recent posts...
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silksong
23 Oct 2025 - digitalily
A bit later than I’d originally hoped for, but as of a few weeks ago I finished my playthrough of Hollow Knight: Silksong, a game which has been anticipated for a little while to say the least.
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mystia's izakaya & fossilized wonders
17 Sep 2025 - digitalily
I found myself getting a pretty major Touhou kick earlier over the past year, which started with Touhou Artificial Dream in Arcadia, which is a retro dungeon crawler ala early Shin Megami Tensei (something to discuss more another time), fuelled further by going a bit too hard in a Minecraft server, and then getting really solidified by my decision to give Touhou Mystia’s Izakaya a try. I started back in April of this year, and finished it up in late August. I did have a few long sessions towards the end to wrap everything up, but this is the kind of game you could drip play for a long time.
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a new year
12 Jan 2026 - digitalily
Happy 2026!
It’s been a while since I last posted an update, but it’s been a relatively quiet last few months. Of note:
Hades II
After wrapping up Silksong, I could finally turn my attention towards Hades II, which was an amazing time. I still have plenty to wrap up, but I had a pretty intense few weeks with it that ended after hitting a couple noteworthy goals. While at first I found the coloration of the starting area and level a bit drab, I quickly grew out of that and came to love pretty much everything it had to offer- character designs & their animation flourishes were incredibly on point, music was excellent, and the gameplay feels super good. I hesitate to say it almost has too much content, but I’m not sure it’s particularly overwhelming or anything, just chunky. I do think though, having gone through the original Hades, I was good enough at the game that I zoomed through the first clear a bit faster than was probably ideal, but that’s a fairly minor nitpick, and one I don’t know there’s a great design way out of. I’m hoping to get back to and wrap this up soon!
DDR
Earlier this year while visiting with some friends across the country, I ended up playing on a DDR machine for the first time since I had one of the PS2 games with janky unstable floor mat as a kid ages ago. Though incredibly exhausting, it was a super fun outing, and one that planted a seed in my head for later. At ACEN this year, I ended up watching some friends play it a bit after we discovered a machine with Mr. Bass Man on it, which was a bit of an inside joke among those of us there, and we were amazed that it existed. Ultimately I began to reason that there must exist a scene for making custom simfiles (as I came to know them as), and ultimately this fall I ended up buying my own hard mat (with bar!) and hooking it up to Project Outfox on my Steam Deck. It is very fun. I’m very much still a beginner, and I think there are a lot of configuration things I ought to mess around with re: timing & latency and such, but playing along to songs I’ve actually sought out and am interested in is a treat, and I’ve been trying to add it as a regular activity in my exercise routine. The only unfortunate thing is that I also learned there’s a large community of keyboard players, which means a lot of simfiles I come across are essentially impossible on a physical dance pad, so sometimes song selection is a bit more limiting than I’d like. I may try to learn how to make my own eventually, but that’s a very future thing.
A final note is that while looking for song packs, I came across a guy who was a member of a forum I used to belong to many years ago, who I guess is somewhat prolific in this scene, or this particular niche of this scene- unexpected to be sure!
Pluribus
I ended up watching Pluribus on the recommendation of a friend, and knowing that it was something from one of the Breaking Bad writers meant that it must be worth taking a look at. Won’t go into too much detail, but I found the premise so interesting as to binge all that was available at the time in short order, and I’m pretty satisfied with what I’ve seen. Keen to see the next season, and hopefully the wait isn’t as painful as it has been for other new series (looking at you, Severance).
Linux
With the official end of support for Windows 10 having come and passed, I had been seriously thinking about finally making the permanent switch over to Linux. I’ve dabbled with it several times over the years, at some points truly daily driving it, but due to inconsistent support for some of the games I played at the time in wine, ultimately ended up mainly running Windows 10 for the sake of convenience. Nowadays though, with Proton being in the state that it is and all the work Valve has put in for Linux gaming support, a permanent transition seems much more realistic, although in this time I’ve picked up a few other applications that I’m not sure how I’ll replace just yet, but I don’t see those as being too much of a roadblock. What is a roadblock though is that I’m also somewhat due for a PC upgrade, and now RAM prices are exorbitant in addition to good GPUs still being quite costly, and I’m not very keen to pay quite so much at this point in time. In the meantime though, I realized a newish (few years) laptop I had wasn’t doing too much sitting around, and so ended up refreshing myself on an Arch Linux install and checking out what’s new in window managers since my college days. Way back when I used AwesomeWM + polybar, which worked well enough but were pretty rough around the edges. I’m pleased to say that this time around, I came across hyprland and waybar, which are much nicer out of the box. It would seem that many of the aesthetics developed in places such as r/unixporn have been around long enough now to be out of the box in some software- tiling with gaps and rounded corners, for one.
The laptop itself is in a pretty good place right now, with a login manager and some special workspace rules setup. I found initial install and configuration of the OS itself to be quite a bit easier since the last time I tried Arch out, which is nice, but I haven’t stressed the compositor too much or with anything beyond integrated graphics, which I’m pretty sure I’d need to do on my desktop, so I imagine there’s more fun to be had there. I am very interested in doing this ‘for real’ on a replacement desktop, but I think for now I have to resist (even more so with a rumored Minas Tirith LEGO set on the horizon…).
Cosplay
Unfortunately cosplay work has been stalled a bit since the summer, but I’m starting to tinker again. I ran into some design roadblocks with the main thing I’m working on, which ended up knocking the wind from my sails in a pretty major way, but I think I’m beginning to see ways around at least some of that, or, how I can begin to try to solve for these issues. There are definitely parts I have a lot of uncertainty about though, mainly because it’s my first time working with EVA foam and patterning something out to my body. Expensive and not as neat as I would like for sure. I’m uncertain if this particular cosplay will be ready in time for this year, in which case I may do a Goldlewis redux with a more sensibly made coffin, but we’ll see.
Other misc. highlights include the washing machine breaking down unexpectedly, the HVAC breaking down unexpectedly (you don’t want to know about this one), and more positively, the release of Old School RuneScape’s first new skill, Sailing (which is very fun and an outstanding accomplishment from the dev team).
…but that’s pretty much it for now- ‘til next time!