This is why I am still not done with the blogpost on many topics, such as my overview of 2023, or my favorite XYZ of the year. Besides, I am having a great time playing Ori And The Blind Forest on my Switch and that’s keeping me a little busy. I’ll probably finish it really soon so stay tuned for a review!
Still, I also want to go to sleep early today, hence the briefness of today’s post, its more of a notice rather than actual content so I am sorry for that.
Don’t worry, though, I am making use of the drafts feature in Jekyll to keep track of the ideas that pop into my head and also just write blogposts bit by bit over the span of a couple days, against my usual practice of just writing everything down in a single day. Some blogposts will still be written like that, and others will take some time, I’ll just try to keep it simple, and stay consistent.
This is day 4 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Honestly though, I never really managed to go past the first 5 or 6 puzzles, be it because I forgot or I was into other things back then, or I simply lost interest—it is not the best game to play at school.
Around September of last year, I decided to finally redeem myself, and I acquired the digital version of the game on the Nintendo eShop. Once again, I completed the first 4 or 5 chapters—as the game calls them—and I left it as that. It wasn’t until the last day of the year, that I dedicated some more time to it, and until now, January 3rd, when I finally completed it.
This was a fun game! The atmosphere was pretty great all around, and the graphics have not aged one bit. It is a game that still looks amazing today. The animations and the physics are really well done honestly. The music was rather minimal, mostly ambient sounds. However, there were time were it just rised up in a fantastic way, merging with the sounds of the environment around the player, quite awesome!
The puzzles featured in this game are also pretty good, although I don’t have a ton of reference to compare it to, I have to say I had to do a couple attempts on many, and even 12 or so in a few of the chapters. Regardless, I always had that feeling of Eureka! when I finally got the method.
I watched a documentary on about the development of the game and the many challenges that came with it, and it really gave me a ton of appreciation for this little gem.
I have to say, I can’t wait to give a try to the sequel too! Although I may play some other games first just to mix it up some more. But hey, my backlog has shrunken, right?
This is day 2 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I’ve actually done a couple of games already for many Game Jams during the pandemic. However, I kind of lost my way, and ended up dedicating myself to other things. Of course its not like I wasted my time, I learned many things and started this blog. University, internship, work—school just kept going.
Honestly, I think that game development as a hobby—and not my work—doesn’t really sound that bad of an idea, since Game Jams don’t really take that much time I think I want to try my hand at trying doing my own roguelike one of these days, as simple as I can.
Recently a YouTuber I used to follow a while ago also returned with a video sharing what he has worked on during his abscence.
Regardless, I also watched a bunch of videos from ThatGuiGlen who talks about the history of many indie games and their development, so maybe this is just a phase and I won’t feel the itch to develop games anymore.
I won’t make any promises but it would be nice if I manage to do this.
This is post 99 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I have watched dozens of videos about indie games of all kinds, from roguelikes to platformers and JRPGs. I am feeling the urge to buy like 20 different indie games—most of them roguelikes—that will eat away my free time despite my best efforts.
Because of this, I’ve been looking forward to trying games that let me play for less time, or at least, games that don’t need me to commit for hours without end. I am not really talking about infinite games such as endless runners, but something more meaningful, and actually fun.
There are many games that meet that requirement. Games like A Short Hike or Lil Gator Game where the whole thing is less than 3 or 4 hours, even games like Resident Evil at 7 hours or TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge at less than 2. Games of every genre can be found in this style. They can make good stories and good mechanics and have everything in a smaller package.
The other style of game that has caught my intereset are roguelikes, which I already mentioned quite a bit in my last blogpost. Basically, a roguelike is a game that usually has role-playing elements, permadeath, and procedurally generated levels, although the definition has evolved over the years.
A single run of Spelunky on my Switch is around 3 minutes before I meet my demise. However, for some reason, I feel like I can go at it again and again, and the good thing is that, if I have to stop playing, or I lose interest, it doesn’t matter that much, because the challenge will still be there, waiting for me.
Ember Knights, Hades, Into The Breach, most roguelikes can technically be beaten in a single sitting in less than 2 hours, most of the time. What actually takes away your time is the fact that you need to get good at the game and keep trying.
In some of them, you unlock new stuff that can show up in your next runs, making things easier—this is known as meta-progression. In more classic games, truer to the original Rogue, you have to do with what you find, starting from scratch every time, and you are the one who has to get better.
