We didn't do half-bad this weekend, all things considered.  Yeah, we had that sleepless night.  Honestly, the first night I spent away from home I had this feeling that the whole 5-day weekend would just slip away from me and I wouldn't really get anything done.  But no, I managed to pack in an okay variety of work.  The weekend certainly didn't go as planned, in multiple ways, but at the end of it all, it's not really too bad.

Got some letter-writing done.  Not a ton; I'm going to have to see if I can pick up the pace a little bit in the coming weeks.  But some got done nonetheless.  And today I spent some nice time on Rhythm Quest.  I've been working at various performance improvements, but today I also (mostly) knocked out a bigger task, which was launching my weblate community translations site in a move to hopefully deprecate the old crowdin site.  This has been on the todo list for quite awhile, so it's good to have it finally be reaching toward completion.

Did some groceries too.  Unfortunately it seems that Nob Hill Foods is continuing to have some of my fav specialty items disappear....it's already been a while since they've carried lamb flank steak (really a shame as that's something I've not seen elsewhere either), but they seem to no longer stock duck breast either...unfortunate.  Well, I've already started shopping at Berkeley Bowl mostly anyways due to it being close to Teance, so maybe it's not a big deal.

I finally made it out to the Golfland at San Jose!  Was my first time at that course and it really wasn't half bad at all!  It's kind of hard to directly compare whether it's better or worse than the one in Sunnyvale, I mean of course they're quite similar overall, so it's just minor differences.  I think some parts are better, some parts are a little worse.  You definitely have to pay a lot of attention to the carpet surfaces, as half of them are new carpet where the ball travels much more slowly, vs the ones which haven't been replaced where you get a lot more rolling.

The Castro Valley location had a lot of challenges with uneven ground when putting and that wasn't as much of an issue here, though it still popped up minorly in a few places.  There were a couple of unique hole ideas which I appreciated as being different, though a lot of it of course was repeats.

I put up a totally acceptable performance -- 45 on the easier side and 53 on the harder one.  Par is 51 (only 17 holes per course) so overall really not a bad time at all, especially on the easy side.  Well, besides one hole on the hard side that was like, impossible for me.  It was one of the mound holes and I kept trying to see if I could use backspin on my shot to make it easier, but in the end I think I had to just play it straight.  If I'm ever out on the courses alone at night or something I'll have to play around with trying to spin the ball to see if that's actually a viable strat.

Been doing a little organizing in my room -- my drawers, specifically.  It's not super vital, I mean I hardly ever use most of the stuff in there (which maybe is a problem...), but I've been moving toward using dividers and such in an effort to give some order to all the stuff in there, as opposed to just "a pile of junk all cluttered around".  Especially for things like my extra USB cords and such, that's already helped a lot.

I stopped by the keyboard shop in San Jose!  That was a fun visit; I mean there was no reason for me to spend more money, but it was nice to see various things, and I picked up a little single-switch keychain thing.  I wasn't super interested in buying actual keyboard stuff there, but maybe if I had been there like a year or two ago I definitely would.  They had some Monokei Standard TKLs there and I definitely remember being enticed by the idea of getting a pink one of those at one point.  Interestingly enough I didn't really find it to be a great way to test switches, although you'd think it would be?  They had a tester out, but I think it's very hard to realllllyyy test switches unless you have a very controlled environment; putting them in your own board also helps a lot too.  There was one keycap set that looked and felt nice, but not really something I was considering purchasing as the color scheme was a little off and it's not like I need more keycaps anyways!

Honestly the thing that was most intriguing is that they do stabilizer tuning for like $12.  I can definitely see myself using that service.  Maybe if I have a reason to be in that area again I'll ask how they handle that.

It's voting season again so I've been spending some time going through the ballot already because I always do these sorts of things early (I look forward to them like some sort of crazy person just because it's a task I can take care of and feel good about).

I started playing through Mega Man 8, on a whim.  Really, not the best Mega Man game I could have chosen, not at all, but I honestly don't think I've played through 8 since the time we rented (?) it once upon a time.  From the "nicoevaluates" site (which appears to be down; I had to look at it via web archive), I know that MM8 really doesn't do well in the level design/overall design, and I'm already definitely starting to see that show through a lot.  There are some..."ok" gimmicks in the levels, but none of them are particularly =enjoyable=.  The enemies are pretty boring and get reused everywhere, etc. etc.  So I'm not getting my hopes too high.

Still, it does have a pretty sweet animated opening movie.  A rare instance where I think the Japanese song actually doesn't fit as well as the English one.  I don't think that's my own nostalgia talking either, I just genuinely think that the international song fits the video better and it's not particularly close.  The Japanese (vocal) song is upbeat, but feels quite misplaced, almost as if it was designed for an anime opening with very different beats and pacing.

JP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev1RsHQcrcI
NA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30VhRsLapt0

The instrumental song that we get in the NA release gets it =right=.  The filtered intro with drum loops during the slow shots of Mega Man's body parts, erupting into the main guitar chorus RIGHT when he shoots the screen and the "MEGAMAN 8" text comes up.  You can tell that the different sections of the song were written to fit the video, down to the whistle synth cue that plays right as proto man appears.  Overall the song is a little less "hype" but IMO it fits given that quite a number of shots are just pan+scan, so it's not like a full-on modern anime OP or anything.

Near the end of the video we get the main guitar chorus playing again, during the shot of Mega Man running, and it's like, YES!  The tempo is even synced to his running, and yes, yes yes.  That running animation is so quintessentially Mega Man.  He's not Mario, where you accelerate and then leap and bound.  He's not Sonic, where you zoom across the screen at high-octane speeds.  He's Mega Man, and he's got a 4-frame run cycle.  Oh yes.

