• Even though I am Mexican, there’s a lot of Mexican food everyone seems to love, but I just don’t like as much. I can eat it if I have to be polite, but yeah, I’d rather not. I don’t like Mole nor Menudo, even though both are quite popular and I’d recommend trying them out if you ever come visit this country. I also tend to avoid spicy food if possible.

• I love origami as a hobby, this is not new information for most of you, but I do want to share my favorite origami model, which would be the Rat by Eric Joisel, he was one of the best origamists ever, and this model is one of the most expressive I know of, with a simplicity which I adore. There’s a diagram available if you want to give it a try, though it is of intermediate difficulty. In second place the Horse by Hideo Komatsu is lovely for opposite reasons, it is much more complex to fold, yet it looks as clean as a traditional crane. Both are fantastic. Check my origami page—though none of these models is pictured there…

• I love gaming, and most of my gaming is done in a handheld format, I currently possess a Nintendo Switch OLED, a PSP 3000, and Anbernic RG 35XXSP, a Miyoo Mini Flip and a New Nintendo 3DS XL, I also have a Miyoo Mini Plus that is currently on my sister’s care, and a Game Boy Advance SP which still works and was my first proper handheld—other than the cheap ones that came with 5 versions of tetris and blocky games I guess.

• When I was in high school I pretty much introduced every one of my friends to speedcubing. I taught at least half a dozen of them how to solve the Rubik’s cubes and provided learning resources to many more, I did a couple of meet-ups and even went to a small event with a friend, teach algorithms, techniques to improve, etc. I would also recommend puzzles to get and would find the best local online stores to order from. As such I’d ask them to select what to buy and I would order a bunch of cubes at once to my house and distribute it from there. Looking back, I kind of promoted the hobby more than I realized and it was a sign of things to come… cough cough

• My favorite primary color is blue, and in case it isn’t clear by my profile picture and my website, my favorite color is turquoise or neon purple.

• I have lived on four different states all over my country (México), the south, the north, and currently on the central region, all sorts of weather conditions and altitudes. Not too bad I’d say.

• For some reason my first ever full anime was Neon Genesis Evangelion. I didn’t even know it was a mecha anime, I was not expecting what it would become later. Of course I was already exposed to some classics, such as Dragon Ball, Captain Tsubasa or Yu-Gi-Oh, which are constantly airing on public TV channels in Mexico and which I have never seen more than a couple episodes each. Evangelion was the first one I chose to watch consciously from start to finish.

• Finishing games was not very common for me as a kid. Looking back, the first game I ever completed is probably Halo 3 with my friends, though memory fails me. I would have to ponder some more on this… The earliest games since then is Ocarina of Time and Chrono Trigger in 2015-2016.

• I have had four dogs, and only two of them at the moment. The first was Chicharito, a chihuaha I had for almost 14 years. I dug the grave myself, and it was surprisingly quick how I got over it after that. The second was Navi, who I barely got to have for a couple months due to a disease, she died first years ago,I wrote about that back then. My two remaining dogs came after and got to be with Chicharito for a few years, they are 3 or so years old and I’m quite happy to have them.

• My current YouTube obsession continues to be football. I keep watching documentaries and goal compilations from X or Y players or my national team, the World Cup does something to me, heeeelp

This is day 13 of #100DaysToOffload and day 8 of #Blaugust2026

I actually write most of these posts in a single big text file that I then copy paste to a final post.

So, by looking at this text file, I have an idea of a few drafts that have been around for a very long time. Some are super long, and I decided to just talk about these ideas for once. Some are still definitely works I want to complete, but it may be months until that happens, I may as well share some of these.

The post right above this one was about apps I wanted to share, three apps—maybe more in the future—that well, I am currently using and liking. These apps are cool and all, and a lot of my earlier blogposts were about app recommendations! But it just felt like I was writing filler and that just leaving links to those apps would be better.

So yeah, the three apps I was mentioning were:

• Image Toolbox, a super complete… image toolbox, which I use for my weekly collages.
• Buran, a great client/browser for gemini capsules (whenever I check one of those links).
• Screen Time, a neat app that tracks the time you spend on each app of your phone.

The next post was about the Max Steel franchise of toys, and its movies that were part of my childhood. This one is a bit more complete and it’s about a topic I am passionate about, so I’m definitely going to keep going.

What stopped me on my tracks here was the research I started to do. I learned about a lot of things such as other toylines from Mattel that influenced Max Steel, such as Big Jim, as well as competitors like Action Man. It kind of overwhelmed me and I lost the focus which should have been on my personal experience with the franchise.

I’ll definitely return to this, and I also want to watch the movies I still have pending, before I continue.

Another of my uncompleted drafts was a response to Dom Corriveau’s post about letting go of old hobbies, a theme that really struck me, given the amount of hobbies I have had over the years.

I was going to talk about yo-yoing, card magic, origami and some other things that have ended up abandoned when compared to my reading and gaming. I used to spend hours with a pile of paper sheets and watching endless tutorials on YouTube, sharing pictures taken with a 480p webcam on Flickr, where every cool origamists uploaded their work circa 2011, I guess.

I should revisit that post, it’s literally a single paragraph right now.

The next incomplete work was an entry for The IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories. One of my favorite ever trips in my life was a visit to Houston TX, where we visited the NASA museum, and it was a once in a lifetime experience for young me. We also went to another more regular museum with bones and paintings and the like, but I can’t recall the name of that one and I’m too lazy to check right now.

I was going to do (and I can still do) a fourth entry on my series on Videogame Franchises, but I should probably start with a tag to compile all of them first. I won’t spoil the series I was going to mention there just yet. It’s not a difficult post to start over after all.

One of my favorite drafts that I started back when I was absolutely focused on Breath of the Wild. I had a pretty fun adventure where I went up a huge hill, and I tried to turn it into a complete narrative journey, talking about what I found and did to reach the summit.

This was fun and all, but I couldn’t bring myself to post it, it felt a bit childish to talk about it especially because I was describing it as if it actually happened, and then do a fun reveal where I was like surprise! it’s all Zelda

Now that I wrote it, it makes even less sense to do so, but if I ever return to finish that game, I might try it anyway. Or post a different thing.

One of the longest posts I’ve written and haven’t published yet is a huge ramble on block puzzles in videgames. This was actually caused by my love for the level and world design found on Soul Reaver, one of my favorite games I completed last year.

I talked about the first puzzle designs games and also focused on the latest game with block puzzle elements I’ve been playing: CrossCode. It was a bit of an extra ode for my love for Soul Reaver, seeing the shortcomings present on a lot of modern titles (CrossCode included) that lack some of the nice mechanics included on that game from 1999—like moving a cube from side to side instead of always having to push it.

It was already about 1400 words and would include screenshots of plenty of games, but I felt it would work better as a video essay for some reason.

I am yet to do a yearly recap for 2025, no comment.

This is day 78 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

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

Around 10 years ago I used to have a pretty neat bike, it was a bit big for me but I could use it no problem. It was gifted to me by my uncle and I really liked it. However, we moved, and my dad told me he had to sell it to a friend.

I was very, very upset, but we couldn’t bring it with us, and eventually had to come to terms with it.

A couple years later, my dad gave me another bike, but I kind of neglected it for many years, I don’t know if it felt like betrayal or what but I only really used it twice and it never felt right. The bike was smaller too, with 24” wheels, and I was already (barely) an adult, so I felt too slow with it.

When I had the day off on Monday I decided I’d try and get that old bike up and running. It didn’t work out.

The tires were deflated and had some cracks, so I carried it with me and walked to a workshop to see if they could fix them—it was closed. I walked back and left the bike home, and took a bus to Walmart to buy a pump and inflate the wheels myself—it didn’t work. The bike was in a garage/storage room, a hand-made one with an aluminum ceiling and plenty of gaps, it was easy for moisture, dust and other elements to set in, so there’s that.

Anyway, I figured it wasn’t worth it, and decided that it was too small for me, so I’d get a used bike from a workshop instead.

Yesterday I went back to work, but after my shift was over I went to a bike shop nearby and saw a few options.

Unfortunately I was feeling kinda introverted and could only ask something like “a bike with different speeds that can go uphill and through dirt roads and stuff”, which was as generic as it gets. Anyway I was still offerend a few options, some were way out of my budget (which is around 450 bucks), but some others seemed pretty decent.

I didn’t take note of the brands for this post, I could only remember a Giant which was in reparations and would cost around 290 USD once fixed. I may return today once work is over and try and make some more questions. I literally walked to four other bike workshops from there all over the city—maybe just walking is fine—but most were closed or had a very small catalog.

Once I returned home I checked online for some reviews of affordable bikes in my country. I saw a few interesting options from brands such as Alubike, Gravel and Mercurio that seem to be popular in México and with prices to match the economy here. I’ve been looking at the Gravel Everest and the Mercurio Ranger, for the most part, with the Alubike Sierra as a more expensive option which may be worth the extra.

There are some pros and cons to consider here, I made a list with some more random thoughts:

• Buying online will require me to some assemble the bike, but learning how to do it might be fun.
• I could still assemble it wrong and ruin some part, but I am pretty confident in myself to figure it out.
• For the price of a new budget-friendly bike, I could buy a used one that’s higher quality.
• I am not super sure the bikes available will be higher quality, but it may not matter that much anyway.
• Buying used on a bike shop will let me try it immediately and check how it performs too.
• I could also buy and assemble a new and more known brand bike online, get it serviced, and call it a day.
• A bike shop will guarantee that it’s well assembled and maintained, I can get more equipment there.
• Supporting a small business that brings old bikes to life sounds kinda cool.
• I should still fix my older bike, maybe I could resell it after all.