It is kind of weird, because a lot of Roguelikes end up having the same grindy style of the lenghty and story-driven JRPGS, which can make it a hard sell to a lot of gamers out there, since they don’t see the point of them. I thought myself to be part of that camp, although I ended up coming to terms with the genre, and simply enjoying them as what they are, as you can tell.
So, in a way, these shorter games end up making you want to play them again further more. Just look at the thousands of hours people have on Vampire Survivors, a game that simply asks you to survive for 30 minutes against hordes of enemies. In the end, regardless of what I play it will be considered a waste of time by someone out there, so I may as well just have fun.
This is day of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Basically, I still have a full drawer of notebooks and paper that go all the way back to middle school, even one that contains drawings I did since primary school. I have to work on getting rid of the stuff I don’t really need any more, like my high school math notes, and also trying to keep or digitalize the things I care about, such as some drawing practice from some classes I took a while ago..
There’s also a ton of blank paper in various formats, such as note cards, post-its, blank notebooks and even letters. There’s some old books from English courses and similar stuff.
I wish I could avoid this but I also feel like, I need to get around doing this at some point either way and I might as well do it now. It really isn’t that much stuff I am just procrastinating by writing this blogpost.
Now that I confessed the true purpose behind this writing, I shall now accept my destiny and get back to work. I have nothing left to do, other than try the games I just bought for my Switch, but I won’t, I will not, I will definitely NOT.
BYE!
This is day 93 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Last time I ever made use of this stuff was to help me with some code I had already done, and also to generate a blogpost for me, after I typed out everything I did in a list and asked ChatGPT to turn it into a few paragraphs of text. You can see the output of that experiment over here.
At the time, I was quite amused by this, and I remained somewhat optimistic about it. I actually still type prompts to ChatGPT for certain things, since it has quite a bit of uses.
Sadly, as more people caught up to this, a ton of websites saw the opportunity to generate blogposts to whatever questions people may have out of whatever this so-called AI thinks is a good answer.
The worst thing is how the websites are just a list of questions that sometimes aren’t even related to each other but will be answered in succession and end up confusing me even more.
It is so lazy and annoying. Even in the Spanish language websites like this started to show up and it’s the most annoying thing. They don’t make any sense, they are usually wrong and badly formatted, and despite it all they are always at the top of the search results.
I just want to go back to the older days where random websites hosted by people on Blogger or WordPress would have the answers to all my questions, in Times New Roman and an ugly default theme.
This blogpost in particular may be little more than a rant and is probably not the greatest example of the amazing things humans can write about, but it is still better than whatever an AI might spit out of its black box.
This is day 91 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Today, I just wanted to point out what a weird year this has been for me when it comes to writing posts constantly throughout the year.
Just take a look at the numbers:
I barely managed to stay afloat thanks to the epic feat of doing a third of the progress in one twelfth of the time.
In February there were only 10 posts, which was still more than 9 out of 12 months in the year. Then I went by doing a single post for 3 months, then half of what I did in February in July, I dropped again in August and I finally managed to go up a bit more during September, with October keeping the ship afloat. From there on its remained somewhat steady, although still short from the ideal of 8 blogposts per month
But I wouldn’t say I lost hope at any point of the challenge until now. Seeing how I could post daily or even twice a day if I really wanted to, so, embrace yourselves—it’s happening now.
I am now in the final sprint alongside other great bloggers like Clayton Errington, Garrit Franke and Brian Bennet and of course Noisy Deadlines! I am ashamed to say Hyde managed to beat me this time around. But I have to mention this is his fourth time beating the challenge, so we’ll see how it goes in the future! If he decides to join once again…
Finally, I wouldn’t blame you if you missed it because of how quick this guy did it, but Fredrik Bjoreman actually completed the challenge twice this year. Now that’s what I call crazy fast.
This is day 90 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>There were many possible topics. The obvious one was about the first few days of my new job, my experience, my coworkers, the courses, etc. But its honestly not that interesting to everybody, and even if it is, it would be kind of too long for me.
There’s also the fact that I finished a book (Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir) and I kinda wanna make book reviews a bit of a regular thing here, so I’ll come back to it at some point.
Another topic was maybe gaming, I haven’t played much by myself but I’ve played multiplayer switch games quite a bit on weekends. We’ve played stuff like TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge and also Castle Crushers. Or I could’ve written about the dozen or so games I randomly installed on my new phone.
