Just finished a major video game jag. Been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the last few weeks. I want to finish it before any new content comes out for it, but I’ve set this weird rule for myself that I have to have all of the side quests and missions done before I can finish out the main story line.

Luckily the publishers, CDPR, are taking their time to put out new stuff for it.

I’ve been playing the game on and off since I picked it up last December. (I played day one on a base model Xbox One, and it was a buggy mess. I am very brave.)

It’s been quite enjoyable, so I’ve been savoring it like a fine wine because we aren’t likely to get 80’s style cyberpunk on this scale ever again. As it turns out, reality caught up with our anxieties over the worst impulses of the Regan’s America. But the maps never included boring and banal the dystopia would be.

One of the most striking things about the game is there are no suburbs, which we now know was the birthplace of most of the problems cyberpunk was trying to warn us about.

Still, there’s something cathartic about running around a future that’ll never be, which is commenting on a present that is all too real.

It’s August. When the hell did that happen? While a lot of people have that “losing time” feeling, I’ve found that I get it the most when I haven’t written in a while.

It’s been about a month since I’ve written in my journal, done any notes, or written any fiction. Therefore I’m picking blogging back up after a few months to get time out in front of be as opposed to behind me, as it were.

I’ve also scheduled the last session of my long running D&D campaign. That feels pretty strange, but I’ll unpack all that after I run it. (Might be on here, might not. What’s important is a throwing a writing prompt for myself in the future.)

Anyway, That’s what’s going on in this moment today.

Looks like the website is caching it’s records in the social repositories that it should. Albeit a little slower than I’d like.

Took the day off coding yesterday because of the whole, Democracy was saved thing. It’s great to finally have the Trump Administration in the rear view.

But it’s a new day and back to coding for me. The new site stands up and has the very basic functionality to be called a blog and it looks like hell, but I put it together with my own hands. Now just comes the work of getting to feature parity with the current site and making it look… I’m not going to say pretty… just better than it currently does.

So I fixed both connections in IFTTT, but FaceBook isn’t posting and it’s just… sigh… it’s fine.

I don’t know if yet another change in FaceBook’s TOS as made it so that you can’t automate posts even for pages, which I was forced into using. Honestly, at this point I don’t feel like pouring over documentation. Don’t know what I’m going to do about that connection point yet. The smart money is currently on the “I don’t care anymore,” train.

I might be moving all my social connections over to Twitter now that it’s slightly less of a hornet’s nest. We’ll see.

Back to the coding pits to work with technologies that I actually want to work with.

There’s a web service that I have been using for years called IFTTT – stands for If This, Then That. It’s a way to automate things across the web and I’ve recently been using it to throw this site’s feed into Twitter and Facebook. The alternative being – ugh – actually using Facebook and Twitter.

But IFTTT has now updated their TOS and only allows for three services to be used on the free account. Shouldn’t be a problem because I was only using two, but when they made the change it broke my applets anyway and removed them from the interface.

An interface they have quite frankly, totally fucked up. I had to dig through menus to find the things I’d set up. I turned the services back on, but who knows if they are working right. Going to post this as a test.

I’ve been trying to build the new version of my site but I’ve been spending the last 45 minuets just trying to breath life back into this.

Haven’t written here in a while, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been writing. Far from it. I started journaling again back in November and I’ve more or less kept up with it every day since. So that has wicked some of the impetus to create on this blog, but I needed to do something to justify my re-awoken notebook lust.

It’s a new year and I am a resolution kind of guy. Although I’m not going to go over all of them here. I have my analog journal for that. Yes blog, I’m cheating on you! But I did want to say that I’m going to be rebuilding this site given that at some point in the next month or two I will have been running it for a year and I want have a lot more control over the look and feel of it. (If you’re not going to code and setup everything by hand, what’s the point?)

So look forward to more updates on that as I create my own Jekyll theme, and possible crash the entire site. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

This late Saturday evening brings to an end another Tech week. I should explain the term: for a long while my interests have vacillated between technology and art. This has been going on for most of my life by I noticed about a year ago that I will usually get into one for week long chunks. So I have artistic weeks and I have tech weeks.

This week was most decidedly a tech week. I switched out my router for a brand new on and rebuilt my entire home network, which because I’m me, meant more than just replacing the router. It was about as big of a pain as it sounds, but now I get download speeds from my laptop that are seven times as fast as when I started, so I’d say it’s worth it.

Now I just have to start on rebuilding the home server and lab. Issues for another week.