nick

The small, real, original web via space • time • tech

Incredible intro to the small web, and not centered around the Atmosphere like most of the things I post here. The internet isn't dead, you just have to know where to find the cozier, more authentic parts of it.

The Feed is the Product: Why We Stay in Walled Gardens, and Why We Might Finally Leave for the Open Social Web via Zsolt's pckt blog

Posts like this make me jealous of how talented some indie bloggers are. This is by far the most comprehensive case I've seen on why the open social web is so important, and why anyone still living in the Zuckerverse should make the leap over here. If I still had Facebook or Twitter, I'd share this with everyone.

Blog how you want to blog!

Especially if you're doing it for you. Everything doesn't have to be a spectacular show of professional journalism, covering breaking new stories that take dozens of hours of research.

A lot of us are here because it got way too toxic in the Zuckerverse and Twitter. Or sometimes we write just for fun. Mostly it's that.

This space isn't reserved for some highfalutin group of elite writers. It's for everyone.

I came across a post on Bear Blog's Trending feed yesterday. It was from this guy who took time out of his day to dig through someone else's archives and make a big list of posts he thought were "unessential", "repetitive", "redundant"; a list of negativity linked to different posts, trying to dunk on a really nice guy. A guy who writes thoughtful posts that inspire people like me and plenty of others to keep blogging. That guy is Robert Birming, and here's his response:

Re: Re: Blank blogging counts too – Robert Birming

I'm probably reading into it more than I should, but it's such a bummer because this place has been so chill otherwise. Honestly I guess that's a good thing though? I've been on the small web around four years and this is the most drama I've seen here so far. Props to Robert for taking it with grace and going about his day.

Andrew and Tristian Tate arrested via AP News

wtf is he wearing 😂

I wonder if it makes sense to try to implement standard.site in the context of rss.chat?

via Dave Winer / Scripting News

Not much to go on here, but it's cool to see the guy who invented RSS talking about standard.site! Full disclosure, I don't fully understand how rss.chat really works... I mean it's definitely a microblogging platform tailored to developers, but I think you have to run you own instance? Big Micro.blog vibes though — it's cool to see so many OGs of internet culture still tinkering and innovating.

Colin Domnauer: The Hallucinogen That Isn't There via Psychedelics.co.uk

This is the kind of shit I wish I could volunteer to get out of work for. You should be able to choose one thing a year: either jury duty or eating a bowl of mysterious mushrooms that are totally safe, aside from making you hallucinate tiny people for an unknown amount of time.

tipping culture is odd via lizzie's thoughts

i believe it really shouldn't be like this. instead of employees and customers shouting at each other, they should take it to business owners and managers who pay below minimum wage! why are they owning a place if they can't pay their staff properly? in my mind, employees deserve at least the minimum wage, some guarantee that the work they are doing is getting them something. and customers should get to pay the price that's on the menu without being shamed into paying the employees' salary- that's on the owners!

I hate tipping culture, but in my experience as someone who grew up dirt poor in some backwoods Ohio town, it's one of the few ways to actually make an allllmost livable wage without going to college. That, and working for commission but I'll leave that be for the sake of not writing an even longer wall of text.

My partner used to work at a dive bar that didn't pay an hourly wage at all, but on a good Friday or Saturday she would bring home $300 in cash. When she left and started a new job in retail, at the beginning she was only bringing home a little more than that per week.

I will say it drives me insane when I go somewhere like a vape shop and they ask for a 25% tip because they rang you up at the point of sales.

I've always lived here so it never dawned on me how fucked up tipping culture is until non-Americans started pointing it out. But I always tip my barber 50%, at least 25% on any sit-down meal, and no less than $10 for a DoorDash order, no matter how small, because I honestly wouldn't drive to a fast food place, wait in line for 20+ minutes and then hand-deliver someone's food — period, let alone for a $2.60 tip on a $26 order.

All of that being said, I totally agree with the author of this post. Especially the note they left at the bottom:

NOTE: i do apologise if i have made any obvious mistakes in what i'm saying. once again, i'm not american and my opinion is based on what i know about the tipping culture over there. i just believe that this system is wronging both the customers and the employees- and that the real enemy should be confronted.

Can't argue with that. It's a bad way to do business and things should work differently. It's just as shit as most other American "culture" but I don't think it'll ever change tbh.

