nose, handshake emoji, eyes, bottom text: leaking

I have been sick since thursday, which I think is a result of couple of factors: consumption of food and bevarages of questionable quality (met some friends at a local pub) and people generally catching colds around this time. I got literally no sleep during the bedtime hours between wednesday and thursday, and I developed a headache and a cold soon after.  

Literally me fr

All of these things which influenced me to do a very wise decision: Instead of resting I'm gonna play a video game. Specifically Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name. Even though I told myself I would play Hollow Knight as the next game to give myself some break from the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games. 

But it has been a while since I played a game to begin with, and I've heard that this was a relatively short game so I could finish it by the weekend. 

One thing I was worried about with this game is the developers major problem with Refusing To Let Kiryu Go. Up until this point he's had, what, 4 games where the end is "This Is Kiryu's Last Story" and then follow it up again by picking his arc by straws just to have him do something, often at the expense of other characters. I groaned loudly when he made a sudden comeback in the middle of Y:LAD and stuck around for a while. And now he gets his own game as the sole protagonist. Again. Yippie. 

So with that pessimism addressed; LADG:TMWEHN is really good and has an absolutely fantastic ending. It works as a second/third/fourth attempt to do Kiryu's story right. There's a lot of rethreads but they've been repackaged to make the story better overall. Also the ending turned me into a sobbing mess. Which I haven't felt for any piece of media in Years, so that's gotta count for something.

The new gadget mechanic for the combat is a welcomed addition and it is really fun to pull gang of people with the Not Spider Man Web Shooter Metal String Watch and dashing around with the goofy jet shoes. 

 I'm so used to the games being from a different time period in terms of technology that I did a double take when I did a substory that revolves around a guy using Not ChatGPT as his dating guide, hilarity ensues. It does feel strange that the games have now reached the moderna contemporary period instnead of catching up 30 years of technological development. Rombas aren't that quirky anymore, it's AI time now, fuckers. 

Who needs an hour long youtube video about the dangers of ai chatbot when I have a japanese video game from late 2023 telling the same thing with (slightly) less insanity 

In the end the game turned out to be a really positive surprise, almost frustratingly so. Like "Oh, they still got it" kind of way. I don't know how well regarded the Majima spin-off and Infinite Wealth are (latter of which this game has a demo of, and the ending does feature Kiryu with his godawful haircut from Inifinite Wealth, ugh), but it did make me feel a bit more hopeful about playing those games. That being said my main frustration with Y:LAD was the game got really tedious to play in the last quarter, and it is in a different game genre than Name, so I'll see.

why

Until then though, I played maybe 15 minutes of Hollow Knight so I will finally get around the indie darling I should have gotten around to ages ago, I finally find out why his night is hollow.

drip it like its hot (showing my cool jackets)

 If there's one thing that I'm looking forward for the spring/autumn period it is the Fashionable season (read: cool jacket season). I'm quite fond of layering in terms of clothes and jackets make the best use of that. It helps that they are generally the most detailed/attention grabbing part of any outfit.

I have a collection of jackets that I quite like and figured I wanted to show them all In One Single Beautiful Post. 

I took all of these with my digital camera and figured around... 3/4 in that I have a standing lamp right next to me to make the darker clothes a little more clearer. And could have used it from the get-go, but oh well.

Sand brown parka from Superdry

My go-to winter jacket. Warm, plenty of pockets (except no on the left chest for some reason). It's drawback is that it's pretty heavy, so I generally try to avoid wearing a heavy backpack with this. Altough the word "try" is doing a lot of heavy lifting (heho) here.

!Solid all-weather jacket

Another go-to jacket, but for the other seasons when it's getting chilly. Which, living in Sweden, happens a lot. Very easy to put on and fairly practical. I like the blocky kind of striped pattern on it. At the very least it looks more interesting than down jackets (I see them a lot in my area. I understand why they are popular but my god have I grown tired of them lol).

Down coat

Or as we call them here "the mom sausage". Got it from a guy who got made fun of for "wearing a coat only women do" (and that was before the nickname was made). I didn't care and just wanted a big heat isolating coat at the time, which it did well mostly. Hate the hood though, it collapses if the air resistance is anything higher than "walking speed".

Levi Denim jacket

I like denim jackets for their "rough" look and that you can customize them with patches and stuff. And as you can see I'm too much of a coward to actually make a use of that. I have single Oni patch that bought in summer that I haven't made use of. Maybe one day.

Majima Sukajan from Insert Coin

One of my most weebish clothes but that's okay because it's still good as hell. Based on the back tattoo of the Extremely Good Character Goro Majima from the Yakuza games. Among the jackets they had for sale I thought this was the best looking, and it fits really well.

Brown hunter jacket

The token brown jacket that looks pretty cool, but is frankly a bit lousy with the pockets and such. I think out of all my jackets this is the one I feel the most "eh" about.

