I don’t like to think of myself as someone with “brand loyalty”, but it’s undeniable that I have preferences for the tools I use hardware and software-wise.

When it comes to brands for any product, I like to think that I do my research and often go for the most budget-friendly options. I used Xiaomi devices for a long time because they were easy to jailbreak and install custom Android versions on them that allowed me to customize my device however I wanted.

I chose my Kobo Clara 2E because it’s not Kindle and it was easy to install KOReader on it. If it were any other brand, if it lacked a built-in store and if its default OS were bad. I wouldn’t mind, the hardware allowed me to do what I wanted, it was the most practical choice. The XTEINK X4 showed up much later to fill a different niche, but I still would have gone Kobo for a proper-sized reader, Amazon is just evil.

I went with Anbernic and Miyoo handhelds since they simply had the most community support around them and I knew the hardware was plenty for my needs. I could have gone with even cheaper no-brand options too but the amount of information available would not have been as big.

Built-in features are almost never what I care about, a pretty logo does not matter to me, I don’t need some comfy walled garden either, when it costs me my freedom.

However, I am weak when it comes to one brand: Nothing

Or at least, that design language of theirs.

Yep, the title had a double meaning, I apologize

I don’t think this warrants a super long blogpost, you can just look up what they sell and you’ll clearly see how incredibly unique they are.

I own one of their phones—Nothing Phone (3a)—one of their wireless earphones—Nothing Ear (a)—and I just purchased their of open earphones too—Nothing Ear (open)—that I’ve been testing for a couple of days and plan to use while cycling around my city.

For the price, the brand is well placed, offering affordable devices with some compromises that I don’t really care about. But when I purchased these earbuds (and the ones I already had, to be honest) I realized that I completely ignored my “budget-friendly” ideals of before. I would usually go for something like SoundCore or Haylou back in the day.

I got them because they were competitive, sure—any more expensive and I would not have bothered—but the design is what won me over. They look unique, they say something about you. And as much as I don’t want a brand to represent me or seem superficial, I just can’t help but love it.

There are better products for better prices, but the creativity just won me over, their phones’ bootloader is also unlockable so that’s a plus for the day I finally decide to get into rooting and installing a rom on my phone again.

Now, if it’s not obvious. Nothing (the brand) doesn’t actually deserve brand loyalty. They have done some sketchy moves too. I am not a fan of the pathetic AI button on my phone that can’t be reprogrammed by default. There are also some updates that have shown some notifications with ads for app recommendations and the like. Definitely not perfect at all.

I just love that their phones and products are more than just boring rectangles and Apple clones, okay?

Oh, actually, I am also weak to Nintendo, they suck, they do terrible stuff sometimes, but those games are just so goood…

Sorry, I am just a hypocrite. Enough.

This is day 68 of #100DaysToOffload)

All of my Nothing products, very aesthetic!

I added the following button to the bottom of my articles! I made use of Jekyll’s Liquid syntax.

<a class="button" href="https://share.joinmastodon.org/#text=Check%20this%20blogpost%20by%20%40joel%40fosstodon.org! https://joelchrono.xyz{{ page.url | uri_scape }}" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Share on Mastodon</a>

You can find this line in use on my _includes/comments.html file—available on my git repo, where I also have my Mastodon-based comments section, just in case you are also interested on getting those set up on your static website!

Thought I’d make a shorter post for once. Could it just be part of my weeknotes? maybe, but I write whatever I want on my website. I actually realized this thanks to a short update post, not too different to this one, on Andreas’ website. Cool stuff!

Anyway, I should go back to playing CrossCode before the day is over, I have a bunny to catch.

This is day 28 of #100DaysToOffload

It went well last time so, yeah! I’ll even actually come up with a title that lets me search for whatever I was talking about on the post this time…

Updated Uses Page

Yesterday I took some time to update my uses page! I added some things like my music player and e-reader, as well as some apps, check the changelog at the bottom for a full list, I am not sure why I took so long to change some of the stuff there. Not even my current phone, the Nothing 3(a) was listed yet!