I'll add my own closing note, er more of a question I guess:

Do service workers in countries without tipping culture make a decent wage? I feel like they do, but I've never been to a restaurant with servers who even make minimum wage.

Online Friends Are Real Friends via Absurd Pirate

For my whole life, there was always this stigma towards online friends, honestly just people online in general. Having more friends online than real life seemed like a trait a complete loser would have. While I think that stigma still exists, it exists to a lesser extent. Especially with younger generations who spend a lot of time online.

I remember those days of people cringing from a mile away when you said you "met someone online" lol it's definitely changed a lot, and I agree people's perspectives on "online friends" has too.

I've got friends all over the world, and I think that's beautiful. My friends from Germany, Austr(al)ia, the South, Hong Kong, or Italy are just as real to me as any of my other friends. I value all of them because they're all lovely people.

That's is what's beautiful about the internet. Sure, there are terrible places here too, but someone from a couple generations ago never could've imagined the luxury of being able to meet people from all different cultures and backgrounds, anywhere on Earth from a little rectangle in your pocket. Especially when you live somewhere that's hard to find likeminded people, or if you're stuck at some dumb ass job all the time to survive. Online friends keep me sane, and that's worth something.

i don't want to be defined by only one thing via RNOTTÉ Animation

and neither should we be defined by what we do for work. i like that i discuss a variety of things on my own blog. i like various art forms, retro computers, the indie web, flower photos, and cute things. sure, i bring up my music video animation business every now and then on this blog, but that doesn't mean that's all i want to talk about.

So many people let their jobs define them. That's one thing I hate about working in sales. Every sales manager tells you to "always be selling; tell people who you are and what you do!" as if your entire life revolves around work.

That's also one reason I quit trying to make a niche blog and got into personal blogging. That's why I loved Tumblr so much back in the day, too — it's this scrapbook of things you saw and said "hm. That's neat" so you reblogged it. Added it to the collection. Regular blogging can be that way too. Talk about what you wanna talk about and don't worry about cramming yourself into a box ❤️

I sketched out a joke about doomscrolling via JetGirlArt

I Spent an Hour Learning Who DHH Is. That Was Enough. via Ewan’s Blog

Tl;dr Omarchy is racist Linux

Local Home Depot's Sign Change Upsets Customers

In related news: there are a lot of loudmouth dipshits like the Omarchy guy living in Michigan. It hurts no one to add an extra language to store signage. Especially when so many of the locals speak it.

7 Reasons Why Standard Reader Is My Choice via mochott

It is the Google Reader of the ATmosphere network. If the classic Google Reader read syndication feeds based on the W3C Atom standard and the old RSS format, Standard Reader reads and displays Standard Site data.

When I wrote my post about the Atmosphere yesterday, this didn't even dawn on me. It's so true though. Back when Google Reader was at its prime, most RSS feeds looked great. Nowadays, almost every commercial website on my feed is just a short, one sentence summary and a link to read more. Or sometimes there's no content at all, just a link to the article and some garbled social media links and blank bullet points. Every personal blog lets you fetch the full feed, and it's the same with sites on ATProto. The irony is that with most blogs, I'd actually rather read it on the website to see the author's style. Standard Reader lets you set things up that way, if you prefer.

First things first, this is coming from a complete rube with little to no understanding of software/web development, but: why would you ever need something like ATProto?

The internet itself is already a bit of an operating system right? You interface with it through the browser, and you can point it at the address of a website or a web app. It runs on JavaScript, HTML, CSS, etc. while your PC runs on more powerful languages like C++ and all of that other stuff.

Back to the browser:

ATProto is like another layer on top of that existing environment. It's an ecosystem that runs on top of the web we've already had for decades. I hate to use this analogy, but it reminds me a bit of when cryptobros were going all in on "Web 3" — only without all the funny money, Ponzi schemes and dumb ass six-figure JPEGs. You could log into all these different websites, games, marketplaces with your wallet address. No need for a password. And it was like its own little universe. A universe of garbage, but a universe nonetheless.

The Atmosphere lets you do all that, only without being garbage. It's quite nice actually.

You could build a cozy blogging platform that looks identical to Leaflet with HTML and JavaScript; you don't need any of these open standards or integration with Bluesky, or Standard.site or whatever.

But then it would just be another blogging platform.

