Blog
2026-07-28: Waow I haven't hardly touched my blog this month. As I mentioned before, it was a rough one. Thankfully, I am getting along better.
(this has permanently altered how I say "wow" for better or worse)
It's remarkable what some physical activity can do. My brain feels less messy than it has in months. And I physically feel a lot better in general. I also found out a couple I'm friends with are members at the same Y, so I am going to try and join up with them from time to time. It's way easier to stay on the wagon when you're doing it together with friends.
Also, I have gone kinda ham with retro handheld stuff. The one I bought a while back passed its stress test, so I gifted it to one of my interns who's moving on to greener pastures after this week. I also ordered one and set it up as a gift for an old friend, who was absolutely stoked. It's one of those things that he'd never know to seek out for himself, but he's curious to explore a lot of older games that he's only heard about from uncles and stuff.
Intern came back to work yesterday and said he blitzed through Sonic Advance on Monday, and got humbled by a Mega Man game soon after. As one does.
I also got Stardew Valley working on my original clamshell one! This is like, the third time I've tried in the last year. Turns out, it needed the Windows 32-bit compatibility version of the game, not the Linux one. And, those game files needed to be in a specific folder that the guide i previously followed was unclear about. After following along with a video on YouTube, it works!
Playing this particular game on a slightly bigger Gameboy Advance SP is a delight.
So yeah. My life has basically been working out, swimming, and futzing around with retro emulation handhelds this last week or so!
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2026-07-22: A rough week is finally looking up. I ended up feeling miserable for most of the week with really bad muscle tightness around my shoulders/neck/back. Sedentary atrophy + stress and anxiety + and poor posture is a terrible combo. I was able to get through it and feel a lot better now.
I decided to get a membership at my local YMCA. Partially for access to an indoor pool, and also for a space to work out. It's way, way easier to get knotted up muscles when inactive so I'm going to try and do a bit of cardio and strength training to get back to a decent baseline.
Here's hoping it helps!
(Edit: I caught myself scrunching my shoulders in like crazy while browsing a page on my phone. That probably isn't helping.)
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2026-07-18: What's that? ANOTHER movie night with a couple other friends??? Yay!
Just got the house picked up ahead of their arrival. Here's hoping for a fun evening!
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2026-07-13: Just finished up a movie night with a couple friends! We watched the 2025 Superman movie. Good stuff. Also made dinner together and had some good quality time.
The start of the movie got interrupted by some door-to-door salesperson. Brushed them off pretty quickly. Kinda rude with it but no sense in wasting their time or mine.
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2026-07-12: Yee haw, just beat Grandia 2! It was quite good. Just grabbed some early-game screenshots from both Grandia 1 and Grandia 2. I may write up some preamble for the review today, but I'll wait til later in the week or sometime next weekend to really review them in earnest.
Oh, on another fun note, I managed to successfully pitch an anime I reviewed about a year ago, Girls' Last Tour, to one of my interns! He is a big fan of Cormac MacArthy's work, and the idea of "The Road but with Anime Girls" really gobsmacked him. He's more of a manga fan than an anime fan, so he plans on starting there. He's in for a rough time, since the manga ends on a way, way sadder note than the anime adaptation. He's ready to be sad and, by extension, mad at me for suggesting it.
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2026-07-11: Freshly sogged! I just got back from swimming at my local water park. It's been a long time since I got some time in a pool It feels like a good afternoon for a nap.
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2026-07-10: The friend who started using Linux didn't take long to run into his first couple challenges! The first one came up last night when he tried to run a massive update on Nobara as it moved from basing itself on Fedora 43 to Fedora 44. Turns out, the GUI updater on Nobara has some issues and people recommend not using it for stuff like this. So he'd be better served updating through the terminal. Annoying, but he's willing to live with it. (I need to remove Nobara from my new user's recommended distro list, if the system management stuff is that wonky!)
While issue #1 was due to something not working as it should, issue #2 was a bit different. Basically, he tried to get a secondary hard drive to automatically mount today, but set the mount point incorrectly. As a result, he couldn't access his photos or documents or downloads or anything in his home folder.
Thankfully this wasn't anything catastrophic. It didn't overwrite all his stuff or anything. He had to find a workaround to stop it from automatically mounting, then set it up to mount properly elsewhere. Everything went back to normal!
A tech industry friend and I were able to help him think through the situation and he felt pretty satisfied after finding his way out of the wilderness. Good stuff.
Have a great weekend everyone!
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2026-07-09: Waow, I went almost two weeks without touching this site, to the extent that I didn't move June to the Blarchive until a third of the way though July. Sheesh.
It's been a long couple weeks. Heat's been hot, work's sucked, and I've not had the energy for much. Yesterday's the third day in like, two weeks where I had a really long, arduous day and went to bed before 8:00 PM. I'm now up before dawn, so here I am, updating my blog! Here's hoping for better days.
One thing I finally rallied and got enough energy for was my Grandia 2 playthrough. I thought I had the game beat a couple nights ago before realizing there's a boss rush leading up to the final boss. It got too late so I had to just abandon ship and hold out for a weekend afternoon or something to finish up. I'll probably review Grandia 1 and 2 together as a combined experience, since it's apparently the JRPG series for me!