Programmers are feeling it

The picture looks different for programmers. A friend of mine who writes code is already feeling the pressure, and that is the part that makes this feel real to me. When tools can produce a lot of working code quickly, the work that used to be spread across a team starts to look smaller from the outside. I don't want to overstate what I know about their job, but I can see the effect on someone I talk to regularly. [Add what your friend has actually said or seen happen at their job.]

Why this matters to me

What I take from this is that my own position is not the same as theirs, even though we both work with technology every day. Being hard to automate is not the same as being safe. The question for me is how much of my day is routine work that a tool could take over, and how much depends on judgment and context that it can't see. [Describe the mix of routine and judgment work in a typical week.] Thinking about that split is more useful to me than assuming I'm fine or assuming I'm next.

The hardware

It was notoriously complex, an ambitious maze of dual processors and custom video chips that drove contemporary software developers to tears. That complexity is the part I keep coming back to. Most consoles were built to be easier to program for, and the Saturn was not. [Mention one specific quirk you've run into, if you have.] I think that complexity is what gave the hardware its unique soul.

Arcade-first design

When you boot up a Saturn, you aren't just starting a game. You're engaging with a specific era of arcade-first design philosophy. The crisp 2D sprite work, rendered with unyielding precision, holds up today in ways early, murky 3D polygons never could. [Name a game where the sprite work still looks sharp to you.]

Games like Saturn Bomberman, Panzer Dragoon, and Dragon Force don't just feel nostalgic. They feel purposeful, designed to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a system that refused to play by the rules. [Say what it feels like to play one of these on the real hardware.]

Its place in history

While history often remembers the Saturn through the lens of its commercial struggles against the PlayStation, enthusiasts know better. To love the Saturn today is to appreciate hardware with genuine personality, a complex, brilliant oddity that rewarded anyone willing to learn its quirks. [Which quirk did you have to learn, and how long did it take?]

The widescreen on it is crisp and looks amazing still to this day. Before it, most of what I carried around was some derivative of a square ratio but The PSP made it feel like it was a different kind of device, one that could be a screen first and a game machine second, or the other way around.

The design is what keeps me coming back to it, and I bought it in pearl white last year. Looking at it now, it still reads as one object rather than a pile of parts, and I don't see that often in gadgets.

The basic problem as I see it is that the apps seem to make money from you staying frustrated and paying for boosts, extra likes or better visibility, rather than from you actually meeting someone. When the thing you pay for is the thing that would make you stop using the app, the incentives are off. I keep coming back to that mismatch.

It also makes the whole experience feel worse than it should. Paying does not reliably get you better matches, so you end up spending money and still feeling like you are shouting into a void. [Describe one specific time you paid for something and it did not help.]

That leads to the question I am still stuck on: is there a better way to meet people that does not depend on an app charging you to be seen? [Mention any alternative you have tried or considered, such as meeting people through friends, clubs or events.]

That's the part that bothers me most. It's not one big thing that goes wrong. It's a lot of small days stacking up, each one feeling fine on its own, until you look up and can't say exactly what the last few weeks were for. [A specific day or week when you noticed this for the first time.]

Starting from something small

When everything feels unclear, I think the first step has to be smaller than a plan. Maybe it's just writing down what actually happened this week, not what you meant to do. [The one thing you looked at or did this week that you would normally have skipped.] Seeing it on paper makes it easier to tell which parts still matter and which ones just carried you along.

From there, the next question is what to pick back up first. I'd rather choose one thing to return to than try to get everything in order at once, because trying to fix all of it is usually what keeps people stuck.

Why it matters

Losing track of things is more than an annoyance. It means you're not making the decisions about your time, and that's the part I want to change. [Why this matters to you specifically, in one or two sentences.]

Not in the way Bilbo takes it. He's ready to leave it all behind; I'm not looking for a boat into the West. But goddamn, life is heavy sometimes. Not in one big dramatic way. More like a lot of small weights that never quite get put down.

I'm trying hard to disconnect. Less scrolling, less news, fewer screens. The problem is that there's nowhere to disconnect to. Everything happens online now. Plans, friendships, hobbies, even arguments. Log off and you're not somewhere else, you're just nowhere.

There used to be third places: not home, not work, just somewhere you ended up. A café with regulars, a club, a pub where someone would know your name eventually. Places you could meet people without it being a whole project. Those have mostly disappeared, or turned into somewhere you sit alone with your phone in the company of other people sitting alone with theirs.

The town i live in is a student town, and the social life is built for students. If you're in it, you're never short of people. If you're not, you're kind of out of luck.

Full disclosure: this post exists because I found a way to write it without sitting down to write it. I answered some questions like I was texting and cleaned it up afterwards. Without that, this would be a tab I closed after ten minutes.

