I will also note how worth the purchase is or will be once I play it, in my opinion. This is not based on future pricing or rarity, but how much I’ll actually enjoy the title itself from what I know of it, and how expensive it is compared to getting it digitally. My list is in alphabetical order.

Also, if I don’t remember what a game is about from the title and memory alone, I’ll let you know, that’s probably a sign I shouldn’t have bought it, but I sometimes buy obscure unknown games because of that! Besides, I think at least one reader will be like “that game is so good, you better give it a try right now” or something.

• 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim - I have heard some incredible things about this title when it comes to its setting and story. I am still unfamiliar with most of it, I know it’ll involve mechas and high schoolers though, maybe even some time travel? I am interested on the scenario those protagonists will have to face. I think this one’s worth having and playing some day.

• Animal Well - This one’s my most recent purchase. A metroidvania that seems to be focused on exploration and curiosity over combat. I heard amazing things about it and I was there when it came out. Everyone seemed to have something to say. I was extremely tempted to get it on Limited Run Games back then, but thankfully it was published for much less money later, so I’m glad I found it at the price I did. I blame Wouter.

• A Space for the Unbound - The title alone made me want to get this game. And the pixel art seemed amazing too. I think it’s a bit of a coming of age story set in the future, something like that? I must admit I don’t recall the plot of it. I found it for relatively cheap though, even if it’s the European release. The cover looks really pretty too, I am glad to have it with me.

• Astral Chain - This is a title that came out early in the Switch lifespan, and it seems to have acquired a bit of a cult following, even though there has been no sequel for it yet. I believe that just owning it kind of neat. I am yet again unaware of its story, I just know it seems to involve some sort of mecha police, and stuff like that.

• Bo: Path of the Teal Lotus - I was excited by this one, a Metroidvania that seemed somewhat similar to Hollow Knight with a japanese artstyle and setting. I remember seeing it compared to Nine Sols. I am yet to play it but I let a friend borrow it. I got the Japanese release and it doesn’t have Spanish, so unfortunately my friend didn’t understand the plot and kinda abandoned it. The mechanics seems good though.

• Balatro - A fantastic title that I have already purchased three times. Digital Switch version, physical Switch version, and on my phone. What is there to do? It’s an amazing videogame where you use Poker hands to win chips forevermore, that I am yet to win. I haven’t been helplessly hooked by it, but I really appreciate what it has done and the innovation it brought to the scene—even if we are a bit flooded with Balatro-likes lately.

• Castlevania Advanced Collection - I completed Aria of Sorrow pretty much a year ago, and I really enjoyed it! So I decided to get the whole collection, which saw a Limited Run release as well. Thankfully, it was being resold rather cheap in my country, so I didn’t even struggle to pay for it. I should give a go to the other titles in the collection soon.

• Castlevania Dominus Collection - Everyone seems to think that Dawn of Sorrow is the best of the Castlevanias. I am not sure yet, but I want to try it. This was the first purchase I made on Limited Run. It came out with three different covers, and it does look like most of the versions with the cover I liked (from Order of Ecclesia) are rarely sold (or very expensive) so that’s kinda cool. I blame Wouter.

• Celeste - A title I completed on a Christmas before this blog was even a thing. I remember vividly going through it and accepting challenge after challenge of the main path. Years later I decided to buy it, and saw someone from the fediverse sellling their Limited Run copy for a good price! I decided to purchase it from them and well, that cover is just awesome to see. I am so happy to have it with me, now I just need to replay it soon.

• Chrono Cross: Radical Dreamers Edition - Alright, this one’s interesting. A port of a PS1 title that is a follow-up to my favorite videogame of all time! And that cover? Absolutely gorgeous too. The only caveat is how it could affect my enjoyment of the first game or something. Honestly, I am not too worried and I don’t think it’ll be terrible either, I am looking forward to giving it a go someday. I have heard the Switch performance isn’t the best or something? I am not sure though.

• Crow Country - A modern indie game with the style of the PS1, inspired by old school survival horror, such as the Resident Evil games I already played and loved, with a main character that looks like the blocky models from Final Fantasy VII? Why would I not want to give this one a try I wonder? I am definitely playing this at some point. I blame Wouter.

• Crypt Custodian - Honestly, this was so cheap to get physical in my country I am not even worried of buying it. And thankfully, I know that my friend Amin loved it to bits! A sort of Zelda/Metroidvania game I look forward to.

• Dead Cells: Return to Castlevania - The physical version of this game that includes pretty much all the DLC on it. I want to play it soon and have fun with it. This is another one that Amin loves, and I have other friends who agree. It was in fact, one of the first titles I tried on a friend’s Switch. I have heard that after so many updates, the performance of the game has worsened, but if that’s really the case, I’m sure I can wait for the Switch 2 to run its smoothly anyway whenever I buy it.

• Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake - Listening to Into The Aether is very dangerous sometimes, they praised these games so much it was almost impossible for me to resist when I saw them at a very affordable price. Two games completely remade and improved in every way, from archaic and storyless to playable and with characters you actually care about is just awesome.

• Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake - The one that did that trick first, this one was a truly helpless purchase at basically full price and I am yet to even open it. A bit pathetic of me to be honest, but I have a reason to trust this series so much, and it’s the next game.

• Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition - Now this is a masterpiece, a game I’ve dedicated dozens of hours to already. It’s a wonderful game that has been featured in plenty of my posts, selected as my desert island game—make sure to check to post if you haven’t, lots of recommendations to be found.

• Emio The Smiling Man - This is another recommendation caused purely becase of Into The Aether—ITA from now on, it’ll come up a few more times—this is a game from the Famicom Detective Club series, a murder mystery visual novel style of game, with some great art and writing, from what I’ve seen. It’s something akin to the Ace Attorney games apparently, although there are some horror elements to it as well. It’s part of my Summer Game Challenge so I may finally play it soon.

• Fantasian Neo Dimension - For a long time I heard of this game being an exclusive for the Apple Arcade that featured music from Nobuo Uematsu and produced by Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy itself! I’ve heard the Switch port doesn’t have the best loading times, but that it doesn’t really matter much either. We’ll see.

• Final Fantasy I-VI Collection - This one was quite the bummer. I bought it when it was rather expensive and it ended up getting more copies produced later, bringing down the price. Definitely a mess-up on my part. In any case, six classic games that shaped what a JRPG is ought to be in one package? Awesome. The games are not as beautiful as the Dragon Quest remasters though, sticking to the original art for the most part with a revamped UI and an ugly text font—which can be changed in the settings at least.

• Final Fantasy VII & Final Fantasy VIII Remastered - The next two games of the Final Fantasy series are here! I must admit, most of these I own just to have a legal copy and feel less bad about playing them with an emulator. In this case, I could start over FFVII, but I have spent like 20 hours already on it, and I may as well play VIII on my Anbernic handheld too. Not the best purchase but cool to have anyway.

• Final Fantasy Tactics - The Ivalice Chronicles - Of course there is even more Final Fantasy here, but this one is a Tactics RPG! That means there’s a grid and characters move like chess pieces. It seems to be a very beloved game, and I’m definitely looking forward to giving it a spin. In case it’s not clear… I own too many JRPGs.

• Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster - This is my most expensive purchase. I got it at a certain price, used. I realized the second game had to be downloaded with a code that no longer worked… I asked for a refund and they refused to give me the full price back, saying it was used and well, I immediately purchased the game right there brand new… Then I realized the Japanese version of the game includes both titles in cartridge, but I haven’t purchased it again, and I hope I don’t… I won’t!

• Final Fantasy XII The Zodiac Age - So many Final Fantasies, I wonder which one will be the real final one. In any case, Zodiac Age was mentioned a lot in some episodes of ITA and I decided I may as well get it too. The only game missing from my Switch collection is Final Fantasy IX, I wonder how long that’ll last…

• Fire Emblem: Three Houses - When I purchased Celeste, this was a title also on sale by the individual who sold it to me! I decided to purchase both to help a bit. This game seems to be beloved by many, and after how much I liked Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, I saw no reason not to give it a go.

• Gris - This is another game I purchased because of Amin’s love for it. What else can I say? It’s all his fault. Its a platformer with amazing art and music, super minimal in design too, will give it a shot someday.

• Hades - This is one of those that maybe I could have saved, as I also have it digitally. But, the game is so good I already finished it! and it also came with the full soundtrack, with a Bandcamp download code. That was definitely a delight to see. Review coming soon.

• Hollow Knight - This is worth having no matter what. Amazing game, I will definitely own Hollow Knight Silksong physical as well, as soon as it goes out of preorder and is available on cheaper stores in my country.

• Kirby and the Forgotten Land - A bit of a homework buy for me. I just wanted a wholesome game to play whenever small kids in my church or extended family visit. It’s awesome and fun for me as well. I just haven’t given it a go in a while.

