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  • 1899 cancelled after one season

    January 3rd, 2023

    Netflix won't renew the mystery sci-fi series 1899, the co-creators said Monday via Instagram. 

    Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, who co-created 1899 and Dark also available on Netflix, posted a statement on bo Odar's Instagram saying the show will not be renewed on the subscription platform.

    "With a heavy heart we have to tell you that 1899 will not be renewed," the statement read. "We would have loved to finish this incredible journey with a 2nd or 3rd season as we did with Dark. But sometimes things don't turn out the way you planned. That's life." 

    This is why I hate Netflix. So happy Dark got to finish its run in the end.

    • ↩️ CNET

  • "How many layers does it take to get to the UI center of a Windows 11?”

    January 2nd, 2023

    It’s 2023, and Windows 11 is finally a mature operating system that most people would be happy to use. Sun Valley has finally arrived, and it’s all about a long overdue reinvestment in design under Panos Panay’s leadership. But is it enough?

    Let’s take a look.

    For anyone using Windows 11, this is both depressingly painful and immensely satisfying. Like indulging in a kind of shameful interface design kink. It's just utterly mind-boggling why Windows 11 is still such a mess. (Not that macOS is doing great at the moment; looking at you Ventura.)

    • ↩️ NTDEV

  • LEGO Hokusai

    January 2nd, 2023

    Both clichéd and nerdy. I love it.

    • ↩️ LEGO.com

  • Way, way too much information on Pac-Man

    January 1st, 2023

    It wasn't too long after the release of Pac-Man when word began to spread of players occasionally passing straight through a ghost unharmed, seemingly at random. This rumor turned out to be completely true as most die-hard Pac-Man players can attest. If you play the game long enough, you will eventually see Pac-Man run into one of the ghosts and come out unscathed on the other side—it doesn't happen very often so enjoy it when it does!

    Apparently, due to the way the sprites update their location in the Pac-Man maze, there's a very tiny possibility that both sprites can move towards each other and swap locations at the exact same time, allowing the collision detection to never fire. Pretty amazing. And that's just one tit-bit of information about Pac-Man you can find at The Pac-Man Dossier. A simple web page documenting just about everything about this arcade classic.

    • ↩️ The Pac-Man Dossier

  • 2022's actual resolutions

    January 1st, 2023

    I don’t like new year’s resolutions that much. It feels like an arbitrary date to start doing whatever you wanted to do anyway. And if we’re going with arbitrary, why not start right now? So instead of making resolutions for the new year, it think it’s better to look back upon 2022 and take stock of the personal changes I made during the year in order.

    Bullet journal tweaks

    I still use a bullet journal, though in the original sense1. The concept of a bullet journal has kind of shifted to somewhere in-between art-infused scrapbook and meticulously detailed daily planner. Just take a look over at Instagram.

    I’ve never been that artistically inclined, nor does an actual planner seem to work for me. I need an overview of tasks, notes, and a somewhat mindful “feel” of the day/week/month. And for that I use the simple text & symbols based setup. My 2022 bullet journal gear featured a Leuchtturm 1917 A5 dotted notebook (though this year, I'm using an Edition 120), a Rotring Rapid Pro ballpoint, and three Stabilo Boss Original neon markers (green, magenta, yellow).

    Next to the common symbols used in the bullet journal concept, I use bracketed timestamps to mark events that day, usually meetings, calls, deliveries, etc. That’s a duplication of stuff that’s in my normal calendar, but I find that adding them manually at the start of each day keeps them present in my thoughts as the journal is something I keep coming back to. The calendar is more of an appointment database in a way.

    The markers I use specifically to highlight additional aspects: yellow to highlight something that needs to happen/be shared ASAP; magenta to indicate critical (work) issues that can act as blockers; green to denote anything time based (the aforementioned bracketed time symbols get these by default). Next to highlighting whatever needed, I find it created a pleasing cadence throughout the pages giving me an impression of work load over multiple days.

    Next to the daily overview, I do have a monthly overview. Here the markers denote location/time off: yellow are work-from-home days, magenta are office days, green are days off. For the moved tasks they follow the same coding as the daily tasks.

    It’s a simplistic addition, but I don’t need much more. As said I use a bullet journal to maintain a grasp on the feel of my workflow, it’s not meant as a straitjacket.

    Stable lunch, less meat

    Somewhere during spring I started getting annoyed by having to think too much about lunch. So I purposefully sought out something I liked that I could prep ahead of time and use throughout the week. I’ve always been partial to beans, so this cucumber and black bean salad proved perfect. Especially when combined with some of Ivan Orkin's taberu rayu.

    That inadvertently had a knock-on effect of me eating less meat, as I swapped the tasteless feta with avocado to make it a vegan recipe. That intrigued me after I noticed what I had done a few weeks later, and now I do make a conscious effort to eat less meat. Treating meat consumption more like I would alcohol; something to be savoured or to be enjoyed socially. I haven’t perfected that, and still find myself adding meat to a meal when I don’t think about it, but it’s slowly getting better.

    More walking/rucking

    As working from home during the pandemic caused a flare-up of athlete’s foot, I started walking additionally in the morning and evening to simulate my daily commute to keep my blood circulation in order. That kind of fell to the wayside as 2022 rolled by, restrictions got lifted and the actual daily commute started returning into my life.

    Over the summer I picked that up once more on my days (working) at home, cementing it into my daily routine. Additionally, I started turning them into rucks. To and from the office I do carry some weight, but at home that was nowhere to be found. Now I just pop a kettlebell into my backpack whenever I go for a walk.

