Recently I’ve had the pleasure of playing Baldur’s Gate 3, and in the later half of the game there’s a pretty annoying (tricky?) bit. Of course I’m talking about Lady Jannath’s estate. Spoilers follow.
Kyoukai no Kanata
Time again to watch some anime. I’ve had a pretty offensive gif from the 4chan /a/ era based on the idol dance bit, and since this weekend I felt drained to the bone I watched Kyoukai no Kanata instead of going to the mountains. Not sure if it was worth though. Obviously spoilers galore follows.
Bye Seafile
Operating Seafile was a very frustrating experience. In the first place, setting it up on my Kubernetes (k3s) cluster was quite a ride. It didn’t have a Helm chart or any manifests ready to spin it up, so I had to build my own. This turned out to be pretty difficult because it was clear that the software was not designed with containers in mind and it took significant amount of hacking to even just get it to work. But once it did, then you’d need to manually run garbage collection every few months, because that was a Paid Feature™. I put up with it because of the sunk cost fallacy and because other than that five minutes every 3 months or so, it was working okay. Until it wasn’t.
Old Gods of Appalachia
A while back I saw a post (skeet?) on my timeline that mentioned something called “Old Gods of Appalachia.” I haven’t had anything eldritch in my life recently (other than this cicada on my landlord’s tree that’s so loud I need earplugs to sleep) so I was instantly drawn to the mention of “old gods.” Today I at last listened to the first 4 episodes on the treadmill and I must say it’s real good stuff. Because of how compact (~30min) each episode is, it’s much easier to casually enjoy than for example trying to follow Critical Role (finding time to watch a 4 hour episode every week is tough). It’s not directly Lovecraftian in setting or the style of prose, but it has an unsettling feeling to it that I really appreciate. Definitely a good find!
Setting up additional container runtimes
The other day I noticed a post on one of my Misskey Antennas about “a container runtime written in Rust” called youki. This piqued my interest especially since its repository is under the containers org, which is also the home of Podman and crun for example. I’ll be honest and admit that I’m still not very clear about the exact responsibilities of such a runtime. It gets especially fuzzy when both “high level” runtimes like containerd and docker, and low level runtimes (that can serve as the “backend” of high level ones) like kata and youki are referred to just as “runtimes.” Anyway I decided to give it a try and see if I could get it to work with my k3s setup. It really wasn’t as easy as I’d hoped.
Breakfast issues
For the past few years, unless I’m in the mountains (or very severely hungover) I’m having granola with almond milk for breakfast. I switched from using cow milk after it started causing trouble (bloating and such fun stuff), but that’s genetic.
However recently I noticed that right after eating breakfast I get incredibly sleepy. It makes no sense: at that point I’m only 2-3 hours at most into the day, usually past my first coffee or energy drink, and possibly even past a good gym workout. And yet.
I grew suspicious, so this week I’ve been experimenting. Not having breakfast. Having the granola breakfast when I’m really hungry. Only having a slice of famichiki for breakfast. Conclusion is that the granola + almond milk mix, even if only half a serving, still makes me very sleepy.
What gives? More importantly, what could I replace it with so I’m not dead first thing in the morning?
Convenience
I’ve been trying to use linux for pretty much as long as I’ve had a computer. I’d kept running into blocks though: at first I was using my computer mostly for gaming, and that’s still not a strong suite for linux 20 years later. Then my workflows were dependent on tools that only worked on Windows (like Office’s Publisher, or Dreamweaver and Fireworks—hell I still miss the productivity I had with Fireworks). Then I had a laptop half of whose hardware wasn’t supported by any linux distro at that point. Then gradually those issues went away and I’ve been an Ubuntu main for over ten years now. Some linux elitists will look at my desktop and hiss that it’s not just a terminal or a tiled window manager that looks like it’s still 1995.
Arabaki.
I was looking at Reol’s tour dates when I found a surprising entry: the Arabaki Rock Festival, end of April. It was surprising because fests like that are usually in the middle of summer (see Summer Sonic or Rock in Japan) and this one, well, definitely isn’t. At first I wasn’t all that interested, since it’s held near Sendai which is quite a distance from Tokyo to go for a Reol show, but then I looked at the lineup and changed my mind.
Kamikochi I’m back
Last year I was so depleted financially due to the Karakoram expedition that I wasn’t back in Kamikochi until the end of the season. Since I still wasn’t well off enough to afford another attempt at Denali this summer, I can instead hike in Japan every weekend as I please (or as the weather allows). Naturally that means that I was hiking next to the Azusa river at the first chance.
The Global Rescue Experience
For my trip to Pakistan last summer, I’d signed up for the Global Rescue travel insurance in addition to my “normal” membership. I’ve been using this setup for most of my expeditions, since the membership covers helicopter rescue (a very important aspect especially in rural Pakistan) and the travel insurance covers pretty much everything else (though they refused to pay for my camera that was stolen in Argentina). For the Broad Peak + K2 expedition it wasn’t even a cheap endeavor with the travel insurance clocking in at almost $9000. However it included “interrupt for any reason” coverage, meaning it should pay up for pretty much any reason.