• Legacy of Kain: Sould Reaver 1 & 2 Remastered - This one was absolutely worth it. Two great games, one of which is already a favorite of mine. I was going to get the Limited Run release of it, but then it was published for normal and I just went for that one. It’s a great collection of ports and the extras are also super interesting to see.

• Live A Live - Along Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, this title is probably one of the most interesting JRPGs of the SNES days, which remained exlusive to Japan for quite a while. This port brings it to modern times with HD-2D, and I am rather excited to give it a go some day.

• Mario & Luigi Brothership - I loved the original Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, and when I saw the trailer for this one, I just had high hopes. I saw it on Walmart on sale and decided to pick it up. It seems like reviews are rather mixed, but I want to give it a fair shot sometime.

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe - This is just a must, let’s move on.

• Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection - A lot of great games that none of my friends have been willing to try in multiplaer, honestly a bit of a fail since I haven’t touched it in ages and I kinda don’t care about playing it myself, maybe one day.

• Metroid Dread - Literally one of the best experiences in gaming I have ever had, the first game I’ve ever completed at 100%. A truly fantastic work of art in the Metroidvania genre, in my opinion. I will probably replay it at some point. I borrowed it at the time but had to get my own copy in the end, worth it.

• Metroid Prime Remastered - This is the game I’m currently playing at the time of writing. After more than 16 hours of playtime, it’s fair to say this game is defeinitely worth it. What a delight, a perfect remaster, in my opinion.

• Metroid Prime 4 Beyond - This was a bit of an impulse purchase this year when I saw it on a deal that was more than decent for me. I think it’s going to be a pretty nice adventure, if not the best Metroid Prime has to offer. Thankfully, I already played that, so I’m ready to have a bit of a mixed experience in Samus’ world.

• Monster Hunters Generations Ultimate - I have Monster Hunter Rise digitally, and it’s the only one I’ve played, but I love Monster Hunter as a franchise, and whenever Freedom Unite on the PSP becomes way too archaic for me—probably never to be honest—I plan to check this one out to keep the old school style of the game alive.

• Nier Automata - Everyone I know tells me this game is one of those that might change the way you look at videogames, and your life as a whole. That’s an experience 1000xRESIST gave me, but perhaps this one deserves a shot as well. We will see! Some say the Switch port is subpar, so I’ll probably wait until I get a Switch 2 to try this.

• Nintendo Switch Sports - I miss the actual Miis having the spotlight, and to be honest, not all of these games are worth playing at all. But I really enjoy Golf, Bowling and Volleybal with friends, and that’s all that matters to me.

• Octopath Traveler II - Although I haven’t played it, a friend borrowed it from me and has more than 40 hours of playtime. I know this game is worth it, and someday I’ll check it out for myself. One of the great JRPGs of modern years.

• Outer Wilds: Archeologist Edition - This is a title that is another life-changing experience. And after 11 hours I can truly confirm this is already the case. I ended up leaving it pending for a bit, but I truly want to return to it soon. It’s a really fantastic game that I would love to finish for the Summer Game Challenge. I got this one because of JP

• Persona 5 Royal - This one seems to be yet another eye-opening experience for many people, although a bit harder to get into than the rest because of the commitment it takes. It should be fun, but I’ve heard the performance on Switch, while passable, is not ideal. I personally paid like 1/4th of the price for it and have no complains, will play some day.

• Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo - After so many heavy hitters, this indie title with a GBA style seems to be more of a fun Metroidvania title with some heavy platforming elements. I got it because of Wouter, although he ended up a bit mixed on it—he’s not as good at platforming compared to me.

• Pokémon Legends Arceus - I had heard so many things and praise for this title for finally giving the Pokémon formula the refresh it needed. I really want to get into it at some point, I’ve never completed a Pokémon title though, so we’ll see.

• Pokémon Legends Z-A - I got this because of FOMO and I haven’t even touched it, I’ll probably love it if I give it a try and some time.

• Pokémon: Let’s Go Pikachu! - This one is actually borrowed, so it doesn’t count. It’s a remake of Pokémon Yellow that seems to be made for little kids.

• Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown - An absolute masterpiece of Metroidvanias, so many quality of life features that have been lacking on Silksong and even Metroid Dread, I love every aspect of this game and I am happy to have it on my collection. The physical version has gone down in price a lot, but I’m glad to have played it when I did. Check my review of it!.

• River City Girls 1+2 - The beat’em up genre is super fun and requested among my friends, so picking this up seemed like a good idea. We played the opening hour of the sequel and were surprised by it. However, right now Full Metal Furies is our multiplayer title, so this is currently shelved.

• Sea of Stars - A title that I actually found because of Linus from LTT, yes, I actually found out about CrossCode and Chained Echoes because of him too. The guy has taste in videogames. Anyway, this title also showed up on ITA and everywhere because it was the indie GOTY in 2023. It seems like there were mixed reviews about it overall though, so I’ll see.

• Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance - The SMT series is a blindspot for me (like Persona, and Octopath, and many already mentioned, but whatever), and it seems extremeley interesting and mechanically rich compared to most others JRPGs . Some day, I’ll give this one a go, it may absorb me completely, which scares me.

• Signalis - This is another one I got because of Resident Evil, although it was before I actually played them. I was thinking of playing it before the classics, but things happened, and now I’m eager to see how it evolves the mechanics in the genre, especially compared to Crow Country. It has a darker feel to it akin to Parasite Eve too, which I like.

• Star Wars Heritage Pack - This physical game contains five titles in the cartridge and two download codes. The game I cared about from it was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a game I tried and loved in my childhood playing on my PSP. The rest seem to be awesome too, especially the Knights of the Old Republic games, which are the ones that are download codes, unfortunately. It was rather cheap though, so nice.

• Streets of Rage 4: Anniversary Edition - This is another beat’em up that actually stuck! Because it’s beatable in a single sitting, unlike the RCG games that are almost like open worlds. In any case, the music, art and overall atmosphere of this game is super cool, worth beating, and probably replaying too.

• Suikoden I & II HD Remaster - This one is another title that I am yet to complete first on my PSP, and then on my Anbernic handheld.

• Super Mario Bros Wonder - a wonderful return to the 2D games of the series, with an incredible art style and excellent courses. Played it multiplayer with friends and enjoyed every second of it!

• Super Mario 3D All Stars - This one is also borrowed and I think it’s best to play the games emulated, and I already have a better port of Super Mario Galaxy anyway.

• Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury - What a title this is! One of the best level-based Mario games ever, can’t complain much about it, wonderfully chaotic in multiplayer.

• Super Mario Galaxy 1 + Super Mario Galaxy 2 - These ports from the original Wii games had a mixed reception because of the price, the games are more than a dozen years old. I paid a lower price myself and have never played them fully, so I accepted the Nintendo tax.

• Super Mario Oddysey - one of the first titles in the system and one that redefines what Super Mario can be! I hope I get to play this one at some point, I got it at a good price and it’s now waiting for its turn…

• Super Smash Bros Ultimate - This is just essential and a must, let’s move on.

• Tactics Ogre: Reborn - As if I didn’t have enough with Ivalice Chronicles, this title seems to be a great port of the original Tactics Ogre, and yes, this is one that Wouter made me purchase, evil!

• Tales of Graces F Remastered - I have never played a Tales game, and this release on Switch seemed interesting enough for me, I saw it mentioned in the TWG Online Discord and I just couldn’t help myself…

• Teenage Mutants Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge - An intense beat’em up featuring the ninja turtles and friends! An awesome homage to the franchise with great mechanics, awesome music and cool moves, I’d say this one’s worth having!

• Trails in the Sky First Chapter - This one is probably a masterpiece, and a very dangerous game to get into, given how it spawns a whole franchise with a dozen videogames I may end up addicted to. Will try it sometime, one of those JRPGs that could change you or something. I even got a special edition of it with a metallic case.

• The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - Quite literally my most played title on the Switch, this game is very much worth it. It’s a fantastic, mind-blowing story, a visual novel mixed with tactics and a Mario Party map. The best part is I am not even done with it yet, it’s so fun. Over 70 hours and counting.

• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild - There’s nothing to say, this game is a must on the Nintendo Switch, a delight that has given me 40+ hours of adventure and awesomeness!

• The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - This one looked so fun, and my sister wanted to play it too! Unfortunately haven’t had the chance to complete it, and I think my sis left it halfway, we’ll see how it goes.

• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - This is quite literally the reason I finally bought a Nintendo Switch, I wanted the Tears of the Kingdom edition, and I wanted the game to match! Unfortunately haven’t had the chance to play it yet… I know it’ll be worth it

• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening - This one is also borrowed so it doesn’t count, but someday…. I may end up playing the GBC version anyway.