Anyway, I am still on the fence on all of this, I am trying to figure out where does a bike fits in my current lifestyle. I don’t know if I’d use it to commute to work, since I need to go through a highway with a lot of trailers and trucks and it just seems super scary. By the time I get home it’s already kind of dark too.

So would I only use it during the weekends? Or I should learn how to be safe on the bigger roads? I also really enjoy just taking the bus and having an hour to spend there without worries.

Decisions must be made once again…

This is day 62 of #100DaysToOffload.

I often call myself an introvert, and due to yesterday’s post, I got some helpful feedback, advice and opinions about it, which I appreciate a bunch! Some got me thinking about how introverted I really am, and the sort of behaviours I often adopt when facing different situations.

Maybe I could make a quiz or something—but nowadays most of those websites are just AI slop. I’ll just write and describe what goes through my head, and I’ll let you judge what you think of me in this regard. Obviously, as I’m the source of these descriptions there’s a bias here, but anyway, my interactions in real life and online differ a bit, depending on the context.

First of all, I consider myself to be much more active and outgoing online. After 6 or so years on Mastodon, I am somehow close to 3K followers. There are a lot of duplicates and people who migrated and follow me from multiple accounts, or are no longer active, but the point is that there’s people who have found me interesting and worth talking with, which is cool! Number go up, brain happy.

I love to get comments and (usually) reply to them, I like when my posts get some attention—unless that translates into toxic Hacker News replies—and people are inspired by me or reach out to me about many topics. I have made online friends and I can name many of them, they are real persons and I’ve had some honest chats, some that are only technical or superficial, but many have been really significant and valuable to me too.

As for online gaming, when I was a teenager I would happily spend hours on Monster Hunter Freedom Unite with strangers all over the world, many times I used voice chat and had a lot of fun. There is a YouTube stream archive out there from some small Spanish YouTuber where I played with him for a couple of hours straight! It was epic. A while back I wrote about the Guild Cards I had which contain information of fellow hunters I played with, including a column with the date we last interacted. Thinking about how it’s been almost ten years since then makes me feel very old…

More recently, I haven’t had a lot of issues playing Peak with some friends from the Fediverse and also the TWG Discord server. The game has proximity voice chat, and it’s an essential part of the gameplay to cooperate with each other, I’m rather active, constantly seeking to help (or be helped) by the people I teamed up with, joking and bantering about random stuff. Some of the people I had never even met, but there was always someone I knew, which brought me confidence to be myself. The goofy nature of the game helped to build a chill atmosphere, everyone was super friendly. I did not fear joking around with my teammates a bit nor trolling them a bit (and helping them out afterwards). I died plenty of times myself and got to be a little ghost haunting the surviving players. Haven’t played this game in weeks though but whatever.

Be it Discord, Signal, Threema or XMPP, I don’t have a lot of trouble interacting with groups of people I know, and I am often the one who will try and start a conversation there, by sharing a blogpost I wrote, or something I’m currently doing (right now that means sharing videos of my Tomodachi Life island). The same goes for messaging specific people, I have plenty of chats on Signal that have been going for a long while and that have helped me develop some true friendships I appreciate a lot.

However, I don’t have interest on long-running online threads where I keep being mentioned about things I have nothing to do with. My friends in the Polymaths’ instance often get into “hellthreads” talking about rather deep stuff, or some TV show I don’t know anything about, or politics; and I rarely engage after the first three or four replies—which turn into dozens and dozens by the end of the day—even worse when more random people get involved and things end up blowing out of proportion. It’s usually harmless banter, but the notifications do build up.

I don’t interact much when I don’t care about a topic, and I try to not switch themes on a chatroom until it’s been a while since the last message on Discord. I often stick to one or two channels, and get familiar with a few active users there. A common practice of mine which you may already notice, is that I love to share my blogposts everywhere, and to spark conversations about them. I can’t help it, I do like to have some attention after all, I’ve even been called out on it by the mods of some communities a couple of times, especially when I am constantly sharing progress updates on a game and such (sorry TWG). I’ll often share and photos of books or manga I’m reading, and stuff like that.

Online group calls are very varied and heavily dependent on the group, but the latest ones I joined were for the Homebrew Website Club. The circumstances there have been rather dire for me though, as I am often on a busy place, only able to listen. At the same time sometimes the topic goes to places where I don’t have anything to add. There’s a bit of technical chatter sometimes and I can’t add a lot since I’m unfamiliar with it.

It’s one of those times where I feel kinda out of my league. Even when blogging and playing around with my website is one of the things I do the most, I am really terrible at talking about it. I feel like everything I say is pretty obvious, but I’m sure if any one of them reads this they’d say the opposite. Either way, I’ve not had the chance to talk many times, I enjoy being a listener though.

Where it goes a bit different is in the TWC Discord’s voice chats. There is a reading club and a gaming club, and both hold meetings where there are discussions and everyone gets to share their thoughts! I’ve participated on these for Soul Reaver and Resident Evil 2, and talked quite without many issues. However, there was not a lot of exchange required from me, I said what I had to say during my turn, and then I didn’t provide much feedback, simply listening. There’s also the podcast episode I participated in, which was I still can’t believe I did, I am told it was pretty good, but I am yet to relisten to my own voice, I remember saying my piece and nerviously laughing at whatever my cohosts said during their turn, again, I just enjoy listening.

One-on-one calls with online people have been rather nice. I rarely do these, but it has happened on Discord, with random conversations here and there. I recall one where we just rambled about the PSP for almost an hour, it was quite a fun time though, and I even learned about a couple games that are now on my backlog, like Black Rock Shooter. There was also that one time I watched a movie with a friend I randomly met on some app where you meet random people, and then we talked about manga, anime and videogames for a long while. Tt was one of the few times where I could give all sorts of recommendations, ramblings and suggestions to someone who was pretty new on all of it and had a lot to learn and experience in those hobbies yet.

Perhaps talking comes easy to me when a) It’s about something I’m interested on and b) I don’t need to look at anybody’s face while chatting. These voice calls do have one deterrent though: The language barrier.

I am a bit iffy on my pronunciation and self-conscious about structuring spoken sentences in English. It’s not that I don’t know how, I write these paragraphs without any problem, but the process of saying the words continuously in conversation makes things weird for me. It’s not the main factor anymore though, just something that lingers from time to time.

The more I write this the more I feel it’s just a simple matter of being familiar with the people I talk with. A single common interest or goal is enough for me to hold a conversation and go from there.

But the problem is I don’t like to reach out to someone for the first time. I don’t know how to start conversations in person. I can write something here but I don’t get to just recite it in some public place until someone stops to listen and wants to talk, after all.

Once I am with friends in real life, I have no issue being loud and joking about things and suggesting we play some card game or setup my Switch for some multiplayer fun. But what gets me to actually talk or make friends in the first place? Well, being in a situation where it’s better to interact than not, perhaps?

I think I’ve mentioned before how I’m one of the more senior members in my friend group at church. I live closest to the building, within walking distance, so my house often hosts extra activities: Nintendo Switch gaming, tabletop games and, every once in a while, a session of Land of Eem. Not too long ago my “social battery” ran out rather quickly, I’d even escape home from everyone as soon as we were done, although my friends would walk there too and visit anyway. I rarely said no, but I knew that when I did they would get it, it’s just how we are lol

I don’t really mind having guests, I let my friends use my Switch or play while I am just using my phone, when I don’t really feel like socializing. My home is theirs and I’m happy to have some background noise and sometimes just watch what they do without feeling forced to say a thing.

Honestly that’s just the best for me, to be around people who are happy to have you among them but don’t expect you to force yourself into whatever’s going on. It’s a little weird after all since it makes me a bit of an “outcast” but it’s still cool. Sometimes, I am being grumpy for no reason they will tease and annoy me, but that’s often because I’m at fault and way too unfocused. For example when I agree that I’ll play with them but I keep scrolling and getting distracted on my phone and the like. It’s okay when things are made clear from the start instead of ruining what we had planned, after all.

Either way, I’ve made an effort not to be as grumpy anymore, and switching to more active board games that I bring to church instead of going back home where I can escape to my room and turn into a hermit has helped too.

Of course, I am also a complete hypocrite. When someone in the friend group pulls out their phones, I will very much be annoyed when they use it during a game and. Some times, since I’m the one in charge in my house I get to ban phones out during visits where everyone agrees to play together, except for mine of course.

At work most of the interactions happen during lunch, it’s the same group every day and I don’t really feel like I belong, nor do I feel that I want to. The chatter there is full of gossip, drama, complaining about workmates or the boss or some other topic. Sometimes they’ll talk about current events and things like that, but the focus is never where I’d like it to be. There’s also a lot of teasing and dirty jokes. These are often part of my culture, the kind of thing that gets one cancelled on social media especially in a place like the fediverse, but that’s just how things are here. I don’t feed those conversations, hence why I stick to reading or using my phone, even though I come off as quiet and shy, which I guess I am.

A few times some device I have or thing I do comes into conversation, and even then I’m like “this is going to lead nowhere, I’m only going to look like a show-off”, for example, as cool as the XTEINK X4 is and how I keep boosting posts about it and recommending it online, someone saw me using it at work and I just summed it all up as “it’s an e-reader” and said nothing more.

Basically, when a conversation at work focuses on me or requires my input, I try to make it die down as soon as possible… I don’t like to stand out, I’d rather they keep talking about whatever they saw on Facebook and such.

