Games of January 2023

For a bunch of reasons, January just hasn't been a time when I've really wanted to sit down and play much. I've mostly been poking at Tactics Ogre and picking up Xenoblade Chronicles more when I've wanted to play something with more story and activity.

My top five games (by play time) for January were:

1. Tactics Ogre: Reborn - I'm a sucker for Ogre Battle stuff, what can I say. The game is pretty satisfying, although I do wish it has an easy mode just to make moving through some of the game a little easier.
   
   


2. Xenoblade Chronicles 3 - I'm enjoying the replay and trying to get through doing as little side content as I can. Doing all -- most of -- the side quests and stuff was really important to the world building, but as with all of the Xenoblade games it really ruins the pace, so now that I'm seen everything I'm hoping to get a better feeling for what the story feels like when you're keeping your pace up.
   
   


3. Mario Kart 8: Deluxe - Vrooom vroom.
   
   


4. Super Mario World (Nintendo Switch Online)I had 10 minutes to spare and wanted to play something quick, responsive and fun. Super Mario World is one of the best feeling games I actually have installed on the switch.
   
   

Here's my total play time chart for January:

And here's a chart of how much I've played over the month:

What to do about the books I'm reading

 I've spent the last several years tracking the books I've read on the blog. I started doing it more or less become Sharon Lee does it and it seems cool. I also may have some latent quantified selfer tendencies.

It's been fun to do, to some extent and it's something I can do to feel creative without really having to think (and knitting projects are also kinda nice). It also makes me revisit what I've read and keep the keeping track I'm doing on Goodreads organized. I'm not sure whether or not it helped me to read more, but it certainly didn't hurt.

On the other hand, there are some problems. Some of them are technical and then a few are more organization (and now one is ethical).

The first problem I have is that blogger limits the number of tags you have on a post. Actually that's not true. Blogger limits the number of characters you have in tags to 200. I have no idea why, but it means that if I have more than about 3 books in a post I have to leave things out and I really like having the authors and books and series show up in the cloud tag at the bottom of the blog. I suppose I could put one book per post, but that's always felt like too many extra posts.

The next is that it's hard to keep a numbered list in a table in HTML. It's not impossible (and I do actually intend to write up how I automated it) but it means that when I look at my blog on the web on a nice big computer screen it looks good, nice list of numbered lines with enough space for things like the title and the author. However if I look at it on my phone, or at the RSS feed it's messed up. The counting relies on javascript which isn't implemented the same everywhere and often it's a mess.

I used to manually number the table to keep that from happening, but manually numbering 120 rows of an HTML table is an invitation to duplication and mess. It also doesn't' help the inevitable problem that no matter how careful I am, the list I have on the blog never matches the list of have on good reads and I'm at a loss to fix it. I think it was pretty good in 2021, but more or less it's always been wrong.

Keeping the list on Goodreads and on my blog is also redundant, and aside the benefits I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure there's a lot of reason to keep two lists. I think putting the books on the blog also provided me with a good excuse for not writing on things. Oh, I should writing about automatically numbering rows in an HTML table, but I'll just update the books first. Blogging about books has certainly swamped the number of posts I've made about anything else for the last while.

Finally I'm tempted to quit Goodreads. My partner and I have been trying to move a lot of our business away from Amazon, and since the business with Comixology, I've been pretty unhappy to let them be the automatic choice in our life. I've discovered Bookwyrm, which has the benefit of being part of the fediverse along with Mastodon, but on the other hand I really like seeing the handful of friends I'm friends with on Goodreads and I'd be sad to leave there right now.

So I'm not all that sure what I want to do. For the time being, I'm not blogging the books I've read this year. If you're interested then you're totally welcome to keep track of what I've been reading over on Goodreads. I think some kind of periodic data project might be the way to go, since there's a lot of fun visualization things that I could be doing and that would also keep me in touch with the books I've read the way blogging them did. 

There are other more general thoughts I've been having about blogging, none of which I'm all that ready to write about. For now, I think this is where I'm at, less book blogging and I'm going to have to find something else to do when I need a slightly brainless project. Any suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated.

Project 23 - A Space Station Mystery Novel

Lately I've been reading a lot of mystery novels, and I've been kind of inspired to make something mystery on my own.

There's something in good mystery books that makes character and space feel familiar and comforting, even while unsavoury things are going on around your detectives. A good detective in a good detective novel is noticing things and connecting things and I think that makes the world feel really real and rich.

So I've plotted out a mystery novel, and I decided to set it on a space station. As I've mentioned for the other science fiction novel I'd like to write, I've been thinking about it for a long, long time about those stories and that world, and I wanted another way to approach them. So enter our hero librarian, her three friends, the diner they hang out in, a cast of hopefully charming and interesting people, a few of whom may be committing crimes.

I've drawn a map of the story and I've written around 3000 words in an outline (with a bit left to go).

Spoilers?

Hopefully it will turn out to be a fun read, with interesting people exploring an interesting place. I like the idea of sci-fi and mystery mashed up and I'd like to see where I can go with it. I'm also just very fond of the idea of space stations, and once upon a time write about a walk on one.

That being said, since I'm all over the place in terms of the projects I'm working on, both the ones I'm documenting here and the other ones. I don't know exactly when or how I'll work on this or what will come next, but if nothing else thinking about it makes me happy.

Project 22 - Setting up my own about page

In light of certain online spaces failing, I've been thinking about better controlling my presence on the web.  I've had an about.me set up for a long while, but it seems like it's time to make sure that I have a point on the web which I own.

So if you were wondering who I am (and where else you can find me), I now keep a list of all that stuff at tj.kendon.ca.

I've owned my own domain at kendon.ca for a long time, so that makes it an easy start for building my own identity page. It's been pretty good for e-mails, but I haven't really done much else with it. I already had hosting set up, so I just had to put a page together there.

My webdev skills have grown fairly rusty -- and weren't that fancy to begin with. So this project gives me a place to play with some things and learn some new stuff. I've already spent a while playing with Hugo, which lead me to realize that CSS has changed a bit from what I knew before. I have a lot to learn, but I'm excited at the thought of getting to improve my page regularly.

For now, I've set up a pretty basic HTML page with an updated version of my CSS from my grad school page. I've organized into the two spheres I think about my life in, work and making stuff and there are links to my web presence.

I think my next two goals for the project are to set up SSL and smooth out the CSS.  I'm not totally thrilled with the style right now, so I may also rethink what it is I want that page to look like.