The Sun and The Air

As you might have noticed from the lack of posts this week, I'm skipping Blaugust this year. I enjoyed the process of refining posting to a daily task last time, but frankly it's been an absolute shitter of a July and I'm starting August on only the most technical of upswings. I just don't think I have the capacity for the mental load of a productivity goal as well. I know Blaugust isn't "31 posts or bust" but it exerts a pressure on the participant that I can just do without right now. All the…

In speedrunning, there's a common routine where the runner is focused less on improving skill and consistency and more on beating the Law of Large Numbers. At times it can feel like the payoff of "more practice" is just less than the benefit of "just do some runs." When does that happen, and when it does what does it look like? If a perfect run of a hypothetical game is 58 minutes, and I have a 50% chance of losing 5s every minute, how long will it take to get a sub-1-hour time? I think the…

In August last year, couple of months before it launched in the midst of its "2 of the 6 clans will be Day 1 DLC" PR disaster I called Bloodlines 2 [the most unbuyable game I've ever seen](https://criminallyvulgar.dev/bloodlines-2-is-the-most-unbuyable-game-ive-ever-seen/. While I stand by that take I've had time to relax, forget the furore, and observe a 50% discount. My partner is in the middle of an online TTRPG VtM campaign so my interest is at a local maximum and I've just finished an…

I saw a comment on a post somewhere a few days ago, I'm afraid I have no specific recollection of exactly where, but it was a post (video?) around the topic of Americans having rooftop solar, the strange reticence around it, and the benefit it could have both on the personal and the global level. A commenter said something to the effect of "I have solar and I've been blasting air con all summer and my electricity bill has been like $8 a month". On its own this is probably just standard…

Had a bit of a home networking collapse a couple of months ago when I finally accepted the inadequacy of the now-12-year-old computer I was using as the "service-box" for my home network setup (*arr stuff, jellyfin, anything that required more grunt than a dedicated NAS and wasn't directly storage intensive) and gave it the proverbial Do Not Resuscitate badge - I backed up everything I could think of and waited for it to fall over again. About a week later it fell over, I gave a little salute,…

So I posted a few weeks ago that I was frustrated with the format of footnotes available to me, specifically how being taken to the bottom of a (potentially) very long page felt like a huge break in focus, and that I'd like to have something that sits more inline with the page. Something that still serves as an interruption, but more of an Aside than a Reference. I received a few really nice recommendations for this, including putting them off to the side (which works really nicely with how…

For a long time now, but especially since I started using this blog, I've been very concerned with the correct way to include tangents and asides in my text. I'm a chronic rambler, and being able to consign the particularly unrelated parts of what I'm writing to a purely optional area of the page is very important to continue pretending like I can maintain some kind of flow. It's your fault that you clicked on it and broke your train of thought, not mine! Originally it never occurred to me that…

Bit of a weird one from me. Romantic C-Dramas aren't my usual media, but...