I could install my own Miniflux instance on a server and have an RSS app I have total control over, but then why did I just trade that in for an RSS reader that runs on ATProto?

I'm writing this without knowing much about the mission statements or philosophy behind it too btw; I'm writing this as some guy who's simply online way too much and has become absolutely obsessed with all the cool shit I keep finding here. That's why I decided to write it though: there are hundreds of posts about what makes this machine run, but the second I start reading one of those my eyes glaze over and I might as well be trying to decipher hieroglyphs.

I wanted to give some perspective from an absolute end user who really, really appreciates what's being created here.

A big part of it is the community.

It's wired up to this place where I'm already shitposting and re-skeeting posts from other people all day: Bluesky. Or if you use one of the other servers like BlackSky or Eurosky, they're all using the same protocol so you can log in with one of those accounts too. I have a single unified login that gets me into a suite of different apps without creating a million different accounts. I have the same username everywhere in the Atmosphere, instead of being moldyringwald in one place, m0ldyr1ngw4ld somewhere else, and moldyringwald199 in a third place.

I could even take it a step further and use one of my own domain names for my handle if I wanted. I can self-verify my identity on social media as the guy who owns this blog through updating a couple of DNS records where I host my domain. That's pretty cool, if you ask me.

Another reason this feels so important to me is because it's open source, and a lot of it is community built. You can log onto Meta's dreadful servers and have an account on Instagram, Threads and Facebook, and even log into third-party games and apps, but it's... on Meta's servers. It's so commercial and the entire goal of having you there is for billionaires to make more money off of you, or at the very least harvest all of your personal data to serve you eerily relevant ads and influence you through gross algorithms.

That doesn't exist here. At least not yet. And that's definitely one thing I'm afraid of; Bluesky isn't making money, so how sustainable is it? When will they introduce ads and pro plans that come with different tiers of subscription fees?

I honestly have no idea what's in the cards for this place down the road. But I'm confident enough in what's being built across the 'sphere that I paid for a year subscription to Leaflet and deleted my old blog. At the very least, it's largely community built. There are already microblogging alternatives to Bluesky. It doesn't really mean anything to ATProto; it would be perfectly fine without Bluesky at all.

A big part of this whole thing is that no single entity owns it; no one is responsible for maximizing profits and increasing member signups. There is no board of directors who need to see improvements on earnings month over month.

Some apps I like / final thoughts:

Things like Anisota completely rework what it means to interact with a social network. Glean makes RSS more social without feeling like ancient tech or trying to reinvent the wheel. Leaflet brings blogging to your digital social life without being an entire ecosystem of its own like Wordpress. Standard Reader makes it easy to read and interact with all the bloggers you follow in the Atmosphere. And KlearSky? Well it's just another Bluesky client like Anisota or the Skeets app, but it looks so fucking good. You have all these options to drastically change your experience here.

Where most of the tech world is going corporate minimalism, the Atmosphere is a fucking rainbow of color.

Freedom, I guess? It boils down to freedom. The freedom to use whatever front end you want, to do whatever you want with your data, and to be in a community that doesn't resort to ragebaiting and manipulative algorithms to influence elections and sell screen protectors.

I'm sure I got some stuff wrong, but this is my best understanding of what this place is and why it matters to me, the end user. So far.

The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change via The Marginalian

The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

On Loving a Senior Dog via Notes by JCProbably

Cocoa isn’t just my dog. She’s my soul dog. The only way I’ve ever been able to explain it is that it feels like, in another lifetime, we were one soul that somehow found its way back together again in this one.

Maybe that’s why everything just feels extra heavy lately. The thought of mortality doesn’t just feel like a heartbreak. It feels like imagining a part of my soul being torn away.

But she’s still here.

I’m trying not to grieve tomorrow while we’re still living today. I’ll keep helping her heal, maintain her quality of life, celebrating the good days, and loving her through every moment we still get to share.

I feel this so much. We have a few cats and a little rat terrier at home, but my 18 year old cat Pepper is the most important one in the whole world to me. I have anxiety about how old she's getting, but she's been through so much with me and she just keeps on going. I definitely baby her more than the other animals. I'll sneak her extra treats sometimes when no one's looking, and she has toys that are just hers, that she treats like little trophies. I, too, have to shake it off and tell myself pretty regularly that we've had nearly two decades together already and I need to appreciate her while she's here instead of looking too far into the future.

