I thought I’d share some progress photos of our garden. Here’s how different it looks compared to Spring of last year.
Currently we’re shopping around for more garden furniture. Lights, barbecue accessories, and all that. Quarantine would have been quite depressing without the outdoor space.
It’s also time to learn how to replace that old fence in the background of the first photo…
Here’s another batch of fake Pokemon that I made a while ago.
In other news I’ve finished Half Life: Alyx, and immediately started playing it again on hard mode. Apparently there’s also a lot of cool mods to check out, which is nice since the game’s a bit short. I’m also approaching 200 hours in Age of Empires 2: DE, and finally feel like I’m somewhat competent at the game.
The UK continues to be awful at handling coronavirus, so we’re not going outside anytime soon. Every government measure seems to be 2 months too late.
Stay safe!
Over the last few days I’ve been following the protests and riots in America quite closely. For those not following the news, an unarmed black man named George Floyd was slowly suffocated to death by a group of police officers in front of a crowd of people. This quickly sparked large protests and riots in many major American cities. Here’s an article which sums up the events, and also links to some organizations you can donate to if you wish to help.
Remember that the mainstream media will dramaticise things, and that they protect the establishment. Whether it’s Fox News or CNN, they’ll show you burning buildings, but not peaceful protests where nothing violent is happening. They won’t show the police antagonizing peaceful protestors and driving their cars into them.
Any sensible country would know that the police should be trained to de-escalate situations like these, and yet, in America they seem to be trained to do the opposite.
The situation is complicated, and you shouldn’t trust anyone who’s trying to give a you a really simple and satisfying answer! There’s a lot of factors that contribute to so many people getting so mad. I hope you can relate to at least a few of the issues listed in this image:
Sure, there are a lot of people rioting, but don’t let that overshadow the 10s of thousands of protestors that aren’t, and the millions who are at home but are sympathetic to the protestors. Ask yourself why people are sympathetic.
Ask yourself why the minimum wage hasn’t increased in over a decade? Why America has the highest prison population per capita in the entire world? Why it’s the only developed country that doesn’t have universal healthcare? Why the justice system is so much fairer to wealthy individuals? Why neither republicans or democrats try to fix any of these issues, while they give trillions to corporations?
Personally, I think working-class Americans are right to be pissed off at their corrupt and racist leaders and institutions, and following the money can give you some idea of who they’re really working for.
Hey guys, I’ve been playing Pokemon Clover a lot lately, and was curious about how difficult it is to edit Pokemon Fire Red. Turns out editing maps is pretty straightforward – there’s some robust tools for that, and the game seems to handle the changes quite well without crashing. It’s a bit more complicated if you want to add your own graphics, but I was happy enough just making my own version of Pallet Town with the existing tiles. The grass is populated with Weedles and Caterpies and Missingnos.
Changing Pokemon graphics was tricky though. You need to learn a bit about how to change pointers and use empty space in the ROM, so that you don’t end up overwriting any essential stuff while adding your new content. It also took me many attempts to get the color pallet right. Some of the tools used are very primitive, and just installing the text editing tool was a huge pain. What you see in the screenshot below took me 3 hours! Meanwhile the whole town took less than an hour.
Anyway, I’m probably done with this stuff now. It’s cool to mess around with for one evening, but no longer than that. I have respect for people who can devote years to this stuff without getting paid.
Hey guys, me and Ronja took some photos at Glasgow’s botanic gardens, and figured they would make good phone wallpapers. So here’s a pack of 80 vertical wallpapers in roughly 4k resolution. Feel free to use them as stock images for whatever you want.
It’s broken up into 4 zip files:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
