Z Space Blog - Health

A Look Back on 2022

2022-12-17T23:45:00-08:00

I've spent the past few weeks reflecting on the sort of content that tends to get posted this time of year: retrospectives. Opportunities to review the events of the year, look at what went well, what didn't, what we'll do in the future to be better. Even though companies and other bullshit are joining in the spirit, it's still important to give yourself moments to look back and self-assess your life. A new year is a new opportunity to improve. You don't need a new year to justify it, but it feels right for some people. I kicked a nicotine habit cold-turkey with a New Year's resolution, back in 2005. It can be done.

So, what was 2022 like? Let's try to exclude the grim politics and general state of the world. Life is rough right now. Some countries are at war. Some are dealing with radical extremists. Some are starving or struggling to stabilize their currencies. Others are fighting for basic rights of expression with clothing, or to keep their culture alive in the face of re-education camps. Let's try to find the good stuff.

How was it for others?

Let's start with what happened in general, that stands out to me. That generally means new developments in GNU/Linux or the video gaming world.

Libre Software

Sadly, I can't think of much that happened this year in libre software that was notable. Maybe I'll come back and edit this before the end of the year.

Video Games

Elden Ring was released. I thought I'd be much more hyped about it. I ended up not getting it at all. I still have Dark Souls 1 through 3, and Sekiro, to finish. I'm not thirsting for Soulslike content at all, lol.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus also came out this year, I believe? It almost had what it takes to get me to buy. Scarlet and Violet have technical issues and design flaws that prevent me from enjoying 9th gen as much as I'd like to, so I have avoided buying them as well.

The only games I bought this year were either games that I already owned (Quake for Switch), replacements for the Switch that was stolen from me, or Narita Boy. I haven't played enough to give any solid opinions, but I love the motif of the game so far.

Anime

In the latest season finale of Pokémon, Ash Ketchum becomes the World Coronation Monarch; the most accomplished and dominant trainer in the world! With his dream achieved, The Pokémon Company is bringing Ash's story to a close with 11 episodes set to air in Japan in mid January 2023. The new season has already been teased, featuring two new protagonists. One of them has a hairpin with a design resembling Ash's original hat design. There may be more to what's going on.

As someone who's not been watching the anime, I came back to it when I heard the rumor that Ash might become world champion. To see the twerp I used to make fun of for being a nublet in the 2nd season end up facing off against, and defeating the most accomplished trainer ever in Pokémon is quite impressive. Finally giving Ash a proper send-off is almost like a milestone for the first generation of Pokémon fans. All I could think at the end of the season was, "The kid actually pulled it off!" I am filled with a sort of bittersweet happiness. For the first time in a while, I'm looking forward to anime content!

The Dragon Prince got its next series, which I haven't started yet. Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners has been pretty intense and quite interesting, despite my total lack of knowledge of the series. I hope it's true to the source material.

That about wraps up what hit my radar, outside of whatever real life events were happening.

My Life

Things were challenging for me. Near the end of 2021, I left a profitable job that was sapping my energy and motivation. I ended up going into a part time job for a while until getting back to full time work this year. This job isn't really my cup of tea either, so I'm looking for more computer-oriented work.

My partner was diagnosed as Celiac. The change has been very difficult for her due to her appreciation for baked goods, but also foods from different cultures. She has such a broad palate, and to see her health restrict her food choices has been challenging. She's been strong and diligent at checking ingredients, and I do what I can to help find or make safe food for her.

A good friend of mine had to leave the state due to economic reasons. It sucked to see him leave, but we were lucky enough to be able to spend some quality time together before he had to go. I'll always remember our trip to Ocean Shores.

Projects

As always, it's been difficult to get enough free time to put something together that I can give a shit about. One such thing is an anxiety meter in PICO-8! It took a decent amount of planning and experimentation, but it's a complete feature that looks and acts really well. With any luck, my work on core gameplay elements will come to a pause soon, and I can start churning out assets and get some level design going!

If you're reading this, then the blog was relaunched, after being dormant for three years. Some content was still produced in the time the blog was absent, but not anywhere it would get attention.

Gaming

The 12-in-12 for this year doesn't look too hot, unless I can pull a game or two out of my ass in the next two weeks, haha. I did, however, knock out Box Pusher, another long-standing entry in the backlog. It took nearly 6 months, so it took up a lot of time I could've spent on other games. For one reason or another, my year's been spent playing games I've already beaten. Risk of Rain 2 is almost 100%ed; the gameplay challenges are all finished and all that's left is farming monster logs.

