I had this conversation with my boss the other day about the blank page. I’ve never been good with it–but I suppose like, who is? I’ve always either sat down at the keyboard with thoughts flowing out of my brain so freely that I end up writing on and and on and on and on with no stopping OR I sit down and it’s just like “oh no i have never written anything before in my life”

The advice people always give is basically “just start typing, literally type anything”. I first heard that from a middle school English teacher and honestly it’s served me well my entire life! Whether it was as a middle schooler writing so much fanfiction (just so, so, so much fanfiction) or now, writing a blog for my personal website, I’ve really gotten a lot of traction out of giving it a good ol’ running start.

And see now that my brain is a little warmed up it occurred to me to want to talk about time. And I guess like, the structuring of it.

I have a blog somewhere–it may be within a game review or maybe I just remember it from a post I did somewhere sometime about how in this day and age we all have a like, Backlog. It’s a regular–daily?–occurrence to have a conversation with someone (a close friend or a work colleague or someone on the internet) that goes like this:

A: You seen [movie/show/game?]
B: Ah nope, I want to though! It’s on the backlog!

And like, look, I’m not saying this is a brand new thing. I would reckon the cool kids in the cool bars reading the cool books in 1960 were like oh you read the newest [book, by author] and get a response of like, oh no i haven’t I’m gonna get around to it though. Or something. I have to reckon it’s categorically different now though because of the fact that the entirety of everything is available to us at all times. Based on memes I’m led to believe that Gen Z queers are off spending every waking minute watching all of Columbo which is like 4 days of watch time. Columbo!! And look I’m not coming for Columbo at all–far from it–but I’m just saying like that’s a show older than I am and I’m almost 40. If folks are off watching Columbo then how can I convince one of them to watch something brand new that I thought was cool or hell, Friday Night Lights (5 seasons!) or Gilmore Girls (7 seasons!). I know how much time I have in any given week for like, recreation, and it’s not a lot!

So what do we do, with our backlogs, which hang around us like as many chains, Marley style? I don’t know! It occurs to me as a thing because I realized that, left to my own devices I would follow robotic patterns, and so in order to disrupt or somehow inject into those devices I should do reminders and checkboxes and such, and so far that’s worked to shake me out of certain patterns. I read in the mornings after journaling for instance, but I want to figure out how to make that reading more than just comic books. I play games–mostly on a portable device–in between work meetings. I ride my bike after work and before my wife comes home and then when she comes home we watch something on the TV–usually something airing weekly brand new, and if we’re out of fresh episodes we dig into THE BACKLOG of TV. We used to just mindlessly watch Youtube videos but that really, really wore on me, so I wanted to shake it up. I’m not making any judgements about whether watching a 2 hour youtube essay is “better” in any appreciable way than watching 2 one hour episodes of a tv show, but it feels better to me. Youtube feels like junk food, and of course that’s just my own brain talking.

Anywho, I’ve been trying to figure out how to mix in journaling games and other solo TTRPGs. But who has the time? How do I make the things I do for fun not feel so scheduled and specific and structured? Does anyone do this successfully? Am I just in classic overthinking mode?

I just wish there were fewer options and fewer good things haha

I read a post on a forum a week or so ago that said they feel like the video game industry may eventually run itself into a problem with the economics of video games in general, which is that a brand new modern big budget game is $80. How does $80 of “value” stack up against the sum totality of all other video games that came before it when eventually (in like a year) that new $80 game will be a third of that cost. There’s never really (I’m open to arguments to the contrary) been a time in human history where new stuff has had to compete with literally everything else that has ever existed.

And I feel like I feel that so concretely when I stop and think: “what do I want to watch/play/listen to”.

