A lot of my video game playing lately has been on portable consoles, mainly the 3DS, DS and Gameboy Advance SP. In playing these games, I’ve grown a greater appreciation for game cartridges. It’s beautiful when you think about it, the entire game and save in a removable and highly portable form factor. I’m also amazed by the amount of content they fit in some of these games. The tricks game developers used to show depth and detail in such “weak” systems, especially the GBA, are so cool.

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Look Back is a movie based on the one-shot by  Tatsuki Fujimoto, also the creator of Chainsaw Man. The story follows Fujino, a child who loves to draw comics for the school newspaper. She is told by everyone how talented she is and loves the attention. She is told that for the following week, another student, Kyomoto will also be drawing a strip for the newspaper, and Fujino is blown away by how great Kyomoto’s art is for someone her age. Not willing to lose to Kyomoto, Fujino decides to improve her art skills through practice, and the story develops from there.

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Philadelphia is a court drama starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. The court case is about an illegal termination lawsuit where Tom Hank’s law firm purposely hid his brief to pretend like they could fire him for negligence when, in reality, they fired him because they found out he had AIDS. There wasn’t much actual law in the movie; there weren’t many precedents set or other cases mentioned. It was more a commentary on how people with AIDs and more generally gay people were treated and still are treated, and the relationship between Denzel and Tom.

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I like a combination of New Years Resolutions that a) remove negative habits but also b) add postive goals. One of the positive goals I want to do this year is watch more movies. I mean the movies that are the “Oh you haven’t seen that yet?” tier of movie. There’s so many movies on my list so this year I’m going to make a commitment to watch them. The list is as follows:

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About half a year ago, I saw a youtube video by Savah Davis Baker called The Internet Used to be a Place. It was a phenomenal video about how the internet was treated. Growing up I had a computer room, my dad’s office dedicated to the computer. If I wanted to access the internet we had to do it on that computer. When I was done with computer, I left the room and disconnected.

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With Gym 1 defeated I continued to explore the town. There’s a museum with a scientist that mentions something about fossil research, probably something to note for later! I travel north to find a slippery hill that a biker said I need a bike to climb! They said I can get one at the bike shop in Eterna so I guess that’s where I’m heading next. Checking the map, its north of Jubilife, so before backtracking I decide to get my Route 207 encounter and train my team to the Gym 1 level cap. I catch a Machamp which I named Mike Tyson and proceeded to bring everyone up to level 14.

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Okay! Officially starting our journey, still with no Pokeballs, we pass through Sandgem town only to find Dawn waiting for us in some tall grass to show us how to catch Pokemon. After a brief tutorial shes gives us our first 5 pokeballs. We can now get our first encounter of the run.

So going back to route 201, our first is a Bidoof! A beaver looking favourite meme of a Pokemon which I named Jeff, after another meme. Then I returned to route 202, where I caught a Krikitot as my second encounter, naming it Mozart after it’s evolution’s musical inspiration.

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Introduction to Nuzlockes

This is new project documenting my blind Pokemon Platinum Nuzlocke run. It would have been cool to track my progress but I know I wouldn’t record enough clips to make a cohesive video. I decided that blogging it and taking pictures as I go would be a fun way to record the story… except I thought of blogging it after I started the save so the pictures will begin starting from the next one! I will be summarizing the story as I play and I may mess up some of the details as I recount them but thats okay!

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Over the last few months, I’ve been grossly aware of the how algorithms have been shaping my life. Content being directly streamed to my brain with no friction whatsoever. It’s been taking away from my attention span, my focus, my enjoyment and my well being. When I got into homelabbing and self-hosting, I thought it was going to be my solution to this. No more corporations, no more algorithms, I can collect the content I want to watch and listen to. But something felt missing, I think I was missing the core of the issue. Yes part of the issue is algorithms made to keep me consuming, but another piece of the puzzle is the over abundance of content available. Since there is no end to the content stream, there is no time to reflect on the content consumed. There’s always something else to watch. This is where I went wrong, instead developing a curated collection, I pirated all the music I’d ever want. Yes, the access was nice but it left me with the same decision paralysis from before.

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Overview

We live in an age of software as a service (SaaS). For a monthly fee, these software give their users access to the conveniences of their product. Services like Netflix and Spotify give their users access to petabytes of content without the struggle of hosting or carrying that content themselves. The convenience is undeniable, but not without their concerns. Focusing on Spotify, their revenue stream for their artists isn’t small artist friendly, mainly benefitting labels and popular artists. Nothing wrong with convenience, but if you are looking to support artist, you are better off buying the artists music directly and listening to the files off your phone. Unfortunately, given a large enough collection, it is not feasible to save thousands of songs along with photos and apps on a phone anymore. There is the option of getting a dedicated music player like an iPod or music player, but that poses its own inconveniences. The goal is to have something almost as accessible as Spotify, and with selfhosting it is now possible. This post will go over the steps to create your own music service using Navidrome as the music server. To track your listening, this will also show you how to connect Navidrome to Last.fm.

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