As an aside, I keep noticing how I do these sorts of dismissive remarks about normal people sometimes so I should make it clear, this is mostly for hyperbole and maybe comedic effect and I know—or want to believe—that most people have plenty of goals, activities and hobbies that bring them joy, and they are obviously not two-dimensional caricatures. Alas, they rarely bring those topics to conversations at work. I am not superior to anyone just because I have niche devices or hobbies, I am not better because I play single-player indie games instead of FIFA or Call of Duty or because of whatever hobby or craft I’m good at, and similar dumb comparisons I make sometimes. Maybe I feel guilty because a part of me does feel some pride about “not being like them” but I know it’s just a silly thing to think okay sorry bye.

In many situations I could have gone on and on about me and my interests—I mean just look at this post’s word count—but at work all I’d get is “ah so you use it to read during work hours”—which yes I totally do—but the teasing is just annoying to me, and I am sure at least one of the people there dislikes me or is jealous of me for some reason. Maybe I should just change my friend group, but I am not that bothered by it. I am used to how things are and I don’t hate the people I’m with, I laugh way too much at some of the random complaints and stories told there, I just don’t really say much myself nor do I want to spend any more time with them outside of work hours.

Then there’s the friends I’ve made ages ago, from high school or from previous places where I used to live. I don’t speak with the vast majority of them, but every once in a while a status update on WhatsApp (yes that’s what I have to use to communicate in my country) will spark a conversation. I don’t share links to my blog to people I know in real life, but I share photos of the games I play or the books I complete. The latest for example was a short chat of 4 or 5 messages with my best friend from University, when I shared the latest Lego I built. We haven’t seen each other in ages, but I did convince him to buy a Miyoo Mini Plus back in the day.

Also, if I know your birthday and I have you on my phone contacts it is very likely that I’ll send you a Happy Birthday message even after years without talking to you, for no reason whatsoever. Fine, maybe if you are a highschool crush of mine there’s a bit of a reason but I’ll shut up about that.

There have been times where I met those friends in real life, and I don’t have a problem talking as if we’ve never stopped! It has always been fun to catch up and see where we are at in life. Sometimes our interests and hobbies have completely drifted off, but I still manage to find common ground most of the time. I can’t recall an old friendship of mine that I would want to avoid nowadays.

Same goes for cousins and family members. I am extremely grateful about how nice my extended family is. There seem to be some issues between brothers here and there, but me and all of my cousins (there are dozens) get along extremely well. The age difference between us all is rather big, but small groups with similar ages are easily made and it’s always fun when we get to reunite during Christmas and the like.

I still don’t really come up with talking topics or anything, but I am happy to go along with what they talk about, and more than pleased when I bring my Switch and my cousins brings it too and we get to do some epic Mario Kart tournament. I happily annoy and tease and play around with my extended family all the time, which is fun.

Almost nobody in my family and real life people I know are aware of my blog. There’s only like five people who know it exists, but nobody is actively keeping in touch with whatever I share here that I know of.

Look at me, writing another blogpost about myself and putting you all through such a ramble. Perhaps I wrote this all for me more than you, but I appreciate if you made it this far. I am shy and introverted, but I also try and interact with the people around me, I am pretty outspoken online and even a bit of a troublemaker, I will barely be able to look at someone in the eyes, and I won’t even notice you if we find each other on the streets. I guess I could keep going on and on, but I don’t want to spend any more of your time. Introvert or no, I’m just another person trying to get by, living on this pale blue dot.

This is day 59 of #100DaysToOffload.

A few weeks ago my mom had a talk with me, when she discovered my videogame collection. To be clear, it was not even hidden, you only have to enter my bedroom and look to the right, something she has done before, my guess is she never stopped to count them or she didn’t think those boxes were all games, whoops.

She was worried about me, and talked about how I need to focus on the right things and stop getting distracted by the internet and videogames, and that I should not be spending so much money of it. She doesn’t know how much I actually spent, but well let’s just agree that it’s not insignificant.

I do also agree with the time investment/getting distracted part. I do waste time on YouTube, and even if I mostly stick with the fediverse for social media, it still can be a bit of a timesink. I definitely could do without some of the impulse purchases I’ve made before.

But calling videogames a distraction doesn’t sit right with me. They have plenty of positives, but I don’t think I need to talk about that here.

One of her questions was about what do I even do sitting in front of a computer most of the time, once I arrive home from work, especially when it’s been a while since I’ve gone to the gym too. Yes it’s YouTube, and scrolling on social media, maybe some PC games here and there or some graphic design on Inkscape. I’ve never been clear about it, “I’m just using it”, I say, whenever I am working on my blog, writing or editing a post. I use a window manager on Linux, so it’s always easy to switch my screen to a browser or whatever. Sometimes I don’t mind to show the editor though, they don’t read that closely.

I don’t have to hide the stuff, to be honest, if my parents stumbled upon any post from my archive, they wouldn’t find anything new about me or something that would change the way they see me, the only difference is they’d know I share it online, when I don’t talk much in person about things that interest me. That reminds me of another post I wrote a while ago about how terrible I am at explaining my hobbies. Either way, the face I show to the people in real life is not too different to here. I try to be honest.

Writing for me is a hobby and a bit of a ritual by now, no matter how fancy I try to explain why I write on a blog post, I don’t know how I would say it in real life. I feel that spending time typing out words that are not a novel or something that makes money doesn’t make sense to most people, it’s not productive I guess? Even less so when I don’t even care for ads and sponsored content—I wouldn’t mind reviewing a handheld or getting a steam code every once in a while though ;)

Back to videogames for a bit, it’s true that there are plenty of experiences more important than them, sometimes they can become an escape, and while that isn’t wrong, acknowledging reality matters, I don’t want to trick myself otherwise. I should be looking forward and actively work towards achieving something more. Perhaps it’s kind of a cliche but I do want to save up for a home, I do want to find a partner to share my life with, get married, and form my own family, I want to go through the good and the bad moments all of that entails, so many questions and things to experience. I want to live a good life, and that shouldn’t just be on the web, or just videogames or writing, but people, community, life.

But even then, videogames are awesome, I love to play them and to experience them, the variety of stories I get to live through, the challenges I manage to overcome, the mechanics and puzzles and gameplay I learn and even master sometimes. I think it’s possible to have both things so I don’t see myself ever leaving them completely.

I look at my dad who didn’t grow up with games and refuses to play them nowadays, and like, yes, he’s cool and he does read a lot and other things, but I want to also show my kids how to appreciate videogames from the ground up. There’s some pretty cool dads out there which are also a model for me, but nobody is perfect, so I parse through the examples of those that come before me and that I’ve met during my life, to grow myself according to some ideal. I may never reach it, but getting close is enough.

Yep, my kids will be playing SNES and GBA games before they learn what polygon-based graphics are, they’ll be getting stories from JRPGs and get used to waiting for their turn to move while the enemies still attack you, they’ll get used to a couple buttons and a d-pad before they need to use dual analog sticks. Eventually we’ll get to Halo and they will understand that you don’t need a run button to have fun in first-person shooters.

Reading and writing too, they spark so much, they inspire so much. Before bed I will read for them, stories from Jules Verne and C.S Lewis, like I did. They’ll learn how to solve the Rubik’s cube and all of that. They will have their own pens and learn cursive writing and know a world before whatever the future is. At least that’s what I’d like, but it doesn’t have to be any of that, I think I just want them to love learning.

Woah look at me, talking about what’s yet to come. It’s so weird, but I guess it’s something I’d like. If they want to do something else or lack any interest on anything of what I have to show and teach them, I will still try to guide them, but I’ll have to accept their choices, and love them regardless, it’s okay too. Maybe this is one of those posts I wouldn’t want my parents to read, why am I typing all of this out anyway?

I remember, I was looking for ideas online and just saw the way Robert starts a writing session and thought I may as well do the same, just another ramble of thoughts flowing one after another without any particular structure, and well now I am revealing a bit of what my hopes are.

I guess there’s a bit of a barrier to express myself fully in person. I am, after all, an introvert. I still barely talk during lunch with my coworkers, preferring to scroll on my phone instead or read some manga. I still don’t go out that much and if I do, it’s just to go by myself to some public space and read there instead of talking or meeting people. It’s not like I’m about to change who I am just yet though… I guess I could say I’ll try but not even sure how to start I guess.

Are videogames a deterrent on my progress? Is writing the same? I’ll spend less money on videogames sure, I already have a big backlog anyway so. Should I write a little less and experience more? Should I spend my free time in other things? I don’t particularly feel the need to. I eventually want to make a trip somewhere, like Japan, or Canada or some European country, Spain could be fun too I don’t know.

What’s this post about? How will I even title it? I talked about so many things from gaming being a good thing for me, to blogging and writing being things I don’t mention much and how I don’t want people around me to know I do it even if I don’t care that much, to building a family in the future and raising mini versions of me who will get into my hobbies and my wife’s too of course but ideally we’ll share some of them and…. I’ll just stop rambling about it all for now.

I’ve been working for two years now doing the same thing, and I guess that’s a totally normal thing too, I get good money, I don’t get overworked, I am building up on vacation days and the like. It’s all good, do I want more? Would that help? I don’t really want to rattle things that much, but I wonder if I’m stuck in a bit of a cycle. I have been thinking about the next step for a while, I don’t know which is it, or maybe I do and I just don’t want to take it yet, I like how things are, even though I feel something should change.

This is day 58 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.

Write a blog post about this moment in time—what you see, smell, hear, feel, taste? Where are you? What were you doing immediately before this? How are you feeling both physically and emotionally in this fleeting moment in time? What do your senses notice about this particular moment in your life?