RL Dane suggested me to add my Fountain Pens to the page, but since I only have a couple of them, I don’t really feel like doing so. Besides, I am yet to create a page for my Casio watch collection, and that takes priority at this point in time.

I guess I could just add “Pen” and “Watch” there, list the model and leave it at that. Actually it may be already done by the time you read this post…

Innioasis Y1 shenanigans

I’ve been updating and adding music to my Innioasis Y1 and it’s been quite a fun experience. I keep thinking about switching to Rockbox now, since I am literally a couple of clicks away from giving it a go, but yesterday I forgot the device at the office like an absolute fool, and today I’ll be busy, so the switch to Rockbox won’t happen until the weekend comes.

Another reason I am interested in trying Rockbox is that one of my albums refuses to be displayed properly, no metadata is shown, it’s just the ugly filename, but for some reason three of the songs are getting recognized and grouped properly. I spent a while trying to tag it a certain way, with Kid-3 and MusicBrainz Picard, and even used ffmpeg to re-encode the file on Linux, checked the output with file and metaflac, comparing to working tracks, etc. No idea what happened yet.

Want to know which album is it? The Chrono Trigger soundtrack, dude!

Still loving the device though, my experiment continues!

Jana used Quick Reply!

It’s super effective!

Jana already wrote a reply to my reply with some extra thoughts on the matter. I find myself in a similar situation. During my Mastodon break in August—I wonder how many realized that happened—I uninstalled Tusky and limited myself to using the browser to access Mastodon only if necessary, which should’ve been never to be frank.

Initially it was just logged out, to maybe see posts linked to me in some chat. In the end I ended up logged into my accounts from the web client, and even though I managed to do it more purposefully—since there are no notifications—I still knew I was just getting around it and missing the point.

I’m not sure I want to go all in on splitting everything a phone can do into different pieces of hardware or techniques, but I guess I am kind of already doing it since I got a music playing device, a retro handheld console and my kobo e-reader. Where’s the harm in getting a camera at this point? Hmm…

For now, I’m good.

I actually already participated on this challenge, so in case you missed it or if you are wondering why I have not written anything about it, feel free to check out my answers, the seventh one might surprise you! 🤯

It’s interesting to see how themes come and go, just like how yesterday I wrote about friendships after the discourse going around it for months.

I remember a few years back everyone was talking about a reality without Javascript or CSS (including me), and it sparked a bunch of interest conversations from the webdev blogging scene. Simpler times…

Things come and go all the time, sometimes I was there, and sometimes I didn’t even know they were a thing everyone was discussing.

In a way, it’s nice to be unaware, there is some pressure that comes when everyone is saying something and you feel that you should do the same, but when a theme or idea sparks naturally instead of coming from a bandwagon, it’s nice too, it’s more you.

Anyway, not that long of a blogpost really, just wanted to share some links I guess.

What are some of the challenges or themes you wish to see again?

This morning I was catching up with tiramisu’s blog, who hadn’t published anything for a couple of weeks since September because of a trip. I’ve always appreciated the writing, the anectodes and quotes shared from time to time there, which is always inspiring, although I wish I could do more things like that. Check out their stuff!

For some reason I stayed awake pastmidnight yesterday—or I guesss today?—replacing some of my older music albums in MP3 format with some rips in lossless FLAC. I was staring at the download progress bar for some reason, I could have played a bit of Soul Reaver or maybe continue my read of Exit Strategy (Murderbot #4), but alas, I was hyper-fixated on transferring the audio files to my phone as soon as possible.

I used LocalSend—a great alternative to Apple’s AirDrop or Google’s Quick Share—to transfer the Album folders to my phone, and it was a flawless experience. I used the Flatpak package, although apparently there’s a web client, I couldn’t get it to work and didn’t spend a lot of time setting it up. After installing the app on my phone transferring everything only took 20 minutes or so.

I probably could have just used a cable, but I haven’t actually installed MTP support to my Laptop running Arch, and I’d rather not set it up if I can afford it. I do have USB drive with type C connector, but I did what I did.

I lied when I said I just stared at progress bars, I just remembered I watched a reaction to a reaction ranking which movie nuke is the most realistic, the algorithm is scary sometimes.

