💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › intermission.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:53:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-06-14)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
(congratulations, you have found a Gemini-exclusive post! I have removed this from the HLTB website...)
This post will be very long and not very mentally healthy.
When I started this log more than a year ago, I mentioned in the original (HLTB.com forum) post that I live in a "cheap-ass country". Some of my later posts specified that the country is Ukraine, which wasn't a very relevant detail until about 5 months ago, when I stopped updating.
The first month or so of the war was indeed pretty scary. I was woken up in the middle of the night by very loud explosions more than once, one of which was a hit on a nearby apartment building. I kept my laptop in my backpack at all times in case of air sirens, and just used my phone all day; air sirens weren't stopping so I moved to a village in Western Ukraine.
Afterwards, the heat had shifted away from Kyiv and into the East. The thing is (and my experience is not unique here), while this has turned out to be an utter nightmare for the affected regions and people who fought there, for most of the country this meant a return to some semblance of normal life. I safely returned to Kyiv, universities opened up (as messy as that was), I wrote my graduation paper and got my Bachelor's, and in general my daily routines have not changed much compared to the COVID days.
So I could've updated the log this whole time, but I just could not come up with an appropriate way to keep writing about 'Linux and Low-Spec gaming' in the current context.
I feel shame for spending a lot of time playing games for 4 months during a war, not because I aspire to be a soldier (I do not) but because I could've been helping people in some other way. This post that you are reading right now is a result of my internal bargaining: I'm going to feel less ashamed if I also list out some stuff that I did accomplish recently.
1. (this is a pretty unhealthy relationship I have with myself, maybe I should do some soul-searching, or better yet, some job-searching)
2. I did release the Minecraft modpack I talked about in my previous post. Light in the Sky is available on Modrinth and Curseforge.
Light in the Sky (LitS for short) is a tiny modpack that delivers a technical skyblock experience but is playable on very low-spec devices.
Light in the Sky on Curseforge
3. I released *another* Minecraft modpack called Ariadne, one that celebrates the open-source Modrinth modding platform as opposed to the walled-garden, Amazon-owned Curse. This is probably a weird tonal whiplash, going from talking about war to discussing petty drama in a modding community; but this community happens to be important to me since modded Minecraft was the reason I originally started programming as a kid. I wanted to return to it for comfy nostalgia's sake, and was sad to see Curse getting a tighter grip on it and making very questionable decisions.
Modrinth is an alternative platform which strives to keep its mods openly available for anyone, and Ariadne is my attempt to bring a lot of its most notable mods together for the sake of balancing them, helping solve some technical conflicts between them, and so on, all to improve the Modrinth ecosystem as a whole.
Ariadne: All of Modrinth/Quilt
4. I, uhh, got my Bachelor's. Oh, I already said that. Fuck, I'm bad at being an adult, as you can might be able to tell from reading all of this. What am I doing.
5. Mitch, the unofficial itch.io mobile app I've been developing for a while, got updated to v2.0, which allows not only installing and updating .APKs but also locally installing (some) HTML5-games for offline play on your phone. Inspired by hiding from missile strikes in a basement with no Internet access, and also hiding in remote Ukrainian villages with intermittent Internet access.
6. I started a "buy me a coffee" donation jar, with no expectation to make consistent income from it.
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/gardenapple
So yeah, my life goes on mostly as it did before the war: hiding out at home, using that time to mainly just play video games, but also hopelessly trying to make something positive out of that, whether through this log or some other means. This lifestyle seems to work so far, let's just see how long it will last.
------
According to my HLTB profile, I've completed 8 games and retired 1 game during this period. Soon I will make a write-up on all of them, I kept notes on some of those games, and for the others I'll have to just rely on my memory of playing them. Perhaps that will be written in some kind of shortened format. After that, the log will continue as before.
-- gardenapple 2022-07-21