The weather here has started to warm up, no longer that cold—it’s never that cold compared to the north during my childhood—so I don’t need to wear more than a hoodie, and I take it off after I get to the bus to work. It’s warm enough during the rest of the day.

I’m at my workplace, sitting on a pretty comfy office chair, on a large desk with adjustable height and the usual peripherals as well as my work phone, ID and earbuds case—a water bottle too, of course. I plugged my laptop into the dock and the monitors light up, email, work chat and other programs already open—boring stuff. My backpack is by my side—I should probably leave it on the coat hanger behind me.

It’s an open office space so all I see is desks around me, some fake plants—they are rather pretty though—and some meeting rooms that are walled by clear panels. Six or so desks away to my left there are windows. The sun is out, but the air was still fresh when I got in.

I’m typing this up before any other coworker shows up. The only noise is the ventilation, which is always a bit colder than I’d like, so I put on my hoodie again—just to be comfy.

When I was getting ready earlier, I had a mug of coffee and a couple of cookies. It definitely woke me up, but I was chatting with some friends on Signal and kind of got distracted.

I ended up running late to the bus stop to work—which is ten minutes away when walking—but there’s a public bus that gets me closer and quicker, saving me like 6 minutes or so. The only risk is the public transport may not show up for up to ten minutes, which means I would miss my bus to work completely. A risk I was willing to take this time.

The bus arrived right on schedule and I got to my work transport—with a couple minutes to spare—without breaking a sweat! I was listening to the latest episode of Into The Aether from the moment I dressed up until I got to my seat at the bus.

I carried my Switch to work today, so I went ahead and played Into The Breach during the commute, I managed to get to the first boss of the first island before the ride was over. It was a perfect run so far with no damage to the grid, but I had started it on Easy difficulty, I still need to get better on Normal.

There’s a meeting where I have to speak and suggest solutions and I actually feel somewhat nervous about it. It’s literally nothing I haven’t done before, but I keep overthinking it, even though I’m like, the one “expert” there who knows what’s going on. It’s a weird feeling to have.

One coworker just showed up, I wished them a good morning, many more have started to arrive now, so it’s time to call it done, maybe I’ll write another post if I get more free time later. I’m feeling inspired.

This is day 32 of #100DaysToOffllad

Helping with the media and worship presentations during service at my local church is a common task of mine. I probably should have done more to prevent this and set some guidelines beforehand, but now that it happened, I wouldn’t let it fly. After a short explanation of why, I saved the day, and educated one more person about the horrors of AI slop. I wish that had been the biggest mess of the day…

The morning kept going, I finished the presentation, song lyrics, the usual stuff. I have no breakfast on Sundays, I dressed up—more formal than usual, I was feeling fancy—and headed out with my family!

After the service was over—with AI nowhere to be seen—everyone stayed to have lunch together.

My church has been collecting money for a new building, so each week a different family prepares and sells a meal for everyone—we are a rather small group—to acquire funds and enjoy the time together.

I get in line for my serving—some great tacos de bistec that I couldn’t stop eating—and I sat on a different spot than normal, since most of my friend group helped prepare the orders, or handle cash. I was enjoying myself, listening to the chatter without saying much. I start to hear about violence going on in the streets, about drones flying above some areas, things start to get a little tense.

As much as I hate it, I install Facebook again—still the most popular social network in Mexico. I read the headlines, I read posts from the government in my state and my city. I hear the people around me, sharing their own thoughts and updates on the situation.

Some people with friends or contacts elsewhere start to get phone calls, people checking up on each other, people making sure everyone is safe. A few leave early, but things keep going pretty well.

I talk about it on the fediverse, in some group chats. I check up and see this is news worldwide. Flights are delayed, roads are blocked, hotels closed their doors— nobody in, nobody out.

The leader of the biggest drug cartel in Mexico died.

After this military operation, the narco is acting in retaliation with terrorist acts all over the country. The posts online from the local government are clear: go home and stay inside.

Things were going fine. People left at a rather slow pace, those who stayed finished their meal, and things went on as usual—the kids played and ran around outside. We were all rather calm, it was no big deal.

Perhaps is in moments like these where faith shines through, and being together brought a sense of peace amidst the chaos. Maybe it’s naive, maybe we are oblivious to reality. But we rest assured, beyond any despair this world may bring.

And the day went on, we returned home, and enjoyed a quiet evening. My mom decided to catch up on her current TV show of choice, my grandma joined her, even my dad. They made some popcorn too.

I wasn’t feeling like watchting TV, and I stopped reading the news. It had been a while since we had popcorn, so I got my own bowl and went to my bedroom to watch Resident Evil retrospective videos and essays clean up and get it tidy.

Later I returned to my playthrough of Resident Evil 2. It has been such an enjoyable experience, and it felt a bit surreal this time, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that I’m surviving a zombie apocalypse while there are vehicles on fire and buildings closed all over my state. At least I don’t think Zombies stand a chance in Mexico, I admit I chuckled at the intrusive thought.

Checking my emails, I realize I won’t have to work on Monday, and that my gym would be closed too. Not much to worry about, just an unexpected day off, a welcome development despite the circumstances.

A bit later, my church did an online call, where we prayed together about the whole situation going on, everyone arrived home well, and even though shops and the like were closed, we all had our needs covered. We prayed for the authorities, forgiveness for those committing these acts and their repentance, for the people who suffered a loss, and those who struggled because of it all.

My dad prepared some migas con huevo for dinner—probably my favorite way to eat eggs. I was happy that I wouldn’t have to wake up early tomorrow, and things went as normal, then it was time to go to sleep.

The thought about how I could have realized absolutely nothing if I hadn’t been with other people is also weird, I really am completely unaware of the news most of the time, but when stuff like this could happen all of a sudden, I see now why some folks are often very worried on what’s going on around them.

I guess I should try to find a balance. It’s easy to ignore that which doesn’t affect you, I guess, but then it does, and now what? I do hope that I’ll remain calm even then, maybe I can say it because nothing really affected me much, just the tension in the moment. I don’t know, I’ll figure something out.

I’d also like to thank those who checked up on me! I’m writing this last couple paragraphs a few days later now, and it really does feel kinda melancholic. I thought about writing about my day off too, but it really was just a normal time staying at home and playing videogames. That Sunday though, that was a day full of mixed emotions, but it kind of got me to see so some things differently, it was an interesting experience.

This is day 22 of #100DaysToOffload

As an introvert in real life—hard to believe I know—I tend to avoid interacting with people, even those that I should be familiar with.

If I see friends from work, I won’t engage with them unless we actually face each other and there’s no way around it. If I see friends from University, I will not talk with them—unless she was a crush and we somehow happen to sit together in the bus, maybe I’ll say hi, but that only has happened twice so far. Otherwise I’ll probably ignore.

However, this situation was a little different, because now there is a certain social imbalance that I had never felt before. Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s not a real thing, I know that we are equal, I know status based on the work you do is as vain as it gets.

And yet, I couldn’t help it. This person studied a similar career as me, could probably land a job similar to me, and yet he’s a cashier.

That is of course, absolutely fine, absolutely great for anybody. Who knows what other factors are at play here, maybe it’s only temporary, or maybe he’s still doing a Master’s degree and just needs some extra income and will surpass me eventually. Or maybe he just enjoys it. I don’t know.

But the truth of the matter is that, at least for a second. I felt bad for him. I just couldn’t look at him in the eye, I didn’t say Hi, as if I didn’t know him. I didn’t even bring it up to my parents, and I always say “oh that person works with me!” or “they were a classmate of mine!”

And then I felt bad about feeling bad, that I looked down on him like that. I guess a feeling of superiority got to me, the fact that I’m closer to some arbitrary ideal than them. A part of me wants to think I just felt bad not because he was lesser, but because this world is just kind of unfair. But well, I know part of me thought that, and it was wrong, or at least it felt wrong to me.

Or who knows, maybe it was actually insecurity of mine, mabye I felt a sort of imposter syndrome, for being in a better place because all of my circumstances just lined up better, even if he could do just as good a job as me. No idea at this point.

Maybe the other person didn’t even recognize me either, maybe they were happily focused on work and doing their thing. Maybe I just felt bad for being impolite and I am trying to justify myself just to feel better about it somehow.

To make matters more ridiculous. the reason I saw them was because the label on a product had a lower price than the one showing up on the screen, and they showed up to validate the price and change it. So not only did I not say a word to them because I felt bad about being in a “better position” than them, I did so while being a cheapskate who complains about a product being 2 bucks more expensive than what the label said.

Whatever it is, maybe it’s no big deal, maybe they didn’t want to talk to me either, I don’t know, I am terrible when it comes to reading social interactions, I just felt like writing something about it and move on, and well, I just happen to have a place that lets me do that.

This is day 11 of #100DaysToOffload

Lately I’ve seen more conversations popping up, this time about how to manage friendships as an adult.

First it was Stephen, who linked to a reddit post from someone using Obsidian for this.

I assume this is not new. Be it analog or digial, from post-its to calendars to Notion to Zettelkasten and other the like, keeping up with acquaintances is something everyone who is social tries to do, one way or another.

The latest post from Gobino. about Unhinged—a friendship tracker and reminder app—was the trigger that got me to provide my two cents on the matter.

As an aside. One of the most important things I do is add their info to my contacts app.

A lot of people may not be aware of this, but the contacts app on your phone can get you a long way in the journey of friendship management. It is already integral to your phone, and it lets you add more than just the name and phone number. I like to include addresses, emails, websites, birthdays—which will sync to the phone calendar by default—and a note, where I usually add how we met or how we interact the most. Last but not least, a contact picture; be it a selfie, a videogame character, or an avocado, something that I immediatly relate to the person in question! A lot of these contact fields are hidden in some stock apps, so fiddle around in the contact info screen to see if you can expand it, or use a privacy respecting alternative with a more practical layout. I recommend Fossify Contacts if you use Android.

