at the end of their posts and i honestly need that shit right now <3

japanese food isnt actually japanese food

link
a friend of mine wrote this piece on the perceptance of traditional japanese cuisine a month or two back and i think it's super intriguing! give it a read!

anime narenare

i saw a couple of clips from this show and grabbed it immediately because it looks absolutely gorgeous - i particularly love the use of contrasting linework to make the world feel bright and colourful, and while theyve used 3d animation for the more complex dance scenes, it looks pretty good! the real problem with this show is that the story is extremely generic and uninteresting, to the point that i had to put it down after just three episodes

i parry everything

conversely, i heard a brief explanation of this show and thought "well, it cant hurt to watch an episode or two" and then proceeded to binge the remaining episodes and get completely up to date. i parry everything is so intriguing because it's a native isekai (an exquisitely boring setting), the animation is just okay the music is just okay and the characters are about as generic as it gets. what really makes it interesting is that the main character has willpowered himself into being unbelievably skilled (one punch man style) but is such a sheltered dipshit that he doesn't realise that all of his feats of strength are at otherworldly levels. i don't even like stories that pivot around misunderstanding between characters, and yet this one somehow works. i'm going to sheepishly give this one a recommendation, with condition that it's currently only up to episode 9 and could totally go downhill before the season ends

personal update

holy fuck! im not doing well! my brother has been having problems with my mum for the last couple of years and officially dropped an ultimatum which has totally turned things nuclear. i managed to masterfully fumble two separate people who were totally into me, and my ex informed me theyre starting to date casually again - its pretty rough to have someone who verbally professes their affection to you but finds it hard to back it up with actions then show interest in other people. all in the span of a week! i'm feeling pretty fucking rough at the moment, which is kind of funny given how well the rest of august went. i'm sort of interested in recording my state of mind each day so i could plot it on a graph. i suspect it would look a bit like a sine wave

let's start with a nice easy question - what are you meant to do with your life? theres a few answers that would get good scores on family feud: finish school, get a degree, find a good job, pair off with a romantic partner, buy a house and have 2.1 children. what are my goals? ive gone through uni and found a job that pays pretty well and doesnt put a huge stress on my time or energy. so what now?

something that freaked me out after breaking up with my really long term partner was the realisation that we didnt have any shared goals - largely because i don't have any. im not a sedentary person (i could honestly probably benefit from doing less) but i feel like all of my needs are met and the things that i want to improve on or strive towards are all steady, long term projects. i could try to travel more but that's a little outside of my financial range at the moment, and i might be able to afford a house one day if i keep saving for a couple of years.

primarily, my "goals" were more driven by my relationship; we bought a house together, decided we didn't want children, and their work meant they would likely need to move to another country to find a good position. after we split i was still entirely able to continue meeting people, seeing live music and art, involving myself in local groups and working on my own silly little projects, but it feels like something is missing.

i recently learned about the concept of "queer temporality": the idea that queer people, through leading lives that fundamentally disagree with the classic white-picket-fence lifestyle, have found themselves feeling like the classic markers of adulthood (the aforementioned education, property, marriage etc) no longer feel like they fit. this is compounded by the fact that a lot of millenials and basically all gen z people feel like marriage, property and children are out of their grasp on a purely financial level.

this all came to a head during my recent trip to melbourne where i, walking to my hotel, sleep deprived and full of ramen thought "what do i do after this?". and instead of the old answer of "go back to your partner and lead the life you share" my mind returned, disco elysium style, "live the rest of your life, i suppose". i've suddenly been thrust back into complete and unconditional control of my future, and its honestly kind of scary. im happy with my life, i have everything that i want, but is it okay to just keep rolling with the punches for the next eighty years? do i even actually need to want more, or is that a capitalist psy-op? do i want another committed relationship, or do i want to learn to love myself completely without the need for outside validation? do i want to pursue a non-conventional relationship schema? do i want to move to tibet and become a monk?

✒️editors note: holy fuck the run on sentences in this one are crazy good luck

i've got a lot of joy out of keeping on top of current game trailers the last couple of years. as someone with three or four layers of ad blocking on every device i don't get new games advertised to me, and even when i did they would be whichever big update fortnite is adding this month. taking matters into my own hands has made me aware of loads of really nifty little indie experiences that i might not have seen otherwise! i first became aware of the big catch in the middle of a big batch of other psx/ps2 style movement games, and if it wasnt for the demo dropping a couple of weeks back i might not have given it another thought

the demo did drop though and hoooooly shit. first and foremost, just to get it out of the way, i need to give huge props to valve for starting nextfest and catapulting the concept of game demos back into the mainstream. they should never have gone away in the first place, but i'm happy to enjoy them now that they're back. theres a level of transparency with a demo that you just don't get out of a trailer and i love how extremely pro-consumer it is

further to this, the demo is incredible. it's huge, it lets you play with every little toy that the game appears to be providing, and it does an amazing job of tickling the exploration-for-exploration's sake itch that i constantly have. the demo is so good that people are already doing insane speedruns of it

movement

talking speedruns, i think they do an amazing job of showing off how watertight the movement system is in the big catch. runs are almost entirely high level play and creative movement around the map, leveraging only three glitches over an entire run (two ceiling clips and one superjump, and the ceiling clips are omitted in the smaller 10 fish category). in my personal experience, being someone who is not a speedrunner, i did find it initially a bit tricky. i started playing at the 'bones rails' area which has a couple of super weird jumps, but the fact that i stuck with it despite the difficulty is testament to how quickly the game grabs you. my most recent equivalent is penny's big breakaway, another movement platformer which came out a couple of months ago. comparatively, this game was driven by high score and combo chasing, which i found very demotivating. i also think penny's big breakaway is a bit more difficult in general: the perspective is tight and movements feel a little bit slippery and hard to control. i assume that i'd be able to master it like the big catch if i gave it enough time, but the aforementioned motivation meant that i didn't follow through there like i did here

in general, the broad strokes of movement seem to have been tuned to be satisfying wherever possible. climbing poles, ledges and walls is quick, and the latter also has a little jump, letting you blast through what would otherwise be a tedious action. the jump also snaps to the wall, meaning you won't fly off as long as you're holding a direction with the right stick. crazy! each area is separated by a big slice of desert, which i think is key for the world the game is building. these big gulfs would be daunting to travel without the shredders, sandworms that act similarly to the sand seals in breath of the wild. the boost minigame makes your travel feel much more active, while keeping the grandeur of the wide open spaces

the other elements (one might say, the key elements) of movement all come together in a lovely harmony. wallrunning and walljumping are an extremely key part of movement and are used almost everywhere. more secondary mechanics like swinging from your fishing rod, swinging from poles, bouncing on bouncepads and ropes, and grinding sonic-the-hedgehog-style on rails make an appearance in about half of the areas each. an area will focus on one or two special kinds of movement, linked together with precision jumps and wall runs. i began to really feel the flow of the movement system after i got over the aforementioned difficult curve which was IMMENSELY satisfying. the game also does a really good job of preserving momentum, so you can link swings into wallruns for extra distance, or ground pound an angled piece of geometry from a big height to transfer all of that vertical velocity into horizontal and go absolutely flying. by the last couple of challenges you've got such an immense grip on the basic techniques that you'll pick up the unique elements of the area instantly and begin to see the path appear your eyes like that bit at the end of the matrix

to summarise, the movement is rock solid, which is obviously important for a game like this, and strikes a happy medium of being challenging enough to be satisfying when you get it, but having some kind of secret spice that makes you want to power through after fucking up the same move ten times in a row

gameplay

what a segue! one of the key parts of gameplay that i really like is how it handles failure. the game is really good at legitimately punishing you for messing up, but never in a way that makes you want to storm away from your computer. i think the key to this is the generous and well-placed "checkpoints" - fishing lines placed in the world that let you shortcut your way back up to certain spots in an area. like the shredders, this removes the artifice of artificial checkpoints and also reduces time waste. if you die completely you normally only have 30 seconds or so of futzing about to get back to where you were: a good enough motivator to not fuck it up, but not too frustrating. it blatantly cheats off of dark souls' homework, but adapts it perfectly to the flavour of game that it's making

observation also plays a big part into the gameplay. sometimes the path will be clear to you, but just as often it'll just be a hodgepodge of random ruin elements. in these cases half the job is figuring out the plan of attack, experimenting and reassessing. it's a wonderful and creative gameplay loop that adds to the satisfaction when you finally figure it out

aesthetics

and while you're observing your surroundings, you might notice some honestly genius psx-style visuals. the retro aesthetic is a fine line to walk, and i think the recent resurgence of the psx style is having the exact same growing pains that pixel art did in the 2010s. however, like new pixel art visuals that build on the simple foundation with cool new modern effects, the big catch: tacklebox integrates reflection maps for metallic objects and clever shaders that build on the style without looking out of place. the aforementioned foundation is also rock solid - there is just the right amount of detail to the textures and models to pull the effect off, although i wish there was some kind of psx texture blurring included to really amp up the look; maybe i'm asking too much

we only get two characters in this demo, but both have extremely unique silhouettes and designs. bail is lanky and towers above the player character, with eyes and a posture that imply a haughty indifference. tackle leans back slightly while standing and pulls the classic japanese delinquent squat while crouching, which gives him a cocky confidence that i also adore. bail is dressed in a somewhat tribal-looking fisherman's outfit with various body wraps and jewelery, while tackle wears a bucket hat and wide-legged shorts. both characters can be visually read instantly, which is obviously super key to effective design. animation-wise, tackle has a long stride and throws his body with each movement, helping to add to the feeling of momentum from the gameplay. topping this all off is the incredible fish-catch cutscene, where the camera drops to a worm's-eye view below tackle as the kick the fish into the air, then up to the stunned and spinning fish, and then swoops into the smug grin as the fish is stowed in their hat. it's the absolute icing on the cake of a difficult fish hunt and it never got old

some final aesthetic musings that didnt seem to fit into the flow of my earlier writing:

• the game has a slew of filter options that start with the particular janky psx polygon filtering, giving everything a slightly unsettling (but very accurate) wobbly warping effect to polygons, an emulator style de-pixelisation, and then two levels of crt scanlines and noise. even the most intense effects are still extremely playable due to smart texture and model design
• the vistas of the game are all quite lovely. there's one at the end of a major area that will seem like a reward in and of itself, but i won't spoil it
• bail speaks with a banjo-kazooie style chopped and spliced jibber-jabber that i absolutely adore. i hope they don't change it

conclusion

the big catch: tacklebox has no business being as fucking good as it is. i've played some other demos in the wake of the steam nextfest but none have grabbed me to the point that i played a demo for ten hours in order to get a 100% achievement - frankly, almost no games have grabbed me enough to make me even think of trying to get a 100%. i am immensely excited for the final release, and while i won't be getting it on preorder (on principal) i am very keen to get it in its first week, and probably spend a couple of sleepless nights on it

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🧑‍🔬 NERD CORNER 🧑‍🔬

i managed to get all the cool animated webps in this blogpost (semi-bypassing neocities' video ban) using a tutorial by matt j. the exact code i used was as follows:

ffmpeg -ss 12 -t 7.4 -i ./tbct.mp4 -vf "fps=20,scale=720:-1:flags=lanczos" -vcodec libwebp -lossless 0 -compression_level 6 -q:v 50 -loop 0 -preset picture -an -vsync 0 intro.webp

where -ss is the point that the section of video i want starts, -t is the number of seconds, and -i is the input file (in this case, a youtube rip of the game trailer). you can also tweak fps and image scale super easily here

i try to keep an arms length between a lot of my personal life and this blog, partly for privacy, and partly because i've found writing about a lot of my personal life sounds a bit boring. i hope you'll allow me to indulge myself a little. i'm currently feeling quite content, under two quilts and three blankets with my shitty busted up thinkpad sitting on my lap, typing into an obsidian window with a twee and whimsical theme (that is maybe a little to bright for 11 at night) (further observation, you can switch obsidian to dark mode without taking your hands off the keyboard using the ctrl + p shortcut. neat! i'll probably talk about how i use light mode in a lot of my software at some point in the future). my 2024 has been insane, having split with my (very) long term partner and having my friends swoop in to catch me. i'm currently paying fuck-all for a room in the house of my good friend that i've known since the start of university, and i've spruced my space up with plants and books, and absolutely plastered the walls with art. my wardrobe is now a free standing ikea nikkeby which is limiting, but also freeing. i'm listening to the pokemon platinum soundtrack. my fingers hurt from climbing, but i hung out with two friends who have just started dating (and have an almost tooth-achingly sweet story about the moment they decided to take the plunge) and another friend who has been rebuffed by someone they wanted to be more serious with. i had an accountability call with my discord art group where six people located all around the globe talked about what they're passionate about and how they want to aim to keep improving. despite it all, i've been reminded of who i am, and that i can be satisfied with just being myself. i've had a huge fear of loneliness after leaving high school, but my last couple of years have proven to me that i am entirely capable of connecting with people across a wide gamut of lifestyles and outlooks, even if cold call socialising still scares the shit out of me. my new freedom is both terrifying and exhilarating

pardon me if that was a bit rambly, but i was struck with inspiration while working on an upcoming blogpost and wanted to word vomit my feelings out. i've had a post about growing up socially and my journey of self-discovery and becoming comfortable around new people in the works for ages, and while i'm not sure i'll eventually put it out, the core conceit of "find people who like the same things you do and deal with the risk of conversation being hard until you figure out exactly where you fit" is still worth putting out there. like that one guy on tiktok said, "if you cant beat the fear, just do it scared". it'll suck for a while! it sucked for a couple of years for me. but i'm glad i put in the effort, because i'm not sure i've ever felt more loved or sure of myself. life is beautiful, basically

okay that was definitely rambly. lets get back to your normal programming, my top three albums of the month. this was a weird one! i listened to a bunch of new stuff but not very much of it stuck. despite my whinging i ended up listening to brat by charli xcx again, and dusqk dropped the excellent angel/mem, although i don't think i can say about that album that i haven't already said about gaia/rae. i also grabbed a bunch of music from tohomoko and napcast who are in the same neighbourhood as nobonoko, a big favourite of mine, but i haven't given them the careful listen that i reckon they really deserve

i'm also gonna start posting my last.fm monthly feed instead of my spotify playlist because i'm getting way more use out of my ipod and local music via musicbee recently. check the link!

no dogs allowed - sidney gish no dogs allowed by sidney gish on bandcamp

i first listened to this album pretty soon after it came out, way back in my heavy folk indie era. the whole thing is super twee and upbeat, but there is a surprising amount of depth in the lyrics, almost like the tone is a smokescreen to sneak heartfelt musings from sidney under our noses. i normally actively dislike lyrics, but the fact that A. i was actually listening and thinking about them and B. they still somehow don't upset the overall feel of the album is a testament to how genuine they feel and how insanely whimsical the melodies, harmonies and percussions are

fever - kylie minogue fever by kylie minogue on spotify

i know, i know, i'm hardly plumbing the depths of exciting new interesting music, but i've had some kylie on my local media library for a long while, and i decided to give it a listen while doing a bit of a clean up a couple of nights ago. wow. obviously, love at first sight and can't get you out of my head are massive, worldwide hits, but the rest of the album is serving the exact same level of confidence as the real big hitters. i'm not saying that i'm so fucked up about my breakup that i think i'm unlovable, but there's something about this music that makes me go like "y'know what? yeah, there's someone out there for me" and if a silly little dance pop album can do that then it's gotta have some value

joyride - kesha joyride by kesha on spotify

yeah, the top ranked album this month is a single. i'm not sure i've ever seriously listened to kesha, but the amount of skill on display here truly blew me away. the accordion, the polyrhythmic clapping, the layering of multiple different vocalists for emphasis. kesha's voice sounds almost synthesised at moments, which could maybe be a callback to her heavily autotuned past, but this time it's all real. in some ways it's shameless, using every catchy club music trick in the book, but it works on my stupid little peanut brain

linux emoji picker

i really love how straightforward the windows emoji picker is. the win key + . brings up a menu at your cursor, you type your emoji, press enter, and you're right back in the action. it looks good, it works fast, and it's reliable

i tried five (5) linux equivalents (smile, emote, flemozi, gnome-characters, ef*ck) and found them slow, unreliable or both. the obvious answer? weird shell script that opens a new terminal window, opens fzf, searches a text file of all the emoji i could want, then pastes where the cursor was (with a delay if necessary)

if i was the kind of person that relied on the grid menu to select an emoji with my mouse this wouldn't be a great solution, but for my workflow it works perfectly. i find myself using it completely instinctually, which is a great sign, i think. anyway, the source code is here (check openemojipicker first)

alba: a wildlife tale

i checked alba out this month and was so unbelievably pleasantly surprised. from the outside this game looks a bit barren of meaningful experiences, classic cosy game fare, but the actual experience is extremely delightful. you wander around a small island collecting photos of animals and restoring the wetland and wilds back to their original state. your character moves slow, but i remember realising that it wasn't bothering me in the slightest because it meshes perfectly with a gameplay loop focused on hunting for birds and terrestrial critters. the story is simple but feels heartfelt in a saturday morning cartoons kinda way, and gives you an overarching goal to return to after semi-aimlessly wandering through a forest of across a beach for ten minutes. the design of the characters is super smart, with the plastered looking faces both looking kinda funny and extremely endearing, and the game manages to use them, as well some very clever game design decisions, to serve a couple of legitimately effective touching moments. my only complaint is that the price is probably a little steep to justify a 3-4 hour game, but i would easily recommend grabbing it the next time it comes on sale. this is up there with a short hike in the "games that might have cured my depression" box

emma in the moment emma in the moment - a deep dive into chunky boy lore

i've been watching a crapload of this this month. turns out that craft drama is huge and extremely entertaining, no doubt in part due to emma's amazing screen presence. this has actually got me kind of interested in making my own knitted garms - maybe i can toss my shitty uniqlo sweaters

whats the deal with all the marble busts?

whenever i want to dig into a new area of art, my first port of call is usually to find like thirty youtube videos, watch a bit of all of them and then dive into the one that grabs me. i've been wanting to get better at digital painting for ages, and this video was the one that stuck (sorry for no embeds, the youtuber doesn't allow them for some reason). for some reason this technique just clicked and has allowed me to make some stuff that i've been very satisfied with, which i'm sure we can agree is extremely important for motivating you further. hopefully it'll do the same for you!

short comics!!!

i have been LOVING pautipeep's latest comic series. the characters, the artstyle and the story are all super gripping for me and i am constantly waiting with bated breath to see what'll happen next

i didn't have the idea to do this until i got home so im missing a bunch of photos - i'll add some from elsewhere where necessary and add links to their sources. i'm also sticking the bill of items and price where i have them, and an approximate where i don't

bowery to williamsburg

this is a little new york themed cafe down a side street in the south east corner of the cbd. sitting outside is quiet and nice, i had a little work to do and this was a great place to do it. the drinks were all fine, a bit lackluster for melbourne, but the bagel was very enjoyable

1x small long black
1x small hot chocolate
1x lox bagel
- $28.91 aud

state library

i spent a bunch of time in the dome to get my laptops charged up and do some more work. power points are plentiful and the location is super cool. the chairs in the dome are a bit uncomfortable and the space somehow amplifies every sneeze or cough.

