Back into the swing of it

16 November, 2023

Tags: blogging

It's been a bit, hasn't it. I got to a point where the mental load of writing a post, editing it and the html for it on top of my schoolwork very much (clearly) got in the way of me actually writing anything. Guilt lead to feeling bad and putting it off even more even though, I'm largely doing this for myself so why beat myself up? Brains, they're weird.

To help reduce that and allow me to focus more on just getting words out, with a lot of help from Renkon, I switch over from Zonelets to 11ty. Zonelets was really good for getting me back to playing with HTML but manually fussing with it every time got tiring.

Very little will look different as a reader, but on my side, it's a huge difference. I write a post, save it to a folder, run a command in terminal, my rss feed gets updated, my template applied to the post, post list updates, and I can just upload and get on with things. Not having that editing looming is honestly a massive load off and it feels pretty nice!

I was also reminded by jillian's post that I do like being able to write and have one place where I can share things I find interesting rather than just a scattering of posts on social media.

I've spent a lot of time studying and working on assignments, as well as doing things like setting up Anki in a way that facilitates my studying. Existing apps and services I was using prior to doing this required making so many compromises and I was seeing how much that was impacting my ability to study effectively. Things like reviewing vocabulary, when I only know some kanji in a word, displaying the whole in kanji with furigana just isn't helpful because I then have to figure out which ones I know and try to recontextualize it in the way I'm required to present it. Now I can just edit them as I need which has been a great improvement!

What I've been watching

We recently finished watching Monster. This was a rewatch for me and a first watch for my wife. It's still impressive to me how well it holds up, as well as how much it stands apart from typical anime fare.

We also just finished Reservation Dogs, which has been stellar from the start. If you've not watched it, I can't recommend it highly enough. Not only is it notable for featuring all Indigenous writers and directors, and the cast and staff were also almost entirely Indigenous, it's also heartwarming and in turns, funny and sad.

Frieren and 16bit Sensation continue to be this anime season's MVPs. There are a few others I want to check out that I haven't yet but that'll be for when I've got more time.

What I've been playing

Much as I've been busy, I've still managed to cut some time out to play games.

Since last time I have:

  • finished Nights of Azure. It was pretty good! I'm looking forward to playing the sequel which I hear is a significantly better game
  • played through The Evil Within 2. It was great! Quite different from the first and so many great ideas at play here.
  • played through Inscryption. I don't have much to add to all that's been said about it, I liked the ways it played with how card games function.
  • started playing the best game from spring 2022 again: Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin because I decided it was time to get to that DLC.
  • started and finished The Case of the Golden Idol. Heck of a puzzle game. The way it gives you all the clues and gives minimal guidance to solving the scenes made it incredibly satisfying to piece together information, poring over the clues and trying to reconstruct what happened.
  • played mahjong as I've had time. I've mostly been on Riichi City but my play has been improving and becoming more consistent which feels really good!

What I've been reading

Hopefully this new flow will lead to me doing this more regularly. We're in the final weeks of the semester so I'm looking forward to things winding down for a bit. Maybe in that time I'll figure out how to add webmentions on here because it looks a whole lot more involved than I'd expected.