We ended up completing Twisting Corridors in Torghast last Monday, all eight layers, and I have to admit it was surprisingly fun. Well, perhaps not surprisingly, I had kind of expected it to be more fune than normal Torghast since one actually properly has the opportunity to do something sensible even with some of the common anima powers, but still.

The runs themselves went rather well, we ended up having one failed run but that one was probably more down to late-night shenanigans than anything else, but all in all it felt more like a question of the content being time-consuming than difficult. To be fair, it’s a hard balance to strike, and with the runs being so long it would probably also be rather frustrating if it was more punishing since it would mean more time was “wasted” on failed runs, so the current balancing is probably correct.

One slightly unfortunate thing with it all, is that now there isn’t really any reason for me to revisit the Twisting Corridors outside of doing it for my own enjoyment, and the normal runs will probably feel even more boring than they were before since I’m more aware of the cool things that are possible with longer runs yet are so unlikely as to not be worth aiming for during a normal run. It really is a pity, and one nice change that could be made on that front is having Twisting Corridors as an option instead of the normal runs for the weekly ash, though implementing that might be somewhat difficult even if it would make farming it on alts that much more enjoyable.

The biggest gain from the whole ordeal, of course, was the mount awarded at the end, which is one of the few mounts currently available that is actually useable in the Maw, making that zone not utterly terrible to be in. It was really the primary motivator for me to get started with the whole thing, since I had been ignoring the Maw best I could but this strategy is probably not viable in the long term if I want to continue raiding at a reasonable level, so making doing the Maw not utterly terrible as it was unmounted was something of a priority for me, actually having some fun achieving that was just a bonus. It still baffles me at times, how Blizzard can make so many steps in the right direction to make the game more enjoyable with less mandatory grinding, and then just kind of give up at the last moment and introduce something like the Maw. Still, should have enough time now with the mount and weekly quests to get a sufficient amount of reputation for the gems before the next major content patch hits, so I guess that annoyance has kind of been dealt with for now; having to re-farm the Maw on alts however, I’m not looking forward to, hopefully that gets fixed at some point.

All in all, a successful week, especially since we ended up killing Sire Denathrius the next day, completing progress for now. Quite a nice feeling, being able to take it a bit more relaxed with the game again.

I guess it had to happen at some point, but it would seem I have missed my weekly deadline. It happened oddly quietly in a way, I thought about writing something a couple of times during the week, but never could really think of what I wanted to write, and when Sunday evening/night rolled around, there where simply sufficient other things going on to distract me from remembering to still write something that I just kind of didn’t.

Were this some sort of corporate setting and more serious a subject, there might be some sort of post-mortem of what process allowed this to happen and what steps will be taken to prevent it in the future, but at the end of the day, this is a personal project and something I’m doing for my own benefit, so the whole thing getting delayed by a few hours doesn’t really change all that much, if anything at all. Now, sure, it might to a certain degree contribute to a personal feeling of failure, and that can definitely be harmful in the long term but I’m also learning how to deal with such things better so I’d say it’s not really harmful at this point.

So what does this mean in the end? Nothing more than I get the opportunity to write two posts this week instead of one, and maybe having a break from time to time isn’t all that bad, I could of course prepare posts ahead of time if I feel the need to take a break but if that’s forced it doesn’t really feel worth increasing stress in order to reduce it. Anyway, bit of a diversion this time around, hopefully something more interesting next week.

So sometime at the end of last year, I ended up renaming my main character. Now, it’s probably not something big for most people, but having played mostly this character with (almost) the same name for the last 15 years or so, there was quite a bit of emotion and memory attached to that name for me. This, of course, begs the question, why did I end up renaming if there was so much attached to the name? Well, quite frankly, that attachment was partially beginning to feel more like baggage and a hindrance than something positive, and the new name is something quite a bit more light and fun which also helped quite a bit.

It’s strange sometimes, how much emotion can be associated with something like a name, and how stepping back from all of that can help one gain some perspective both on the path one has been on and where one is going. It’s not even that the emotions are necessarily negative, on the contrary, that name and the character and the game have definitely helped me get through some hard times, and for that I am grateful. However, it does also mean that those old feelings and patterns of behaviour are attached to that name, and that can be rather constraining at times when one wants to evolve and grow and better oneself. That does mean that renaming has been oddly freeing, which I think was not the thing I was expecting from that.

The most interesting part of it all however, has probably been the reactions from other people with regards to the new name. It seemed to be a rather common sentiment in the beginning to ask if I had lost a bet or the like, since the name seems to have been so far away from what they knew from me, and the other seems to be joy or pleasure in regards to the new name since it is rather fun. Amusingly, it has also given a few opportunities to have some fun in Details with the custom names there, since it’s close enough when spoken out loud to one of the abilities in the game that I can put variations of the calls made during the fight as my name there, which has been an unexpected but very welcome bonus.

