My Stupid Plants

I had purchased this pachypodium saundersii years ago, pre-COVID during a local plant sale. She’s pretty hardy as she just lives on a table in the backyard in mostly full sun year round and hasn’t died off or suffered too much from overexposure of any kind (we live in a favorable succulent environment so overexposure isn’t too much of a concern, but it did rain quite a bit the last year or two and it can dip into almost freezing at night a few times in the Winter).

I had finally, years later, re-potted her into a container other than the ugly plastic one that it came in. I always see pictures of these with gorgeous thick caudexes. I have a feeling that I need to water her more, especially now when it is hot AF.

This is Bob the coffee plant. Bob lives outdoors on the porch. I would love for Bob to live in the house in a window or something, but I cannot trust the orange one not to eat the plants. One of the few plants that I own that regularly requires actual watering. The goal here is a long term one: Keep Bob alive, let him thrive, may be at some point down the line enjoy coffee beans; But I think for the time being, not dying is a good starting point.

Whistler 2024

We had the absolute pleasure of visiting Whistler earlier this summer to hike through old growth forests and mountain bike around lakes and down trails over a long weekend. The super long days and cool weather made it a perfect time of year to visit. We took the float plane up from Vancouver and were treated to fabulous views of snowcapped mountains.

(Pictures below the cut)

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My Techo Kaigi for 2024

I have seem the term, “techo kaigi” floating around various journaling and planning blogs, channels, and communities that I follow online. It is a Japanese term that translates to notebook/planner meeting and roughly refers to a self-reflective meeting that one has with themselves to review what planning systems did or did not work and why. I find it to be a good end-of-year and mid-year audit of personal organization and project systems. It’s also a good opportunity to review if any personal needs have changed to warrant something new being added or removed. And if we are all being perfectly honest, it is also an opportunity to treat myself to new stickers or something like that.

At one point in time I had tried containing all of my journaling and planning to one or two notebooks but I am terrible at journaling regularly in any capacity whatsoever and well, life is too short to only use a mere one or two notebooks anyway. So, I will take what I can get which usually means writing, drawing, or scribbling in any number of notebooks or digital devices whenever I feel like.

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New Customized Keyboard

About a half-year ago I had purchased a budget keyboard for work and personal use off of Amazon (an Epomaker RT100 for about $100); My 75% keyboard is great for personal use and light travel where I need a keyboard, but not so great for work-at-home because it really annoys me not having a numpad to use. The keyboard was great, up until the point where it wasn’t and the entire QWERTY row just died. Unfortunately, I was way outside of the return period so I took it as an opportunity and a sign to just upgrade to something that is a little bit better.

Brand: Keychron Q6 Pro
Switches: Gateron Pro Yellow
Keycaps: Pink Milk & Honey XDA profile PBT keycaps
Mods: 2x tempest tape mod, force break mod, poron case foam.

Technically, 88.88% Gateron Pro Yellows with exactly 8 Keychron banana switches because the RT100, the board I pulled the switches from, is a 96% and not full-size. At some point in the near future I will get new linear swit ches whenever it is that I figure out which ones I want.

The force break and tape mods get got rid of the metallic ping from the aluminum case.

Japan 2022

Totally meant to do a Japan Trip #3 picture dump literally a year ago, which is when these photos are from. Then again, I don’t think I ever did a proper photo dump of our second trip in 2019. Whoops.

We booked and planned this trip a month before we left. Japan had just opened up to tourism and the yen was like, 150 to the dollar. We wanted to take advantage of the low crowds and being generally antsy to go somewhere outside of the state.

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My Battlestation: July 2023

Obviously I need even more screens on my desk. Finally bought a laptop arm (rightmost side of desk) on Prime Day for my work laptop so that I don’t have to constantly shuffle the dice tower and whatever else is on the rightmost side of my desk whenever I join a meeting.

Not pictured: The canvas bag full of unorganized crafty/journaling things on the floor next to my desk and my GUNPLA backlog.

