LOG

Long Form Writings

2024-08-09

• A new blog post, the first for many many months, detailing some quick thoughts about the state of this blog and its success on a personal level, over here. This might be the last blog, as I’m thinking about migrating away to something even more simple and braindead to manage to focus entirely on the writing and blogging. Not expecting any movement anytime soon, however.

2024-03-18

• A new best-to-worst discography ranking is out! This time for the band Cryptopsy.

2024-01-15

• A small piece, written entirely in a few hours in the early hours of a Monday morning, about my current unhappiness with work - attempting to put some words to my thoughts over the last however-so-many months. Its here.

2023-06-26

• Two new pieces in as many days, record breaking pace for me!
• Firstly, another best-to-worst discography ranking for the band Carcass.
• Secondly, some reviews and thoughts on some assorted Steam’s Next Fest Demos that I played during the week (beginning 2023-06-19). 9 Demos in total.

2023-05-07

• Very first long form music piece up! A best-to-worst discography ranking of my very first Metal band, Metallica.

2023-03-12

• Very first game review up! A strategy game I absolutely adore, Master Of Orion (1993).

2023-03-02

• Get 2nd blogpost up, doing a personal retrospective on my first two jobs.

2023-02-14

• Get first blogpost up, looking at why I bothered setting this up in the first place.

Shorts Writings

2024-08-09

• Add game review for the excellent Roguelike Deckbuilder, Slay the Spire. Hype for the sequel!

2024-07-28

• Add book review of 4th & 5th Hitchhiker’s book series (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish & Mostly Harmless).

2024-07-21

• Add book review of the 3rd Hitchhiker’s book series (Life, The Universe and Everything).

2024-07-15

• Another quick music review, this time of Casiopea’s Super Flight - the second album (of many!) from the Japanese Jazz Fusion band.
• Add two book reviews that I initially forgot to put out, discussing the first two Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books by Douglas Adams.

2024-07-14

• A quick review of a half-satirical half-serious grindcore album, Brujeria’s Mantando Gueros.

2024-07-13

• A quick review of Brodequin’s Harbinger Of Woe, the Brutal Death Metal band’s comeback album after 20 years.

2024-07-08

• A quick review of Beherit’s subsequent album Electric Doom Synthesis, another electronic installment in the former black metal band’s discography.

2024-07-07

• A quick review about another interesting, parodical and melancholic visual novel, REFLEXIA Prototype Ver.

2024-07-06

• Another pair of quick reviews of two albums with… very little in common. One album written entirely on a cheap casio keyboard, Beherit’s H418ov21.C, and one forgotten album from progressive metal giants, Dream Theater’s Falling Into Infinity.

2024-07-03

• Added short review of Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, a slow-paced Sci-Fi book set on a space station on an alien planet… and a book I wish I liked more than I did.
• I’ve also been looking through the archives of all the music I’ve heard and listened to again. I picked two albums I didn’t rate too highly, and a revisit has not helped - but I’ve at least put some words to why I’m not a massive fan. The albums in question are Unseen Terror’s Human Error, and Vital Remains’ Dechristianize.

2024-06-25

• Another day another short review for Japanese Jazz Fusion Casiopea and their debut self-titled album. I’m liking my rhythm so far, even if I’ve sort of deliberately picked out albums that already have formed thoughts, and writing a little less on them currently.

2024-06-24

• Added short review of another early-era punky grindcore album with pitchshift vocals, Blood’s Impulse to Destroy. This was actually written ~2/3 weeks ago but I completely forgot to put it up.

2024-06-23

• Added short review of an instrumental prog metal EP, The Helix Nebula’s Meridian.
• Added a short review of platformer game N++.
• fixed a dumb typo in this very page of the date right below this line (2014 -> 2024).

2024-06-16

• Added short review of Neal Stephenson’s crazy cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, chock full of crazy technological and neurolinguistic ideas and themes.

