The theme was: Moonlight, hosted by James.

We are always three

My Mom told me about the big circles in the sky, of how darkness used to be full of dots of light. I don’t understand the stories. There is no sky outside.

We are going to a new sun now, Dad says this one is younger—but still older than me! The other one was the moon—a big rock that shone in the night sky—how can it be dark when there’s a light above?

We used to be able to find all sorts of things in the feeds, like shows and cartoons, but storage is needed for new planet stuff, and some of the archives had to be taken out. Mom saved a couple of them on our terminal, though.

Some were shows by magicians, my favorite ones. They could multiply, or change, or make objects dissapear! With a wave of the hand or under a cloth—Dad told me it’s “sleight of hand”—I can’t figure it out.

The man was wearing some weird suit, in the middle of a table, the expectator had colorful clothes and her hair was long, he was a little bald. We cut ours to keep the place tidy. Maybe hygiene wasn’t too important back then?

He took three little pieces of bread, put two of them inside a tea cup, flicked the last one towards the audience, and started to talk about an ancient poet.

The man let the cup spill on the mat—the three balls of bread rolled out from it.

He shared a poem while he did it all again:

Once the party is over,
the guests have to leave.
I don’t know that sadness.

As I walk back home,
we are always three:
The moon is my partner,
my shadow follows suit.

Once our trip is over, us passengers have to leave, I look forward for that day.

I will have a new home, friends to play with, a new moon above me, and a shadow to follow me!

Afterword

Well, I rarely do fiction! This is definitely a first for the blog, but I wanted to try my hand at it. Where does this come from? Why do I write about it? Feel free to share your thoughts before reading this, or afterwards too, hehe.

Well, first, I wanted to try doing this for the sake of it. I enjoyed the theme and wanted to explore it.

At first I thought about writing from the point of the view of a certain character from Outer Wilds, but I won’t share much spoilers about that game or the context of all that. Play it yourself, please.

Anyway, I also wanted to write from the perspective of a kid with an untainted sense of wonder. I had read some fiction like Strange Dogs by James S.A. Corey, and of course, The Indomitable Captain Holli by Rich Larson. Completely different stories, but both from the perspective of kids who are yet to understand the world. I thought I could try it out. My inner child is still alive and kicking but maybe I used a couple terms that were too much? Like, “storage”?

And of course, the magic. This talks about a real magician doing a real performance, the wonderful René Lavand is one of my main inspirations in close-up magic. His presentation was absolutely unique. Poetry, classical music, and an elegant presence at the table—performing all of his illusions with a single hand.

The effect can be seen on YouTube but the language is in Spanish. I did my best to translate the main lines of the poem here, it still doesn’t compare to the original which is a bit longer.

I hope you enjoyed this little piece of fiction, perhaps I’ll try some more.

This is day 45 of #100DaysToOffload

Why you ask? Well, because I can literally make a recap of only sci-fi movies, and a recap of other movies if I want to, and all I have to do is wait for the end of the year.

I’ll definitely save the writing I already did, and probably use some of it for this month’s recap as well.

(If you’re curious about it, this month I have watched The War of the Worlds—awesome and terrifying—, Mercy—pretty meh—, The Day The Earth Stood Still—absolute masterpiece—, and I’m halfway through Minority Report—which is looking great.)

(As another aside, let me know if what I just did with those commas and em dashes is stylistically correct or whatever, I thought it looked kinda neat and I have read a couple books that have used that weird em-dash+comma thing. If you have to know, yes, I am stealing the whole paragraph inside a parenthesis idea from the Murderbot novels. Also is the last dot supposed to go inside or outside the parenthesis? I don’t wanna skim through the novel to check.)

In any case, I think this thing where you start writing something only to realize it should probably be something bigger (or maybe smaller, sometimes) can happen in plenty of situations, and I wonder how much does it take for some people to realize this! The treshold is different for everyone I guess.

For example, I have plenty of posts on a series titled “What Interested Me Today”—which is yet to have an actual category or special index for it—and I’ve thought about stealing some other formats from some fellow bloggers, when my weeknotes aren’t enough and I simply have short thoughts to say.