It might not be that in the grand scheme of things renaming one’s character in a game is all the meaningful of an act, but there is quite a bit of symbolic significance to it all for me, letting go of the past in a sense. There’s a lot of that I need to be doing, and I think this was one small step in the right direction, but it’s a long journey. Still, even the longest journey happens one step at a time.

I recently wanted to do a bit of experimenting with an old tablet I have, a Galaxy Tab 10.1 (yes, one of the original ones), and happened to notice that installing Linux—more specifically PostmarketOS—was possible and in fact somewhat simple.

Now, it is still very much an unfinished product, and it did take a couple of tries before I got something that actually worked, and I’m not quite sure what I’m going to use the tablet for now, but it was quite a fun time experimenting around with it. To be fair, I wasn’t using the tablet before anyway, it is kind of stuck on Android 4, anything newer runs rather terribly, and even the old Android just works rather slow on it.

I have been considering making it into some sort of dashboard or info display, and that should now be rather easily achievable with simply some sort of browser running in kiosk-mode, after I create the website with the info I want displayed of course. There comes the next problem however, since I’m not quite sure what I would want displayed, I simply want to make the thing. Something like weather and possibly messages seems like the obvious thing, but does that actually even make any sense? Do I need that? Weather I guess could be rather nice for my parents, since my father at least does have a tendency to check it rather often, so maybe there is some use-case for the thing.

Of course, me just wanting to make it is enough of a reason to do so, but it is always a bit unfortunate to have projects that then end up just lying around somewhere unused.

The installation I ended up with after some experimenting of what actually works and what doesn’t, is basically Alpine Linux with XFCE, and it is all surprisingly useable, even though me not having a keyboard connected does make it all a bit more difficult, especially as the standard installation didn’t include an on-screen keyboard. Luckily that was rather easily solved, and now it’s actually possible to do things with the device again. It, oddly enough, actually also feels a good bit more responsive now than it did before with Android, even if the user interface is a lot more clunky to drive since it really is built for a mouse and the touchscreen just controls the mouse which isn’t the best experience at all times.

Another problem I’ve encountered is that Firefox doesn’t seem to launch, I’m not quite sure why yet and I’ll have to look into that, but luckily for now Midori is a decent enough alternative especially since I’m probably not going to be using the device for all that much for now. Hm, that does get me thinking though, with simply a keyboard it would actually make for a decent Linux portable for me, and a Bluetooth keyboard shouldn’t be that expensive to get, maybe I’ll have to research that next… Though maybe it would need to be a keyboard+mouse combo, it will get tiring at some point to poke at the screen especially since the interface isn’t designed for it as noted.

So I guess I have a couple of ideas there of what to do with the device now, I’ll update in the future if any one of them ends up actually panning out.

I have always had something of a fascination with “old-school” methods of communication, from relatively recent things like e-mail to the original long-distance communication method: letters. I’m not really sure where this fascination comes from, since I am on the other hand also someone who likes modernity and technology a great deal, but maybe it is exactly the eccentricity or the effort involved that makes it have more of a personal feel that draws me to them.

Now, this does not mean that I have spent a great deal of time in the past writing letters or sending postcards, I think I sent a letter in elementary school once and since then nothing else really, but having my mother read some old letters that her mother and other older relatives had sent in their youth along with a general desire to explore this communication method made me start sending letters. I haven’t as of yet sent many, well two to be exact and only one has arrived so far, but the reception so far has been very positive, they noted it was very sweet and personal to receive something like that. I think it was a combination of choosing to send a handwritten letter instead of printed that contributed to that feeling, along with it being such a rare occurance in today’s society that it simply stands out.

One of the reasons that I have sent so few letters as of yet and and a problem I am discovering is, that for many people who would be the most suitable for this kind of communication on account of me not actually talking or chatting with them that much otherwise at the moment, I actually don’t have the address for. These are people whom I know rather well and have a decent amount to do with in the past and might even know where they live, just simply not what to write on an envelope so that it reaches them. I could, of course, simply ask them, but that would kind of spoil the surprise.

So, at the moment, it does at times feel a bit silly writing letters to someone I already at the very least chat with pretty much daily, though it does provide the opportunity to communicate in a different way about different things when writing something a bit more long form, and it is quite simply nice to have someone to write letters to since I do enjoy it, and perhaps it only being one person does make it a bit more special for the two of us.

Even then, I think this is something I want to expand upon in the future, probably start writing my parents in the summer since we don’t see each other quite as often then, and possibly other people once I find a fitting excuse or way to get their address without raising too much suspicion.