2024-06-15

• Added quick music reviews for 4 Carcass EPs. Not much to say, they were mostly released alongside/near album releases and track quite closely towards them, but not a detour that felt like a waste.

2024-06-07

• Quick music review of Last Days of Humanity’s Putrefaction in Progress, one of the most disgusting and extreme metal albums ever made.

2024-06-03

• Quick music review of Arzachel’s self-titled, an excellent heavy psychedelic rock album.

2024-05-28

• A quick game review of the fantastic and sprawling CRPG, Disco Elysium.
• Secondly, another quick review of the Strugatsky’s brothers sci-fi book, Roadside Picnic, which inspired the STALKER series.
• Finally, a quick review of Siege’s Drop Dead, an interesting hardcore punk artefact of a record.

2024-05-04

• A long time coming, but my on-and-off reading habit has finally kicked back in. First book review is up, for the only-somewhat-famous SF novel, Neuromancer by William Gibson.

2024-04-30

• A quick review of two very different things. First off, a review of a modern grindcore record - Harsh Realities by Death Toll 80k.
• Secondly, a review of cute Visual Novel/Choose-Your-Own-Adventure about overworked anime girls, Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines.

2024-04-10

• Another quick music review (I may start condensing these down by month, its starting to seem a little excessive, another thing on the todo list!) of Grindcore legends Napalm Death and their Peel Sessions Compilation album.

2024-04-09

• A quick music review of oddball black metal album Drawing Down the Moon, by Beherit.

2024-04-07

• A quick (there’s a theme here, there’s an awful lot of music I want to get through and write down even a few lines of thought to, and I’m feeling back in the groove again for it) music review of inabakurmori’s first vocaloid rock album, Anticyclone.

2024-03-31

• A quick, short music review of ambient electronic pop album, AIR’s Moon Safari.

2024-03-18

• A quick review sort-of-review for another platformer, Wings of Vi.

2024-03-03

• A short, one line review for puzzle platformer, Out There Somewhere.

2024-02-03

• Add another short review, for indie atmospheric 2D platformer, Limbo.

2024-01-27

• Add a short music review for Noism’s ± over on the shorts page.
• Add a short game review for the Roguelike/Dungeon Crawler/Tower Defense mish-mash, Dungeon of the Endless.

2024-01-13

• Added two more short game reviews, this time for the management sim/roguelike hybrid Despotism 3k and the platformer Ninja Pizza Girl.

2024-01-07

• Added the whole music shorts file (all 20k words worth!) - its a bit messy, still not sold on the layout and distinguishing between albums and other types of releases and there’s a bunch of placeholder reviews that I haven’t got round to/tidied up enough to be coherent etc. But I thought it worth to throw this up here, even in this messy-ish state and sculpt it over time.
• Added two more game shorts, namely the turn-based tactics game Wargroove and the visual novel q.u.q.

2024-01-01

• Some minor tweaks and updates to the recent game shorts, mainly to include my rougher grading scale for games I’ve played but would like to revisit to check or re-evaluate my opinion. Opinions don’t quite form in a day after all!

2023-31-12

• Merry christmas and happy new year all! Have been on the backburner to keep churning through my review backlog - which has taken a much longer time than I expected to take, for various reasons. I’m still not done (nowhere near admittedly!), but I’ve got to the point where I’ve churned though a lot of my Games reviews backlog and should be throwing up reviews in more of a dripfeed fashion.
• Music (& Books!) are still in review hell, but they’ll get there, I’m sure. Blame me for setting this ridiculous goal a year ago.

2023-09-17

• Added a whole bunch of short reviews (26 in total) for games I’ve played over the years, all with some basic info and ratings/5. One of my goals has been to work through the majority of my backlog and offer thoughts on them, even if just a few sentences and a number-out-of-five worth of thoughts. Surprisingly, this takes time! And so I decided to throw out the set of reviews I’ve worked on over the past few months inbetween everything else.
• As a side note, while I’ve found it very helpful to revisit, to either re-evaluate or re-affirm my opinion on something, as well as getting said thoughts formed for future revisits. However, it takes a while and has felt like a burden at times (especially when looking to play new games, listen to new music etc.).

