huel essential, a disabled being's review
My disablities can make eating hard. ADHD makes knowing when I should cook before I am too hungry difficult, depression kills my appetite, and autism means I often feel like there is no food I can bring myself to eat even when I'm hungry. I have considered huel and other meal shakes before, but only recently pulled the trigger and got some huel essential powder. It's been helping, but I have mixed feelings.
on obligatory-feeling blog posts
I rewrote my blog backend. It's now not hugo but an SSG I wrote myself. I won't be open sourcing it, and I do not care to write a post about it. It's boring. It's a static site generator, and one that is only useful for my personal blog specifically, and the most boring blog posts are the ones that are about the blog they are on.
Converting a netbook into a dedicated, instant boot writing machine
I decided to try and get a machine for writing on, for writing my journal. I wanted to get an alphasmart, but they are now rare and expensive. So I decided set up an old netbook as a dedicated, instant booting writing machine, and want to talk about how I did it.
Dodecadragons - a review
[Dodecadragons](https://demonin.com/games/dodecaDragons/) is an incremental game that runs in a browser created by Demonin. It is a work of pure evil, and I loved it.
"Bad" charting rules!
a blog post I wrote in like less than an hour while sleep deprived and ranting about rhythm games
My Pump it Up dance pad build log
In late 2023, I got into pump it up and decided I wanted a way to play at home. I tried playing on soft pads but was very unsatisfied with the performance so set out to build my own arcade style pads. I didn't have much money for this project, so did as much of it with leftover materials from other projects and materials I could get cheaply or for free. This is a build log, I guess. For this whole build I followed schematics from [the openpad github repo](https://github.com/gabe-fz/openpad/blob/master/Schematics/PIU%20Renders/Readme.md), without which this wouldn't be possible. Thanks!
My Theory (and practice) of Magic
> "This is magic if you want it to be magic, and brain-hacking if you want it to be brain-hacking. But for me, it’s both." > > \- sleepingirl, *[Six Days Asleep](https://sleepingirl.itch.io/six-days-asleep),* 2022
Beatmania IIDX/BMS controller build log
I made a controller for playing beatmania IIDX and BMS. Here it is. I wanted to write a full, proper build log with a ton of photos of every single stage of the process, but various technical issues have happened, so now it's gonna be kinda underwhelming. Sorry! But I wanted to post this anyway.
toki a!
toki! ni li lipu lon lipu linluwi mi. tan seme? mi wile sona e ni: ilo mi li pakala ala pakala? a a a
THE FACTORY MUST GROW - a critique of factorio
Factorio is a game where you land on an alien planet with only basic resources, and your task is to build a rocket to escape. To do so, you build, from the ground up, a vast factory drilling for resources, producing power, assembling components, processing chemicals, and eventually constructing rocket components and launching things into space. It's certainly not intended to be a game with much to say about the world, but it unintentionally takes some very strong positions through how it implements mechanics like pollution and resource extraction.
Another site refresh!
so yeah I got bored of my site again. This new design is based on Amiga Workbench 3.1, the best user interface to ever exist[^1]. Hope you enjoy! Any issues let me know through any of the ways you may know how to contact.
Gabe Newell's Steamed Ham (my Steam Deck experience)
in which no hams get steamed, no games get played, and one nico gets annoyed
Is Beat Saber a Good Dance Game?
I'm a bit of a dance game nerd, and when I say a bit I mean *a lot*. I'm pretty sure I've played every major dance game out there, I've got to levels of DDR/ITG where I draw stares at the arcade (even though I still think I'm honestly pretty bad at them). Recently, due to my dad making a midlife crisis tech purchase[^1] and being kind enough to let me use it, I got to actually get some real play time with Beat Saber (after trying it every now and then at friend's places and arcades). That is enough that I now have Opinions, which I guess I'm sharing here. (also, yes, Beat Saber is a dance game, it's a rhythm game that involves macro-scale movement in time to music, it's a dance game. Also, just look at [this chart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flAsTHJ6mlU)).
On quality, or why I am now just posting things
I'm tired of a problem I always have when writing a blog post, which is that I feel like every post I write has to be, somehow, "quality". That I have to provide original and useful thoughts. That I have to make sure every single fact is correct, that everything is properly sourced and referenced, that there isn't a single spelling or grammatical error. That I am making a real, important contribution to a real, important discussion, or I am creating things that are properly worthy of people's time. Posts have to be long enough to justify existing but not too long as to be a pain to read, etc etc.
Minecraft 1.14 was a failure, but here's how to (maybe) improve it
Minecraft 1.14: Village and Pillage was meant to make villages actually interesting to players and increase their importance and make players actually care about them. But as we reach 1.19 and beyond, it’s clear that this didn’t work, and most players still don’t care about villages beyond being a place to pillage earlygame items, sleep the first few nights, and maybe trap a few villagers to use in farms. So why did it fail?
some writing thoughts, and probably leaving gemini
Starting a new post is hard. This seems to be a universally accepted fact among people who post stuff (except, maybe, the people who are actually good at it). When you have nothing but ideas and a blank page, and you want to somehow communicate those ideas, in a form that is readable and understandable.