I was also inspired by my purchase of a new watch, a Casio A-168. Adamsdesk asked me where is my blogpost about my current watch collection, and sadly, there’s none! But that seems like an interesting idea for the following weeks.
Lastly, I tried to buy some LTT merch—lttstore dot com—because they had some insane Black Friday deals, but I ended up getting my debit card blocked (my fault) and it was a bit of a funny experience. So idk maybe later.
However, after checking my blog archive, I noticed that last year I wrote a total of 82 posts, and that I was about to reach that very same amount thanks to this very writing.
And so, I decided to just write about that fun fact I noticed and how happy it makes me. This has been my most productive year ever, at least when it comes to writing, so that’s something right?
This is day 82 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>If you have a question for me, leave it in my post on Mastodon but feel free to contact me in any way you prefer if you feel like doing so, encrypted email is preferred.
As I said, I still have quite a bit of things to do today, but I’ll answer some of the short questions I got yesterday. If I don’t answer them all its because the reply is longer—or I didn’t feel like it.
Benjamin Hollon asks: Favorite kind of tea or herbal tea?
Well, coffee is technically a tea, but if that doesn’t count, mint. Not much of a tea guy.
Bahadir asks what was your first starter Pokemon?
Squirtle, on Pokemon Fire Red for the GBA, playing from my HTC ChaChaCha using the My Boy emulator around 2015.
Adamsdesk asks What’s the next Origami?
I haven’t posted origami pictures in ages, I don’t know what will be my next one, probably a frog—I haven’t done frogs in ages.
Alright, the rest of the questions will be answered later. This is enough for post 72 of #100DaysToOffload—don’t forget to leave your questions!
]]>Besides, I have Nextcloud installed and I have to admit I pretty much just use it to sync my contacts and a couple of folders in my phone. I may as well just be using Syncthing, but I decided to at least put it to use a bit more, although I’ve also considered switching to something simpler like Baikal and freeing up some resources on my Raspberry Pi server.
So yeah, things such as feeding my dogs at a certain hour, taking a medicine, and taking out the trash, etc. I hope with time I get used to being told to do this by a notification. And who knows? maybe it becomes kinda useful for me, and if I miss doing something, I will know that its purely because I am being lazy, or extremely inspired writing my blog.
Ultimately, I decided to play around a little more with vdirsyncer. I’ve been curious about any clients other than Khard and Khal that also happen to use vdirs. I discovered Orage, a super simple calendar that’s a part of the XFCE family. It is super minimal, but after a simple article I followed, I got it working quite nicely. The tutorial explains how to sync with Google Calendar, but extrapolating the information and applying it with any other service is quite easy. The official documentation has a general tutorial too.
Eventually, my brain realized that I could just add khal calendar
to my .bashrc to have a quick overview of my events everyday, since I open my terminal on a daily basis! Still, if you like GUI tools, you may like Orage, its super simple and minimal, it reminds me of Claws Mail simplicity.
This is day 28 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Some examples are these:
And these are some features on many different apps that I just enjoy having around and I can’t help but keep tweaking all the time
This is day 25 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I had homework and spent a bit of time in my computer writing it, it was such a chore, the teacher wanted us to hit a certain amount of words for every section of an assignment, that tired me out a lot more than I expected, although I got distracted quite a bit anyways.
I was tired of being on front of my computer and ended up shutting it down. I was actually thinking about not posting anything and breaking my streak of posts, which have not stopped since the start of the year.
I had already typed “I won’t post today” on my mastodon client (Tusky btw) when I was like “Not today” and went ahead and saw what I could do.
I initially logged in to GitHub from my phone, which was possible, I didn’t look enough to see if editing a file from the web interface worked, so I went ahead and tried to just edit the file locally. I copy pasted one of my existing posts since I didn’t have my automation scripts available here and I wanted to save myself some time.
I created a file and tried to edit it, Simple File Manager (from the Simple Mobile Tools suite) has it’s own text editor, but it’s super bare bones. I decided to go ahead and install Markor from F-Droid, since it’s quite a good Markdown editor that served me just fine to write this short post and have something to keep my streak going!
This is day 24 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I’ve been reading quite a bit over the years. My goal is to read at least 15 books this year. You can track my progress by following me on my Bookwrym account. The truth is, that I got back into gaming a bit more. I’ve enjoyed playing Brawl Stars for quite a while and a recent update that removed a lot of the gambling aspects that plague so many of today’s mobile videogames, got actually removed!