    Duolingo for Japanese

    My work trip to Tokyo Game Show this year, brought me into contact with the people of the Dutch embassy in Japan, who informed me that yes, Duolingo is now actually a good tool for learning Japanese. Which was something of a surprise. Last time I checked, Duolingo was stuck in a kind of romaji-only mode and had some horrible texts to work through.

    When I got back home, I installed Duolingo to give it another go, and yup: kana and kanji everywhere with structured grammar to top it off, making it indeed a good tool. Today my streak reached 106 and I have no intention of angering the owl anytime soon.

    More blogging

    Which if you’re reading this, you might have noticed already. The Twitter-pocalypse caused a reset on my side about how reading and sharing info works for me on the internet.

    These days, I’ve set up a Mastodon-account, rebooted my use of RSS, and started sharing stuff this here blog first, turning that into my link and thoughts repository. Someone else finds interest in that? All the more fun, but I’m kind of done with advertisement-fuelled “social media”.

    Kettlebell training and climbing

    Another thing that went awry during the pandemic: my bouldering level. It cratered and once everything opened up and I started climbing again, I found myself lacking in strength and stamina.

    For most of 2022 I’ve been trying to build that back up but I guess a combination of two years of almost no climbing and well, getting older wasn’t doing it for me. By the end of November I was getting really sick of it and flipped the table on it: I added daily kettlebell exercises in the morning to focus more on strength and started upping the rucking game a bit, adding progress to the routines on a weekly basis.

    Been doing that for little more than a month now without fail and yes, this is much better. Not that I’m instantly back at my previous peak level, but during my sessions on the walls I can already notice me being able to exert more power and generally remain climbing for longer. Let’s see where that all leads to by the end of next year.

    1 Sadly, it seems Bullet Journal had its own new year’s resolution and turned completely commercial. You used to be able to find an overview of the basic rules an practices on the homepage, but all traces are now removed to get you to unroll into a 250 dollar “course”. Dear lord.


  • Yearplay 2022

    December 31st, 2022

    Looking back at 2022 is a bit strange. There's a black hole of a game in the early months and after that I found myself drawn towards the smaller and often more indie titles. Although there wasn't a lack of games, it was noticeable that the bigger developers and publishers had reached the end of their titles in storage and the effects of the pandemic were finally seeping through. As such, my highlights for the year are as follows:

    5. Dungeon Encounters (PS4)

    This one snuck up to me. After so many years of JRPGs trying to do new things, it was refreshing to delve into one that was just the most basic in years. Except it wasn't. Although Dungeon Encounters starts off making you think you can just brute force your way through it, it slowly layers new abilities and new twists on top of each other. The stark grid you navigate and the spartan battle scenes you engage can be both very sweet and bitter in alternating waves. It's brutal at times, but then again you can be as well. Moreover, it's pretty amazing in how it paints a world without actually presenting you with much to go on. This could've been an 8-bit JRPG, and sometimes that's exactly what the doctor ordered.

    4. Ghost Song (PS5)

    Hauntingly beautiful and audibly somewhere in-between comfort and discomfort, Ghost Song is Mixed Bag: The Game. It throws everything and the kitchen sink at you, from classic Metroid-progression, to Souls-like combat, and never really excels. What it presents is very solid though, and my only gripe with it is that it is over quickly once you start to get into the groove of things. What looks like a huge map becomes a cosy affair towards the end of it. Really enjoyed it and would definitely be on board for a sequel, but it's not one to easily drop into another's lap as a must-play metroidvania.

    3. Citizen Sleeper (SD)

    I basically played Citizen Sleeper over two periods — one at the start of summer and one at the end of summer — which turned out to split pretty evenly in two as well. It plays like reading a book, but one where if something interests you, you can dig a little deeper. Using dice rolls and placement is an excellent mechanic and I hope it gets adopted as a core mechanic for many visual novels to come. What sets the game apart from others is its setting and its characters. It sells cyberpunk concepts better than the other eponymous AAA-example and still maintains a very human angle to everything, even though you play a not-human character. It might show its gears a bit too obviously as you get towards the end, as the pull and push of the mechanics gives way to optimization of the game's meta. Though after the credits, this one stays with you for a while, and that's worth way more to me.

    2. Vampire Survivors (SD)

    Steam Deck's Tetris. Really, this game should've snatched up by Valve as a pack-in instead of Aperture Desk Job. Vampire Survivors contains all the Skinner Box weirdness of an idler, yet manages to combine that with the overpowered feel of some of the best RPGs and metroidvanias, and then suddenly starts adding goals and mechanics on top of it, making what seemed to be throwaway busywork into a genuine game experience. I've whittled away a good 50 hours in this and will probably keep doing so for many hours more. Huzzah!

    1. Elden Ring (PS5)

    Quelle surprise. Of course it was going to be Elden Ring. It took up more than 200 hours of my time, was the biggest gaming event this year, and was greatest hits style celebration of everything Souls-like. All while showing the entire open world design field how to instil some proper exploration and wonder into a game world. Thinking back to the game feels like remembering a vacation with friends (doubly so, as I experienced a good chunk of the game with a group chat on the side). I haven't returned to it, even after the update a few weeks ago, mainly because I'm not into the multiplayer aspect of it, but also because I want the memory of the game to fade a bit further, only to boot it up once more on a spare day for a second play-through with an entirely different character build. I want to experience that vacation again when I need it.


  • Set up your Chill Corner

    December 29th, 2022

    Thanks to GAME Watch for pointing out Chill Corner, a free "game" by Vietnamese developer Low-Hi Tech in which you decorate a room and earn currency to decorate it even more by just letting it idle. It's like Mountain but with a reward system.

    • ↩️ GAME Watch

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