1x 72 watt hour charge
- $0.00 aud

bench

theres a distinction between a brunch place and a coffee shop and this is definitely the latter. the place is quite small, theres only sitting space for about six people at a bench seat, and if they're full (they were always full) then you have to get a takeaway. the waitstaff gave me a sparkling water for the two minutes it took to pull the shot which is honestly incredible service. the coffee was far and away the best i had in melbourne

1x small long black
- $5.60 aud

whisky den

my hospo friend gave me this recommendation, apparently because it's a bit of a hospo haunt. i had the full intention of going upstairs for some me-time but there was a space at the bar so i chatted to the waitstaff and other patrons for a bit. one was a sommelier who picked my white wine for me (thank you so much). the vibe was super cool and the crowd was fun - i did feel like i'd sort of inserted myself into a friend catch-up but the people next to me seemed very happy to talk. the waitstaff were super knowledgeable but not that conversational past things related to liquor

1x nikka single malt (15 years i think)
1x an white wine
- $40.00 aud

shujinko elizabeth

i wanted food late at night and this was one of the few ramen spots open past 10pm. the vibe of this spot was really nice, full izakaya with quite a few patrons. i kept getting bumped by people wanting to walk past me, which i count as a positive. the ramen itself was just fine and the waitstaff didn't know what oi ocha was and i had to point to it in the menu

1x shujinko (signature) ramen
1x oi ocha canned green tea
- $24.84 aud

lune

i asked some of the whisky den patrons about the best spot for french pastry in the city and this is where they pointed me. it's got a bit of a touristy reputation, with lines regularly going out the door and up the street. the prices are frankly insane, and while the quality of the croissants is top notch, i think you're paying quite a lot for the image. still totally worth it for a one off, especially if you can get in early (they open at 7.30 and i got there at 8, the line was only three or four people long and i got more order more or less immediately)

1x ham and gruyere croissant
- $10.91 (!) aud

vacation coffee

i came here with my stupid little lune croissant bag in hand for a liquid accompaniment. the location was much more consistent with a "nice" coffee shop experience in the rest of australia. the coffee itself was fine, better than bowery to williamsburg, worse than bench. i didn't stay inside but it looks like it would be a nice spot to start your day

1x small long black
- $4.50 aud

treasury and fitzroy gardens

these were my next morning stops to get slightly out of the vehicle fumes for my breakfast. they're similar to a botanic garden but with each section separated by big stretches of lawn. not very biodiverse of you. i get the feeling this would be an amazing summer picnic spot but it is not summer and there were no picnic-ers. i did some writing on a park bench and my fingers went a little numb - i should have gone to the conservatory which was lovely and warm

1x homeless-friendly bench
- $0.00 aud

cibi

i went here with a friend and got the whole story of the place - it apparently has a sister location in japan, with each location having staff and gifts from the other country. how nifty! i had natto for the first time ever here and bought a cute plate for my housemate

1x ultimate breakfast plate
1x small long black
1x oat latte
- ~$40.00 aud (my friend paid for this)

stefanino panino

this was the second spot my friend wanted to show me so we continued our brunch into elevenses. i've been to a couple of panini places and while i love the simplicity of a really nice bit of bread with some nice cheese and mortadella, the price always smarts a little. everything tasted good though, the cannoli was potentially the best i've ever had

1x bologna panini
1x custard cannoli
2x san pelegrino chinotto
- $31.54 aud

market lane coffee (collins st)

this spot has the potential to have some incredible coffee, but the filters we got were a bit insipid and boring. the location was absolutely lovely though, the outside seating is a perfectly balanced amount of enough street traffic to be interesting, but not so much that it's annoying or distracting

2x brazilian single origin filter coffees
- $15.00 aud

11 inch pizza

i was craving italian, but didn't want to go to a full on big deal serious business restaurant, and this pizza place was nestled in a little side alley. the pizza itself was lovely with a combo of mozzarella and goats cheese, but the crust was quite crunchy which i normally don't care for (personal preference i suppose). the vibe was very nice, watching the delivery guy out the front doing a cleaning job on all of the bikes before the dinner rush started to roll in

1x "salami" pizza
1x fancy organic chinotto
- $34.00 aud

mork

this was a hot chocolate spot opposite 11 inch pizza. it seems to attract big crowds but i didn't find it particularly exceptional

1x original dark hot chocolate
- $7.10 aud

new month! new blog! regular delays! not to fear!

playlist

somewhere in between - leyline hex somewhere in between by leyline hex

between this and dusqk's album last month, i am doing amazingly with finding random atmospheric drum and bass albums and subsequently playing it to death for the full length of the subsequent month. i've somewhat gone off of pure ambient music recently, but this new niche has been filling that same spot really well, giving the same calming and quiet vibes but also a nice beat to keep my stupid adhd ass from drifting away. i would normally call the mmorpg ai voiceover soundbites cheesy, but they do a pretty solid job of simply tying together an ep that is otherwise quite varied in terms of tone and general style.

desire, i want to turn into you - caroline polachek desire, i want to turn into you by caroline polachek

i've listened to quite a bit of caroline polachek in the past and yet i haven't talked about her before. she's getting a mention here partly because i think her music is really good and i listened to quite a bit of it this month, but also as a bit of a protest vote against charli xcx and chappell roan. both of polachek's albums are incredible artistic works, pulling in inspiration from all kinds of strange genres and musical experimentation to make pop music that really does feel unique. i particularly love the south american vibes of Sunset and the instrumentation of Billions which sounds like it could be out of a galen tipton or giant claw album.

elis & tom - elis regina and antonio jobin elis & tom by elis regin and antonio jobin

i originally found out about elis & tom from the famous omelette animation, but was delighted to find that the entire album is actually very lovely! the first half or so is quite upbeat and cheery bossa nova, dips into something a bit more somber in tracks 10 through 12, before jumping back to something light and pleasant to wrap the whole thing up. elis is an absolutely insanely skilled singer but i do wish there was more antonio on the album; the conversational back-and-forth feel of águas de março in particular is so playful and fun, easily making it the best track on the album.

brat and the rise and fall of a midwest princess

two albums i listened to quite a bit that did not end up on the list are brat, charli xcx's most recent release, and the rise and fall of a midwest princess by chappell roan. both are absolutely gigantic in queer circles, but i had a bit more of a mixed experience with them. brat has some absolutely killer tracks on it; von dutch has mass appeal that i apparently appear to be susceptible to, talk talk is catchy in a way that i think doesnt make me angry, and i think b2b is a bit of a sleeper hit. unfortunately, i think a lot of the tracks near the middle don't have the same level of care put into them, and im a little confused at the amount of people calling it a perfect album.

the rise and fall of a midwest princess, on the other hand, didnt interest me in the slightest. chappell roan appears to basically just be bisexual taylor swift, to the point that i think you could take one of taylors albums, replace half of the references to a boyfriend with a girlfriend and ship it directly to the chappell roan fans. the track 'after midnight' literally repeats the same line in the chorus but swaps back and forth between boyfriend and girlfriend each time. confusing. anyway, if you're just sitting in the car and enjoying it they are pretty good albums! they just didnt grab me that much.

crash landing studio bathtime by crash landing studio

keeping up the trend of short animation in my blogposts, i stumbled onto these guys this month! these videos are all unequivocally 3d animation, but they use a bunch of cute little effects, low framerate and harsh lighting to really effectively emulate the look of stop motion animation. their approach to blocking and shot composition is also stellar, which is easy to see from my example video, but i implore you to check out the rest of their library!

sub marine cable map

submarinecablemap.com/

this site is just really nifty! it's an interactive view of all the submarine cables used to transmit internet connections along the ocean floor.

my friend gave me a spare bottle of hormone blockers today!

i want to say it put me in a spin but i suppose it more just made me very thoughtful and introspective about what being non-binary actually means to me

i like to think of myself as a bit of a realist when it comes to my physical construction and what that means for my gender expression, which i will happily admit is a benefit i am afforded by having the more nebulous goal of androgeny, rather than passing like a capital t Trans person. i have quite a few afab non binary friends who have gone on t and really enjoyed it, but i feel like a lot of that has got to be down to the very obvious and somewhat immediate effects - voice changes, muscle growth, hair growth. going in the other direction sounds like more of a toss up, as the most you can expect in the semi-short term is softening of the skin and growing boobs if you're lucky. there are some nice mental changes as you go further down the road, as well as things like fat redistribution, but that can take quite a long time

so some flavour of medical transition (for me) comes down to throwing my hormone balance out of whack for softer skin and a pair of a-cups. does the latter half of that equation sound good? sure! i actually think that the generally milder effects of hormones on amabs actually fits my preferred level of androgeny quite well. do the potential risks and some of the more difficult to reverse changes scare the crap out of me? absolutely!

in a way, i do feel a little blessed that i feel very comfortably non-binary instead of something else. the vagueness of the definition sometimes feels a bit silly, sort of like you're faking it or fooling yourself, but its fundamentally a bit of a 'what you make of it' kind of identity. it both is and isn't wishy washy - you just dont feel like presenting either masc or femme matches the way you feel inside. it's nebulous, but its also concrete in its nebulous-ness

i'm still not sure if i'll try the blockers, - i gather having no primary sex hormones can fuck your shit up pretty bad, but you can also stop them without any major effects. in any case, it has given me an opportunity to be introspective about the other parts of being non-binary that i've really enjoyed, like thinking about how my internalised gender presentation (positively) affects my personality, or how i relish in the challenge of finding cool womens' clothes that still works with my hips and shoulders

howdy all! the days have continued to fly by for me recently, but there is nothing that motivates me quite like an arbitrarily set, personal deadline. suffice to say that i have not been hit by a bus or suffered catastrophic food poisoning, and i've been slowly plugging away at a like four separate blog entries despite my frankly dangerously hectic out-of-house life. ive got most of the way through one about being non binary, some deep dives on a couple of pieces of media i really like, and even just about blogging itself (and why i think i'm not very good at it). no spoilers though!

i have buried the lead slightly - i broke up with my very long term partner a bit over a month ago, which has had a very predictable effect on my psyche. we both went through a gnarly couple of months trying to figure out whether our lives still made sense together, and while the answer we came to was no, we still care for each other a lot! i (obviously) have lots of thoughts swirling through my head on that point, and i might talk about them a bit in the future. my thoughts during the uncertain period are very well documented, and i like to think that theres something unique or interesting in there that i can share (how unique is any given separation? idk). in any case, we were together basically my whole adult life, which means that i now have to figure out what kind of person i am on my own and which direction i want to take in my life from here! scary stuff 💀! anyway yeah keep an eye peeled for the blog post

that's enough sappy shit for now! i've been listening to music! oh boy have i been listening to music! three albums in particular! here they are!

the flashbulb (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
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this might be a mild copout, but i listened to the flashbulb's entire discography on the 27th of may, basically accidentally. i was already somewhat familiar with his stuff from compositions for piano (which was actually an honourable mention back at the start of 2023) but i randomly watched a youtube video of his on aphex twin, realised the connection, and went "huh, i should give this guy more of a listen". i'm extremely glad i did! benn jordan has been making music for decades, and the irony of learning about him via a video on aphex twin was somewhat ironic because he's very clearly inspired by richard james. i am and always will be a huge sucker for both modern piano compositions and strange electronic experimentation and the flashbulb has that in spades

horseshit on route 66 - the garden (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i actually learned about the garden from a neopunk fm video aping on the machine girl / 100 gecs / the garden crowd but waited like a year to listen to them? i don't think its a massive surprise that i'd be into them because their music feels like an art rock version of machine girl's and death grips lyricism - which is not to say that their melodies are simple or predictable. there's an absurd amount of experimentation and style switching between and within songs, but the core tinny-ass electric guitar, thrumming (sometimes ommitted) bass guitar and uncomplicated drum beat bring you back to earth each time. i do find the clownier themed tracks a bit gimmicky, but they're thankfully mostly absent in this one

gaia/rae - dusqk (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

let me tell you folks, 2024 is a great time to live if you grew up in the 2010s. as much as i despise frutiger aero and frutiger metro as labels, i am the exact target audience for the flavour of ps1&2 / gamecube / sega dreamcast inspired tracks that are starting to really pick up steam at the moment. i originally thought this album was one of those game ost mixes on youtube (although, can you blame me). tracks like under_lust would feel right at home on an actual game score, eternal lightwaves pulls the extremely cheeky move of remixing eternity from final fantasy x-2, while a bunch of other tracks use this general vibe as a springboard for something more bouncy and energetic. eyes/aeon and gaia/breaks are my two personal faves, blending some delightfully catchy melodies with heavily modified vocals

there is no antimemetics division

i normally don't particularly care for sci-fi fan productions, just because the effects can really take me out of the experience, but scp (and a more philosophical scp concept) seems particularly suited to making the genre work. i really enjoyed watching there is no antimemetics division as it came out, but neglected to mention it in my last update, so here it is!

podcasts

i've never really talked about it on here before but damn i love podcasts! i've recently been enjoying well there's your problem, a podcast about engineering disasters, the adventure zone versus dracula, a dnd podcast by the mcelroy brothers (and one of the most fun series they've done in years, imho), and let's learn everything, a science and knowledge show! the latter is a new addition to my big podcast repertoire and it's honestly so much fun! it feels really good to put on some fun goofsters and also feel like you're bettering yourself by learning super interesting facts

ipod

i've become a bit of a music hoarder in the last couple of years, and as i start to collect more and more music that isn't on spotify, the concept of getting an ipod kept ringing in the back of my mind. after a particularly comfortable paycheck and a particularly lucky catch on ebay, i picked up a particularly dodgy ipod 5 (aka ipod video) with the intention of unfucking some of its age related and technically limited issues. the shell of the device is charmingly roughed up and the apple logo and text on the back has completely worn away, leaving only an afterimage. cool👍. the main upgrades i made can be seen here:

notably, i got a bigger battery, a storage adapter and a new 3.5mm / lock switch assembly. removing the old hard drive that used to be in the ipod significantly improves battery life, and lets me use a hefty 256gb sd card! neat! i almost ended up buying from elite obsolete electronics, americas go to for ipod parts, but i got lucky and found ifurb, the australian equivalent, which allowed me to skip some horrific shipping prices and a two week wait. the ifurb experience was completely painless and highly recommended

i also installed rockbox and the infomatrix theme which gives this delightfully utilitarian look to the device, and lets me play flacs directly instead of having to downmix them to mp3!

all this rampant reddit-style consumerism aside, how is the daily experience of having an ipod in your pocket? for starters, i had quietly hoped that moving my music over would help me to use my phone less, but that has unfortunately not been the case. i'm still very dependent on it for maps, my calendar and my credit card, so going without tends to not be an option, even for moving between rooms at my apartment. despite this, it is nice to not have to carry a dongle or bluetooth receiver around for my earbuds, so that's a big plus, but i hadn't realised how important both spotify's radio feature and general interface are when listening idly. i seem to be very reliant on being able to mentally parse albums and playlists by their album art, which isn't an option with an ipod quite this old.

all this said, it's a super fun piece of kit for listening to stuff that i've bought on bandcamp, as a conversation starter and as a little tinkering project. i spent a couple of hours yesterday writing some arcane obtuse configuration code and i wouldn't have it any other way

short animations

i continue to be on the short animation train! i've actually been enjoying them so much recently that i'm starting to put together a list of interesting ones that flow together neatly to perform a screening in my home city! the main hurdle to this concept is that a lot of short animations are A. quite short (~3 minutes) and B. have themes focusing around either friendship, anxiety or love, and while they're all great pieces with great themes, i think an hour of just those ones would get a bit samey. anyway, on that note, heres four animations that all kind of fit that description lol

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(these gobelins people in particular seem really neat, might be worth keeping an eye on)

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games ive been playing pepper grinder

pepper grinder is this super nifty 2d platformer with a really satisfying movement system where you burrow underground and pick up momentum by throwing yourself out of the soil towards the next patch. it feels incredible and the soundtrack by xeecee is lovely. they also do some super cool illustrations? i just stumbled onto that by complete accident!

balatro

this one probably isn't a huge surprise, just about everyone i know who plays games has poked their head in on this one. for the uninitiated, its a weird roguelike version of poker where you build high scores using an arcane scoring system and stack multipliers from run-specific conditions. it's absurdly addictive and super satisfying when it all goes right

yakuza 0

i have unfortunately been roped back in to the yakuza series by my darling norwegian friend ed. i'm constantly excited to see what's new stupid shit is around the corner, and i constantly dread the fact that this game is DEFINITELY gonna chew up 60+ hours of my life this year

i've had a hell of a couple of months that have somewhat impacted my blogging and art schedules, but i have to get in the three albums for april 2024 for the sake of my own sanity. theres a couple more things in the pipeline, so keep an eye on the blog!

this month's playlist

salami rose joe louis (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i had a friend throw this on at a little friendly get-together and i was honestly stunned at how incredible they were and the fact that i'd never seen them before. this performance in particular is a very synthy acid jazz performance with some lovely vocals that meld harmoniously into the instrumentation - the guitars remind me of casiopea, the vocals of pinc louds and the synths are really poppy, almost like galen tipton or something from the mother 3 soundtrack. the whole set is a bit of a journey and pretty masterfully merges a fairly conventional jazz flow with searching ambient segments and haunting vocal solos.

i am - wilding (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

after absolutely stacking my monthly playlist with weird ambient music and synthwave nonsense i stumbled onto this track on my local community radio and it very quickly rose to the top of the ranks for this month. i normally don't care for lyrics with meaning but this track manages to weave meaning into something still whimsical and a little silly. the melody itself is a piece of extremely upbeat and lighthearted british-flavoured indie pop, despite the artist being australian. the whole thing is exquisitely catchy and was stuck in my head for days (in a good way)

hard to make plans - naomi keyte (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

when i said i don't care for lyrics in the last paragraph, i was slightly lying. i was lucky enough to have this track played live for me at a yoga meditation and the lyrics hit me like an absolute truck. i've been feeling very scared and uncertain recently, and i think feeling like someone else was feeling the same way helped to soothe my soul (but not before causing a pretty intense outpouring of emotion). i think the vocalist has absolutely beautiful vocal technique and the production of the whole technique is so blissfully genuine - this song has been a bit of a life preserver for me for the last week or so (so if you're reading this naomi, thank you so much!)

the desko bmos 5200 is a pretty interesting keyboard. i first saw one at the amman civil airport in jordan, and it has been absolutely stuck in my head for the last four years. i snagged one from taobao for a mere 50 aud and, horror of horrors, was greeted by this:

that's right. a full width backspace. the nerve.

some context

i've been an unabashed keyboard dork for some time now. i don't particularly care for the current saturation of the hobby in dropping big money on enhancing the sound and look of a keyboard, and am much more interested in the tinkering side. very few of the keyboards that i have bought have cost more than a hundred bucks (although keycaps and switch prices tend to blow the final cost out a little bit (a lot)). my keyboard list post should illustrate this pretty easily. besides microbudget costs, the other thing that has been core to my my messing with keyboards has been the layout. i got a happy hacking keyboard years ago, which has a bit of a unique layout - most notably, the ctrl switches have been removed from the corners and moved to the caps lock position, the backspace has been shifted down to where the 'pipe' key normally sits, just above enter, and a short shift allows for the addition of a function key in the bottom left corner, moving a lot of standard keyboard functions below a layer. i've made a couple of personal modifications to the layout of what the switches actually do, but i've found this physical layout has been incredible for me and very difficult to stop using, hence the creation of the uuupah standardised layout

i've modified or designed all of my boards (bar a few) to use this layout so i can swap them in and out at will. it's very much a muscle memory thing at this point, but i do find typing on a normal board much more of a chore, given that i have to use the ctrl key and backspace so often, and they're both normally stretched out to the full extents of the layout.

blissfully, the desko already has half of the problem solved: the right shift is a full unit shorter to squeeze in the arrow keys. this is generally the more difficult problem to solve, leading me to buying an entire spare caps lock key for my aek60. unfortunately, the backspace is full-width, and even worse, there isn't a hidden spare pair of contacts on the pcb for me to do an easy switcheroo.

this board was very secondhand and the pcb was FILTHY. apologies

clearly, more drastic changes will be required to get this thing where i need it.

the plan

a lot of people are, understandably, a little nervous to modify a printed circuit board. they tend to be small and fiddly and also generally multi-layered, meaning the circuit you can see on the top isn't necessarily indicative of all the magic going on inside. this lovely reddit post shows just how easily you can mess up a piece of precision electronics with a power tool. thankfully, comparatively, keyboards are extremely simple hardware. each switch is about as simple as a component can really get, and they are huge and spread over a large area, meaning theres plenty of room to get a little silly if you're willing to get your hands a bit dirty. hence, my modification plan, scribbled in the back of a notebook:

the long and short of this plan was to remove the existing backspace switch and the pcb underneath (shown in dashed red) and add in two more switches with a plate supporting it against the surrounding existing switches. this was done with basically zero knowledge of the actual construction of the pcb (and i had assumed that there would be gaps under the switch blockers above the number row to make this cutting easier). in reality, the pcb is completely filled in (because why wouldn't it be) so i decided to go a little bit off the rails and follow my gut:

first up, i removed the existing backspace key, followed the traces on the circuit board and soldered some arduino jumper wires to them. hot glue was used for strain relief, which is horrifically ugly, but should work just fine. for those a little unfamiliar with circuit boards, the little raised lines (known as 'traces') are functionally wires which carry the signals around the circuit, and they are generally coated in solder mask - a thin layer of plastic that stops the trace from touching something metal and creating a circuit somewhere else. it's not uncommon when repairing electronics (providing they aren't too complex) to scrape this solder mask off and solder directly to the trace. this lets you make connections wherever you want without relying on the big exposed conductive circles (generally called pads, but sometimes also contacts). in this case i have just connected to the two traces that make a backspace signal when combined - i still want to use this circuit when i add the new switches in. for now, i've just scooched the wires through some spare holes in the pcb, normally used for the centre shaft of a cherry mx style keyboard switch

next up, some precision marking was done with a sharp pair of tweezers to make guides on the circuit board - once i actually got this open i realised that my "cut away a big piece of pcb" plan would actually be a huge pain, but because the circuit board was so empty, i could maybe drill the three requisite holes for a switch to mount directly to the pcb. a bit of a crazy plan perhaps, but the worst outcome is that i would screw up this section of pcb and go back to plan A. also note the lifted pads that the backspace key was previously attached to. if you get these two hot or yank them too hard they can come right off, which is a major pain in the ass to work around. thankfully i won't need this particular set of pads again, but i'll need to be way more careful when desoldering in the future.

this concept is so absurd to most normal electronics people that i had to grab a pic.

and away we go! this didn't go quite as smoothly as i wanted, but i did manage to drill the three holes per switch that i needed. i found that my horrifically oversized masonry drill and very cheap chinese drill bits tended to slide around a little bit, despite me tapping a homing point on the pcb, but silicon is actually pretty soft and holes can be adjusted with a craft knife of a pair of nippers. note that i was wearing a respirator this whole time! pcb dust is pretty nasty shit and you do not want to breathe it in.

my original plan was to use a plate to keep everything stable, but because i'd gone down the alternate route, i put down a bunch of hot glue to the sides of the switches. normally you can hold switches to a pcb with the two plastic pins on either side of the central shaft, but the first six holes had been hard enough to line up, and i didnt want to try my luck with four more. this solution is temporary, as i'll discuss in a second, and it feels fine for the time being.

on the back of the keyboard you can see the jumps i made to connect the new switches to the circuit board. the left switch is connected directly to the old backspace, and the right switch to the scroll lock on the far right of the keyboard. i did this because scroll lock is basically unused in 2024, so i could remap it to some other switch and not really impede the original key. what's that? remapping? how do you do that?

soarer's converter // vial

way back in the infancy of mechanical keyboards as a hobby a guy called soarer created a kit for converting the then-more-common ps/2 connector to usb. given that the desko keyboard runs on ps/2, i considered making one myself, but because the hardware is a bit of a fiddle to get your hands on, i instead opted for this little number from a person called tinkerboy. this lets me take the backspace and scroll lock that the keyboard is taking in and change them to the inputs that i want (as well as some other mods)

final product

this is what the board looks like as of april 2024:

(i have since found the missing tilde key) the caps are still a bit dumpy and the cherry mx blacks are not quite my cup of tea, but they're getting replaced soon. the two new switches are also a little bit wonky, but i also have a stabilisation plan to fix them as well!

what next?

there's still a bunch i want to do with this board!

