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The ereaders are fully set up now... I'm happy with what I did and I think my mom is satisfied as well. In other news I'm still enjoying that chinese dressup game. Playing a phone game reminded me of how CASUAL phone gamers are. It's a whole other level of casual-ness that I haven't been exposed to in a while. These days everyone is a phone user, whether they're really interested in, well... games, or not, so I guess the barrier of entry is much lower. This is why phone games will get players that aren't usually familiar with how games work at all. That includes them not reading patch notes. Ever. Asking the same questions over and over again in the official discord no matter how often they get answered. Not bothering to look up info ingame on some basic shit, like which items can you find in the gacha. Not knowing WHEN the maintenance will happen even though you get 50 different popups if you just enter the game, and to even know a maint is happening it would imply you've seen the popup in the first place. It's truly a whole different level of insanity. I remember when I played mmos more you'd get these types of noobs every once in a while, but at least everyone would be relatively familiar with the Basic Rules of Gaming... Here I see even extremely active whales ask stupid questions which I figured out from the moment I downloaded the game. How do you spend hundreds of dollars yet you don't know how to do something really simple! Really boggles the mind... I shouldn't be such an eleeeeetist but I can't help myself. I finally ordered the missing batteries, chargers and memory cards for 3 of my digital cameras that were missing some of those components. It's funny, I have like 6 different digital cameras, I don't think more than 2 of them share the same type of memory card. I'm going to give some of them away once I bring them all to a functioning state. Annoying, there's a perfect verb for that action (fix them up? make them work?) in my language but nothing similar in english. Capacitate? It doesn't fit I think. My friends old cybershot stopped working so she'll get a camera. My sister will get one too... I'll put that bought batch of cheap cameras to good use.
The used e-reader I ordered came in mail yesterday. It's a Kobo Libra H2O. The body has a few scratches, and one is present in the bottom corner of the screen as well, but it's nothing major. I wonder how much use it got to have so many scratches though, not that it bothers me. I got it for an extremely low price lmao. What did bother me though, was that it was kind of dirty! I spent half an hour disinfecting it and cleaning all the dust with a needle and a toothpick. This is the first time ever that I ordered something used and it came in such a messy state... I'll be honest, I really love the physical page turning buttons. It makes reading and holding it so much easier, especially when it comes to my weird sitting and laying positions. My old Kobo will be given to my mom, for her birthday. My sister, grandparents and me are also buying her some jewelry too... Kinda feels funny to give my mom my old e-reader as a birthday gift, but an ereader is such a perfect gift for her, and she's the type that hates spending money unecessarily. I set up a dropbox cloud so she can easily transfer files, something I never bothered doing for myself until now. It will make book downloading less of hassle which is nice. At first I wanted to set up an FTP server, and I did, but then I had troubles with connecting to the server through my phone so I got pissed and gave up lmao. I connected just fine with both of the ereaders though, but my patience is always low when it comes to phones, idk why. Then I thought I went with the "easy" route with dropbox, but it seems they changed their API to complicate the connecting process but I prevailed with the help of a good old forum thread guide. Then I thought to myself how long has it been since I had to follow a guide like that? Too long! Thank you, user 305869 of mobileread.com... One thing that surprised me is just how complicated syncing your old reading data is with koreader. Why is the cache process so weirdly hard to sync? A default plugin with that functionality that comes with koreader is now useless because it transmitted files through a server which is now dead... Real useful. Other plugins require a lot of messing around as well, so I gave up on it for now. I won't wipe my old ereader so I'll transfer the old stats at some later date perhaps.
2024 is here... I went to celebrate with the same friend as last year, but this time in a different location. She has a different boyfriend now, I don't want to go into details but he's from the same area I am and because of them being together I reconnected to multiple people from my hometown. I have to say I was really apprehensive about hanging around with these people for many reasons, mostly related to our shared past and my dislike of people from my hometown, but tonight I grew a bit fonder of all of them. It's weird but I feel like they barely accepted me for a while, except for my friend's boyfriend, but this time around I got different vibes. I mean we only hung out for about 5 times all together so far so it's natural, but I hate feeling like I barely fit in. I hate having to perform and slowly get out of my shell in a very close knit and established group and then wait around to see if I got accepted. I didn't have this issue with my friend's past friend group, and they were just as close knit. I think it was way easier to be myself because they knew nothing about me, whereas here it's totally different. These are kind of the people that I already failed to make friends with once in the past, so I'm feeling incredibly... inferior to them. Like they know all my secrets almost lmao. There's also somewhat of a class difference involved in all of this, which doesn't help. I hate being vulnerable! I guess I'm also a little jealous of my friend for managing to get on their good side so quickly - but in all fairness she spends so much time with these people because of her boyfriend and I barely ever see them. I don't know why I'm feeling so bitter about this. I never obsess over leaving good impressions or wanting to be seen in a good light. I'm always a worry free person. These things don't even cross my mind usually. But because these people knew me when I was younger, I'm catching myself regressing mentally. Sappy shit to the side, the celebration was really fun. We were staying at my friend's bf's place, which is located in a... very nice spot. It's a one bedroom apartment but booooy. The fireworks were fun to watch. One reason why I like the fact that some of these people are from my hometown is the gossip. I hear so many juicy things from them, it's super entertaining. Almost makes the internal suffering worth it. At around 4:30 am I walked to my sisters place to sleep over and recuperate lmao. I got pretty drunk, but in a good way. Walking home through a big city alone is always fun when you're drunk. And when your country is relatively safe, of course. My sister and I woke up around 11, and ordered really tasty gua bao at around 2pm. After that I went home by train and heeeere I am. Honestly, a comfy day. I'm not hungover, in fact I still felt drunk when I woke up and then the feeling just dissipated throughout the day. I didn't have this thing before - where I wake up drunk from the day before. It happened almost every time I drank recently. To be fair in this case I only slept a couple of hours but still. The rest of my holidays were pretty fun too. I spent Christmas with my family, my sister and I watched another documentary about a cult, I managed to get the neighbours cat to come sleep in my bed... I also made and ate a ton of cake and cookies.
I hope this year will be a good one. I don't have any crazy resolutions. Regarding my site, I'd like to eventually move away from neocities and leave a redirect. I want to mess around with php more and I can't do that here. It would also push me to update and upgrade my site looks-wise more often. Aside from that I want to read more, this year I didn't read much at all! I'm eyeing a second hand Kobo libra h2o which is a bit bigger and has buttons for page turning. The plan is to gift my mom my current ereader because she wants a smaller and lighter one. Well, if I continued writing about what I want for this year there would be no end to it. I need to work on myself more, is the gist of it. Wishing everyone a lot of happiness in 2024, let it be a good one PLEASE.