I love video games. Or, at least, I think I do. I don’t finish very many of them. I either play them for a few hours and forget to come back or I hyperfocus and get like 75% through the story but lose interest before getting to the end. This summer, I’d like to make progress on my backlog of unplayed games. I’ll start with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. These both fall into the 75% category and I last played them recently enough that I won’t be completely lost with what’s going on in the story. After that I’ll dig into some indie games, stuff like Hades, Hyper Light Drifter, Hotline Miami 1 + 2, because they are shorter to complete and do a lot of interesting things. Then I get back into AAA games and beat one beginning to end, just to prove to myself that I can. I’m thinking one of Persona 5 Royal, Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima or Final Fantasy VII Remake. A challenge I face with this goal is that a lot of first-person and third-person games trigger my motion sickness, so I can only really play for an hour at a time until a build up a tolerance to them (which I lose if I don’t play for a few days). Usually I stick to top-down games like strategy and simulation games to get around this, but I really want to play these games, so I will try my best to persevere.
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I’ve started doing intermittent fasting to help achieve my fitness goals. It’s only been a week so far but I’m liking how it’s making me be more intentional about my eating habits. My eating hours are from 11am to 7pm, so I basically get two full meals and some snacks. I thought the hard part would be waiting until 11am to eat, but it’s actually pretty easy (probably all the coffee helping there), then when I do eat breakfast I can put more thought into it than when I’m half awake. What is actually hard is not being able to eat after 7pm. I eat dinner around 6 but by 9:30 or so I’m starting to get hungry again. Maybe the solution to this is just going to bed earlier. I imagine it will get easier as my body gets used to the new schedule and I figure out exactly how much I need to eat in those 8 hours.
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Woah three blog posts in a week(ish) is unheard of
JS Naked Day🔗 happened this week, and as usual, I’m fashionably late. I decided to permanently remove a significant portion of the JavaScript from my site as it was affecting load times. There wasn’t a whole lot of JavaScript to begin with, which made this pretty easy to implement. What I did have was the following:
1. A script to randomly select from an array of quotes to display in the sidebar on each page load
I just removed this as I just wasn’t finding it amusing anymore. Maybe it will return later, who knows? Certainly not me.
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This didn't start out as a rant about Discord, but it sure ended that way.
fLaMEd’s post about instant messaging programs got me thinking about my own IM journey. I’m too young to really have experienced the peak AIM and MSN days, but I did use MSN/Windows Live Messenger in the late 00s to keep up with some online friends I had met through various forums. Eventually, I moved to Skype as that is what all my IRL friends were on at the time. I was also on Curse Voice for the brief time it existed, mostly for voice calls during League of Legends matches. As Skype started dying out, I moved over to Discord in 2016, which made me a pretty early adopter.
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Algorithms suck, except when they don't
As a teenager, the music I listened to was music my dad shared with me, music my friends would play when we would hang out, or music from video games and movies I liked. I remember spending time on Pandora creating stations based off my favorites in hopes I could find something similar I liked. I would discover a few songs this way but otherwise didn’t have much luck. As a result, I find I just listen to the same stuff over and over again, but there is so much music out there, I want to find more! But how?
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This past week I’ve been working on a big redesign of my site. I’m trying to recreate the vibe of MSN / Windows Live Messenger around 2008-2011. Today, I spent most of the day recreating the avatar frame from WL Messenger in CSS.
At first, I was trying really hard to recreate the kind of squircle🔗 shape from the login screen. It turns out this is quite difficult in CSS, and the only way I could possibly have done it is through creating an SVG path that I could use to clip the HTML element, but then I would lose access to the border and box-shadow properties. So instead I opted to just make a rounded square, using the first-radius value to round the corners with an ellipse shape rather than a circle. After all, we’re going for the vibe, not a 1:1 recreation. After hours of tinkering with just the shape, I added the gradient background, as well as a <span> on top of everything to add the “glossy” effect. You can see the code on CodePen🔗.
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Man, my one blog post per week goal sure fell apart quickly. To avoid going too long without a post, I figure I’ll give a quick update on what I’ve been working on. Over at the 32-Bit Cafe, we announced we are expanding into a Discourse forum🔗! I’ve been spending a lot of time setting it up and working alongside the rest of the mod team to get it ready before the February 15th launch. This weekend, I was able to find some time to work on projects, though. I built a PC for my partner, which they have been enjoying! It was a much needed upgrade over their old system, which was a frankensteined build made out of the core of my first PC build from 2015. I also spent some time working through Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment🔗. I’m working on the first homework assignment, which is a simple program that copies a file. It’s been a fun challenge and I’m learning a lot. On the fitness side of things, I haven’t made much progress yet. I actually took the week off from the gym because of a combination of sleep issues and hurting my back, but I’m feeling a lot better now and will be back at it tomorrow! While the first month of 2024 hasn’t gone quite to plan, I’ve been keeping busy anyway.
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Last weekend I was really getting the semi-annual itch to play Minecraft. When I loaded it up, I realized it would be a good idea to do a backup of my world, because I hadn’t done it in a while. I’ve poured a lot of hours into it with my partner and we would be devastated to lose it. So I wrote up a quick rsync command to send it over to my network storage (a strong term for an Raspberry Pi 4 with a USB hard disk attached). I/O error. Huh that’s weird. After some intense googling, I found out my SSD has reported 535 blocks unable to be reallocated. In other words, much of my SSD was becoming unreadable, and it was running out of good blocks to move my data to.
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2023 was truly one of the years of all time. In this post, I will look back at some of the cool things I did in 2023 and set some goals to achieve in 2024.
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This week, Riot Games announced they are bringing their Vanguard anti-cheat software to League of Legends🔗. Previously introduced with the release of Valorant, Vanguard is a pretty typical kernel-level anti-cheat software, which is to say, a security nightmare. It runs at the highest level of permissions possible on your system.
A lot of people seem concerned that, because Riot is owned by Tencent, Vanguard serves as a backdoor for the Chinese government. Honestly that seems ridiculous. Not that it necessarily can’t be used for nefarious purposes by the Chinese government, but Chinese spying has a much lower possible material impact on U.S. players than American spying. In the video🔗, Riot said that Vanguard “does not collect or process any personal information differently from our current Anti-Cheat software,” which I guess is something, but that can change at any moment. The bigger concern, in my view, is if Riot suffers from a security breach (again) and hackers are able to deploy malicious code through Vanguard. Truthfully, I’m not totally sure how feasible it is for that to happen, but it is certainly possible, which is worrying enough.
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