your source for Game Z
In the days leading up to the end of 2023, zlg.space's primary hard drive
began having errors and locking up the entire server. It began with simple
unresponsiveness, and ended in a replacement drive, new OS, and a bumpy road
of /opt self-compiled madness to bring the backup to the modern ages of PHP.
The server is now on bigger, faster storage and an OS that won't get in the way
if/when it breaks again, but it didn't come without an arduous test of patience.
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.
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.
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.