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.