Stop. Writing. Shell. Scripts. (a rant)
(warning - this is basically unedited ranting into a text editor. Here there be dragons!)
Smartphones are good, actually*
So I recently moved to using a smartphone after being a basic-phone only person for multiple years, and my experience has been actually positive. To the point where I would write a provocatively titled blog post about it for the clicks from annoyed FOSS and permacomputing people at me liking an objectively trash device. And yes, smartphones are objectively trash. They're hard to repair, built for minimum life and maximum profit, and generally suck (as all devices invented by modern capitalism do). But after having lived without one for so long, I want to talk about having one again.
I simulated 6,400 bad AI Games of dots and boxes, and discovered nothing
Occasionally, I get a silly idea and then decide to make it. Most recently, I decided to create a bunch of bad AI and have them play the children's game "Dots and Boxes" against each other. Here's how that went.
Complaining About a Door (for far too long)
In his book *The Design of Everyday Things*, Don Norman used doors as an example of unintuitive design. His primary example was a door that needed to be pushed to open, but had a handle that intuitively would be pulled - leading to confusion and frustration for anybody attempting to pass through it. These confusing doors later got called "Norman Doors" as a reference to his work. But what if I told you that Norman Doors were only the beginning, and there is a whole WORLD of terrible doors out there? Introducing: the automatic revolving door (the peak of terrible door design) and its application in a situation it is very unsuited to. This post is mostly just complaining, but it's possible you might learn something about door design from it. Who knows?
My FAWM 2022 Experience
February is over, and with it, FAWM (february album writing month) is over. I challenged myself to write 14 songs in February, and I successfully wrote...10! Or 6. Depends on how you count it (10 songs submitted to FAWM, 6 I'd consider "songs" by my own criteria). I actually started FAWM on the 10th, because I had exams and other things that were more important to deal with for the first half of febuary, so I wasn't expecting to reach the 14-song mark. Instead, I set myself some other challenges and targets:
Documenting Projects (and a question)
I've been wanting to blog more about projects I've done and how I did them, sharing those creative things, but I've run into a few problems that make me unsure if doing so is worth it.
Site updates - new recipes, gear page
So I've made some more stuff on this site, and I thought I'd write about it here to get an update out. Firstly, I've made a page for the gear I use:
Using a soundcore bluetooth speaker (or similar) as a meditation timer
I have a soundcore mini portable speaker. Like every modern device, especially aimed at the smartphone accessory market, it has way too many god damn features including an FM radio, bluetooth, audio playback from SD cards, and probably more things I don't even know it can do (I bought it originally only as a portable speaker to use wired). These features were initially just an annoyance to have to press "mode" a few times before being able to just use it to play from an aux in, but I've found a way to put the SD-playback mode to good use, as a meditation timer.
My 12 Days of Tea TIER LIST
I got a box of an assortment of different teas and infusions for Christmas. Over the 12 days of Christmas (entirely coincidentally, as it turns out) I tasted all of these. Here's my opinions on them all and a TIER LIST (because Gemini needed tier list content). All teas are from twinings. (the tier list is using abbreviated names because some of these blends have very long names)
New Site, New Year, and Depth
It's 2022! Here's hoping that 2022 ends up feeling like a new year, and not like 2020 part 3.
Book Review: 1984
(note: post date is due to the fact it is a pre-migration post with an unknown date) (Review migrated from old bookwyrm profile, apologies for brevity) 1984 is a classic for a reason. It's often misunderstood or its political and philosophical commentary is taken at such a surface level it gets stripped of meaning, but this is a very good book that is well worth reading. It's a cliche to say that this book is "only getting more relevant", but that's because it feels true. 1984 has important things to say on politics, epistemology, love, human nature, and the nature of power, while still being an engaging and well-written story with a strong plot and good characters.
Book Review: The design of everyday things
(note: post date is due to the fact it is a pre-migration post with an unknown date)
Book Review: Entangled Life
(note: post date is due to the fact it is a pre-migration post with an unknown date) (Review migrated from old bookwyrm profile, apologies for brevity) This book is a very compelling book that is a good introduction to the world of mycology - at least, an introduction that has got me so interested that it's opened up this entire new field of fascination to me (especially radical mycology) that I had absolutely no interest in before. 100% recommended.
Book Review: How to Take Smart Notes
(note: post date is due to the fact it is a pre-migration post with an unknown date) (Review migrated from old bookwyrm profile, apologies for brevity) I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this book. On the one hand, it was an interesting read, and certainly from it I learned how to use the zettelkasten (and I have started doing so), Although so far I've found that many of my notes just don't fit the format at all, as most are project specific (which are to be kept seperately). Almost all of the practical information is this book is focused in the first 5 or so chapters. The rest is an interesting deeper look into how and why the zettelkasten works, but it is less "how to take smart notes" and more of a "why these notes are smart". I'd recommend this book, but I'd recommend deeply reading the first few chapters, then skimming the rest. It's interesting, but if what you came for is to learn the method, it's largely redundant or adds a little value for a lot of explanation. Zettelkasten is, in a way, too simple a system to write a whole book about.