Perhaps a quick and random list of thoughts is fun, like what Loura did just now as I was writing this post. Or like Steve’s thoughts of the day, which is a fantastic little series that I always peek through to see what’s up with the guy.

But well, maybe I should just write my thoughts on those sci-fi films already, gushing about movies is something I rarely do, after all.

For now, you’ll have to settle with a ramble, bye!

This is day 42 of #100DaysToOffload

It’s not because I am obsessed with people who visit my website (although I kind of am), or because I want to write according to what my readers view the most (although I sometimes do that too). I simply love to see when someone links to a post of mine for the first time, and I see their website on my referrals showing up. A lot of the time it’s only four or five clicks from X or Y small website.

Since I only get the referral, an investigation is sure to follow! I love to explore blogs, digital gardens, and personal websites in any form. Checking their blogrolls, reading through their guestbooks, skimming through posts to see where we may share interests or hobbies.

However, every once in a while I’d find a website that would have no mention of me whatsoever anywhere in the page, and I wasn’t sure how they ended up linking back to me, you know? I had to go even deeper. Maybe using things like FreshRSS’s user queries, websites like Backlink Watch or cool search engines like Marginalia, which has lots of neat information about sites on its index.

But no, even then I couldn’t see where some of those clicks were coming from, and I kind of left it there, it doesn’t matter that much after all. You see where this is going right?

Last year I wrote a pretty extensive list of every blogroll, webring and site that links to me, but well, I always enjoy belonging to more of them, I guess.

Today I wanted to get setup on The Worst Webring, and I edited my footer to add the corresponding URLs for Next, Previous and Random. Typical webring stuff.

I decided I would check if all the other webrings were still working (one of them, the previous link on Geekring, currently does not, by the way), so I clicked on all of the previous and next links, and that’s where it finally hit me.

The reason I was getting referrals from websites that didn’t have any links to me, was because those websites were my neighbours in the webrings I’m on!

So any people clicking around the webrings and ending up visiting my website, come from my neighbors, who don’t really link to my site, but I happen to be the next/previous site on the ring for them!

I didn’t forget webrings exist, I simply forgot how they work, by helping people build connections!

So, that kind of puts me in an awkward position, how come I have never checked up on my neighbors before?

Umm, hi :3

This is day 40 of #100DaysToOffload

Honestly, it hasn’t been too bad, and I actually really, really enjoy a lot of the videos I’ve gotten through the algorithm.

But of course, YouTube Shorts have caught up with me and continue to be a very annoying problem, wasting seconds, minutes and hours of my time at every moment.

The algorithm does show some interesting things, or funny content I enjoy, but things go downhill pretty quickly with the usual AI-generated slop videos and recycled content.

A few of the saving graces I’ve seen is shorts made from genuinely awesome videos that came out like 5 years ago, so I think it’s an interesting way to bring life to evergreen videos about science and the like.

With Outer Wilds playthroughs and essays running rampat, my feed slowly phased into more space and astronomy themed topics, which has been pretty fun to get into until I realize half the videos are way too long for what they have to say and use genAI graphics for everything.

So whatever, I just deleted YouTube and cancelled my subscription now. I will continue to use it via Fennec Browser and Newpipe, though maybe a full YouTube detox would be a good idea to try.

Yesterday alone I wasted almost 6 hours on the platform, and I think like 4 of them were just Shorts. Even now I just had to have a video on the background while writing this, what is going on?

You know what, I will try it, I will limit my YouTube time to one hour a day for the rest of the month. It’s possible I’ll fail completely, but hey, at least you will know if that happens and you are free to bully me for it. The weeknotes next Monday will also be the last ones where I share YouTube links this month, as I also feel like a part of me watches more videos because I have a need to find stuff worth sharing here. The less excuses I have the better!

Alright, let’s do this.

This is day 30 of #100DaysToOffload

At the same time, I like this format quite a bit, so let’s get to the media I enjoyed during the last 31 days of my life, shall we?

Podcasts

This has been the worst month of the whole year, in fact, it has been the worst month in all of my podcast statistics. I barely listened to 14 hours of audio, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact I had visits and couldn’t sleep to podcasts as I usually do. I would probably use my earphones, except that I somehow lost them for a whole week too! Because people were invading my living space, I couldn’t search for them as comfortably and by the time I found them it was too late.