• The Messenger - I blame Wouter for this one. A platformer I think? Kinda metroidvania-ish? I heard about it from ITA so that means it must be a good title.

• Triangle Strategy - Every time I try this game I get hooked for like three hours and then I don’t want to play it again. I am in like hour 17 by now and it’s a great title, I just need to get a grip to finish it. It’s borrowed though so whatever!

• UFO 50 - This one is a collection of fifty games developed by a fake company (like a sort of alternate history thing in the plot) and you can just play them all and enjoy! Very retro stuff. Wouter got it too but I can’t blame him this time

• Unicorn Overlord - I found out about this one from ITA and since Wouter got it too I thought why not. It’s a tactics RPG with some very unique mechanics, done by the same people from 13 Sentinels, I think it will be worth it!

• World of Horror - I’ll be honest, I was told by YouTube that this game was rare and got it just because of that. Seems to be a sort of horror detective point and click thing roguelike. Could be worth it though.

• Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord - The ultimate dungeon crawler or something, a genre I am yet to explore in depth. I got this one from Limited Run, and I must admit the quality of the cover left a bit to be desired, I’m sure the game itself is going to be good, someday.

• Xenoblade Chronicles - I heard of this game for so long and I finally played like the first five hours. I was enamored and I want to play it more, I just haven’t picked it back up… I should have put it on the Summer Game Challenge.

• Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - I don’t have 2, but 3 seems to be the one people prefer anyway, I’ll get to it someday…

• Xenoblade Chronicles X - The marketing got me and I was helpless, this one was definitely something I could have done without at least until beating the others. Then again, some people prefer it over all of them.

• Yakuza Kiwami - I’ve heard great things about the Yakuza games from everywhere, I definitely plan to get to this someday, also purchased from Limited Run, bundled with Wizardry!

• Ys Origin - I love the Ys games, sibling of the Trails series but more action focused. This one title promises a lot and I sure hope it delivers.

• Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA - This one though, seems to mark the refining of the franchise on a new direction started by Ys Seven—which I completed—and it was one of the first things I bought more than a year ago. I am eagerly waiting to play it.

Honestly, I know I own too many games for me to even complete, and I’m not even counting my digital purchases.

I am not sure why I am writing this, I thought it would be fun but it just kept going and kinda felt pitiful in the end? It’s not like it matters that much.

Anyway, if you recognize any of these games and would vouch for me finally trying them, feel free to do so. But of course, there’s quite a backlog waiting for me…

Eighty one in total.

This is day 79 of #100DaysToOffload

Let’s start with the lock screen. Last time I was using a custom ROM with no way to customize it. However, since I am using a Nothing (3a) with NothingOS, I can add widgets! I have one for the weather and a global clock, both quite handy!

My wallpaper here is some official artwork from The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom—a game I have not played yet—I paid some silver points to download it from Nintendo’s rewards page because it’s just adorable and I had to have it. Not much else to comment on.

Now, the home screen itself does not have a lot going on! I am using a wallpaper featuring artwork from Into The Aether that is simply breathtaking to me. Best part? It was kind of made for me by the artist after they shared some versions where the artwork was squared or vertical with the planet at the very top. I wanted it centered and did my own version with Snapseed’s expansion tool. The artist took pity on me and gave me a proper one.

Now, the layout and mitself was made using KISS Launcher, which has been my choice for the last couple of years.

Nova Launcher is what I used back in the day, but after a whole mess that just keeps going, it’s just not worth it anymore.

KISS Launcher offers a minimal template to start building up from. I have the Minimalistic UI turned on, which let’s me add widgets to an otherwise empty screen. I just have a digital clock. I also have a row of favorite apps and the KISS search bar at the very bottom—with a three dot menu to see some settings and an app drawer button.

I set it up with a transparent theme, so it’s as simple as possible.

My row of favorites features six apps. I am starting to become a boring adult, so the first one from left to right is the phone app, I am currently using Fossify Phone, since it does what I need and not much more.

The next one is Fennec, a fork of Firefox for Android that has some extra plugins and honestly works just fine for all of my needs. I prefer to avoid Chromium browsers when I can. Fennec disables some of the telemetry of vanilla Firefox too, although I’ve heard there’s more privacy-focused alternative like IronFox, Ice Raven and iode Browser.

Next up, Signal, my favorite messaging platform. It just works and it has worked for many years now. Thanks to usernames, it has been easier than ever to make groups with the friends I’ve made online. It does everything I want it to do, and it does it very well. I have some other messaging apps but none of them I use as much as this one.

AntennaPod is simply the best podcast app for Android. It’s what got me interested into listening to podcasts in the first place. It has pretty much every feature you may need, and I like to see my stats on it every once in a while.

Besides Podcasts, there’s music! Although I grew fond of my Innioasis Y1, I still listen to music on my phone quite a bit, so I use Booming Music Player for that. I particuarly enjoy its feature to suffle albums (instead of shuffling all the songs and making a mess).

Last but not least, the Fossify Gallery app. It is the fastest and simplest of them all, loads super quick and has every feature I may ever need in a gallery.

Now, besides the minimal home screen, KISS Launcher has a History screen, which displays frequently used apps. These can be sorted in a variety of ways, but I just sort based on frequency, instead of recency, time of day, or other modes available.

Right now, my most frequent apps are the following:

• Tusky - my favorite Fediverse client
• Discord - to chat in the TWG Online server
• Mihon - super cool manga reader I love
• WhatsApp - people in Mexico won’t switch from it
• Bible - I try to read daily and finish it in a year
• Material Files - to access and manage my… files
• Markor - markdown editor for my blogposts and quick notes
• Binary Eye - scanner for barcodes and QR codes
• StoryGraph - book reading app with tracking and socializing
• Image Toolbox - for my weekly collages and other image things
• Droid-ify - app store for all my FOSS apps
• Switch Parental Controls - to track my Nintendo Switch play time.

These change every once in a while but it looks like a pretty accurate list of the sort of apps I use the most.

KISS Launcher has been around for ages. It is, in fact, featured on my very first proper blog post, and even though I have mentioned it in my uses page too, I thought it was worth sharing how my phone looks like thanks to it.

Of course, the icon pack featured here is Arcticons, the one I’ve made contributions to for a long time now, it just has everything I need, and if it doesn’t, I make the icon myself. Good stuff all around!

This is day 72 of #100DaysToOffload

The games I chose should be pretty manageable within that time frame. I selected some titles where I already have progress in the mix, since that’s not against the rules. In any case, I split them up and listed them here in no particular order.

Resumed plays

• Grapple Dog - I’ve managed to complete two of the worlds in the game and I am halfway through the third one, in about 6 hours of playtime. I would like to beat this game! The grappling mechanic is pretty fun but it can also feel a bit samey. I am enjoying the challenge of collecting all the things though.

• Terranigma - This is a restart of a game I had 13 hours of playtime on. I am a couple hours in and about to progress to the next chapter of the story, which will significantly change what the game’s about thus far. I think this has been long overdue for a completion from me, so I would love to finally reach credits on it.

• Hades - With 30 hours of playtime, I really want to get this game’s credits rolling. It has been a joy to play so far! A true masterpiece with a lot going on for its story and gameplay. I just need to do a few more runs to get the ending. I will keep playing it every once in a while after that though, but for this challenge? credits are enough.

• Outer Wilds - This one is a real gem, after 14 hours of almost continuous play, I can’t recall what got me to suddenly stop. I really need to continue the story told here, it is mindblowing and super cool, and I’m sure I’ll get a lot of fun out of it once I return. So many clues and things to figure out, some day soon.

• Silksong - I reached credits on Silksong after 67 hours or so, but I really wnat to experience everything Pharloom has to offer. I want to do the 3rd Act of the game and see the new bosses and the rest of the story for myself. I want to challenge my skills and get good, suffering through whatever this game throws at me, because I know I have what it takes, or that’s what I want to believe!

First time plays

• Resident Evil 3: Nemesis - After completing the first two games of the series, it only makes sense to complete the original trilogy! I did play a bit of this game years ago on my PSP, but I never got far, and I want to see I can do with all I’ve learned from the previous titles. I’m always happy to see more ofs Jill Valentine, who hasn’t been around much on later games in the series.

• Metroid Prime Remastered - Since I purchased Metroid Prime 4 Beyond, it is only fair of me to try and complete the one that started Samus’ journey into the 3D world in first person view! I have heard the game holds up magnificently and performs really well on the Switch, so I am really looking forward to this one, always happy to play more Metroid.

• Chants of Sennaar - This one seems like a super interesting puzzle kind of game, similar perhaps to Outer Wilds, without the physics and such, though. I have heard great things so if you have played it feel free to hype me up with a comment or email about it. I heard it’s not too long so that’s another reason why I chose it.

