2021 Week 34/35: Thoughts and Catch-Up
2021-09-07
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My sister-in-law is American, but she has been dating an Englishman for almost a decade. After a rough period in the last few years, they've decided to marry, and she will move to the UK to be with him. My wife and I have just received a save-the-date message for the ceremony next year. It will be the first time I visit England, and I am very excited.
Our most recent tabletop session was delayed due to a local convention, with which most of the players are staff members. That's okay with me; I need to update my character journal, and I keep putting it off.
Whenever I play beatmania IIDX, I'm reminded of a friend of mine from childhood named Charles. He and I didn't directly talk to each other very often after we left elementary school, but we both played a rhythm game called StepMania for many years. I started playing IIDX in 2014, and in 2015 Charles and I met up in our hometown to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Since he enjoyed rhythm games, I wanted to tell him about IIDX, but I forgot about it during the trip. Six years later, I still haven't mentioned the game to him.
My replacement NAS is finally ready to use in the configuration I wanted. It originally had two drives in RAID 0 configuration, but with some esoteric moving of files and creation of storage pools, I was able to expand to four drives in RAID 5 configuration.
It has been revealed that Morgana from Atlus's "Persona 5" RPG is going to be a playable character in a new Super Monkey Ball game to be released next month. I've seen a lot of people talking about playing the game for that reason alone. It annoys me that companies use such nostalgia baiting and referential winks to get people to buy their products. All that matters to me is if the game controls well--the best Super Monkey Ball games are all about precision control, and if the controls are smooth and tight, I'll play the game.
I've decided to switch my VM server from VMWare to KVM running from a vanilla installation of Rocky Linux. My eventual goal is to be able to self-host all kinds of applications and services using only FLOSS tools.
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Photo of the week (week 34):
(PNG, 800x450, 358 KiB)
Even though I work at my office full-time again, in the evenings my wife and I often stay in. Our neighborhood has a lot of trees that block our view of the horizon. These days it's somewhat rare for me to be out at twilight, which makes sights like this a treat.
Photo of the week (week 35):
(PNG, 450x800, 365 KiB)
It's been quite a struggle to clear new 19 charts in Sound Voltex. In the last three years I've only cleared nine of them. This is my ninth clear: Everlasting Message (GRV). Unfortunately Konami's eAmusement network was undergoing maintenance at the time, so the clear was not saved to my account.
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[Last updated: 2025-01-27]