• Into the Aether - 6.6 hours. Brendon and Stephen are also on hiatus for a couple weeks, so I had even less episodes to listen to than usual.

• The Rest is History - 3.5 hours. I’ve been listening to one of their series on the Great War, so that’s been interesting.

• Land of Eem: Actual Play - 1.5 hours. Since I want to get better at GMing, listening to how others run the game is helpful!

• The Ten Minute Bible Hours - 1.4 hours. Back to this one after a long while, still on Matthew of course.

Gaming

I’d say this was the main hobby that completely took over this month, especially combined with the tabletop session we had!

• Outer Wilds - A game I started on January, abandoned for months and only returned to in the middle of August. This title immediately gripped me all over again, and it didn’t let me go until I finally rolled creadits. This adventure was so good, I simply had to keep going. It was a rather profound experience and it will linger inside my head for quite a while. Remember, don’t look anything up, simply go and play it, as long as you are okay with some zero gravity maneuvres in a 3D space, you should be okay. I don’t want to say anything else!

• Hollow Knight Silksong - After finishing OW, it was about time I returned to Pharloom once again. I made a bunch of progress this time around, finally unlocking Act 3 after defeating the final boss one more time. I have also accessed a whole new area and gone through a couple of gauntlets and new bosses. I have a feeling this will take me another twenty hours or so which I am really looking forward to playthrough.

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D - I returned to this game later in the month and completed the Jabu Jabu’s Belly dungeon. It took me a while to figure out how to beat the miniboss for some reason, but everything else was pretty nice! I am finally ready for the next adventure in the game, which will be going to the Temple of Time, and using the Ocarina to access the chambers within, and fight for Hyrule’s future!

• Fire Emblem Awakening - This month was mostly dedicated to the leveling up characters and doing side quests. For some reason I have been unable to follow up on the main story—okay, the reason is Outer Wilds and other games—but I am still really looking forward to putting more time into this tactics game.

• Donkey Kong ‘94 - This has proven to be absolute platforming perfection. Donkey Kong has so many interesting mechanics for its time, it is kind of ridiculous how well it holds up today. I have completed half of the stages now and I will definitely continue for September, it shouldn’t take much longer to beat.

• Minecraft - Only played this one for a day, with some friends on a LAN party on our private server! I started to finally build a house and make it pretty. I was messing around with block textures and stuff to make it a bit livelier, but there is a lot of work left to do, and I don’t even have a rooftop yet.

• Super Mario 3D World - We are so close to the finale of this game, my friends and I have been doing steady progress. and we continue to collect all the stars and stamps in the game! It’s incredibly fun to just get everything there is.

• Risk of Rain Returns - Played this with a friend of mine, just the two of us versus the world. We barely managed to get to the second portal in the game, it really is kinda difficult!

• Faster Than Light - Before our Minecraft session I quickly booted this up on my Laptop and had a fun time on a run. I didn’t last long though and my ship was destroyed in the end.

• Land of Eem - After so many months we finally returned to this TTRPG, and it was absolutely glorious. I’m really happy that we managed to go back even if it was a bit improvised. Most of my players forgot a lot of their abilities and features of the game such as how XP works and the like. We still had a lot of fun though and I’ve read some parts of the core rulebook again to improve for our next play.

Books

• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson - I read this while listenint to the soundtrack of Resident Evil. I’m only at 40% of the book and I’ve already been taken to some dreadful cosmic horror trips. Not bad at all, I can see how Lovecraft was inspired by this one, I have to say. I will definitely finish it soon.

• Clarkesworld Magazine #211 by Neil Clarke - The first issue I’ve ever read and it was a very nice surprise! I already shared a review so, give it a read!

• Leviathan Falls by James S.A. Corey - The finale of an epic saga. I should also write my overall thoughts on the whole thing. For now the review is already available though.

Manga

• Centuria - Chapters 39-47. This shonen manga featuring some dark fantasy and eldritch horror elements has been rather interesting! I started it late in July so I’ve read a bunch more of it this month.

• Spy x Family - Chapters 138-139. Because of all the gaming I forgot to keep up with this one until last week. It continues to be as fun as every though!