• Emio and the Smiling Man - This one was a bit of an impulse purchase last year. I knew nothing about it other than the praise it got on Into The Aether when Brendon talked about it. It’s parrt of the Famicom Detective Club game series, so I expect some great mystery and looking around rooms and the like. Apparently it has some great thriller/horror elements too? Will check it out for sure.

• Pipstrello and the Cursed YoYo - I got this because of Wouter last year and it looks incredible. It’s a bit of a Metroidvania but with gameplay akin to 2D Zelda games. I’ve heard good things so I definitely want to give it a try.

Bonus games

Although I only have to beat four of these to consider the challenge complete, and my list of ten is already pretty good, there’s some titles that may have a chance to be completed along these. Here are some of them.

• Gris - I know that Amin has greatly enjoyed this game, and since I already have it on my Switch, and it’s actually rather short, I really think I should give it a go and maybe finish it before some of the main titles here!

• Super Mario 3D World - This is a title I’m playing with friends during some Sundays, therefore I can’t promise I’ll complete it, because my friends would have to be in the mood and choose this over some other videogames, card games or whatever other activity there is.

• Metroid Fusion - I am pretty confident I can beat this very quickly, but it is not a first time playthrough and I’ve already beaten it multiple times so it does not really count.

• The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy - I don’t think I would be able to finish this game so quickly, but I would definitely get a couple of the endings. I haven’t given this one a go in a long while, I really need to return to it.

• CrossCode - I am loving this game so much! but I am playing it along with some friends and I don’t want to get ahead of them. It’s a fantastic story in a great world and lovely characters, I think I would finish it if I were by myself, but I won’t betray my friends!

If you want to join me on this challenge, feel free to let me know! I would love to see your progress updates as well, you’ll see mine on my weeknotes, though I’ve been thinking about making a separate post just for my games, who knows.

This is day 71 of #100DaysToOffload

Photo from Unsplash

Don’t worry, I am not going to expose anyone but myself here.

A few weeks ago I saw a YouTube video: The Performative Epidemic (Invidious) by chon digital, that was about something I think everyone has heard about in one way or another.

Basically, people that pretend to do or engage in a certain activity and post about it online. All with the hopes of getting engagement and make themselves known or internet famous, although sometimes they genuinely want to form connections with people but end up looking like attention-seekers anyway.

I will be honest. I do like to be known and to have some fame. I am not going to pretend otherwise, but I have also tried my best to write about whatever I am feeling like writing, and to do so without worrying much about what is trending or popular.

However, I’ve been very, very tempted lately, to go ahead and copy whatever is going on in the online circles around me.

Seriously though, I look at what’s on the top of the Bubbles frontpage every couple of days and often think “how did I not write about that sooner?” Even more so when there’s a trending post that caused a lot of public responses—such as Hey you, start communicating! by David, and many others before it!—that I could have contributed to—and I may do so even after they are not trendy anyway.

I just need to admit it. I am a little jealous, because a lot of the posts are kind of obvious. They are meta-posts about blogging, about being yourself, about the indie web, about socializing in the internet, a rant against AI, someone who switched to Linux, or whatever in between!

And you know? Writing this, I think it has been holding me back. A part of me wants to write about the next big thing that will get a lot of clicks, and that has stopped me on my tracks from writing about what my brain would usually come up with.

Look at my weeknotes that mention what I actually do and engage with, and you can see a lot of themes that would usually be expanded upon from a paragraph to a whole blog!

Maybe about my return to Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, a guide on how to get started through the early stages of the game or set up online multiplayer rooms for it via emulation! I’ve even been asked for this by a friend already!

It could be a tour through the Miis and experiences I’ve had on Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream, sharing some funny screenshots and recordings of the game that I’ve saved with hilarious moments, and some thoughts about it.

Or it could be that post about cycling through my city! I experienced a lot of things as I’ve gotten started on this hobby/transportation method, and I could even do a tour through some neat places I’ve seen on my rides, although I prefer to keep where I live private for the most part.

Perhaps a nostalgia trip through Max Steel, the toy franchise that heavily influenced my life through its movies—which I’ve been bingewatching for a few days—and their action figures I wanted as a kid

But like, who wants to read a young adult rambling about a toy from the early 2000s and its low budget movies with PS2 quality graphics? Why would one care about the early beginnings of yet another hobby of mine when there’s a dozen I’ve written about already? How trendy can a blogpost about an old PSP game with terrible controls and lots of grinding really get? Tomodachi Life is the one somewhat trendy topic, but whatever.

Funnily enough, some of those themes are things friends have already asked me about a couple times, I am just being deaf here for no reason—nobody cared about Max Steel though unfortunately.

Of course there are readers for everything, and I’ve been reassured by many of my online friends about how they like that I write about whatever all the time.

And yet here I am, writing my own meta-blogpost, with a title that is likely to make it to the top for once.

Is this the ultimate move of “performative” blogging? Am I being as hypocritical and desperate as it can get while writing about the fact that I should not write about trendy topics just to get attention for it?

Perhaps I am, but I will write about my little niches soon enough too. Now click that upvote button in the comments section for me okay? Or just send me an email, I love them very much too. 😁

To make it clear again, a lot of the people who have blogposts that get to the top are actually awesome. They, like me, have plenty of variety and themes and shenanigans they share online. I am definitely not saying they are being performative and it’s something that is hard to judge anyway. If anything, I’m the one being a little childish about it. But hey, that’s just my brain sometimes.

Now I just need to share this post at the perfect time to get the largest amount of readers as possible…

NO, STOP IT, END OF LINE.

This is day 67 of #100DaysToOffload

Basically, this file is a way for websites to vouch for the human authorship of others. It comes with a web extension you can install that will let you know if a site is vouched by another.

I saw a couple of people doing it and decided to jump on the bandwagon, as it is part of what inspired me to write about human websites before.

Some of the people I saw implementing this protocol were Axxuy, Naty and STFN, but I think the post that got me to pull the trigger was Neil’s.

Handling json is not very human friendly, it’s one of the many funny quirks about this protocol, but alas, it’s just a fun thing to do so, whatever.

For now, I simply created a humans.yml file inside my Jekyll’s _data folder, and created a human.json file in my root directory with the following Liquid template:

---
layout: none
permalink: /human.json
---
{
	"version": "0.1.1",
	"url": "{{ site.url }}",
	"vouches": [
		{% for human in site.data.humans %}
		{
			"url": "{{ human.link }}",
			"vouched_at": "{{ human.date }}"
		},
		{% endfor %}
		{
			"url": "https://examplefinalwebsite.com/",
			"vouched_at": "2026-04-03"
		}
	]
}

The humans.yml file simply looks like this:

- link: "https://example.com"
  date: 2026-04-03
- link: "https://example2.com"
  date: 2026-04-03
- link: "https://example3.com"
  date: 2026-04-03

and last but not least, adding a <link> tag in the HTML <head> section:

<link rel="human-json" href="/path/to/human.json">

Of course, having a YAML file that gets turned into a JSON file is not the best thing ever, but it’s easier to edit and modify on the fly, it only gets generated at build time anyway.

Given what this project entails, I’ve been a bit conflicted on what websites would make it to my own list. The obvious ones are easy, but those that are real people who used generated content in one shape or another, even if the rest is human-made are harder to decide for me.

Part of me wants to be kind of gatekeepy and leave out websites just because they use an generated profile pic, or thumbnail here or there, or maybe they have written a couple of articles about using an LLM to generate some code, or whatever.

But well, I’ve decided to just go by feel for those cases that are hard to pinpoint exactly.

Another word can be said about having to do all of this in the first place. That humans are the ones having to prove themselves, instead of websites being clear about using generated content.

In any case, the project seems very fun. It will probably not be a big thing in most websites, but alas, I don’t mind doing this and vouching for other people. I’ll try to keep it updated over time, and be sure to let me know if you find a site I link that isn’t as human anymore.

This is day 45 of #100DaysToOffload.

I don’t even want to use those two letters, or the more appropiate three-letter acronym, because honestly, it annoys me to even type it out at this point. What a pain.

I’ll share some things that shouldn’t need to be said, but in just in case, here’s what a personal website does not need:

• Perfect grammar.
• Up to date posts.
• Links to everything it talks about.
• Clear structure.
• Posts with catchy titles.
• Fancy thumbnails or images.
• Perfect “SEO”.

Sure, editing is okay, rewording is okay, humans make mistakes, humans can correct those mistakes. If you are too lazy to correct a mistake, just leave it there then, it’s your blog, you write what you want and skip the rest.

I could go through every point here but it all boils down to the same thing. Just express yourself.

