Rebooting Life, pt 2 - Collecting
By nature, I'm a bit of a hoarder. I'm not like bad or anything like on those terrible reality programs. But I collect things, and I have some things that I hold onto for sentimental reasons. I do tend to go through a purge every year or two where I just go through and get rid of 10-15% of all my things. I go through the closet and just toss stuff at will. But specifically, I collect a lot of games, a lot of movies, and I have a spattering of other things that I like to have as well like a few vinyls and what not.
Rebooting Life, pt 1 - Finances
I'm 46 now. It sometimes helps to remind myself of this. I don't necessarily feel 46. I still feel, I don't know, 32? The signs of being 46 are certainly there. I'm in more pain now than I was then (unbelievable to me honestly), I have heartburn when I sleep if I eat too late at night, I complain about those darn kids, I prefer old music and games over a lot of the newer stuff that's coming out. I'm turning out to be a fine ole crankity man just like I had hoped.
No Man's Sky... A Redux?
Last year at some point, No Man's Sky did an update that utterly broke my ability to play. Every time I tried to load it, it just crashed. Regardless of playthrough, I tried new playthroughs and old ones, they all crashed. My PC, being several years old at this point, coupled with NMS's constant upgrades to graphics improvements led me to the natural conclusion that the game had finally surpassed my ancient computer and my ability to play was terminated until I upgraded key components.
Fast forward 12-16 months, and I decided to finally get around to upgrading my PC so that I can play more games at a decent graphical fidelity and I booted up No Man's Sky to give it a go. Sure enough, it worked! Time limited my ability to play right away, but eventually a new expedition was released and I decided to try getting back into it.
I went through the new expedition in good order, and though I loved the concept of Adrift, I wasn't overly a huge fan of the actual expedition, I begrudgingly finished it. I don't know what it was, I loved the loneliness of it, that was something of the original No Man's Sky that I liked the most. But a lot of the "darker" content was not for me. I am not a gamer who wants to be scared particularly, and I don't care for a lot of NMS's more combat centric scenarios, which this expedition was heavy in. I did like the more difficult setting without any players or NPCs which made it trickier to get all the goods in it and really want to play that style. (I haven't tried to create a new play through in that style to be fair, I'm not even sure if you can! I would love to play it, with maybe at the very least better Nexus access!).
Once the expedition was completed, I returned to my old playthrough to check things out and see what had changed in the year or so I had played. I found bases overrun, to be expected. My Freighter was kind of messed up, I believe due to some freighter and base building changes they made at some point, but all in all it was what it was. I started going through and looking at what resources all my farms were missing when I left the game to try to pick up where I left off, and for a short while it was a good time.
But after a bit, I noticed some major things had changed, namely the base building on the freighter. It seemed like I could no longer lay down giant farms of produce in the freighter, instead being forced into new, albeit more attractive, farm rooms that had more limited space for resources to grow. If I'm going to be honest, This change was probably a better way as it forces you into getting bases on planets where honestly we should be forced into. Previously, bases on freighters were just better. Planets the land keeps on taking over your base if you tried to reshape it in anyway, and everything you could do planet-side, you could do in your freighter which followed you around wherever you went, so why not just do it in the freighter?
So realistically, that was a good change, for the game at least. But I also couldn't place the trade station anymore on my ship? Even floors seemed different. I had a stair case to the second floor of my freighter previously and I seemed to now require a ladder instead, no more stairs (I thought I had a stair at least). And when I placed the ladder, the floor still covered it. I could use the ladder but it was difficult to find sometimes on the upper floor. I still had my old plant pods, I just couldn't put new ones or move the old ones and my designs weren't complete.
My community that I had built had gotten overrun by sentinels, lots of them. I didn't wanna deal with that and from what I've heard they still haven't really given those things much of a purpose sadly. And a number of other changes happened, that I cannot recall, but just led me to feel like I basically had to start over which was disheartening to feel. Especially because I am in a deep universe, and they have killed some of the tricks that made getting to new universes easier and I didn't want to go through the pain of going to a new one. On top of all that, with the imminent release of Light No Fire, it felt like the updates had been getting less frequent, and smaller in scope. It was starting to look, to me like No Man's Sky had turned into not much more than a testing ground for the new hotness. Looking at the screens of the new game, you can literally point to the tech that they developed in NMS. So, after waiting over a year to play the game again... after feeling disheartened by the future of the game... I quit again.