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Luna the Cat B&W

I think this may be my new favorite Luna photo. I still haven’t posted our Japan 2022 photos anywhere. You would think that after around 7 months I would have finally cleared my Lightroom editing and posting backlog, but sadly that isn’t the case.

Musings on Starforged (TTRPG)

A while back I came across Quest Calendar on Reddit/Kickstarter, a single-player RPG in the format of a tear-off day calendar; It’s a fun RPG that only takes a few minutes out of your day to play. It has also opened the door for me to explore the Solo RPG genre, which I was previously unaware had even existed. I have been playing Starforged on-and-off for a few months and it is positively delightful; It’s a PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse) based tabletop RPG that can be played either solo, co-op or guided; My chosen method of play is sort of a blend between a tabletop roleplaying game and a creative writing prompt.

You see, I love journaling and drawing/watercoloring as a form of personal creative expression and I really like dice rolling TTRPGs. I also really really love world building but I really really don’t want to DM a game. Starforged seems to do a decent job of scratching the odd combination of all 3 itches. So lately, there have been more than a few evenings spent with my Traveler’s Notebook, a printout of some of the rules, dice, a cup of tea, and background music to set the mood. It’s also nice having other activities that aren’t in front of a screen or don’t require daylight and expensive sporting equipment.

One thing that I really like about PbtA systems (vs D20 based systems like DND) is that I feel it is a better balance of chunky stat things vs narrative based actions. The systems is also open enough to make it fairly easy to incorporate other role-playing systems. For example, I really like Stars Without Number’s method of sector generation as it’s more comprehensive so I have been using a blend of SWN and Starforged to generate new sectors and planets. I might integrate some of the ship building and ship combat rules, but I don’t want my campaign to get too mechanically “chunky” so we’ll see.

Here’s a couple of things that I have bookmarked that I either use or have bookmarked to look into:

  • Stars Without Number: Mentioned above
  • Bucket of Bolts: Another indy solo space RPG. I really like the idea of playing through this and then integrating any characters and ships into my Starforged campaign.
  • Starship Geomorphs 2.0: In-depth ship building. It looked neat.
  • itch.io Starforged Jam: Community created extended Starforged content. The Cyberpunk playkit interests me greatly as I am enjoying Cyberpunk 2077 play #2 (inspired by watching Edgerunners).

…I also really love how the community has officially unofficially adopted the standard sized Traveler’s notebook as an analog medium for this game. I have a notebook insert and folder with laminated cheat sheets that I use during play sessions.

Happy November

I am not really great about updating this site, am I? I had a random actual/digital life update post sitting in drafts from way back in May but I think most of that is old news now. Anyhoo:

  • With the news that Japan would be opening up for tourism in October, we had quickly planned a November trip at the end of September. We actually just got back this week. Fabulous time as usual, I have a mountain of images to sort through, edit and post, which will be hopefully mostly done by next week because I kind of wanted to show them to family at Thanksgiving.
  • This is old news but my solution to needing a new personal computer and not wanting to deal with any GPU or CPU shortage was to just buy a MacBook Pro. A+, would recommend.
  • The bag that I use for my photography & adventure every day carry has once again changed, so I’ll make a post about that at some point.
  • A while back I came across a TTRPG system called Ironsworn and had bookmarked the site and put off looking into it. What I found interesting about it was that it could be played both solo and co-op. Recently-ish, Ironsworn: Starforged, a sci-fi themed followup RPG was released. I’ll make a separate post about this at some point but I have been playing it on-and-off in my spare time and it is very fun. It scratches a very specific analog creative writing/journaling, dice rolling, and world building itch. I’m really sad that I had missed the kickstarter.
  • I had this paragraph typed out in late May about how I had started up the Final Fantasy XIV trial again and was enjoying it but that phase only lasted about a month or so and I haven’t touched it since. Triple Triad for life though.
  • Finished reading Dragons of Deceit, the new Dragonlance novel on the plane trip over to Narita and started up The Expanse series. Slowly working through my reading backlog…