Week of 2025-10-13

You would think that at some point, I'd learn that when I talk about wanting to do a bunch of things, I would realize that I'm likely going to accomplish none of them in the time span that I'm imagining.

Oh well. At least it only took me one week this time.

Burnout

This was a week for executive dysfunction. After writing my notes last week, I sat down to contribute to Tangled, like I had planned. I wrote my little one-liner fix, and then I went to start the application so I could test it.

Unfortunately, I forgot to start Redis, and for some reason, that tanked me emotionally. I couldn't bring myself to continue working at that point, although I knew rationally that all I needed to do was open a new shell and run redis-server. I had to close out of my terminal and call it a day.

My burst of energy and productivity, I thought, was a sign of healing from my last job. When I left that position 2 years ago, I was so burned out that the thought of coding alone left me with a profound sense of dread. I guess I just pushed myself too far.

Lunacid

If you can't work, and you're too bothered about not working to rest, the only thing left to do is play -- so I finished up my playthrough of Lunacid.

Lunacid

Cast into the Great Well, unwanted by the world above. You delve the dark in search of the Old One, your last salvation. Lunacid is a dark fantasy dungeon crawler inspired by Shadow Tower and King’s Field.

It's another one of those modern-but-low-fidelity titles, with a heaping helping of Fromsoft/Lovecraftian worldbuilding, just enough challenge, and immaculate vibes. It also has a lot of secrets, so if you're into Tunic, you might enjoy this as well.

I happen to be a sucker for the "descend into hole/ruin/facility" narrative, so I really loved this game. If it speaks to you at all, you should give it a try.

★★★★★ review Lunacid (2023)

This game is for folks that love Tunic, Death's Door, the Fromsoft aesthetic, or other games that are packed with secrets. Fortunately, I'm extremely representative of that group. I really enjoyed the world that they built out, which was rich with interesting lore and rife with conflict. The NPCs are lovable, and the combat isn't too punishing. Oh, and every single music track is a banger. No exceptions. The phrase "better than Oblivion" ran through my head during the entire game. It's not really in the same genre, but it felt like the character scaling was pretty similar. By the end, though, they still managed to provide a challenge. I spent about 20 hours playing it, although I decided not to pursue all of the endings. All-in-all, the game was excellent, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A

Lunacid only got me through Wednesday, unfortunately. Nintendo had my back, fortunately, so I was able to launch straight into the newest Pokemon title.

Unexpectedly, my impression after about 17 hours is that Z-A is one of my top Pokemon titles of all time. My other favorites are Platinum, XD: Gale of Darkness, and the Ranger series -- and Legends: Z-A is like a mashup of all of those titles.

Some highlights:

There's no turn-based combat, anywhere. It's all cooldowns.

On Switch 2, the game runs like a dream (60fps+)

The music is peak. The OST is filled with perfectly-instrumented jazz. You can feel insaneintherain 's influence, especially in the overworld tracks.

There are hundreds of different clothing pieces to buy. As a mall kid, there's nothing quite like spending the night thrashing Pokemon trainers, and then heading to blow all my earnings on clothes.

I'm having a blast so far. If you're on the fence, you should definitely give it a try.

paperbnd.koplugin

I was able to get back to doing a little coding by the end of the week. I have a partially-working implementation of my KOReader plugin for syncing reading progress to Paperbnd / Popfeed .

I used Claude Code to get the basic plugin structure together, referencing some records in my PDS and the Readwise Reader KOReader plugin as a structural reference.

Even with a complete working example as a reference, Claude hallucinated a bunch of methods, so now I'm left with the debugging. I'm just happy that Claude got pretty much all of the boilerplate right -- I wasn't looking forward to setting that up myself, thanks to the practically non-existent KOReader development documentation.

So, we're successfully pulling records from my PDS, but now I need to correctly associate those records with books in KOReader. That's my next step, and my single goal for this next week. We'll keep this week light on expectations.

That's all for this week's journal. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great week -- may your productivity fare better than mine!