I admit I fell for these new and “innovative” technologies at some point, there’s even a blogpost I did years ago that’s barely written by me. I refuse to delete it for the sake of posterity, but I also won’t link it because it’s kind of cringe. Other than that, these words are mine, this is my voice.

Since we are at it, here’s what I like to find in a personal website:

• Your unique experience and view of life.
• Harmless grammar mistakes.
• Misstyped urls.
• Incomplete sentences.
• Multiple posts about the same thing.
• Drafts published by accident.
• Vague titles that have nothing to do with the topic.
• Honest and human thoughts.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have something a little bit more proper or elegant, there is tooling out there that has allowed for that to be possible for decades now. Tools to help you write and edit your posts properly without having to rely on those things. And even if there were not, how is it that books have been a thing for hundreds of years. handwritten, printed, whatever, all of it was done by a real person.

Maybe it’s slow and tedious, maybe it takes more manual effort, maybe it’s the “boring part” that you don’t like. Other than accessibility—and I still have my doubts about how truly accessible this is—it mostly boils down to putting in the effort.

There are, maybe, valid reasons for it all. I am not really unfollowing those that use it, like some others have, but I can’t get the feeling out of my head, that I am no longer reading a human sometimes, and that they are mostly excusing themselves, precisely because at least there’s a feeling there, that it’s wrong.

Regardless of what you do, on this website, it’s just me, here and now. Me and my dumb takes and opinions, my rambles about nothing and my thoughts on things everyone has mentioned before, but it doesn’t really matter does it? Because I am the one writing. Helplessly human, helplessly unpolished, imperfect and wrong, but documenting it all because it’s just fun for me.

Like, look at this post, it’s kind of ugly, it sounds like I’m bragging, and I hate that, I’m not doing anything special, it’s just another blogpost out of the hundreds of blogposts I’ve done, out of the hundreds of millions of articles written by humans.

So, yeah, write your own words, or don’t, you are entitled to do—or avoid doing—whatever you wish.

What I want, however, is to read you.

Everything started when I got a great little videogame known as Hades for the Nintendo Switch. It came with a neat surprise, a code to redeem the official soundtrack on Bandcamp. Since I love to get stuff for free, creating an account there was worth it, and I ended up finding a whole new world…

Since then, I’ve decided to support creators there whenever I can, I won’t deny I still get some music from other sources, but if I can find it on Bandcamp, I will often get it from there— though sometimes Steam or GOG have the soundtrack for much cheaper. If I like the artist a lot I actually don’t mind to pay the extra, especially when they get a bigger cut when acquiring music from there.

My first purchase ever was the whole soundtrack of 1000xRESIST, because it’s some of the best music ever, and right after that? Well, the score for Hollow Knight and Silksong of course, because they’re some of the best music ever.

One of my favorite finds also has to be Natsu Summer. I love City Pop, and I love what Ryusenkei has done—Tokyo Sniper is such wonderful album—and when I saw these albums on Bandcamp I simply had to get them. I’ve struggled to find other original City Pop artists on the platform—I don’t really care about the remixes that mess with the tempo and such—so, if you know artists that make original music with that style, definitely let me know.

Now that Bandcamp Friday is upon us, I thought I’d share some of the stuff I plan to buy right after I publish this blog!

• Fixer’s Song [darkmode] EP by sunsetvisitor - This song from the original game was remixed for the release trailer for other consoles (it was on Switch and PC only at first) and I think it is amazing! However, please play the game itself. I am begging you. - It’s on sale on Steam right now…

• Q-UP OST by kariomart - Probably my most random pick, this is a videogame soundtrack for a game I haven’t even played, but I have heard so much praise for it from Brendon Bigley that I was very interested. I checked out a couple songs and yep, it’s amazing, buying. It feels like elevator music but hyped up to the extreme and I love it.

• Into The Breach Soundtrack by Ben Prunty - This is from a game I really like, although I really have to return to it one of these days. Still, the soundtrack is pretty chill and it makes for great background music while focusing on work or writing blogposts like this one!

• Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid by dracula9antichapel - This artist has many other arranged tracks from old games I love, and I really enjoy them. I may snatch up the rest of them as they are free to get, but I’ll definitely send a couple bucks. These are from 2017 or so. I have to admit, I feel iffy about modern remixes because it could be made with AI. I highly appreciate the work put into these arrangements and I’ll be happy if you know real artists doing stuff like this nowadays as well.

Feel free to check my Bandcamp profile, if you want to see some other stuff I bought before. I gotta reiterate about my request for more City Pop style music! If you know some artists who sell their work on Bandcamp (or in other sites that offer DRM-free music), I’d be happy to check them out!

This is day 29 of #100DaysToOffload

At the time, I was still doing my internship, so I had money, but not the kind of money I would get now that I’m a full time employee. The amount of time and my interests have shifted slightly, things I used to care about I don’t care much for anymore, and life changes, I guess.

I am more conscious about the where I want my money to go, as well as how people deserve to get paid and such.

Or that’s what I would like to say, as I tend to be the polar opposite of myself.

Streaming

Most of my subscriptions for this are still being paid for by others, so most don’t count.

I am no longer subscribed to YouTube Premium, haven’t been for many months. At some point my billing info changed and they were unable to process the monthly payment and I never fixed it and I haven’t missed it at all. UBlock Origin does the job.

I used to be on a Spotify family plan for free, but it’s been ages since I stopped using it and someone else took my place, I’m good.

Disney+ got into some trouble in the US, but here’s just normal, I am still in a family plan and I don’t pay a cent either way. Same goes for Netflix.

I’ve been using Tubular more than ever, Nintendo Music (which comes with Nintendo Online) works extremely well, and I listen to a lot more local music, as I’ve grown my digital collection and purchased some albums from Bandcamp.

The only streaming service I pay for is HBO Max, mostly for my family to use it, but I’ve been watching anime there from time to time.

Fitness

I pay a gym membership now, it’s part of what makes me feel like I should go more or else I’ll be wasting money, and it somewhat works, although as I said yesterday, I am considering to quit the gym and commit to excercising at home and maybe running, it’s not that expensive but I could buy a couple videogames by not paying for it.

Gaming

Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack once again takes the crown as the most expensive subscription I pay for, and they even increased the price this year (and then lowered it again for the next year, after I got billed, oof). However, I’m still splitting it up between some friends, so it’s not too bad.

Also, against my better judgement, I got a subscription to Humble Choice, for some reason (I wanted a certain game and then I kinda kept it going for a bit). It’s a pretty good value for the money but this could go at any time and I could actually buy games I 100% want to have, maybe.

Web Services

A while back I started to pay for my own email provider, I decided to go for Zoho Mail since Amin recommended it to me. It’s super cheap and it’s been nice to have a separate email that I only use for personal conversations (whenver I remember to reply to them, sorry everyone!).

Of course, I also pay for the domain name of this blog! As well as a couple of others via Porkbun.

I hadn’t taken my time to check this, but recently, .xyz domain names raised in price, I paid a couple more years in advance when I got them, but after doing the sum of all the domains I have, and since I only really use two of them, I am spending way too much money on unused domains. I could buy a videogame by not paying for those…

Other

Well, there’s been a couple of additions now that I had mentioned in that older post… yeah, not only do I keep supporting my Mastodon home, I have now subscribed to the Into The Aether podcast as well as Backloggd, the videogame tracking website I prefer.

Into The Aether did a bit of an oopsie earlier in the year and they joined a podcast network that proceeded to inject ads, which also ruined podcast chapters. I couldn’t stand it—so I subscribed to their Patreon and got a new feed and extra bonus episodes! A few months (maybe weeks?) later they preferred to stay indie and abandoned that podcast network. They still have “ads” that are for more personal things, like birthdays and shout-outs to projects, indie bands or whatever, which you can pay for, I stayed on Patreon anyway and moved to the yearly tier because it’s cheaper.

I use Backloggd to literally journal everything I do when it comes to videogames (just look at my Silksong journal), so I think it’s only fair to support the developer of this one.

And last but not least, Clarkesworld is a monthly sci-fi magazine that features… Science Fiction stories, of course. I have read a grand total of half an issue from these so… I blame Amin, again.

Totals

Without any further to do, here’s the table. The domains haven’t hit as much because a lot of it was paid for in advance, but still, looking at the numbers hurts…

In total per year that amounts to 867 USD… Ok, that’s like 16 Nintendo Switch games, I really need to check my priorities.

But really, those domain names gotta go, and maybe I should lower my Patreon tier of ITA, and given how many issues of Clarkesworld I’ve read, I should probably stop until I catch up. But I really like those EPUB files…

Well, maybe I’ll cancel some of these in 2026.

Maybe we can go back to a time where any time you shared a link it would not immediately take over two thirds of the post because a thumbnail loaded with a fancy automatically generated image of the title of the post or—much much worse—some AI slop that whoever wrote whatever thought looked nice.

