february (lol) 2025 blogpost

it's been a crazy almost two months since my last blogpost! i've been up to an immense amount of stuff - ran a weird comedy show with a friend, did a load of introspection, saw a bunch of music and cabaret. the art situation has ground to an absolute halt but! ive still been thinking things! i've also been listening to music! but my brain is mush so im not gonna give any thoughts on these albums. just trust me! theyre good!

pezzi della sera - marco castello

moondial - pat metheny

saya - saya gray

(side thought - it's kind of a fucking pain in the ass to find players that don't require authentication if an album isn't on bandcamp or soundcloud. youtube works for now but youtube embeds are really resource intensive and this blogpost is already inherently a bit of a youtube trashpile)

moving

i moved houses a bit over a month ago! i think i always forget how shit the experience of having all my shit disorganised and in boxes makes me feel, but ive done it three times in the last 12 months. layer that with realising that, despite being pretty vigilant about clutter and unnecessary possessions, i should get rid of 30% of my books and 50% of my clothes, and the headache of changing your address with your bank and work and drivers license.

this lack of stability is pretty new to me, although im starting to get a lot better at at feeling less attached to a singular spot, which is probably good. home is where the heart is, like they said in episode 4, season 1 of madeline (the animation about the french boarding school). i'm also living further from the cbd which makes seeing shows and gettting to work a bigger pain in the ass. that said, living with new people for the first time in like five years has definitely been great for my development as a human being. i stayed on a couple of couches after the breakup and am now living in my second semi-permanent share of the last 12 months, and its been a huge learning experience for how different people live. that maybe sounds a bit alien-living-amongst-the-humans but it's cool! most importantly, i think it makes my expectations for living with others way more realistic. the novelty of the whole thing is also a lot of fun.

youtube shakeup

i work from home, so i end up watching a lot of youtube while just noodling around. i'm mostly pretty clean when it comes to social media slop - my instagram is only following people i know in real life and i don't have tiktok or twitter - but youtube has a terrible habit of providing the same thing if you let it (i love you northernlion, but most of your stream captures are kind of brainless). ive combatted this by reinstating a time limit on my mobile youtube watching, but also by trying to get into videos that feel a bit more productive; interior design and fashion videos, cutesy little slice of life vlogs and stream of thought conversation-type videos. these are some of my favourites from the last couple months!

these have also got me kind of thinking about myself a bit more. i have a bit of an eating disorder - i (somewhat unintentionally) taught myself to ignore my need to eat five or six years ago after finding out that hunger is incited based on hormones that wear off after a while. i was in the middle of uni at the time, unbelievably busy, and had got in my head that i needed to drop the four or five kilos i had picked up when moving from my early twenties to my late twenties (i absolutely did not). in any case, this habit has stuck around, and has been exacerbated by the general rise in the price of food. i am buying less food at the moment just because it's so expensive, and i'm quite large so i generally need more than i'm giving myself. anyway, watching self-helpy videos and people talking about their own struggles with eating has maybe been enough of a wakeup call that i need to figure out how to eat more so that i dont feel so fucking hungry all the time. i'm writing this on the bus and i'm starving! god! i should start bringing cashews in my bag

doodads

gameboy camera

i got this in japan! its in very good condition, but is only in japanese, which makes the menus absolutely fucking unintelligible. it's a super fun thing to mess about with and has got me a couple of really sweet photos and like fifteen times as many terrible ones. it behaves best with single subjects that are well lit but not super reflective (ignore my examples below that are both super reflective). there's loads of interesting modifications you can do to them liek the 2bittoy shell which i am kind of keen on, but only if i could minimise the cost

digicam

i knew i wanted to get a digicam in japan and this was one of the first ones i found for less than a hundred bucks. it takes pretty crappy photos, which is sort of the point, but it most importantly fills a bit of a gap / annoyance i've had with my pixel 6 pro - despite all of google's riches, the low light performance on these phones is still a bit crap, and they lean on some pretty nasty post-processing to try and bring in contrast to the detriment of detail and an even dynamic range. the digicam gets around this by being intentionally crap (ive cranked the iso and pushed the white balance to a warmer shade) and having a flash that will fix shots in extreme dark while adding a bit more character. it's nice!

dsi

jokes on you! i actually got this years ago! it turns out you can buy a nintendo dsi in australia for like a hundred bucks with very little trouble - this one was basically new and has never given me any trouble. internet people talk a lot about how easy it is to mod a 3ds but the dsi is just as easy and, in my opinion, has a better game library. i started playing ghost trick while i was overseas and it was incredible, and the dinky little camera also snagged this photo for me

walkman

i lost my m300 on a train in japan! fucking whoops!! two hundred bucks down the drain right there. luckily, id picked this little character up at a hard off a couple of days prior for a measly 12000 yen, and i had a spare sd card preloaded with music because, come on. look at me (i don't actually remember why, but i still dont think it's that surprising). these walkmans are awesome, and primarily improve on the m300 by having better buttons (the m300 bizarrely uses rocker switches for play and back, and doesnt come with a forward button) but its battery life is noticeably worse, its just small enough that its a bit of a pain to use with my bigass hands and it only goes up to android 10, which leaves an annoying bug that means you can't use syncthing to keep your library in sync over wifi. all this said, it was cheap, and its cute