Wowweee it’s been a kind of a whirlwind week or so–I end up piling up so much stuff I want to talk about that I almost don’t know where to start! I suppose first and foremost I want to nerd out about a book I just finished yesterday at the hair salon–‘This is How You Lose The Time War’ by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I ABSOLUTELY STINKING LOVED IT! At its core, all it is is a book about lesbians writing one another fawning and longing letters that are just THE BEST but some people would tack on a lot of extraneous details to that which I think are really not needed. Yes, they’re both basically like pan-galactic pan-time like agents of civilizations trying to erase the other from history, and yes it’s really great sci-fi but ultimately that stuff is just (really cool) set dressing for lesbians longing for one another. It rocks and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I’ve been sick for the last couple days, including a day where I just took the whole day off to rest and lay around, and on that day I spent like 10 hours playing Phantasy Star Online on the home server–here’s some pics below (the Dreamcast is askew because even though I got 25 feet of ethernet cable it wasn’t quite enough so the Dreamcast is sitting a bit precariously). I did a kind of “full review” over on Backlogg’d that I’ll update the Game section here with for anyone to read, but suffice it to say it was a fun project that was fulfilling to some part of my soul, even if at the end of the day I’m not gonna play very much more of it (if at all).

Baseball Opening Day is tomorrow, which is basically a high holy day for me–I can’t freaking wait! Hoping the Mets have a good year, but who even knows hahaha

Alrighty that’s all for me today

Ok so it’s been 16 days since I said I would post more and I haven’t posted since. It’s classic! The funny reason why is related to my most recent post and it’s that I became obsessed with a video game. WHO KNEW?! And what’s even funnier is that it’s a Pokemon game. Sorry to all the true Digimon heads out there, I guess it’s just truly that I am a tried-and-true Pokemon girlie after all. I mean, I knew that, but it’s still funny that I had this borderline like VIDEO GAME EXISTENTIAL CRISIS and it turned out to be basically nothing more than not really liking a game the way I wanted to. Leave it to me to wildly overthink things.

But also, my sister visited and we had a lovely time, so I don’t think I touched the computer at all then. But since she left, a whole slew of things have come pouring out of my fingers from a like, fussing with my home server and other gadgetry nonsense. I’ve put in some really cool stuff into my server, and I can’t help but feel so cute about the things I’m charmed by. For instance, I have a whole thing set up to organize my ebooks, and when I add a new book to a certain folder on the server the app automatically picks up that its new and asks me to check the metadata and stuff. It feels like magic–I absolutely love it! And as we speak I’m waiting to get a long ethernet cable to connect my Dreamcast into my network because (and get this, Leah from 2001) I CAN RUN A PHANTASY STAR ONLINE SERVER MYSELF!! Sometimes the things I am doing make me feel really cool and good because it’s taken me a lifetime to do the stuff I could have only dreamed about doing as a like 14 year old.

Speaking of gadgets and technology, I also just recently bought a new rEtRo HaNdHeLd that has the same form factor as the 3DS but is like, close to Steam Deck beefy. I am VERY excited about it, but I am also kinda…grieving? for my actual 3DS. This sounds stupid but I almost don’t want to play a lot of 3DS games on the new thing because I don’t want the actual 3DS to like…feel bad hahahah. I wish I understood fully and completely why it feels bad to me to think about, but it’s also just conceptual–who knows how I’ll feel when I have the thing in my hands.

Here I am, typing out this blog on my BRAND NEW (old) LAPTOP ahhhhh I am so stoked about it. I got something that was tip-top of the line in 2022 for basically nothing (in like, gadget terms that is) and I couldn’t be happier. Fundamentally the life of this thing is me typing stuff on it, reading the internet on it and it being connected to the living room television so that we can watch Youtube with uBlock (a brief digression: yes, yes I know one of the main reasons people run a homelab is to run PiHole and turn off ads at the DNS level yes yes it’s on my roadmap yes yes I know), and it’s absolutely perfect for those tasks. And even better that I can put VS Code on it too and just like fuss around with my little private repos and coding projects to my hearts content. Oh and Retroarch of course.

So anyway, I’m excited to have another gadget–I can’t get enough of it! And that’s a really lovely feeling, that feeling of like, not wanting to put something down. I just want to be sitting here at the computer doing nothing but just like, doing any random thing on it. I just want to like, be with it or whatever. And the thing that makes me think of and the thing that makes me realize is the degree to which I don’t feel that way with the current game I’m playing.

