Just this guy, you know?

I’ve been in Army Bosh Mode for a while now. The French Napoleonics, DAK, and 30k Space Wolves have taken up all my hobby time. I need to mix it up.

Tickets for Warhammer Fest 2023 went on sale and I picked up a Golden Demon ticket too. I’m going to do a diorama. It’s been a while since my last diorama but I think I have a good idea. I’m planning on documenting the process here.

I’ve signed up for a Mastodon account. I had a poke around there a few years ago but it was almost entirely people talking about how great Mastodon is. Now there seems to be a (sub)critical mass of people where you can just have a conversation about stuff that isn’t Mastodon. It’s got a bit of the quiet pub vibe that Ideni.ca did back in 2010ish. So far it’s nice.

As per my previous post, I destroyed my Ghost installation. Nginx was shafted, networking in general was shafted, node was shafted. It was a mess. So I gave up and decided to go with a nice static site. Just like I always should have.

I managed to fix the networking enough to SSH into it. From their I dumped the mysql database into a file using a little bash

mysqldump -u root -p ghost_production > ~/mysqldump

From there back to my local machine where I used rsync to get the files downloaded with the classic:

It’s alive! It’s static! It’s a complete rebuild.

To cut a long story short I utterly ruined the VM my site was running on. This has given me the push to redo the site using a static site builder. I’ve chosen Hugo because I quite like Go.

I’ll slowly put my old posts up. Right now it’s a manual process but I’ll try to automate it.

It’s wild how it’s been 3 years since the last Sabaton album. Pandemic adjusted it’s ~1 year I guess. In between we’ve had a few singles in which have been somewhere between Fine and This Has Aged Poorly.

On first listen I wasn’t impressed so I’ve given it a lot more time before committing opinions to the blog, listening to it a lot.

First I’ll break down what I think of each track, then the album as a whole, and finally something about what I want from Sabaton these days.

Last year I wrote about useful stuff to buy/use. This will cover some useful stuff I found this year.

Order your coffee beans from a good roaster. Previously I’ve either had a Pact subscription or picked up random bags from cafes I’ve visited. Obviously with the Pando that’s been hard. I’ve taken to alternately ordering from Quarter Horse or Square Mile. I’ve been getting the filter roasts generally, always in bean form.

About 4 years ago I bemoanedthe heating in our house. It turns out that providing you’re willing to connect things to the internet it’s super easy. It was probably possible the time I wrote the post if you’re okay with the internet[0].

Simply use Tado°! Replace your thermostat with theirs, connect the internet bridge to your network and you’ve a minimal setup. At this point through the app you can define arbitrarily complicated heating schedules, have it adapt to the weather, detect open windows by drops in temperature, reduce the heating if you leave the house.

I managed to source an Xbox Series X late last year. I’ve been playing a lot of Assassins Creed since then.

There was a sale and picked up Odyssey for really cheap and proceeded to put 70+ hours into it. It’s brilliant. After not playing an AC game since 3 it was great to see the series improved the formula quite a bit. Combat felt better than I remember. The story was fun and Kassandra was incredibly likeable. Getting the “Good” ending is worth it I feel. The segments set in the future are always jarring but the payoff is very cool.

I think it’s fair to say that my interest in Warhammer 40k 8th edition peaked early and dropped off a cliff after playing a few games. I don’t think I really gave it a fair whack, something I think I’ve at least started to do better with with 9th edition (and Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game).

I have played exactly one game of 9th (and MESBG) this year and both were brilliant. As is my want I’ve spent more time analysing why I think that than actually playing the games.

Some of the albums I have enjoyed in 2021. In no order and not all from 2021.

Thatcher’s Techbase OST - Barry “Epoch” Topping

My GOTY has such a ripping soundtrack. Barry knocks it out of the park.

Oak, Ash & Thorn - Dark Forest

Wow. Just wow. I found these guys via Sayem’s excellent metal playlist. The sound of drinking a pint of warm bitter and shooting a longbow.

Ellipsism - Ba’al