As we’re still in recovery from the move (which isn’t truly over since there’s still boxes and piles of stuff in various parts of the house), here’s a few bullet points of “how I’m doing at this point of my life”:
(more…)Category: Linkage
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Satisfactory – Phactory Phase 3
I sent the Phase 3 materials shipment up the Space Elevator a few play sessions ago. So, how has my overall approach to this new save (the “New Clear Plan”) gone so far?
In short: A qualified success.
There’s a neat light show when you send the Space Elevator up, but capturing the best single instant in a screenshot is too tricky for my skills. In long: Well, let’s dig into that…
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Satisfactory – Entirely Too Silly
What do we, as a family, get up to when we’re technically “done” with the game but want to wait out the production of Phase 4 products into the Space Elevator to fully round out the game save?
Well… this:
If you want to skip ahead to the really silly parts, go to ~2:15 (h:mm) to see Spud build The Ladder of Babel, and about ten minutes later he discovered the fun to be had with driving vehicles over jump pads and at that point pandemonium ensued… featuring airborne factory carts.
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Changing How I Note The Time
When I started with my current employer, lo the many years ago, I started taking notes in text files. One text file per day, every single day. I have (nearly) all of them, just in case I need to refer back to something I did [mumble] years ago. It happens!
It’s not a bad system, obviously, since it’s served me well. Text files are easy for the computer to index for searching, to name one useful feature.
I manually created a new file every day, and at the end of every month (and every year) I moved the previous month’s/year’s text files into an archive folder. Also, I pressed Ctrl+S a lot to make sure I didn’t lose information as I go. The “ongoing notes” and “to do list” sections I maintained at the bottom of the file needed copying over to each new document every morning.
At home (as it were) I’ve been using Obsidian, the notes tool which saves everything as a discrete Markdown file in its library structure, for all of my personal notes for a few months now. A Markdown file is just a text file with simple formatting markers that reads like plain text in Notepad++ but does fancier things in a product like, well, Obsidian (and others).
So at the start of 2024 I made the change: A new Obsidian vault in my “work” document folder, complete with automatic creation of the new day’s time file every day, already placed into a year-and-month folder structure. The carry-over notes and to-do list are separate documents “outside” the day/month/year structure but still in the vault. And since Obsidian saves changes as you go, I spend a lot less time hitting Ctrl+S. (Or, I will, once I break the habit…)
If you surround some text with a pair of equals signs on each side, you get a “highlight” effect. Handy, since I like to flag which time blocks I’ve entered in the ticketing system. Was this really worth it? Who knows? Who cares! It feels like an improvement, and “a change is as good as a rest.”
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2023: A heckin’ good year for music
It started with a spark and it ended with a bang, to (slightly mis-)quote a song from one of the new releases I picked up in 2023. I’m just going to scroll down through the artists list (sorted alphabetically) in MusicBee and point out the ups & downs, plus direct you to some highlight songs you may want to check out via the online service of your choice.
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A Steam-y 2023
End-of-year retrospectives are as common this time of year as wadded up balls of wrapping paper thrown aside in frustration while trying to wrap presents. I’ll be putting together my thoughts on some of the music released during this calendar year later on, but I was reminded this afternoon that Steam’s fancy “year in review” results are now available, so let’s take a look-see.
Sadly, most of those 4 new games didn’t connect with me very well. Better luck next year, game studios! My attention is valuable, after all! Checking out the full document may be entertaining for you, but if you’d rather just get the high points in summary: I played a lot of Satisfactory, I spent a couple months getting back into Skyrim pretty heavily, and I used my PC to play Gems of War & Ascension a few times (usually I play those on the tablet).
The amount of Satisfactory I played will come as no surprise to regular followers of this site. (Hello to both of you!)
No kidding? Over 170 sessions, nearly 70% of my entire time spent out of all games from my Steam library. Yeah, that tracks.
But that’s not the whole story, is it? I play games which aren’t on Steam, after all. Like Honkai Star Rail (my main mobile game), Fire Emblem: Three Houses (several years on and I’m finally winding down on that one), Fire Emblem Engage (for a few months there, anyway), the beta for Palia (the 3D Stardew we keep hoping starts to gel), the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV (just getting back into that very very recently), and a few other odds & ends besides.
That seems like a lot of games, but again, remember that Satisfactory (and HSR) are getting the bulk of my attention… as do books, TV shows, music, and so on. I’m a “gamer” but only in the mildest, most casual sense of the term.
And that’s fine!
I hope you’ve all had fun this year, and I hope you have increasing amounts and quality of fun in the year ahead.