I’ve been playing Digimon: Time Stranger since January 11th, according to Steam. It’s now March 2nd. That’s too long, I think. I have this general rule I’ve stuck to that I don’t “get to” play more than one game at a time. That’s largely because I have this pet theory and worldview around the gaming idea that with a degree of scarcity (artificial or otherwise), we stick with things more than we otherwise would.

I have this memory I return to a lot where I was hanging out with some friends, visiting them from out of town, and one of those friends brought her MiSTER over. For those not in the know, a MiSTER is basically a little mini-PC box whose sole job is to emulate retro games. The core conceit of the whole thing is there’s something to do with how the hardware works that it like, makes the emulation basically 100% accurate to how the original hardware worked? Genuinely it’s utterly lost on me what or why that’s good compared to a laptop running Retroarch but like, I really like this friend a lot and she’s cool and she was interested in it so who am I to care. But anyway her MiSTER had like hundreds of games on it, and we had a like, not not fun time basically playing (watching her play, really) about 3 minutes of about two dozen different games. And I have experienced this as well before instituting this rule of mine a couple years back. The idea being that right now in my home server’s emulation database there’s something like 200gb of retro games. It’s more than I could play in the rest of my life (is it? Let’s go with that it is) and if I just like, allowed myself free reign I would always be looking over my shoulder.

Too many choices is, I think, insanely poisonous to our brains. Even the strongest willed amongst us can’t resist the sirens call of “what if I’m not doing the most optimal thing right now?”

And so, my one-game-at-a-time rule. I told myself like, you need to play until you’re satisfied, or something. And it’s the space of that “or something” that has me really vexed. I think, fundamentally, I’m sticking on things too long. Certainly it’s true for Digimon: Time Stranger. It must be, right?

I told some friends last week that I am a big time like, “just hit the bricks!” type girlie when it comes to movies or live theater. Like, if I’m in the seat and I am just having an absolutely wretched time then like, just leave. Get outta there. Why suffer?! We get but one life to live so why sit here in agony! And yet, where is that line? Ellie and I sat through all of the 2026 Wuthering Heights despite me thinking it was pretty damn wretched. But I guess I didn’t think it was bad enough or something? I mean obviously I didn’t; there was something compelling enough to make me stick to the seat.

Video games aren’t movies; I know this. Video games, I think, take more work. They take more buy-in of some kind. It’s more effort, more engagement. And generally, part of the whole one-game-at-a-time idea is that I’m more likely to stick out something for longer if I tell myself that I “only” have that game for the moment. So it stands to reason I should hit the bricks with Digimon: Time Stranger right? WELL I DUNNO!! It’s not a Wuthering Heights situation in that sitting here right now I can tell you that I like the game! I do! Or at least I think of it fondly? Is that a thing that makes sense to say, perhaps? That I like it but I don’t like playing it? Or is “liking” it a separate concept from “feeling compelled to play it”? And also, how do I separate out a lack of desire to play anything with whether or not the thing has a certain quality level to it or not? For instance, I’m sitting here staring at my manga/comic book tablet knowing that surely there’s stuff on there I would devour, but I’m not dying to pick it up. How much could I or should I trust my gut versus my intellect in this case? I have this feeling that I could be missing out on finishing a STONE COLD CLASSIC and that I must hang on and finish it.

But why?

Last year, as evidenced by the long long review I wrote of it, I was obsessed with the PC-98 game Yu-No and I couldn’t put it down. When I wasn’t playing it I wanted to be playing it. And in the late fall of last year I started reading a Light Novel series that I couldn’t put down, I wanted to do nothing else in life but read it. So I should trust that things can indeed compel that feeling in me, so how long should I stick with something that I feel so-so about picking back up?

I think with Digimon: Time Strangers 16.7 hours spread out across the last 50 days is enough. Time to hit the bricks, I reckon.