I was tasked with going to pick up our dog from the vet clinic after work yesterday. My parents were out of town again, so I had to ask a friend for a ride, he’s the one who actually gifted us the dog in the first place when it was old enough to be separated from the pack.

The dog was pretty much alright, no broken bones or anything, just some bruises and a leg that still can’t quite stand. I was given some medicine too. I wanted to ask what for, and the receptionist told me I should ask the doctor, but I forgot to do it so I am just hoping for the best.

As soon as we got home, my dog was quite excited to be back home, my other dog was also happy to see her friend back. She had been sad during the couple days of being alone in the patio. I was just glad both were OK now.

Giving the medicine was a bit of a pain, the pills were fine, I just wrapped everything in some ham, but I had to use a syringe for the liquid ones and getting it in the dog’s mouth was pretty hard to do by myself. I managed though.

I’ve noticed that my dog won’t move one of the front legs though, almost as if it’s not there

Because of the schedules, I wasked to leave early today to give my dog the required medication as soon as possible. I’ll be leaving shortly!

(This section was actually a short rant about the fact that TRON Uprising is a great show that didn’t get a proper ending, but I ended up writing so much about it, I decided to make it a separate blogpost instead, so go check it out!)

I somehow didn’t mention this anywhere in my week notes, but I actually really got into some daily puzzle games in the style of Wordle (remember when everyone was into that?). The ones I am currently invested in are:

• Tiled Words
• Waffle Game
• Reunion

I’ve had success on all of them and haven’t lost any streaks for the couple days I’ve played them, which I think speaks quite a lot to my increased English vocabulary, or my luck, but it’s definitely my lexicon, want proof? I know what lexicon means.

If you play these word games, let me know at once!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are quite a lot of things that happened today that are better left for the upcoming weeknotes in a couple of days, which is why I almost didn’t write this post, because I am not allowing myself to mention it.

Let’s just say it was a busy day, and a busy weekend overall. I played some videogames, I also watched some movies from a certain popular franchise, and started a new TV Show that’s still airing related to that universe—you already know this one right?

I also finished one of the games I’ve mentioned in my weeknotes recently, and I returned to an older game I had abandoned for a few months. Actually two games, good stuff!

I don’t even know why I am being so secretive about it, it’s literally not important, but well, this is what happens when I have no theme or idea of what to say and time keeps ticking.

Interestingly enough, as soon as I started typing this I thought “maybe I should check what others wrote today” and Jedda’s post about blogging breaks and acknowledging it’s ok to take them showed up right on top of the feed, and yeah, I probably should do that instead of whatever this is. But I am already six paragraphs deep into this nonsense and you somehow kept reading it!

Well, now that this is dealt with I’m going to play one last race (or maybe two) of Ridge Racer 2 for the PSP, and then I’m going to sleep, or probably finish a chapter of Nemesis Games, because I’m behind on that one!

Byeee.

For now, I’ll only do a quick list of multiple website changes I did this past week for the sake of cleaning up some stuff and making everything just a tidy bit better.

I already did one of these , but I guess that writing so much and using my website even more often kinda gets me inspired to fix all the little caveats I find here and there, which is pretty cool

A lot of the changes are pretty unnoticeable, but at least I know they are there, which is what matters.

Most of this is relatively non-sensical words if you are unfamiliar with Jekyll and static site generators, but it’s really not a big deal.

• Implemented microformats support for my main page and my articles.
• Turned the more section into a more.yml, placed it on the _data folder and used a for loop to generate it.
• Adjusted the CSS stylesheet so the more section looks like blocks instead of a regular list. Same class as the blogposts in the main page.
• Turned the navigation bar into a flex element, to make it more responsive, the gap between each list item is now equal.
• Added Blogroll and RSS to the navigation bar.
• Removed the whitespace in between the navigation bar list elements by doing the for loop in a single line.
• Fixed and cleaned up the RSS Feed’s XSL human readable structure which had been broken for a while.
• Made the avatar in my about page responsive.
• Fixed the blurry favicon issues with Real Favicon Generator.
• Added author and permalink to the bottom of the posts template.
• Fixed the IndieWeb Webring setup with some extra rel=me link elements.
• Added some more buttons on my blogroll, and removed some dead links.