Biker jacket

look it was on sale and the last sample and the arms don't go way back when i raise them in front so that makes them cool and good okay no i dont have a motorcycle or anything dont make fun of me

Double breasted navy blue wool coat

My "Fancy" coat for all of the Important Occasions. Or if I want to wear something really nice that day. 

Brown wool coat

I got really attached to the blue coat and decided to get something casual. The most recent item in my collection and real happy with it.

Japanese bomber jacket

I call it "my second hand golden treasure". The actual "cool jacket", which I was not only lucky to find but was also my size. Fell for it immediately and I'm looking forward to the spring/autumn season to wear it again.

Racer themed leather jacket

Another good one found in a second hand store (same as the bomber jacket). It's pretty volumous and I love the colors and patterns on this thing. Pretty good at keeping heat as well so it's surprisingly useful for a detailed jacket.

sport hatin gym rat

I've never been a sports person in my life. I hated playing soccer during breaks (which was the absolutely most common thing boys did) and I hated watching sports as well. I hated participating in gym class, only somewhat tolerated brännboll (baseball for babies) and basketball (because I was tall and it wasn't as endurance demanding as soccer).

I did try a couple of martial art classes (Judo and Karate) but I found the training to be rather boring and I noticed I had a sense of FOMO if I were to somehow skip a class. So for a big part of my life up until my early 20s I avoided exercising altogether.

I did try weightligting a few times before it truly stuck with me. I didn't know what I was doing or why I did specific exercises for or why a lot of workouts had rather redundant movements in the same workout sessions (turns out: they were bad).

So despite, frankly, not looking the part, I have been going to the gym for a majority of my adulthood and found the freedom of being able to train however I want whenever I want really rewarding. So it being good for my health and making me stronger really adds to the whole thing. Oh. And getting muscles. I honestly didn't know being swole(-ish) would feel as good as it does... it helps with the motivation sometimes as well.

Let's get the gains!

quickly comparing photos by a digital camera from 2004 and a smartphone from 2022

Clickbait title: does OLD DIGITAL CAMERA beat SAMSUNG SMART PHONE!? 

I got around to getting the CR-V3 batteries I mentioned before and they really did make the camera work properly. No longer having to shake it just to hope that the batteries manage to keep proper contact to the case, assuming they haven't been drained already. 

I decided to take some shots with it and my phone to see in what ways they meaningfully differ. Which, as it turns out, is many. 

(Digital camera to the left, phone camera to the right)

(im not fixing the weird alignment issue)

The most apparent difference are the colors. The digital camera has a much warmer tone, which I appreciate, as it makes the images feel lively. The shadows are also a lot darker and more prominent, definitely more than they are in real life. The phone camera is a much colder and has brighter shadows, if any at all. I would say that in terms of creating a moody scene the digital camera wins on this. 

Another obvious difference is how detailed the pictures became. The phone shows things like wrinkles, material texture and just generally making things more obvious about what they are. The camera is generally blurry. Not enough to make it hard to tell what things are made of, but definitely not as clear as the phone, even in brighter settings. 

It may be due to habit, but for me it's also easier to control a phone than a camera. It's much easier to focus on what you want on the image, where as the camera feels like a bet half of the time (it took me so many tries to get the glowing letters on the keyboard readable). And I'm sure I can do some editing in my phone to make its photos match the appearance of the camera photos. 

Overall I am pretty satisifed with the digital camera. I think I'll have to get used to its quirks (if I should even call them that) to make a proper judgement of it and to make the best use it. Don't think it's going to replace my phone camera completely (being easy to pull out and also to post with are huge benefits) I do hope it'll eventually become my primary camera... assuming I can also get a charger for the camera/battery but uh that's for future me to solve lol.

camera mia

Having used a smartphone camera for a while and pretty often, I noticed a few quirks about it that's been pushing me to look for other alternatives for amateur hobby for fun photography:

• The lens is tiny and it has a distortion to it that I think makes it pretty bad for.... almost everything? Anything closer to edges of the screen looks larger and closer than it actually is, while anything in center looks smaller and further away than it actually is. That could work some experimental angles, but that's not why I use a quick and convenient camera for most of the time.
• Without doing some annoying post-edits, the camera will not capture the color/shade/brightness/whatever like I see it. This would be fine if it had a look to it, but the colors feel usually dull and sometimes just inaccurate, even with editing.
• So it's oddly neither good for selfies or nature/street photos, which is what I usually use it for.

I know that the big benefit of phone cameras is how convienent and fast and relatively detailed they are. And I won't, and can't, argue against those points, especially for the layman. But I want Accuracy To Reality. I want the skyline that I see look as proportionally large as I see it, I want the tree that's 5 meters away from me not look like it's 25 meters away, and so on.

A while ago I impulse bought a DSLR camera in inspiration from, sigh, Life is Strange. I didn't want to deal with film, but rather have photos in digital format so they can be easily edited on the computer if I wanted to, and a lens that didn't cause the cell phone distortion. I spent quite a bit of my time learning about aperture, focal lenghts, ISO and the cameras settings. In the end I've used the camera...... a total of 6 times? In the past 8 or so years I've owned it?
The issue was that it was just a smidge too bulky. I needed a separate bag to carry it around, and it was often difficult to catch photos of spontatnous moments. I've also found image editing to be a rather tiresome activity. So on the whole it is a perfectly fine camera, but I didn't have the Photographer Spirit to wield it.

