august 20, 2024

its been an eventful past couple of days!

i bought a Miyoo Mini Plus! a friend recently purchased an Odin 2, which planted the seed of a handheld of my own in my head, but then i saw a TimeExtension article on the PowKiddy V10 which intrigued the hell out of me. did some research afterwards and deduced (with a little help from the Odin 2 purchaser) that the handheld i liked the best was the Miyoo. per Retro Game Corps review, there were some display issues that i was worried about with the V10, but the Miyoo does not have any of those! it is currently in the middle of shipping now and i eagerly look forward to having it in my hands. the college semester is about to start so this is the perfect time i could have picked one of these up.

i have been playing the recent Kex Engine Doom rerelease these past couple days. the last two days were an episode a day, although today i only got through half of Inferno, on account of all the time i dedicated to other things! (foreshadowing!) i think it is an excellent remaster, with a very high level of control over the engine and a shit ton of nice bonus content added alongside it. i have been playing on Ultra-Violence, which my previous playthrough years ago was on Hurt Me Plenty, so this feels like the natural step when returning to this game as a young adult and not some teenager. if i am gonna be honest, i dont notice any difference in difficulty, which i think means i just got better at Doom because im a somewhat competent 20 year old now. i forgot how exhilarating racing through these levels and mowing down enemies is, plus playing some Bring Me The Horizon and Slipknot while playing really added to the experience. i plan of playing all the episodes available in the release, so i have like 8 episodes to go. i got a lot of Doom to play! one thing that does disappoint me is the green cross change, which is pretty dumb! i think we can add an exception to the geneva convention allowing Doom to use the red cross. this sounds very plausible and very appropriate. please make it happen world leaders.

i am almost at page 2000 of homestuck. the craziness of the story has amplified so much in such a short period of time, but i still really enjoy it. it is still continuing to be creative and clever, and hopefully it can carry this on for at least another 2000 pages.

yesterday i started a month long break from the Flashpoint Archive. i announced my break, put the server at the bottom of my list, and just am doing other things for now. i have wanted to take a break for a while now but after another mental spiral over it yesterday, i decided that i really do just need to take a break and evaluate how i feel. i may not do an awful lot of tangible real contributing work, outside of server moderation, but i am still constantly thinking about the project and worrying if what we are doing is good enough. and i just need to not do that for a month! plus it helps that i have a list of personal projects that i have been meaning to get to, and this is the perfect time to do that. these personal projects are still webgame preservation related, but completely separate from Flashpoint. im taking a short break from the project, but im not taking a break from the scene. there is still too much history that needs to be told and documented before i could ever leave the scene. i really do wish that Discord had an actual way to disable pings, because i had to manually right click the server and click Mark as Read when i got pings after the announcement, which i felt bad about! but ill look at them when i get back.

i installed Linux Mint on my computer today, as a dual boot alongside Windows. i am not brave enough to completely abandon Windows just yet, but it will be good for me to get some experience with Linux. i had Linux once before on my old laptop, which was also running Mint. based on just my impressions today, Mint definitely feels a lot more responsive and faster than Windows. it is far less intrusive also, save for the notifications my music player loves to throw at me (until I disabled those.) i played some Doom, Ultrakill, and Streets of Rogue and i can confidently say all three of those ran perfectly fine on this. there are some issues i have though, i need to figure out how to get my d drive to automatically get mounted on start up, so i dont have to do it everytime i want to listen to music, and none of my controllers connect. my Switch Pro controller appears in the bluetooth menu but never actually connects and allows Steam to use it, while my 8BitDo SN30 Pro just doesnt show up at all. strange things, but i am sure i can figure it out soon. had some initial audio issues with my bluetooth headphones but after some fiddling with settings and a restart, they work perfectly fine and i am able to participate in Discord calls. unfortunately, audio currently does not work in screensharing, i might have to get a third party client to allow that to work. another thing to fix is screenshotting, i need my captures to be automatically saved and copied to my clipboard. i cannot live without this, it is essential to my lifeforce. ShareX has fundamentally changed how much i use screenshots.

my setup isnt much to write home about, and i still need a real wallpaper. the one i am currently using is what i originally used on my laptop, although here and up on the big screen, its lower quality is unfortunately pretty obvious. i plan on getting some kind of Nier Automata wallpaper. i wish my wallpaper engine playlists could make the jump over here, but alas not (or at least it doesnt seem likely.)

anyways, see you next time!