• general cleanup - the pcb and some of the internals are filthy, but this will be easier to fix up when i do some more major modifications in the future. i will be keeping the massive scuff on the top of the magnet scanner because i think it gives the board character
• new switches and keycaps - i spent an embarrassing amount on a new set of switches and keycaps. i'm willing to cough up for the keycaps because they're very universal and can be migrated to other boards if i feel the need, and the haimu switches were quite affordable by todays standards.
• caps ctrl - i've remapped the caps lock key to ctrl as per my normal layout, but this board doesn't have n-key rollover. this means that the normal ctrl key has been wired so that it is unlikely to conflict with any of the other switches on the keyboard, but the caps lock is just a normal key, making it prone to conflicts. my most pressing example is that i use ctrl+shift+1 and ctrl+shift+2 to speed up and slow down playback in reaper, but conflicts mean that the first shortcut doesnt work if i use the caps lock enter. easy solution: cut the existing traces for caps lock and jump them directly to left ctrl. ever so slightly risky, but should be worth it
• extra support for new switches - the new split backspace works fine, but the hot glue is not an amazing long term solution. to give it some more stability i've grabbed the cheapest fr4 pcb i could get my hands on from aliexpress (15aud) and i'll be cutting it down to do the same switch support i wanted to do in plan A. i might also have to do this for the above caps ctrl change, depending on if i do any serious damage to the pcb
• removing modifiers - i might pop the bottom row ctrl and right super/win key, just because this makes homing a little easier for me. i'll also be getting rid of the arrow keys - up will become fn, right will become a numpad 0, and the other two will be unused
• more function keys - the contacts hidden under the switch blockers do seem to work, and while i wouldnt really have any practical use for them it would be really fun to have f13-f24 keys on the top of the board. the real trick is finding a keycap set that will fit them
• updating tinkerboy firmware - the tinkerboy unfortunately only supports two layers, and i prefer to use three to put page up, page down, home and end in the same positions as the arrow keys. i'm in the process of talking with tinkerboy on if it would be possible to modify some other parts of the firmware to support this
• internalising cable - i like to use mini usb connectors for my boards, so i'm heavily considering the entire cable, tinkerboy adapter, and then another adapter to a plate mount mini usb port that is accessible from the outside

i spent a bunch of time (and a bunch of money) in 2022 modding a gameboy advance with a pretty new ips screen and a bunch of other gizmos. like any nerd hobby there is a load of posturing for "who can spend the most money", and a fair bit of it is sort of unnecessary, so i'd like to talk through what i've done and whether i think it's worthwhile.

i didn't notice the horrid finger smudge on this one till i started writing this post and i don't want to take the photo again

ips screen

i can't actually find a record of the store i bought this from, but its unlikely to be a huge deal because i'm pretty sure they're not sold anymore. people go for the laminated ips screens these days because they forgo the ugly gap between the screen and the glass panel, and while i can't speak directly for this product i can say that the upgrade to a new screen is an absolute must. it's hard to remember just how crummy the stock screens were until the gameboy is actually in your hands and you have to angle your back to a light source just to see what the hell is going on

shell

again, these particular shells aren't really sold anymore because the new screens require a very specific cutout. my main advice is to skip the mirror / glossy finish cases. i was initially interested because it would be nice to see the cool circuit board with complete clarity, but the slippery surface isn't that nice to hold on to

peep the top right corner where i almost completely lifted a pad for the shoulder button. i've left a note so that if someone sees it in the future they know that, yes, i did make a mess, but i'm aware that i did it so it's obviously okay

capacitor kits

the flex cable on the centre right here, as well as the GBA Power Cleaner in the next picture are part of a mild trend of whacking more capacitors on the gba to clean the power signal - i'm not entirely certain that this does anything meaningful (i suspect the answer is no because you can't really buy them anymore) but they were surprisingly cheap so i don't plan on taking them off

clean amp pro and funnyplaying speaker

i was never actually super bought in on buying a replacement amp for the gba. the main draw seems to be that the speaker is louder, but i never really thought that the gba speaker was too soft. in any case, i managed to damage the speaker cable while making some other modifications, and if you're going to buy a new speaker, you might as well shell out the extra twenty bucks for the amp that is made for it. i can't say that i can hear a noticeable difference in clarity - the gba audio is almost always pretty harsh and tinny, and cleaning up that audio might honestly make it worse. the thing is also much louder, loud enough that you can hear music clearly from the other side of the house if you crank it all the way up. do you really need that though? i'll let you decide

tactile button kit

this is the sleeper hit of my gba modding adventures. to the best of my knowledge no-one sells these on any of the big name stores, but a kit is quite affordable from aliexpress. the difference with these is absolutely night and day and i can't recommend them enough. besides the screen i think the buttons are the gba's only other real hardware failing, and this kit brings them up to speed with the gba sp. note that i've stuck a little bit of cereal box cardboard in the middle of the dpad - if you skip this step your dpad can sometimes bottom out on more than two directions at once, which feels very disconcerting. i'd say that this is a must-have modification to the modification

shoulder buttons

you might look at the shoulder buttons and go "hey, those just look like the normal shoulder buttons but spattered with solder flux!", and you would be mostly correct! i fell into the trap of buying clicky shoulder buttons when i first started messing with this gameboy, and while the clicky buttons feel great on the face buttons, the reduced travel and high actuation weight make the shoulder buttons a complete chore to use. luckily it seems that some kind soul on aliexpress has started selling the stock shoulder buttons again - just make sure you buy two because they're not sold in pairs. better yet, just stick with the stock buttons because they're fine

cleanjuice gba

a rechargeable battery is a bit of a must have in my opinion, and these usb c ones are super convenient. as with a lot of these parts funnyplaying has sort of become the default option, but they do make good stuff so i'm not going to complain. with this particular part i would recommend sticking the circuitboard to the battery but not sticking the battery to the case. this gives you freedom to stick normal batteries in if you ever need to do that, and also makes disassembly easier because you don't need to get under the usb c port to get at the case screw. i've also stuck a piece of thick rubber on the top right to push the battery against the battery cover and keep the whole thing in place. ymmv if this is necessary for the battery you get

ezflash omega

this flashcart is the most expensive part of the project, but if it saves me sifting through secondhand listings to get games i reckon it's worth it. the ezflash omega is the most feature-rich and straightforward to use of the flash carts on the market, and i only really take it out to mess with my childhood games that i still have kicking around. the omega also lets you run homebrew gba games like goodboy galaxy and even gbc homebrew titles like the melting apartment and pokemon coral. if you want to try the latter i would recommend loading the jagoomba patcher, as it fixes a bunch of weird gb and gbc bugs for the ezflash's onboard emulator

all good new year resolutions need to fail in february or march and my resolution to be more on top of blogs has failed spectacularly! for recompense, heres a bumper double music post as well as all the other stupid shit ive been thinking about for the last couple of weeks

february ison by sevdaliza
people time by stan getz and kenny barron
momentary lapse of happily by adult mom

i had a surprisingly unelectronic february! i listened to momentary lapse of happily while i friend of mine gave me a (very time consuming) stick and poke, and i think i got recommended sevdaliza because ive listened to arca? i had some fun and exciting relationship troubles in february and there was something surprisingly zen about absolutely saturated my aural senses with something lyrically and musically dense and a little grating. my people time recommendation is a million times more embarassing, as i learned about it from the manga amemiya-san by keiichi arawi (the person who made nichijou). its super long and very cosy and can easily fill a lot of audio space if necessary

march john white - self titled album
a greater bliss by wordclock
library music by marcus fjellström

my break from electronic music did not turn into a statistically significant pattern, alas, although i did stumble on to a really cute jazz-funk album by john white. i think this one is particularly funny because there have clearly been a load of john whites performing without a pseudonym over the years and spotify hasn't gone to the effort of dilineating them all, so you can browse a wide variety of genres and skin colours on the official page. wordclock and marcus fjellström sit on two sides of the electronic-ambient coin, with wordclock being interesting and almost narrative, with a big backlog of tracks that are easy to listen to. marcus, on the other hand, provides a variety of interesting and difficult to describe musical experiments (a little more detailed than a sketch) that are musically very competent but not always the most soothing. a really fun experience in any case

relationships

i know this is in bad taste but its also still a little funny

i doubt too many of you care but i did mention it before so i thought i'd mention that my very long term relationship is on a break! because its one of those fun normal adult relationships its one of those exciting situations where no-one is really at fault which is both nice and also a nightmare because the obvious solution is much less clear. the whole thing is still in flux and i might have something interesting to say when the dust settles but for now my fun piece of advice is to bring issues up early! and if those issues aren't resolved bring them up again! don't nag, but also don't sit on things and hope they get better because that festers into resentment when given enough time

shoulder

a good pal of mine (who helped put together last years art exhibition) went to the excrutiating trouble of permanently emblazoning this jacob's ladder to my shoulder! i've only had tattoos with a tattoo machine previously and yeah, i wouldn't recommend stick and poke unless it's really small, or the artist is really experienced - they take a really long time and they are noticeably more painful than the alternative. all this said, i'm super pleased with the outcome (and not even because it was free!). it looks a little wonky because of the angle i took this photo at but the overall shape is spot on and the stippling effect gives it a notably organic and homegrown feel that i adore

(readers are now equipped with the knowledge to identify my bloated corpse when it washes on to shore after a horrific 18th century boating accident, and indeed, by reading this sentence, you have entered into a binding contract to do just that)

rss

i added rss to my site! i dont expect this to get loads of use but its more or less a set-and-forget type system so theres no harm in having it just sitting in the background. as always, the 11ty documentation came in clutch with a super simple guide but i've continued to tweak it a little more to my liking. my blog posts tend to be chock full of embedded media (iframes) for youtube, spotify and bandcamp, but feedly doesnt play nicely with them so theres an extra filter that runs over the top to replace iframes with an equivalent link that feed users can use to see the contents of each missing embed. i think my solution works okay, but there is some kind of annoying behaviour where it seems that every second embed just isnt detected or gets skipped or something. i'll keep working on it because getting my head around jsdom and general node.js functionality is kind of fun, and i also just don't like finishing a project unfinished

cohost update

i talked about cohost in a previous post and how i was pretty primed for it to be my new tumblr replacement - after a month or so i'm still hopeful for its long term success, but i've noted that it seems to have had huge uptake by artists who draw somewhat more spicy art, but doesnt seem to have as many users who make interesting text posts, more normal art, or just have normal aggregator-type accounts. i suppose it doesn't make loads of sense for the average artist to jump ship at the moment because there's nothing actively harming them on tumblr - bit of a shame, and it means that i still spend more time on tumblr, but we shall see how it shakes out in the next year or so

desko keyboard

i found this little guy on taobao for a cool fifty bucks and snagged it with the intention to convert it into something a smidgen more palatable in 2024 - this keyboard is used at airports for initial sign in staff, and the slot of top is (i believe) a magnetic scanner, or maybe a barcode scanner. i unluckily got a version with a ps/2 connector instead of usb, but i've grabbed a tinkerboy ps/2 vial adapter and a panel mount mini usb adapter to make the whole thing more portable (i'll also be upgrading the keycaps and switches in the fullness of time). i'm still waiting on parts to arrive but i'll probably make a post about the upgrade when it happens - the most interesting part of which will be trying my darnedest to put a split backspace on a pcb mount keyboard - watch this space

systemctl-bot

i've been thinking about running a minecraft beta 1.7.3 server for my friends for a while, but the dilemma of handling running multiple servers at once had been bouncing around my head - luckily, thanks to the wonders of open source software, someone has already had my exact issue and solved it with systemctl-bot: a discord bot that can be configured to manage systemd services on a home server. for the layperson, this means that my friends can send a simple text command on a discord channel and this nifty piece of software will start and stop the appropriate program, making it completely hands off on my side. it can be used to run any program that can run through systemd (read: basically any software) meaning there are probably loads of other creative ways to use it. i've already mentioned this program in my most recent home server post but i'm so psyched about it that i wanted to give it a second shoutout

some independent animation i thought was fun take me home, country roads by shar
snif & snüf by michael ruocco
sassy gay eridan by bb-panzu

i really love both short animations and short comics - i also recently started a tumblr for the latter. the bite size nature means you can discuss a single concept or explore a single visual idea but with a super low barrier to entry (at least as far as artistic pursuits go) (also short animations are still a huge undertaking, but a one minute animation is obviously much easier to make than a twenty six minute episode) (i also love animatics for the same reason, although a lot of animators dont seem to love sharing them because they feel 'unfinished' which i suppose is fair)

id really love to make some new site that could store all these sweet vids and comics ive found - tumblr pages and links of youtube pages work but they aren't exactly archival so a downloaded copy would be better. the main issue with that is that some artists might be pretty cheesed about their stuff being hosted somewhere without their permission. a clever fallback system that usees a native youtube or tumblr (or other artsite) embed while the post is up but has a backup in case it goes down might be worth looking into. this concept does have the potential to be a bit space consuming though so it might have to be somewhere outside of this site. again, watch this space

snail comic

talking about small comics, a friend of mine just put out the first issue of their little comic the other day! it's also here if you don't want to download anything. i feel like their scratchy sketchy style might be a little offputting to the average person but i think it meshess super well with their expressive characters and fun worldbuilding. they've also started a new comic called 'hell' which seems like it might be a touch more depressing, but equally intriguing

i had some big plans of writing all my home server guides in one big string when i did the first one, but it turns out that these actually take a really long time - so long that i've actually bought a second thinkcentre and started using it for hosting game servers! two key things i wanted to do with this box (which i think are actually worth sharing because they were a bit of a fiddle) were to run a server for minecraft beta 1.7.3, and to set up a system for switching between different servers without having to connect to the box with ssh - i'll go over both, as well as running a normal modern version of minecraft

what's on the menu entree

- core setup

mains

- media streaming
- cloud storage

dessert

- discord bot
- game server hosting

---

modern minecraft

we'll start by downloading and installing the necessary software:

sudo apt install openjdk-19-jre-headless
sudo mkdir /opt/minecraft_1.20.4
cd /opt/minecraft_1.20.4
sudo wget https://piston-data.mojang.com/v1/objects/8dd1a28015f51b1803213892b50b7b4fc76e594d/server.jar
sudo wget https://github.com/Tiiffi/mcrcon/releases/download/v0.7.2/mcrcon-0.7.2-linux-x86-64.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvzf mcrcon-0.7.2-linux-x86-64.tar.gz
sudo rm -f mcrcon-0.7.2-linux-x86-64.tar.gz
sudo mv LICENSE MCRCON_LICENSE

if there's an issue you can get the latest version of openjdk headless with sudo apt search openjdk jre headless and the latest version of the minecraft server at www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server

test the server by running:

ufw allow 25565 comment 'minecraft server'
java -Xms4G -Xmx4G -jar /opt/minecraft_1.20.4/server.jar nogui

the first command allows connections through your server's firewall, assuming you have ufw configured. if you don't, check out setting it up here! if the java version is good and your networking is all fine then you should be able to connect to your server from another device on the network and have a look around

stop the server and open the properties file using sudo nano /opt/minecraft_1.20.4/server.properties. add these lines at the bottom - i'll explain them in due course, but they are basically just configuration for managing the server with mcrcon:

enable-rcon=true
rcon.port=25575
rcon.password=YOUR_RCON_PASSWORD

create a randomised password for YOUR_RCON_PASSWORD and put it in a text editor - it doesnt have to be particularly complicated, but it also doesnt need to be remembered, so just make a random alphanumeric string of 16 characters or so

now that we know that the server behaves, we want to set up a systemd service to make managing it easier - for those unaware, systemd is a linux program that helps to manage services on the computer. it's used to run a lot of the software that makes the computer tick, but it can also be leveraged by users to autostart software, make stopping software easy and restart software if it crashes (among many other features). its super feature-rich and while it is a bit intimidating, learning how it works will save you loads of trouble messing with the cron table or some other janky scripting system

we're going to create a new user to run our service, give it permissions to use our /opt/minecraft_1.20.4 directory, then create a new service file

sudo useradd -c "minecraft service 1.20.4 service" -d /opt/minecraft_1.20.4 -s /usr/bin/nologin minecraft_1.20.4
sudo chown -R minecraft_1.20.4:minecraft_1.20.4 /opt/minecraft_1.20.4
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/minecraft_1.20.4.service

when nano opens, enter this configuration:

[Unit]
Description=minecraft 1.20.4 server
Documentation=

Wants=network.target
After=network.target
Conflicts=minecraft_b1.7.3.service

[Service]
User=minecraft_1.20.4
Group=minecraft_1.20.4
Nice=5
KillMode=none
SuccessExitStatus=0 1

ProtectHome=true
ProtectSystem=full
PrivateDevices=true
NoNewPrivileges=true
PrivateTmp=true
InaccessibleDirectories=/root /sys /var -/opt /media -/lost+found
ReadWriteDirectories=/opt/minecraft_1.20.4
WorkingDirectory=/opt/minecraft_1.20.4
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java -Xmx8G -jar server.jar -nogui
ExecStop=/opt/minecraft_1.20.4/mcrcon -H localhost -P 25575 -p YOUR_RCON_PASSWORD stop

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

i understand that this is a lot but i'll go through the key lines that are maybe less obvious:

> Wants=network.target
> After=network.target

these lines make sure that the network is connected before starting the server, which will keep it from whinging in the logs

> Conflicts=minecraft_b1.7.3.service

this line is used to make sure our poor little pc doesnt have two servers running at the same time. our next server will have a similar line, and they both basically make sure that if this service gets started, the conflicting services get stopped

> User=minecraft_1.20.4
> Group=minecraft_1.20.4

these lines just specify the user that's going to run the service (our previously created user). this is pretty standard security, because if the minecraft server gets hijacked due to some kind of exploit, it should only be able to perform actions that the minecraft_1.20.4 user can perform, and that user has been given a very narrow area to work in and very minimal permissions

> ReadWriteDirectories=/opt/minecraft_1.20.4
> WorkingDirectory=/opt/minecraft_1.20.4

these lines just make sure that the server is run from inside the same directory as the server.jar file. minecraft servers dump all their configuration data and logs in the user's current directory, so this ensures the server.properties and other files don't get put somewhere weird

> ExecStop=/opt/minecraft_1.20.4/mcrcon -H localhost -P 25575 -p YOUR_RCON_PASSWORD save-all stop

ExecStart was pretty self explanatory, the service is just running the same java command we did before, but this ExecStop command is a little unfamiliar. minecraft tends to misbehave when it isnt stopped properly, and mcrcon ensures that all your ports are closed so they can be used by another process. it also allows you to add extra steps to the shutdown, like sending a message with "say MESSAGE" (including the quotes) or waiting using the -w option. check the usage on github

the rest of the lines are mostly interested in security, and your server would run without them, its just good practice to keep them in

anyway, now that the service is all handled, we need to restart systemd, then spin it up and make sure it doesn't error out on us

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start minecraft_1.20.4

and the first step is done! if you stop here you'll have a minecraft 1.20.4 server that will start when your server starts and will restart itself if it crashes out. you can fiddle with the configuration files that have been created in /opt/minecraft_1.20.4, and add mods or replace the server.jar with a custom one if you like

---

beta minecraft

beta minecraft is slightly more fiddly, but this should be a fair bit quicker since we already know how systemd service files work from the last step. you do understand how systemd service files work now, don't you?

we don't need to get mcrcon or open jre this time so install is a bit simpler:

sudo mkdir /opt/minecraft_b1.7.3
cd /opt/minecraft_b1.7.3
sudo wget https://files.betacraft.uk/server-archive/beta/b1.7.3.jar
sudo mv ./b1.7.3.jar server.jar

we can use the same ufw rule as before - skip this if you already enabled it in the previous section

ufw allow 25565 comment 'minecraft server'
java -Xms4G -Xmx4G -jar /opt/minecraft_b1.7.3/server.jar nogui

as before, check the server from a separate device and if it spins up, sweet! time to automate it

sudo useradd -c "minecraft service b1.7.3 service" -d /opt/minecraft_b1.7.3 -s /usr/sbin/noLogin minecraft_b1.7.3
sudo chown -R minecraft_b1.7.3:minecraft_b1.7.3 /opt/minecraft_b1.7.3
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/minecraft_b1.7.3.service

when nano opens, insert the following service file:

[Unit]
Description=Minecraft Server b1.7.3
After=network.target
Conflicts=minecraft_1.20.4.service

[Service]
WorkingDirectory=/opt/minecraft_b1.7.3

# Solves the issue where the minecraft server will endlessly restart itself
# See https://askubuntu.com/questions/953920/systemctl-service-timed-out-during-start for more info
Type=simple

PrivateUsers=true
# Users Database is not available from within the unit, only root and minecraft is available, everybody else is nobody

User=minecraft_b1.7.3
Group=minecraft_b1.7.3

ProtectSystem=full
# Read only mapping of /usr /boot and /etc

ProtectHome=true
# /home, /root and /run/user seem to be empty from within the unit. It is recommended to enable this setting for all long-running services (in particular network-facing ones).

