I’m removing the now page I used to have up. I never felt like I updated with any regularity or with anything meaningful. I know the linked explainer site says that social media does not serve the same purpose, but actually I think that my socials do serve that purpose (you just have to wade through some real sad girl shit sometimes). So, goodbye now page, you were just one more thing I felt obligated to update with no personal benefit.

I’m also toying with the idea of moving the pinned posts on the front page to another page, just to simplify that page more and make new updates more visible.

I am, finally, after so many attempts, further than I’ve ever been in Final Fantasy 4. I will finish this game this time. It’s always been my favorite FF game. I adore the themes of working hard to earn your redemption after doing horrible things. It’s also by far my favorite FF soundtrack too. I had attempted this game multiple times in the past: emulated the SNES rom, as part of the Final Fantasy Chronicles collection on PS1 (which also contains a really bad port of Chrono Trigger - the new anime cutscenes do not make up for the horrendous load times), multiple times on the DS, and multiple times on Android (which is just the DS game ported to a single screen device). I’m doing it on the DS again, on my 3DS specifically, and I’m having a blast. I’m gonna finish this game finally 💪

I want to talk about my Games List.xlsx spreadsheet that I’ve been using for like 14 years now. It’s a big spreadsheet that helps me keep track of my video games and offers lots of different statistics. I’m just struggling with how to approach making a blog post about it. If I sit someone down to look at it then I can easily walk them through it, but making a static write up does not feel feasible for some reason.

I also keep thinking about making it into a proper database, but good god I do NOT want to code and maintain a database and a frontend.

Also, speaking of, mini rant time: I DO want to move off of Microsoft Office. I tried LibreOffice and immediately found that it did not like this spreadsheet. Lots of formatting got lost (which is solvable), but most egregiously the table slicers were completely non-functional. I use the slicers to visually pare down the games list based on certain data (e.g. console, play status, genre). These slicers are monumentally important when I’m trying to rediscover what’s in my library or manage and update what I’m currently playing and have finished. I looked around online and so many people have asked for slicer support in LibreOffice Calc (the Excel analog). And you know what responses they always got?

Take a guess. It was incredibly typical of open source software communities.

They were told they were doing it wrong. They were told to make a database using LibreOffice Base (the Access analog) and then to make queries to the db. NO! I talked to my wife, a database engineer, and she said that my use case is actually exactly what spreadsheets are for! Making a database for this would be overkill. And when the people requesting the slicer feature said the same thing, they were yelled at! They were told either to be thankful for the “help” they received, or they were just further told they were “doing it wrong.” Like, no?? The user is not actually doing it wrong here! You, the OSS community member, are being close-minded and shitty.

I fucking. hate. OSS communities. They always do this. They refuse to think about how a user uses software. They refuse to think about the user’s intentions and goals. They refuse to think outside of their rigidly defined “correct” methods. Is the user sometimes wrong? Absolutely! I worked in user-facing IT, I know this. But to jump to the conclusion that the user is always wrong is toxic and, frankly, evil. You do actually have to meet the users where they are at and try to understand what they are trying to do. Perhaps you might learn something from the user.

You do not gain users by calling them idiots. But sometimes I wonder if they actually want users, or if they forever want to be insular underdogs.

To add to the frustration, the tables that some of the requesters wanted to slice were so basic compared to mine! My table currently has 667 unique rows with four different columns that I want to slice on. I’ve seen more complex tables when working with clients, and even then a database did not make sense. These askers had ever smaller and simpler tables than mine. And they were told to make a DATABASE and write QUERIES. Most people using spreadsheets aren’t gonna understand databases or how to code queries. They’re business executives, or secretaries, or parents managing their budget, or students working on a project, or. I just. I’m so mad on behalf of the askers, especially after they got yelled at. And I’m so mad that again I am actually forced back into Microsoft’s ecosystem because OSS does not actually want to make their software good.

Yes I know there’s a lot of other OSS office suites out there, but fucking hell Excel Just Works™️ and I respect my time far too much to keep digging just to be further disappointed. I also respect my time too much to rework this entire spreadsheet into separate database and frontend components when the spreadsheet has been working perfectly for a decade and a half.

But apparently I just love using my time to rant :)

Also mini mini rant: I really like having linux on my older Surface Pro 7, but there’s two major issues:

• the battery drains so fast while the device is off (seriously what the fuck is happening there, it lasts much longer when the device is in sleep mode…)
• the touch screen and pen support are passable, but impossible to use for any kind of digital art

So I’m resigning myself to reinstalling Windows 10 (11 ran kinda dog shit on it) so that I can start playing around in Aseprite or Krita again. My Surface Laptop 7 is a really nice device, but it has no pen support because it isn’t a tablet, so drawing just doesn’t really work on it. Also rant-inside-rant: I wish I had upgraded the disk space on the Pro. It’s only 128GB, so I can’t really dual-boot :/ Also the RAM is only 8GB, which if I had bumped that even to 16GB I might still be using that device today.