Walking the Archipelago, or: Couch to 1080p
It's been a week of eventfulness as well as anti-events.
I took the last of my ADHD medicine last Monday (the 24th), so I contacted my doctor that morning to send another prescription. They said it can take "up to 72 hours" and offered me no guarantees that it would be filled before the end of the day. This is frustrating, because whenever I try to fill the prescription in advance, the pharmacy website yells at me for trying to fill it prematurely. Why can't they just fill it, because they know it's coming up for renewal soon, but not let me have it until the renewal date? Why the attitude? It makes me anxious to fill it until the day it's due, because I don't want to get flagged as some sort of non-compliant drug seeker or something.
So unsure if I would be able to get it filled, I walked to the pharmacy after work to see if it was there. It wasn't, and it would be a waste of energy to catch the bus home and then catch it back to the pharmacy later, so I just kind of hung around. I got fast food for dinner. I got an extremely expensive but very good cold brew coffee from a little doughnut shop called "Duncan's". It's apparently a chain headquartered in Massachusetts. I'm not sure how they ended up in my neck of the woods, but they make a good cup of coffee.
I hung around until 18h30, which is when my doctor's office closes, and checked to see if my medicine was there one last time. It wasn't, so I caught the bus home. In the future I guess I need to contact my doctor's office for refills instead of the pharmacy, so I can do it 72h in advance, but when I do that, it tends to fill up my profile with multiple prescriptions for the same drug, and I'm worried that's going to get me in trouble somehow too. Why do I keep asking for redundant prescriptions for a controlled substance? I feel like someone would find it suspicious. It's all very kafkaesque.
Since I didn't have my medicine on Tuesday morning, it was an anti-day. I struggled to get through work, struggled to go to the pharmacy, struggled to pick up my medicine, struggled to come home, struggled to make dinner and finally collapsed into bed at 21h00.
Wednesday I had my medicine and was back to normal, which was good because I had scheduled a live stream for that evening and would've had to cancel if I was unmedicated. I'll talk about that below.
Thursday was Sunny's vet checkup, and I'm happy to report that she's as healthy as she appears to be. The only major issue is a bit of gingivitis, which is making it hard for her to eat. Getting that cared for is going to be very expensive, so we're going to start saving. In the meantime, we're only giving her soft food, and I'm mashing it up for her. I used to occasionally care for a relative's cat with bad dental issues, and mashing the food into a paste-like consistency helped him. We're also feeding her less food at more frequent intervals, which helps her not, to coin an expression, bite off more than she can chew. We made an appointment to get her spayed, which will give us a lot of peace of mind, since the vet said her amorous phase would probably recur every other week. Luckily that's not nearly as much as the dental work, but still gotta wait for a couple more paychecks before we're stable enough. I'm glad she doesn't have anything else seriously wrong with her.
Friday, I worked on this blog post. Work is still busy, but not as overwhelming as the winter was. From the beginning of Nov. to the end of Feb., one of my coworkers was out having and recovering from surgery, and it was on me to cover for most of her daily job responsibilities. Doing that while trying to stay on top of my own work was mentally taxing. I still have a large backlog to work through, but being able to focus only on my own work has been like letting my brain out of a straitjacket.
I don't have much time to write. My goal is to work on a post in little bits and pieces during work and have at least one entry a week. This is already rough for my ADHD brain to deal with, but I'm adjusting to it. I have an hour for lunch, which would be enough time to write what I consider a good post every day if I could use a computer, not so much on a phone. But it was enough. At least, it was. I have to spend my lunch break on something else now. More on that after this video game break.
Exploring the Archipelago
I'm a big fan of randomizers. It's great to be able to experience my favorite games in a fresh new way. I've finished randos for Dragon Warrior, Earthbound, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Win the Game.
It got a bit of press coverage, so you may have heard about a Games Done Quick event in 2019 featuring a Super Metroid/Link to the Past mashup. One person plays LttP, one plays SM, and as they explore their randomized worlds, they find items that the other player needs to progress through their own. It creates a unique experience of indirect cooperation. At no point do the players interact directly, but each player's progress is fundamentally linked with the other.
