Very cool month, finally managed to have some hard earned holidays! I had the privilege of going with some friends (even some I hadn’t seen in a long time!) to an apartment near the beach, and oh boy did I need that. I came back fully charged! Apart from that, not much movement in any area.

Projects

I have refactored my local network a bit, bought a proper router with integrated firewall and monitoring, and a new AP to get along with that. Next step will be re-creating my entire home-assistant instance from scratch on a new raspberry pi. With that I will start a blog post series on every step I’m going to take, sort of a tutorial sort of informative. You can do very cool things with it.

Not much time for anything else.

Books

• The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

  I read only a little more, either the good is not as impacting as the first one (it isn’t) or I’m completely gone with my reading habits again. I though I would enjoy this on my vacation time, but I didn’t end up hooked. I will probably drop this one, sadly.

Games

• Super Mario 3D All-Stars: Tried starting with Mario 64 first, but the camera and controls were so frustrating I ended up skipping it and going directly to Sunshine. I’ve collected a few stars but I haven’t sit down properly to get with it, only playing on spare time between other things.

• Among Us: The new cool kid on the block, very funny to play with friend over discord; guaranteed fun.

Articles

I ended up doing a Telegram channel to paste interesting articles/videos as I see fit, this way I don’t forget taking notes that much. Now I only need to remember this channel exists…

• The design behind Super Mario Odyssey
• Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild - An open world adventure
• The magic of the first Legend of Zelda
• How to keep players engaged (without being evil)
• How One Gameplay Decision Changed Diablo Forever
• Diablo: A classic game postmortem
• When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number
• Edmund McMillen Breaks Down His Game Design History (Meat Boy, Isaac & More) | Noclip
• Did Nintendo download a Mario ROM and sell it back to us? - Here’s A Thing
• Why Masks Work BETTER Than You’d Think
• Mining Your Own Design: Crafting the Crafting System in Astroneer
• Skill-Building Series: Pixel Art and Animation in the Hi-Bit Age
• The Era of Visual Studio Code
• The origins of the Super Mario fashion decision