The Raven's Roost

There hasn't been a lot going on here this week, so I haven't thought to post much. Mostly preparations for the ultra on Saturday. Over the weekend, Fox was trying to do some tractor work, flattening out an area in the back where we'd cut down some trees that were blocking the solar panels. The ground's all churned up, and if it's flatter, it can grow grass which I can then mow. It's also near one of the major trails he cut through our forest going over towards the access road in Belmore, so if that gets a little more love, it will be much easier to head over there on foot, rather than driving ten miles or so out of my way to get to the trailhead off Sharon Road. But the tractor threw a code, along with a big-ass red light and a lot of high-pitched screeching as if simply starting the engine were going to cause the whole thing to explode.

So we loaded it onto the trailer and took it over to AgPro. They cleared the code and ... nothing's wrong. The tractor's onboard computer just freaked out for some reason. They're doing "winter maintenance" on it while it's there, cleaning filters and checking grease fittings and stuff like that. We'll be picking it up tomorrow, and running a few last minute race errands. Fox wants some bananas, I want to see if Academy has travel-size Body Glide I can stick in my pack, and we may swing by the address given for the starting area to make sure we know where we're going. We should be good on everything else and ready to go. But, as Mike Tyson has famously said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

The trail will start punching around mile 3 or 4, and will keep swinging the rest of the way. There's a LOT of up and down for a Florida race - most of which are pancake-flat, even on trails. The last three miles even feature non-stop elevation gain, woohoo! I love running up hills when I'm already exhausted. On the other hand, two thousand feet of gain over thirty-one miles isn't THAT bad. Right?

I finished playing Axiom Verge 2 the other night when I completed a speedrun. Four and a half hours isn't exactly super-speedy, but I mopped up several more achievements and felt like I'd enjoyed myself. I've gone back to Little Nightmares and made it to the Geisha's Chambers. Getting through the Guests was pretty hair-raising. I think I've also missed a couple of Nomes, but it looks like once you finish the main game you can jump around and hunt for collectibles. I also have the DLC, and Little Nightmares 2 ready to go. I'm really impressed by the look of the world they made - if it's safe enough I sometimes like to just explore the rooms and look at things. It really is nightmarish.

Fox found a YouTube video about "how did they update and patch games before the internet?" We both laughed, "They didn't." And ... yeah, they didn't. If you bought a glitchy game, it sucked to be you. You'd have to buy the next version that hopefully had bug fixes included. Of course, now we have games with day one patches. Looking at you, Cyberpunk.

Fox also found a way to let me share my Steam library to our living room TV and play with minimal input lag. I'm still going to blame my poor gaming on input lag, though. Stray looks amazing on the OLED screen. If I weren't so weird about "bothering" everyone with the sound of my gaming I'd embrace this more, but I worry that it'll annoy Fox, who has said on several occasions that he is not at all bothered by it. That doesn't stop my Anxiety Brain from worrying about it, though.

And Clip Studio gave in to the whiners and Luddites, and the new version will no longer include an AI generator pane. *throws up hands*