merry christmas!

wednesday, december 25th, 2024.

Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals! I hope the holidays have been good to you and yours— they certainly have been for my crew! We basically just spent the whole day at home watching the little one unwrap presents, eating leftovers, and generally just lazing about the house as Saint Nick intended. It's been so good.

My father-in-law came to visit from Florida Saturday and he'll be here for about a week. Sunday, we ran our errands then spent the evening downtown walking around looking at lights and eating dinner out. Monday I had a bit of work, then our usual (if a little light due to the holidays) Flesh & Blood armory night. Yesterday was quiet for the most part, then that evening the little one's dad came to visit and we opened presents and had dinner together, then drove to see more Christmas lights before he headed home for the evening.

Pretty proud of this: we managed to do pretty much all of our Christmas gift shopping locally. The little one got a bunch of small toys, a stuffed unicorn, and a Nintendo 3DS from the local retrogaming shop. I think she's taking some time to get used to it, but I've gotta say— Santa was real good to her this year.

Our middle kiddo got a record player from their mom, so I got them a Mother Mother record and a gift card from the local record store. I plan on bringing them there while they're visiting so they can pick out records they want. I did take them to a Cavetown & Mother Mother concert earlier this year so I think that LP was a safe bet, though.

Our eldest, being the nerd she is, has really enjoyed spending time with us as the local game store. We introduced her to Flesh & Blood and got her a starter deck. For gifts, we bought her a Vampire: the Masquerade rulebook that she was eyeing there, a bunch of Flesh & Blood boosters, and some fancy dice sets for all of the above. She's also got a bunch of quilting supplies since she's interested in that!

My wife and I have already exchanged presents: many expensive Flesh & Blood cards, mostly. It's becoming a bit of a problem, haha. They got a nice set of headphones and some beauty supplies from their dad, and I got a 500GB SSD drive, portable bike pump, and a folding Bluetooth keyboard, which I've typed this whole post on. Here's the portable SSH setup using my phone now:

The keyboard is a little weird— it doesn't have a proper "Escape" key, which is something of a problem in Vim. You have to hold the "Fn" and "Shift" keys down before hitting the top-left key, which is some Jimi Hendrix-esque chording. So I remapped my keyboard in my ~/.vimrc file so smashing the "J" and "K" keys together inputs an "Escape":

" Map jk and kj to escape so you can smash the two keys together.
inoremap jk <Esc>
inoremap kj <Esc>

So, yeah! This is a pretty neat little setup. I reckon I'll need to make an ImageMagick script to downsample & dither my post images instead of doing it all in GIMP like I usually do, but this works for now. What really prompted my interest in a keyboard like this was taking notes at the Georgia Bike-Walk-Live Summit. It was a little cumbersome bringing my backpack and laptop to all the breakout sessions.

Other than all that, I've been playing quite a lot of Flesh & Blood online as well as Final Fantasy XVI, which barely runs on my midrange computer. I'd heard it was a resource-intensive game but I tried out the demo to see if my PC could run it. Thank goodness for "low" graphical settings and adaptive resolution downgrading. It chugs along at some places, but it works for the most part. The demo drew me in, though. Gameplay-wise, it's a bit like a Yakuza fighting game. Aesthetically? Imagine you mashed together Final Fantasy XII with Game of Thrones. It drew me in so fast. I bought the game during the Winter sale and have been enjoying it over the break.

Our two elder kids are coming tomorrow! Excited to see 'em for most of a week! Not sure what we'll get up to— the record store, of course, but maybe the weather will be nice enough for visiting a park or something! We've also got to drop by my folks' for a post-Christmas get-together. They live on 15 acres out in the rural parts of our county so it's always an adventure when we see 'em!

Well, anyway, that's about all I can muster writing about the holidays. I really hope they've been good to you, as well. Hard to believe 2024 is almost over! It feels like the year just got started! "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" as they say.

Until next time, be well! :)