ProtectKernelTunables=true
# /proc/sys, /sys, /proc/sysrq-trigger, /proc/latency_stats, /proc/acpi, /proc/timer_stats, /proc/fs and /proc/irq will be read-only within the unit. It is recommended to turn this on for most services.
# Implies MountFlags=slave

ProtectKernelModules=true
# Block module system calls, also /usr/lib/modules. It is recommended to turn this on for most services that do not need special file systems or extra kernel modules to work
# Implies NoNewPrivileges=yes

ProtectControlGroups=true
# It is hence recommended to turn this on for most services.
# Implies MountAPIVFS=yes

# Set default memory values
Environment="MCMINMEM=512M" "MCMAXMEM=8G" "SHUTDOWN_DELAY=5" "POST_SHUTDOWN_DELAY=10"
# Change memory values in environment file
EnvironmentFile=-/opt/minecraft_b1.7.3/server.conf

# Uncomment this to fix screen on RHEL 8
#ExecStartPre=+/bin/sh -c 'chmod 777 /run/screen'

ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/screen -dmS minecraft_b1.7.3'
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/java -server -Xmx${MCMAXMEM} -Xms${MCMINMEM} -jar server.jar --nogui'

ExecReload=/usr/bin/screen -p 0 -S minecraft_b1.7.3 -X eval 'stuff "reload"\\015'

ExecStop=/usr/bin/screen -p 0 -S minecraft_b1.7.3 -X eval 'stuff "say SERVER SHUTTING DOWN. Saving map..."\\015'
ExecStop=/bin/sh -c '/bin/sleep ${SHUTDOWN_DELAY}'
ExecStop=/usr/bin/screen -p 0 -S minecraft_b1.7.3 -X eval 'stuff "save-all"\\015'
ExecStop=/usr/bin/screen -p 0 -S minecraft_b1.7.3 -X eval 'stuff "stop"\\015'
ExecStop=/bin/sh -c '/bin/sleep ${POST_SHUTDOWN_DELAY}'

Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=60s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

the guts of this are the same but it's obviously a bit different. first and foremost, thanks to the minecraft wiki for this script. reading it has made me aware that you can set these more complex multiple-minecraft-server systems up a bit more elegantly, but this works for now. notably, rcon isn't supported by beta versions of minecraft, so we need to use screen instead. it's a bit more prone to issues, but this setup has given me the most stable results. we also have Conflicts=minecraft_1.20.4.service, which works the same way as the previous service, but in reverse. as before, spin the service up and check it behaves correctly

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl start minecraft_b1.7.3

if you want one of your servers to start automatically when ubuntu box boots up, enable it with systemd:

sudo systemctl enable minecraft_1.20.4

OR

sudo systemctl enable minecraft_b1.7.3

don't do both because they'll fight for port 25565. note that if you did want to run both, you could go into the server.properties file for that server and change the server-port property to an available port number; just note that you will need to specify this new port when joining the server, as the client will automatically assume 25565 otherwise

---

systemctl-bot

now this is where the fun begins. i wanted to be able to let my friends swap servers and allow myself to turn them off without having to pop open ssh. my first thought was to make a discord bot, obviously, but thanks to the wonders of open source software, someone had already done it for me! forrestjacobs on github has made systemctl-bot, and the description hilariously describes my exact dilemma. nice! their setup instructions are all on the github page, but i'll go through them anyway - it might help with troubleshooting if you run into any issues

first up, make a discord bot here: discord.com/developers/applications

in the main section (general information), add a name, icon and copy down the application id

make sure to save your changes! next, navigate to bot in the menu on the left side. tutorials have said that you need to activate the bot but i haven't actually seen any settings for that - they seem to be activated automatically. in any case, reset and copy down the bot token.

finally, head to oauth2 on the left side menu, scroll all the way to the bottom, select "bot" and "applications.commands" and copy the url it generates

finally, head to your discord server, right click on it and select "copy server id"

thats all the big long numbers handled 👍 time to make a config file. run sudo nano /etc/systemctl-bot.toml and insert this into it

application_id = <APPLICATION ID>
guild_id = <SERVER ID>
discord_token = "<DISCORD TOKEN>"

# Create a [[units]] section for each unit you want to control from Discord
[[units]]
name = "minecraft_b1.7.3"
permissions = ["start", "stop", "status"]

[[units]]
name = "minecraft_1.20.4"
permissions = ["start", "stop", "status"]

you can add any services to this list that you are interested in, and you can restrict the permissions so you can stop users from killing a service, or only allow them to check its status (for example). next up, we'll download and build the bot

sudo apt install cargo
cd /srv
sudo git clone https://github.com/forrestjacobs/systemctl-bot.git
cd systemctl-bot
sudo cargo build --release

at this point, try following the oauth2 link you generated before and adding the bot to the server you got the server ("guild") id you grabbed before. note that the bot will only work with a single server for security. once the bot has been added to your server run /srv/systemctl-bot/target/release/systemctl-bot and test the bot works via discord. if something is wrong with the build or the configuration the bot will tell you in your terminal, and while rust errors arent the most simple you should be able to dig through them to find the source of the issue. i misconfigured my bot three times in a row before i managed to get it running

once the bot is working we'll add a new service user with sudo useradd -c "systemctl discord bot" -d /srv/systemctl-bot/ systemctl-bot and create a new systemd service file with sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/systemctl-bot.service. enter the following text in that file:

[Unit]
Description=systemctl discord bot
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=systemctl-bot
ExecStart=/srv/systemctl-bot/target/release/systemctl-bot
WorkingDirectory=/srv/systemctl-bot/target/release
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

finally, enter these commands to enable the bot and open up your polkit settings for service authentication:

sudo systemctl enable systemctl-bot.service
sudo systemctl start systemctl-bot.service
sudo nano /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/service-auth.pkla

entering these settings in the pkla file:

[Allow system-ctl to start/stop/restart services]
Identity=unix-user:systemctl-bot
Action=org.freedesktop.systemd1.manage-units
ResultActive=yes
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes

this final setting is the kicker that will allow your bot to freely start and stop systemd services - it's way safer than adding it to sudoers and much more simple once you know where you should be looking.

and that's it! you can add further servers by installing a game server from steamcmd or a standalone, creating a secure service user, creating a systemd service file, before finally adding it to the conflict lists in the other service files and the systemctl-bot config. it's a bit of a fiddle but if it's all set up properly, It Just Works™

i was going to say "tumblr has really done it this time" but the last five years of tumblr have been a real rollercoaster of tumblr-doing-it-this-time. that said - they really have done it this time.

in the span of a week or two their ceo matt mullenweg had an insane meltdown where he personally singled out a trans user for saying that she 'hope(s) photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.' matt, who was actively on holiday, took this 'threat' so seriously that he banned user predstrogen and their backup accounts, before taking to twitter to make the freakout more public and more unhinged. this (rightfully) brought a bit of a shitstorm down on the website that has a documented history of A. not treating trans people amazingly and B. having kind of piss poor moderation (see: app store takedown and porn ban)

shoutout to carhammerexplosionmatt for documenting this screenshot and other photomatt screenshots in this dropbox

soon after this, it was rumored and then announced by tumblr that they were selling their user data to midjourney for ai training. there is a setting to disable it, but it runs on an honour system for the removal of files which i frankly do not trust. you can see exactly why something like this would be done - it's extremely lucrative for the company, but it doesn't seem like a move that the core tumblr development team would push for. instead, it seems like a bit of a money grubbing move from the top to try and push the company back into the green. my art is obviously not being used to feed any artist-specific models, but i might figure out glazing and nightshading nevertheless.

post 1 and post 2 about the tumblr ai situation

in any case, this has felt like the sign that we needed to finally start shifting over to cohost. some other friends have recommended pillowfort which also seems like it could have potential, but on my initial skim cohost seems like the the experience i'm going to prefer. the difference has been handily summarised by my friend Aludra from the doodle crew art group

[2:49 PM]Aludra: Cohost doesn't follow an algorithm, you absolutely have to find people through tags. NSFW is allowed and must be tagged. You have the freedom to code just about anything into the posts. A browser game, music (they were adding that feature last time I checked), pictures, fancy wobbling text instead of a gif, etc.

[2:51 PM]Aludra: Pillowfort is like Tumblr and Reddit merged. The interface is incredibly similar to tumblr. Liking posts, reblogging, however you can't add your own notes to a reblog. You CAN however, reblog your posts into communities, which is where the reddit part comes in. So if you follow 5 different art communities, you can post your picture to your blog, but also every community you think the post fits in, to get noticed more easily

[2:54 PM]Aludra: Also allows for NSFW, and very, very long posts. No gifs yet (no gifs for bluesky either) because they apparently take a lot of funds to host, so hosting a gif yourself and inserting it into a text post (they let you add images wherever you want, unlike an image post) would be the better option

[2:56 PM]Aludra: You join and the only community you're automatically a part of is introductions. Post an introduction, then go search for things you like in the communities and join them. You can join but mute the community from being shown on your feed, but also just watch a community and not join it. This way your feed doesn't get cluttered with things you don't like or get filled too fast

how convenient! thank you aludra! we're living in a bit of a quiet renaissance of new grassroots social media platforms, and if it wasn't for the big hitters still having an absolute stranglehold on the market it would be super exciting. which is not to say that a site needs mass adoption to be fun to use, but it does need to hit the critical mass of more-than-a-couple-hundred-active-users.

in any case, im going with cohost for the time being because A. i haven't really missed reddit since i stopped using it and heading back to a site that is reddit-like doesn't really excite me and B. you need to wait for an invite or pay five bucks to get into pillowfort. say no more, i'll wait for it to open up properly. it's also a little bit ugly compared to cohost imho, which isn't a reason to not use it, but it is a nice bonus.

while pillowfort seems a little more wishy-washy in its goal, cohost is very targeted towards providing the old-tumblr experience with none of the corporate bullshit. theres a couple of things that i really enjoy about the site so far:

1. it's crowd funded - we'll see if this actually works out in the long run, but cohost has dedicated themselves to running the site off generous users rather than ads and tracking (see their about page for their full set of core tenets). whether that works out in the long run is yet to be seen, but if i get enough value out of it i would be totally happy to drop five dollars a month to help keep the site up

2. it's not about metrics - cohost doesn't have a like or share counter like basically every other social media site. i'm super into this, because i've always found them as an intrusive annoyance that makes me think more about fake social credits instead of making connections with my fellow humans or looking at cool art. this might also be something that actually pushes people away, because a lot of users tend to be driven by the number go up skinner box, but given that its a niche site to begin with, i suppose we'll see

3. they don't have mobile apps - i mentioned the apple app store takedown before when talking about tumblr's big problems, and cohost has a really clever system to bypass that. the site is focused entirely on the web experience, and leverages progressive web apps to make it a bit more convenient on mobile. pwa's allow for websites to be presented as an app and leverage some handy app features like native notifications and storage, if needed. this unfortunately makes installing it a little bit more of a fiddle (which could hurt userbase growth), but means that they're not beholden to google and apple to keep their app up and push updates

(this is what cohost looks like on my phone)

theres a couple of other cute features that i like: because the app isn't on an app store they can bring back nsfw posts; i was never really that interested in tumblr as a porn location, but loosening up restrictions means posting art that is on the more risque side isn't risking your whole page being taken down.

posts supports full markdown and embeds, meaning you can post a youtube video or a bandcamp album or an itch.io game in the post - this gives loads of freedom on the user side and makes supporting out-of-site content a trivial job for cohost developers. i'd be interested to see if this ends up becoming some kind of security risk, but the security currently seems to be pretty solid, asking the user to either allow a full site (such as all posts from bandcamp.com) or just this one embed

anyway, i don't have a stellar way to end this thought vomit, so i'll probably just spruik my cohost - it's moving a bit slowly at the moment but i'm hoping my favourite artists will continue shifting over as tumblr continues to fall apart

---

https://www.tumblr.com/calicos-stimboards/743056596359397376/exploding-hammers-and-cars-stimboard

pardon for the lack of activity in january - i had very lofty plans of starting my new blog schedule, as well as finishing the "best things of 2023" that i think i've mentioned elsewhere on the site, but neither happened. i also didn't really do any art because i was busy doing manual labour and then recovering from that manual labour (although i think this year's art page is starting to look pretty good). i got a couple of lovely messages in the guestbook which never fail to put a smile on my face - thank you sabrin.party and matinao!

i'm taking part in funguary this year, which is basically just an excuse to get prompts on doodles for the month and to soak up that SWEET SWEET SOCIAL CREDIT. im pretty happy with my first entry, a take on the turkey tail mushroom as a celestial priesty lady. future readers will see if i was able to keep my shit in gear and actually complete the challenge

i managed to squeeze a fair few movies into january considering my workload - the rewatch of annihilation was purely self indulgent; i love that movie and i will not be changing my mind. i actually watched saltburn twice, once at home and once in a cinema, and was amazed by the visual direction and acting of the whole affair. i also saw dune in cinemas but this was a follow up because i'd finished reading the books. denis villeneuve does a great job of sanding the rough edges off of it and i am begrudgingly excited to see the second film at the end of the year. the menu was a really good one, and while i don't think its a perfect film, the bits that were meant to get me absolutely got me. theres some pretty nasty stuff in there so be warned, but i reckon it was worthwhile. the john wick rewatch was mostly for fun, but i did really notice how low budget the whole thing is - it doesn't at all ruin the film, and honestly just makes it more impressive that we got the movie that we did on such a small amount of money.

the other three films are for my film podcast, which i will not be sharing out of embarrassment. in short, 3 idiots is one of the better amir khan films i've seen, das boot is a great thriller that ends weirdly, and braveheart sucks. i did not enjoy it

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top 3 albums

this month's top 3 are a bit weird because i spent most of the month listening to A. the radio, B. podcasts and C. video game soundtracks because id been a very good person in 2023 and abstained completely for a whole year so i deserved a little treat. in no particular order, my notable albums for this month are:

Star Lore by Aindulmedir
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obsidian soundfields in particular is pretty fun - they do this sorta droney sorta arctic ambient, and each track is an hour long. it's legitimately great music, but its also incredible for rocking over an entire work day

talking about being very good in 2023 and not listening to video game soundtracks, here's my last.year report!

in an surprise to absolutely no one, solar fields took out the top place. i absolutely HAMMERED them last year, and they were my most played artist by a factor of two. i also was introduced to golemm this year and they very quickly hit second place, as well as askii in my constant quest for a skyrim soundtrack that isnt the skyrim soundtrack. overall, i'm really happy with the abstinence year because it introduced me to a load of cool new music, but i'm also going to avoid tracking the numbers too hard in 2024. sometimes its just nice to put on the persona 5 soundtrack and turn off my brain

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other blog stuff!

- kalechips introduced me to this super nifty method of binding books that i think i might give a go! my initial thought was to replace the expensive field notes i use for day to day note taking, but those are stapled and probably aren't worth the trouble.

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- persona 3 reload came out! i've already played it before and honestly don't have the time nor motivation to play it again, but there is a fresh new soundtrack to listen to

- i started and finished the talos principle in a continuation of my quest to play every big deal puzzle game since braid. it was really fun, with a decent balance that meant i didn't spend much time bashing my head against a wall, and actually had a solid setting and ending for a puzzle game - a serious rarity!

- i started watching dungeon meshi and continued watching frieren. dungeon meshi was one of my favourite literary works of 2023, and the show appears to be doing an excellent job of adapting it, with a sort of digital hand-sketched look i've never seen in a big budget animation, and classic trigger goofery to match. i haven't got super far through frieren, but it probably actually rivals dungeon meshi as just about the most interesting fantasy story concept i've seen, paired with some unequivocally beautiful art. i can't wait to finish it

- i had originally planned to slap my best things of 2023 in here but honestly the post is long enough. i'll do it next week

hello all! this is probably a little off-brand for this blog but i've spent the last fortnight+ renovating my shitty australian apartment and i thought it could be helpful to other people who would like to remove their stupid acoustic ceiling in their 70's era domicile. first up, a super brief intro to popcorn ceiling: this stuff was big in the late 20th century, mostly because it allowed construction companies to half-ass their ceiling surface and cover it up after the fact. if you're in the same approximate age range as i am and you're lucky enough to own a place then it's not unrealistic that it would have this. there are two hidden issues with popcorn ceiling if you're living in australia:

1. it might have asbestos

a lot of stuff that i have read has actually assured me that this practice was pretty rare in australia and was more of an american trend, but you should be sure anyway. i went via hazsure - their procedure is super simple, the test only costs a hundred bucks, and they appear to complete it the day that they receive the sample. i was really happy with these guys

1. there are two kinds of popcorn ceiling

while researching the job, i ended up watching this video by diy duke that made it look really straightforward and quick, but i didn't realise that i'd been swindled by the fact that newer popcorn ceilings are a mixture of cement render and styrofoam, while older ceilings are cement render and vermiculite. the latter comes off really easy when wet, but the former is basically soft concrete. knowing which one you have is key to how i would recommend you complete this task

this is what this cursed stuff actually looks like, if you're unfamiliar

so how do i actually remove the ceiling?

honestly, you probably shouldn't! i didnt realise until halfway into the first day that my ceiling was vastly different to the ones i'd seen online, and that this project would be much more trouble than i signed up for. hiring someone to do popcorn removal is fucking expensive (about 7000aud for our 50sqm apartment), but doing it yourself is also really hard if you have vermiculite instead of styrofoam - the removal took me six days, two of which were assisted by my dad, and plastering A. took another four days and B. doesn't really look that good

if you're stuck with the stuff, the move i would probably recommend would be to spray paint it white - you'll level out the texture a little, bugs will be less likely to hide in it, and you'll have an actual white ceiling, just like the hoi paloi. the moral dilemma you will have to come to terms with is that this will probably make the ceiling completely impossible to remove for yourself or someone in the future - if that's a weight that your soul can bear, then you should go for it. a 1.5 bedroom apartment will probably take you about a day to spray paint and then you can comfortably forget about it and get on with your life

i'm not chicken / i'm morbidly curious about what you did

if you decide to ignore my warnings and follow down this dark path, i have a couple more pieces of info to impart:

1. scrape the whole thing, not just the top layer

if you have a crack with a tool like a plaster scraper, you'll find that you just knock off the top half of the popcorn, which is the actual popcorny bit - this seems easier, and looks like it gives you an easier surface to work with, but don't be fooled - this will make your life waaaay harder when you need to run a plaster coat. render / plaster will dry super quick if the surface you apply it to is porous, and popcorn ceiling is super porous. it sucks way more to begin with, but it's easier to work with in the future

1. get it seriously wet before scraping

i mean it, by the end i was spraying it with a garden hose to soften it up. the difference is pliability is night and day when the popcorn is saturated all the way through, and i probably could have saved a day or two of scraping if i was doing this from the beginning

1. i mean it, don't do this shit

we scraped the ceiling with a floor scraper that we turned into a makeshift dark souls boss weapon with an angle grinder - this shit weighs probable five or six kilos and swinging it over your head for ten hours absolutely destroys your body. additionally, if anyone else has had the bright idea to try and fix the ceiling before you then you now have either paint, render or cement over the top of it - this will transform the already hard popcorn into a composite of near-mythical strength that will need to be individually chiseled away

the best part is that you now probably have a lumpy concrete ceiling with big stupid gaps in it, which now require plastering to make a surface that you can bear to look at

wait don't people get paid like actual money to plaster things

i don't have loads of good photos of the plastering process, but it sucks pretty hard. you need to roll it on with a paint roller, and the paint rollers will only last 6-8 hours before they completely clog up and die. it will get on anything that you love that you havent sent yourself crazy bagging up with painter's plastic, as well as your ladder / scaffold and the floor. you'll need to clean it while it's still wet, or scrape it off with a concrete scraper the next day once it's dried. you will eventually get the hang of it, but by then you've probably done two thirds of the rooms and they now look hideous.

yes i am scarred by this experience.

if you have to do painting (and you probably should, since your furniture is already elsewhere) get your friends in on a working bee - we managed to paint the whole place in about twelve working hours over two days. it's also a great way to snag some photos of your friends with paint in your hair

additionally, if you want to replace the floor (and your probably should, since your furniture is already elsewhere) places like carpet court will supply and install for surprisingly little money. we had timber laminate and carpet put in for just under 4000aud, and with extremely little trouble

i mean it, just spray paint the ceiling

bon voyage 2023! my "next blog" note file is getting huge and my monthly albums are a bit boring, so i'm doing another combo post. i think this is the format i'm going to do next year so i might as well get a head start

three albums

this month's playlist mostly contains my favourite albums of the month and a couple of less exciting ones that i wanted to give a proper listen

3. songs from a world apart - lévon minassian (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
i've been reading through dune and the instrument and vocal choice of this album seem to fit the vibe perfectly. this is potentially due to cowriter armand amar's moroccan upbringing providing a fresh angle to lévon's normal feel. the whole album has a bit of a narrative feel, which makes it a delight to listen to in the background 2. sawtooth - jonny l (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
i won't lie, i found jonny l through a 'liquid jungle' spotify playlist, but it appears theres good reason for him to be basically at the top of the list. sawtooth is extremely heavy on the electronic instruments, which i adore. 1. wants a diamond pivot bright - m. sage (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
the last album in particular got a huge amount of playtime from me - it's a much more quiet and dainty ambient piece, with a lot of experimentation and new angles from the different featured artists. it features a bunch of different field and life recordings, which made it great to recentre myself during the month tanaka tatsuyuki

i found this artist while digging around pinterest - he's done a bunch of japanese animation and manga and his style is absolutely gorgeous:

i believe the majority of the stuff on his catsuka page is digital, but it does once again make me interested in trekking down the watercolour train. maybe doing it digitally would minimise the amount of mess at the end. in any case, the grimy dieselpunk look is awesome and i think he could be a huge inspiration

youtube animation

as a christmas gift, i present you with a shitload of different youtube animations - each of these brought something unique that i really enjoyed:

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i loved the full-send nature of this piece - the live action recordings really tied the whole thing together and made it super believable. props to the actors, they did an amazing job

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the high-shadow rendering style in this animation is supere appealing and worth a go in the near future

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the experessions in this one are top notch