I am probably missing a couple of things, but I am pretty happy with all these changes. No long explanations this time, I just want to go sleep and get ready for tomorrow!

A new week is upon us! and Blaugust2025 shall continue.

I never thought the day would come, but it did.

My workplace assigned me an iPhone SE, and I had no choice but to accept it.

Sadly, there were no other options available, other than iPhone 15 models which are reserved for the higher ups anyway—would’ve been nice though.

Today I went to buy a case and a screen protector for it, since I don’t want it to get damaged, since it is not even my property anyway and my workplace didn’t include one—would’ve been nice, though.

I have to say, if there’s one thing I found charming about this device, it is the screen size. It is totally tiny and adorable compared to my regular phone, and having huge black bars in the top and bottom, as well as a home button in the front is rather nostalgic, despite the fact that I never had an iPhone before.

Also, just because I am barely allowed to install things on it and the like, doesn’t mean I’m not going to customize it to whatever degree Apple will let me, I don’t think I’ll share it or anything since it will probably just be the same wallpaper I already have on my other phone, but still, just letting you know.

Regardless, no need to worry dear reader, I’ll still be mainly using my trusty Android device, the Poco F4, for the time being.

This is day 56 of #100DaysToOffload

You will post as much as you can, ideally daily, but we all have lives, so go easy on yourself. This is meant to be fun!

Indeed, we all have lives, and most of mine was spent playing and thinkering with the Miyoo Mini Plus, creating icons and a theme for it. Or playing the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown on my Switch, or watching 3 seasons and a half of the sports anime Haykiu!! for the sake of my sister—and eventually my own—so we can go watch the movie coming out today in México. And of course—I also have a job.

I was already a bit unsure about me doing a blog per month, I had done it before, but a lot of my evenings were spent on all those other things—I didn’t even finish my Top 25 Games post like I intended. That’s alright for me, since I still wasn’t happy with how I was writing it. I will dedicate a some more time to complete it.

Alas, the month is over, and the challenge was completed. I would have liked to go for the 31 posts I originally wanted, but I am happy with how things turned out, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I am happy I took it relatively easy, after all this is not something I wanted to force myself into. I wrote when I wanted, and that was ok.

Regardless, I blame my Miyoo Mini Plus for everything. But I can’t really get mad at such a cute little portable device. It’s just too good!

Be it gaming, blogging, reading or watching anime, it’s all good!

I’ll write my monthly recap, so you can expect more detail on what other shenanigans I got myself into tomorrow as well.

This is day 54 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 22 for #WeblogPoMo2024.

However, something made me feel a bit icky about it, not the writing itself or the idea behind it, but a word that to me, is almost uncofortable for some reason.

Consumption.

In this specific context, I feel like this word is almost a swear word to me, I don’t like it, I don’t want to say I “consume” content. In fact, I don’t like referring to the “content” as such either to be honest.

Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely times when I “consume”, whenever I scroll on social media, and read a few words in a random post, or whenever I watch a YouTube Short of a topic I don’t care about just because it is mildly interesting to me, knowing very well it’s not worth it, and forgetting about it after scrolling down.

However, more than just consumption. I think being mindful of whatever I’m watching, reading, playing or enjoying, should be called something more than just “consuming”.

I think the best word for it would be nourishing.

Consuming to me, is like eating, maybe it’s not junk food or desserts, but you are just doing it because you need to. But nourishing rings a little different in my head, it means something that helps you get nutrients, keeps you healthy, and helps you grow, it is more purposeful and leads you to be a better person and improve your state of mind.

So now I wonder, what would be the ratio, between what I consume, what I nourish, and what I create? To be continued… maybe?

This is day 52 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 20 for #WeblogPoMo2024.

Honestly, the title is made more to rhyme rather than actually compare the apps. I’ll just ramble about the state of YouTube nowadays and stuff like that so—here we go.

This was triggered by a post by @dm talking about swinging back to Newpipe over YouTube.

There are many reasons for it! Most of them I already mentioned in my older post, but one that is missing is of course is the addition of YouTube Shorts to the app, which happened a month or so after my original post got published.