Building a city

As a kid I wanted a game that simulated the whole world. Never got one, so I'm making a small piece of it myself: Uraroji, a Tokyo you can walk around in at night. Warm streets, neon, endless stuff to look at. It's built from real map data, and the tight streets and neon signs are simple but look like they belong there. Watching it grow has been the most fun I've had in ages.

[project slug="uraroji"]

Friction

I started it because I figured I could vibe it out with an AI: I bring the ideas and designs, it does the heavy lifting. I'm now mildly addicted to working like that.

Self-diagnosed ADD. Every tiny bit of friction stops me dead: a setup step, a config file, a blank page. AI coding removes most of it, so ideas actually leave my head instead of rotting there. This post is the same trick, applied to writing.

On repeat

[collected id='264e14f0fe' compact='1'] Alex Calder (rip) and Mac DeMarco's project from before everything else. You can hear both of their beginnings in it. "Freemasons Prayer" mostly: lots of Mac DeMarco-isms, and it sounds raw. 38 plays this week. My server keeps count, so I don't have to.

Why bother

I'm a bit lost right now, to be honest. No partner, work that's fun in places but mostly tedious. I've been losing weight for almost a year, so I walk home every day and mostly without music, leaves time for thinking.

My server already logs what I listen to, what I commit and where I take photos. It just doesn't log how any of it felt. So: a trace, for anyone who cares, and for me later.

When the Game Boy Micro dropped, I was 15. Back then, my whole world was the Xbox 360 and spending endless nights into World of Warcraft (and oh my how I paid for that dearly). A tiny handheld that couldn't even run old Game Boy Color games felt completely pointlessly small to me. Everyone was looking toward the future of gaming, including me.

Twenty years later, my brain is fried by modern screens. Today's tech is just a wall of notifications, updates, and endless menus.

That little metallic brick I ignored as a teenager has somehow become my favorite piece of gear. Fitted with an aftermarket bigger Makho battery, the battery anxiety is completely gone. It just sits in my pocket until I actually want a quiet break, holding a charge forever.

No load screens, no Wi-Fi, no system patches. Just real buttons, a crisp tiny screen, and whatever single cartridge I shoved into the slot.

What looked like a weird gimmick in 2005 feels like pure relief today. The 360 and WoW defined my teenage years, but the Micro gives me what I actually need as an adult: a way to just unplug and play.

My creative brain is constantly picking up new interests, but lately, the gear stack has just felt like noise. Too many options make the first step to creating near impossible.

So, I’m simplifying.

I just sold my Korg Minilogue XD (+ various other parts of my music setup) and my Ricoh GR IIIx. To keep keep it a bit "lighter", my Seqtrak is filling in for synth duties on a tiny footprint, and I’m considering returning to analog photography for a while to slow my roll and force a bit of patience back into the process instead of the instant gratification of a modular raw file.

I love picking up new gear, but I now know that it's almost suffocating me when trying to decide what's taking up my free time.

When was the last time you cleared out the clutter to actually enjoy the process again?

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

What an opening line. I finally started reading Neuromancer, and only 25 pages in, it’s already super obvious why this book is regarded as ground zero for all of cyberpunk.

No hand-holding just Case, black-market cyberware, and terms like ice and simstim. It’s wild to think this was written way back in 1984 before the web was even a thing. Pretty much everything we see in sci-fi and gaming today traces right back to these exact pages.

Honestly, I’m loving it so far and I’m intentionally taking it slow because I really just want to have a nice bedtime routine with this book as a companion.

FINALLY

I grew up in Piteå, and I have to admit I've been awfully bad about going back to visit — so finally spending three weeks there brought back a massive wave of childhood memories. It's probably just that walking past old streets and familiar spots triggers things you haven't thought about in years.

My visit also lined up with the Piteå Summer Games — which I actually won, and scored in, as a kid — so the town was absolutely packed with visiting Norwegians, southern Swedes, and random kids from around the world. A nice addition to the mood.

I spent a lot of the trip listening to Accidentally by Pro Teens. I really do adore that album, from a group that's sadly not that well known.

The preferred mode of transportation

The main goal was to get active and drop some weight, so I ditched all forms of transportation and just walked everywhere. The effort paid off — I lost around 4 kg on the trip, which made the daily mileage well worth it.

Some routes were a genuine grind. Walking from Skuthamn to Bergsviken was a massive challenge, but keeping the Norway vs. England match in my ears via Radiosporten kept me entertained the whole way.

Eh, whaddaya do

It wasn't a seamless three weeks, though. I lost an entire week to a cold after my dad brought it home and generously shared it with me, which temporarily wrecked my walking routine.

