Honestly? Bash. I tried a bunch a few years back and eventually settled back on bash.

Fish was really nice in a lot of ways, but the incompatibilities with normal POSIX workflows threw me off regularly. The tradeoff ended up with me moving off of it.

I liked the extensibility of zsh, except that I found it would get slow with only a few bits from ohmyzsh installed. My terminal did cool things but too slowly for me to find it acceptable.

Dash was the opposite, too feature light for me to be able to use efficiently. It didn’t even have tab completion. I suffered that week.

Bash sits in a middle ground of usability, performance, and extensibility that just works for me. It has enough features to work well out of the box, I can add enough in my bashrc to ease some workflows for myself, and it’s basically instantaneous when I open a terminal or run simple commands.

Babel does sound neat, I’ll probably check it out.

I’ve had D-Genesis on my to-read list for ages and can no longer remember why, but I guess a new volume release is a good reminder to get on that sometime.

Code: White was so much fun in theaters. It kind of runs into similar problems to a lot of other anime movies, with the non-canon status-quo excuse for a big fight, but Spy X Family naturally handles that better than many series and it turned out to be a ton of fun.

!The fact that the fate of the world rests on Anya not taking a dump is just peak comedy, I don’t care what anyone says.!<

The Konosuba LN is really funny, great read.

The Konosuba anime is peak comedy, the crazy VAs and goofy-ass animation bring so much to it and it hardly loses a thing in the process.

I have a few evergreen notes that I update as needed, but the most frequent one is simply a list of what books I have on preorder and when they’re expected to ship. I have a book buying problem.

Otherwise most of my notes don’t get referenced often because they’re stores of knowledge, not items related to active projects. I have several reference docs for fiction writing and DnD that I reference and update often because I work on those projects often, but my note on the Zanclean Flood is just obviously not going to come up almost ever. But writing is how I learn, so I wrote about it 🤷

I was conveniently hoping to catch up on some non-LN reading, and it’s nice of the release schedule to make that easy on me.

As promised, Apothecary Diaries, vol 11: This was a wild volume. Lots of politics, lots of tension, and the climax hit out of nowhere in a way I found surprisingly satisfying. Finally finding out more about Gyouko-ou, the Yi clan, and Rikuson was great, although some of it felt like back-filling information that could have been presented in a more cohesive way over time.

Still, super good volume with a lot of interesting developments. Honestly it speaks to the strength of the cast that Maomao took the backstage for most of this volume and it’s still fantastic.

Yup. If my merino shirts didn’t work so well through my workouts I’d probably hardly ever do an intense workout. My back sweats like I’m my own personal rain storm.

The art direction seems kind of off, but sometimes that can shake itself out in game.

The tone of the trailer is definitely not the Dragon Age vibe. Lighthearted Oceans-style crew selection to deal with what looks like some sort of world-ending calamity? Yeah, that’s not right.

Things could work out but I’m sure not feeling optimistic.

As far as I can tell, he’s basically a random web designer who got traction on Twitter with criticism of Trump. It’s kind of impressive how prolific a dude can be out of nowhere.

My prediction is that people will overhype it with lots of hopes for super complex systems, call it shit when it has fewer mechanics and civs than 3/4/5/6 with all their DLC, and then eventually decide it’s good after a couple years of DLC and patches.

You know, the usual Civ cycle. I’ll probably buy it day 1 assuming it isn’t actually broken, per usual, and dump a couple hundred hours in it, per usual.

Notwithstanding the four Cabinet documents, federal departments and agencies withheld or refused the disclosure of over a thousand documents, in whole or in part, on the basis that they were Cabinet confidences.

Wait, is this even a Liberal thing then? It sounds like they requested information from federal departments and those departments said “We have these documents but cannot share them due to Cabinet confidence.” That doesn’t sound like it involves a single elected entity, nevermind a Liberal one.

On principal I don’t use cloud-based password management solutions like this, but Proton Pass does make it somewhat tempting, especially since I have a Proton Unlimited subscription anyways. KeepassXC + syncthing do well enough, but PAM integration would be kind of nice some days when I’m opening and closing my vault a ton.

People can be a bit mixed on Gardens of the Moon because it’s dense and confusing, but generally once you wrap your head around it it’s very good. I appreciated it a lot more after a reread.

Deadhouse Gates is fantastic, although I find the start pretty slow. From Memories of Ice onwards every book is just great from start to finish.

We really got the whole spectrum of Darkness being best girl this episode. This season has truly been blessed.

It can be rough to get into (Erikson was very much sorting out his writing style for the first couple of books and it just dumps you right into a complex intercontinental conflict with no context) but it’s widely recommended as one of the best epic fantasy series for good reason. If you put in the effort it pays off beautifully.

I have a few I like to talk about with these sorts of questions.

• Macbeth: I’ve read this a fair number of times and every time I’m enthralled, I get chills, I want to cheer as Macduff walks in holding Macbeth’s head at the end. It’s chock full of everything English class tells people to look for in literature, except it’s a thrilling read to boot. I want to see it performed so badly. It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever read and the only downside is that it’s actually a play.
• 2666 by Roberto Bolano: This is one of those books where there are so many layers to peel back that, as I read it, I spent a lot of time thinking deeply about what Bolano was trying to communicate and how the disparate storylines connected and what that all meant to me. It’s such a sprawling narrative that it’s hard to even describe what it is, except that it’s vaguely about a reclusive author and a series of murders in a Mexican city. It hits on so many things that it’s hard to even know what to say about it other than it’s incredible.
• And as a maybe more normal recommendation for this community: The Malazan Book of the Fallen is far and away my favourite fantasy series. Incredible worldbuilding, so many fun and interesting characters, plots that coalesce into absolutely wild climaxes, and underlying themes that provide a bit of hope even in the face of a grim world and plot. Absolutely fantastic series.

Mount and Blade: Warband has multiple incredible total conversions. I’ve dumped a lot of time into Prophecy of Pendor and The Last Days, probably more than the base game.

For actually free games there are so many options that it really comes down to taste. Unciv is a fantastic reimplementation of Civ 5. Super Auto Pets is a fun casual auto battler. HoloCure is a really good Vampire Survivors-style game themed after Hololive vtubers. There are tons of MMOs and shooters that are F2P and good, but I know most of those from hearsay rather than experience.

I don’t know what I watched but what I listened to was a banger.

Misfit of Demon King Academy vol 6: If this volume is an indication of where the series is going then I’m 100% on board. Much more mystery, much more abstract problems, much more ideological conflict. Anos struggles (for some definition of the word) with the strength of his opponent’s conviction as much as their combat strength, and as things go on he’s never entirely sure whether he has the right information on anything. Really good volume.

Brunhild the Dragonslayer: This was such a good revenge story. The author’s note really hits the nail on the head: they try to aim towards a happy ending, the plot tries to move that way whenever it can, but would it really be that convenient? I think this is more like a series of related one shots than a traditional LN series, but I’m really excited for the next one anyways.

This week: Apothecary Diaries vol 11, which I had apparently entirely missed the release of. Oops.