For a while I didn’t care and I kept using Newpipe on my phone, while sticking to YouTube on the desktop. I even did some experiments over time like logging out of YouTube.

However, the little cracks of Newpipe started to show up and I have to admit I just got lazy. Sometimes videos did not load, sometimes rotating the device would crash the app, sometimes the comments wouldn’t appear, sometimes the Picture in Picture would behave incorrectly.

As a FOSS enthusiast, I am very much used to jank in software, but at the same time I wanted to just watch YouTube and not worry about anything else.

I tried many other clients, alternative frontends like LibreTube and similar things. Then YouTube Vanced died, and then ReVanced showed up later and now everything was a mess and confusing and a proper safe APK no longer actually existed unless you patched everything yourself. And I did patch my own APK and stuff for a while, but then an update broke things. Then you could disable updates for it, but then a server-side thing would breake it.

And the same thing happened to Newpipe, and everything was bad.

So I ended up getting a YouTube Premium subscription, thinking I would finally solve all of my problems, and to be honest, it is really good, no more ads in my YouTube app was simply incredible. And the extra addition of YouTube Music is really nice, I even managed to get a year at student price despite not being a student anymore, dont tell Google please.

Regardless, despite its good parts, the UI is just terrible now, with Shorts showing up, community posts I don’t care about, livestreams taking over the top of my Subscriptions page, and more Shorts cramped wherever they fit.

I just want videos, videos and nothing else. Please.

I will try to use Newpipe again, I don’t know if I’ll stick to it, but we will see.

This is day 51 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 19 for #WeblogPoMo2024.

After all, the point of writing for my blog is not to do it by force after all, and I don’t really take part of challenges like this because I need make a commitment or to push my limits. I am not saying that is wrong, everyone has their priorities and lately, writing simply hasn’t been one. I’ve been quite distracted by a new hobby. Something simple, portable, and handy, which is nice.

I’ve written pretty consistently for the last 4 years at this point, and the real reason I take part on this challenge is simply to interact with other bloggers and readers. People with common interests, or completely different ones. Some of them writing for the first time, some returning from a long hiatus, or some simply looking for a popular hashtag to show their work to wider audiences.

According to my instance whenever I type the #WeblogPomo2024 tag, there are more than 300 posts using it during the week. Let’s just say it is only half of that due to the @Pomo bot aggregating all of the participants in its feed. That is still a lot of participants, and I get to participate not just by writing, but by checking out the work of the others and adding many of them to my RSS reader!

Besides, there’s no need to worry about being a little behind on things, I assure you I’ll reach 31 posts this month. Just because I didn’t publish anything, it doesn’t mean I didn’t write anything. I just have to finish up my drafts and if everything goes right, I’ll be sharing more than a post per day at least a couple of times before May ends!

Have a good day, dear reader!

This is day 49 of #100DaysToOffload, and post 17 for #WeblogPoMo2024.

The first one is Mario and Luigi: Super Star Saga for the GBA, this was one of the first games I tested and it made me fall in love with the system, it looks so good, colorful and crisp. I had a savefile with 25 minutes or so and I decided to just keep going on it. The moments have been fun so far and the battle system remains as fun as ever! The fact that I have vague memories of what to do helps me speed the process quite a bit, which makes the whole thing a breeze as of now, I’m making steady progress thus far and I hope to finish it very soon.

Another gem of the GBA, is Advance Wars, a tactics RPG that has been on the top of my Play Activity for a while now. The game is pure strategy and I am going through all of the tutorial stages as of now, I only need to do another 5 levels or so, but it is incredibly fun and addictive. I really wish there was an Into The Breach demake for the GBA though.

Final Fantasy VII is another I plan to continue on the device. Last time I played it on my PSP, it got stuck during a cutscene, and I couldn’t get past it in any way, so I ended up just not playing the game. I also bought the Switch version that comes bundled with FFVIII, but a friend of mine borrowed it, and I think I’ll be fine completing the game here.

