Hello
Welcome to my homepage! I program and tinker with computers. This site is a collection of notes, ramblings, things I like, and more. My hobbies include video games, TTRPGs, and collecting Transformers figures.
Latest Posts
Blog Question Challenge
fLaMEd fury recently tagged me in his Blog Question Challenge post that has been circulating around the indieweb over the past month. I finally got into a headspace to write for my website a bit, so here are my answers!
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I have a lot of thoughts which are, in my unbiased opinion, pretty great and other people’s lives will improve by reading them. Seriously, though, I mostly wanted to practice writing and expressing my thoughts, which also ends up serving as an archive of my opinions and thoughts as time goes on, for better or for worse.
Motion Sickness and Video Games
Madeline Miller recently wrote about motion sickness triggered by video games, potential causes, and potential fixes. I feel seen. As a child, I distinctly remember playing Shadow the Hedgehog of all things when I first discoved games could make me nauseous. I am able to build up a tolerance to games if I play daily, which is how I dumped many hours into Minecraft as a teenager and Cyberpunk 2077 more recently, but it wears off fast, and intentionally making myself sick every day for a few weeks is quite unpleasant. For that reason, I mostly stick to games that are 2D and/or are primarily played with a top-down view. Baldur’s Gate 3 was a godsend for this. It’s interesting because not all 3D games affect me. Almost all first-person games become unplayable after 15 minutes, but third-person games are hit-or-miss. I was able to play through Persona 4 Golden just fine. Final Fantasy 7 Remake wrecks me. This inconsistency makes the potential fixes that Madeline brings up interesting to me. I have never considered how FPS and field of view could affect my motion sickness. I am curious to experiment and see if I can make more games playable, because it’s kind of an isolating experience at times. I love video games, as do all of my friends, but I am limited to only a small subset of the games that they play. They recently got really into Marvel Rivals, and I could only play a game or two at a time with them before I have to go lay down for the rest of the night. I have only ever met one other person that is also affected by this, so coming across this post showed me that there are dozens of us. Dozens!
Fixing Up iPods
A couple of weeks ago my brain suddenly got an itch. I was at the office listening to music on my old Sansa Clip+ player when it’s battery died halfway through the day again. Disappointed, I put it and my headphones away and continued my day in silence. But my brain would not be silent. This was a problem and it needed to be solved now (or at least as soon as the postal service allows). I started researching many different models of modern mp3 players (I guess we call them DAPs now?) and didn’t quite like what I found, until I eventually landed on fixing up an old iPod, partially due to “My iPod is better than my phone” by Veronica Explains, which showed me that this was even possible.