Honestly, one of the things I always do on my Mastodon client is disable link previews and hide boosts from my timeline. Sadly, while the first is a global setting, the other is done on an account per account basis. If you know of a way to not have to do it that way let me know—I use Tusky by the way.

I don’t mind when you share a link, or boost something, but the lack of feedback or context (when it is the only thing you share) is always a bit annoying to me, I do appreciate when a reply or subsequent post contains the context though, and it’s fine when I already know the person and can figure out their thought based on that, so anyway.

Also, sparking a conversation about something totally unrelated to the post for literally no reason needs to stop. This happens on my posts! but it’s usually from friends telling inside jokes or just being annoying on purpose so it’s fine—even though I boil inside a little bit.

That wouldn’t be a problem if every social media site decided to implement threaded replies already, they really need to be a standard, they’re so. Much. Better. One of the things Reddit got right, to be honest.

Also, Mastodon is introducing quote posts soon. This is not something bad by itself, the implementation is really good objectively speaking, I’ll probably even use them myself sometimes (hypocritical much?), I will not disable quote posts from my account or anything, I just don’t think I’ll be reading the ones people make, or maybe I will.

It’s way too easy for some people to just become boosters and link posters, never sharing any sort of personal thought at all, and it just annoys me so much sometimes.

And don’t get me wrong I totally get having an account just to follow others and not interacting at all as well, just do your own thing.

I’m a nobody screaming from a monitor after all.

I don’t even remember what sparked this rant, I don’t even think I will agree with half of the things I wrote today, but well I already wrote a proper post today so a random baseless complaint as an aside isn’t so bad sometimes.

Just start a blog already!

Right now, especially because of Blaugust, my feeds are being bombarded by new blogposts everyday, this means that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take some measures and ensure my head doesn’t get overwhelmed by all the words being written and published online for me to read.

I’ve done one or two things to organize my feeds, and I’ve seen other people like Matt judging blogposts by their titles and skipping through the rest.

In my case, it’s not a matter of leaving things as unread, I don’t really care about that at all. Actually, right now there are 3,612 unread articles in my FreshRSS instance, feel free to suffer on my behalf :)

However, I worry about sticking to the same blogs and not growing them further. This is a problem not many have, as I know of others who want to trim down their selection further more—looking at you Amin. Of course, I will probably change my mind in two days, but for now, I want to try to read blogposts from the people I read a bit less, or that may even be completely new (to me).

I constantly mention people on this website that I read all the time, you can usually find them on my blogroll as well. I already know I’ll enjoy whatever Sylvia, RL Dane, Naty or Jakov come up with. And if you are a blogger who reads me constantly and interacts with me, you already know I’m talking about you too—I’m purposefully avoiding to highlight the ones I link all the time ;)

So, at least for a little while, I’m going to willfully skip through my usual reads and try to give a chance to the people I haven’t read as much, and that are totally new to me.

For the sake of it, here are links to some recent additions to my feeds. Some of them are doing Blaugust, but not necessarily, I have checked some of their posts and from what I’ve read, I think I’ll like them.

• Syl’s Blog - I already shared a post from here on my weeknotes, lots of gaming related posts which I’m 100% here for, and some others about music and personal thoughts.
• Unfiltered Thoughts - The title alone lets you know what this is about. Short, personal thoughts, about tech, life, and blogging itself.
• The Tangent Space - More weeknotes to enjoy! With some gaming notes on them, can’t complain at all.
• LMNT - This one is from an artist and it shows, there’s wallpapers, and a lot of other things related to designing icons, logos and websites!
• Thread Pool - I saw this blog on Mastodon a while back and I check it here and there, it’s about technology, coding and just life in general!

Of course, if you know of any other bloggers out there who you think I have not seen and that I may enjoy, feel free to send me a link!

Recently, I’ve been adding more buttons my blogroll, such as mercurial’s (what a cool gif!), Syl’s (loved the background), Marisabel (super retro and cute!) and James’ (I don’t know why I didn’t for so long).

I have also made my own buttons for some projects from friends or clubs I’m on. I did one one for the Clew search engine and the Cookie Zero Club, which you can see in the footer section of every page.

The rest of the buttons I’ve made were for bloggers! I created one for Burgeon Lab, which was a nice challenge because of the logo, and one for Anhvn, which I feel doesn’t represent her site well at all, even though it’s her favicon, but well it’ll do.

In any case, trying to represent something in a limited space such as the 88x31 button is a very interesting excercise in creativity, as is the case with all of pixel art.

If you have a website and you don’t have a button yet, I encourage you to try and do one yourself! And I will link to it if you share it with me.

I do all of my pixel art using GIMP but I also found this online site to make your own button with some pretty simple configuration options available.

This weekend has been quite busy, so I was too lazy to write longer posts these past couple days. Hopefully tomorrow’s weeknotes will serve to balance that out!

For now, this is it, have a good night!

I already completed #100DaysToOffload this year, so I thought I may as well participate on something else that gives me another excuse to use a trendy hashtag interact with the community a little bit more.

Blaugust is a month long blogging event where the goal is to write 31 blog posts! It’s similar to WeblogPoMo or Writing Month, and there are some weekly prompts you can follow if you need ideas.

I am pretty good at just coming up with my own themes, but I like some of the suggested ones, so I may use them in the upcoming weeks. Pretty much everyone is welcome to take part on this, so, this is your chance! share me your post if you are worried nobody will read it, because I definitely will.

As I’m trying to cutdown on my social media usage, I won’t be joining the Discord server, but I’ll send emails and replies when inspired by the posts being written, and I’ll still share my own to social media (albeit via a shell script using toot) whenever they happen, with the appropiate hashtags. Of course, if you want me to see any replies related to them, you would be better off contacting me directly.

So far, I’ve seen these people participating, and I’m sure there’s a list somewhere with more:

• Jedda
• Marisabel
• David
• Sam
• Alex

I just remembered that I can follow the hashtag via RSS so I don’t need to open Mastodon or anything! Feeds for the win!

That’s the tl;dr. But keep going if you like my rambles.

I was reading a really good post—but pretty off-topic to this one—by Nat, who mentioned an idea that never ended up becoming a blog post:

…part of what’s so nice about sharing my thoughts on my blog is that I can do thought-composition by linking to older articles. I can’t just like, interject in the middle of a conversation with a contextual link. If I tried actually breaking down why I believe some of the things I believe verbally I’d probably just overwhelm whoever I’m talking to…

Isn’t this like, such a great thing? In this case Nat talks about explaining personal thoughts and beliefs, but of course this applies to pretty much any type of blog post.

If there is a type of post I don’t really care about when visiting a blog, it would be technical tutorials about niche tools.

Of course, I just did one of those yesterday, talking about FreshRSS User Queries. I linked to it on a chat, and well, I immediately thought of adding a warning: “you might not get any of this, so probably check other posts of mine instead”.

And well, it’s true! Most of the time tutorials or technical topics are only useful for the people looking for them, so I rarely follow bloggers who only post that kind of stuff, since it can feel like they are only trying to get clicks, play the SEO game, and such.

Of course, you should write about things you are passionate about, don’t stop doing that just because I dislike it, it’s just that I may not be interested on reading it—same goes for articles with Titles That Capitalize Every Word For No Reason.

Back on topic, a neat thing about writing on a website instead of talking or writing on paper, is that you don’t really need to give all the context upfront—I feel like I already said this multiple times with different words and I keep writing anyway.

I am conflicted on this, on one hand, why do I need to dig into a rabbit hole to understand what you are talking about? but on the other, why would I read through ten paragraphs of something I am familiar with just to get to the point?

But, honestly, I kinda feel that digging around in rabbit holes is probably better, or at least, it’s something the web is quite good at.

It’s easy to forget that this is what the web provides, hyperlinking. I can mention someone’s blogpost and you can go and read it, I can link back to older posts referencing what I am talking about, and you can go ahead and get some context!

Reading a book doesn’t let you do this, sure, you can reference authors and all but you can’t immediately access a reference as easily as you click a link.

Having a conversation requires a common understanding between speaker and listener, any foreign concepts will require explanations that may end up being overwhelming, as Nat said. Besides, it’s not uncommon for some people to just nod and agree and figure it out later, or to end up with a misunderstanding.

I am actually kinda terrible at talking about things, I’m decent in some scenarios or with previous preparation, like presentations where I can write down my thoughts beforehand, but I still struggle otherwise.

In the web, I don’t worry much about it, just express what I want, and link to other pages explaining missing context, if I deem it necessary.

And to me, that’s great, because it lets me discover the web the way it was intended to be.

Back when search engines and AI slop answers weren’t a thing. That’s how most people navigated and discovered where to go. Blogrolls, webrings, link blogs, all of them work, because of hyperlinks.