It should be noted, I do not use a Google account to store this information. I sync the info via CardDAV/CalDAV¹ instead using the DAVx5 app. I rely on my email provider’s DAV integration for this. I used to have a self-hosted solution in the past, and there are many available, like Baikal and Radicale.

You can also stick the local storage on your phone to keep this information and, just do regular manual backups. I must recommend Fossify Contacts again, because its backups are the only ones that keep the full resolution of the contact picture. Every other app including the native one will downscale the images to 150x150 px or something terrible like that.

Okay, enough technical mumbo jumbo.

To start things off, I think it’s important to differentiate between the friends I know in person, and those that I’ve only interacted with via a username, and email or a phone number.

In real life

When it comes to the real world, I must admit I don’t consistently keep up with more than 4 or 5 friends, besides family and the co-workers I interact with day after day. I am an introvert after all, I don’t really talk with anybody in real life very often.

There’s really nobody from my school days anymore, I could reach out to them at any time and chat maybe, but actually going for a coffee or something I haven’t actually tried.

I remember a lot of people by name and I have their contact information, so I get notifications for their birthdays, and I’ve sent messages sometimes to congratulate them, which sometimes sparks short chats where we catch up. At one point, I even got in touch with a friend who I convinced to buy a Miyoo Mini Plus, and we played together for an hour or so—it’s been a year since then.

When it comes to my co-workers, I mostly keep it professional. I have gone to the Christmas parties, and I have had no issues with any of them, I regularly talk about videogames with one, but honestly if I were to leave I don’t really think I’d keep in touch with anyone. Even though I am extremely grateful for the teammates who’ve taught me so much, and the experiences I’ve gone through, I’d move on to what’s next.

It’s really just friends at church that I talk to regularly. I’ve been blessed by friendships that I can count on at anytime over the years.

Even when I’ve moved to different cities, I’ve always been able to catch up whenever I visit one place or another, it’s delightful. I have a friend I made when I was 7 or 8, who I hadn’t seen in more than 15 years, I visited on a whim more than a year ago, he let me stay at his place and we talked for hours about things I’ve rarely talked with anyone else. Friends like that are hard to come by.

On the web

Quite a bit of my social interactions nowadays are, for better or worse, online. For the better, mostly, thankfully.

I’ve found many great people on plenty of sites and networks, from a casual comments section on a blogpost, or constant exchanges in online spaces such as the Fediverse or Discord.

I have had the pleasure of chatting on multiple platforms as well, from XMPP to Matrix and my favorite, Signal. Some of those conversations have been ongoing for 3 or 4 years now, and many of those people are wonderful individuals who I just can’t believe I’ve stumbled upon on this space known as the web.

And of course, there’s something awesome about a slow but constant email exchange that just can’t be quite rivaled, I don’t get tired of them.

I even have the privilege of receiving a couple of physical letters from online friends I trust and care about deeply, although I haven’t actually made the effort to write a reply. Now that I am into Fountain Pens though, I think there’s no better time to get on with it.

The internet is such a scattered place, it has been around for so long, so many old accounts and dead online chatrooms, abandoned servers, shutdown online games (RIP Club Penguin). And, despite it all—at least since this blog started—I’ve managed to meet some wonderful people out there, who are no longer just a profile picture or just a bunch of text and pretty graphics on a screen.

Sometimes it’s easy to dismiss someone online on a first impression, in reality, everyone is a fully three-dimensional person with feelings and experiences, differences and similarities. And somewhere in the process the internet turns us into ones and zeroes, and we may think that’s all there is to it. It takes an effort to get past the digital and get to the analog when the internet is in between, but I think it’s possible, and usually worth it.

So, yeah, online friendships vary a lot depending on the situation. Be it instant messaging or just a random comment on each other’s posts from time to time, I don’t really have to plan out anything here, except for time to respond to the longer email conversations I might have going on.

Final thoughts

Honestly, in either case, I don’t really go out of my way to worry a lot about when or how is best to interact with someone. I think that, despite my introverted demeanor at first, this usually vanishes as soon as a sense of trust is gained. Even if we stop chatting for a bit, I’ll probably just randomly pop-up and say anything for no real reason other than wanting to know what’s up with you.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s bothersome, but I know I’m never bothered by someone contacting me, so I just think the odds are on my side that the same is true for most people out there.

In any case, I feel like this post went to a lot of places and it’s pretty decently sized already, so, I hope it’s good enough.

Friendships are quite awesome, and so are you!

Due to this, I thought it would be fun to share a little bit about every pair of glasses I’ve had in my life!

I couldn’t find good pictures of any of these glasses, so I decided to represent them using pixel art, just to have some visuals for this post.

I still remember when I finally got my first pair of glasses, I was 10 or 11 years old, maybe, I was just getting started on my 4th grade of primary school, and getting a desk that was further away from the whiteboard—maybe it was still a chalkboard, can’t recall—or maybe my eyesight was just decaying naturally as I grew old. Not sure.

For quite some time, my parents didn’t believe I actually needed glasses. I was the kind of kid who just wanted to have new shiny things, so they probably thought I wanted to look smart and that my eyesight was actually just fine.

Turns out, I had myopia! Short-sightedness. I could see fantastically from up close, but everything turned blurry when I looked at something far away. So, my parents decided to take me for a vision exam.

~2011

I changed glasses in the same eye clinic for the first three times, it became a pretty common place because we were friends with the doctor there. I remember the place very vividly, first it was me, then me and one of my siblings, and eventually all of us, who would get our tests done, and we always had to wait some time in the reception room.

We would play around with some toys there. All of them were didactic ones, for kids in kinder garden, but even a grown-up kid like me could find some fun with those colored wire mazes, moving beads of different shapes from one end to the other.

There were also some magazines, and newspapers. I never forgot the name of one, Algarabía, a beaufiful word in Spanish I must say—which means “commotion” or “shouting”, but with a distinct elegance to it—without a true equal in English, in my humble opinion. It was a magazine filled with a variety of articles about culture, news and opinion pieces. I remember reading some of it, but I can’t recall any specifics. I do remember liking the cover artwork, which wrapped around the back and front of the magazine. During all the visits I did, there was always an issue of these to flip through.

My first glasses were silver-colored and oval-shaped, I don’t really remember why I went for such a weird choice but alas, I was—and still am—weird. Going with that style inevitably ended with comparisons to Harry Potter and nerdy-ness in general at school, but I didn’t mind and wore them up until middle school.

~2016

Eventually, I think my head turned too big for them, or I simply had to do another vision test. I got the chance to update the frames too, and I somehow got a pretty neat pair of Ray-Ban, that I also really liked for quite a while.

A year or two into high school, I got hit in the face with a basketball, and well, one of the legs broke. Don’t worry, it didn’t hurt that much, I was already used to getting hit in the face as a goalkeeper in middle school.

I remember all trying to fix it in a couple of different ways, most of them were using a mix of crazy glue with sodium, since my mother said that would turn the glue into a stronger plastic compound. It was actually pretty cool, and worked well, until it broke off again after a few months, maybe in just weeks, I can’t recall.

As an aside, a thing I love about Mexico, is that a lot of stuff that would cost hundreds of dollars in the US or Europe, is actually an everyday thing here. Right to repair thrives, from washing machines to furniture upholstery, small workshops where that gets done are pretty affordable overall.

My dad found a glasses repair shop, and got that leg fixed in place for 3 bucks, and off we went for another while.

Unfortunately, I felt a bit annoyed by the slight imperfection in my glasses. The fix worked fine, but the leg had a small bump, it was fixed by a staple welded in place, and the resin was slightly melted around it, it wasn’t a smooth finish, and I guess I just got bothered by the aesthetic, even if it was functional.

~2018

At some point I was given another metallic frame for oval-shaped lenses. It definitely looked like it was made for grandpas. It was gold colored and the legs had wood-textured temple tips. Honestly, I kinda liked how quirky they were, I got the lenses on my Ray-Bans and got them cut to fit on this one, so I could use them in case of an emergency. This means I didn’t go to an eye clinic and got a new eyesight check at the time, so, while they could work, it wouldn’t be ideal.

I eventually went to the eye clinic again, and had another chance to update my frames, and didn’t get to use these very much, for now…

~2019

My new glasses were from some other brand I can’t quite remember, I want to think they were cheaper, can’t confirm. I remember them because the resin had a matte finish, they were dark blue on the top bar and bridge, and frosted/transparent on the rims—yes, I had to look up the part names for these things.

I really liked these new ones, and I wore them all the way to University, actually. I liked the look, I loved the feeling and I then stopped liking them.

Honestly, I should have seen this coming. The clear plastic always ends up yellowing, especially when in constant contact with my nose and stuff. Also, the finish in the plastic ended up peeling off overtime, maybe it’s just my skin, but it was probably just the constant exposure to sunlight, and, the environment? I guess?

Finally, one of the rims broke, and since it’s a rim, it could not be welded back into place as easily, I remember the technician telling me it was way too thin for it too last, so I only used it for a little while like that.

As the plastic kept getting worse and no good fix could be made, I ended up going back to my golden colored glasses for a while. Until a friend of the family decided to gift me and my siblings a new pair for each of us.

2022

This was the first prescription that I didn’t get from the eye clinic that I had gone to since my childhood. We went to Costco instead.

I liked the gold grandpa glasses, but I still wanted a change of style, I was definitely not going to buy anything plastic or transparent this time around, so I picked these from the available options.

