Music, games, and pet care

Yet another week goes by, and the world keeps spinning. A lot of stuff happened, let’s get through all of it.

🐕 My dog is doing much better now after the car accident—he is as grumpy as ever. However, he seems unable (or unwilling) to move a leg, and we haven’t had a chance to take him to the vet again. He doesn’t want to put weight on it, but he also doesn’t react when we touch it or hold it. I’m worried it may have gone numb or something like that, we didn’t notice this the moment we picked him up from the clinic because we were holding it the whole time, I would’ve brought it up immediately, can’t believe I didn’t think to check it, but even then we might have been told it would get better later. We’ll see.
✉️ I received a mail from an online friend! it was a beautiful letter and a welcome surprise! I won’t give names, but they know. Thank you so much!
🏢 My co-worker went on vacation last week, and I had to cover for him for a couple of days. Thankfully nothing too bad happened and I got it all under control! Although I was still a bit stressed in the moment.
🚮 Did some volunteer work on the weekend and cleaned up some trash around the neighbourhood! There was quite a lot of plastic and glass bottles, caps, bags, and the usual, I forgot to wear sunscreen and I think I am now browner than normal. A lot of neighbors and some friends from church showed up and we were done in… not that much time!
📻 I’ve acquired quite a bit more music lately given my recent enthusiasm with music albums, some of it was from Bandcamp, some of it was the result of “seeking within my soul” ;)
📁 Organizing music files (and files in general) is usually as much fun as actually listening to the music (or playing the videogame, or whatever equivalent. I ended up using Picard to tag some FLAC files that were missing some metadata. Good stuff!
🎼 Unfortunately, I’ve had mixed results with some japanese music metadata, because I prefer the name to be readable in English, but then ListenBrainz’ scrobbling will not recognize the song properly—or it will get assigned to the wrong album. I may have to come to terms with just using the artist names in japanese characters.
🟩 I mentioned it on a short updates post but I’ve been playing some online word games (like Wordle) to pass some time and it’s been really fun to engage on these again. I’ve returned to some like Waffle Game, and discovered new ones! Such as Tiled Words, which is my current favorite!
🃏 Played some The Mind with different people and the experience was quite awesome as well! Someone suggested to play some music and I thought “what better music to get in the zone than some Balatro?”, so I just played a loop of that from YouTube. We managed to reach level seven!

Gaming

I was kind of surprised at what I accomplished this week, and at the amount of games I played! Interestingly enough, I barely touched Slice & Dice this time around.

Completed

Soul Reaver Remastered - This was a fantastic game, enough praise was given in previous weeknotes, I’ll save my commentary for the review itself!

Ongoing

CrossCode - I promised Amin and Steffo I would finally join them to this game after beating Soul Reaver. I heard of this game a while back and I actually got it on Steam a couple years ago. Eventually I got my Switch and decided the chances I’ll play it were higher on it. So far that’s the case! I’ve played it around 5 hours now and it’s great. CrossCode is about venturing in an MMO while trying to recover my lost memories. So far I’ve done a bunch of sidequests as I wait for my friends to catch up to the spot we agreed upon.
Hollow Knight: Silksong - I finally returned to the world of Pharloom! But I only played it like an hour or so. I’ve found a new silk expander and uncovered a secret here or there. Next time I plan to face the final boss for once, and maybe try to unlock Act 3!
Fullmetal Furies - My friends and I decided to return to this and finally did a boss fight we got stuck on last time we played. It was actually pretty complicated and we had to grind a couple of times to improve our stats. In the end we managed to win though, and it was great.
Ember Knights - We did a run of this one with relative success. Compared to FMF, the optimization for it is much worse, something we already knew, but playing one after the other, the contrast is huge, it doesn’t run great on Switch at all but we still played it a bit.

Reading

Exit Strategy - The fourth novella of Murderbot is upon us. I’ll admit I have barely read anything this time around, I just had other things to do for the most part. I even forgot my Kobo today, as of the writing of these notes, tragedy ensues.
Ariadne in the Blue Sky - Read up to chapter 200. There are only 17 chapters left! This manga has turned out to be pretty awesome, and I am really looking forward to see if it can stick the landing.

Music

What is this? a new section for the weeknotes? Well, I used to mention music during my Monthly Summary early on but it was pretty much always the same stuff.

This time the same is kinda true, but we’ll see. Just listicles to be found here! I added some emojis to differentiate between videogame soundtracks, electronic or instrumental, and songs with lyrics.

Maybe I’ll keep this for the monthly summaries, or even just yearly ones, still thinking about it.

Top Albums

Okay so, as you may tell, I was litening to full albums this time, so the sheer amount of tracks contained on these albums was enough to put some above them all in the stats… anyway. Here are the top 12.

🕹️ Celeste OST by Lena Raine
🕹️ Hyper Light Drifter OST by Disasterpiece
🕹️ 1000xRESIST OST by Drew Redman & Line Katcho
🕹️ RIDGE RACER PSP OST by Bandai Namco (Various artists)
🤖️ TRON: Legacy by Daft Punk
🎙️ Tokyo Sniper by Ryusenkei
🎙️ Steps by Yurie Kokobu
🎙️ Magical by Junko Ohashi
🕹️ Jet Lancer OST by Fat Bird
🎙️ WAVE by Anri
🎙️ Timely!! by Anri
🎙️ Cologne by Kaoru Akimoto
🎙️ Love One Another by Furui Riho

Top Tracks

Okay, so, the rest of songs here are just Celeste tracks so maybe I’ll leave it at 5 for now.

🤖 Rinzler by Daft Punk
🕹️ Prologue by Lena Raine
🕹️ First Steps by Lena Raine
🕹️ Resurrections by Lena Raine
🕹️ Reflection by Lena Raine

Around the web

Blogposts

“Let people enjoy things!!” - With AI slop running rampant and lazy content dominating the media, it turns out that criticism of “pop” media (or, being kinda snobby about music/movies/whatever) is making a bit of a comeback. Honestly, good riddance lol.
Everything is Broken - A compilation of stuff that is broken, I kind of wanted to write something like this, but most of my stuff actually works? Or maybe I’ve just gotten used to it, will check.
It’s In The Game - This is an awesome essay about how videogames were like board games that came with everything in them, and how they becamse infinitely updated always online messes filled with microtransactions. And how Kirby Air Riders returns to the old way. I hope this sets a trend, honestly.
there’s a first time for everything - Tiramisu went to a creating writing workshop! And well, it went alright! Immersive and entertaining as always.
Smartphones are not the enemy - Some good advice right here! Also some interesting responses as well. Get rid of those notifications and you are 95% of the way there.
Not So Simple - Linkrot is a real problem, archive what you can, but accept that there won’t always be a way to refer or access the links you share. Whole websites can be gone all of a sudden.

Videos

Adam Savage Shocked by This Practical Effects Prop From Hellboy! - I love physical props in movies and this one was absolutely mindblowing. It was great just to see it in action!
The Most Controversial Children’s Book in History - I had never heard of this book before, not speaking English as a kid and such, but I enjoyed the journey and story of this video.
Building pawns that transform into every piece - The engineering behind these pieces was awesome to watch. Is this Chess 2.0?
Your Kindle Can Finally Be Jailbroken Again - If you have an Amazon Kindle, now it’s the time to free it from the oppresion of Jeff Bezos.