2023-04-27

• Second “blog shorts” entry, outlining that the website isn’t dead! and some thoughts about having many projects on the go, the pros/cons etc. And a link to a really nice video game development blog post I read recently.

2023-03-18

• First “blog shorts” entry, about ubiquity of art, derived after spending time going through my video game backlog.

Website

2024-06-15

• Update a few behind-the-scenes dependencies to resolve some flagged CVEs:

  • vite
  • tar
  • undici
  • braces

• some minor tidyup of an ‘editor’s note’ that I forgot about for… a while.

• some linting, which I always forget to do.

2024-03-19

• A few assorted spelling fixes, writing is in fact hard and proofreading is even harder sometimes. Expect plenty of these over the years, especially if I look to write more and more. Or does it getter better with practice?

2024-03-03

• Update @svelte/kit to resolve another CVE in undici

2024-01-20

• Small update to last blog post to give it some text, not just leave it a bare link.
• Update vite once again to resolve another CVE, oh I love JS dependency management…

2023-13-12

• Add Dependabot for some dependency management behind the scenes, since I had completely forgotten to keep the dependencies up-to-date beyond initial creation, oops!

• Update a bunch of behind-the-scenes dependencies to resolve some flagged CVEs:

  • word-wrap
  • undici and @sveltejs/kit
  • vite
  • postcss

• Remove all my ‘drafts’ work from the website repo and move into a personal Obsidian repo. Again, another behind the scenes thing that should hopefully make things slicker. December often ends up being month of getting things that have been on the backburner for months sorted for me.

• Also serves as a self reminder to start throwing up all the reviews I have in draft hell, nowhere near done but the turn of the year seems like a good time to throw some things out.

• Some small linting as well, something I always forget exists!

2023-06-17

• Some small typo/wording fixes in Metallica review, writing and proofreading is hard

2023-06-10

• Changed my mind! Centered all images, plus added images to old Master of Orion review (and another paragraph!).
• I’m hoping, this might finally be the end to the experimentation with layout, setup, structure etc. and that I can finally focus on the writing! I’ve been rather slow at getting up to speed in my mind.
• Don’t have much plans to add any images to blogs or any shorts (unless blogs really need it!) - do want it to be used sparingly or to support writings, and put in short reviews would dilute too much.

2023-06-04

• Have started to bring in some images into website, starting with the Metallica Best-to-Worst. Not planning to do a whole lot with them, just add them where appropriate (generally going to be long form reviews only, using front-cover art and in game cases a screenshot or two), and generally going to be small (currently decided on 300x300 or a size around that) and uncentered (can use center html tags, but thats kinda hacky)
• Will add images to other long form reviews in the near future

2023-03-21

• Split out log between Long Form and Shorts writings, otherwise I’d forsee a lot of noise there as I plan on adding a whole load of little shorts over the next few weeks.

2023-03-12

• Minor css adjustments, making width of content larger, increasing line-height slightly.
• Fix date formatting in shorts pages to be consistent throughout website (YYYY-MM-DD vs. YYYY/MM/DD).

2023-03-07

• Adding new books and music section, replicated structure from blog (once again).
• Fix category list links always pointing to “/blog/category…” instead of correct subsection e.g. “games/category…”
• fix typo

2023-03-06

• More minor behind-the-scenes changes, general code refactoring.

2023-03-05

• Add a section for blog shorts, designed for smaller interesting thoughts/observations that don’t quite deserve their own blog page.
• Add new games section, replicated structure from blog.

2023-03-02

• Small behind-the-scenes changes.

2023-02-14

• Begin hosting! Live on Vercel.