Archipelago is the extension of this concept into other games. A huge number of people are collaborating to add randomization and multiworld support to a wide variety of games. The number of supported games is bonkers. The idea that I could play Adventure for the Atari 2600 and it'll meaningfully interact with my friend's game of Dark Souls 3 seems like an April Fool's Day joke, but it's real. In fact, AF Day is the software's anniversary and a bunch of new games were just added, so it's a good time to check it out.
Anyway, my streaming partner and I were wanting to get back into it and were looking for something to play, and he had expressed interest in trying a randomizer before, and it's something I can play on my crappy old computer, so I suggested we check it out. I played Super Mario World and he played The Legend of Zelda. We finished after a couple streams, and we're in the process of playing a switcheroo, so now I'm playing Zelda and he's playing SMW. We're having a great time. Honestly I'd be happy if it were just playing games with my friend, but hanging out with some cool people in the chat is a nice bonus. We're trying to stream for a couple hours twice a week. Here's the playlist with every stream recording so far. It contains both my and my friend's sides. The best way to watch, in my opinion, is to sync them up with both videos side-by-side with one side muted. Unfortunately, there's no good way to automate this for people. Believe me, I tried. That's one reason this entry took so long, I was researching and testing what options are out there. Youtube Doubler is dead, Youtube Multiplier is riddled with ads (and there's no way to add a delay), and every other tool I found that claimed to do what I want didn't work. I'm not surprised, google is constantly removing functionality and breaking APIs so all the tools that interact with it are rickety at best. If I had a better computer, I'd try to edit them into a compilation vid, but I doubt any nLVE would be anywhere close to functional on my laptop.
Rattling the Can
Speaking of bad computers, I'm accepting donations if anyone has a few bucks to put towards the cause, or has an old but decent computer you're not using and want to give a good home. My needs are modest: I have no interest in playing games or video higher than 1080p60 and no interest in recording or editing video higher than 720p60. Based on my research, I should be able to get a refurbished computer that suits my needs for about $250. Now that crypto has become a Weyland-Yutani-scale industry and all the GPU hype is around AI slop and bonkers real-time post-processing,1 ones that are Pretty Good at games and video are fairly affordable.
Anyway, if you'd like to contribute funds you can click the tip jar link in the navbar or click here for my Ko-Fi (already 20% funded!) and if you want to contribute hardware send me a message. Anything with at least a GTX 16 series and 16GB of ram is probably fine. I can cover shipping if you're in north america.
I want to stress that the world is shit and I will absolutely survive without a new computer, so this should be last on your priority list as far as charitable giving goes. But if you have a few bucks in your entertainment budget and would like to use it to thank me for / assist me in entertaining you, it'd be appreciated.
Why This Took So Long
A couple weeks ago I noticed that my back was in agonizing pain when I woke up in the mornings. It was definitely some sort of muscle stiffness and not something wrong with my bones, because once I got up and started moving around, the pain subsided and would only recur if I contorted my body in specific ways.
"Huh," I thought, "this is agonizing. I should probably do something about this." So I committed myself to doing something that I had wanted to do anyway once the weather got nicer, which is start walking during my lunch breaks. I had sort of forgotten about this quest, because it was easy for me to do other things instead, but the back pain brought it into sharp focus.
So, for the past couple weeks I've been going on a walk every day for an hour. I should've realized that sitting most of the day at work and home was going to start causing more issues as I got older. I walk to work and home from work every day, but it's not quite enough.
Luckily I enjoy walking, and my only issue was finding time for it. I downloaded a simple step counter app2 to see how I'm doing, and between my lunch and "commute", I'm getting just over 10,000 steps a day. Which is the number everyone says is a good one. Nice and round.
I, uh, may have slacked a bit over the weekend
I'm happy to report that my back pain has already subsided almost entirely. I'm still a little stiff getting out of bed, but I haven't had a day where I questioned if I'd be able to get out of bed in several days.
Unfortunately, and you knew this was coming, every silver lining has its cloud: this means that the chunk of time that I was most likely to blog is now spoken for. I don't have any regrets, because being in agonizing pain is also not conducive to blogging, but it is disappointing. I'll probably have to ask you to expect fewer and shorter entries until something changes about my work situation. Thanks for understanding 🦝
Peri-processing?↩
Someone's working on a walking game for Archipelago à la Pokémon Go, which would've been the perfect connective tissue between two otherwise unrelated topics, but I haven't yet figured out how it works. I'm devastated.↩