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this one was just cute and funny :-) very inventive use of the original song

game award reveals

there were a couple of things that caught my eye during the game awards, but this one caught my eye in particular:

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it just feels so damn pure and sweet and looks like loads of fun for you and a bunch of buddies to explore together

it's spotify wrapped month! 2023 has been the year where i've endeavoured to drop videogame score, originally (shamefully) for my spotify wrapped, but i got heaps out of it and i'm glad i did it, even if the resulting post isnt that interesting. i'm actually considering ignoring it completely next year anyway as it focuses on individual tracks instead of albums, which i think is much less interesting. (theres also the conspiracy theory i heard that the wrapped dropped a day early because it could drown out an organised social media campaign to spread information about the tragedy in gaza, but i havent been able to find any further info on that one)

anyway, heres the goods:

solar fields unsurprisingly pulled ahead, and almost all of the tracks were from golemm's album hazardous bubble basics, with a surprise showing from taylor deupree. i'm going to do a more comprehensive rundown of my music for the year early next january, this is more of just a taster. anyway, on to the normally scheduled top three albums!

this months playlist

ep no.1 - tigran hamasyan (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

a running theme for all three albums this month was having an incredibly good start. ep no.1 tells you what to expect immediately with a really minimal jazz instrumental performance (piano and drums), overlaid with two vocalists absolutely BELTING it out. each track has its own very distinct and catchy melody, and the whole album is short but sweet. i'm absolutely blown away by how different this is to anything else i've ever heard and would die to see them perform it live!

fixed earth - bobby swan (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i was shocked to see that bobby swan only has 128 monthly listeners on spotify because they make some incredibly competent and complex atmospheric music. quiet and simple drones and tempered instrumental notes start each track, and different layers weave in and out - i spotted harps and hand pans, synthesised bloops and a gottan used to put the bow on the opening track. theres a little bit of digital warping sprinkled in - basically, just about anything you could consider experimenting with (besides vocals) is tried, and with great success. the tracks are all very different but also succeed in creating an impressive amount of cohesion - one of my favourites were 'truth serum' which lays two key repeated melodies over each other, with the higher one almost poking its head out at the end in an inquisitive nature. i also loved 'resin jam' which subs in a jazzy little bassline as a backbone for the track

self awareness through macrame - sonny & the sunsets (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

sonny and the sunsets are an indie pop band from san francisco, and this track is a really new release, coming out just a couple of months ago. it doesnt appear to have set the world on fire, but i was pretty immediately drawn in by the first song 'waiting', and was happy to be drawn along for the whole half ish hour runtime. for risk of telling on myself, the vocal performance reminded me somewhat of car seat headrest, but much more contented than will toledo's affect. every track is bright and bubbly, and it was an excellent contrast against the more somber tracks i was listening to this month

✒️ editors note: i started writing this review back in march or april and completely forgot about it. i sort of just charged ahead and finished the second half in a two hour session, so if it feels a little weird, sorry! i'll probably go through and edit it later

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i've been on a puzzle game kick recently; antichamber and manifold garden have always visually intrigued me, so i knocked them out in the beginnning of the year and found them pretty enjoyable. i had a crack at filament, which was a creative and interesting idea, but it went a little too hard too fast for my liking and i pretty quickly got demoralised and stopped playing. so what was next on the chopping block?

we're only a quarter of the way in, but the witness is potentially my favourite game of the year. it's been out for about seven years now so i've heard plenty of hot takes on it and frankly expected it to not hold up to the hype, but i was almost instantly swept up in the puzzles and world. i pretty quickly started making comparisons to myst, as you're dropped on a big island with no people but loads of weird mechanisms, cryptic mechanisms and a wide variety of architecture and flora. the location designers clearly had no shortage of inspiration, because you can find all kinds of weird perspective tricks and shapes in shadows and reflections if viewed from just the right angle. the look of the whole game is bright and warm and i spent a lot of time heading over to some exciting looking ruin or cluster of plants i saw out of the corner of my eye. this world design decision keeps the mystery high and makes exploration a reward unto itself!

puzzle-wise, the witness is structured extremely well to make you feel like a genius, regardless of how clever you actually are. different puzzles follow different "rules" that dictate the lines that you should be drawing, and the game (largely) eases you into how each rule works with a series of super simple puzzles that try to demonstrate the nuances, as well as the circumstances where a rule is broken. for a game considered rather pretentious, this method is surprisingly straightforward and unsubtle, a nice move that aims to avoid frustration early into an area. this also gets you in the headspace that if a puzzle is too complicated or the rules are entirely unfamiliar, you're probably in the wrong place. simlarly, theres nothing stopping you from putting an area down and checking out somewhere else if you you're completely stuck

there are a couple of exceptions to this, of course, but a lot of these really out-there examples are for puzzles meant as endgame // secret content, and i don't decry the game doing this. i've also heard some complaints that certain areas were impossible to understand without prodding for certain players. joseph anderson had trouble with the sound puzzles, whereas my highschool level musical education kicked in immediately and i absolutely blitzed through this area. conversely, i had trouble with the gate at the "tetris" area, and i actually had to ask for help

this brings up two tangential thoughts that i want to bring up: A. the witness was a difficult enough game that i needed to ask for help once, something that didn't happen with antichamber and manifold garden. despite this, i completed almost all of the rest of the game without prodding from my friend who had already completed it, and their only other contribution was secret areas that uncovered more for me to do. B. i am totally in support of round-the-watercooler style sharing when it comes to games. it harkens back to the pre-internet sense of collaborative discovery, and allows you to control how much you get """spoiled""". and frankly, getting completely stuck on a game isnt fun. the witness encourages you to stop and think more about a problem, but completely depriving yourself past this point doesn't feel worthwhile to me. in any case, perfectly balancing a game like this has got to be an almost impossible task, and i think the move of babying you in the beginning and trying to teach you the deeper concepts in a more unconscious style works great

spoilers it's a little unfortunate that this mystery is never explained, and i gather that's because it never really meant anything. the ending implies the game is simply a game, and that you are a developer playing a beta build of said game. one of the endings shows you unplugging from the beta build matrix and stumbling around your house, seeing circles and lines in the same way that any player who plays the witness will. it's a shame, but it's also not enough to ruin the experience. you can wax lyrical about what the game is trying to say (and many philosophically minded people on the internet already have) but, like antichamber and manifold garden, i'm happy to not let a heady universal truth get in the way of playing a fun brain scratcher that lets me explore a bizarre new digital world

i want to shout out the video that got me into the game in the first place, this aforementioned video by the aforementioned joseph anderson. joseph has a bad habit of coming off a bit negative where i don't think he truly means to; he seems to like picking apart the real issues in experiences that are critically praised, which can sometimes make him sound like he hated it; he also loves to play games to absolute completion, and will criticise a game that has problems if you approach it from this angle. i disagree with a lot of his complaints about tedium in the witness; i truly thought that it was paced great, and the sometimes excess of simple puzzles are fine; they're there to make sure that everyone is on an even playing field. (i'm realising that i now sound guilty of doing the same thing that i criticised joseph anderson for! i really do enjoy his videos and would highly recommend his stuff, i just wouldn't let it stop you from playing this incredible experience)

i snagged this thinkcentre m710q for super cheap on an auction store because its a low power, low cost option for getting started with homelab type tasks. a lot of entry level recommendations i've seen involve using an old desktop pc or getting an embedded celeron in a mini-itx form factor - the former is space hungry and generally power hungry, and the start-up cost of the latter is a bit much considering this doesnt include a case, power supply, memory or drives. my thinkcentre came with 8gb of (expandable) memory and a pretty nice intel nvme ssd, in a case that is smaller than my router with a maximum power draw of 65 watts and an idle draw of 9-11 watts. this makes it an excellent option for someone who wants to get in on the ground floor of "always on pcs" while not spending so much that you'll regret it if its not for you

these m710q's tend to ship with windows 10 pro, but i've been setting my little server up as a ubuntu server in order to bring up the performance (and hopefully bring down the power cost). i've found it surprisingly straightforward, but i thought it would be nice to share here for both personal reference, and maybe to help someone out who's looking to do the same thing. i'm going to slice it up into separate posts for related projects, with this one being the "core" config - i'll cross reference when an action in one entry is used for another, such as some peculiarities in the file system being defined here, but mostly being for the benefit of the <legal downloads> section

what's on the menu entree

- core setup

mains

- media streaming
- cloud storage

dessert

- discord bot
- game server hosting

first things first

whatever box you end up going with, you'll want to download ubuntu server (lts version) from here, then follow their installation instructions here. for those new to code or open source software, lts stands for long term support, which is more or less what it says on the tin. new versions of ubuntu come out every couple of months, but these regular versions only come with nine months of support by default, meaning you'll have to keep updating to take advantage of security updates and support. lts versions are normally supported for three years, and because theyre the version the average consumer uses, theyre also the version most regularly targeted by the software we're installing, like some kind of software ouroboros

anyway, our ubuntu is going to be running in "headless" mode, which is to say, without a user interface / desktop environment. this cuts down on unnecessary cpu use, which is great, but does make the initial install a little fiddly. my m710q doesnt have wifi so i just sucked up having to sit on the floor next to router for twenty minutes while tapping through the initial install. once this is done, we shouldnt need to plug it into a screen again, although i would recommend doing the drive setup first because issues can happen there that will knock out your ability to contact the server over the internet.

also, on the note of sitting next to your router, i would very much recommend wiring your server in directly. wifi kind of sucks to begin with, and and the wifi cards that tend to come with these systems also aren't super stellar. we're going to want a high throughput for streaming our <legal downloads>, and using ethernet here lets you remove one bottleneck from the system. get a short run of cat5 or higher, plug it in and forget about it.

ssh

once ubuntu is installed and restarted, we're going to set three things up while the screen is still connected: ssh (secure shell, for connecting to the server from another pc), ufw (uncomplicated firewall), and any extra drives. i used this tutorial(local copy) for ssh, but the long and short of it is to update your package manager packages, and run apt install on the openssh server.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade 
sudo apt install openssh-server

some quick ones for the unitiated: ubuntu is pretty stringent with its security, and sort of like windows, your default user won't be the all powerful "administrator" of the system, for security reasons. this all powerful mega user is the root account, and using sudo will "DO" a command as if you're the "Super User". apt is ubuntu's package manager, which helps to centralise all of the software your average ubuntu might need, as well as making updating a bit easier. the above commands are three separate apt commands, update, upgrade and install. update refreshes the internal list of software versions that apt uses for search and comparison, upgrade updates all of the software currently on your server, and install installs the package requested, in this case openssh-server. the && is code shorthand for a 'logical and' and linking two commands like this tells the system to do the second one if the first one succeeds.

openssh sets up a 'systemd service' on install. systemd is a service management system used to run the majority of software in ubuntu, and while it's not the only way to handle things like this (and some people have some criticisms with how it functions) it will work just fine for our fairly vanilla configuration, as well as give us access to some really convenient management tools, allow ubuntu to handle programs that crash by itself, and much more. we can check the status of the service by running one of the following two commands:

service ssh status

or

sudo systemctl status ssh

the former is the more convenient shorthand, but the latter gives you an idea of how these systemctl commands are laid out. either way, your output should look something like the following:

if the green "status light" in the top left corner is empty and the Active line says "inactive", run the following command:

sudo systemctl enable --now ssh

this will start up ssh and make sure ubuntu starts it on system boot in the future

ufw

uncomplicated firewall ships with ubuntu, and allows us to configure a firewall in an uncomplicated manner! sweet! i'm using this tutorial(local copy) for ufw setup. first up, i'll introduce you to a friend that's going to be with us for the rest of this adventure:

sudo nano /etc/default/ufw

nano is a text editor for use in the terminal, and /etc/default/ufw is the location of a file we want to check. / at the beginning says that we're looking at the bottom level or 'root' level of the file system; the windows equivalent is a folder located at C:/. if you want to navigate to a file in reference to our current location, you can omit the leading /. etc is a folder that holds a lot of configuration files, and the ufw at the end of the string is our actual file. unlike windows, a text file doesn't need a .txt extension; they work the same way.

running this command will load nano on this particular file, with sudo / root permissions so that we can make edits if we need to (the file is owned by root, and we normally wouldnt be able to mess with it). look for a row with IPV6=, and if it says no, change it to yes. this just means we can process ipv6 addresses, which is unlikely to come up, and is more just a nice-to-have. we won't really be stressing about this anymore in this guide, but if you want to learn about what's going on, read about ipv4 here and ipv6 here.

you can save changes in nano using ctrl-s, and exit using ctrl-x. if you don't save changes it will ask you to confirm, which is a bit annoying, so i just ctrl-s every time.

next, we'll set some nice simple base configs for ufw

sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw enable
sudo ufw allow ssh

the first two commands disable all incoming traffic (systems trying to connect to your server) and allows all outgoing traffic (your server trying to connect to other systems). we then enable the firewall to activate it (it can be useful to disable it during debugging) and the we allow ssh through the firewall - most systems will require an explicit port to be specified here, but ssh is known to the system and this shorthand can be used instead. whenever we want something to be accessible to other devices, we will need to allow it through the firewall.

storage

if you're not adding storage you can skip this, but i would highly recommend that you wrangle a secondary drive, even if its an old one from a laptop you don't use anymore. the m710q has a spare 2.5 inch bay, which will take a sata ssd or a laptop sized hdd (spinning drive or "platter" drive). ymmv if you used a different computer.

lsblk

this command should return you something that looks a bit like this:

this is an absolute mess, but you should be able to spot your drive in the sd- section. mine in this case is sda2, which i can tell from the listed size of 3.6tb. the drive is actually 4TB, but sizes get weird once the drives are this big - read into decimal vs binary sizes if you're interested. now that you know the drive name, you can perform a format to ext4 if necessary. this is also fiddly, so check out this guide(local copy) for your particular usecase.

now that the drive is all good to go, we can run lsblk with some extra variables:

lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,UUID,MOUNTPOINTS

you can then find your drive again, and make a note of the FSTYPE and UUID (unique universal id). take note of these elsewhere. note that ctrl-c in the ubuntu terminal is an old shorthand for stopping a piece of software and won't work here - use ctrl-shift-c instead, and not that it works the same for pasting - ctrl-shift-v is your friend.

make a directory for your drive to be mounted to and do a test mount to make sure it all behaves. this is more or less equivalent to naming a drive in windows, so i normally find a random greek god to use as a name, but you can just call it something like 'storage'. make your new drive under /mtn/, as this is the standard location for mounting drives in ubuntu

# replace 'panacea' with your chosen drive name
sudo mkdir /mnt/panacea 
# replace replace 'sda2' with your drive location from lsblk and 'panacea' with the folder you made in the last step
sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/sda2 /mnt/panacea

mkdir is used for making a new folder (referred to as directories in ubuntu), and mount is for temporarily mounting a drive. annoyingly, this drive will be unmounted on a restart, so we need a more permanent solution.

sudo nano /etc/fstab

fstab is our file system table, and is referenced by the server on boot to put all the drives in their right place. i used this tutorial(local copy) to set mine up. you should be able to add a new line to the end of the fstab, along with a comment so future you can figure out what's going on:

# 4tb drive aka panacea
UUID=xxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx /mnt/panacea ext4 defaults 0 0

copy your uuid from the earlier step, and add your mount point. once the file is saved, run findmnt:

sudo findmnt --verify

findmnt will check that your fstab looks valid, because an error in this file can stop your server from booting. if everything comes up good, run a restart on your server using:

sudo reboot

if your server boots again then the first bit of config is over! if not, use sudo nano /etc/fstab again and fix the issue. the terminal may be a bit of word soup, but it should still tell you what's wrong with your configuration.

howdy reader! i haven't been active on here for a little while, but i've had a million ideas bouncing around my head on things that i want to write. this blog post is going to be a bit of a catch all on what i've done in the last few months on this site, what i've been doing offline, as well as sort of bundling my top three albums for the month

three albums

i've known that spotify's payment plan makes it basically impossible to make money as an indie musician for years, but they recently really sunk the boot in by adding new stream limits to smaller artists. i'd believe that this move was made in somewhat good faith, as it's target was ai generated noise tracks, but it also attacks field recordings, a genre i happen to really enjoy

my plan from here was twofold. i've switched to tidal, which has a better model that gives more to artists, but is priced almost identically (my tidal family subscription is 2aud more than my spotify couple's plan); i also started hoarding my favourite albums locally. my first port of call was bandcamp, which has also recently enjoyed a bit of drama, but at least guarantees to give the vast majority of money to their artists. a five dollar album isn't very much for me to cough up now that i have a real job, but gives the artist more money than all of my streaming to this point would have paid out

my backup move is the excellent (but less legal) zspotify. zspotify can download an absurd amount of money in a super short amount of time, and doesn't actually require that you use a premium spotify account to use it

with all of this local music handled, i redownloaded foobar2000 and musicbee, two old local music tools i had in my (short) pre-spotify days - foobar provides a more customisable experience, which was why i used it as my primary player for so long, but musicbee honestly surprised me at how nice it has become. it also has really solid auto-tagging provided by musicbrainz, which helps to fix some of the formatting screw ups provided by zspotify

in any case, because of all this back and forthing my october monthly playlist is looking a little bit gaunt, but i can still drop in some albums i enjoyed, sans any big cereberal criticism and analysis.

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home servers

on the note of having a great deal of music stored locally, i was looking at a corporate auction site while looking for a spare monitor and stumbled across this beauty for a whopping 70aud:

these old pcs are prized for their low power usage, and while their 2017-laptop-spec hardware would make for a pretty miserable desktop experience, it has more than enough power to run a minecraft server and some <LEGAL> file management. i have spent more time than i care to admit fiddling with it for the last couple of weeks, but it's doing a great job of streaming my <DVD RIPS> of adventure time, bee and puppycat and this season's anime to my tv, as well as a discord bot and a couple of other nice-to-haves

art

i haven't been posting as much stuff as i would like due to the aforementioned distractions (although i'm very proud of this fun doodle i whipped up mid-workday). i've still been doing some croquis' and gesture drawings when i get a chance, but my real project was inspired by this cool vid by zephyer about their process of pursuing art as a career. i'm not 35, and i don't think i'm pursuing art as a career, but i really took his advice of "working towards a project" to heart, so i've tasked myself with creating and fleshing out three original characters, and making some short stories or comic strips with them. it's still slightly aimless, but there is a distinct general direction, which is a great start. i've been having a lot of fun with the three characters: i'm giving them distinct silhouettes which i have dubbed 🔺, ♦️ and 🔻, and have given them different adventurer archetypes in a medieval setting. i'm not happy enough with the designs to put them up publicly yet (the bulky armor on one character is giving me a lot of trouble) but keep your peepers peeled

the site

i recently learned how to use data files and shortcodes in eleventy which means that i can keep a page like the infinite nightmare super simple, and push all its contents off to a json file. this means that A. the data in the page is actually stored as data, but also B. i can use pagination if these pages get too big. i'm always keeping an eye on pagespeed to make sure this site is as light as i can manage, so i need to be able to trim pages down if they get too big, especially if theyre full of images

the shortcode is here and i think it's pretty east to understand. having stuff like this is a godsend if you want to paste multiple similar blocks of html with the same formatting without having to actually worry about the formatting

i also have a bunch of posts in the works, including blogposts on sea of stars, the witness, iconoclasts, and the film mars express. i've spent way too much time on this particular blogpost, so hopefully i can keep the momentum up and finish them soon

media

i've poked my head into a lot of different stuff over the last couple of months, and i would like to talk about a lot of it in more detail, but heres some snappy summaries:

baldur's gate

this is literally the only screenshot i have from the game - i'm on the left
i'm lucky enough to know enough people with beefy enough pc's for us to play baldur's gate 3 in 4 player co-op, which has been an absolute delight! the going has been slow because a couple of us (me included) are the kind of people to pore over every nook and cranny before moving forward in a game, but it has a very similar vibe to playing tabletop dnd, especially if you put everyone's facecam up on another screen

bg3 has also been a really nice experience in playing a non-binary character who really feels androgenous. a rarity, and a feature that it doesn't quite share with the next entry in this list:

starfield

i couldnt imagine spending a hundred bucks on this
i put away an absurd amount of time on skyrim and fallout 4 when i was in high school, so i was cautiously optimistic about the new bethesda offering, but once i got my hands on a / early copy i was a little disappointed. i learned later that this was partly due to me doing the classic skyrim experience of running in a random direction and seeing what you find; the vast majority of open space in starfield is somewhat limply procedurally generated, and it seems that the general consensus is that these areas aren't really worth visiting. besides this, i was still taken aback by how shallow the small slice of story i experienced felt, and how characters truely just feel like cardboard standees pointing you towards a scavenger hunt or a shooting gallery. i'm not sure if this is because the design has got worse in the last ten years or if i've just been exposed to enough "good" games that i can sort of tell the difference now. like cyberpunk 2077 i should probably give it another go once it's had some time to improve a little, but given the noise my poor ailing 2070 super is making that might have to wait for a gpu upgrade, and that might have to wait till i get a payrise

iconoclasts

i'm not even sure how i stumbled on to this one when i first grabbed it, but iconoclasts is a super nifty metroidvania with lovely animation and a colourful artstyle. the puzzles are legitimately challenging, everything feels really punchy, and the story actually had me super intrigued - i'm going to do a full blogpost on this one in the future, so watch this space

enslaved - odyssey to the west

i picked this one up on an absolute whim - i remember watching a tv review on abc's good game when i was quite young, and had always meant to give it a go. enslaved is pretty unpolished as both a story and an experience, but there is something kind of special about the games that came out after uncharted 2; every game in this era had (very simple) climbing mechanics, brawl style combat and a narrative story with plenty of scenery-chewing. enslaved leans extremely heavily on the 16th century story Journey to the West but set in a post apocalyptic world, but the ending leaves a lot to be desired. it screams early deadlines or tight budgets to me. despite this, it was pretty fun to go through a game where the required inputs are unambiguous and the story and world are colourful and in your face. i knocked it out in a couple of sessions

splatoon 3

this game continues to kick so much ass i love it so much

this month was a really fun one! i dabbled in a lot of stuff in september, and while i did dip back into my ambient roots a little, i also stumbled onto some really solid albums from a couple of other genres:

this month's playlist!