Years ago, and to this day, I would get lost in Wikipedia, check out a random article, click on a random word, see it originates from a certain book, that was adapted into a movie in the 90s, and came out at the same time as this other movie, and keep going and going just by clicking around. Nowadays there are Wikipedia speedruns where people try to get to one article to another just by clicking links on them!

Take my post yesterday, which is about a neat feature in FreshRSS. There I have a direct link to their website, and two links to different posts explaining other features of FreshRSS. Now, even though I answer what FreshRSS is with the website link, I didn’t include an answer for what RSS is. However, the post has the RSS tag, and by clicking it, you’ll see multiple a post about what RSS and how I use it.

As an aside, it’s an explanation that still assumes the reader knows a bunch of things, but, alas, I was young! I will probably write an update at some point.

You will notice how I didn’t link to any of the stuff mentioned in the last couple paragraphs. Well, do I need to? When I already linked to the post I wrote about User Queries at the start of this post?

It is perfectly understandable to want everything perfectly in one page, but well, used properly, hyperlinks can let you choose when you actually want to do that, both as a writer, and a reader.

Sadly, there are those other horrible websites that will be like “Top 10 XYZ” and will separate the list in multiple pages just to feed you as many ads as possible, or keeping you in a page wasting time. I literally didn’t remember those existed until I thought “what’s the worst case scenario of just adding links for everything instead of writing fully formed articles?”—Thankfully adblockers exist.

I guess everything should be balanced, so, okay, here’s a direct link to what RSS even is, it’s a 4-year old post written by a much more Linuxy wannabe puritan me but, well, it’s alright.

Maybe this was just an excuse to make you check multiple posts on my website all along! Well, if you made it this far, thanks for reading me still!

There are those for news, comics and project updates, as well as one for Personal Websites.

Later on, I also created a category for all the websites doing #100DaysToOffload, like me.

This has been the case for 3 years.

What has not been the case for 3 years, is the quantity! The amount of blog posts I follow has grown by a lot. I am susbcribed to 250 websites, more or less, and I constantly adding more to the mix. There really are a lot of feeds to follow.

Obviously, a couple of categories is not really sustainable anymore. Not everyone posts at the same rate, and sadly, I don’t have the time to read every single thing every single person I follow writes.

There’s also the problem of some bloggers writing with more frequency than others, with different levels of relevance as well.

Ruben Schade posts a lot of stuff at all times, which means he’ll show up much more regularly than Flamed who doesn’t post that often.

There’s also HexDSL or Hollie who share micro-thoughts or drawings more than regular posts, which means that they have a lot of entries on their feeds, and even if they’re quick to read, they take more screen space than I’d like.

And of course, there are those bloggers that will take ages before they publish something, like Hund or Analog Office, sometimes they share some absolute bangers, sometimes it’s a simple post catching up, letting us know they’re still around. Whatever the case, I don’t want to miss out!

Chatting with Amin, he told me he has some categories based on how much he values the posts to read them later, be it weeks, or just a few days. He has Gold, Silver and Bronze!

He told me I am in the Silver category, so from now on my current goal is to achieve Gold status some day—the odds are against me though, because he has very high standards. 🥲

Anyway, I don’t think three categories is enough for the volume of blog posts I get every week. I could trim down the feeds, let go of some of them that I don’t follow that much. But that’s too easy.

I’ve created a few categories that I’ll try to improve over time, right now it’s something like this:

• Blogging Friends: for people I interact with often, regardless of how often they post.
• Sporadic Bloggers: for those that really take a while to post stuff, I moved a couple friends here to not miss out on them.
• 100DaysToOffload: People who are doing, or have completed the challenge already.
• Blogs in Spanish: I follow so few people writing in Spanish I just grouped them all. If you have recommendations let me know!
• TWG Discord: Members from the only Discord server I actually interact with, that also have blogs, kinda specific but it works.
• Reviewers: This one is kinda empty, but it’s pretty clear what it will contain, for games or books alike.

I still have to actually move plenty of feeds around to the correct categories, but I think it’s a decent start. How do you guys do it?

This is day 63 of #100DaysToOffload

Mastodon update, cool article author links!

So, Mastodon 4.3 just came out for Fosstodon, the instance I use and help moderate, and there’s now a pretty cool feature for bloggers and websites to display the Mastodon account of the author of articles and stuff!

So, I just added this line to my headers and let’s hope it works well!

<meta property="fediverse:creator" content="@joel@fosstodon.org" />

I haven’t tested this just yet, but this blogpost should work already! It was introduced earlier in the year, but it’s now available for everyone to try!

A spam wave is upon us

At the same time, a huge wave of random spam accounts started popping up, and I gotta thank the people in Fosstodon for reporting all of those accounts, I had a good time spamming the ban hammer on them, it had been a while since the last time I used my moderation powers so frenetically.

Changing my urls formatting

Another thing I did out of nowhere is change my permalink format to /date/YYYY-MM-DD-slug which is something based on a post by [Bix Frankonis] on url formats and SEO pandering. It’s a bit rambley and opinionated, but aren’t we all. But this line explains the main reasoning:

Blog permalinks should contain human-readable temporal data. It’s a hill on which I’m willing to die metaphorically.

All of my old links will still work, thanks to the super neat jekyll-redirect-from plugin, and to apply this change globally, I just had to add the following line to my _config.yml

permalink: /blog/:year-:month-:day-:title

For more information on formatting permalinks on Jekyll, you can check their website’s documentation!

New Switch games!

Ever since the article I wrote about my obsession with collecting Switch games I have acquired Castlevania Advance Collection, Dragon Quest XI S Echoes of an Elusive Age and Nintendo Switch Sports. I also pre-ordered the pysical edition of Balatro, Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection and Outer Wilds—which is already out, but I wanted it for the free shipping. I also ordered Pokémon Legends Arceus, Hades and Hollow Knight. As well as pre-ordering—via LRG I’m sorry 🤢—TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge Ultimate Edition and Castlevania Dominus Collection.

I have already played almost 2 hours of Dragon Quest and I have to admit I am pleasantly surprised by it. I have been making progress on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown a lot this past week, I am close to beating it, and then I’ll probably focus on another Metroidvania to play alongside DQ.

Regardless, I have gotten too many games now, and I really need to stop. But I can’t! Mario & Luigi Brothership is coming soon!

This is day 79 of #100DaysToOffload

Just writing

I am once again not writing that much recently. However, unlike other times, it’s not really that I don’t have time for it, I guess I just don’t feel like posting anything lately.

It’s not even that I don’t write, I have actually written two drafts that I somehow haven’t published, and I have also been writing on paper twice a week or so. For a while my blogging workflow was kind of messed up because my script to share my blogposts to Mastodon broke due to a misconfiguration of toot.

But yeah that’s not the true reason. When I have time I game, or read, or listen to podcasts and watch videos, I have time to spare, I guess I just haven’t been feeling it, until now.

Dungeon Crawlers for PSP, GBA or SNES

The thing that spawned this interest was actually this video that showcased a LotR game for GBA that played like Diablo. I have never played Diablo itself but the isometric view and gameplay looked kind of interesting and I wanted to see if there was more I could play on my PSP or my Anbernic handheld.

Reddit says that games that fit this style would be Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance and Shining Soul I and II, for the PSP it seemed like there weren’t many “worthy” alternatives other than Dungeon Explorer and the PS1 Eboot of Diablo itself.

A Widescreen remaster of Avatar: The Last Airbender

This video titled The City of Omashu - Remastering Avatar The Last Airbender by ChunnyKay is exactly what the title says, this guy went ahead and filled in the left and right sides of the original 4:3 aspect ratio. The final result looks simply incredible and it was an enjoyable watch.

Readrops 2.0 beta finally out

This release on F-Droid caught me by complete surprise, but Readrops, my favorite RSS reader with FreshRSS support, finally got an update after being silent since 2021. I am supper happy for this, although I had to delete my app data and login again for it to launch.

Final thoughts

The end is upon us! Tomorrow I’ll be writing my summary, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff, so you better be here tomorrow!

This is day 67 of #100DaysToOffload

Today I saw Annie’s Top Posts of her weblog, and I decided to share some of my most frequently visited ones. I don’t think they are that good or anything, but I always see 6 or 7 people that visited them whenever I check.

I don’t have all time stats, since Vercel only let’s me see the last 30 days, but by scrolling under the latest ones, there are some standouts that have managed to stay relevant despite the passing of time.

The easiest way for me to differentiate these posts, is by filtering by referrer, and choosing Google, since these are posts that people look for, and I found it all quite interesting. So, here are the 5 posts of mine people end up in when googling for stuff.

