My heart breaks for King Halo

Her mom was a famous Umamusume and her mom calls her saying shit like “Are you ready to stop being delusional and give up? Stop before you disgrace yourself.”

And with my expert training we’ve successfully proven that her mom is… right. She’s lost every race. Her career is ending in shame and embarrassment.

A couple weeks ago, I noticed my watch was no longer connecting to my iPhone when I was out of the house. Apple support pages say to unpair the watch, so I did that, and then I couldn’t get the watch to pair back to the phone.

So I took the watch to the Apple Store and the Genius there had me uselessly delete the VPN apps from my iPhone for no apparent reason, believing it to be related possibly. When that didn’t change things, he restarted my Apple Watch and then it was able to pair. But by the time I got home, it wasn’t working again.

So I chatted with Apple Support and they told me to call a phone number to get repair support. Because this was the first time in my life I didn’t get Apple Care+, I knew it would probably cost about as much as getting a new watch to fix, and I had other suspicions.

I’ve been pretty sure that the Bluetooth on my phone has been broken, but not convinced because Bluetooth LE stuff was still working (when unlocking doors in the building) and my AirPods were fine. But my Chipolo did not seem to be connecting, and, well, when I got a new iPad the other day, my iPhone was failing to do the wireless account setup thing with it where your devices talk to each other. But my other iPad set up the new iPad just fine.

So, I felt pretty strongly that my iPhone’s Bluetooth was broken and thought that I could go to the Apple Store again and use AppleCare+ to have them swap my phone out. But alas, no, the Genius told me they do not swap phones out in store anymore, that they only do certain hardware repairs. He ran a series of diagnostics on the phone which claimed that everything was just fine.

He told me to try wiping my phone, no thanks, but that I can also just order a replacement using the Support app on the phone. So I went home, and used the Support app to order a “Express Replacement”. Two days later I had my new iPhone, the transfer over went perfectly (I was worried the eSIM transfer would be impacted by the Bluetooth being broken, but it was not), and now my watch works and iPhone mirroring works and my Chipolo work. It’s great.

Anyway, that’s it for exciting updates in my life.

I had a lot of fun last night jamming on my TD-3-MO with some drum loops going. I don’t think timecodes work in Postalgic yet so jump to 29:05 for some ‘good stuff’.

We watched Bring Her Back last night. That was a very well made movie but I’ll never watch it ever again, for the rest of my life.

I’m not ignoring your message – I’m overwhelmed by the tyranny of being reachable

I’m switching lanes like a Subway Surfer. Digital whiplash has branded itself on to my cheek. My psychological tabs are maxed out, and there’s no alert to clear storage or update my internal OS.

This is a good read. I feel fortunate in that I, for some reason, have always been this person. I do this naturally. I recently heard a friend appreciate the fact that I am someone who always responds to messages.

Also… reading these two quoted sentences out of context make me think, “Did AI write this?” But we live in a new age where language is now shaped by LLMs, everything is suspect because nothing is immune, as the second you read LLM-generated text, you are susceptible to it.

My buddy got me a new toy! Very excited to start playing with it. This will be my first analog synthesizer. Not counting the microKORG I had briefly in my twenties.

I had to abandon my PSI-only playthrough of System Shock 2 because I am a giant baby and the game is very hard. I was only an hour and a half into it, so it wasn’t a big deal. I respec’d as a Navy boy, like 41% of gamers on Steam, and seem to be going for a gun-focused jack of all trades with no psionic ability at all.

I’m finally past the point that I got to as a teenager, which means I got to Deck 4 and saw the (in retrospect, as an adult, obvious) big reveal. But even with some more careful choices, I am still finding myself getting utterly schooled by this game on normal difficulty. No wonder teenage Brad, who was bad at video games and impatient, bounced off it despite the wonderful everything about the game.

I’m not quite sure what I am going to do. The worms and the flies are pretty brutal and now there are zombies who can throw grenades at me. How the fuck is anyone supposed to survive this? I feel like I should go back and respec again as some sort of mutant melee tank hero, because you’re always lacking for heals and ammo.

Maybe I am just not playing smart enough. It took me a while to figure out I needed to play Prey (2016) as if I was really there, and I’m still not quite there with System Shock 2. I should be noting down which replicators have stuff I need and be doing more backtracking. The maps felt massively huge when I was a teenager, but now they seem quite small and it’s very easy to cover them quickly… so why am I so stubbornly insisting I never leave a floor except to get chemicals for research? I am being a silly goose.

Ah, well, we’ll see what happens…

Nintendo finally sent me an invite to buy a Switch 2, so against my better judgement, I bought one. (Backstory: Nintendo kind of pisses me off, from releasing underpowered hardware, to their terrible online play systems, to never discounting their games, to …)

But, you know what, Mario Kart World is pretty good. I expected to be pretty underwhelmed both by the overall gameplay itself (I wasn’t a big fan of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe) and the graphics.

In actuality, the gameplay is pretty great and appears surprisingly deep (if you want to get crazy into wall riding and rails), the tracks are a lot of fun, and the graphics are pretty good. Could they be better? Sure, but they do the job and the game runs buttery smooth and looks great on my OLED. The new Rainbow Road specifically is a joy to race on and a spectacle to behold.

Is Mario Kart World worth a full $500 asking price to get the console and game together? I mean… no… but that’s the Nintendo tax for you.

I’m 30 hours into Death Stranding 2 and I never want it to end.