2025 on yequari.com

Some Books I've Read This Year

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 10:23:06 -0700

One of my goals for this year was to read 10 books start to finish. I haven’t really read for recreation since I was a child, so I felt 10 was a high enough number to have to work towards but still low enough to be attainable. So far, I have finished 7 books, so I thought I’d write out some brief thoughts on them.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers

The first two entries to the Wayfarers series. Dubbed “cozy” science fiction, these books were a lot of fun to read. Exploring the world that Chambers has built is so interesting and fun, I look forward to finishing out the series.

A Month of the Gundam Card Game

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 10:25:51 -0700

Recently, I’ve been completely absorbed by the newly released Gundam Card Game. After doing a few booster set and starter deck release events, I went to my first local constructed tournament for the game last week and had a blast. My expectation was that many players would be playing late game control decks based on results from other tournaments, so I tried to take advantage of this with a Green/Blue Zeon aggro deck. My first two rounds, against Green/White Wing Gundam Zero decks, proved me correct as I was able to finish the game quickly, before their decks could fully ramp up. My last round was against my friend who I had been testing decks with since the cards first got revealed, which was cool since we both knew our matchup well. He was running a Red/White Triple Ship Alliance deck, which seems to have a favorable matchup into aggro, which wasn’t helped by some unlucky draws. My friend ended up taking the game and my final record was 2-1. For next week’s tournament, I have a few adjustments to make to see if I can get the 3-0. I’m expecting others to also be making adjustments to better handle aggro matchups. The process of refining a deck over time and adjusting to your local metagame is just such a fun experience and it makes me really glad to be playing a TCG again!

Pink Floyd at Pompeii

Sat, 03 May 2025 21:27:34 -0700

Pink Floyd at Pompeii is a live concert film, originally released in 1972, where the band plays in the amphitheater in the ruins of Pompeii. Last weekend I had the excellent of experience of seeing a showing of the 2025 IMAX Remaster. The remastered footage looked great, and the remastered audio was mind-blowing. The original recording was not of particularly great quality, but the mastering work done by Steven Wilson was truly impressive, making the recording sound as if it were originally meant to be an album release, which sounded especially good on the movie theater’s sound system.

I'm Doing Grad School

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 20:23:35 -0700

The other day, I received my acceptance letter for an online Computer Science Masters program. There is some administrative minutiae to complete before I can register for classes, but it’s really happening! It will be difficult to balance my schoolwork while also working full time, but I’m excited to learn all I can! I’m hoping to pivot my career into systems programming, I can’t be doing CRUD web apps forever. 😔 I’d love to be able to do kernel or compiler development full time.

Life After League of Legends

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 20:23:23 -0700

I have played exactly two games of League of Legends in the past 35 days. Since I started playing the game back in 2013, I’ve consistently played matches almost daily. I’ve had breaks of a week or two, usually to dive into some other game that was flavor of the month, but for the past 12 years, League of Legends was a constant part of my life. About a month ago, I was playing a game, doing really poorly, and realized I’m not actually enjoying it. I wondered if I would be having fun if were winning that match. I realized I would not. So after that game, I just stopped. Something about the game just no longer scratches that itch in my brain. It’s a very odd feeling to just suddenly not like something that was a major part of your life for so long.

Blog Question Challenge

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 21:24:01 -0700

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

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 21:19:34 -0700

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!