• Hunter x Hunter - Chapters 397-401. This epic adventure finally returns from hiatus, and its ongoing arc is rather convoluted after a little while. There are a lot of pages and a lot of texts to go through so my progress has been slow. I do like the build-up though.

• Blue Lock - Chapters 355-356. Another one that I fell behind on because of priorities.

• Fly Me to the Moon - Chapter 289. Same thing as the rest!

Movies

• Spider-Man: Brand New Day - This really is the best Spider-Man film since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 and I really, really enjoyed it. I loved the cinematography, the story, the new characters and how the rest of the Marvel world is interconnected with Peter Parker. Really enjoyable adventure so far!

• Edge of Tomorrow - This is one of those sci-fi films that has gotten better over time. Groundhog’s Day with an alien war in the middle. It’s still a pretty refreshing concept and very well done, a blockbuster that delivers, what else can I say?

• Sunshine - The sun is dying and a crew of movie stars is sent to the send a bomb to revive it all over again. This was a really interesting watch, with some great visuals and a bit of an Alien feeling to it, given the conflicts between the people in the ship and the series of events that happen. Loved that final sequence quite a lot.

Music

I would also like to point out listening to a bunch of Resident Evil’s soundtrack while reading The House on the Borderland as well, extremely immersive.

• FTL by Ben Prunty
• Outer Wilds by Andrew Prahlow
• Hades by Darren Korb
• Minecraft - Volume Beta by C418
• Hyper Light Drifter by Disasterpiece

Finishing thoughts

And just like that, August is done! The month is over and there are a lot of things still to say. I have to admit I am not really feeling too accomplished with the goals I’ve been sharing so I’ll stop with that for now.

Anyway, this is already enough, until next time!

This is day 26 of #100DaysToOffload

To be honest, I was unable to reach the goal of 31 posts for the whole month. I wanted to give that a try and I even did two posts per day some times when I missed some previous days. However, as usual, some other matters got in the way! My siblings were visiting, my sister’s boyfriend was visiting, and I also had a few days of vacation which I decided to spend on other hobbies unrelated to writing.

As such, I ended up with a total of 19 blogposts for the whole month, one less than July which didn’t have an event tied to it! I basically wrote the usual, and well, that’s pretty good, although my pacing was all over the place, with some weeks much fuller than others and the like.

Not many people can afford to write in the same way I do, so I am content, even if it’s not a particularly impressive amount given my previous history.

Here is a quick list of some of my favorite moments and things that happened because of this event!

• I started chatting with Sam from The Tangent Space about our blogging, videogames and specifically how epic Outer Wilds is.

• My post about how we should react to slop was one of many responses to Andreas, who had a fantastic Blaugust too.

• My post on iconic gaming moments inspired Victoria to do a tabletop edition!

• My post on books and tranlsations inspired Marisable to write a blog reply!

• Jedda found this event very helpful to process her recent losses and grief.

• Naty participated for the first time ever, and got a Silver Award just like me.

• Syl actually beat me this time around, I’m going to steal some of her post ideas for future dates.

And here are some of the post ideas I am yet to draft or post, which didn’t make it in time for Blaugust!

• A very long review about Outer Wilds.
• A retelling of my second session GMing the Land of Eem TTRPG with friends
• A post about the Max Steel franchise and its influence during my childhood
• A post/reply inspired by Syl’s favorite game screenshots

I could share a bit more but I’d rather get working on them and publishing something more soon!

All in all, I now posses the Silver Award for Blaugust 2026! after publishing more than 15 posts during the month, and I can continue to write whatever I want as usual. Not like I ever stopped doing that, but still!

This is day 25 of #100DaysToOffload

Then reality hits and it doesn’t quite let you make that post in a way that feels right for the subject.

In the end, you end up writing nothing at all, or with a draft that is quite big and extensive but still not completed.

And welp, you have many smaller ideas for posts you could do in the meantime, but you don’t want to because you gotta dedicate all of that time to that great post idea.

Except you don’t, work shows up, distraction shows up, life shows up, and you end up procrastinating both the main post and doing anything else.

At this point, I would rather have something out, something complete and ready to be posted on this evil blogpost of mine.