hanging masses - cell (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i've listened to this album loads of times - it's basically considered the next logical step from solar fields, a rung on the ladder for mirrors edge fans to get into the wider world of downtempo / space ambient / psychedlic ambient music. this month, however, i had a super lovely moment where i just sat down and listened to this album with no other distraction, and i was absurdly impressed at how it builds its space. individual drones seem to move around you, completely disconnected from one another in a way that evokes floating through space or being surrounded by some cosmic force. the melodies are simple and repetitive, but give the tracks structure, and clever processing gives these more upfront tracks a glitchy style that makes it just a little more interesting. on top of this, there are an array of little mechanical noises popping throughout each track to give it texture and keep your ear bouncing around

i'm honestly amazed that this album sat in my library for this long, enjoyed but not truly appreciated. i'm going to give their newer album, onwards system, a really solid crack next month to see if it holds up the same way

rum sodomy & the lash - the pogues (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i take back everything i said about fontaines cd last week, because this is the irish music i really want to listen to. it definitely sits more in the folk music corner of the genre wheel, but it has the same "waving a fist at authority" feel as punk music, but perhaps a smidge more hedonistic. part of the beauty of this album is its pure catchiness; the sick bed of cuchulainn throws you directly in the deep end with the high energy and toe tap-pability, in a way that the rest of the album actually generally avoids; there are some more somber tracks like a rainy night in soho, and some purely instrumentals like planxty noel hill, but the rest seem to sit comfortably in the middle, evoking the blissful back end of a night out partying with friends

this album also managed to shoot me off on a research tangent on the striking similarities between irish folk tunes and the iconic pirate sea shanty. the answer wasn't as cut and dry as i was hoping, and my personal perspective is probably swayed by public media's depiction of the classic sea shanty, but it was a cute little historical rabbithole nevertheless

phoenix: flames are dew upon my skin - eartheater (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i have no recollection how i stumbled onto eartheater, but they're quickly becoming one of my favourite discoveries of the year. i laughed out loud when i checked rym for the genre they consider phoenix to be:

these people have NO idea what's going on, but that also shows how out there of a style that eartheater is serving really is. the bones of their music is actually sitting somewhere around the old indie folk i used to listen to after i finished life is strange for the first time (i do still love daughter and amanda palmer and will not apologise for it) but this is more of a springboard than anything. the fairly conventional and familiar part of these tracks is layered with some bjork-adjacent lyricism and vocals, as well as heady, sometimes screechy synthesised sounds that are more in line with the heavy experimental music i touch on every now and then. despite all this, the album is extremely easy to listen to, enough so that i comfortably binged both this album and the rest of eartheater's discography over a work day or two

honourable mention: good time film score - oneohtrix point never (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

on top of everything else, i managed to put away 2017's good time this month, a film that leans extremely heavily on its score by oneohtrix point never (who i saw in person just a couple of months ago). while the crazy droning of this score integrates with and heightens the experience immensely, my favourite track is probably the credits track 'the pure and the damned', sung silkiliy by iggy pop, of all people

3. skinty fia - fontaines dc (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i love punk music, it's one of the genres most consistently easy to see live, and one of the genres that is most consistently decent live (not always good, but very rarely offensive). similarly, i find punk music consistently a really fun listen, even though some punk heads would probably label a lot of the stuff i've listened to as hacky or whatever

fontaines dc also ties into my feelings about certain genres just sounding right with certain accents / different sources. rap music should be sung with an american accent and punk music should be performed by people from the british isles. brits have been a cornerstone of the punk aesthetic, but irish people have even more charm because they have significantly more reasons to be anti-establishment after their storied history on that small pair of islands

skinty fia is one of the more popular fontaines dc albums but i honestly listened to all of their stuff this month. it's all super solid (and is actually maybe a little more post-punk than punk-punk) and has made for a decent break from the ambient hellhole i fell into a couple of months back

2. lumina - dreyma (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i mentioned my skyrim soundtrack minus the skyrim soundtrack playlist a couple of months ago, and after doing more digging i fell into two artists that really feel like they effectively represent the particular jeremy soule feel, being askii and dreyma. both are an excellent listen if you really like soule's work, but lumina is one of the most consistent out of the lot (and ironically, does a better job of the skyrim vibe than Chapter II, an album literally subtitled "jeremy soule inspired music"). like that pokemon album a couple months ago, this is totally just a self indulgent act, but all work and no play makes jack a very dull boy

1. unoja - nicola conte (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i have no idea how i stumbled onto nicola conte, but he's one of the most fun artists i've listened to in a long time. his music is acid jazz with some heavy bossa nova elements, and is one of the first albums with vocals that i've been able to listen to while working, which is a great positive. i don't actually heaps of interesting stuff to say about it, so i would recommend you just give it a listen!

art

i'd left little hints about this throughout the site over the last couple of months, but i've been prepping for an art exhibition since the start of march and it opened at the start of august!

this isn't my art; i stupidly neglected to get a photo in front of my own pieces

the experience was pretty fun; we were given three months to put pieces together exploring a theme of chaos, and given that i have the most experience with the human form, i decided that that would be my primary style. thus began a couple of months of compositional development and sketching, leading to me completing the final pieces over july. the experience definitely pushed me to consider theming, composition within framing, and presenting a message, as much as i theoretically abhor the concept.

despite the location looking extremely suspect, i can confirm this was actually the dining room in a pretty popular local pub in my city. there was a punk show going on during the opening night, it was cool

my series was used as an opportunity to explore the physical aspect of my personal non-binary experience, and to present the kind of body that i think i would like to have. i wasn't 100% happy with the final product but honestly who ever is?

i celebrated the end of the exhibition and my self-imposed three month drawing prison by finally coughing up for an ipad; i havent done real digital art since high school and remember it being a pretty miserable experience, but for a smidge over 600 aud i got a secondhand ipad mini and an apple pencil and it has been a night and day difference to my dodgy secondhand 2010 wacom tablet on the family pc. i've managed to knock out a piece every few days and i've started to learn how to handle colour and how to do digital painting! i'm currently riding the high of motivation, which you can observer on my art page

webbed

i made a note to talk about this game way back in may. this blog update truly has been a long time coming. webbed is lovely little game from an indie team in queensland australia that i super enjoyed. the main mechanic of the game is the ability to shoot silk from your little peacock spider. this lets you make full webs to climb around on, move objects around by attaching them to each other and swing around at high speed using the games' very solid feeling physics engine

the physics of the webs is what really makes the game shine above the other indie titles i've played recently. they're super intuitive and almost always super fun to use - the only exception is that they are a bit frustrating with some of the final ant nest puzzles, but after watching some of the speed runs that might in fact be a bit of a skill issue. as you play through you pick up the knack pretty quickly and the game continues to give you different and more difficult challenges until its conclusion.

the game is a bit short, but it also felt like it totally judged how long the average player might want to play in this little cyber playground before moving on to something else. there is more stuff out there to find and i 100% intend to go get it once i've knocked my current backlog back a bit

my other game stuff for the month:
- i finished eastward which was a super fun experience, and experienced the classic post-rpg melancholy; i sort of want to write a post about it but i'm going to take my time with notes and the like
- started playing baldur's gate 3 with a full party of four players, which is INSANELY fun
- started playing planescape torment, signalis and iconoclasts - all a really good time, none have been finished
- keeping an eye on metaphor: refantazio since it seems to basically be a new persona game

independent animation on youtube

tiny independent animations are everywhere on youtube - often made with so much effort and care and yet i normally don't have the willpower to give them the time of day. is this a tiktokification thing? am i just using using social media as an excuse for my poor internet hygiene like everyone seems to these days? anyway this animation is super sweet

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cool art stuff i found that i dont quite want to put in the infinite nightmare even though thats kind of the point of the infinite nightmare

eiken3kyuboy has a big series of anime girls with robot legs and i think theyre kind of dope (although honestly mostly for the legs)

this series of digital paintings with inklings in the real world

some super cool development teasers by 128_mhz

Leap pic.twitter.com/ezdSZdz5KM

— 128 MHz (@128_mhz) June 18, 2023

some outrageously smooth animations by birdman (i had to convert this to a shitty gif because neocities doesnt let you host mp4s or webms)

comics

my final observation for the time being is that A. turns out that your classic newspaper comics are all really easily available on gocomics and B. these things are even worse than i remember them being. bill watterson famously ran calvin and hobbes to its logical conclusion and then stopped instead of turning into one of the multiple decade spanning shit-fests like garfield.

i did however stumble onto a couple of classics, including saintmostre and their outrageously charming little vignettes and pocketts' goblin and harpy based japes. both are absolutely worth a look! (and should probably get added to my webcomics page)

this month's playlist!

3. cancionero musical de palacio: music of the spanish court - accentus ensemble (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i stumbled onto this by complete accident and might have ignored it if it was a bit less interesting, but when someone drops an album based on tunes from the 1500s into your lap, i feel like it's generally worth a listen. i was really taken aback by how much it reminds me of what some might consider stereotypical medieval style music, but i guess it makes total sense to use the real deal as your inspiration when making a movie or videogame or whatever. either that, or the accentus ensemble took some heavy creative liberties when recording this thing

2. what a body can do - female wizard (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

listening to this album sends me straight into the nightclub scene from the matrix, which is ridiculous, because none of the music in the matrix sounds like this. i've heard some people say that this is a more dj-friendly album than their previous, which is probably why i get that impression, but it also makes the sometimes-grating industrial experience almost easy to listen to. despite that, the album has plenty of depth to it, as each track leads you from a nice approachable entry point to something grimier and with loads more depth

1. radio therapy part 1 - sci clone (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

rym assigns the genre "jazzstep" to radio therapy part 1 which is frankly foul. who is making up genre names these days? thankfully it has broken beat and liquid dnb as kinda "sub-genres" which works just fine, because this album is a classic liquid dnb piece in my opinion. the first track opens with a classic start-of-album answering machine message talking about how the caller finds sci-clone exciting and relaxing and says that it "takes them back to all the places that i've been that i love"; i'm not sure how intentional it was, but the positivity coming off of this opening slice immediately rubs off on you and primes you to just have a really pleasant time. the sound is very reminiscent of something you might find in a classic 90's racing game, but it doesn't feel like they're chasing an aesthetic, and rather just feels like the organic feel of a pair of guys that fell into a particular type of music that they like to make

honourable mention: oneohtrix point never

oneohtrix point never is doing an australian tour and i made it to the local gig! i'm not sure that i've aired my gripes with live electronic music, and this set definitely isn't immune to my normal criticisms, but it was still a really fun experience. the skinny is that many electronic artists make pieces that are too complicated to perform live, but people are there to hear the tracks that they know, so they're forced to either play a cut down version of the classics or to find a way to "perform" them, which normally just means plugging all of the stems into a midi controller and making fine adjustments during the show. my favourite part was the encore, where he went up and performed a live composition on his two synths and decks, although you can sort of see why the full tracks require a little more fuss. in any case, still on the hunt for some artists that are happy to make some toned-down versions of their classics, or to play their classics but with more time between transitions to make up for the manual overhead

⚠️ i'm spoiling this bitch! don't read if you intend to play it! ⚠️

also! i got all the images for this post from rpgfan which is really nice because i did not want to go and replay a bunch of it just to get pretty pictures

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i bought eastward within a couple of days of release (16th september 2021), and i finally finished it at the start of july. i think that says a lot about both the flaws and strengths the game might have; the story is overall plagued by weird pacing (although i think it might be somewhat intentional), but it has enough going for it to drag me back in and finally finish it ten months later.

big elements of the games story are key to the experience as a whole, so i'm just going to slap this whole thing with a big spoiler warning. my short thoughts are that eastward is one of the best looking games that i have ever played, and the whole experience is only marred by a story that is paced a little weirdly and is sometimes a bit difficult to get your head around. well worth a look!

feel

the feel of eastward hits you immediately, and there's a good chance that you bought it because of the feel you got from trailers and clips and screenshots. the world is insanely detailed with potentially the best spritework that i have ever seen. there is very little in the way of reused assets except where it makes sense to do so (furniture and combat related items crop up repeatedly, but i can happily give that a pass). every single building is unique with its own structure, history, greebles and crumbling advertisements. everything was hand designed by some of the most talented environment designers i have had the pleasure of witnessing.

the sprite format also works perfectly for this effect, by limiting the amount of detail you can expect to see. this would be much harder to pull off in a 3d engine with realistic assets. when you only have to draw junk and construction debris up to a pixel scale, you can focus on squeezing everything out of a location without fear of not being detailed enough.

these worlds are absolutely filled with people, and no side characters are alike. regular humans, weird mutants and robots all coexist, and while a lot of the dialogue for a lot of them is pretty standard rpg fare, they help sell the feel of an area by giving you a slice of what pepole are thinking about their situation. nothing groundbreaking, to be sure, but not hearing it from a cookiecutter model that has been used multiple times in one area, makes it feel like it's coming from an actual person with actual opinions.

the game's structure also does a stellar job of reinforcing the world itself. while the stop and start pacing does feel very odd and definitely made me lose interest once or twice, it gives you an overall feeling of uncertainty; this place might be really nice, but there is a feeling in the back of your mind that something might go horribly wrong at any moment. potcrock isle sounds like somewhere you should be in and out of in thirty minutes but you actually spend quite a bit of time there. greenberg is unbelievably homely but its a fraction of the amount of time before you're forced to leave. you're in new dam city for so long that it feels like this might be it, and it becomes hard to imagine where else you would even go.

the music of the game is lovely, although i'm hesitant to talk about it much after hearing it quite as much as i did. most of the tracks are under two minutes and can loop multiple times through the games long dialogue and exploration scenes. that whinging aside, the music is a perfect fit for the earthbound nostalgia that the game is playing with and i enjoyed it immensely.

gameplay

when it comes to actually playing the game, the experience is fairly neatly split into combat and exploration. the latter largely covers the time you'll spend in town talking to people, doing small tasks, looking for little side objectives, moving the story along and preparing for upcoming combat. this includes the game's cooking minigame which i see as a deeply iconic and core experience that sets eastward apart from a lot of similar experiences. the cooking itself is fairly simple and very reminiscent of something like breath of the wild: combine three ingredients and an optional spice, try to score a big number on the cooking slots, and then watch a little animation to receive your final dish. ingredients fit into groups (meat, fish, dairy and eggs, fruit, vegetables) which are used to determine about half of the recipes, but more specific ingredient combinations can give you more specific outputs, like pizza, pumpkin soup or takoyaki. the cooking element pulls triple duty, as a way to give yourself healing and buffs during combat, an action that links directly to john's character of being caring and loving, and for making ingredients a surprisingly compelling reward in the combat-based areas of the game.

speaking of combat, eastward provides a fun experience of hacking your way through the wilds to whatever character or mcguffin you need to find to keep the story moving. john is permanently equipped with his frying pan as a short range melee weapon, which has a slow and weighty swing with a bit of knockback, and which gets upgraded throughout the game at key plot points. to my pure delight, each visual change to the frying pan is mirrored in the cooking animation, an attention to detail that i hadn't expected to see. there are also three guns which didn't get heaps of use in my playthrough: a short range shotgun, a short to medium range flamethrower, and a long range sawblade gun. ammo is fairly limited and i found that good placement with the frying pan with its knockback effect made it an easier weapon to use most of the time, even if the damage was maybe a quarter of what the guns provide.

the guns (and bombs) are also used during environmental puzzles, which i found were balanced to be just long enough to not be fatiguing. they're not desperately complicated, but they're also not pokemon-level simple, and some of the latter ones required me to take a couple of goes to get through. for a story based game, not halting the flow for too long is pretty key, and i reckon they nailed it just about perfect.

that covers the majority of gameplay elements! i also thought it worth mentioning that enemy variety is solid, both visually and mechanically, and bosses were also quite fun looking, even if most of them could be completed first go. overall, a really good match for the story the game wanted to tell.

story

i'm really not 100% sure with the story of this game. i felt myself wondering what the point of it was; you don't get that with a final fantasy, for example, because the point is to trust in your friends, stand up for what you believe in, and kill the big monster that is threatening the world etc etc. eastward has all these things, but the courage of the characters is never called into question and is more a bigone conclusion, which leaves any player with a bit of media literacy asking what the experience is trying to tell you. quickly changing settings with a varied cast of characters also sets off my metaphor-meter, even though i don't think there was really meant to be any. while i think i did come to a satisfying conclusion after a little bit of googling (which i will discuss throughout this section, so spoiler alert) i decided that i didn't really care about that, because the dynamic of the main characters is what kept me going.

anyone who has any proximity to videogames in the last ten years or hbo in the last seven months is familiar with the father-child dynamic that has cropped up in telltale's the walking dead, the last of us, 2018s god of war etcetera, etcetera. you take a gruff middleaged man with some kind of trauma and dark past, you stick him in with an impressionable child to form a parental bond, and then you pull out his demons to mess with the whole deal and make some sweeping statement out people being unable to change or forcing their expectations on others or something. eastward is nice because it's the story of a kind man who brings a kid up right and cares deeply for her, and a kid who cares for him back. there's hints throughout that he's got some other stuff going on, and the game explores him wanting to settle down with uva (although i have heard some interesting thoughts about the greenberg people actually being aware of the human harvest, hence their insistence on getting the two of them together asap), but the dynamic is extremely positive to the end. some theories posit that sam was actually put in potcrock isle to experience the worst of the world, but john's love kept her from being jaded about humanity, and set the whole game in motion.

sam's saccharine perspective stems from this relationship; because she isn't jaded she loves to meet new people and approaches the world from an extremely positive place; she befriends the gruff and shady lee, a character who everyone in new dam city sees as cold hearted (and frankly, might still be). this positivity is mirrored by the bright and cheery aesthetic to create an angle on the post-apocalypse that i'd never seen before, and also gives incredible contrast when the more serious moments come to the story. i think this veil is unfortunately broken completely at the end of new dam city, where alva and isabelle disappear and the fate of the people seems shakey; i think that monkhollywood and the lovely ester city are attempts to get you back into a positive vibe to pull the rug out again, but we've been hurt one too many times at this point and the impact was lessended for me.

i was also largely lost by the time travel, the significance of solomon, and the whole ending. i like to the think the end-end is the result of sam's rebirth after joining with mother; she's come back to the world somehow and stumbled on to an older john who has been making it without her. i thing it's meant to represent the end of the cycles caused by mother, but it could just as easily be interpreted as just another one. i feel like we're a bit inundated with time travel and multiverse stories these days, and i honestly would have liked to see the story explored without it; this was my issue with 13 sentinels as well, where too many twists are layered on top of each other and they lose all their punch. at least they didn't pull an "it was all a simulation" one at the end. boom! spoiler in a spoiler.

finally

i think that eastward is truly one of the prettiest games i have ever seen, with one of the most charming worlds i have ever set foot in. i think the conclusion unfortunately let the game down a little, but i loved the story itself and the wholistic experience of the setting that comes from the characters and plots within it.

this is likely going to be a shorter post than usual, but this month's playlist is here

3. sinnohvation - insaneintherainmusic (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

this is maybe a bit more cheesy and self-indulgent than usual, but it's been a really big month and i needed some shameless nostalgia to fall back on.

orchestral reimaginings of scores is hardly new, but it's largely the brainchild of a guy with a single daw who thinks he can really give that classic track the extra punch it had been missing. sinnovation goes in the exact opposite direction, and sticks really close to the vibe of the go ichinose, hitomi sato et. al. original. the difference is that insaneintherain employed multi-track composition done by both him and other performers, as well as the help of a full orchestra for a couple of tracks. while i'm a huge fan of unmodified game score, i think that this might actually be the better experience

2. comfortable silence - tomcbumpz (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
this album / ep is full of a bunch of little musical sketches, and that is my only real complaint with them: i think each track is so lovely and evocative that i would love to see them all fleshed out properly and given time to shine. technically speaking they don't even appear to be that complicated, with each piece only having a handful of tracks in total, but they're woven on top of each other in a way that lets the imagination run wild. i implore you to close your eyes for ten minutes and imagine alien forests or exploring a cave of phosphorescent mushrooms 1. odyssée - jordane tumarinson (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
i feel incredibly predictable rounding out yet another month with yet another solo piano album, but the heart wants what the heart wants. jordane has an incredible skill for storytelling with a single instrument. the album has a classical backbone, and some tracks (e.g. momentum) lean in on it more than others, but jordane brings in a modern feel to the whole arrangement honourable mention - aloe vittoria makes music for you - aloe vittoria

link

(there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
Aloe vittoria · [Album] Aloe Vittoria Makes Music For You

this album came out of my local scene and i found it a really pleasant surprise; i normally have little interest in mumble rap, but some of the tracks really threw me for a loop here with some crazy inventive production.

this month's playlist is here!

