29 August 2021

I have been busy of late. Friday evening was spent at my first beer 
festival in some time. It was odd and a slightly sad version. 
Typically, you expect to see a row or 3 of barrels and to never taste 
everything. Instead, I was faced with a car park with 2 beer sellers, 
a wine seller and a cider seller. Thankfully all local businesses 
having an opportunity to spread the word about their products. It just 
meant the beer choice was limited. Mostly as one brewery is a 
reasonable ale place but there really is not much variation in it. The 
other brewery is 2 guys playing around with big, bold flavours. It was 
a nice opportunity to sample their 2 new beers though. I ended up 
sampling rather more than expected. I was joined by a couple of 
friends which was nice. A visit into Solihull followed and more beer. 
They were a mistake. I forgot I was not used to being out and about. 
Sigh. Toilet puke meter reset. I also fell for the trap of not eating 
something substantial as I have a weird aversion to eating lunch while 
working from home. Lessons learnt and doomed to be repeated again 
probably! Just not for a while. 

Saturday was spent in a bit of a hung over state but I got to play 
with my new toy. I have been using emulators on my PC for a bit. I 
find I dip into this every few years. Recently, Retroarch has made 
things very complicated and simple at the same time. I have found it a 
right pain to set up due to various limitations and madness I can only 
find out after some searching around. As a result, I have been eying 
up an emulator console. I settled on a Anbernic RG351P. It is a really 
nice device and feels worth the money. I have been playing with 
various ROMs and find it sluggish with PSP/NDS/Dreamcast games. An 
attempt at playing South Park's Love Shack quiz game was horrific. 
Chef was reduced to a wire model with streaks of flesh dangling. 
Mildly worrying for sure. That was a N64 game so I suspect many are a 
bit ropey on that too. However, it does what I want which is playing 
Gameboy and GBA games well. It has been nice being able to use wifi 
and SFTP to transfer things too. 

Today was spent seeing my Grandma again. I brought cakes and it was 
interesting. Her short term memory involving food is spot on even 
though she kept asking where I bought the cake from. She never 
questioned if I had bought cake. More of the dribbly brain issues from 
vascular dementia I suppose. She was looking well even if there is no 
quality of life. She knows she is not well too. It is cruel for sure.