Then there were the mosquitoes... I'd completely forgotten how brutal they get up north during summer. Being out on foot all day made me an easy target, and the swarms were relentless.

Even with a week lost to a cold and getting eaten alive by bugs, dropping 4 kg and reconnecting with my old hometown made the trip a success. Next time, I'll just dodge the family germs and pack a lot more bug spray.

WHO'S BACK

I really did use to live in Japan back in 2011 and after a long awaited re-visit I once again visited in 2023 with then girlfriend and close friends. But for summer 2025, the plan was to go back, but this time bringing a group of friends that haven't been there with me yet and one girl that hadn't been to Japan whatsoever so my mission was to really try and show them my side of Tokyo.

And I knew that knowing the language helps so much so in being a tour guide to people who haven't seen Tokyo other than the most shallow version of it and I really did have lots of fun doing it!

Record heat

[photo id="61c23d27.jpg" size="small" alt="last train from ikebukuro"]

That godawful humidity was brutal. Being a bit overweight at the time (read as A LOT) it was more physically exhausting than the times before and my mood really did sour at times, but the heat didn't ruin everything during the trip we still had a blast most of the time but sadly random allergic reactions and sickness kept us at home way too much to be quite honest.

Split the G and exchange Instagram accounts

The absolute highlight was getting everyone together at a bar to meet my friends since back when I used to live there, Yosuke and Amada. Seeing my younger friend who didn't speak a lick of Japanese try to communicate with Amada about workout ethic was quite the sight and well worth it.

• Yosuke came in from Gunma but had to keep an eye on the clock. The trains out that way stop running early, so he had to dip out to catch the last connection home but not before he tried "splitting the g" for the first time and actually succeeded!
• Amada traveled all the way from Kumamoto in the south. Since heading back the same night wasn't an option, he booked a hotel in Tokyo so we could actually make a night of it which included karaoke at the shittiest karaoke place known to man so if you are ever in Ikebukuro craving karaoke don't go to the maneki-neko in the weird builing on the main street.

I Feel It Coming

I think it’s that time again. I’m fully prepared to play Minecraft religiously for three weeks, only to spend the following month desperately nagging my friends to log back on long after the "feeling" has died for everyone else.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that I'm looking forward to twenty-one days of pure dumbassery and total disconnection from the real world. Honestly, I think I need it.

It doesn’t matter how many times you spawn into a fresh world; it still feels like the very first time. It’s remarkable what that kind of "free" game design can achieve. Even if the magic only lasts a few weeks before I’m left grinding away on a solo server, the day this game finally becomes truly stale is a day I genuinely dread.

Bossman Said Yes, Then Said No

I’m not entirely in the loop regarding what happened with Notch and his proposed "Minecraft 2," but part of me really wants it to happen. Minecraft feels stuck in a cycle of small, safe iterations, and the cracks are starting to show.

New blocks and colors are fun for a minute, but there hasn't been a fundamental shift in how the game actually plays in forever. We need new systems, but I don’t think retrofitting them into the current engine will work and it would probably just result in a wave of complaints. Maybe a clean slate is exactly what the "bossman" should have gone for.

A friend called me a month or so ago asking if I wanted an old PlayStation she’d found at a thrift store. Sure, I already have one or two lying around, but this was a launch model. I couldn't say no.

Is this anything you'd ever want? I just saw it and thought of you.

It turns out the laser was on its absolute last legs. The drive died after only ten minutes of gameplay—typical. But fret not; my previous hesitation toward soldering small circuitry vanished the second I realized this was the perfect "low-stakes" moment to try. If I was ever going to mess something up, this was the time to do it.

What Must I Do?

I did what any sane person would do: I ordered an aftermarket ODE (Optical Drive Emulator) the second I realized the disc drive was toast. And boy, does that thing work wonders.

I’ve been on a total retro binge for a couple of weeks now. I’m already on Disc 4 of the glorious Final Fantasy IX, and Front Mission 3 is next on the list!

The OSSC really does its thing when paired with high-quality RGB SCART cables.

ODE Everything

Over the last year, I’ve been on a real bender when it comes to replacing physical discs. It’s happening just in the nick of time, too. Most of these 90s disc-based consoles weren't built to last forever, and between failing motors and the looming threat of disc rot, the hardware is getting fickle.

Luckily, there are amazing modern alternatives to these slow, aging readers. So far, I’ve replaced the drives in my GameCube, my Saturn, and now the PS1 I never actually got to enjoy.

PS: The UI is so damn snazzy—and it even has a very apt Christmas theme!

I finally did it. I had a talk with my Kindle and that talk involved a USB cable, some questionable firmware files, and some "pleasedontbrick" anxiety.