I've wondered a lot over the years about the ways in which people yearn to be heard. Babies cry of course, and kids do those really kid-like things of either outright begging for attention or not begging but still very obviously demanding to be the center of attention. Teenagers do this by rebelling or just being little dipshits until someone pays attention to them, and even amongst adults these behaviors manifest in all sorts of ways. I don't think that the desire to be heard or paid attention to is even a symptom of such a thing lacking in one's life–there's just a very human thing to want connection of some sort, no matter how loose. There's nothing new under the sun, of course, but what I've wondered about is the ways in which the internet has added new ways to communicate this longing to be heard. I can think of myriad ways this manifests in the modern day internet: "vagueposting" on Twitter, making Youtube essays to an audience of 1 viewer, Twitch streaming to an audience of 1 viewer (I did this for like 25 viewers and it was so addicting I think about it all the time because I am a total attention lover)–hell, basically any of these "content generation" social media sites I think basically have the userbase they do because people feel compelled to want to be heard. The way this manifests in older eras of the internet were chat rooms, AIM away messages with hilariously vague and emo song lyrics and, of course, blogging. I was just telling some friends the other day that I was an avid Livejournal user back in the day.

And of course, this website is what that is too. Of course it is. The reason the whole idea of writing on the internet is so compelling to me, even when it's for no one–for all intents and purposes I could write this in a notebook and leave it on a table at a coffee shop and it would have the same (actually probably higher?) chance of being read by someone. But that's what it is, isn't it? The possibility? I've been a lifelong paper journaler–"diarist" is the cool word that we don't seem to use anymore; like no new "diarist" has been born since like 1890–but that's different. That's talking to one's self. Blogging like this is writing a message in a bottle.

It's actually what I think the sinister genius of the social internet is–turning the ocean one desires to put their bottle in into a small pond, and allowing people to pick up those bottles and immediately respond. It has the same degree of anonymity as a message in a bottle, and with all of the same brain chemicals firing when you put on that cap and drop it into that pond to sail off to who-knows-where.

I don't want to drop my bottles into a pond; I don't need that. There's no comments like Livejournal had or even a guestbook like lots of websites from back in the day had either. It's just me and the ocean; me and the void for my words to stream out to.

Anywho the reason this post has the title it does is because I'm gonna commit to I think at least two posts a week as an exercise in seeing if I have enough ocean bottle thoughts. I reckon I do.

It's gonna happen. I'm gonna update this here desktop PC to probably like, Linux Mint Cinnamon. It's kinda funny, I'm old enough to remember the last couple waves of "you should migrate to Linux" on the internet. The first one was back when I was in High School and I messed around with an Ubuntu distro and just had a terrible time with it. Then there was another wave probably around the Windows 10 area and I completely let it pass me by.

But this time it's happening! With all of my research it sure seems like it's easier now than it ever has been; my experience over the years has big time made me skeptical of ease of use, and I really, really don't want my "main" home PC to be a like, project. However, people I trust on the internet reassure me that I likely won't run into any big issues. So here we are!

Maybe I'll buckle down and spend the time fussing this weekend, or maybe like next week or something, but either way, I'm excited.

You'll have to pardon me for my sort of prose style of like, "scene setting". When I was in undergrad, in creative writing workshops I would always get feedback from the professors that a core part of my writing voice was also a combination crutch+weakness, which is that I feel this incredibly strong urge to put the reader exactly in my brain, and a propensity to like, apologize for doing it. This anecdote is actually a perfect case, because when I started typing I was going to begin with a little screed about how I remember things being when I was younger. "Leah, you have to eventually get on with it", said none other than literally Marilynne Robinson to me once.

Anywho, I sometimes wonder if the tech independence desire I feel is actually a sort of like, miscategorization of nostalgia. Linked within the desire to replace Big Enterprise Tech with open source and/or locally controlled tech is a desire to move away from One Device Which Does Everything and back into individual devices which do the same thing (even if they maybe do it technically worse). So when I say "tech independence" I'm also basically referring to this desire I have to engender a new relationship to the technology I love; I don't want to have one iPhone 17 Pro Max that does every single thing I need it to do. I want to have to choose to take out a camera or a music player or a gaming device or a notepad or whatever. That's the relationship that I want.

But it's not a new relationship, is it? It's a return to what it used to be, isn't it?

