Welcome to ZLG's quest to beat twelve games in 2021! My backlog has exploded to over 100 games, so it's time to burn through it!

A Brief History of 12-in-12

/r/12in12 was started on Reddit in 2018 to help people get through the list of games they want to beat, i.e. a backlog. I discovered it shortly after it was created, and have participated independently ever since. It's a good initiative for people to motivate and encourage each other to play through and enjoy their games more.

In 2023, the subreddit was shut down in protest of Reddit, Inc. charging for bulk access to their API. The original community was effectively killed. In late 2025, it was reopened by a random person claiming moderator status. The quality of the new community remains yet to be seen as of early 2026.

Some people choose 12 games to beat and try to stick to it, while people like me just try to focus on beating games at all and, if you hit 12, awesome! If not, that's fine, too. It's about putting in time to play and enjoying what you paid for.

My 12-in-12

With that out of the way in my maiden post on the subject...

Here's the successful hit list for this year:

• Painkiller: Hell & Damnation [Steam]
• Super Hexagon [Steam]
• Koi-Koi Japan [Steam]
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD [WiiU]
• Unravel TWO [Switch]
• Minecraft [Switch]
• Mighty Gunvolt Burst [Switch]
• Final Fantasy 4: The After Years [Wii]
• Strikey Sisters [Switch]
• Golf Peaks [Switch]
• Hatsune Miku: Project Diva MegaMix [Switch]
• Metroid Dread [Switch]
• Risk of Rain 2 [Switch]
• Street Fighter [ARC]
• Street Fighter II [ARC]
• Hammerwatch [Switch]

For a whopping SIXTEEN games beaten in 2021!

Read more...

About two months ago, it was announced that Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender, were leaving production of a live-action series that they were doing with Netflix. The particular drama appeared to be artistic differences, etc, but Bryan's closing statement in his announcement struck me pretty hard:

I will put my time, energy, and talents towards the projects that give me the most fulfilment, and where I am afforded trust and respect. Life is too short to do otherwise.

It's only two sentences, but it represents an attitude that I think more of us could stand to adopt. When I read it, I can think back to the moments in history where I didn't follow this idea, and regretted it.

It's something I'll keep in mind the next time I consider contributing to a project.

-z

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.

Read more...

Today, I wrestled some mistletoe into the cgit installation on my server. Not the plant, silly, it's mistletoe, a CommonMark-compliant parser!

Since the server runs Gentoo, I needed to write an ebuild for mistletoe to get it into the system-wide Python path, since Gentoo uses Portage for system-level Python and pip for user level... Thankfully my past experience as a contributor made this task easy, but any other distro would've let me install mistletoe at the system level from pip.

Read more...

When I returned to mkbak¹ in order to give it better options for custom backup naming, automatic date tagging, preservation of permissions, etc., I noticed that I was writing complex and tricky rsync filter files. I ran with this for a while -- and still have them as I write this -- but the problem stewed in my mind. Something bothered me about the organization of the files under my $HOME. Eventually, I felt there was a way for me to shorten my rsync filter files and reduce the stress I felt about my files. I just needed to figure out what the core problem was. To answer that, we need to understand what hierarchy's purpose is, or what its use introduces to your data.

Read more...