Worst of all is that this is also in the middle of Blaugust (pretty much ending in just ten days now) and now I’ll have to play catch up! If this wasn’t the case I could simply let it happen, I literally post at least twice per week anyway, not that that means something.

The only good thing is that there’s a couple drafts that should be done very soon. I rarely publish thouse but the desperation on my side is on that level already.

In any case, I just want to get some post out there to break the procrastination streak and call it day.

That’s a good title, I’ll use it, hope you enjoy it. The original title was actually “When a blogpost stun-locks you”, but perhaps that is too much of a gaming reference for some.

I really want to write a little less about games too, but also not, because I love to talk about games, confusing stuff!

Perhaps I am just playing way too much Outer Wilds this week and my brain can’t process everything properly right now. Too many mind-bending moments.

The blogpost in question is my retelling of my session of Land of Eem with friends by the way. Though my review of Gris is also pending…

This is day 21 of #100DaysToOffload and day 16 of #Blaugust2026

It’s really weird that I chose not to review this one when I rolled credits on it, because it really is a fantastic return to form for the franchise. Super Mario Bros Wonder is a game I completed with my friends almost completely. A title that became one of many choices to try whenever my friends were up to the task.

For so long, the Mario 2D platformers were stuck in a weird place. All of them since the original DS title that added the “New” to the name felt like a rehash of what came before. The artistic direction just didn’t age very well and looked rather basic.

I played some of the original on a borrowed DS back in the day, out of an R4 card, I obviously tried the Wii version, which was rather popular. I remember giving it a go during a birthday party, in one of those fancy birthday places you can rent that come with gaming rooms and giant bouncy castles. There was a Wii there and I shared controllers with random kids beating a couple of levels together.

Years ago I also tried New Super Mario Bros U. A friend of mine had it at the time, and it was a period of my life where I only had my PSP. I wanted some multiplayer stuff and both this and Super Smash Bros U proved ideal. I have a faint memory of playing New Super Mario Bros 2 on a 3DS actually… but not much.

Super Mario Bros 1, 2 and 3 look extremely different from each other, and the same goes for Super Mario World and Yoshi’s Island! As long as the moustache and overalls are present, all of them were recognizable and iconic Mario Games.

While none of the “New” Super Mario titles were bad—in fact, they all had excellent level design and very fun mechanics!—all of them lacked an identity of their own.

Super Mario Bros Wonder gives everything a fresh coat of paint, it is fantastically animated and it does not really miss. Every little detail is wonderful and whimsical and made with passion. It’s noticeable everywhere and I can’t help but love it.

Another thing I enjoyed where the extra power ups, I liked becoming an Elephant and breaking blocks left and right. I never fully understood the Drill Mushroom, but going underground and to roof tops was actually fun and felt great, the classic power ups are there too, and the animations for them are a joy to watch. Trapping enemies in bubbles was funny, not gonna lie.

The game was also very approachable in the way you could complete levels, and replayable too, thanks to badges which gave you extra moves or helped you out in some way, like the Parachute Cap, that allowed you to control jumps better, the Wall Climb that was a lifesaver when you could barely reach a platform, and of course the Dolphin Kick, to swim super fast on underwater levels. There were many others that were fun to use.

The multiplayer was chaotic in the best of ways, and the wonder seeds only multiplied that feeling every time. Some times we played the online mode, and seeing other people running around was a joy. Everyone was actually helpful and I got saved by strangers more than once.

I wonder how many people still run through it today, I should visit some of the levels I didn’t fully finish to see!

Definitely a highlight of the Switch library. I really recommend it!

This is post 3 of 3 for day 95 of #100DaysToOffload

This is one of those chill and cozy types, a photography game where there really is not a lot of pressure or challenge. It was the debut game from Something We Made and you are a young photographer who is tasked by mom (or grandma? can’t remember) to take a picture up a mountain of a phenomenon called “TOEM”.

To get to that mountain you have to take a bus, and to pay for the ticket you have get stamps, which you get by completing quests, all of them require you to photograph certain things in your current location, and the bus will give you a ride to a new place after you collect enough stamps.

This game was an absolute joy, it looks really nice, with a style similar to Paper Mario, where characters are flat and 2D, in a basic 3D environment. The whole thing is also in black and white.