R.I.P. (Burried in one of my drawers).

Last year I got the photography passion running again (think I was in a Get Off The Phone phase) and decided to try on digital cameras from the early 2000s. The internet told me they worked not only good, but that they had a certain Look onto them that makes them feel different from the cameras of today. Something something CCL or whatever. Either way I got sold in and eventually got a Pentax Optio S40.

There is a video of me doing the fortnite dance in this thing

I will be upfront that haven't been good at using it either. Some photos from home here and there. But I stumbled upon an issue where it wouldn't detect (or even quickly drain?) the batteries. I looked more into it and apparently that model is notorious for being picky about which types of AA batteries it uses well (didn't even know that was a thing). So I have to order some CR-V3 batteries (basically the best type of battery for old digital cameras, but they are pretty uncommon in stores it seems) to get the thing work reliably. I will give that a chance and try to stick with it. Otherwise I might have to try out a different digital camera, old or modern.

Dislike a Dragon

Just finished a second glass of sparkling wine.

In the previous entry I mentioned I was playing trough Yakuza: Like a Dragon and was about to encounter a notorious difficulty spike of a boss fight. I fought, lost, grinded my way higher levels and more varied movesets, changed team setup, fought again and won (felt like the fight took a while). Felt obnoxious.

What I wasn't expecting was this process would be repeated in similar ways for every upcoming boss fight, with their own annoying quirks that made to tired of playing the game. It got to it's breaking point in the final chapter where you have to go trough a 30 minute long dungeon and a fight a boss with ridicolous amount of health (no save points during any of this) and, get this, the boss starts using an instant kill move after getting to half health, trough the rest of the fight. The only way to deal with it was to use the rather unreliable blocking mechanic. He first attacked Ichiban, the protagonist. I failed to block, and it killed him, causing the game to ask me if I wanted to redo the fight again.

I didn't want to do the fight again. I got so sick with this annoying nonsense, so I watched the rest of the finale on youtube. Did you know there are two more long fights right after the boss? And, again, no way to save? Yakuza games have always had this weird dichtonomy where they want to have big long epic finales in these adult-themed games, but they are usually tedious and the lack of respect they have for players time (especially this game) has always made the finales dreadful. Doesn't exactly help that they rarely had satisifying endings, wether it's the gameplay and/or story.

Thankfully ending is actually among the best in the franchise. It's just a shame it's locked behind a massive swamp of slog.

It's a shame that I'm finished with the game on such a sour note, because everything up until that initial difficulty spike has been pretty darn good: main story, cast, side-quest and all.

I had plans to play either Hollow Knight or the DMC trilogy collection, but after being frustrated by game mechanics so much I'm feeling a bit hesitant of risking having that happen again, so I might take a break from games for a little time. Doesn't help that I haven't done much else today so I feel the desire to get other stuff done.

Bit of a shame to start the first proper work-weekend on a sour note. Should figure out what to do with the rest of the day, of the few hours I have left before bedtime.

Cool as Dragon

Can you believe it's snowing in Sweden? Well aparently, Sweden doesn't. This whole week has been filled with gorgeous snowy weather, but today it snowed Just A Little Bit Too Much so public transit fully stopped for a bit and I assume the car traffic did not fare much better. Me though? I was working from home and took a 25 minute long walk to the gym. I'm fully aware that it was the equivalent poverty tourism for snowy climate, but it is a bit odd how Sweden (or at least the south of it) seems to be so ill-prepared for heavy-ish snow. But hey, good opportunity for photos!
 

Statue of Karl IX

It also seems like tomorrow is not going to look any better weather-wise, so it will be a nice and chill restday tomorrow (which means: gaming). Actually, speaking of games, I've been craving some Riichi Mahjong lately. I wish I could say it was due to Yakuza: Like A Dragon since I'm playing it, but I haven't touched the Mahjong minigame at all. Instead it's due to passively watching some NorthernLion VODs and I felt the urge slowly growing on me. It's a similar feeling when I watch someone play World of Warcraft even though I've sworn off that game about the 5 times by now. But with Mahjong it wasn't so much "swearing off" as other things took interest. Doesn't help that learning the conditions you need to have a winning hand is a pain. I found out the city's Mahjong club is pretty close to where I live and it's been active for quite a few years. But I figure that I should prioritize getting my Croatian to be decent before I even consider getting another hobby. I have plenty of them as is. I do hope to finish Like A Dragon soon, but I do know from spoiling myself that I'm heading towards a massive difficulty spike in form of an Important Boss Fight, and there still are 3 or so chapters left, so it's going to take a while, but I have done what I think was sensible amount of grinding, so tomorrow I'll see how that paid off.