The Justis Zone

Hey, the hugo template I used to use isn’t real anymore so I moved everything over to a new one. Let’s see how this gos.

We’re nearly three weeks into 2023 and I am finally ready to review various things that I enjoyed about 2022. If you needed to ever ask “Well, how are things going Justis?” that is about the current status. Let’s see how many of these I get through before I totally lose steam. Or drink too much of this wine I just opened. Or both.

The lists

Well, everything is in multiples of five so I have decided to only produce four lists to really make this uncomfortable in my brain.

Current Info

Listening to: Rx Bandits

Writing habits: Ha. Funny joke, me.

Status: Headcold - minus two constitution and wisdom. Minus one intelligence.

So, I have a podcast now? I’m actually really happy with the name as the creative process about what the show could be was stuck on “what on earth do we call this?” Most of the creative process has been the two of us drinking beers and talking for years about various things but, we never really tried to structure the conversation before. I love me a good wordsmithing. I can spend whole minutes wordsmithing a whole sentence into a fine edge that I can be proud of. The difference with a podcast is that the thoughts that leave my mouth have to be good the first-ish time. I’ve never let perfect be the enemy of good enough for anything I’ve ever done (you’re reading this, aren’t you) but, it’s a real struggle when I go back and listen to myself and regret absolutely every dumb fuckin’ thing I have ever said out loud to other humans for my entire life. I have to operate under the assumption that this is normal for starting your very first ever podcast.

Year Summary

One of the things that stuck out to me was how much I wanted to do the act of “grinding,” where you just do a repetitive task for moderate character improvement, in video games in 2021. It was pretty critical to helping me get through so many dang books and podcasts. I read 56 books in 2021. This was an improvement on almost zero in 2020 and virtually none since college. The repetitive grind was replicated with my domestic life as well where I did a lot of cleaning to get through some of these books. I mopped my whole house twice thanks to Brandon Sanderson. Robin Hobb kept my vacuuming on schedule. I’ve even did some driving around to finish an audio book now and then (“Well, I guess I can drive an hour and half to go get a growler of beer. Sure.”). Anyway, I put together some ordered lists of video games. Here they are.

I’m only a couple hours into the video game Returnal and I’ve come to a strange realization - The active reload is using the wrong stimuli for how my brain works. Specifically, the noise that comes from the controller, the specific way the controller rumbles, and the information presented on the screen is all wrong for what I find intuitive with a modern video game. Housemarque (the developer of Returnal) should have used the new fancy controller to provide this information in a better way. I want the new controller to bump me when it’s time to press the button.

Welcome to my blog. Go check the about page and see what’s up about me. I don’t really have much of a plan for writing here yet but, you can probably expect to find my thoughts on Video Games, table top games, and maybe some IT related topics. Mostly, this is to keep me honest about trying to write something when I feel the need to write something. I would like to attempt to get better at the habit of doing it. So come and read my nonsense!