Now

Recent Things, in no particular order

With the change of season I was inspired to issue an update to my Now page.

Brighton's single-A baseball team the Jets reached the playoffs and went to Exeter for a semi-final game against the Exeter Spitfires. A band of us travelled across to watch them lose 12-2.

I've got the itch for self-hosting and recently bought a 10-inch server rack. Plans include a decently large (~24TB) NAS, some SBCs to play with clustering (Proxmox?), JellyFin, Pi-hole, some VLANs, and so forth. The intent is to get us to not use streaming services that are bad for content creators, bad for the quality of the content that we watch/listen to, and bad for us as we aren't being intentional and inconveniencing ourselves anymore. I've been writing a larger piece about being more intentional and getting rid of digital convenience/convergence in my life, so that will come out at some stage.

On the way to a holiday in Cornwall I stopped by my parents and ventured into their loft - I retrieved a large bucket that I brewed Kilju in during one of the lockdowns. Now safely in our spare room, I intend to brew some mead. And yes, everyone I've talked to about it has made jokes about going blind (which comes from US prohibition-era moonshiners - no homebrew method can create dangerous levels of methanol - industrial methanol was added by unscrupulous bootleggers to increase profits!) Maybe I'll write about it later.

Went to Boomtown this year (after nearly a decade of wanting to!) and reimmersed myself in the dnb scene, came out feeling alive again and with less social anxiety. Skream b2b partiboi69, my dnb hero DJ Marky, Aphrodite b2b Mickey Finn from the front left of the speakers, and many other incredible DJs... Reach for the lasers!

Rewatched United 93 with friends in a special edition/takeover of our weekly Media Night and it was the most gripped I've seen them. September 11 is a particularly emotive part of modern history that gets a certain set of Millennial/Zillenials fired up about the consequences of a post-9/11 world - mass surveillance programs, terrorism at home and abroad, the unjust war in Iraq, the 20-year "War On Terror" in Afghanistan, and not least - the meteoric rise in Islamophobia across the Western world. Lots of lessons not learned and plenty of societal othering accelerated cultural problems we still grapple with today.

Finally sat down and started playing Metal Gear Solid (PlayStation, 1999) for the first time. Besides the somewhat irritating near-30-year-old control scheme, the payoff for sneaking around undetected and getting a from-behind kill is immense. Huge bonus points for the long sections of dialogue that Kojima is very obviously using to directly talk to the audience about how the military-industrial-complex is bad, and the Solid Snake Method of conversation.

Added a tag system to the blog. This is based on the 'eleventy-base-blog' system (I used some of the Nunjucks filters from that repo) but this now means I can group posts together. The now pages are excluded, as they have their own archive that is accessible from any Now page.