My Spectrwm Setup

It’s been a long while since I used spectrwm, I could probably switch now, but dwm is just perfect for me, I simply have no complaints.

Regardless, for people interested in spectrwm—despite it being kinda dead at this point—there really is not that much stuff out there, so despite how short it is, people keep looking for interesting ideas and ricing to add to their personal configs, which I respect.

My DWM Rice

I really need to give this post an update, it doesn’t even have a screenshot to go along with it! But I do list my dwm patches and stuff I used at the time. I have chenaged a few things here, such as adding a system tray and other few plugins, but other than that. This post is still kind of accurate!

Creating my own Theme with FreshRSS

If you have installed FreshRSS, and you like dark, but not too dark themes, you probably use mine! Since this post was published it was added to the official theme selection, which is one of my biggest accomplishments ever. It is based on the Nord color scheme, which I used to prefer back then. I should probably make another one based on Tokyo Night, but I don’t really mind it that much.

Installing LabVIEW on Linux Minut

LabVIEW is a very ugly program to make very ugly programs, block style programming that can’t even be exported to any kind of code, and somehow it is incredibly expensive.

It has a Linux version that worked well but only on certain distributions, so yeah…

To whatever engineering student going through this, I am sorry you have to use LabVIEW, but if I managed to survive it, so can you!

Fixing Bootloader on Void (for me)

So, yeah, I guess there’s a lot of people dual booting Void Linux like me, and going through a lot of pain whenever Windows updates.

To be fair, ever since I got my new laptop, I have never experienced a broken bootloader again. I still dual boot Windows and Void Linux, but I don’t really have any problems anymore, other than Windows messing up its time clock despite my best efforts. Nothing a quick time sync can’t fix.

Finishing thoughts

In case you are curious, besides the main page and the blog section, most of my visits last month had been to the post on my home screen.

Also the most visited posts in generals are the ones covering RSS and FreshRSS, I did quite a bit of tutorials and posts about it.

Other than big search engines, most referrals come from Cloudhiker, Kagi and The 1MB Club, there’s quite a bit of other small websites, webrings and references from other blogs, which are always fun, since I usually discover random people with websites that found me somehow, sometimes not even through Mastodon, but just the web itself, and I can’t help but feel like that’s really, really cool.

This is day 39 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 7 of #WeblogPoMo2024

I recently remembered that I have a Gameboy Advance SP lying around in my room, and I turned it on and it still works! Sadly, I also noticed that theres a vertical red line of pixels on the screen, and it also looks incredibly bad, compared to what my childhood eyes remembered.

I got the itch to maybe replace its display with an IPS one from AliExpress, and maybe get some soldering practice going again, change its shell while I’m at it. At the same time, with my upcoming Miyoo Mini Plus, I don’t see myself playing on real hardware soon. I might still try the mod though, just as a challenge, and it would make for a good blogpost.

CDawgVA’s Chrono Trigger playthrough

This series has been my happy place for the last couple of days. I always love me some Chrono Trigger playthroughs, and Connor’s voice is just great at giving at dubbing the great characters in the game. I am still not done with it, and I think he rushed past some dialogues a little too quickly for my kinda gatekeepy side—where everyone should talk to every single NPC to find out the lore behind everything going on in a game—but it is still very fun to see him play this favorite of mine.

The Rest is History Podcast

I’ve mentioned this podcast in the latest monthly summary. This podcast is really winning me over quite a lot, and there’s a huge backlog to catch up on! So far, the Titanic series was great, and I am currently listening to their series on Lord Byron, some random guy who was kind of a big deal back in the day, and had quite the strange life, still not done with it, but it’s great.

XKCD on the Remarkable 2

Just a blogpost from my mate @hyde that mentioned what his interest to install KOReader on his Remarkable 2 led him to.

Miyoo Mini Plus 3 in 1 Case

You can use it as case, a stand, and a grip, all in one! Very cool stuff. I found it first in The Worst Garbage’s Discord server and I decided to order it. I must admit I went for a similar one available on AliExpress, because the shipping price from the Etsy option was incredibly expensive to my country, but it is how it is.

This is day 38 of #100DaysToOffload and post 6 for #WeblogPoMo2024.

The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster, was a fantastic short story that blew me away as much as the previously mentioned anthology.

It was published in 1909, and yet it contains one of the scariest, most accurate depictions of what a world dominated by reliance on technology could look like—and one might say, already looks like today.

The story is in the public domain, you can find a free copy of it in Alice & Books’ website, the story can also be found in The Eternal Moment, and other stories which is at Project Gutenberg, I hope Standard Ebooks does their own edition as well soon.

While Orwell’s 1984—published in 1949–deals with a corrupt form of government using surveillance, rewriting history and in a state of constant war; the world in The Machine Stops is honestly kind of perfect—at least on paper.

Humanity lives underground after the atmosphere is no longer inhabitable. There’s an hexagonal room assigned for one person, and everyone gets to live in one, everything can be reached at the press of a button: food, music, films, literature, a bed. There is instant video communication, video conferencing, online shopping.

Ideas, knowledge, cannot, and should not, be obtained from their original source. It is wrong after all, since feelings and experiences only undermine reality and facts.

Physical contact is frowned upon, you don’t visit people in person. Water is hot, the lights are comfortable. You can request to become a parent, you can request euthanasia, but birth and death rates have to stay balanced. No matter, there is no pain anymore, the Machine knows best.

Travelling is mostly unnecessary, but flying machines exist, although everyone closes their windows, nobody wants the Sun shining over them, nobody wants to look down to the old cities and landscapes found in the surface, there are no ideas to be gained there.

I don’t usually talk so much about what a book contains, but this is just the idea and the setting, there is also a story to be told, despite it all being so short, there’s still a lot more. It is an easy read to fly through in a single sitting. I highly recommend it.

The Internet Dies

Literally while writing the review, I stumbled upon Heat Death of The Internet, an article that, if everyone had read this book—and taken it as a warning instead of an instruction manual—probably would not even need to exist, for the problems shown there are quite similar with what we are living today—the Machine is crumbling.

We have our buttons to get food and music and content in the palm of our hand. We have phones and apps and websites as frontends to avoid interacting directly with each other. We have grown used to moving things to us, rather than moving ourselves.

We are fed AI generated websites, removing all humanity and emotion from the information we consume for the sake of “getting to the point”, and all of that is running through another AI to summarize it further more and generate more websites out of it. More and more diluted content, more and more “proper ideas”.

Eventually, time passes, and we no longer resent the defects, getting used to the stinky atmosphere, getting used to the poor writing, getting used to the failing infrastructure, getting used to the darkness.

This is day 35 of #100DaysToOffload and post 3 of #WeblogPoMo2024.

I woke up, and I was like “it’s been a while since I watched some anime”, I ended up binging through the whole of Uncle From Another World, just a bit of a slice of life comedy with some Isekai elements that I found quite hilarous, if a little too suggestive for my taste at times, I just couldn’t stop from laughing at how ridiculous it is. It has some great comedic moments, a few actually awesome action scenes and a bit of intrigue at how things ended up as they did.

After watching the whole season and reading some of the manga, I had breakfast. Just some cereal, since it had been a while since I ate it and I decided to go for it. I watched some Linus Tech Tips videos, such as I Built the World’s Biggest Gaming TV and The World’s Stealthiest Tech Upgrade, both of which were really fun and interesting to me.

Another video that caught my attention was a reaction to Halo 3 ODST’s soundtrack, without a doubt, one of my favorites of all time. I know reactions are somewhat frowned upon, but I can’t help but smile and cry along, especially with masterpieces such as Deference for Darkness playing in the background lol.

I read some more of Dune, by Frank Herbert, which I started this month. I read bits during the day, and I just finished Chapter 15, where the first Sandworm finally shows up. Due to this I also decided to watch some videos about it, with various topics such as character names pronunciation, a comparison of the book’s physical editions and the like.

I also watched Rotation without Rotation, an interesting Math video about the difference between skewing and rotating in video and graphics, which was rather amusing.

For some readon I ended up listening to a random, but quite good mashup of Plastic Love, a classic among the City Pop genre where it all fit, somehow. This made me go watch a short video about the rise of the genre in recent years.

From there, I listened to a live concert from Yellow Magic Orchestra, that was definitely something.

I watched a couple of different reviews of Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, while washing the dishes.

I listened to a city pop cover of Fly Me To The Moon by Caitlin Myers, which I loved a lot, then I listened to the version by Utada Hikaru, and queued One Last Kiss after it. Along Plastic Love and Stay with Me, these songs give me a sense of nostalgia and melancholy that I just can’t quite comprehend, but I enjoy them all very much.

Before the day ends I think I’ll try and read some more Dune, but first, I’ll upload this post, take a shower, and see what happens next.

This is day 22 of #100DaysToOffload