3. hello, my name is pipotaku - pipotaku (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i'm going to talk further down this post about my sickly game score depedency and the lengths that i've gone to to kick the habit. while something like the skyrim soundtrack is a bit more complicated, the breakbeat tracks from neon white are a lot easier to emulate. while machine girl has plenty of albums with a similar vibe (gemini is a great example), i'm always keeping an eye on new artists coming into the scene

what sets hello, my name is pipotaku apart from the rest of this flavour of music is a little difficult to pinpoint exactly, but from a purely subjective angle it does scratch a happy little itch in my head. it may be as simple as it being a full half hour of tracks without a dud, or the way that it takes many common breakcore sounds but sharpens them to a razors edge for a really satisfying final experience

this should also be a subtle push to go through and listen to their entire discography, as it sits just barely over an hour and has a comprehensive feel that lets you jump from one directly into the next

2. ultraviolet - kelly moran (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i adore prepared piano and have since i first listened to jynweythek many years ago. you can get really ridiculous about it if you want to, but sometimes simply adding some items to make a piano sound harsher and tinnier adds all the spice that's really necessary to elevate the experience. the piano drives all of the tracks with some light drones performing a harmony role to fill in the overall tone of each piece. i found this super refreshing after both the high energy of pipotaku's discography and the more complex ambient and modern classical music i was trying out through the month

1. asperities - julia kent (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i think (embarassingly) that this album caught my attention because the first track, hellebore, sounds initially like something from the dark souls soundtrack. the string melody fading in and out of the piece in layers reminds me of firelink shrine, but thankfully the rest of the album isnt just aping this same aesthetic

asperities has the aesthetic of a more progressive ambient album, but uses entirely orchestral instruments rather than drones and synthesised sound (at least as far as i can tell). the melodies are repetitive but driven, almost like the opening build up to the big crescendo of a pivotal scene in a fantasy or historical drama, except that crescendo never comes. that might sound negative, but it just means that you get to really absorb the mournful beauty of the sound

other musical musings the skyrim soundtrack minus the skyrim soundtrack

anyone who has had the misfortune of digging into my last.fm might have noticed an absurd trend in my listening habits: close to 10% of the music i have listened to in the last five years has been the skyrim soundtrack. i could gush for hours about how well composed this score is (and i probably will at some point), but it A. makes my spotify wrapped look very embarassing and B. doesnt really contribute to my media literacy in a meaningful way

my solution? create the skyrim soundtrack without using the skyrim soundtrack

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now there are plenty of half assed equivalents to this kind of project, where someone grabs six albums that sort of sound similar to something else and just call it a day, but because this is something i want to listen to regularly, im taking it deadly serious. i'm being very precise about tone, volume modulation and the instruments used in each track, and being quite brutal with cutting out tracks that aren't quite there. i'm also trying to avoid artists whose whole thing is to just make music that sounds like game score (scorewizard in particular), just because it sort of feels like cheating; i want the final product to also be a great source of new inspiration for easing people out of the soundtrack space and into the larger world of ambient music, and that kind of work doesnt really assist that task

this is still a huge work in progress and will probably continue to be so for a while, but blog readers will definitely be the first to know when it's finished

nadia birkenstock (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i have a soft spot for hippie instruments. there, i said it. the harp, hand pan and marimba all have this natural warmth that i simply cannot go past. i suspect that the prepared piano also scratches that itch, hence kelly moran making it big on the list this month. i had the sincere intention to dive into nadia birkenstock this month, so much so that i put her name on the early draft of this blog four or so weeks ago, but that didnt end up happening

trauma center 2 (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i just remembered that this exists and i like it a lot

more stuff that i've been thinking about series of photos of oil rigs

link

if you dont think about the environmental impact these are so fucking cool. oil rigs have this particular hyper industrial look to them that you dont get in many other places and would make for an excellent inspiration for other industrial drawings. it's like hyperconcentrated cyberpunk vibes.

organisation postmortem

i mentioned my bullet journalling technique in my post on organisation and how i sort of skip the larger scale life planning, instead keeping them in google calendar and records of past events in my journal. i do wonder if i should try bullet journalling properly because A. it would allow me to keep more of my thoughts in one place where i can bounce them off each other and B. it would force me to keep my bullet journal at hand more often instead of leaving it in the other room accidentally. dropping google calendar does have the downsides of taking info off the cloud (chance of data loss if i misplace the book) and a lack of noisy notifications to tell me when an event is happening.

a friend of mine also started using evernote and likes it a lot, which makes me wonder if i should get in on it as well. i do know that i dont like taking short term notes on a phone because theres more fuss involved than just scribbling something down, but there might be some benefits i havent experienced before

i also stumbled onto the concept of a commonplace book which seems interesting, but the concept seems a little hard to nail down. i think it might actually just be "a book you put your thoughts and notes in" which i actually already have via my second field notes: this one contains my journals in the back, but also movie notes, shopping lists, recipes, napkin maths etc.

these are my notes from my recent playthrough of fez, where i foolishly tried to translate the in game language before the part where the game just tells you. i cherish how it looks like absolute crazy person scrawlings

finally, i did a bunch of reading and testing to find a game tracking system that i really gelled with. i tried grouvee, rawg, gg and infinite backlog, and eventually settled on last one. the kicker was the too much / not enough information ratio that infinite backlog seem to nail, as well as having a "now playing" list on the home profile page, a-la anilist. i like to have easy access to the games that i'm currently working towards, and that didnt appear to be a thing for most of the other options. a close runner up was gg, which is made by a single passionate dude, and has a nice visual design with quite a lot of creature comforts. my obsidian needs a downsize in general, so hopefully moving the game tracking elsewhere will help in keeping it exclusively to the things that benefit the most from being saved on a simple markdown editor. the two other big ones are music ranking and my rolodex; the former could maybe be done by creating the worlds most simple rym account, and the latter by migrating all of my personal notes to google contacts or some other service? maybe?

feeling this

a little bit of art motivation for ya

stickers

i recently got an excellent deal on a super cool sticker from sealdeer (their tumblr is here). im a huge fan and stuck it straight on my new sketch book, as well as some spares i had kicking around in my stationary box

this got me really psyched on the idea of becoming one of those sticker people that i hear so much about, but i very quickly ran into the dilemma of sticker purchasing: i'm not super aware of any local events that really do them besides horribly overpriced conventions, and your two online options for buying stickers is redbubble and etsy. etsy's real issue is that you have to get each sticker shipped individually, and because a lot of people dont seem to configure their shipping settings that means a single sticker can cost like five bucks to ship domestically. redbubble lets you do bulk orders which brings shipping down to being a non-issue, but the quality is not as nice and there are other fun ethical issues with buying from them.

look back

i really enjoyed reading both chainsaw man and fire punch last year (two serials by tatsuki fujimoto). theyre these crazy raw experiences that separate themselves from the tropes of manga in a way i hadn't really seen before. the content is of course kinda grim and regularly unsavoury, but i like to think that it scratches some of the same itches as zombie media: what are the effects of human beings being put in intense and awful conditions and being forced to fight for their lives without the modern expectations of polite society. the result is a resounding "it's not that good for most people involved" but it also has some moments of pure wonder and positivity as characters manage to make a happy life despite their circumstances

some time this month i was pointed to another of fujimoto's works, a one-shot called look back. it tells a really interesting story of a pair of young artists writing their first manga together, and touches on the feeling of looking back at the past and wondering what could have been. i don't want to spoil anything, but it's a five or ten minute read, and as always it is incredibly well illustrated

journal.html

i added a couple of new static pages to the blog in the last month: journal.html and the infinite nightmare list of artists / pieces / references / things i want to draw. journal.html's main use is just to give me a super simple place to record updates to the site and really minor stuff that i'm doing that shouldnt require a full blogpost. the infinite nightmare is sort of a catch-all for art things that i want to return to because i think that they could be useful. for individual posts i will try to keep that to my pinterest (which is currently going through a reorganisation) but this page gives me flexibility to add things that can't be put on pinterest (whole artist pages, nsfw / nude models, wear.net for some reason). it also gives me everything chronologically, meaning that i can see what's been on my mind in the past

you know the drill. top 3 albums at the top, musical musings at the bottom. this month's playlist is here

3. fallwander (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)
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honestly this album (?) ep (?) collection of singles (?)(✅) has made me understand just how terrible i am at media critique. the temptation to go to rym to slob off other people's opinions is overwhelming, and yet i resist, in the name of genuine, unfiltered soul searching

i like to analyse and recommend full albums, but the single nature of this set of tracks makes it a little more difficult to guess how they are intended to be listened to. probably individually, honestly, but i've put them together in reverse chronological order

i sort of feel like singing english with a european accent is a cheat. it works for bjork, and it works here, giving the vocals a slightly alien (for want of a better term) feel, at least for the english-first-language listener. the dual vocalists also evaded me on the first couple of listens: i originally thought that it was a cool digital effect that added a nice layer of texture to the vocals, but i guess it's a cool analogue effect that adds a nice layer of texture to the vocals

the rest of the composition is also lovely: muted drums, a flip flop behind a two handed piano melody and harmony and a more extended, ambient style synth alternative. theres also this incredible effect in good grounds that sounds sort of like a train shifting from left to right? if anyone knows what that is, drop a message in the guestbook

2. scaring the hoes - jpegmafia x danny brown (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i was put onto this album by the lovely aidia. i've dabbled in both jpegmafia and danny brown previously, especially in my deep dark death grips phase, but i was completely unaware that a collab album had come out.

to be completely frank, i've always liked peggy's instrumentals, but i'm not a massive fan of his vocals. the lyrics are usually solid, but the performance isn't my cup of tea, especially when put side by side with the obvious comparison of mc ride. danny brown, on the other hand, has one of the most out there voices in music, full-stop. i've listened to atrocity exhibition a couple of times, and while it is nice to listen to something so experimental and varied, it's a little fatiguing.

so along comes the combo of the century, with these two powerhouses to put together an album greater than the sum of its parts. it leans on enough familiar concepts for hip hop plebians like myself to latch onto, while still bringing out something really new and different.

this is a little goofy, but the hook that probably got me to stick through with this whole album was actually the saxophone used in the title track, Scaring the Hoes. it has this wailing, strained effect to it that burrowed into my mind, forcing me to spend literal hours to hunt down the track it reminded me of:

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hyper-dimensional expansion beam is an incredible album, and i will probably talk about it in the future

1. nice to meet you, we are midori - midori (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i'm on record saying i dont normally love vocals, but i can tolerate (and very occasionally enjoy) them when they are used as an instrument first and for explicit storytelling second [sidebar: i think a consistent throughline between the albums that really inspire me is the ability to do storytelling without any vocals. i might go back over some of my top albums and see if this stands true]

the vocals in Nice to Meet You will probably stand out to you immediately, because it switches between the light hearted and upbeat light music girls-band style that any K-on watcher will be familiar with, and manic, aggressive punk style screaming choruses

on top of this, the instrumentals are their own third thing that doesnt immediately match the last two concepts that i introduced with the vocals. the band's instrument composition is in line with a small four piece jazz band, with a piano taking the lead, occasionally supplemented by an electric guitar, and supported by a drum set and a bass. plenty of familiar jazz vibes bleed into the rock energy of the album, as well as some interesting swing rhythms such as in my personal favourite track Monkey (track 4)

other musical musings inon zur (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i absolutely adore inon zur for his soundtrack work in fallout 4 (and i gather he did the ambient score for fallout 3 and new vegas as well). these albums are potentially some of the most consistent and evocative game scores i've heard, and while they dont scratch the musical storytelling itch of something like the skyrim or final fantasy xiii scores, i like to think that the less dominant vibe is actually a bit of a benefit, as it lets you take in the whole experience as a package as opposed to taking centre stage from the exploration and iteraction elements

it's been a second since i've listened to much of his stuff, so i thought i might give a peek at the rest of his discography. avoiding his other game score, i passed an ear over his suite of four self-published 2022 albums (mad panic, doomsday, dead of night and age of heroes). i'll be honest. these albums are quite bad. i was honestly flabbergasted that someone who has made such iconic tracks could flub so hard at doing something off his own back, but they have an extremely amateur energy that isn't present with the other higher profile albums

i don't have heaps more to say and its probably not worth harping on it too much. thankfully, this doesnt take away from the quality of his previous work. i'll always have you, fallout 4

higedriver - ukigomo (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i'm of the belief that watching a music video forever changes the way that you experience that song (generally for the better). i remembered this song in the middle of a short anamanaguchi kick, and couldn't help but feel the bittersweet victory of the little being running their heart out, despite mortal peril and insurmountable obstacles. it's difficult to figure out how much of that is the intrinsic storytelling of the musical composition and how much is this cute little music video, but i like it nonetheless

teddy - teenage dads (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

this track popped up on the local radio this month, and it's some of the most unapologetically upbeat cheery stuff i've heard in a while. perfect, no notes

patrice bourgeault - birds and airplanes (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i honestly have no recollection of how i ended up on patrice bourgeault's bandcamp, but i loved this little sizzle reel style album. this dude is seriously talented, and i hope he keeps knocking it out of the park

this fucking spotify playlist

link

i ended up playing a bunch of wingspan this month, which is a board game about populating a bird sanctuary. it's basically an opportunity to sit at a table with a bunch of friends, look at bird pictures on cards and listen to birdcalls through the companion app. we decided to amp it up a little, however, and add the community spotify playlist, which goes unneccessarily hard. one of the stars is cosmo sheldrake, an artist whose music was frankly made for this game, especially with their multiple bird-themed bird-call-recording-having albums

i'm the kind of person who feels like theyre always being assaulted by a million thoughts and exposed to a million concepts that i might want to revisit: a cool new art style or technique, a game or album or movie that i want to experience, or a friend i haven't caught up with in the last couple of weeks. this used to cause me a great deal of fomo, or something similar, as these thoughts that feel desperately important fall away was a new task appears. i would then remember that there was something important going on in my head a few hours later, but i would have no idea what that something actually was. i hope that this is a pretty universal experience, and if it isn't i am extremely envious of the people who can just let thoughts come and go (i did learn to do this while doing mindfulness classes, but i feel that the intention there is a bit different)

so i've recognised that i need to do something about the something that i'm forgetting, but i'm not entirely sure what the something i need to do is. in fact, i've just added to the thoughts bouncing around my head by thinking about the thoughts bouncing around my head. it's sort of like the anxiety snowball effect where you start feeling anxious about how anxious you feel

the organisation balancing act

from my fiddling around with different systems, i've landed on two key variables that are going to determine how useful an organisation system will be for you: ease of storage vs ease of recall. an ultimate system would be super quick for you to put your thoughts down and let you go back to whatever you were doing (ease of storage), as well as super easy for you to find a specific note or thought the moment you want to bring it back (ease of recall). unfortunately, it seems like the best of both worlds doesn't really exist. for example, a notebook is insanely quick to write in, but it can be a real job to hunt down something from a couple of months ago. on the other hand, i can store an image that uses a shadow technique that i would like to replicate in a set of nested directorys (art-inspiration > technique > shadow), and then pull up a bunch of shadow technique inspirations when i want to practice, but navigating through all those directories is a nuisance. additionally, what if that image also has a pose that i really like, or what if i forget that theres a specific directory for shadow techniques and i make another one somewhere else?

tagging

the latter issue can be somewhat fixed with tagging systems; theyre much easier to navigate, and they allow you to associate one item with multiple concepts. the real issue is that almost nothing truly supports tagging in a way that i find satisfying. obsidian needs bulky frontmatter, pinterest needs more clicks. tumblr supports it rather smoothly, but racking your brain for everything about the image you might want to recall later sucks, and if i'm on my phone i just want to store it and keep scrolling. you could do it after the fact but are you really going to spend half an hour a day tagging everything after the fact instead of doing something fun? let's not even start on windows' support for tagging. i spent a couple of days trying to work out a script to use image recognition to automatically tag images so that they would be easier to find in local storage, before i was blissfully informed that the clusterfuck that is windows search indexing would basically make that useless

obsidian

let's put storing images and bookmarks on hold for a second and just focus on note taking. i've mentioned obsidian a couple of times now. the app boasts a pretty similar interface to a modern ide and it flaunts the honestly quite solid benefit of keeping all of your note taking to local, simply formatted files. if you can effectively keep your files in parity between all of your note taking devices, this sounds like a great system to take advantage of the benefits of digital note taking over physical. digital in particular actually provides a solution to the issue i dismissed at the start of this paragraph, because a text file is a great place to store references to images and websites with descriptive text and links.

so i had a crack at obsidian for a couple of months. i think the real issue is that it actually has more functionality than the average note-taker needs: the most touted is the ability to make connections between files with tags and links, supplemented by the apps ability to make nifty graph views reminiscent of those maps of the internet:

this is mine! cool right? you can see groups of notes related to music in the top right, videogames in the top left, journals and contacts in the bottom right and general miscellania everywhere else. the real issue is that this system is deeply deeply useless. i have basically never used my links to navigate between files, and the tags are largely unnecessary because i can just remember a word or two that i know is in the title or body of a file and search for it that way

fundamentally, this functionality is designed for researchers and students who have huge complicated webs of concepts and documents that are much harder to keep in (wetware) memory. i've also seen people use them for tracking things like a dnd game, and that looks totally cool. for personal notes, however, i don't recommend it; it's basically the programmer's equivalent of making a bullet journal and spending fifteen minutes on each page writing a title in cursive and ruling each area in multicoloured felt tip pens.

all this said, as a place to keep simple text notes, especially as a holding area for them to be moved elsewhere, obsidian is great. i still use it for many things, especially note tasks where markdown shines (tracking the progress of a software project and the steps required to recreate it is a big one). its more just an issue that obsidian is sold as a solve-all system where i think there are better options

my obsidian thoughts are more or less in line with this great article by fernando borretti where they talk about pushing away from this line of thinking that you need a single tool for organisation

bullet journals

i'm actually writing this out of order for dramatic effect. bullet journals were one of the first systems i tried using after the old faithful "just having a small book on you all the time". i think the bullet journal also tries to be a solve-all system, but its underlying system is genius. for those unaware, a bullet journal is just a list of thoughts, with certain dot points depending on the type:

• a dot for a task
x a cross for a completed task
< / > / V an arrow for a moved task
- a hyphen for a thought
○ a circle for an event

this shorthand makes the bulk of a bullet journal super easy to read at a glance:

i've been using this system with a pocket notebook for years now, as it allows me to take notes of tasks blazingly fast and dismiss them from my mind.

this is technically only the daily log part of a bullet journal: the journal also has a monthly and future log that let you move things out of the daily log when it isn't optimal for them to be there. this seems like a super slick system if the bullet journal is all that you're using, but the next two tools cover these requirements a bit better in my usecase: past events are put in a journal, and future events, as well as high priority tasks like paying bills are put in my google calendar.

journal journals

journalling sucks. i'm sure we've all had multiple moments where we've bought a nice leather bound a5 booklet and written a full page of events and thoughts for three to five days before missing a day and deciding that it's not all worth the trouble. reducing friction is always the trick with these things so i started dividing up pages from my a6 pocket notebooks into eight sections, with one section for each day. this gives me about a hundred words, meaning that i need to stick to the absolute most objective events of the day. i then rely on my feeble mind to recall the more interesting parts of the events that i've written down when i revisit them in the future.

google calendar / maps / contacts

i've been a heavy google calendar and maps user for years. as far as i'm concerned, some kind of online calendar is an absolute must for any adult in the year of our lord 2023, and its the one organisation tool on this page that i would recommend unconditionally. there might be some better options out there, and i do have complaints about how the tasks and reminders are a little clunky, but for blocking out my days it is indispensable.

google maps plays quite nicely with google's other tools, and i almost exclusively use it to tag locations that i want to come up first in searches (⭐) places that i want to go (🚩) and places that i have enjoyed (❤️). it also (creepily) tracks the locations that you've been, which gives me a great record for the times when i do forget and need the info for my journals

google contacts seems a bit obvious, but its super useful for tracking random people that i meet at parties and events. you can also save important data about people like birthdays and anniversary dates, and the notes tab lets you stuff whatever else you want to against their name. i guess my real advice is that contacts are great when used as a place to take any personal notes you think you'll need, rather than just a spot where you keep people's phone numbers.

art organisation

keeping my art references and inspiration in check is truly an unfathomable clusterfuck. i like to keep track of video and image tutorials, construction images and stylistic inspirations in terms of character looks, expressions, techniques, composition. i also like to hold on to specific artists who tick a bunch of these boxes, because they act as a bit of a box of all these valuable pieces, as well as someone who can be contacted for info and advice. this data is spread across my tumblr, instagram saves, pinterest, phone storage, pc storage, and bookmarks and open tabs on my four devices. it is frankly impossible to keep on top of.

of all the ways to organise your art references and inspiration, pinterest has the most potential, as you can pull images and videos from anywhere* on the internet and arrange them as you see fit. pinterest is understandably a boon for a lot of artists, but it is very easy to organise your references poorly and find yourself facing down the problem from the start of this post: an awful combination of poor ease of storage and poor ease of recall.

aggregators

if you've checked out my links page, you know that i get into data aggregators pretty damn hard. the impact of giving a company your personal habit data for free is questionable, but each of these sites lets me do tracking tasks in a way that is specific to each medium: last.fm automatically tracks my listening habits and gives me reports on the music and artists i've been listening to the most, anilist can also link to my manga reader, and allows me to record my progress on anime so i can pick them up without accidentally rewatching episodes, and letterboxd lets me make sassy little remarks when i thought a movie was a bit naff.

the one thing that i am dearly lacking is a way to track videogame progress and the games that i am currently playing. i've dipped my toes into backloggery, but found it pretty lacking in features and inconvenient to update.

less useful solutions

three organise methods that i have almost completely done away with are:

google keep - a google based notes app, a la the iphone equivalent. just like it's apple sibling this app very quickly devolves into complete chaos, making it only useful as a last resort when my notebook is buried in the bottom of a bag and i need to make a note right now

bookmarks - browser bookmarks seem like they should have a lot of potential, because they let you store any location on the internet, and they are instantly kept consistent between your devices. the real issue i've experienced with using bookmarks is that you either end up wading through nested directory hell, or you have so many top-layer directories that the bookmark you actually want is impossible to find. firefox bookmarks have a tagging system, which has potential on the surface, but is a little too clunky to keep up to date with in practice.

file storage - this has the same back-to-basics feel as a pen and paper notebook. if you're finding pinterest clunky to move images around, then why not go to the most simple storage system built into your operating system? i do use file storage a little bit; most notably, i will save every image that i use in a piece of art to my pc in case i need it in the future. for mass storage and retrieval however, search is generally lacking, and the issues with keeping files consistent between multiple devices means that it's not my primary go-to

conclusions

my overall take is that this shit is hard as hell. for day to day, my pocket journal / obsidian for long term notes / google calendar for events appears to be doing the trick. i'm probably in dire need of an audit of my pinterest and i might check out grouvee for game tracking

if you're trying to get into better organisational habits yourself, i would recommend the advice of cgp grey from cortex podcast: start simple with paper and work your way up. a notebook will do an impressive amount of what you want to do, and you can identify flaws in it as a system and supplement them with other apps / systems. my one subjective bit of advice in this conclusion would be to be wary of any solve-all solution (for real, read the fernando borretti article)

update 2023-07-10

i am well and truly locked into infinite backlog for game tracking. i was previously using a custom obsidian system for tracking all my game stuff, and infinite backlog immediately impressed me because it used the same tiered system that i had envisioned with states of play and states of completion separated. this lets you track both a list of games that you have and haven't completed, as well as games that you are or are not playing separately. it truly ticks all the boxes for me and i'm super into it

my monthly playlist for mar 23

i thought that last month was a bumper post, but if my draft notes are anything to go by, this one is going to be even bigger. as before, i'll start with the top three, then stick the honourable mentions underneath!