These are the glasses represented in my profile picture, I love the dark blue color of them. I’m still wearing them today, as I’m still waiting for a notice from Costco to go pick them up. The brand is Bulova, which is actually a watch brand. I don’t really have any loyalty to it, but the new ones I got turned out to be Bulova too, so I guess I just like the minimalist designs they offer.

Honestly these glasses (and the golden ones) are still in pretty good condition, I am considering paying just to get new lenses with my updated prescription on them so I can swap styles around whenever I feel like it. Could be fun!

This is it for now, what glasses have you had in the past? which design do you like of the ones I shared? Let me know your thoughts!

I’m the older brother who ended up being the one who stayed, found a nice job close by, and is saving up and living a quiet life in our small city somewhere in Mexico.

Anyway, I don’t feel like reflecting on all of that right now, I’ll just narrate how today went, as we went out as a family for the first time in a few weeks, now that my parents got a moment of rest at last.

Honestly, I didn’t want to go out in the first place. I wanted to stay and play videogames, maybe write a completely different blogpost about something unrelated, or maybe write the same kind of post, but about being home alone maybe.

We usually go to the same bigger city half an hour away that has malls and big-box stores, I don’t mind, I can read while on the move on my Kobo. I actually did quite a bit of progress on Nemesis Games, after many weeks focused on gaming and manga.

Our first stop was at Costco, we bought some big boxes to carry some belongings for my sister, which we’ll visit in an upcoming trip. I also updated my eye prescription and was congratulated because it only changed by .25, in only one eye—I forgot which one—after three years without doing a vision test. Not gonna lie, I felt a bit smug about that.

I decided to get a new style of glasses and will have to wait for a couple weeks to pick them up. I wonder if this will push me to update my pixel art profile picture…

While walking around the store I was tempted by some interesting devices.

First, apparently they sell Steam Decks at Costco now, and the price wasn’t bad at all. However, I also saw the Nintendo Switch 2 with Mario Kart World at an even lower price. I know the Steam Deck is the right choice, but, I like Nintendo games way too much and I’m afraid it’s still what I would pick up, if I were to.

In the end, I resisted once again, and only bought a new pair of pants, and a couple of things for my parents.

After that, we went to a mall to have food. We arrived a little early, so I decided to visit the book store with my dad while my mom checked some other department stores.

To my horror, they had completely reorganized a bunch of the sections. The one with books in English got changed and I couldn’t find it. I was too socially awkward to ask someone working there for directions, but after exploring around, I found it in a different floor. To my surprise, I ended up buying Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.

Sidenote, this was one of the first books that got me into retro stuff, geek culture and reinvigorated my love for science fiction, somewhere around 2016. It got ruined for me after listening to 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back, but it’s still kind of nostalgic, and there are some high school memories associated with it that I can’t ignore wether it’s bad or not. I’ll give it a re-read and see what’s up. I’m sure Matt would approve.

I think that seeing it reminded me of my sister, who would always go with me and pick some book, and kinda coherced me into buying one too. Sometimes I had no interest in anything but that one, but I would resist because it was a bit pricier than I’d like, especially since I also had to pay for her book, as the big brother with a job. This time, as I was the only child, I gave myself some slack and finally got it. My dad got something too, but he paid for it himself.

Soon, it was late enough for lunch to be had, so we ordered some chicken burgers from KFC. While waiting for them, I was staring at the tables besides the wall, with three seats. However my mom sat at a table for four, it’s probably something she didn’t even think about—most tables are like that after all—but it did feel a little weird to have an empty chair by my side.

After lunch we walked for a bit longer, visited a couple of shops and my mom got another couple of things. I didn’t really feel like going anywhere. Usually, my sisters would be the ones who would ask me to go to X or Y place, but without them, my parents and I only checked a couple of different stores, didn’t buy anything else, and called it a day.

On the way back, I read some more, catched up in some manga as well, and we got home right on time for me to drop dead tired on my bed. I read a bit more of my current book, and then just rested.

It was weirdly tiring, and a strange experience, I kept thinking how different it would have been if one or both of my sisters were there. They would always grab my hand and push me around and pick clothes for me and the like.

There’s a certain relief that comes with me just being able to do my own business and buy my own stuff without them critiquing my choices or trying to get me to buy some brand. But at the same time, we are family, I will miss the banter and also me being able to bully their choices based on some TikTok fashion trend or some K-pop idol wearing something.

Just siblings, making each other’s life a pain, and a joy, at the same time.

For more, feel free to check my about page, I guess, or any of the blogposts with the personal tag on this website, I guess that would work too!

Anyway, this one will follow the format of Alexandra’s introductory post, just sharing some random fun (or maybe not so fun) facts about me. Plenty of other bloggers have done different types of introductions as well though.

I decided to leave the titles of mine a bit open ended, so you can, if you want, try and fill it with your own random facts too.

FACT 1: I simply cannot…

Stay put.

Or at least, I have a hard time not being in constant motion. Even right now as I thought “what fact should I start with” I was fidgeting with my work id card, throwing it around and doing twirls and flourishes with it, until I started typing and I accidentaly dropped it and caused a bit more noise than I expected…

Really, I still touch the walls as I walk alongside one, and I keep flipping my phone, spinning my keys or glancing at my watch when I have nothing to do.

Ok random extra fact, as I wrote this fact, it felt like a deja vu in progress. That was weird.

FACT 2: I had an accident where I…

Almost lost a finger!

When I was a kid, I was playing hide and seek with a friend at church. There was this room where I thought my friend was, and the door was locked, the window was one of the vertical tall ones, and it could easily be slid up to open it. I tried to do that, it was locked, I forced it, it broke into big chunks of glass, and I sliced the base joint of my pinky finger. My friend was not even there!

I had stitches for quite a while, and due to fact 1, it was definitely a chore, but I learned to do origami one handed, at least. Thankfully, everything ended up fine in the end.

FACT 3: My favorite plushie was…

Bear, from Bear in the Big Blue House, which was a show I really enjoyed as well as a kiddo. I loved it so much, and I played with it quite a lot. Apparently, my parents had to buy me a new one at some point because of how much I had used the first one. I admit I didn’t even notice, or I forgot.¹

Eventually, they took it away from me and I was sad for a while, I eventually grew up and accepted it… or did I?

Looks at prices online

Yes, I did.

FACT 4: My favorite videogame is…

Most of my usual readers already know it’s Chrono Trigger, but for whoever is seeing this blog for the first time, feel free to reach out and talk about anything related to Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy, Monster Hunter, or JRPGs and Metroidvanias in general!

I still need to write a blogpost about my personal Top 25 Games of all time… soon.

FACT 5: My favorite food is…

Difficult to choose, but what I say most of the time would be Tostadas, specifically Tostadas with beans, cheese, chicken, lettuce and tomato, with a bunch of cream on top!

But I also like Flautas, Tamales, and Tacos al Pastor, and all my Mexican food, except for Menudo, no thanks.

FACT 6: I don’t follow them much but..

Sports are fun to play!

I like volleyball, football (not the american one), badminton and ping-pong. I’m not good at basketball (or any of the others, really) but I’ll participate if I have to. Sadly, I don’t go out of my way to play these often though, but when there’s the chance I’ll take it.

I do like watching football during the World Cup though, but Mexico never goes beyond group phase nowadays so whatever.

And I have read and enjoyed sports anime like Hajime No Ippo, Haikyuu and One Outs, and read manga like Blue Lock, The Boxer and Eyeshield 21, the latter is as close as I get to american football.

FACT 7: I have a collection of…

Watches, sure, you probably already know that one if you read me. There’s around a dozen of them nowadays, which is kind of crazy. Still, not an expensive collection at all since most of them are Casios well under 40 bucks.

But, I also have a collection of twisting puzzles! or Rubiks cubes, or whatever the general term is when not all of them are cube-shaped…

Anyway, I have cubes from 2x2 to 6x6, I have a Skewb, a Square One (probably my favorite besides 3x3), a Pyraminx, a Megaminx, and some 3x3 mods like the Mirror, Fisher, and Axis cube. I want to get a Ghost cube at some point.

I guess I also have a collection of Nintendo Switch games, but that’s for later…

I have walked that same path for the last couple of years, and everyone in my neighborhood does the same, going around it would take four or five times as long. The owner gets angry at people when caught in the act, but hasn’t done much else, I guess he accepts it as a fact of life.

It is a beautiful view, getting to see how the field changes year after year.

For some time, the field is empty, and the soil gets dry and rough, a wavy pattern is the only remnant after the harvest, the one thing that makes it different from yet another empty land. That pattern also makes my walking a little off-balance. The distance between each step, trying to land on the highs of each wave, separated by a distance that makes my stride either way too short, or way too long. When I’m feeling adventurous, I try to have fun and run through; I’m always off by a feet or so and I end up walking instead again, scared of injuring myself. I kind of want to nail the pattern down, and then I’ll run through that field everyday going forward, a guy can dream.

In the present, the crops are starting to grow, soon I’ll be walking through corn so tall I’ll be surrounded by it. It is kind of great, if a bit scary at night, since it feels like you can get lost in the middle of it, or more like a little adventure, with the right mindset.

At this point in time, the path has flattened by the constant everyday walk of everyone going through it, making crossing a lot easier. For now, the crops are just leaves that barely reach my knee, but steadily growing as time moves on.

It’s rainy season too, but kind of inconsistent. Yesterday, the sky was clear and the sun shined, the day before, clouds were everywhere and the rain flooded the streets downtown.

And the pathway suddenly transforms into a swamp.