This made it so I started playing a lot more often, from only weekends to 15 or 30 minutes per day. I wouldn’t say it was the reason I stopped reading but it definitely didn’t help.
The initial reason is, that the book I’m reading I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. Is a collection of short stories, and I’ve enjoyed it so much. Each story has a very short introduction to them, and the problem is that the author just said that the next story, titled Lonelyache, is actually what he considers to be one of the best stories he’s ever written. For some reason my mind started hyping it up a lot, and I just haven’t gotten myself to reading it.
Be it because I don’t consider myself worthy enough of reading such a story, or because I am actually afraid of being dissapointed due to my own expectations, the truth of the matter is that I have spent a ton of time without having any progress on my reading goals. So I will read this and probably finish it tomorrow, to at least complete two books this month.
This was a short useless post, but aren’t they all? Until next time!
This is day 23 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I went to school and it was pretty cool. The only new teacher I got from a management class seems quite cool yet strict. Still I think I’ll be fine. The other teacher I already mentioned, should be quite easy, and the course is all about MATLAB coding, which I am pretty good at. I have to do reports of every work we do though, which is a bit of a hassle but nothing a bit of markdown and pandoc can’t fix.
The rest of the day was spent on ricing my desktop. I have been theming my dunst config, to make my notifications look awesome. I was also looking at some music players for Linux, and I discovered Tauon. Its a great piece of software and quite minimalist. Its available as a flatpak on Void Linux, which is not great. However, it does not look bad at all, because its theming is rather configurable. I have been actually writing a theme using the Tokyo-Night color scheme, which is why I completely forgot about doing my blog for today.
Anyways, I am really, raelly happy with how my current environment and workflow is going. My dotfiles are better than ever! So check them out if you want. My dwm, dunst, alacritty and stuff is quite well themed. Very happy about it.
This is day 18 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>The two courses I have to do should be quite simple, I only know one of the teachers, and I was given a good score in the courses I had taken before with him. Sadly, I’ve been told his scoring can be quite random sometimes. I am considering to turn down the course, since I only need one course to fulfill the required credits to get my degree.
You know, I’ll do it. Its fine.
The only remaining task I have is getting an internship somewhere with a decent paycheck and that also has something to do with Mechatronics Engineering. My city is quite small and payments are nothing like in other countries and even other states in Mexico If I were to sell 5 or 6 logos per month, I would probably make more money, but nobody contacts me for any commisions 😭. To be fair, prices are super low too. The couple of bus trips I take to go and return from my campus costs like 1 USD, total.
Regardless, I wanna get some experience in the industry and see whats up. I didn’t even made any plans like previous semesters, I think this should be easy, as long as I get that internship.
This is day 17 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>At the same time I feel weirded out, because they’re outside playing the guitar and singing together. My mom is in the kitchen, helping out, and I am in the dining room.
Well, that’s how it is.
Since the last sentence. I was told to stop what I was doing and I ended up going outside and joining everyone. It was fun and the food was amazing. I didn’t really feel like socializing that much, in the mean time I made a toot on Fosstodon and boosted a couple things, before I left social media and went to enjoy the night.
It wasn’t bad at all, sometimes I just need a little push, I guess. After we were done, we cleaned up and I went ahead an washed the dishes while listening to the latest Trash Taste episode. They’re my favorite background noise, super chill and a great way to turn off my brain during repetitive tasks.
Anyways, I am halfway through the episode, and I feel like finishing this post already. Its been a nice day overall. I hope yours was too, dear reader!
This is day 14 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>For some reason, my mother decided to barge into my room to clean up for me, and soon my siblings joined for the massacre. They basically started all over again, opening containers, drawers and reordering everything she saw out of place. I wanted to do it all alone while listening to some podcasts but it was just impossible.
I was really mad at first, but it soon turned kinda wholesome, I still have a few nostalgic things from my childhood. Some toys, my puzzle collection, an old photo album, a lot of keychains (for some reason I ignore), my small watch collection, and other miscellaneous things. In the end, I have to admit that they did a better job than I could have, and we had a good time, so it was all cool.
I also took some time later to do some cleanup. I backed up some pictures from my phone and compressed them. Using tools such as ImageMagick and the like.