I'm still new here. Just found out about the ATStore! You can browse different apps on ATProto, which is nice because before I knew about it, I was just googling random shit and going off Bluesky posts to find new stuff here.

Last night I found possibly my favorite RSS reader yet on it: Glean.at. It feels sorta like Miniflux in a way; the simplicity of it and all. But it also integrates Leaflet posts and adds the social aspect of trending stories, similar content you might like, and it has a neat AI summarizer for the top news of the day. You log in with your Bluesky handle and then you can import your OPMLs and all that good stuff.

People, Not Posts via Real Housewives of San Francisco

Blink-182 Team Up With Pac-Man For Arcade Collaboration via Retro Dodo

This seems like a weird collab but then again Mark hasn't taken off that 7-11 Pac-Man shirt for like three years...

A tiny keypad for chatting with chatbots via Boing Boing

Codex Micro is a keypad by Work Louder, for OpenAI, that's designed for use specifically with LLM-related tasks such as chatting to chatbots and marshalling your agents. It has 16 RGB keyswitches (clicky or silent) in a 4×4 grid and 32 keycaps for various functions; the corner switches are fancy rotary ones and it comes with dials and knobs for them.

I admit I'm probably turning into a grumpy old man a little more every day, but who actually needs this?

Rant incoming: I feel like we're at a point in the evolution of tech where everything useful has already been invented. Though I can't help but think of my dad back when smartphones first came out. He was still rocking an old HP tower running Windows XP and he'd always say shit like "I don't need a computer in my pocket I just need my PHONE to be a PHONE!"

Meanwhile these days he's just as addicted to social media and TikTok brainrot as any other boomer. He uses speech-to-text because he never quite learned how to type on a qwerty keyboard efficiently and of course he still needs to text and drive somehow. He uses Google Lens or whatever it's called to do AI searches of random shit, and he's still blown away by the fact that you can use Shazam to figure out what song is playing on the radio in a matter of seconds.

A lot of boomers thought smartphones would be a total flop because it was such a wildly new idea; to be eternally connected to broadband and chronically online via tiny pocket-sized computer.

15 years later or so, we're all addicted to these things. Even I didn't think touchscreens would ever take off because typing on a slide-out keyboard with physical buttons is so much better, but here we are.

Any time I see a new piece of hardware for AI, I can't help thinking of the Humane AI Pin. For a (very) premium price, you can have a clip-on microphone and camera that can do all the things an AI assistant can do on your phone, only shittier.

And maybe I am just set in my old ways; I still wear a digital Casio watch because I think smartwatches are too much. But as much as I hate the implications, I won't be totally delusional and say AI is a total failure or just a trend that'll disappear in a couple years. It's clearly here to stay, and will continue to be crammed into every facet of our lives from here on out.

I just don't think we need a whole hardware industry for it, but I guess there's a market for it. I will never be okay with smart glasses though. That's a hill I'll die on.

1Password lets Claude log you into websites without ever seeing your passwords via TNW

Even without seeing your passwords, this still creeps me out. Like I wouldn't even trust a close friend with my Yubi Key... nothing is sacred anymore 🤪

Orange-lipped monkey that roars and snorts deep in Congo rainforest is new species to science via Live Science

New monkey who dis 🙊

Ancient Egyptians Believed That These Newly Discovered Gold Tongues Allowed the Dead to Communicate in the Afterlife via Smithsonian Mag

Well this is a lot more sane than injecting it into your body while you're still alive...

How to avoid getting cyclosporiasis—and why washing lettuce may not be enough via Scientific American

Follow my revolutionary diet of gas station roller grill items and various deep fried meats and cheeses and you'll be just fine.

Startup Developes Micro-Drones Capable of Shooting Down Insects in Mid-Air via Oddity Central

Alex Toussaint and Clovis Piedallu, the engineers behind Tornyol, hope to one day use swarms of these micro-drones to eliminate mosquitoes from whole urban areas, with 10 of them capable of clearing one square kilometer of the winged blood-suckers.

95-Year-Old William Shatner to Play Riot Fest with Metal Backing Band via Consequence

This dude never stops lol. One of the GOATs.

