Weather is still up and down, and every week we have a bit of heavy rain, but it’s good for plants and stuff, so that’s at least something, everything is nice and green everywhere now. The rain has also been good at keeping coming on work days where it doesn’t bother me that much anyway, so it’s pretty nice. I had some nice walks and reading outside times over the week, which is something that just makes me really happy, it’s just a nice thing to do, there is something about it that just makes me feel good.

Books

Got quite a bit of reading done this week, being in 3 series that I rotate through really helps with my usual struggles of choosing what to read. First one for this week is Lab rat one by Andrea Höst, and it started out really slow, being almost too similar to the first one, but it slowly ramped stuff up a bit, and I was pretty happy with it after a while. Not the best book I’ve read, but it was decent, and I want to know what happens in the third one, most likely it’s a second book slump kind of thing, still quite enjoyable characters. Looking forward to the conclusion in the next book.

Then I read Retro Version by J. S. Morin, and this one was just silly fun, nothing deep or really anything, but it was a fun silly story that I enjoyed a lot. It’s nice when something doesn’t take itself too seriously, andjust have some wacky premises that you won’t see otherwise, for example in things like movies or anything, but since it’s a book, you can do more outlandish things since it doesn’t impact the budget for making the thing the same way.

And then I got started with Roche Limit by Nicola Claire, this one is the last one in the series so I hope it will have a nice conclusion, at least from the first 150 pages or so it seems like it’s going to be a quite fun one, I’ve really been enjoying Claire’s books, she just writes in a way that is really enjoyable to me, makes me feel happy about the family that the people have created together, and tend to focus on the things that I find fun. Kind of feeling sad now that after this there is just one more triology in the series, but then again I usually manage to find something more that is fun to read.

Games

Games this week has also been mostly more of the same, which seems to be the theme of the week in some ways, just trudging on, moving things foreward, but not really feeling that satisfying.

I did have a couple of days of playing Rift of the Necrodancer and it’s still a really solid rhythm games, they have done such a good job with the charts, they are all really fun to play, I just wish they had a level in between Moderate and Hard, because these are one of the few rhythm games where hard is really quite hard, to the point that it really reminds me of playing harder pieces when I was playing an instrument, to learn some of the rhythms and runs I have to slow down, repeating a piece that I struggle with, then playing through the whole thing a couple of times after getting the pieces down to get the connections, it’s really fun, but it takes so much time, and music has always been this thing that tends to make me really hyperfocus, so I’m a bit in two minds when I do sit down with it, because if I do it tends to mean that the whole evening is gone, the “just one more go” factor is just so strong for me.

Most of the week I’ve been playing Octopath Traveller II And I’m still really enjoying the game a lot, I’ve done most of the second parts for each character now, and if anything the stories just are starting to get even better, lots of fun having them both, this time like the last one I was surprised over how much I enjoy Agnea’s story, it’s just up my alley, and seeing how she just want to help people, and then actually does is just really heart warming. I also have find that most of the critisisms that I’ve seen about the game so far has been things that don’t bother me at all, that the characters don’t interact that much, is mostly true, but they have done a lot to make things like the little scenes they have together, and them interacting through battles in a way that just feels fun. The second thing, that I can understand people don’t like too much is that characters you’re currently not having in your party don’t get any experience. I see that it can be felt a bit like padding, but I kind of like having to change out my party every now and then, and then have the time while you get the one you just added up to a place where they can carry themselves to tinker with them, see how to use them the best, and how I can make them contribute in a good way to the team. I’m also soon up to the point where I was the last time I played the game I think, so at some time now there is going to be totally new things that I haven’t seen before, which will be quite fun I think. Still going strong with this one, and enjoying it just as much, if not a bit more than last week.

Misc

I’ve been trying to focus more on the small things this week, and mostly I think I’ve been quite successful at it, I’ve been enjoying myself. Most of the week’s work time has been struggling and trudging around with porting ETL jobs which is quite tedious work, first rethinking how the thing work, then testing if it gives the same result, and why eventually not, and then trying to figure out how to do stuff in a different kind of paradigm, some times it just ends up being almost the same, others I manage to do some optimisations, or to cut of something that hasn’t really been in use for years, so it’s kind of nice, still it’s not really enjoyable work for me at all, but that’s just how it is some times, you have to get through the stuff that you don’t really want to, about 80% or so through them now though I think, so that’s at least good to know. And I’ve learned some things, if they are usefull things I don’t know yet, but we’ll have to see.

I’m kind of getting more and more disillusioned with American politics, and things like AI, and it’s starting to frustrate me a lot. I was better at managing to keep everything distant before, but for some reason it feels kind of like it’s something I have to keep an eye on as well. I’ve been trying to keep out of discussions, but some times I just can’t help myself. Things just seem pretty easy to understand for me, I mean we are all humans, so why should we have a class that sits over us and decide what we can do or not, it’s something that I really don’t understand about people voting for right wing polititians, because they do say that they don’t want others to decide what they are allowed to do, and then just go along and vote for someone that will do exactly that.