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”:

• It is absolutely glorious that I can lay in my bed at night and not hear the activities of other humans for entire stretches of time. Apartment living is a minor but persistent kind of personal hell, and I’m glad to be done with it right now. (There’s always the chance I’ll be forced back to it some day, but I’m going to luxuriate in what I have now.) On the upside, I get more exercise on account of having to go up & down a flight of stairs every time I want to go to the kitchen and back.
• I picked up a handful, arguably a double handful, of music on Bandcamp yesterday. First were The Book and The Book 2 by YOASOBI (I already had The Book 3). The songs therein range from “not bad” to “really good.” I feel like they’re improving their craft as they work through their career, and you love to see (or, well, hear) it. Later in the evening I discovered that Venus Hum released an album, Kindness Rages On, back in 2021 so I had to nab that (plus a few lone singles) to check out. More on that later, probably, since I haven’t really had the chance to dig into that purchase yet.
• The co-op Satisfactory game has turned into a racetrack building project. Are vehicles extremely buggy in Update 8? Yes. Is that stopping us? Obviously not.
• Speaking of games, I’m trying a Maddening run of Fire Emblem Three Houses. I know, I swore I never would, but I’m reliably informed that it’s basically on par with the normal difficulty of Fire Emblem Engage’s combat and I got through that just fine. You just need to pay more attention to the weapon triangle (which in lower difficulties of 3H is simply not a factor) and to make sure you have the weapon-counter abilities loaded in, that sort of thing. We’ll see how this goes. It’s nice to spend time with the Fodlan kids again, if nothing else.
• I’m still pondering what kind of art project I want to work on next. Odds are high that it’ll involve the ducks, I just haven’t decided what direction to take things yet. There’s no hurry, it’s just something that percolates in the back of my mind from time to time.
• I subscribed (sigh, I love that you can’t just buy software anymore) to Music Collector (from “Collectorz dot com”) and every so often I get another batch of CDs loaded into my database. One upside? I found that I had a handful of Depeche Mode singles out of order on my shelf. Who knew? Clearly not me. Why this software and not Discogs? Well, there was some kerfuffle going on with those folks a while ago and I decided to back away from them. Why not Libib, which I’m already using for books & video materials? Because Libib’s CD support is… lackluster. (In other words: It hardly recognizes half the stuff I own.) At any rate, Music Collector does a fairly decent job at recognizing and letting me catalog the contents of my CD shelves. I’ll probably do a proper write-up at some point. Probably.

I’m building a list of future post topics (in my Obsidian vault!) so hopefully there won’t be too many dry spells here going forward. It’s worth a shot, at any rate…