The Future

The future holds many things, depending on what you're looking at. For me, it's primarily the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom in May. The new Pokémon episodes are coming in January for subbed, and the Mario movie is coming next year. I'm still on the fence on whether I'll watch it. Hollywood just doesn't do anything my style any more.

Work has begun on VGStash-Tk, and I am experimenting with date-oriented fields for games in one's collection, to cut down on needless note taking within vgstash. As the software's only user (that I know of), I am solely guiding development, haha. Check out VGStash on PyPI if you haven't already. It's cross-platform and should work on a potato.

That wraps up the major thoughts for me on this year. Overall, it was kinda shitty. Would not want to relive, haha. Here's hoping to a better and brighter 2023.

-z

The Beach

2020-09-02T00:00:00-07:00

The lady and I went to Long Beach, WA last weekend for three days. It calls itself the longest beach in the world, but I never bothered to look it up, haha. It was a fun trip. We had Thai food, took pictures and sunbathed on the beach, and I went go-karting for the first time. Sadly, I got smacked with a headache on day two, but we managed to make it go away in a few hours. I'm prone to migraines, so I have to treat every headache as if it could ruin my day... because sometimes it will.

I felt like Bowser in Mario Kart, since I'm a tall, heavy-ish guy. The little engines in those things can take off pretty well, and the inertia from my weight made some of the turns feel a little dangerous, so I had to use the brakes a bit. Overall I had a ton of fun and would love to go to a larger track for adult karting.

There were enough things to do on the peninsula to warrant coming back at least once or twice. Sadly, there were some attractions that were closed due to COVID-19; one of which was a pretty big arcade. Shame we couldn't check'em out.

Most of our spare time was spent hanging out on the beach or snuggling and watching TV in the motel room. We went all three days and stayed longer on the last day. It was almost painful leaving the beach, since I hadn't visited one since November 2018. I miss swimming so, so, much. Washington beaches aren't really swimming beaches. The water had to be at least 45-50°F. Super chilly considering it was at least 84°F outside. No bueno.

Still, the heat was comfortable overall and it was nice to get away from home life for a few days.

I recently bought a second Raspberry Pi 4 -- this one with 8GB of RAM! -- for the Personal Creativity Assistant project. My old screen isn't suited for the Pi4 the way I need to use it, so I'm looking around for screen chassis that can house a Pi and a battery, for a complete mobile Pi4 solution. Vilros makes a neat 10.1" screen, but the reviews I saw were mixed. It will need more research. If you have any suggestions for cases, screens, or more, feel free to reach out to me.

Rediscovering Comfort

2020-04-01T00:40:00-07:00

Recent times have been interesting, to say the least. COVID-19 and the ensuing consequences are having a profound effect on society. I'm lucky enough that my job is considered essential, so I'm working through this. I'm not worried about myself getting sick so much as spreading it to those more vulnerable than I am. Ironically, my generally isolated lifestyle has proven to be an advantage. Staying away from people is second nature to me. :P

I bought myself a new desk. It's a Eureka Ergonomic Z1S gaming desk. The plastic bits and LEDs are a bit too much for my taste, but it's finally a desk that's high enough and deep enough that it can handle my long body. It has a metal frame and HDF desktop, though honestly you could probably use your own desktop if you wanted. The Z-shaped legs offer me even more leg room, off to the sides. There's a hook for my headphones, a cup holder, and a separate, small rack for stuff. It finally feels like MY workspace, and it's only 55lbs. Check it out!

I also ordered an 8BitDo SN30Pro+ controller, in the GameBoy Classic motif. It works on Windows, GNU/Linux, Nintendo Switch, Android, and has an adapter (sold separately) to work on other systems like PS3. There's even a phone tray accessory to turn your phone into a 'portable' gaming rig. I didn't get them, but it's nice to know they're available.

Playing games on my Switch and PC with the controller has been great. I have concerns about the left analog stick, though. It appears to be slightly tilted to the left when it's at neutral. I may seek a replacement since I'm worried it might drift. I assume it's just a fluke since the right stick works fine. Otherwise, the controller has been great. The one catch is their custom software only appears to work on Windows. Oh well, that's where my PC gaming has gone anyhow.