3. message from oasis: forest of ion - takashi kokubo (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

the outside observer might see ambient music as just yoga music or museum ambience, but it spans a super wide range of instrument suites and intentions: i've talked previously about my love for arctic ambient, which brings images of desolate landscapes to the minds eye, largely by layering different drones and slow mechanical noises. i'm also into field recording music, which uses ambient noises from nature as its own kind of instrument; i think it's a super unique style and i can't really find an equivalent in the rest of the music that i know

takashi kokubo has been using field recordings in his music for decades now, and while i'm specifically recommending forest of ion this month, i think you'd have a good time with just about any of his albums. this particular album shifts between a synthesised harmony, a string melody (with some woodwind highlights), and a field recording backing track. the songs are pretty long, so there's plenty of time to focus on one particular element before letting it fade into the background and let the chirping of birds and rustling leaves come back in. i popped on this album when i was feeling particularly overwhelmed last week and just laid on the floor for half an hour; i highly recommend the experience

2. 10000 gecs - 100 gecs (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i first learned about 100 gecs them with money machine a couple of years ago, and i think they're fairly responsible for the creation of hyperpop as a genre. that track and stupid horse lock in the overall style of the band, being aggressive autotune, fast tempos, clipping synths and just enough of a hint of ska that the average listener (aka me) didnt really pick up on it the first time around. it's basically 90's nostalgia from the perspective of gen z, and i'm pretty sure any video using it as a background track is legally obligated to use a fisheye lens.

10 000 gecs leans all the way in on the ska angle but still keeps the high energy beat and the electronic elements that got me invested in the first place. theres a smattering of meme tracks (frog on the floor, i got my tooth removed) but i think the upbeat and genuine feel of the rest of the album meant they could happily jive along with them rather than skipping like i normally might. they use a lot of weird foley in tracks like the most wanted person in the united states, which also feels like it leans into that 2023 internet energy incubated by tiktok, vine and youtube let's-players. i was honestly surprised that this album grabbed me as much as it did, but i'm really happy that 1000 gecs wasn't a flash in the pan type experience, and that we might see a 100 000 gecs in another three years time!

1. music for 18 musicians (steve reich) - erik hall (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i literally just realised while in the process of making this post that music for 18 musicians is actually a composition by steve reich from 1998, and that it seems to be a bit of a pet project for some composers to recreate it themselves with their own personal spin. the original is very analog, i assume because it was performed on actual instruments, and that gives the whole thing a more natural feeling. erik hall's version was just performed by him, and the studio feeling makes it feel a bit more clean and up-close, as if you're having the music piped directly into your head rather than sitting in the audience in a big theatre (which is probably pretty accurate to how the audio was actually prepared). the vocalists and clarinets have been completely replaced with digital counterparts, which makes it feel more like the soundtrack to a cute little puzzle game dealing with grand concepts (thomas was alone, perhaps?). given that i've now only listened to the original once i think it's a bit hard to judge one against the other, but both steve and erik really bring their own special something to the overall experience and i'm now super psyched to check out the original!

honourable mentions whatever the weather (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

you know how i was talking before about how ambient music stretches across a huge range of moods and intentions? whatever the weather manages to hit just about everything in one way or another in a single album and intersects with a couple of other different flavours of electronic music. it's not all hits, and some of the instruments sound a bit flat or simplistic, but it is a super fun bit of experimentation and variety

slow attack ensemble (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i got recommended music for 18 musicians and soundscapes for the emotional-type listener at the same time, probably one after the other or one under the other in the "fans also like" section. both of the albums scratch the same kind of itch, but soundscapes for the emotional-type listener has a smaller ensemble and focuses a bit more on artificial sounds and driving melodies instead of a flowing soundscape. it still kills though!

bigfoot collective - rizkit for the bizkit (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i heard this one on local radio; it's part of a single so its a bit too small for me to put in my top three, but the track is so incredibly groovy that i had to chuck it down here. the bigfoot collective is a 20 piece band based in australia and you've simply got to rep the locals. hopefully i can see them in person some time!

solar fields

listen here

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i went absolutely ballistic on solar fields this month, with 274 listens over the 31 days. i've loved them for a really long time and i think i've mentioned my absolute fascination with ultimae records, their publisher and the publisher of a great number of very similar artists. i was first introduced to their work from the mirrors edge soundtrack, and then the absolutely stellar mirrors edge catalyst soundtrack back in 2016. the really nice thing about their sound is its consistency; i tend to gravitate to artists that have consistent tone throughout their discography, or at least over the span of three or four albums. this means i can really appreciate their work for a couple of hours, and also keeps the music from being jarring if i'm listening to it during work hours

i have a spotify playlist that's basically just every full album from solar fields, and then listened to them exclusively for a couple of days back in the start of march. solar fields' particular vibe is slightly more upbeat than your average ambient track, although it hits a lot of the same boxes (everynoise classifies them as ambient trance, downtempo, space ambient and """psychill""" (i still have a serious aversion to any genre with chill in the name)). this means that it's not always the best music for a certain type of work and i find it a bit too distracting in some cases, but if i really have the momentum up then it's a great time!

besides that, i don't really have anything super incredible to say about them, except that they're one of my favourite artists and that they're well worth a look. i think their new stuff is really nice, or you can try out some of their classics like blue moon station

crater eighters routine (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

i've loved the splatoon soundtracks for ages, long before i actually got horribly addicted to the game itself. 3 is unique when compared to the prior games due to the inclusion of delay lama, a plugin for digital audio workstations that tries to emulate the way that vowel sounds are made by a human voice. this track was included fairly early in to the story mode so the first time i heard it i just went "huh that's pretty funky" and kept going, but now that i've been made aware it's got me even more jazzed about the creativity of this ost

virtual insanity - jamiroquai (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

if lessons in meme culture is anything to go by, the youtube algorithm decided to hit all of us with jamiroquai's virtual insanity music video in march of 2023. i'd heard of jk before but i'd never taken the time to actually sit down and listen to their music, so i knocked out a couple of albums during the month. it's impossible not to adore the guy's positive energy and joy, even when he's singing about how technology is tearing our societies apart

五光発條 × Sountrive「GOKO BANE」 (there was an iframe here but rss hid it)

this track is actually one of the first songs that i ever bought back in high school! the piece takes elements from a field recording of a spring factory in kanagawa and turns it into a bouncy driven idm track, combining synths and individual mechanical samples. i stumbled back onto it by complete chance and it was a nice reminder that my obsession with these kinds of techniques has been around for quite a while

some things i've been thinking about lately my art and this blog

i've only been ""doing"" ""art"" for the last two-ish years, and i decided early in to focus on my own satisfaction and learning over chasing social media numbers. i have shared my work semi-privately in small artist communities (discord servers mostly) and i do recommend doing that if you're starting out to get feedback and motivation!

i've avoided an instagram or a twitter for showcasing my stuff, just because i don't want to be one of those artists that is forced to vertical videos of sketch timelapses with that "did you know how much it means to us artists if you share our work" audio over the top (i do 100% understand why people do this and don't really judge them though; if you want to make a career out of art it really seems that shit like this is the only viable option. i also super love watching peoples progress in timelapse for my own learning)

all this said, i think this blog might make for an excellent place to share my stuff, given that it doesn't have the social media stench attached to it. the real stinker is finding a good portfolio layout, but i'd be happy to throw some of my stuff up here. maybe when i get good enough i'll even make a dedicated instagram!

i made a sona the other day! i like them a lot! i don't know where to put them! here you go!

i'll probably also make a masterpage or a regular post with artists that i'm jiving with. my current little taste test is peter6409, who has that very artstation object concept artist vibe that i really like: peter6409.artstation.com/ // twitter.com/peter6409

art by peter6409 on artstation

finally, i'd like talk about how i manage inspirations and references across the internet (spoiler: it's messy). i'm currently having to reorganise about a hundred tabs that i left open on my laptop from twitter and tumblr posts that i want to use, which is hopefully something that i can work on

love hultén synths

lovehulten.com

a friend sent me a link for love hultén, a person who makes some crazy looking 80's inspired (i think) electronics that are actually functional! see: this machine that transmits electrical signals from cacti and runs them through a synth to create music

desert songs by love hultén

there are all kinds of things on this site, including some videogame consoles and furniture in their particular flavour, but mostly just a boatload of synths

smsl c200

i'm heavily of the opinion that audiophiles are deranged and could spend their money elsewhere, but i do recognise the benefit of some of the more entry level audio gear: more power to run higher beafier headphones or unpowered speakers, support for balanced (if that's your thing), lower noise floor, a nice big dial on the front for when a game decides to run at 0 db and blow your eardrums out.

i've had a couple of desktop dacs and amps since i started taking pc stuff seriously: the infamous schiit stack, and some nice jds labs gear (dac), (amp). i've had complaints about both of these setups:

1. they all use wall warts, which are large, making them difficult to slot onto power strips. the weight also causes them to randomly fall out. theyre also chinese imports and the shells are very weak; i've broken all but one of them and only actually remember physically holding one when it broke
2. the import prices to australia for these things is absurd. both kits are budget friendly options in the states, costing around 200 usd. buying them in australia will cost you closer to 500 aud, which is still close to twice the price, even after currency conversion
3. my modi mysteriously died one day. in a way this is a benefit of a stack rather than an all in one, as i could just replace it with the aforementioned jds labs ol dac, but my magni wall wart fell out of its power strip a couple of weeks later and managed to land pins down, jamming them all the way into the body of the power brick

this all led me to the hot new thing in audio, which is to embrace the weird, less well documented world of chinese first party equipment! the smsl c200 is yet to disappoint: power management is inside the unit, removing the risk of falling power bricks or weird power strip incompoatibilities. the build quality is better than any of the previously mentioned items (the jds labs atom is particularly mild on this point, being very flimsy feeling injection moulded plastic). the case is aluminium with really solid inputs and a super pretty stepped knob. finally, the whole thing is 300 aud, shipped. it took about a month to come from aliexpress, but american import would be slower and addicted to audio in aus isn't super quick either.

look at the cute little bluetooth antenna on this creature

long story short, i really recommend this piece of gear. an all around better unit for a much lower cost.

these delightful little modular cardboard containers

jerswoodshop.com/cardboard-hardware-boxes/

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i randomly got recommended a video of these little boxes by jer schmidt. they're made out of normal corrugated cardboard, which makes them a thrifty option, and the very particular design decisions make them super sturdy. i don't really have enough tidbits to make use of a drawer of them, but the design is so well thought out that i couldnt help fall in love with them, at least conceptually

what i'm up to at the moment

• just finished the witness
• making a considered effort to properly learn anatomy, largely via bridgman's constructive anatomy book
• catching up on the ifsc (climbing) comps that i missed from last year
• playing wolfenstein 2
• completed a website for my podcast! twofiveoh.com
• in covid iso (my partner is sick)

catching the programming bug really cannot be overstated. this is my fourth night in a row where i've accidentally gone to sleep at 3am because i've been making amazing nonstop progress on the website. tonight alone i've implemented the homepage tiles and a system to automatically populate the "newest" post on the first tile (which took a little more wrangling than expected). that new system also allowed me to add in a next and previous button which should make the site a lot easier to navigate. i'd like a "back" button on posts to bring you back to the primary collection, but i'd like to do it in a clever way that avoids any manual messing about.

my short impressions from the last few days is that eleventy is one of my favourite frameworks i've worked with in a long time. the system is both super simple to use, allowing you to use garden variety html and css where it's most convenient to, but allows you to extend the painful stuff like templating and navigation with very little setup. i'm also delighted to be using plain css again instead of some kind of framework; since i already understand flex really well (and if you don't css-tricks guide is all you'll ever need) i've been able to absolutely hit the ground running without having to memorise any extra tags and syntax.

outside of the programming hole, i've been listening to a dangerous amount of solar fields (150 tracks in the last two days) which i guess is a testament to how good of an artist they (especially if you're in the mood for some slightly energetic, slightly contemplative ambient). i might write a post on them because i find their flavour of music and the crossover between them and the other artists on the ultimae label really interesting.

i also watched the 1960s film The Apartment yesterday, which was a real breath of fresh air after the second and third indiana jones films. a really well written romantic comedy (although more romantic than comedy) with some super solid characters. we don't see enough spineless wuss protagonists these days, it's a really fun archetype if it's done well.

for those unaware, my close friend doug and i have been playing an on-again-off-again game of divinity: original sin 2 for more than two years, but we've got back on the wagon recently. the game has been a lot more fun to play after finding out about the lost sinners honour builds. these builds make the game more of a fun challenge than an impossible hurdle that requires several restarts per battle. turns out you need to treat character builds more like a classic rpg than a game of dnd; the latter has a game master who can tweak the difficulty if you're getting thrashed, while divinity will punish you for not giving your summoner enough constitution.

my monthly playlist for feb 23

as the playlist suggests, i listened to quite a bit of new stuff this month. some of it was bad, some of it was reminding myself what noisia sounds like, some of it was my playboi carti friend continuing to try to convert me. i actually had a really tough time narrowing down the list this time, so i squeezed in some honourable mentions at the end.

3. woof woof - arthur

i don't really go for vocals in music as a rule, but woof woof by arthur really brings something a bit out there. i hope that the lyrics represent a bit of a character for the vocalist, because otherwise they have gone through some shit. the performance also reminded me of pinc louds which is always something i appreciate, and the vibe in general doesn't require much introspection into the experience; it's just an exaggerated(?) outpouring of emotion over bouncy instrumentals.

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2. hazardous bubble basics - golemm

besides the obvious options (machine girl, nanoray, golden boy) breakcore music can be really hard to recommend due to its low barrier to entry (i want to coin the term "the vaporwave effect"). a lot of it is just crap with overuse of the amen break and boring generic soundfonts, and a lot of the compositions are also really short, sub 3 minutes. this is the case for one of my favourite tracks, ghost by zaphyre but in that case, and this case, i'm happy to give it to them anyway. is it worse to have an eight track album that's barely fifteen minutes, or stretch out a two minute sketch to four minutes just to shut people like me up?

hazardous bubble basics has an interesting funky vibe on top of the high tempo and punchy beats that i love, which is why it won out against andromeda by windowshopping and basement popstar by gnb chili which both had bangers, but also a lot of misses.

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1. the electric state - simon stalenhag

i was honestly flabbergasted to find this even exists. for those unaware, simon stålenhag has been my favourite artist for a long time. i adore their ability to merge the mundane world with the futuristic / fantastical, as well as their incredible skill in digital rendering. they've written a couple of books, a ttrpg and a netflix original fleshing their worlds out, so it only makes sense they would pull a burial - streetlands and make the audio equivalent of the gritty, spooky world that they're invisioning. this was a super nice experience that i revisited quite a few times during the month.

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honourable mentions farveblind - all clubs are bastards

listen here
a bit of danish electropop never hurt anyone, but this one dodged the list because it wasn't really the most unique experience. i do love lucy love's feature on rock 'n rolla and the general vibe of the whole album is very upbeat, but it's definitely not coming out out at the next experimental night.

noise0002 - eldia

listen here
variety is also the name of the game here, as this is a guest feature album. it's also a breakcore piece, which means that it has the appealing fast tempo and punchy drums, but also the kind of questionable quality on some tracks that you get with genres with a low barrier to entry. the first half of the album has a lot of dreamy """chill""" tracks that i really enjoyed, but the inconsistency of the second half is what kept it off of the podium for me.

compositions for piano - the flashbulb

listen here
this one was a spotify recommendation based on my drill and bass / idm / genres are stupid experience with µ-ziq and squarepusher. it seems that the flashbulb has heaps of other works in that kind of genre neighbourhood, but compositions for piano is more conventional modern classical, maybe with a little bit of a twist as a result of the flashbulb's pedigree.

i always have a moment when engaging with a piece of media that has "changing the game" status on launch. besides the subject of today's post, the most recent example i can remember is everything everywhere all at once. it's impossible to not be aware of the hype before you get in on the show or film or game yourself, and i find that i spend a huge amount of time wondering whether i actually like it or whether i feel like i should like it. this said, i think i did like everything everywhere, and i think i like pizza tower as well, despite the hordes of video essayists raving about it en masse. they don't really have anything insightful to say about the experience, and neither do i, so i might just cut to the core of my feelings.

feel

you know how kids in the early 2000s would get given a gameboy or a playstation but because the parents had just made a pricey investment they had no interest in actually buying a top shelf game for it, so you end up with planet monsters for the gba and play it front to back because there isnt another option? i had sonic advance 2, which definitely wasn't the worst game i've ever played, but this particular "go fast at any cost" experience left a little to be desired. a horrid combination of viewport size (small) and map design (weird) meant that you could only get the wonderful sense of speed and fluidity that sonic promises by learning the maps and getting a bit lucky. more often than not a really fun feeling back and forth of horizontal springs and loops would be shot down by a 1 block high wall and a rising spike.

pizza tower feels like applying the 2d sonic concept against 2020s era movement game sensibilities. slapping a couple of extra moves (wall runs, drifts, super jumps) onto the moveset means that you only need a fraction of a second to recover if you're about to hit a wall, meaning you can realistically play twitchily and take the environment at play time without having to memorise it. the grab being intrinsically a forward moving action, and actually acting as a boost if you want to hit high speed from standing, vastly improves on a jump that requires you to slow down to hit a target unless you have the perfect speed and placement.

these obviously arent the only movement techniques you have on hand but i think theyre the most important for making the game feel so smooth.

structure

i mostly just want to use this to talk about the final boss fight. the rest of the structure of the game is perfectly serviceable and simply facilitates you pushing through a sequence of cool areas while very calmly encouraging you to go back if you just blast through them without looking for secrets or collectables. zero complaints there 👍

my one issue structure-wise is the boss fights, although this is hardly a unique complaint. the gameplay is pretty different and i didn't feel like it was really explained. i also wasn't very good at them, but i'm fine with being bad at boss fights if i can be pretty good at (and enjoy) the rest of the experience.

final boss spoilers this thankfully does not apply to the final boss. i weirdly found it to be the easiest boss in the game, and it did a great job of challenging me _just_ enough while giving multiple satisfying and punchy scenes bundled into one big fight. the reveal of pizzahead is delightful and was legitimately unexpected, and even though it was desperately obvious since the beginning of the game, i couldnt help but grin doing the crumbling tower escape.

i know that that wasn't the most in-depth or insightful input on the finale of the game, but i feel like i need to at least attempt to put into words how much fun i had with it. after a bit of a string of puzzle games ending in well meaning but somewhat limp conclusions (antichamber and manifold garden), it's nice to get back on form.

aesthetic

this is probably the area of the game that has been most harped on about by video essayists, but the art style is a breath of fresh air with its ms paint-ass wonky lines and paint bucket tone. the energy of peppino spaghetti and the games cast of characters is extremely chaotic, but i think the most important takeaway is that it has a different tone to the warioland 4 that inspired it. peppino is equal parts desperate and courageous which basically just means that he can be the best of both worlds when either situation demands it. most importantly to my personal enjoyment is that they dont lean on any gross humour like wario does. farts and breathing raw garlic breath arent really that funny and don't endear me to a character, sorry.

before i started writing this segment i was planning on being a contrarian and saying that the soundtrack wasn't that memorable, but after listening to it through i do have to confirm that it's pretty good. i wish that people would stop fixating on pizza time because theres plenty of other goodies in there. that track in particular is excellent for hyping you up for the final escape, but i think something like splatoon's now or never does a better job, potentially because it's guaranteed to end on a perfect crescendo. my questionable pizza tower skills meant that half the time i would end the level about 60% of the way in, where the song is just starting to build up again for the actual good players doing a second lap to get a p ranking.

==>

art by dailyhatsune on tumblr

3. you always will be - dylan henner

gnarly evocative ambient album that changes in tone and style over the hour to write a really sweet narrative

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2. world is yours - mass of the fermenting dregs

this isnt really a new album but i hadnt heard it before. pretty classic j-rock, think flcl

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1. vivarium - angus macrae

one of the best neo-classical albums ive heard in forever, feels like a really good cohesive movie score

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