Enter Worlds - Part 1
It has been a very long time since I have been so excited for an update as this one for No Man's Sky. It has been a really long time since they have released a world based update. Those two things go hand in hand no doubt. Don't get me wrong, they have added many new features that I had been wanting for years in the meantime. I wanted better space stations (though it was disappointing that we still aren't getting more dynamic internals to the stations), check! I wanted more space ships, check! Hell I wanted creatures with hair on them! CHECK! But what do I always want above all else? VARIETY. And Worlds seems to be bringing that in spades!
This update promises more plant variety, more creature variety, denser plant-life, new weather effects, WIND!, WAVES!, New water colors!, New sky colors!, and a universe refresh to boot. Don't even need a universe wipe, just a refresh. I'm so excited. This is such an overdue update and it's just apparently the first one of, probably 2, but possibly more? That address it. Yes, it probably is another test for Light No Fire (wind, water, clouds and denseness all seem directly tied to LNF). But I don't care, I'm hyped!
One of my long term concepts has been to go through my universe, Sudzerbal, and document it and with this website and this update, I may very well go back to that. Especially now that we can rename everything after the fact as well. It feels like a whole new world. But first, I am going to see how I feel after playing through the newest Expedition. I'm going to call it a test run and see how I feel about it all, but my hopes are high
Vacations & eBay
We are coming to an end of a 4 day vacation of a holiday weekend. Everytime I have off of work I sit here and think "Damn, if I could figure out how to make a living off eBay, I really enjoy this for a job."
Vacations like this really show the template for the job. Normally, I only work maybe 2 hours after work (probably closer to 1.5), and 4-5 hours on Sat & Sun. On holidays, I work the 4-5 hours so this holiday weekend I kind of see how it would normally work. See on a normal weekend, even though I'd be putting in the "normal time," I'm really still tired from working all week. Having an extended weekend allows me to get the flow of how it'd be and it's pretty cool. I walk more often, I get more chores done around the house, I read more, I relax more, I play more games, and still... I feel far more productive than I normally do. It's more fulfilling than my normal job.
Not that I dsilike my actual job, quite the contrary. It pays well, I love my co-workers, I like the benefits, it's a pretty relaxed job, we have a lot of fun and get a lot done. But none of that work is for me, I don't even know particularly if I like what I do, I don't know if I'm good at what I do, I'm very self-conscious of it, and I don't know if I'm going to be doing this in 10 years, but I don't know what else I would be doing. The job is good, but it doesn't fulfill me.
Meanwhile, eBay certainly doesn't use my technical skills. About the closest they currently do is that I have spreadsheets built out that I use to calculate if I buy this for this much and sell it for that much will I make a profit. And spreadsheets figuring out best prices for stuff and lowest prices for stuff. I also imagine that at some point I am going to build a website, I have thoughts on software that I could potentially build to make my life easier and make listing faster. But really, those things are minor bits and one offs. The job itself is really straight forward, it doesn't overlly challenge me mentally, but I still really like doing it. Or at the very least I don't dislike it.
It is pretty easy for me to tell why I enjoy it so much. Besides the more free time thing that I previously mentioned. This job is mine. *I* am doing it for me, and that's so much more fulfilling than doing something for someone else's benefit. I also just have never done particularly well at having people tell me what i must do, I even struggle with telling myself to do stuff. With eBay, it feels less like me telling myself to do this thing, and more me just saying "I have to do this thing." Even when I don't, it's weird. Also... though I like interacting with peopel, COVID taught me that I like being in office to do so and I was super lonely at home alone all day... the reality is that working with people isn't necessarily good interactions. There's a very strange give and take at work, as well as a constant walking on egg shells. You don't ever want to offend, or say the wrong thing, lest you get fired.
All I have to do is figure out how to make exponetially more off eBay... easy right?
Intro
What am I doing on Neocities? I have my own blog that I pay hosting for and have my own domain for, and I ignore that blog mightily. I don't particularly know what to do with this site. Do I make another blog? Do I put in movie and game reviews? I have no freaking idea.