Suikoden II is a game I played for 9 hours or so on my PSP, and I plan to continue playing it as well! The game looks incredible, I really wish there were more games on the PS1 with such wonderful 2D graphics combined with 3D and high-res effects, it holds up perfectly to this day. I am also playing a patched version that has some nice QoL features and bugfixes, I hadn’t experienced any to be honest, but it doesn’t hurt to have it.

Another games I want to resume are Parasite Eve, Xenogears, Metroid Zero Mission, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon, be it Crystal, Emerald or whatever. And of course, start another run of Chrono Trigger, because I have to, it is my duty!

From then on, my plan is not really set yet. I think I’ve put a little too much choice in my hands now. I have been playing Apotris, a Tetris clone that has a really clean interface and playstyle, which makes it perfect for the MM+, I think I’ll look for a demake of Lumines as well, to have a couple of more puzzle games to play around.

Now, when it comes to games I’ve never played, there are quite a lot! Castlevania: Symphony of the Night seems like something I have to give a go to, there’s also Koudelka, a very rare survival horror JRPG game of which I saw some reviews and moments, I was surprised by its superb voice acting and direction, although its combat seemed average, I still want to play through that story. Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain is a game I remember seeing a friend play as a kid, and I was amazed by it, I really want to give it a go, and the same goes for the MediEvil games.

I also really want to play Mother 2 (Earthbound) and Mother 3, Bahamut Lagoon, Trials of Mana, the Golden Sun duology, Vagrant Story, Aconcagua and many others!

Let’s just say there are quite a few entries I need to add to my backgloggd profile…

This is day 47 of #100DaysToOffload and post 15 of #WeblogPoMo2024.

But then I was like “let’s make this a more personal thing” and now I also want to add a personal story of how I first found the game and my personal experience with each.

But then I feel like I would rather write a blogpost for each videogame but I also don’t really feel like writing a short post like this one, it would have to be a fairly decently long essay, since each game is kind of worth one, or they wouldn’t be in the list!

So yeah, it will be a short experience of them and a quick synopsis, I guess, maybe one day I’ll do a whole series of essays about each, but not during a blogging challenge like right now!

This is just another shortie, because I didn’t have another idea of what to write about and I would rather be playing on my Miyoo Mini+ at this very moment!

Have a good day dear reader!

This is day 41 of #100DaysToOffload and post 9 of #WeblogPoMo2024.

• The buttons feel good, the screen looks great, the speaker is much better than I expected.
• Installing OnionOS was a breeze, setting up the emulators was fine, transferring my ROMs from my PSP was simple.
• Getting SSH working was fun, using SSHFS to access it all from my computer was awesome to see, although it was a little slow.
• Transferring save files was alright, I had to delete the save states generated by Miyoo Mini Plus automagically for them to be recognized, or maybe figure out how to reset a ROM is better.
• The GBA save file format of the PSP emulator I used is .sav, the mGBA’s format used by Miyoo Mini Plus is .srm, but there are online converters so it wasn’t that painful.
• The SNES file format is also .srm, but on my psp the .srm was in uppercase, but it was easy to edit that as well.
• The GBA version of Final Fantasy VI sounds awful and runs slower, I might have to fiddle with the emulation settings, but I’ll stick to the SNES run I already had, which runs so much better than PSP.
• Metroid Fusion, the first game I tried, ran wonderfully though.

I can’t wait to play more of this tomorrow!

This is day 40 of #100DaysToOffload and post 8 of #WeblogPoMo2024.

However I’ve also watched videos of other handhelds from Retroid, Anbernic and other similar brands and clones and I have to say I’m discovering a whole new world I’m not sure I want to get into it any more than the Mini Plus.

I already own a PSP as many of you might say, and I am perfectly aware that it can pretty much run everything the Miyoo can. I literally completed Chrono Trigger on it, and I played like 40 hours of Final Fantasy VI on it as well. Not to mention the hundreds of hours put into Monster Hunter Freedom Unite and other RPGs, GTAs and similar stuff.

Despite this, I can’t help but be extremely excited, specifically about SNES and GBA emulation, since I was always able to tell the music of many games slowed down quite a lot unless frameskip was enabled, which would make some things jittery.

