This week in particular felt excruciatingly slow, work was busy all the time and I really couldn’t catch a break as often as other weeks due to my workmate going on vacation. However, I still managed to do a lot with the spare time I got, and my weekend was amazing as well, so I can’t complain at all.
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🌐 Went to another Indieweb Event! I actually brought up the topic of the new Mastodon share button there and even made my implementation on the fly. It was a very short blogpost too to accompany it.
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📦 Ordered (and returned) some phone cases. I was mildly interested on trying some cases that are only just the borders of the phone—I have a Nothing 3(a) by the way—so I found some metallic ones that I screw in place and such. Sadly, they are just too bulky, and the smooth surface of the aluminum is just too slippery for my liking. I returned it all by walking downtown!
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🏷️ My first physical game was purchased… as I returned the phone cases, I actually picked up Pokémon Legends Z-A from the delivery office… yeah. In a way I feel alright since it was cheap and I don’t mind
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📙 I purchased a physical book, since I recently learned that Denis Villeneuve is working on a movie for Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Redezvous with Rama after Michał revewed it, so I kind of wanted to get a copy for myself. I’ve been curious about visiting more of Clarke’s works, especially because Childhood’s End continues to be on my mind.
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🥩 I went to a BBQ party! Some friends from church got together and we ate some good steak and sausages and the like. I also got a call from my sisters in the middle of it all, and we all had a good time chatting and enjoying the food, I was stuffed, but it was worth it.
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🗺️ I found my Hollow Knight map! After a few weeks without success, I decided to check out every box in my physical Switch collection and finally, after opening up my Final Fantasy VII+VIII Twin Pack box, there it was! My Hollow Knight map was safe and sound and now it’s safely stored flattened alongside my poster of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.
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🃏 Card games were played. We had a very nice match of Oh Hell! with my friends on Sunday! It had been a while but it’s still as fun as ever. We listened to the soundtrack of Plants vs Zombies while playing! after that we had a round of Spoons, and for that I put up the soundtrack of Q-UP, it was exhilarating.
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✍️ I’m quite happy with my blogposts this week. I don’t often list or talk about the posts I do during the week—they are already there anyway—but I’m actually rather happy not just with the post, but the feedback and the conversations about them! So many suggestions for music on Bandcamp, inspiring some people to try and do a one-page notebook, etc!
Watching
- 🌎 Orb: On the Movements of the Earth - Watched up to episode 4. This anime takes place in the Middle Ages, when most of Humanity and the Catholic Church held the belief that Earth was the center of the universe. The rest is heresy and prohibited. We follow the journey of a young kid with a great future ahead of him, going to university at an early age to study theology. However, his love for astronomy will lead him to the heliocentric model and the search for truth, all to uncover the beauty of the space above. This is some top tier writing and plot, absolutely worth a watch I’d say. It deals with some complex topics rather interestingly, it almost made me cry already, so, beware.
Reading
Completed
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👨🚀 Planetes by Makoto Yukimura. - This was absolutely wonderful to read. The art was incredible, the characters were so good. Filled with interesting dialogue, thought provoking moments, slice of life fun, and a lot of great hard science fiction concepts. I’ll probably have to write about this one on a separate post. I absolutely, highly recommend giving it a read.
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🚀 Persepolis Rising by James S.A. Corey - I mentioned on my last weeknotesthat I’d try to finish this book by “next week”, and well, It only took me a day to fly through 20 more chapters. This was a great read, and I already published my review for it so, just go there. TL;DR: Read the series already.
Started
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🌳 Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss. - Read up to 32%. This is a book by the same author of Hothouse, one of my absolute favorites, with an incredible setting and world-building in a matter of pages. Such excellence can be glimpsed in this novel as well, which was his first published book. The premise seems quite interesting already, although it definitely has some dated elements showing through. Nothing too unusual for the 50s though. The premise seems to have been played up countless times today, but I am happy to have not experienced any of those, I really enjoy the execution here so far anyway.
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🛸 Jujutsu Kaisen Modulo by Gege Akutami - Read up to chapter 2. This is a new entry into the Jujutsu Kaisen universe set decades after the events of the original run. The protagonists are the grandchildren of some of the sorcerers we know and love, and the premise revolves around an alien civilization that has come to Earth, and share the same powers as sorcerers do. Unlike JJK, Gege only does the writing here, and so far it has been awesome, the art by Yuji Iwasake is still great as well! Looking forward to the rest.
Ongoing
- ⚔️ Kingdom by Hara Yasuhisa - Read up up to ch. 864. These past couple of chapters have focused on a conflict between archers. It’s a small arc within the war, but it actually got me tearing up when I read it this week. These characters are awesome, but the weight of it all, the emotion, the writing. It’s simply incredible stuff, and I didn’t even remember these characters existed like 10 chapters ago.
Gaming
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🥐 CrossCode - Continued to play through this game and some incredible revelations have been made. I completed the sixth and seventh chapters after playing for almost five hours. Had some epic boss fights, action sequences and parkour sections here, not to mention the storytelling and character development have been top notch thus far. There was a twist to the plot that was done super well, and I am really looking forward to see how the rest of the game continues. Really good stuff.
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👾 Into The Breach - I have had the itch to return to a solid tactics game and I thought I should revisit Into The Breach. I played it for 3 hours in a day. This is such a great game that gets my head gears turning like nothing else. One wrong move and things are over, even though I have all the info I need for victory, my brain ain’t big enough.
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🐾 Grapple Dog - Didn’t play very much, but I still progressed through a few more levels of this platformer. It’s fun to move around on and completing all the levels in full is fun, I could go for them again and try to speedrun them too, but I wanna finish the game first.
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🗡️ Caves of Qud - I tried the tutorial and this one seems to be super duper deep. I want to give it a fair shake though, and see what it has to offer, but I only played it like 30 minutes, so I still have a lot to learn.
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🥊 Super Smash Bros Ultimate - Had a super quick match of things one before we had to leave, maybe next weekend!
Around the Web
Blogposts
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Long Books Are Good For You - If you aren’t careful you will end up reading 500 pages in 3 days, or less.
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About my book notes - It’s always fun when Derek Sivers shares some thoughts about his book notetaking, or about anything at all. Except that I only read fiction and I don’t take notes for those.
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Handwriting a blog - I’ve done this before! and it’s pretty fun to see others doing it, I love the little drawins on the side too.
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Mailcall - Axxuy wrote about sending actual physical mail to people. Writing letters is something I’ve been interested on trying for a while. I already own a letter to a friend who sent me some stuff overseas… One day.
YouTube
- Wii Sports Resort - Intro - Move out of the way Final Fantasy VII! This is the best videogame opening sequence of all time. Just wow.
- I Built a Tiny E-Reader - This is a fun open source project! a super tiny e-ink screen reader that I actually kind of want to build.
- Playing around with my Xteink X4 and my experience was… Simple - This is a tiny cheap e-reader that seems to be forming a community around it. Sadly it seems KOReader will never run on it. Although its next iteration might.
- How to defeat the backlog - I watched this video while I was searching for my Hollow Knight map, digging through my 70+ physical Switch games.
- I Tried To Quit Spotify. It Cost $5,000 - It’s always cool to find the Innioasis Y1 in the wild! Well produced video too, but I disagreed with its conclusion a bit.
This is day 31 of #100DaysToOffload
