Author: Karel Kerezman

  • 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.

  • Peter Gabriel – i/o

    When you’re a world-famous perfectionist weirdo, you can probably get away with a two-decade break between full releases of new material, right? Well, Peter Gabriel’s certainly finding out.

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  • Hummingbirds On Video

    Over the course of this year we noticed that some of Vyx’s potted flowers on the deck were attracting hummingbirds. I hadn’t even considered that any of those lived around here, but sure enough, they became our most frequent guests. When the flowering plants ran their course going into autumn, we replaced them with a flat hummingbird feeder and waited to see if they’d appreciate our offering.

    It took them a week or so to realize what was up, but once they did, hoo boy! I’d start hearing their clicks and clacks and seeing them darting between the rails to sneak a sip or two all through the day. After a while they got to the point of just hanging out for up to half a minute, chilling out and sipping that tasty, tasty sugar-water.

    This weekend I realized, oh hey, I have a GoPro HERO9 Black. And it can record 240 frames per second in high definition. A project was born!

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  • The Marvels

    I rolled out of bed after a rough night of bad dreams, threw myself together as usual, took my meds, and as I realized I’d put on one of the two Captain Marvel t-shirts in my closet then thought about things for a moment, a plan emerged for my day: I’d go see The Marvels.

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  • Sew, what?

    I have stubby legs, relatively speaking. Not stubbly, just kinda short proportionally. One effect of this is that it’s hard to get legwear in my size. Shopping for jeans/slacks is annoying, and pajama bottoms are even worse because they don’t really do those by measurements, they’re just… “here, this is a roughly standard size, hope you like it because that’s what you’re getting.” But I work from home, so I’m in pajamas a lot. Thus owning a selection of options.

    One pair of pajama bottoms which started out way too long was hemmed by a kind and caring person with a sewing machine, and boy is that nice, having a nice comfy pair of jammies that fits perfectly.

    Another pair, we tried using some kind of iron-on tape product. It… kinda sorta worked, until it stopped working. And thus that pair of pajamas remained in an unusable state for the better part of a year.

    And that bothered me.

    I’d set myself a few modest goals for this late-autumn vacation, among which was: Learn just enough about sewing to be able to fix this situation by hand, myself.

    And thanks to the Internet, I actually did so! I mean, the stitching is ragged as hell (no, I refuse to share pictures) but it held up through the washer & dryer cycle and seems to be sturdy enough. The proof will be when I wear them next, which will probably be early next week. (Our weather’s a bit too warm for the heavier fabric options right now. A balmy near-winter we’re having. But hey climate change is a myth right?)

    I did a thing! All on my own, if you don’t count the various folks whose instructional materials I made use of! I’m kinda proud of it.

  • Winter Staycation 2023

    I was going to take a few days off and my boss asked, “Why don’t you make it a week?” So now I shall attempt to enjoy my time away from the office… virtually speaking, since I actually live in my actual physical office (my bedroom).

    And try not to stress about all the work waiting for me when I get back, since my boss decided to give me a by-year’s-end project knowing full well I will be losing 1/4 of the month to get it done in by being on the vacation my boss insisted on to begin with.

    Dunno what I’m going to do or where (more like “if”) I’m going to go, but I’ll do my best to rest and revitalize. Hey, it could work. Maybe.