I can't claim to know anything about Brian Eno other than his reputation. More than one person I hooked up with in my past had, with an infectious desire to share something that deeply moved them, put on Discreet Music and I did lots of like smiling and nodding through it, so I'm absolutely a Brian Eno poser. But I'm going to quote him here with what I feel like is maybe the most iconoclastic nailing of the way nostalgia and technology intertwine:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them."

Yes, he's talking about music in a lot of specificity here but this same principle applies writ large to like, everything in our pop cultural life, I think. And what I think it is is that we really like friction. Or maybe it's not the friction itself but it's the…like…fiddling and discovery that comes along with that friction. You get to break it in and learn its intricacies and you end up loving it despite some shortcomings. Friction leads to having to choose to continue to overcome it and learn it and use it. Friction, and learning to love something despite those frictions (which then eventually becomes subsumed by that love and becomes a thing you end up actually loving about it) is where this desire of mine for tech independence comes from; it's not that I don't want things to be easy, it's just that I want to lean into the friction.

I encountered this exact situation over this last 3-day weekend with fussing around on my home server setup. The goal was to create a way to have secure tunneled access into the server even when not on the home network, specifically for streaming music from the server. I cracked my knuckles and set to work learning about network security and tunneling and I was expecting to have to trial and error and mess around and encounter setbacks and all of that but in doing my research I discovered a utility that I installed, did some setup and then it just…worked. And I was disappointed. I mean, happy in some grander sense–the like, job-well-done sense–but I wanted the friction. I wanted to troubleshoot.

There's this scene from the last season of Gilmore Girls where a rich character, accompanying another character to a fundraiser knit-a-thon decides he's doing a nice thing and just donates the entire needed amount. Everyone is kinda like, "oh gee that's nice…" and the organizer calls the event off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8miIpdY8BU. The reason everyone's pissed is that while raising the money is ostensibly the goal, the situational equivocation is that everyone wants to just hang out and knit together.

And all of this is how I've ended up wondering if what I actually want is the real friction or if I'm nostalgic for a time when the friction was necessary. Does it actually matter, do we reckon? The ends I'm looking to achieve with my home server and with specific devices is intentionality and a very mild sort of praxis–choosing to be intentional with my tech at the very least feels like making a choice to step outside of the wretched mainstream.

I've been obsessed lately with the EDC ("every day carry") posts on the subreddit r/dumphones. If you've never seen EDC posts anywhere on Reddit, the best I can explain is that they're Wes Anderson style arrangements of the items that one ostensibly carries on them every day as they move about the world. There's lots of signifiers of the communities and community values of the particular subreddit–like the core EDC subreddit has lots of guns and knives and nice watches. The Digital Audio Player subreddit has lots of really cool colorways and DAP wallpapers and fancy audio tech hooked into them and I reckon there's EDC posts on retro gaming subreddits that feature–I'm just guessing here–lots of limited edition or collectible versions of handhelds. It's impossible to imagine that people don't know what they're doing with these posts, but nevertheless, there's an appeal to the ones in r/dumphones that I can't turn away from:

I'm posting this on February 17th, 2026 where this link will bring you to like at least half a dozen EDC posts of the exact nature I'm talking about. But I have a strong suspicion if you visit this link and it's not the month of February 2026 you will still see examples of what I'm talking about. https://www.reddit.com/r/dumbphones/top/?t=month

It would be impossible for me to say I don't feel nostalgic for these images. There's a strong feeling of "rightness" that I feel seeing, for example, a "19f" share an image of her EDC being a flip phone, a cassette player, an original Game Boy and Marlboro Reds. When I was her age (TWENTY YEARS AGO) it would have been a flip phone, a minidisc player, a GBA and Djarum Blacks. It gives me very like, "nature is healing" vibes. "Healing" from what is a big question worth examining, of course, since, after all, modern smart phones are insanely cool pieces of tech. Navigation, wildly good cameras, any app you can dream of and more power than the PC I had in my efficiency apartment those same twenty years ago (I assume? I don't know but I'm just guessing so). So maybe in place of "healing", I'll simply say that it feels good to see people embracing some friction and choosing to be intentional.

