💕 sugar | Some Updates

I feel like I haven’t posted much lately, so here’s a bit of what’s been going on in my life.

Crochet and Family

I briefly picked up crochet thanks to my wife’s mom just randomly giving me a needle and skein of yarn when I expressed interested. It all happened so fast. I’ve gotten decent at some basic single crochets, but then I put it down because I picked it up in the middle of some bad hand pain. I hope to eventually get good enough to make cute amigurumis :)

And I had the realization that I’ve seen my wife’s family several times in the past year and my own family only once. In fact, in the past year I’ve seen my wife’s family more than I’ve seen my family for the past DECADE.

Game Reviews

I really struggled with the Eastward post.

I had so much I wanted to say that I couldn’t figure how. And this is incredibly frustrating to me because I used to be a decent writer. Like, that was my thing! COVID-19 really does a number on the language parts of your brain. This is not unique to me at all. It’s so frustrating. It’s even more frustrating that it comes and goes. Some days I’m fine and have no problems writing or communicating. Other days I’m struggling to find the most basic of words.

The point is, I need to change how I approach game reviews. They keep getting longer and more detailed and I can’t keep that up. I have one more long one that’s almost ready, but after that I think I need shorten these big time. They’re no fun when I struggle to do them, and I’m only doing this to have fun.

Some of the pieces I think I wrote well:

I made a silly bluesky bot

On Twitter there was a little bot that posted a video clip from Futurama as well as the accompanying text every Saturday night. The text was simply Fry saying the following lines from Anthology of Interest II, the video opens with this too:

All right.
It’s Saturday night.
I have no date, a two-liter bottle of Shasta and my all-Rush mix tape.
Let’s rock.

then a clip of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” plays:

Today’s Tom Sawyer, he gets high on you
And the space he invades, he gets by on you

before it goes into that super cool synthesizer instrumental as he starts playing a Space Invaders cabinet to attack literal space invaders that look like Space Invaders.

I always just found it to be a silly bot and I loved retweeting it on Saturday nights when my wife was away. I missed it, so I made it on Bluesky:

This makes me so happy 😊

Rediscovering my music library

Ever since Google Music went down, I haven’t really listened to my music. I uploaded all my music into it and, actually, thank god I did because I lost a harddrive sometime later and lost my local copies entirely. I did a Takeout and got it all downloaded years ago when they shuttered the service, but the archive has just been floating around untouched. The file names and directory structures were all completely hosed. Trying to find my music was kind of a pain in the ass. Apps like Plex and other big music apps couldn’t properly catalog it.

So on a whim I was like “let’s install Foobar2000” and WHOA it fucking cataloged it. The tag search worked perfectly and it understood the albums and artists perfectly. I’ve been cleaning up some stuff here or there, but that’s my fault going back decades, not Google Music’s. I was blown away by how easy Foobar made it to organize my music. I can perform mass operations for tagging or filesystem copy/move operations. I’m reorganizing my music so quickly and easily, and that’s paying off because Plex is now picking things up as I move them into folders. I have no idea why Plex insists on folder organization even when you tell it to use the embedded file tags, but whatever.

So, I’ve been listening to my old music again! Most of it is video game soundtracks and old remixes of video game tracks from OCRemix

OverClocked Remix

There’s more to update on, but I’m exhausted so I’ll make a new post later