Another part of me feels like the speaker may not even be that good, according to some reviews, but I’m even buying some wired earphones just to counteract that in case I can’t handle it.

There’s another weird feeling of going back to playing some of the Pokemon titles on the GBA. Pokemon Fire Red and Emerald were one of the first games I emulated on my HTC ChaCha with physical keys—alongside a couple Zeldas and Metroid—and I also played them for quite a bit of time on my PSP when I got it. I guess I want to relive those childhood memories once again.

And then theres the possibility of DS emulation! I am perfectly aware that one would probably be best on a device with a touchscreen, but it is still great to have, especially for the games that don’t really make use of the dual screen. I may replay Chrono Trigger’s DS version once I get it, as well as the Pokemon games for it!

Then there’s the Pico-8 support, and the ports of multiple games and software that is just, so great! So many things await!

I can’t wait to have this device and play around with it, and maybe buy some other handhelds down the road, I’ve heard rumors of a clamshell design coming soon, I might not manage to control myself—what rabbit hole did I get myself into?

This is day 37 of #100DaysToOffload and post 4 for #WeblogPoMo2024

Sometimes I feel my reviews are kind of samey and most of them can be summarized as “yep, it is good, I liked it” and not much else, but I don’t really know what else to say, maybe my taste is just that good! I admit sometimes I feel like I should do a reread or play more to have more things to write about, but I don’t really want to turn this into a chore.

After all, if I am writing about something it is because I liked playing/watching/listening so much so, that I also spent time writing my thoughts about it, but I don’t do it out of duty, after all, it is only natural to write about the things I enjoy!

I probably don’t need to write this, since these articles are still a minority, it’s not like I will turn this blog into just a reviews site. There is still a lot of stuff I plan to write about—I am just quite entertained by other things lately.

As always, hobbies come and go for me, so this may as well just be a phase. Soon enough I might get bored and maybe just stick to my monthly summaries, maybe a bit more expanded than they’re now, and call it a day.

In the end, the point is to just keep writing, and enjoy myself while doing so.

This is day 32 of #100DaysToOffload

This is why I am still not done with the blogpost on many topics, such as my overview of 2023, or my favorite XYZ of the year. Besides, I am having a great time playing Ori And The Blind Forest on my Switch and that’s keeping me a little busy. I’ll probably finish it really soon so stay tuned for a review! update: the review is here!

Still, I also want to go to sleep early today, hence the briefness of today’s post, its more of a notice rather than actual content so I am sorry for that.

Don’t worry, though, I am making use of the drafts feature in Jekyll to keep track of the ideas that pop into my head and also just write blogposts bit by bit over the span of a couple days, against my usual practice of just writing everything down in a single day. Some blogposts will still be written like that, and others will take some time, I’ll just try to keep it simple, and stay consistent.

This is day 4 of #100DaysToOffload

Honestly though, I never really managed to go past the first 5 or 6 puzzles, be it because I forgot or I was into other things back then, or I simply lost interest—it is not the best game to play at school.

Around September of last year, I decided to finally redeem myself, and I acquired the digital version of the game on the Nintendo eShop. Once again, I completed the first 4 or 5 chapters—as the game calls them—and I left it as that. It wasn’t until the last day of the year, that I dedicated some more time to it, and until now, January 3rd, when I finally completed it.

This was a fun game! The atmosphere was pretty great all around, and the graphics have not aged one bit. It is a game that still looks amazing today. The animations and the physics are really well done honestly. The music was rather minimal, mostly ambient sounds. However, there were time were it just rised up in a fantastic way, merging with the sounds of the environment around the player, quite awesome!

The puzzles featured in this game are also pretty good, although I don’t have a ton of reference to compare it to, I have to say I had to do a couple attempts on many, and even 12 or so in a few of the chapters. Regardless, I always had that feeling of Eureka! when I finally got the method.

I watched a documentary on about the development of the game and the many challenges that came with it, and it really gave me a ton of appreciation for this little gem.

I have to say, I can’t wait to give a try to the sequel too! Although I may play some other games first just to mix it up some more. But hey, my backlog has shrunken, right?

This is day 2 of #100DaysToOffload