If only the gameplay were actually well-designed too, haha.  Ah, well, you can't win em all.

Sleepless nights...

There is a lot of hurt, embedded in that beating heart.

I can see the memories.  I can feel the fresh scars as I run my fingers over what we thought was healed.

Mm.  Maybe it wouldn't be so bad, I guess.  Sayuri -- I mean, this Sayuri -- had scars, too.  I mean, of a different sort, but also, not really.

I want to be like her, too.  Sayuri, and Sayuri.  Ahahaha.  They really are quite alike, in some ways.  I wonder....if Sayuri, would grow up to be more like Sayuri?

Stats update (Oct 8, 2024):

Blog posts: 3,780 (Xanga archive) + 1,023 (Blogger) = 4,803 over 20.05 years (239.527 per year)
Letters written: 1,572 over 17.26 years (91.081 per year) (1 per 4.010 days)
Letters received: 571 (2.75:1 ratio)
Music: 1,096 songs released over 20.19 years (54.287 per year)
One Hour Compo: 302 top 3s out of 546 Compos entered (55.31%)
Ludum Dare (older): 14 entries, 15 medals (across all categories)
Ludum Dare (newer): 15 entries, 16 medals (across all categories)
Anime: 3,148 Episodes watched (54.41 days)

Over 1,000 songs released, woo!

Let's just quickly recap a whirlwind of stuff since it's been a while and there was a bunch to cover.

- It's been really hot as we got a sudden heat wave.  Thankfully we're basically out of it and I can finally look forward to autumn again, but it threw a number of things off balance -- not only my motivation and physical energy (and sleep...) but I had to rescue my chickens by bringing them inside from their outdoor coop, which led to a bunch of hassle.  I guess next time I know there's a heat wave coming I'll be sure to set up everything =beforehand= so I'm not shuffling around bedding and chickens in the middle of the scorching sun...

- In the midst of that my graphics card up and died and I spent like a whole day diagnosing that.  Thankfully, all systems are back up and running and I ended up with a GPU upgrade at the end of the day.  Honestly just got the cheapest one they had at Best Buy, but still way more performant than the old one I had.  Not that it'll really get put to much use at all -- playing ALTTPR isn't exactly demanding on the GPU front.  But I guess hardware video encoding will go faster probably?

Unfortunately as I was disassembling and doing a deep clean of my computer (that part felt nice), I realized that the only CPU thermal paste that I had around was.........very old.  It still works, but um...definitely not ideal, and I'd like to pull out my desktop from under my desk again one of these days and reapply.  Maybe after things cool down a bit...

- I'm back at it as far as cooking goes, and feeling my groove as I throw together meals every day.  Had one or two new recipe successes as well (braised lamb), so that's nice too.

- I launched the ALTTPR site that I mentioned in my last post, see it at https://alttpr.ddrkirby.com/ -- this took a ton of effort to make but I hope to continue adding more and more knowledge to it over time.

- I made it out to MCS again finally (after probably a year+ of  talking about it).  It was a nice time, the new venue is great as advertised and it was nice seeing some friends there.  I might try and find time to stop by again; lord knows I've been trying to find more places to find community and it sure isn't feasible for me to go dance with the Stanford kids every week or anything like that.

- This weekend was a pretty okay one.  I watched Suzume again and appreciated it; honestly probably a little more on the second watch.  I don't know, I feel like it's a little bit of a flawed movie in that the first time I watched it I was kinda puzzled at some of it, but overall there's much more good than bad and I think it does a really nice job at touching on some themes effectively in a way that resonates with me.

- After like a week of not working on Rhythm Quest I'm diving into the trenches again.  There's like a billion things to do (as always) but right now I'm trying to make a big refactor of how backdrops are rendered in the menu scene, to finally fix (hopefully once and for all?) some framerate drops, particularly when transitioning between backdrop sets.  Most of my backdrop overdraw optimizations (which I've already done) aren't actually able to happen when the backdrops are fading in and out, due to how transparency layering works, so I'm changing how it works so different backdrops sets are rendered to temporary render textures at full opacity (I needed to use pre-multiplied alpha here!) and then I have a shader that takes the two render textures and blends between those, to avoid any weird transparency blending issues.  So far it's "basically" working but I still need to iron out a bunch of the kinks.  Fortunately it actually simplifies / eliminates the need for a lot of old complicated code that tried to do god-knows-what black magic in order to get the transparency and sorting orders all working correctly, so that'll be good to say goodbye to.

Unfortunately it actually slightly decreases performance in a different way since we render everything to an intermediary texture and then render that to the screen, so it's adding an extra step to the process.  But I'm assuming that'll all be worth it.

There are other performance optimization that could be made too, but this is probably the big one that's worth it at least for now.

- I started on my xmas letters again, as it's that time of year (Inktober and all that).  I'm not holding myself to doing one a day, but I'll probably try to do it relatively regularly through the month and then see how much I have leftover.  There's a couple of bday letters to take care of during this time of year too...

- I finished my monthly pixel artwork for October -- pretty early this time, which is a nice feeling.  It's another trace (I think almost all the ones this year have been) but it turned out really well, probably better than the rest, to be honest, and I feel like I learned some things while doing it.  Honestly if I could just do a couple more in the exact same style it would probably be beneficial for me.

- There was a period of time when I really wasn't doing so well, but I seem to be recovered from that.  I'd say that I was lonely and needed like love and attention and care and all that, but honestly the best person that could truly provide all that was myself, I think I just needed to get into a place where I was able to tap into that.

- Been still really enjoying hanging out at Teance.  I know Far Leaves is having an event this Thursday as well that I'm going to try and make it out to, so I guess there is lots of tea in my near future.  Honestly feel like it might be nice to go tomorrow, too...but we'll see how I feel.