But now my Kindle is officially straight outta jail, and it feels so much better to use it now!

Here are my pros (I actually don't consider anything a con, you always trade something for freedom):

The KOReader tablet: This is the biggest pro. If the stock Kindle software is doing you good, KOReader is a going to do you better. I’m finally reading EPUBs natively without begging Amazon to convert them for me with the their extremely convoluted process. The reading statistics are so detailed in this thing and it's easy to keep track of yourself when you get lost in a book.

I don't feel dirty anymore: By blocking OTA (Over-The-Air) updates and stripping away the tracking, the device feels so much faster and It’s no longer "calling home" to Jeff Bezos every time I flip a page.

The Verdict

45 minutes of setup is so worth it, if you have one and see an opening (meaning you are on a firmware that is jailbreakable), just do it!

As a kid, role-playing games always captured my imagination, but none of them made me spend more time min-maxing and grinding like Persona. (Maybe Final Fantasy IX, but that game is a 10/10, always.)

When I was around 14 or 15, a friend of mine was always making Persona references whenever he saw the chance. I didn't have the slightest clue what he was talking about, but it piqued my interest. How could a game be so good that you have to quote or refer to it ad nauseam? Needless to say, I picked up my first copy of a Persona game and I was hooked. The brilliant combination of a watered-down dating sim and a dungeon crawler makes the game flow with a pace I haven't experienced since.

Remakes remakes remakes

Quirky and unabashedly Japanese in everything it does, Persona hooked me even to this day. When I picked up Persona 3 Reload about a month ago on the Switch 2, I thought it would be a slow game I'd play when nothing else excited me. Instead, it made me appreciate the series even more.

Sure, the games can feel pretty slow and repetitive from time to time—just like real high school life—but then it hits you with something big. You just have to beat the boss or see the cutscene before you shut it off. As someone who played through P3:FES a long, long time ago, revisiting the suspiciously Odaiba-like location has me hooked.

[collected id='a47c539703']

Oh you want some tunes? I'll give it to ya.

Aquire this and all you troubles will be gone /Sun Tzu (maybe)

Writing this, I still haven't even touched on what is arguably one of the Persona series' strongest points: the soundtrack. Banger after banger of tracks fuse everything a human has ever tried composing into a beautifully messy mix of genres and tunes.

I even think Persona inspired my desire to collect games and merch. Now, every time I'm in Japan, I look for editions or merch from the series and you sure as hell aren't finding much of it in the West so you better. (although it has gotten better since the release of Persona 5).

ATLUS and the future

Remakes are usually my guilty pleasure in 2025, either that or indie games. I haven't had any respect for AAA game developers in a long time, seeing as most of what they churn out are just lazily asset-swapped UE5 games that run like absolute dogshit. You have to force the person playing it to enable DLSS just to get the thing running.

ATLUS, on the other hand, carefully puts out mainline games in the Persona series, and it feels like a slight shift in gaming every time it happens. I sure can't wait to see what happens after Persona 6 is released.

How did we get here?

Remember when Windows was an actual operating system and not an ad delivery platform with a new side hustle in AI.

I haven't had a private Windows computer since the late 2000s and there is nothing on this earth that would pull me back.. And now they are even losing on the gaming front thanks to basedgabe~

Self-Hosting: Because Subscriptions..

Welcome to 2025, where every app, every song, and every photo you take is just another opportunity to pay someone else. Welcome to paradise! If you’re not paying, you’re probably not using it right.

Oh, and did you notice? Linux is actually gaining market share. I know, wild. Even good ol' pewds is out here burning down YouTube with his new Linux and AI videos while speedrunning to freedom.

I wonder if these two are related somehow...

Get yourself a Server.. Anything really.

Anyways rant /over and here is what you do!

Save some money, get a cheap ThinkPad from a company that rotates them like every 2 years but can't ever recoup the investment on them. srsly and with that money just buy something that is able to stay on 24/7 and run your services.

• No More Monthly Drains: Oh geeeee wiz I sure love my monthly subscriptions and microtransactions!!!11
• My data, My mess: I'm hoarding around the files from my Windows XP machine I had in 2003, BUT IT'S MY DATA and I will do whatever I please with it.
• DIY IT: Just build a media server bro, no one is ever going to now (ok someone will but there are so many good ways to obfuscate stuff online when you run your own machines)
• Raspberry Pi: Aka just get one bro: The Raspberry Pi is so damn cheap now and there are thousands of cheap chinese alternatives (yeah yeah i know)
• No Ads: For real this time, not this half assed adblock stuff and btw youtube premium will always be the only subscription service that makes sense.