My mother got put back on her disability benefits and now I’m hunting down apartments for us to live in to get out of a bad housing situation that we were stuck in because it was cheap and we only had one income.

Got two viewings this week.

I am currently using Linux Mint! I love it, especially as someone who can’t afford fancy things like 70 dollar games or expensive software. I’m enjoying going through recommendation lists to see what I can use in lieu of Windows softwares.

Initially, the gaming was also what made me avoid doing it, but… I can’t play triple AAA games on my laptop anyway because I don’t have a GPU, lmao. The only game I play regularly is on my phone and can be single player.

I don’t play MMO like I did as a teen, so there’s no point in worrying about that either. I have some visual novels I might not be able to play right now, but I play games at such a slow rate that I can just put them on my backlog for when they do work.

Currently, I’m playing through my backlog of older games like Trails in the Sky which work decently. Emulation also works great on it!

Fata Morgana.

Listen, whether you like Visual Novels or not doesn’t matter. But Fata Morgana is just somehow…perfect. Everything is resolved and I don’t feel any need to complain about any aspect of it. It was an experience to play a game that left me with no questions afterwards. It was just a really good story.

Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rails.

Genshin Impact successfully had my attention for over five hundred days. It’s a regularly updated game that can be played entirely F2P, and I love that concept. Anyone who claims that you have to whale to get good at the game is wrong. You just have to play the game and ignore that some Youtubers and Twitch Streamers seem to believe that fake big numbers are the only way to improve in that game. In reality, I’ve watched streamers ignore that, and instead opt to play with their favorite romantic pairing or favorite character because they just enjoy the game more that way.

Honkai Star Rails seems to be a similar concept, however it faces a dilemma where it is a turn-based game and as a result the battle mechanics, so far, have to be more carefully considered. For example, I run a defense-healer-single attack-AOE attack team. So far, I tend to die if I don’t do that. The gameplay is more simplistic than Genshin Impact, but the battles are stronger and tend to take longer. Bright side: because it was recently launched you get a bunch of free pulls! Yeah!

I love visual novels but I’m so bad at playing them. I keep buying them because I love to support the industry, but they tend to be hours and hours long so I don’t finish them, aha.

The last one I played through a route on was “Life After Magic” which is a pretty relatable queer VN about a Sailor Moon expy who dropped out of high school and ended up in a dead-end job, having to reunite with her friends / potential love interests. I’d like to finish this one because I know you can date the villain in one route.

I notice injustice, I just don’t often do anything about it because of my anxiety disorder, which makes me cry myself to sleep for six hours.

Genshin Impact.

Listen. I understand that the entire thing was hyped up upon release. It was, after all, a gamechanger for mobile gacha games. We went from turn-based games to things like Honkai Star Rail and Tower of Fantasy and of course, Genshin Impact. Honkai Impact 3rd existed, but it wasn’t quite the same as these ones.

However. Despite the hype, there was a problem that made me reluctant to play it.

I really suck at gacha games. Every gacha game before then I would drop within what, 6 days? I love the characters, love the story, hate the game.

So imagine my surprise when I logged into my settings the other day and found out that oh, It’s now been over 500 days logged, lmao. I’ve taken breaks from it once in a while, but I haven’t quit it yet. What have I become?

Surprisingly, I installed Calibre on Linux and for some reason it just looks…better on Linux? Not sure if its because it opened up in default dark mode or what, but it doesn’t look as ugly when I’m using it on Pop_OS. Feels at home, really.

I will say its definitely a beast. I’ve used it a few times but I never really went in depth with it’s features. I’m definitely liking the bulk tag editing, the shop search (I’ve been looking for a way to search DRM-free books and it has it!), and the default tags. The last one is mainly because I think getting a tag called “mentally ill women” for The Yellow Wallpaper is a little funny.

It took me a few seconds to figure out what the heck just popped up on the side of my screen, haha! Thank you for the potatoes.

Out of curiosity do you find that neocities is easy to set up for a beginner? I’d like to get into blogging that I don’t have to worry about getting comments on. Something where I can just ramble on a bit about how things went that day, what I learned, and then post and never touch it unless I want to reread that day’s entry.