I dread these days a little, I have to take each step carefully, following or avoiding the path taken by others before me. Sometimes puddles will seem unavoidable, but I’m no stranger to taking leaps of faith, and so far I’ve never ended with a stained shirt, if only I could say the same about my pants…

What sucks, is showing up with muddy shoes to the office. I feel ashamed, because the floor—which is carpeted, to make things worse—ends up sprinkled with chunks of dry mud, that I can’t get out of my shoes completely.

I’ve tried a couple solutions. I usually head to the bathroom immediately and clean up as much as possible before going to my desk. It’s still messy though. Other times, when I know it rained during the night, I ask for a ride and avoid the issue entirely.

Another method my mom told me is to cover my shoes with plastic bags. It works! although it’s a bit nerve-wracking because the grip of the soles isn’t as firm, and having a place to store the dirty bags later is a bit annoying. I keep telling myself to carry a third bag just for that, but I keep forgetting.

Sometimes I wish I didn’t care about dirtying my shoes, that I didn’t have to walk through that swamp, that the dirt didn’t pile up under my desk .

But honestly, worrying about what others think does nothing, so I let go. There is work to be done, and blogposts to be written. They don’t walk through that path every day, they don’t get to see the field turn green, the corn grow high, as the season arrives and harvest time comes.

When I was a kid, I remember going to my grandparents’ house in Veracruz, where everything is green and you can pick up mangos from the sidewalks. In a small town with uneven terrain, and dirt roads everywhere.

The house itself was not big, but the terrain around it was, there were chickens and pigs and trees of all kinds, lemons, oranges, and mangos.

I’d always go play in the swing my grandpa tied to the strongest branch of the huge mango tree. I could spend hours and hours swinging by. I would stand in the big trunk—the highest place I could climb thanks to the big roots that served me as stairs—and let myself swing from there, I pushed against the trunk when I swung back, trying to get more momentum, and reach as far as I could. I have no idea how I never crashed with the tree, one of life’s many mysteries.

Those simpler days were accompanied by rain sometimes, very heavy rain.

I loved the feeling of the downpour, the raindrops hitting my head, my back, each of them huge and cold, like a massage through the entire body. I could rarely experience a feeling like that, even less so today. No fear or worry about ruining my clothes or getting a cold, just the wonder of a child excited by the amazing world around him. It felt like walking through a jungle to me.

I remember my parents being okay with it, giving us permission to use the whole patio as our playground. This is something I’m grateful for, they weren’t overprotective about it, and my grandparents encouraged it too. Whatever case, we were kids just having fun, and it’s just water and mud, how bad could it be? I can’t actually recall ever getting sick due to the rain at my dad’s birthplace.

The aftermath of playing on the mud after that rainy afternoon is the memory that inspired me to write about it.

My muddy shoes were a complete mess.

The mud got everywhere, pretty much impossible to get it off at least by a kid my age—it’s not like I had any worries about it either. My feet too, but cleaning that was easy enough. I had to do it outside of course, or else I would make a mess at the bathroom.

I remember that my grandpa got a knife to slice through the hardened mud and weaken it, more than mud, I guess it kind of turned into clay. The soil over here must be quite different.

My grandpa finally freed my shoes from its cage after a while, and used a brush to get rid of the rest. Only for rain to fall down the next day, and for us to want to go play under it again.

This time, they told us we could go play barefoot. Yet another feeling I’ve not experienced in years.

Thankfully, I managed to resist—way too expensive and probably privacy-invasive—and my interest on it dwindled over time. However, that little itch for getting a proper alarm clock persisted, until now.

A few weeks ago my parents had to go on another trip for a hospital appointment (everything’s good, yay!), and on the way back they were going to buy me another piece of furniture from IKEA. However, they realized it would be too big to carry and my dad hadn’t brought anything to mount it to the car’s roof, so that was a bummer.

However, in one of the photos of furniture that they sent me, I saw a pretty classy analog clock (model name: DEKAD), and asked them to buy it for me, since I was already looking for one, and it would fit with the rest of my IKEA stuff, which at least made the trip worth it.

I got the black colored one, batteries were not included, I didn’t use it until yesterday, after buying some rechargeables. It’s a clock, it tells the time and rings an alarm. It also happens to be analog.

Sidenote: add Analog Office to your RSS feeds, thank me later.

After putting the batteries in and setting the hands to the current time, I stared at it for a while, and it felt like time froze to me.

The clock didn’t have a seconds hand.

For a second—no pun intended—I felt annoyed by that, I kind of wanted to know exactly what time it was.

However, I quickly moved on, I went to play some videogames, and after a while I glanced at it, and the hands position had changed. 😱

It’s obvious, of course it is, time moves forward, clocks keep ticking.—although this one doesn’t because it had no seconds hand but that’s not the point I’m trying to make here.

Time is not something to be fixated on, I guess that’s what makes analog clocks kind of neat? I have been so used to have numbers changing, everytime I look down at my watch, or my phone. A set of digits telling me exactly when I’m at through the day.

These thoughts had been brewing since I got an analog wrist watch recently¹, but well, I guess it took another purchase for these words to finally spew out of my brain, oops.

Not having that precision was really weird, but at the same time, kind of liberating.

Now, I’m not going to go ahead and tell you to stop using digital watches, or to remove the seconds hand from an analog one, that would be kind of dumb. I just mean that maybe if we stop seeing time as something to be measured exactly, we can improve our outlook in some things, such as mental health, or productivity.

This is not a new discovery or anything, of course.²

I recall some article that mentioned something along the lines of analog clocks representing time as a progress pie chart, instead of the discrete metric of 24 hours, 60 minutes and 60 seconds of watches today.

Maybe that very same post—or maybe it was a video? My memory is dying!—mentioned that students are usually more anxious during exams when the wall clock in the classroom is analog, not because it’s analog, but because they were taught to translate the hands position to exact hours and minutes, which takes a bit of mental effort to do.

Of course, the solution would be to not see time as hours and minutes, but as just progress.

I used to have a watch without any markers other than a dot at the 12-hour mark, I don’t know where it ended up, but it was one of my favorites at the time, it wasn’t even expensive, just a cheap one my father bought me downtown like 7 years ago. Sometimes a classmate glanced at it to see the time, but they would usually end up asking me anyway, since they didn’t understand it. I admit I felt a bit proud for that.

I ended up losing it, but maybe I’ll try to find something similar I don’t need to buy one anyway, it’s a matter of mindset, after all. I win this one, consumerism begone!

Seeing time as just progress just feels right, I guess. It’s a lesson I already knew, but it’s also easy to forget. I haven’t worn an analog watch in a couple weeks, but after thinking about all this, I will try to take one for a spin for an extended period of time.

This morning, I got to wake up with the ringing bells of an alarm clock for the first time in my entire life—if memory doesn’t fail me—and I have to admit, it was pretty cool, and noisy.

Next up: getting rid of calendars!

I didn’t really expect I would be able to do this so quickly, but I guess that all the changes going on in my life have made this task easier.

Hyde keeps blaming weeknotes—he’s just jealous that I finally managed to beat him—and I guess it kinda makes sense. Except that I’ve honestly poured much more words into them than regular blog posts would have in the past. If I didn’t write weeknotes, I would have even more time to type even two blog posts for each! One could say that writing weeknotes handicapped my performance. 😉

Alas, I have divided the amount of posts for each of those categories that “write themselves” or that were a given, I guess:

• 28 weeknotes
• 7 monthly summaries
• 5 videogame reviews
• 5 book reviews
• 5 blog question challenges
• 3 responses

That makes for 50 of my posts being somewhat “automatic”, something I tasked myself with writing, or where I followed a template or answered a set of questions, instead of doing something more “organic”, I guess.

But I also really think I’ve done some of my most inspired, out of nowhere, thoughtful posts in a while. With a few replies and links to other people’s blogposts, and some relatively original, interesting ideas and experiences that I decided to share.

Month by month, weeknotes and reviews were commonplace, sometimes even one after another, when a week didn’t give me a lot of time to write something different, and the commitment with my weeknotes took over instead.

January is probably the “weakest” when it comes to “original” content. However, I think that all of those recaps were pretty fun, and seeing how my weeknotes started wasn’t too bad either, I only wrote about having a lot to write about, without a lot of more thought-out stuff.

February was also a bit weak, with not a lot separating each weeknote, other than a quick post about gaming on my laptop and storage management. A book review, a game review and the usual.

March was actually much busier! I wrote about going outside, some random skills you should learn, and even confessed my sins as a FOSS enthusiast. Besides those rambles, I wrote some memories, such as how I got my first console or how Google used to be kinda cool.

I unsubscribed from Spotify and went on a deep dive sharing how I am a fake fan of many things. It was quite a fruitful month, I’d like to mention—even if it was one of the “automatic” ones—that I really liked the effort I put into my delayed anime recap for 2024.

April remained strong, with one of the most boosted and replied to blog posts in a while: Blogging Expectations. I shared my experience switching to Arch, and what’s on my phone storage, updating my default apps list as well. One of my favorites though has to be my Casio AE-1200 review, if only because of the title for it!

In May, I started one of my favorite series, which is currently on hiatus: Videogame Franchises where I wrote about some of the game series I’ve followed and played throughout my life! There are still some heavy-hitters I need to write about, one of these days.

I also wrote what could be my favorite post of this year’s challenge: The constant need for a source of entertainment which also had a lot of visibility on the fediverse, and some great replies via email too, I loved all the engagement it got, and I wrote about that too!. I also shared my struggles organizing my feeds and about the music that plays in my head.

When June arrived, It was filled with game and book reviews! And I wrote another ramble about how I used to take notes, a memory/response about how time flies, and another favorite of mine, a ramble about why not having to work should be the goal, but isn’t because the world is a mess.