The Beatles vs Hitler in the most fucked-up 1970s movie ever made via Dangerous Minds

The basic idea sounds almost like a practical joke. Take thousands of hours of wartime newsreel footage, splice it together with clips from old Hollywood combat movies, then soundtrack the whole thing with contemporary artists covering Lennon and McCartney classics.

wtf I didn't even know this existed lol. I'll stick with George Martin's In My Life record whenever I want to hear covers of Beatles songs.

Jesus "had six packs!" Conservative pastor rages at "gay, effeminate" Jesus images via LGBTQ Nation

Jesus was a twunk 🫦

Nokia’s 14 years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon via OSnews

A look back on how Android and iPhone killed arguably the best dumb phone brand.

Came across a post about an app called Nearby Glasses while scrolling Bluesky today. It uses Bluetooth to scan your surroundings for anyone wearing those dumb ass Meta glasses.

I've been loving Standard Reader.

Some of my posts here are probably a little meta at times, but that's mostly because I'm starting fresh in a whole new place and I'm still discovering new things about it. This is definitely one of my favorite inventions since RSS, so I had to share it for anyone who doesn't know.

It's a web reader for all things Atmosphere: Leaflet, Standard.site, etc. It's like a hub for this whole little universe. Definitely worth a look if you're blogging or even just reading posts in this space. I get most of my content from the Unread RSS app, but this feels more native and immersive for Atmosphere sites.

My history with blogging (what about YOU?) via Debbie's Blatherings

I love everyone's blogging journey stories. It's the Wild West out here; a lot of blogs are self-hosted, or hosted on sites that eventually die, or sometimes we just pick up and migrate somewhere else for the hell of it. I've used Wordpress, Ghost, Micro.blog, Bear Blog, and back in the day, Angelfire, Xanga, Blogger, and I even tried regular blogging on Tumblr in its younger days. I've migrated and tried to save everything before, but lately I just nuke the whole thing and start over when I'm feeling burned out. I think I'll stick around in the Atmosphere for a good long while though. I like it here.

Bluesky Is Not The Center of The Atmosphere via The Digital Renaisance

I use Bluesky — it's pretty much my only social media presence. But Sam is right: it's only a small part of the Atmosphere, even if it was the original app here. The biggest reason I stick with the main instance instead of moving to something different (and with more/better features) like mu.social is because I have nightmares from when I first migrated to Mastodon from Twitter.

I found a cool instance, then it shut down so I had to migrate. Then I found another instance but it got raided by the FBI and its owners didn't tell anyone until months after the fact. Then I moved to another instance and that one shut down too. Decentralization is great and all, but I don't have any more migrations in me right now.

My website is ATmospheric via bekapod.dev

Really good read on hosting your blog in the Atmosphere. For people much more technologically inclined than me anyway; I always screw up anything I try to self host and that's why I love Leaflet.

the internet is becoming increasingly hostile towards VPNs via basement blog

I feel this more every day. I used to use an always-on vpn and it only broke things like banking apps or maybe the HR website for my job. Now it feels like almost nothing works. The only thing I use now is iCloud Private relay. It only works inside of Safari, but (most) websites will still load with it and I get the illusion of privacy or something like that.

Astronomers find sugar near the creamy center of the Milky Way via The Register

The discovery of interstellar erythrulose suggests that the interstellar medium could be a viable source of sugar feedstock for the prebiotic synthesis of the first nucleic acids, not only on the primitive Earth but also elsewhere in the Universe

TIL there is sugar in space.

Tribute Bands Team Up for "The Nu-Metal Values Ozzfest Rehash Tour" via Consequence

The three acts performing on most dates are Twist (Korn), Full Nelson (Limp Bizkit), and Diamond Eyes (Deftones), with select appearances by Oldschool Hollywood (SOAD), Projekt Hybrid Theory (Linkin Park), Stricken (Disturbed), Forfeit (Cehvelle), and Redefined (Sevendust)

This must be how my dad felt when he saw that Pink Floyd tribute band a few years ago 🤪

My Retirement Uniform via Concrete Lunch

Before that trip to Cavender’s I ordered a leather belt off Amazon. When it arrived one of the little snaps where you change the buckle was already broken. ENSHITTIFICATION. I returned it for a refund. Cavender’s was 95% stuff I would never wear. The whole country/western/cowboy aesthetic doesn’t appeal to me...BUT – the merchandise was super nice! My style or not, man, being in a store full of quality clothing and intelligent employees made me feel like I was in the right place! At least for a plain leather work belt.