It's what I'm trying to do, too. Trying to, anyhow.

Well, it's been a minute since I've done any real updates here, but recently I've had this huge rush of motivation to do lots and lots of fussing. When I use the word "fussing" what I'm talking about to myself is like, tinkering–specifically with like computers and technology. What I've done this morning? Updating the Anilist and Letterboxd configurations in the calendar below so they automatically pull! That's fussing. Planning out how to add out-of-home access to my server? That's fussing.

Oh, my server! In all ways, that's really, really fussing hahaha. I've been on this big tech independence kick lately–it's always been an aspiration of mine to fuss my way into not having to buy into the Big Boy Enterprise Evil Companies stuff, but the current political universe (combined with my wife and I having like, extensive means now) finally gave me motivation enough to buy a mini PC and set it all up.

Wowzers has it been a crash course in learning more about Linux, more about deeper home computing concepts and learning about network configurations and everything. It's been a total blast with shockingly few hiccups. Huge shoutouts to the human resources I've had at my disposal, primarily through the forums I've been a member of since 2003 lmao (that's 23 years for those playing along at home).

Expect to see more fussing and tinkering in here I suspect, I think I can find myself in a mood and workflow where I'm contributing more often in this space. The big trouble with that is I have a personal written journal (shoutouts to the best journal ever the Hobonichi Techo Cousin) which kinda sucks up all of the ranting and like "posting" energy that would otherwise go into a blog. But maybe I can do some longer-form (or shorter-form?) thinking in here too. Who knows!

Okie doke and NOW all of the movies I've watched since like, February are all typed up into a movies Potpourri now as well! Go check it out!

Well! I finally did it, I finally went back through like, the entire summer's worth of games played and dropped them all onto the Games page--check it out in the little sidebar over there.

This recent flurry of activity on my site is more or less coinciding with a desire to like, tidy my own little universe and just tinker with things, which has really only just now come back. I've always been a very big like, peaks-and-valleys kinda gal when it comes to my interests: enormous like non-stop cannot-focus-on-anything-else-in-my-life sorts of obsessions with things followed by deep valleys where things disappear from my map entirely. It's not this way with all (most?) of my other hobbies/interests: I have been an avid and regular like 100+ miles a week road cyclist for years now without any interest waning, and every year of my life I continue to be a fanatical sports fan for several teams. Video games is where I experience it the most, I find.

I had an absolutely obsessive peak erode to zero after finishing Yu-No in the early spring. This valley I may only now be coming out of was powerful insofar as what it took down with it, which was like, any computer-based tinkering at all. I barely even played Tetris or the Vita NPB game I would play passively all the time. It felt...odd...like an emptiness. Literal weeks would go by without my being at this PC for anything other than turning it on for the Plex server. But over the last couple weeks some spark of something re-awoke and I've been trying to nurture it without smothering it.

But why did it happen so strongly this time? I have to assume that because Yu-No was so long and because it made such a huge impact on me that I'm sorta *still* comparing everything to it? I haven't really found anything that can grip my attention in that way. My gaming attention span like, Overton Window has been pulled so far in one direction that--as you can see from the newest spattering of reviews I just posted--not only did I not play very many things by volume but I didn't enjoy them very much either.

Anywho, I've got all of the games I've finished (in some form or another) all typed up and such, and I started playing this brand new game called Dice Gambit just yesterday--and I feel like that one has the juice. I have the sense that I'll finish it. I'm not like, obsessing, but I do feel--for the first time since I finished Yu-No--the desire to sit down and turn on the Steam Deck to actually play a game. That's promising! Maybe my like, drive to play video games isn't dead forever hahaha

(Note: It's funny, after I finished typing all of that I remembered how I DID feel compelled to finish a game, to the degree that I really really marathoned it: Tokimeki Girls Side 1st Love--which I talked about in the Potpourri. I was obsessed, and I had an absolute blast. Who knows? Maybe I've just been playing bad games and so I just haven't been pulled in except for the good ones lmao)