Gotta point out I also did a readership survey and wrote my review of an incredible game, 1000xRESIST, which you should play.

In July, I finally switched things up a bit, and now that I am giving a title to my weeknotes, it somehow makes it feel more like a blog post instead of a template! Still, I have shared a few posts, such as how Casio’s website failed me, an updated What’s on my Phone and another post that got a few responses, about my struggles with consumerism.

I don’t plan to slow down my pace for the rest of the year, but I don’t think I’ll do another 100 posts before it ends, so, if I participate it’ll be at the start of 2026, if all goes well.

Thanks for reading my website! I really enjoyed the engagement and the conversations around many of my posts, I’ve discovered quite a lot of other bloggers and members of the small web, and made quite a few new connections and friendships.

Now I only need to find what hashtag to use for the rest of my blogposts this year!

This is day 100 of #100DaysToOffload

You probably don’t know, and probably, you don’t care, but they are currently one of the most popular water bottle brands out there. This is something that changes constantly, One day it’s Stanley, the other day is Hydro Flask, or Yeti. It’s just how things go in the world we live in.

Many months, or maybe more than a year ago, my sister asked me for one! and as the big brother and a reason—can’t recall if it was a birthday or something else—I ended up buying one for her. Even though I kind of didn’t want to given the price, and that she already had other water bottles.

The products aren’t inherently bad, and I know some great lovely people who have stuff like that. I want to be clear saying that I will not judge you for owning X or Y brand of Z thing, at all.

Anyway, today, after I saw my coworker with that bottle, my immediate thought was “I want one of those too.”

Products like that end up carving their way into my brain, and sometimes, they actually get me. I recognized it this time, that impulse, and managed to shove it away.

However, this is not as easy to do when things actually seem like a good deal to me, or when other people I follow say it is a good deal. Many things I wouldn’t even consider before, like buying official merch for a brand I enjoy, are now options to me, things I could obtain, just by swiping that card.

And the same goes for games—videogames were quite a problem last year—if a brand new game I haven’t even played is endorsed by people whose judgement I trust, it’s pretty much game over, sooner or later. I’ve even fallen prey to pre-ordering. Something I was very much against a year or so ago. What has happened to me?

And there’s also the justification for buying expensive stuff that will actually last. This has been the case for me recently, finding that low price for good quality is getting more and more difficult.

And another problem! I’ve experienced non-Spanish, non-Mexican content for very long. Back in the day I didn’t think much of the price of things, since I wouldn’t buy them anyway. But now that I’ve been working for more than a year and have savings, and the desire to buy my own stuff. I find myself looking at US prices and Europe prices more, and normalizing those costs and thinking “yeah, that seems like a reasonable price!”

Sometimes I convert it to my currency and it’s a clear nope, but other times, it just doesn’t compute for me, and I buy it anyway.

And then there’s the shipping fee! And the tax!

My perception of the value of things has been skewed, and I just don’t know anymore. I look at a t-shirt at 25 bucks and I think that’s fine, where in my country most of them are 9 bucks or so, but then I also think “I’ve always gotten cheap things because I couldn’t afford good expensive stuff before, but why shouldn’t I now?”.

it kind of feels like those gacha games (which I’ve thankfully never played) where the real price of things is hidden behind tons of microtransactions between virtual currencies with an arbitrary worth.

The same is true for me, it’s not just the conversion between US Dollar to Mexican Peso, but between regional pricing and international pricing, and between teenage no-income me and young adult without any debts me.

Some day I’d like to get a really, really good commuter backpack. I’ve been skimming through some reviews and I can’t help but notice some brands popping up. In my case Ridge (the wallet everyone is sponsored by) or the LTT Store one. And I see their price being in the 100-200 USD range, and I hear how there are plenty of other alternative brands at similar prices so they are not actually “that expensive” and then I look at my workmates carrying the same company provided backpack as me, that doesn’t even reach 45 bucks and think “nah I’m fine”.

But then I look at how my laptop corners are getting some damage, and how they actually punctured the bottom corners of my backpack as well after not even 2 years of use. So maybe paying a plus for something that will actually last is a good idea?

And then I think “are there any local options that might be better”? but then I have to consider if they are actually better, or if reviews are high because it’s cheap, or if they are actually rebranded products from AliExpress.

Thankfully there’s still some good reviews out there on YouTube, but again, not many are for my country or demographic.

And now we have AI. And oh boy, are websites absolutely filled with it. I would have thought most trash would be relegated to English websites, but no, we got the same problem now. Except that not only is it bad recommendations, it’s also badly translated! Success!

So, even if I am complaining about people’s opinion swaying me to purchase something I didn’t need, I still think that’s much better in the end. And I just have to work on my self-control, I’ll just stick to asking people I know for recommendations on things.

After all, I know people I talk to that have relied on my opinions quite a bit for some things like which retro gaming handhelds to buy, or what book to read, and I like to think that helped more than it could harm. Yes sometimes the demographics will mean that the prices will vary, but at least I will know that price was worth it to them.

If you have a website and you have something to say about that one niche product, maybe it’s not a bad idea to write a review for it! I used to think that kind of stuff didn’t fit well on my site, but where or how else can we stop this madness if not by not using those sites, and relying on peer reviews and the human touch?

When it comes to self-control when buying things, I guess it’s a bit of a lottery for me.

Sometimes, I am perfectly happy with the one thing I got to do the job.

For example, a year or so ago I stopped using cartridge-based razors. I had a super old Gillette Mach 3 that worked fine, but I heard about traditional safety razors, using double edge blades, and how much cheaper they were than buying carts, and I gave it a go.

In a way, there’s a danger here, the razor itself can be super expensive (to what I’m used to in my country, at least), and I know for sure there are people out there that collect a variety of models. From classic to modern designs that are all basically the same shape!

This is one of those where every review out there recommended some brand at 30 or 40 bucks and said “this is the best budget razor!” and I just think “ain’t no way I’m spending 40 bucks on a razor.”

And I know, that it would be a one-time investment, and it would be something that lasts me a lifetime, and yet I didn’t feel like it.

I found something on Mercado Libre worth 6 bucks, I purchased it and I’ve been using it happily for months now! It came with some blades and I got a pack of 30 more, and I still haven’t run out of them! They are worth pennies! This is a complete success and I haven’t fallen into any pitfalls like getting a fancy brush, or a bowl for the foam.

Again, I know people who have their whole set and treat shaving as a bit of a nice habit or hobby. Totally awesome, not me.

But here come Casio watches!

I bought my first Casio (I had some gifted to me before though) back in 2018, a Casio F-108WH. And it has worked extremely well! Still does today, 7 years later. But here is where YouTube and also people who are into watches have managed to creep into my life—in a way that the safety razor review channels didn’t—and they turned me into one of them. I belong to the Casio Cult, and once you are in, there is no escape.

I own like a dozen watches now, and I have gifted Casio watches to family and friends too, I am way too much into them and I don’t know if I can stop, honestly. But at least I manage to not buy more than 3 per year!

I can’t pinpoint exactly what it is, but I guess Casio watches are just part of my persona, it’s something I wear and that kinda says something about me. I feel like it says “I purchase stuff that lasts!” although, I guess it also says “and I buy too many of them!”

Well, that was a nice ramble I think. Consumerism is not good kids. Buy a Miyoo Mini Plus.

This is day 98 of #100DaysToOffload

I am no stranger to answering posts publicly instead than through private means, but I don’t think that’s the solution here, since some of those emails and chats have been less general and more personal.

What is the solution then? Of course, to write about the problem at hand!

This is it, I am definitely writing something right now, in this very moment, I’m typing, word by word, letter by letter, about this problem I have, where I’m spending way too much time writing but not blog posts, you see, but now this is a blog post, technically speaking, so, I did the thing!

Problem solved, I have achieved to write a blog post for everyone to enjoy, since this is exactly the kind of quality writing people expect to show up on their RSS feeds, am I right? I also just want to write some more short stuff anyway, so this fits the bill perfectly fine too.

But hey, I can also keep going, keep blogging about blogging like pretty much everyone does!

…

In case you are wondering, I have been replying to most emails from my work computer. I type my reply on Notepad++ and once I’m done I transfer the text file to my phone. I would like to say I had a fancy method to tranfer the text from my locked down work laptop to my phone from the get go, but it was a bit meh at first.

I could not log-in to my proper email domain, but gmail still worked, so, at first I decided to write them there, let it save as a draft, check on my phone and copy paste to a proper reply email. After some extra edits, I hit send and called it a day.

Obviously, passing every email I wrote through Google first was not great, I didn’t like it, especially those that were supposed to be encrypted…

Don’t worry, I didn’t send many this way, besides, some of the recipients use Gmail accounts anyway.

For some reason I forgot that stuff like hastebin exists, but as soon as I remembered it, I went that route instead, still not ideal but well, it is what it is.

How would you transfer a private conversation in this situation? I am not quite sure about what would be the best way. Installing encryption tools is a no-go here, I thought about just using a QR code generator from the text, but that has a limit, and I couldn’t find a website that would turn the text into the QR, just a link to a not so private pastebin.

Whatever the case, I kinda think that going back to gmail might be the best move? it may be hard for people to stumble into one of those earlier hastebins, but not impossible…

Oh wait! I think I can password-lock them, right? I think there are some services that allow that, or maybe upload the text file to something like send, you know, that might be the actual best move!

Or maybe I should stop writing personal emails at work. That’s one area where messaging apps kind of win! But I like my emails…

This is day 68 of #100DaysToOffload