Despite the new things improving my computer and gaming experiences, I'm still just sort of burnt out or jaded. I'm beginning to think my antidepressant isn't really helping anymore. I wake up in an irritable state, with a short fuse over minor hiccups in my morning. I have a hard time deciphering what someone's intent is, or if intent was there at all when something happens. My mood is unpredictable sometimes, and the chemically induced sleep that the medicine gives me doesn't really leave me feeling rested the next morning and I don't really dream any more.

Next on the list is a full spectrum light. I'm doing what I can to try to create an environment where I can't help but do things that I normally really care about and want to see happen. Changing the outside doesn't change the inside, but it can help.

Stay home if you can.

-z

Non-Zero Day

2020-01-20T17:24:00-08:00

A while back, I found a post talking about the concept of the Non-Zero Day.

The idea is, to fight depression or demotivation or analysis paralysis, or whatever mental block is between you and what you want to do, you do ONE thing. Doesn't matter if it's just tidying a room, taking the trash out, something. If you're trying to focus, make it one task -- any task -- regarding your goal that you can do. Find something you can start and finish in 10 minutes.

Even if that's all you do, you still took a step toward something. It's still progress.

I am trying to apply this concept to my hobbies. We'll see what happens.

Today, I got closer to moving away from pulseaudio again, back to apulse. Ever since moving Windows to a 2TB hard drive, I feel less inclined to put up with pulseaudio and friends on the GNU/Linux side for 'muh games'. There's a list of 15-20 packages I need to remove the USE-flag from and blockers to navigate, etc. Unfortunately some of those are big, like Firefox, qemu, webkit, etc.

Instead of looking at that as the Gordian knot of deptree it is, I'm looking at it in pieces. conky's PA support is easy to disable, so I chose that first. Now the package list is one line shorter. Even if I do nothing the rest of the evening, I'll still have gotten a little closer to my goal.

The goal is beyond the switch to apulse. My goal is a Red Hat-free Linux userland. Whether that journey happens on Gentoo, Slackware, Void, Bedrock, or LFS, who knows. I'm open to suggestions. But I'm going to do this, one non-zero day at a time.

-z

Tidy

2019-11-26T05:14:00-08:00

My physical possessions are a little more tidy now. The shed has been prepped for the winter, everything of mine that's important is indoors and has a place. I bought a new hard drive a while ago to expand Windows to 2 TB. Sadly, Windows doesn't like being cloned. It's been quite a battle but it more or less runs correctly. If it goes to shit again, I'll wipe it before I reinstall. At any rate, Windows is setup and ready to be used if anything happens to my other OSes or I want to game. That's a major source of anxiety crossed off the list.

I sold a bunch of games and systems. It was less than what I wanted, but I considered the opportunity cost of selling 20+ games and 4 systems. I took out the most valuable game for myself, since they were offering less than half of what it was worth. My thirties are teaching me to pick and choose my battles. This one game can fetch almost as much as what I got for the rest of it, so I can at least get around half of what the whole collection was worth once I've sold the valuable one. So, I have a fatter wallet and less clutter. That's nice.

The decision making of various computer-oriented organizations continues to depress me. From the .org domains being sold to for-profit interests to the corporate incursion of Linux land to the hit pieces, astroturfing, and misinformation campaigns of the media, etc. It just sucks. Humans create so many problems for themselves.

I'm researching ways to run GNU/Linux without Red Hat software in the userland. dbus is a particularly difficult target to get rid of; I can't even launch CUPS without dbus! I found a patch to remove the accessibility bridge from GTK+3; once I verify it's working I hope to adapt it for the last release of GTK+2. That'll get an entire toolkit off the teat. KISS Linux is an interesting project along the same lines as what I've been doing, but I'm waiting to see how its author makes decisions in software as it progresses. For now, my efforts will be focused on reverting my Gentoo installation to something sane and reading LFS so I can set up a new environment. I'm getting sick of the drama and churn in Linux so I may pursue other OSes.

I find myself becoming less interested in video games, mostly due to my emotions while playing them or the value proposition changing when we consider day-one game patching, piecemeal DLC, Early Access, Free-to-Play, digital exclusives, etc. If games go to a format where I cannot ever have a physical copy, I will probably stop playing (new) games. Emotionally, I don't like playing against others in Smash Bros. Whether I win or lose, someone's walking away disappointed, and I don't like that. I don't want to spread bad vibes with my gameplay.