I feel like as I get older the nostalgia hits harder and harder. Hell, even 10 years ago, I famously was thrilled that streaming had become more and more prevalent, so much so that I ripped my entire dvd collection and sold it off to a friend for $1 per DVD. Now, I am buying many of those DVDs back, granted in 4K, but realizing that I kind of want complete access to my media at all times. I similarly collect physical video games in a time where people are moving to just digital. I have even started buying vinyl, despite not owning a record player.
And so here I am, lately, I've been nostalgiac for the old internet. I miss it. I hate the modern internet. I feel a yearning to get back to the basics of what was good and pure about the early days. I have thoughts on why this is and what I miss about the olden days of yore at some point, but it did occur to me that complaining about it doesn't so much as do anything, you kinda have to do something, and so I couldn't think of much better way to try to return to those days than to build a website in the style of GeoCities.
However, I am not one of those people who actually think that 90's websites all looked like Space Jam, with super obnoxious repeating background images, flashing gifs/text, tiny graphics, etc. That all existed but that wasn't entirely what was going on. We did use background images more back then than we do now, but we were still, by and large trying to make sites that looked good. We just didn't want to have a straight white background, that's boring. Personally, I know one of the things I always tried to do was to create a site that had fairly normal white background, but I used those repeated backgrounds in like the navigation areas of the site. For instance, I remember making a website that was dedicated to providing information about wildlife. It had a white background and the left and top navigation had a limestone like repeating background and then I made some matching tabs that look like notebook tabs like __/__/__/. My point is, I don't think we all were like "let's make people's brains hurt when they come to our sites!!" We were all in a new form of media trying our best to make things look interesting and mistakes were often made.
I think the main point I want to get from this is to get back to basics though. Sites like LiveJournal and WordPress and Tumblr made sharing our thoughts easier along the way, but maybe something got lost when we stopped having to build the websites ourselves. I know even when I first moved over to WordPress, I would customize the heck out of it, but as it got older and more and more complex, I favored just using existing templates instead because it got so complex it was just easier. AKA... the site became less ME. When you code everything, and have to figure out the layout and have to do all the labor needed to try to make your site look nice, it takes a lot more work yes... but it also is you putting a little bit of your soul out there for others to see and to connect with. All the short cuts made things easier, but it also largely removes the soul from the internet. And while I don't think that is the only thing that is wrong with the internet... maybe it's part of it.
All that being said, I'm not against using modern technology, that's not the point here. I had a moment when I first started of like "let's just go all the way back, no CSS even!" and then I was like nah... CSS was a good advancement really. It helped a ton make web pages easier to make look nice. I mean for all y'all out there trying to make things look like old Geocities... get rid of CSS and try to make your entire site using tables. That'll do it. I'm already looking for ways to make a basic method of to pull SOMETHING automatically without digging into PHP or make huge javascript scripts. I do want to avoid those as much as possible because both get ugly fast, though I am willing to go into javascript a little, I just don't want to get overloaded by them. But I do want to automatically grab sections from pages and put it on the front page, or barring that, create a site map or directory automatically so that every time I create a page, I don't have to go in and update one/many places to link it to the rest of the page. I think there are ways to do this with simple scripts, but I haven't put in a ton of effort yet.
The previous kind of assumes that I want to make some sort of blog where I'd be updating thoughts a lot (and I consider reviews to be kind of a blog). And honestly that sort of thing seems to be the best form for this that I can think of. I do think back of my older sites... the animal info website was very gratifying, but in the days of Wikipedia, seems redundant. I could make a fan page for something, giving thoughts about it, info about it, etc. But honestly, my mind is random, I don't think I've ever done great at concentrating a site on one topic outside that animal site.
One particular idea that I had was like a travelogue of media consumption. I've always been enthralled with sites like RPGComplex where people blog about their games, and heck one of my old sites was the Life & Times of Kazarius (old name) hence the title here. That site logged my journeys through Asheron's Call and, at the time, had a decent amount of regular visitors. But I do want to get out of caring about people visiting, I think that is another thing that modern internet has gotten out of hand with. But I was thinking about, when I play a game, watch a movie, watch a TV show, whatever.. blog about it as if it's a travel site or something. Yeah it's basically a review site, but I kind of like the idea of sharing it as the experiences that they are. Because experiencing media, is more than just dissecting it, it's about talking about who and where you are in life at that point in time. And maybe that is a more interesting way to talk about media, at least to me.