I found the challenges to be extremely fun, the game has an isometric perspective, which you can rotate to reveal certain angles, and expose things hidden from plain sight. You can also use the camera mode to look in places the regular perspective won’t allow. For example, to photograph a balloon in the sky which is not visible otherwise.

There’s also a puzzle element aspect to things, with certain areas being unaccesible until you figure out how to get it. It often is as simply as bringing a photo of something, TOEM also features outfits, where you can style your character however you want, and of course, this is also a mechanic, of the game, where you will be required to disguise yourself, or to wear something specific to access an area.

The game is extremely short, but it really has a lot of charm, the dialogue is thoughtful and warm and the characters you meet, while simple, are still always nice to see. There’s some who you’ll see throughout the game, doing side quests with their own objectives for which they’ll often require your helps.

Since the quests are basically a to-do list, I actually felt compelled to do every single one of them, I got rewards and I felt great doing it. This is a game I got for free because of a Steam code, so I also played it on my laptop (a rare ocurrence) and got every single achievement for it, with some online help for the most obscure ones, not gonna lie.

At last, reaching the top of that mountain is definitely an wonderful experience you owe yourself to try, or maybe the journey is what it’s all about?

Highly recommended if you want a chill time, some nice music and a cozy vibe for a couple evenings, since it’s super short! This is post 2 of 3 for day 95 of #100DaysToOffload

This is honestly a game that I don’t know how to explain that much. It’s God of War, everyone knows how a classic God of War plays right? Probably not everyone I guess.

If you don’t, God of War is a button masher, however, it is a button masher with a lot of style and combos! The game is known for its epic battles against hordes of enemies and is basically a power fantasy. You are literally the God of War, after all.

Kratos is a very angry character, and he is also kind of cool. He is tasked by the greek gods to do many things—I think he’s not the God of War yet or something?—and has to kill every enemy that crosses his path.

I know I just called it a button masher, but there’s an actual science behind it, there really are a lot of weapons and movesets you will be unlocking as the game goes on. Different enemies require very different appraoches, some can only be damaged in a certain way, some can entangle you and you need to break free from their grasp, and there are many of them! You can upgrade your weapons and moves, as well as obtain new ones as the story continues. Keep the hits coming, and you will gain extra points and XP and fill up meters and all of that good stuff that makes your brain happy!

The game also features a lot of locations, both real cities from Ancient Greece, as well as locations from greek myths, such as Tartarus or the fields of Elysium. I should note that the game is extremely linear, an adventure on rails that I actually really enjoyed. Not having to worry or get too lost was nice to see.

Besides the combat, the game contains plenty of puzzles, some of them kind of ingenious, but I have to say I found them a bit out of place sometimes, especially because certain things were just kind of slow to do, such as pushing blocks or using certain levers. They kind of got in the way of the fast paced action during combat, and Kratos’s prowess was relegated to pushing buttons in a specific way (some actions were a bit hard to trigger).

The art of the game is incredible, and the fact that it’s all running on a handheld from 2005 boggles my mind, it just looks gorgeous, even if it has a bit of that “everything is brown” problem that some older “realistic” games suffered from. Enemy design, the animation of every attack and combo, the art and statues all over the place, the fiels of Elysium itself or the giant structures you’ll fight through. It’s all just fantastic.

Again, story-wise, it’s not really weak, but it’s not really that important. I have seen video essays about this game, detailing the story of Kratos’ journey and downfall for revenge, and I guess it is there, but this is also a PSP game that happens between some other games that I have never played, so I had no real stakes to care about. There was one scene that was actually really interesting though, so I’ll not spoil it as it’s rather nice to see.

God of War: Chains of Olympus still plays like a charm, though Ghost of Sparte, the second title for the PSP is technically superior in everyway, this is only noticeable once you compare them. I really had fun with it and recommend giving it a try. Do make sure to level up and get good at the combos though, and keep your health in check, some fights in some checkpoints can get very tedious if you are stuck in a bad state and have to reload a previous save further back. I guess that’s my one complaint, but it’s part of the challenge anyway, lower the difficulty and enjoy the power fantasy if you want that instead.

This is post 1 of 3 for day 95 of #100DaysToOffload

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.