I feel this SO MUCH lately. Everything is shit. It's almost impossible to find real leather shoes, belts or even wallets in most department stores anymore. And I, too, wear Doc Martens to work every day. Even though, as Bob mentions in this post, they're made in China now, they're still the only dressier shoes I've bought that haven't fallen apart after six months. I need to get a good belt now too.

You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month: here’s how it went via OSnews

This goes about how you'd expect 😆

For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.

HyperTexting is now available on the App Store via HyperTexting

I absolutely love this! I geek out over anything with an emphasis on RSS. Especially since everything has an algorithm now, and it's constantly trying to manipulate your emotions and attention so you spend more time in their app, or buying things from ads.

It feels a bit like a Twitter or Bluesky timeline, only everything is pulled from RSS feeds. No login necessary. It looks like they're working on letting you post from your Hugo, Wordpress or Ghost blog eventually too, so that's cool. Anything to make the web more human is cool with me.

The Tiny Awards, celebrating the best personal, independent, non-commercial, and newest websites via disassociated.com

Founded by Matt Muir, Matt Klein and Kristoffer Tjalve, who is also a co-publisher of the Internet Phone Book, the Tiny Awards celebrate the independent, quirky, and utterly unique. Something even a cursory glance at the previous three winners quickly makes apparent.

That's what blogging is all about: being your authentic self instead of posting for clout or ad views. We're all unique and have our own quirks. I love community stuff like this that showcases awesome indie bloggers you'd probably never find otherwise.

Let's call doomscrolling what it is via saiyan's corner

We are drowning in an endless stream of things calling for our undivided attention.

I had to delete TikTok off of my phone recently because it became such a vampire with my free time. If I have something to do in two hours I'm like fuck it; I'll just scroll TikTok until it's time to leave. Or if I'm bored at work, sitting in the drive through waiting on my order, up late on a Saturday night after everyone went to sleep... whenever I had free time, I was doomscrolling.

That's what I love about the small web/indie web; whatever you wanna call it. It moves slower and more intentionally. You might actually have to do a little digging and exploring, but what you'll find is authentic content without an endlessly scrolling page. There's a pause after you read a blog post — an opportunity to tune back into the real world, instead of feeling like you're going to miss something the second you look away.

Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search via AdWeek

Who even uses Google anymore? There are so many good alternatives. Kagi, obviously, but even DuckDuckGo is pretty good these days. The models it uses for its AI assistant are more accurate than Google, or if you absolutely hate it you can easily disable it. Or if you're not a fan of either of those, there's the EU-based Uruky.

I remember how obnoxiously important it was to optimize your website for Google back in the 2000's and 2010's, but we're not living in that world anymore. Fuck em.

SEO slop is out, AI slop is in 😵‍💫

Fan-favorite Taco Bell items affected by ‘explosive diarrhea’ parasite in US via Dexerto

Taco Bell has been causing explosive diarrhea since 1962 but suddenly it's national news 🤨

McConnell Bolts Upright in Terror as JD Vance Enters Hospital Room via The Borowitz Report

“Get that bastard away from me!” the Kentucky lawmaker shrieked.

Before you get your hopes up: yes, it's satire.

Columbus one of the country’s most bed bug-infested cities, Orkin says; 5 other Ohio cities in top 50 via 614Now

Everyone knows bedbugs are the secret ingredient for the "scarlet" in OSU's scarlet and grey. I say that as a Buckeye, with love.

It's pretty early in the day still; most of these links are from last night. I'm back at work today, so I'll be focusing on more productive things like vaping in the bathroom and playing Nintendo games... but mostly trying to manifest no one walking through that fucking door and making me do stuff.

👾 What I'm playing:

I've been into the Castlevania Dominus Collection lately. Tried playing the original arcade version of Haunted Castle but I was ready to rip my hair out after five minutes so I switched to the much more forgiving remastered version and finished it in about a half an hour.

Pretty hyped that Konami is FINALLY working on an all new title in the series: Castlevania: Belmont's Curse.

💿 What I'm listening to:

Converge is still heavily in rotation, right now Hum of Hurt is getting the most playtime. Listening to a lot of nostalgic MySpace screamo bands too, like I Set My Friends on Fire, Scary Kids Scaring Kids and of course a little Hawthorne Heights.