selja@hepta

general

uhhh i'm sleepy. i've been sleeping poorly again due to staying up too late. this is just how it is.

a lot of what's been going on in my life is just "the usual". some of it has also been "still getting used to living here", though one of my traits has always been to get used to new circumstances very fast on the assumption that at least they won't change for another several years now. i think this is some kinda coping method.

it's starting to get bright very early again.

anywho. here's some secret news.

gunpla

so one thing i've decided to do is i've decided to become a gunpla girl. i've already been watching the gundams for a while, and my friends have gunpla, so i thought "fuck it i can do this too".

the problem i have is that absolutely fucking nowhere near me stocks gunpla apart from maybe a few super popular models, and none of those seem to be universal century which is the only thing i care about (this is a lie i also care about uuuuuuniversal century but let's not get into that right now). so i'm ordering... from hobbylink japan. they let you put a backorder on stuff, only pay for it when they actually do restock it, and then give you several months before you're required to actually get it shipped so i can wait for both of my gunpla to arrive there before i have to think about shipping. neat

the two i ordered are the HGUC Jegan and the HGUC GM Sniper II. this is, obviously, because both are variations on a theme of "man, what if the GM was cool?" (as raised elsewhere, the nemo is also one of these mobile suits but i don't care about the nemo). i'm ordering hg because hg models are a manageable size and effort, and basically for no other reason.

i... have no idea when to expect these. could be several months before they get restocked and then several weeks before they arrive to me. but we'll see i guess!!

disclaimer: my choice of mobile suits is not an endorsement of the earth federation

fucking videogames

i'm sure you either a) don't care about destiny 2 or b) have already heard about their latest announcement. anyway i'm not gonna talk about that, i'm gonna talk about something else: i'm gonna fucking quit destiny 2 one way or another. this is a big rant so feel free to skip to the next section and come back later.

my last review of destiny 2 still stands: i'm a sucker for the coolest shit i've ever seen, you should not buy the game, and you shouldn't get into the game. it's a constant fomo machine. and that's the problem right now.

see, the optimal way to pay for destiny 2 is to pay a hundred dollars upfront for the whole year. they'll sell you the expansions (now two separate expansions) and the season passes (now called... something else, who cares) separately, too, but it's more expensive, and you'll miss out on the preorder exotic weapon for at least some amount of time. sometimes those preorder exotics have been kinda good, too, so it's... like, if you intend to keep playing, this is what you Should Do and the other ways of paying are just a prank they pull on you where you pay more overall and get less overall.

but i can't fucking do that 'cause i won't have a device to play this game on in half a year. destiny 2 uses an anticheat (battleye? maybe?) and they've set it up so that it will only work on windows. iirc officially it's there to prevent cheating in competitive pvp, and i would gladly play the game without access to competitive pvp. but they don't let you opt out, so the game is only playable on windows, indefinitely, and they'll ban your entire account if you ever think about doing something else.

and there we get into the root of the issue: official microsoft guidance is that after october 14 2025, i should throw my entire gaming pc in the trash and buy a new one. obviously i'm not going to do this!! i'm currently in a position where i've cut down on my spending a lot because my life expenses have gone up, and i certainly wasn't planning on splurging on a new gaming pc before that, either.

so i'm probably gonna be moving linux-only, again, later this year. not as a protest or anything but just because i still use my gaming pc to do some stuff on linux, and i could probably set up proton on the linux side and continue playing the bulk of the stuff i care about (i have a steam deck, as you may recall, so i already know several of my games work under proton). but i can't continue playing destiny 2, because they've married to windows, and windows says "die".

and like. it feels bad to say "good riddance" but i genuinely can't keep doing this shit. destiny 2 is a really fun game but it's buried under a fuckload of engagement mechanics. the latest two big content drops (the latest season/episode/whatever, and rite of the nine) have both, for instance, introduced an item grind where there are four variants of each weapon: normal, shiny, adept, and shiny adept. and as with most weapon rolls in destiny 2... most of those aren't worth assessing for more than a few second before throwing them in the trash. the average rolls are Passable but i already have a hundred passable or better weapons for every slot. i need Good.

and it's all like that. if you only (!!) play 10-20 hours a week, i don't know how you could possibly complete the grind enough to even get a decent amount of adept rolls, and then even if they're not gone after a few weeks or months, there's already a new grind you need to be focusing on. and it has to be like this, because there's matchmaking queues that need filling, and cosmetics and event passes that need selling, and both of those require that a lot of players keep playing the newest thing, specifically.

but it also sucks. if bungie ever make a good game not built as a perpetual monetisation engine first and a fun thing to play second, i'll probably play that! but i can't imagine they ever will, unless they like, do a management buyout. and also replace their upper management, probably.

what i've heard of marathon makes me feel like i guessed completely correctly what that game would be: a kind of watered down extraction shooter cum apex legends competitor. it's gonna exist for selling skins, and for Competitive Balance. that's just not for me, but at least it's not the complete business suicide that launching a straight up tarkov competitor would've been.

i guess bungie just are like this. they've got people making incredible visuals and gameplay and someone higher up tells them to waste that skill on a game that satisfies nobody in particular. if bungie made me a single player or coop pve shooter that isn't live service i would play that for 200 hours and be pogging about it for two months straight and then quit, because i've completed the game to my satisfaction. but no, everything has to be a live service now, and that requires building the game around continuous monetisation (or unlimited external funding, which is in short supply these days).

anyway. that's it for my rant.

camp

on a less ranty note: in august i'm going to go to WHY2025. it's the latest instance of the dutch hacker camps. my first and so far only one was the previous one (MCH2022), held in 2022 instead of the scheduled 2021 so the camp schedule has been a bit tighter than usual the past few years. i considered going to cccamp and emf, but didn't.

anyway... i'm gonna be there. unless i get sick or something. the whole event's mostly about attending talks on "whatever computer and electronics people think about", probably some kind of workshops, and just kinda hanging out and camping. i'm mostly invented in the "hanging out and camping" part, and there's gonna be people i know to hang out with in there, so that's neat.

unlike last time, i think i should have a pretty decent packing setup ready, but i'll still have to test run it. (maybe i'll tell you about my new bag later...)

i'm hopeful that i'll like it! the last time was mostly fun, and i hope this time will be mostly fun too. i hope to pack a thicker sleeping bag and enough clothes and to make it there and back, safely, and if i can get all of that done it can't be a very bad camp even in the worst case.

music

the beths have a new song out, it's called "metal" and it's about how wouldn't it be fucked up to be a biological entity. i mean isn't it fucked up. anyway it's on bandcamp and it's also on all of the streaming platforms and it's also presumably going to be on their next album but who knows.

other than that i've been listening to the cds from last time, in particular the coaltar of the deepers one and also death cab's codes and keys. and, yknow, other stuff too, but that's what felt worth mentioning.

followups

all since last time.

haven't made much progress with the catalogue system, or barcodes, but i do have a label printer now, so i can print labels. it's one of the brother ql ones, and i've already confirmed it works with brother-ql (or a fork of it). neat!

i... i haven't kept up with the guitar playing either, but the setup continues taking up very little space and being there. the guitar kit is out of stock, i think, so i haven't ordered that. if i indeed will. i did put the cd into boxes and into the catalogue.

i'm still not done with cleaning up all the stuff from the move, but that's just how it is. not like i can ever get my home in a final state where nothing will require maintenance, but getting stuff off the floor and into a closet or shelf or something would help, probably.

end

that's a lot of subjects. hope it's not too much! i think this might be the longest post since... uh, since last may around this time.

maybe may is just the time to post like this.

reach heaven through violence