This is a quick script I used, that will compress the image but will preserve its modified date to its creation date. I like this because sorting images by date is easier for me. I actually used ChatGPT for this script. 😉
for filename in *.jpg; do
mogrify -verbose -resize 1600 -quality 85 "$filename" "$filename"
date_string=${filename:4:8}
time_string=${filename:13:4}
# Create the timestamp in the format YYYYMMDDHHMM
timestamp="${date_string}${time_string}"
# Use the touch command to modify the file's timestamps
touch -m -t "$timestamp" "$filename"
echo "modifying $filename with timestamp $timestamp"
done
I made some new folders, reorganized some stuff and I am getting ready for switching to a new Android 13 rom. I have to do some backups, but I am almost ready! We’ll see.
For some reason I feel like I need to delete and uninstall every app and file I don’t need, even though I will wipe it completely anyways. I am just weird like that.
This is day 11 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>But I literally only had to change like 2 lines of code, and I don’t even know when the changes will be merged, if they don’t conflict with whatever checks they do to see if the update was done properly.
Other than that, I have finally managed to receive some feedback via email regarding my blog!
Funnily enough, both of them were about some part of my blog being utterly broken.
The first one was my fault, it looks like I had some misstyped html in one of my Jekyll layouts, I had hfer
instead of href
and that stayed like that for months, and only now someone noticed. Thank you kind stranger! You even used a gpg signature and you have my respect!
The second email was about something broken with my tags. They’re usually located at my website in /tags/nameoftag
, usually. But they were not there anymore. I just couldn’t figure out what was going out, until I decided to try and add .html
to the end of the url, and there it was. For some reason the behaviour of my local Jekyll build and the one used by Vercel was different.
I use a Jekyll plugin (a ruby script which can be found in this site’s source code) to generate the files that eventually get populated with articles that match the tags they got. Thankfully, I just had to modify it a bit, so now it adds a permalink to the file metadata, and now it works just fine.
Still, I am so confused, since locally and in Netlify this problem did not happen at all. I got no idea.
Anyways, maybe in the future I’ll also talk a bit about how I contributed a package to Void Linux. Its absolutely nothing special, but I have to write about something after all.
This is day 8 of my second run of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Eventually, I remembered I first heard about Vercel on a post by Kev Quirk where he compared multiple hosting providers. Vercel ended up on top when it comes to speed and the like, even if it lacks some of the features Netlify has.
I had been experiencing very slow build times, it kinda felt like Netlify was reinstalling the whole Jekyll environment everytime it built my blog or something like that. I was meaning to look into fixing it and I even considered moving to something like Hugo, but after trying Vercel I have to say I am really impressed, doing the change was pretty easy, and getting my domain configured only took a couple minutes, even if the change took a while to apply in the network, so if you tried to access my blog recently and it failed, that’s why.
Regardless, another thing I was thinking about was how I rarely get email replies from people, I actually kind of like those, but the quick link to do so is only visible from my website. I will not remove my Mastodon comments or anything as extreme, but since I am aware quite a bit of my readers follow me via my RSS feed, I added a special link to quickly reply from there. Which you’ll see from this post onward, maybe that’ll reduce the friction. Anyways, I’m kinda easy to reach out from other places anyway.
This is day 6 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I decided to serve at the computing center of my campus. Since its called “social service” you are supposed to actually help on places outside school, but they also let you do this, and I took advantage of it (like most students). Its easier and they are more flexible with schedules, which I liked.
I thought I would learn some stuff, like using a CMS and post things, or at least fix a computer or two. But most of the time I am just sitting around, lending equipment, keeping a record of it, sometimes printing documents and reserving computer classrooms when a teacher needs it. There was one time where we went to install new computers in some classrooms, which was quite fun.
So, it was not what I had in mind, but at least I have a lot of free time which still fills the amount of hours I need to do, quite a lifehack! I can use this time for whatever I want, scroll my FreshRSS or Mastodon feed, read a novel or manga, design some icons, fold some origami. Its quite peaceful to be honest.
I do have some fellow classmates who also don’t have to do a lot. I am not very talkative but sometimes I am in the mood to chat and change the routine a bit. Sadly I share no hobbies with any of them, and they look at me weird when I have a terminal open on my laptop, but I can’t help it. I wonder if I should try and be more social, but I don’t drink, I would never go to their weekend parties and I don’t really get some of the gossip and topics they talk about. I guess that most of the people in here already knew its a pretty easy place to fill your required hours and chose it for that, rather than any actual interest in computers or technology.
Regardless, as I am typing this I am about to end today’s service, which was pretty average, I lent a projector for a meeting, a computer for someone’s thesis presentation and I also read a chapter of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. A very normal start of the week.
]]>