I'm learning how to make better use of closures for game states in PICO-8. Animation and coroutine management are my next learning targets. Then, I want to do text boxes with flowing text. PICO-8 is fun, but I've also installed LÖVE2D so I can make games with fewer restrictions. Being the change I want to see, and whatnot.

Overall, the theme of the past few days has been reducing any and all stress in my life so I can focus on things I care about. My anxiety remains, but I'm at least directing it toward something.

Now to remove a bunch of games from my vgstash...

-z

Turning Thirty

2015-10-27T00:00:00-07:00

People tend to say that you're not "really a grown-up" until you hit thirty. I can say I managed to not die for thirty revolutions around our dear sun. Due to the simplicity of our decimal number system and our human penchant for patterns, each decade brings with it a sort of "milestone". At ten, it's more for the parents, "Congrats on not killing your kid!" At twenty, it's, "Almost old enough to drink! Welcome to adulthood!" Sitting here at thirty, it's become, "I hope you have a good day. Keep up what you're doing."

With that comes a bit of a pause, I suppose. It makes you wonder, "Did I make good decisions? How do I feel about where I am in life? Where do I want to go, now that I have some life experience?" That's a good thing, though. It shows that -- in my case anyway -- behind my generally fun-seeking personality and desire to dick around all the time that there's an adult underneath making sure things are going along AOK.

That's the kicker about adulthood. Most of us spend a lot of our childhood wishing we were grown up so we can "do what we want," only to find out that the world doesn't quite work that way, and we had it pretty good with our parents taking care of everything. Even with that knowledge, and a dose of the world fucking with me, I still don't feel like I'm "grown up". It makes you wonder what that even means. Maybe it's not good to "be a grown-up", and instead it's used as a measuring stick for others to judge you. Others who have lost their spark and will do what they can to snuff out any sparks they see. But enough of that.

Introspection is powerful, both in people and in software. It allows you to learn a lot about yourself or the program itself, just by asking some questions. I have to ask myself the obvious questions:

How've you handled yourself so far?

Honestly? I'm doing okay, at least from an outside perspective. I could be making more money, and my girlfriend and I could use a larger place to live, but really it's not all that bad. Our bills get paid and we still have a little extra to stow away or save up for things we need or want. Granted, I really don't like my job, but it's the best paying job I've had and it's helped make a few things happen.

Where do you want to go in life?

Professionally, I want -- no, need -- to get into software or computer work of some sort. It's what I've spent the past 15 years learning in my spare time. I have (some) skills, and just need to find a firm willing to take me on and get me up to speed with their workflow. I'm sick of customer service or manual labor. I'm good with computers: web design, troubleshooting, okay at programming... I guess I need to learn that "salesmanship" part.

Creatively, I'm dying. I don't really spend time doing creative things anymore. I need to kick that in the ass and jumpstart it. I used to make pixel art, draw, and dick around with music composition apps. I used to write up descriptions of worlds, make mockups, and so on. I think if I can sort out my professional life and other stressors, I'll return to doing fun, creative stuff. Yes, that means the phone-friendly CSS of this website will actually get finished!

Educationally, I've considered going to school for a BS in Computer Science, if only to learn more theory. History is a subject I abhor, but for some reason I enjoy reading about the history of computer science and hope to someday learn more about the low-level stuff. Low level programming is interesting to me, as it seems closer to engineering than high level programming. It's a lot more satisfying for me to build a set of C functions to do something as opposed to throwing together libraries or using one-liners from higher level languages. I can do that work, but low level stuff is more interesting.

Everywhere else in my life is okay. I could stand to lose some weight, and I wish I had more time to play video games. That's about it.

Festivities

My birthday itself was a normal work day. The weekend prior, however, my girlfriend and her family took us out to eat and I received gifts from them. It was really nice of them because, given that I've only really been in their lives for about a year, they got me things. It meant a lot to me and, admittedly, made me wonder if I deserved it. I received a nice messenger bag that I'd had my eye on for a while and Yoshi's Woolly World, which you can expect a review on in approximately four years, if the Reviews section is any indicator. :P

I also attended the Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses concert in Portland this past weekend. It was a blast, and the first concert I'd ever attended. I'm not sure I'll ever pay that much for an event again, but it was a positive experience and I don't regret anything.

Overall, turning thirty's not been too bad. My hair's turning silver a bit faster than I'd prefer, but as far as I'm concerned I've earned it. Here's hoping the next post I write is something besides the Life or Philosophy sections! I have a few ideas brewing, so stay tuned.