love letter to musicbee

i've talked about shifting to downloaded audio for a while now but i realised the other day that i hadn't used spotify in a week or so. my ex recently took themselves off our joint spotify account and i was going to have to change it anyway, so i decided this was the moment to can my subscription. the process was pretty painless due to my prior planning and all the hardware i've bought - i wouldnt recommend it to anyone on a complete whim. all this faff aside, i really want to talk about the massive amount of appreciation it's given me for one piece of software:

musicbee is simultaneously a barebones no-nonsense music player and an extremely powerful music organisation tool. the interface is excellent for me: i'm a chronic album listener so i can get a full feed of all my album art (with easy to recognise album art) and i can filter by artist using the list on the left. i can then drag full albums into the queue on the right and then not think about music for multiple hours. the whole interface is really clean and straightforward and isn't trying to be something slick and classy - it's just a simple and easy to understand tool! and the whole thing is only 9.2MB?

talking about tools, musicbee gives you a bunch of little functions to make organising locally downloaded music hilariously straightforward. i have albums sorted by date added, so new albums flow to the top. i can select each album and auto-tag it based on musicbrainz's database, downsample lossless files to mp3s, and use the bulk rename tool to move albums from the input directory in my music folder to one sorted by its artist and album. it's unbelievably painless. my one thought on this is that i would recommend using a different source for your genre - musicbrainz tends to be inconsistnet or have literal nonsense in its genre fields. i personally use rateyourmusic because they have a limited set of genres and the genres are voted on by users. this allows you to sort game and movie score by their actual style instead of just being "soundtrack" and helps avoid hyper-separation of different sub-genres

i will say that the convenience of spotify as a music archive is hard to pass up on. i do still have a free account for finding out the most popular albums from a particular artist and for looking up the names of songs i forgotten, but thats currently about it. if i need to check out a song on short notice youtube and bandcamp do the trick

little things

nobara linux

i've had nobara linux running in a micro pc for a couple of months about it but haven't gotten to writing on it. nobara is a linux distribution based on fedora that tricks the computer its installed on into thinking it's a steamdeck (my favourite part of this is the first time startup where your tv will tell you that its power button is on the top and that you can return to the steam menu using the button on the left - something my tv absolutely cannot do). this is awesome for using steam streaming on your tv, and means that you can use something extremely low power, as long as it has a nice enough hdmi output. i use nobara instead of bazzite for a couple of reasons - it has better out of the box compatibility with my hardware and required functionally no configuration, and i already use fedora (which nobara is based on) so that isn't an extra hurdle to jump through

on a related note, if you're going to play games like this i would recommend you have a hardline connection between your desktop pc and your router. optimally you would also have a hardline connection between your router and the micro pc but in my experience it's not as necessary. my current configuration just has the host pc wired via ethernet and it makes latency almost unnoticeable. networking technology has come a really long way

this is how you lose the time war

i was at a dymocks with a friend a couple of months back and grabbed time war because it was on special. i had no idea what it was about, but i knew it had made waves when it came out and the name was intriguing. anyway, hot damn! first and foremost, it's hilarious that i accidentally grabbed a new lesbian sci-fi after finishing gideon the ninth. secondly, this book is absolutely lovely. the prose is super poetic and despite it being set amongst a time-and-space-spanning interdimensional cyber war, a huge chunk of it is secretive letters between two warriors on either side, and you get to understand the growth of their relationship through these alone. the ending is amazingly satisfying and the whole thing was an amazing way to start the year

superliminal

this was another cute surprise! i remember reading about this when it first came out and it being on my list of modern puzzle games to play after the talos principle, but that game took it out of me and i needed a break. thankfully it's super short, and while it initially seems like it's aping on the chell and glados dynamic yet again, it develops into an ending that is WAY better than almost any of the puzzle games ive played. the whole thing actually has some weight and was blissfully unique.

relationships

this post has been slightly delayed because i'm dating someone! this follows on from the february musings where i said i met someone who was then trouble with another person. we saw each other a couple more times and decided that we gelled and we wanted to see where it would go, regardless of how this other friend felt they'd been wronged. aforementioned friend hasn't really taken attempts to reach out gracefully (and was honestly quite hurtful to both of us) so we kind of hit the point of, well, if you're not gonna be happy with us regardless of whether we're apart or together, we might as well be together.

this all sounds kind of dire and maybe not an amazing start to a relationship, but basically everyone appears to be on our side in the whole thing, and we've just been focusing on each other which has been great. we have lots in common and tick a load of each other's boxes. they also have adhd, which i was initially a bit worried about given the history of being a bit of a caretaker with my ex, but the communication has been great and we've been able to talk frankly about our anxieties and histories. it's awesome! and not really something i've experienced before