Week Notes W24

• 🎂 This week was my birthday! The exact date is easy to find but I’ll leave it ambigious here. The point is that I had a great time, got a cake at work and at home, got a couple of great gifts, including: the Casio CA-53W, an couple of awesome t-shirts (one of them is of Metroid, and it rocks!), and a couple of videogames: Fantasian: Neo Dimension and Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age
• 📺 So, as I said last week, my sister is visiting. One of the problems with that is that I haven’t been going to the gym. I just prefer to get home early and binge-watching series together. This is only temporary after vacation time is over! I will definitely return, at some point.
• ✍️ This week was a bit low when it comes to writing. I didn’t dedicate a lot of time to it, and the only blogpost I shared (my third post on videogame franchises) was already 90% complete since last week. It was quite a busy week.
• 🚧 Part of the blame goes to work! We begun testing a new feature last week, and it went better than planned, although it still has lots of things missing or not working properly. It will require a lot of changes before we can actually implement it in production.

Gaming

• Dragon Quest XI - I’ve played this for another 5 hours, and yep, this is definitely my weekend game now, I want to be playing it even more, because it is just so good! I am playing in small chunks and not all day simply to avoid any possibility of burnout, and it’s great. Currently, I visited a city that was frozen by some witch, and I visited a library looking for a book detailing how she was defeated in the past. Now I am on my way back to the city, to talk to the queen about my discoveries and find out what to do next.
• Final Fantasy VI - I have made a lot of progress here as well. I talked to the Empire, which seemed willing to put an end to the war, however, it was all a ploy that ended up with unleashing a terrible power. I am on my way to face them one more time, hoping to stop them before it is too late. I already played this part of the game so I know what’s coming, and I am hyped to go through it once again!
• Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - I got a Steam Code for Soul Reaver 1 & 2 remastered, and played it for about an hour. This game is absolute nostalgia for me, one of those I saw older kids playing. I thought it was a genuinely incredible game, and I am glad I finally get to play it and experience it myself. The dub work is already stunning, and the remastered graphics look just like how the game looked in my head.

Reading

• The Big Time - Read up to chapter 14. I will for sure complete it this week. A couple of really interesting dialogue happened, as well as some nice science fiction exposition that explained some reasoning behind how this universe works. I am looking forward to how it’ll end.
• Hunter x Hunter - Read up to chapter 394. I think I will stop here for a while, at least until the Manga is no longer in hiatus. I am enjoying the story quite a bit and I am eager to know more, but more progress is yet to come and I’d rather know I have more to read, than that to be forced to wait. I don’t know, my brain is weird.

Watching

• The Fugitive - Tommy Lee Jones chasing Harrison Ford is not something I expected to watch, I didn’t know it existed, but I am totally here for it. This movie was awesome, like, such a good action flick from the 90s. It’s one of those that made me go “they don’t make them like they used to” somehow. I wasn’t even alive when this came out, it’s all just fake nostalgia talking, but yeah, it’s just a cool dad movie, perfect for Father’s Day, and yes, my dad chose it.
• Arrival - I had heard and meant to watch this movie for ages. Then I saw the director, and I knew I had to give it a go already. It did not dissapoint. I expected a hard science, realistic take on a first contact story, and that is exactly what I got. I did not expect the cosmic and the philosophical dilemmas to be what they were too. I don’t even want to say much more, just give it a watch if you haven’t. It’s definitely worth it.

Week Links

Here are some things that interested me around the web!

Blog Posts

• It will only take three hours - Procrastination is a problem, especially when you’re like “I’ll obviously do this in time as soon as I start” so you leave it until the end, welp.
• Telegram, el espía invisible en nuestra falsa catedral digital - This is a great article talking about Telegram’s issues and it’s fake sense of security, privacy and freedom. In Spanish!
• Someone at Apple Has a Real Opinion About Design Again, Thank God - I don’t use iPhone, I despise Apple, but the new redesign is pretty cool, and I love Brendon’s blogposts. Anyway, it was Windows Vista all along!
• The Sensation of Change - Marisabel writes about dreams and how her brain has been rewiring during her process learning Japanese. It kind of reminds me of Arrival which I just watched…
• My Note-Taking Problem - Matt has a note-taking problem, I don’t have a problem because I just don’t take notes, so yeah.
• Kidney Transplant, Take Two - Nathan was one of the first bloggers I followed on the fedi. After some time out, it’s nice to see him again, he had a kidney transplant (again), and here’s the story!

Videos

This week was definitely very oriented towards gaming essays and retrospectives! I actually didn’t watch that much YouTube overall, which I found interesting. And most of these were videos I listened to, rather than watched.

• What Makes a Game Retro? - TechDweeb and the rest of the retro handheld gaming channels team up to answer this question!
• Was it Good? Chrono Trigger - Josh Strife has some great gaming essays and I’ve been enjoying his “Was It Good” series. I also really liked his video on Soul Reaver
• Still Worth PLaying? Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain - The previous game to Soul Reaver. The development of this series is actually so interesting, and really messy, I wish I could see what all those games could be if they weren’t surrounded by issues, from dev teams to publishing and all of that.

This is day 82 of #100DaysToOffload