February 2023 Gaming Report
Short month, very little progress for some reason.
I thought I had dropped something this month, but I don't see anything in my spreadsheet.
Pretty slow month. For some reason, outside of Saturday and Sunday mornings, I haven't spent that much time playing games. I did spend a good amount of time on my art, so I'd say that's a good thing.
Again, I have failed to finish Persona 3. I played some in early February, got my ass kicked by a boss, and I have not touched it since. I am so, so close to the end though...
I spent most of the month replaying Tomb Raider III. I liked it, but it is really hard. For some reason I started a replay immediately after finishing it, and I think I might use the cheat to get all the weapons. The Desert Eagle is so good!
Categories: random-thoughts
Trying out Livetext
I was looking at the very few novels I have on my bookshelves this afternoon, and realized that the only ones I would be sad losing are written by Belgian writer Jean Ray, mostly because his works have been out of print for decades, and they are very hard to find second hand (at least here in Canada, and particularly in areas where French is not the main language, like Ottawa). He's written countless short stories under various names, a few novels, and some stuff he was not credited for. I don't think I've ever seen a complete list of everything he's written.
Jean Ray died in 1964. A quick lookup confirmed that, in Canada at least (but not in Belgium), his books are in the public domain. I searched online to see if they were available digitally. I found a few. Most notably Malpertuis, a short novel, one of his most well-known works. But aside from that, it was pretty disappointing. (Part of that reason, I assume, is because his work is not in the public domain in his native country, where it will not be public domain until 2034).
I thought: "Mmmh, maybe I could put a few short stories in eBook format out and help preserve his works." Probably a stupid thought, but hey. Which made me wonder what the best OCR programs were.
There's a whole bunch of them, but out of the lot, it turns out I already had one installed on my MacBook. Actually, it came with the system. It's called LiveText.
So I went ahead and tested it out with the introduction of one of his novels, La Cité de l'indicible peur (The City of Unspeakable Fear).
I took a photo of each of the 7 pages with my iPhone, AirDropped them on my MacBook Air, opened them in Preview. I was able to select the text (as I would in Word), copy it, and paste it in a Scrivener document. I re-read the whole thing, added/removed italics as needed, added section breaks where they should have been, and voilà! I had the whole thing done in about 20 minutes.
I had never used it before but, I have to admit, LiveText works really well, even on a book printed in 1971 with yellowed pages.
So, yeah, great work Apple!
Categories: random-thoughts
January 2023 Gaming Report
New year, same report structure with minor changes!
I was really hoping to finish Persona 3 this month, and I am getting closer and closer to the end (after about 70 hours so far), but I had the (bad?) idea of playing Tomb Raider III as well, and that pretty much took over my gaming time for the last two weekends.
Categories: random-thoughts
The Year Ahead
Despite the world in 2022 being kind of a shitshow, and some family things adding another layer of crap to the mix, I have to say 2022 was a pretty good year for me.
When I quit my previous contract in April 2021, I thought it would take me two or three months to find another one. It ended up taking 10. When my contract ended in October 2022 (after multiple extensions), I was expecting the same amount of downtime. It turns out it only took two months, and I'm starting another job next week. (Which reminds me that I still have not tested the VPN access I got two weeks ago.)
As things are now, here are my thoughts regarding the first half of 2023:
That's a lot for me. I don't think I can get to everything. Japan is top priority (but the dates are flexible, as long as it's not Summer). Art and Blender are next, since they're a requirement for all my future game development projects.
With regards to game playing, there are a few games I want to play and complete this year:
Categories: random-thoughts
December 2022 Gaming Report
December report!
None
It's been almost a year since I deleted the "Backlog" spreadsheet from my Excel document. I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, it was nice to just get rid of it, but on the other hand I still think about it, and I'm slowly building a mental list of games I'd like to play at some point in the future. And I also track the list of games I buy (for budgeting reasons) in the same Excel document, so that provides another way for me to figure out what I have purchased but not played yet. One improvement I will make moving forward is just writing the platform, store and amount of the game, not keeping track of the titles. I will still have the receipts in my email archive (or in the game box for the rare physical game), if I ever need to figure out what game I bought on a specific date (which, let's face it, is unlikely to happen).
I was hoping to get Persona 3 Portable done this month, but it keeps not happening. I barely touched the game in December, after making good progress in November. I will do my best to rush through it in the first week of January, as I will be starting a new job on January 9th, and I also want to start Tales of Arise for the JRPG club (I have it installed and ready to go on my PC).
Same as always: Buy fewer games, play the ones I already own. We'll see how that goes.
The only games I plan to purchase next year so far are:
I will end up buying more than that, of course, depending on what I want to play, the JRPG game club, and sales.
Categories: random-thoughts