Please do excuse the mess while I go through 9 years of blog posts.
]]>Life has been busy busy busy the last few months (nearly a year!) and this is the first time in ages that I can just take a short break and sit down to reflect on the last few months.
So what exactly has happened in my world since we last spoke?
First off, I am now gainfully employed as the manager of a bookshop in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, Franschhoek! It’s been a very busy time setting up a store from scratch and making sure everything runs smoothly. Working in retail also brings a lot of stress, which has seen me gain a couple of kgs since starting work in June. It’s rewarding though. I’ve loved interacting with customers and selecting books for the store. I’m also working with staff that are very easy to get along with, which most definitely helps.
Living in Franschhoek has also been great, although expensive! The community is small and tight-knit, so it’s very easy to start to get to know the people you interact with every day. It’s probably the first time since Japan that I feel as though I’ve become part of a community rather than merely a tourist or visitor.
I’ve been reading a lot again after being extremely unmotivated to read anything other than picture books and short stories. Obviously, working in a book store means I need to read more, but I also think that having a more structured daily routine has helped me to make reading more of a daily habit and a nice way to unwind at the end of my day.
My journaling habit has been somewhat scatter-shot. Since June, I haven’t written much of anything, with my first entries only starting up again here in September. September also means it’s time for me to choose the Hobonichi goods I’ll order for 2023, and this might be the first time I don’t opt for any covers. Instead, I might just order the books themselves, with a Planner, Cousin and Weeks all on my wishlist for personal and work purposes.
I’ve spent less time messing around with Linux on my laptop. My Arch installation has proven to be remarkably stable, with only a recent Grub update forcing me to dig around a bit and sort out the issue by chrooting into my installation. I’m more than happy to keep running Arch as my daily driver.
The off bit of gaming manages to keep me sane as well, with Rocket League and Halo Infinite being the two games taking up most of my time. Once I feel up to it, I might also jump back into Elden Ring on my PS5, as well as the rest of my gaming backlog.
So what’s coming up for me? Lots of work with the Christmas season approaching, but before that I want to try to make October a month of horror books that I can dig my teeth into. I haven’t read much horror since The Only Good Indians from Stephen Graham Jones a few months back. I’ll be sure to post the list of books here and how they turned out once October has passed.
]]>For the past few months Debian 10 has been running my desktop and has given me nary a problem. Everything works perfectly, and it runs on fumes with almost no memory usage when compared to beefier desktop environments such as GNOME.
Using XFCE as my desktop environment has also been refreshing, it’s snappy and stable with sane defaults for most of its apps. It’s the perfect partner to Debian’s slow, but stable, release schedule.
Last weekend, the latest and greatest releaser of Debian came out, and I hopped on the upgrade bandwagon. It was fast and simple to upgrade. All I had to do was edit a text file and run a few simple commands, and I was running the latest release.
I had only one problem in that my volume would be muted when resuming from suspend or lock. Somehow, ALSA or Pulseaudio wouldn’t remember my previously set volume level. No problem, though, as it gave me an excuse to do a fresh installation.
After an hour or two, I have a perfectly running and customized system that still runs perfectly. I cannot imagine not using Debian 11 as my main OS for the next few years.
I’m publishing this as part of 100 Days To Offload. You can join in yourself by visiting https://100daystooffload.com.
]]>The Adventure Zone is an actual play podcast that uses various RPG systems, such as Dungeons and Dragons, to present a fun and interesting campaign played amongst the three McElroy brothers and their father.
A few years back I first listened to it and since then I have become addicted to each episode and campaign. The banter between the family members and the quality of their writing has been wonderful to see evolve over the course of the show.
It helps that the various campaigns jump between different RPG systems, which helps keep the show fresh. Currently, they’ve made 143 main campaign episodes spread over 4 seasons, from the first episode back in August 2014.
If you’re a fan of RPGs and comedy, then I cannot recommend another show as highly as The Adventure Zone.
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]]>The first cover, is Animal Crossing: New Horizons What shall we do today?, which features a design highlight the island and characters from the popular Nintendo Switch game. During lockdown, this game blew up in terms of popularity, and I’m sure the cover will do just as well when it releases later in September.
Next, is MOTHER EarthBound Beginnings which features a simple design taken from the first game in the MOTHER trilogy. These MOTHER cover designs are extremely popular every year, and the simplicity of this year’s design is right up my alley.
Of course, both these designs might not go down to well if you’re using a tech in a serious office environment, but they are excellent for a techo that you use outside of work in your everyday life.
Be sure to check out the 2022 Preview Calendar for further cover designs as they are announced during the month before the final reveal and sale.
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]]>This is always my favourite time of the year, because I get to see a month full of articles about the various covers, collaborations and some interesting interviews about the upcoming 2022 line-up. The actual sales will start over three days: September 1, 2 and 3.
A couple of my highlights from the preview calendar:
At the time of writing this, only one new cover has been previewed, a collaboration with the Michael Jackson brand, with plenty of more previews throughout the rest of August 2022. Half the fun of using a Hobonichi is seeing the wide array of covers they come up with and choosing one of your own.
So follow along with the preview calendar, and I look forward to starting 2022 with a blank canvas in my Hobonichi planner to chronicle the upcoming year.
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]]>Way back in the days of the PlayStation 1, I first came across Final Fantasy 7, and I was hooked on JRPGs. The story, characters, and scope of the game just blew my mind. How could a small CD hold so much? It also helped that being a poor kid meant you could enjoy every single one of the hundreds of hours of gameplay in FF7 without having to buy any DLC or other games.
Fast-forward to adulthood, and the prospect of juggling a JRPG of several hundred hours with a full-time job and family life, and you can guess how quickly JRPGs took a back seat in my gaming life.
Lockdown and COVID-19 has changed that, though. I now have more time than I know what to do with. I’ve tried to occupy my time with reading, Netflix, Prime Video, blogging, learning dev work on The Odin Project, and all manner of other things.
Eventually I thought of the times I played JRPGs and decided to return to them on my Nintendo Switch. Luckily it’s petty easy to pick up almost any JRPG on a good deal, and I ended up with Dragon Quest XI, Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, Okami HD, Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition and a few others.
How have I been enjoying them? A lot. There’s something really calming about playing a genre of game that allows you to control every aspect of your characters, especially during a time when control in your actual life is nearly impossible, thanks to the epidemic and how it’s affected me personally.
I’ve put in nearly a hundred hours across several JRPGs and I find myself starting a game and realising it’s crazy early in the morning, before dragging myself off to sleep. It’s worth it, though, as I’ve been enjoying my gaming much more than before.
As much as JRPGs are games from an older time, with stories and gameplay loops that have barely changed over time, they can be as rewarding and fun to play in 2021 as they were all the way back when I played Final Fantasy 7 on the original PlayStation.
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]]>First off, the series is slated to start September 2, 2022 on Amazon Prime and has just wrapped up filming in New Zealand after 18 months of shooting. Hopefully in just over a year or so, I’ll be settling in to watch a rather exciting series that will return to the beautiful world of JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
The image itself looks gorgeous and has a very similar feel to the movie trilogy, which is no bad thing to say. The scope looks fantastic, and is something I think that is essential in conveying the immensity of the Hobbit’s mission in destroying the one ring. You have to feel how gargantuan their task must feel by seeing the scope of the world lying ahead of them.
I’m still a bit cautious, simply because everything good about Peter Jackson’s movies was tarnished by the Hobbit trilogy, that just lost everything that made the original movies special.
I can only hope that Amazon, Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne have the same reverence for the original source material that fans across the globe have.
Come this time next year, we’ll be able to see the final product for ourselves.
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]]>With some time on my hands, I thought it might be useful to tinker with some of my sites once again. My lekker.page domain has been unused for a while, so I recently threw on a Zap installation to play around with that for a bit. In all honesty, it looks and functions exactly like Hubzilla, except with a different protocol underlying everything. More than likely, I’m going to scrub it and see what else I can use it for. Any ideas for useful projects to host would be most appreciated!
Some changes I’ve been mulling over for this site have been to include a Uses page and a Now page. The Uses page would simply be a breakdown of the tech and software I use in my daily life, and it’s a cool way to share and learn about new software, or approaches to working.
What is a “now page”?
Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”.
Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”.
So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”.
A Now page for my site might be interesting, but seeing as I’m still stuck in South Africa, unable to return to China, it might not have the most scintillating of details for readers to peruse.
That wraps up most of the things I’ve currently been looking at. Hopefully these few small changes will improve the site a bit, and maybe I’ll get to make better use of my lekker.page domain sooner rather than later!
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]]>Running Arch Linux on my old ThinkPad T440p has actually been an excellent choice for retro gaming, as I can easily set up Retroarch and make use of its multitude of options to emulate one game I’ve always wanted to play, but have no chance of ever physically owning or being able to play it even if I did own it. That game, is Snatcher from Konami and the incredible Hideo Kojima.
It also helps that Snatcher is heavily influenced by Blade Runner and the cyberpunk genre. If I haven’t mentioned it yet, Blade Runner is by far my favourite film ever. And even for its time, it was well written and dealt with mature themes when such things weren’t all that common in games. There’s a good reason why it’s seen as one of the best adventure and cyberpunk games ever made. If you’re a fan of Kojima’s later games such as Metal Gear Solid or Death Stranding, then you know to expect a game that will constantly surprise and intrigue you, despite its age.
I’m currently playing the Mega CD version of Snatcher, which was the only version officially released in the West. Seeing that South Africa has never had the best of access to the world of gaming, trying to find a physical copy has been all but impossible, and from what I’ve seen, the few copies floating around online are priced way higher than I could ever justify.
So, thank goodness for Arch Linux and Retroarch. Without them, I’d never have had the chance to experience Snatcher and in all likelihood a multitude of gaming greats.
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