I had a pretty busy and good week! The start of the week was spent down in my old home town for a little bit with family, and I had my first massage while there. It was very nice and my muscles are feeling a lot better now as a result of it. Really need to figure out taking better care of myself and doing stretches and stuff to be honest, but this was a nice experience to have. While down there, I also finished reading my first book in years!; a privately-circulated story given by one of my girlfriends. I really enjoyed it, and have put together a reading list of a bunch of book suggestions from some friends that I’m going to go through and see if I like the blurb/general idea and then try to read them. I forgot how good it was to have my brain stew on the characters & concepts after reading a book.
I’ve been in a bit of a Half-Life mood recently, with YouTube feeding me a bunch of stuff around it and whatnot. So I decided to finally play through Black Mesa properly. I last touched it sometime before they did the full release with Xen some years back, finishing what there was of the game at the time, so I have been meaning to get back to it. I’ve progressed pretty quick through the game, getting up to the first few Xen levels, and it has been a lot of fun. If you want to experience Half-Life in a way that isn’t the original game, this is definitely the way to do it!
I had a sudden blast of motivation to revisit one of my older projects, Prismaliser, to do some refactoring I’ve been wanting to do for ages, having the parsing and formatting work browser-side instead of having an API do them; moving away from Next.js because I didn’t actually need like any of it at all really, I was just using it as a scaffold; and I decided on a whim to add AT Protocol support for it, allowing public shares to be made and also having bigger schemas shared. The main reason for this last change was I don’t want to have to bother with storing the random schemas people will share in my own database and having to keep that secure. This way, people own their data and they know it’s public, easier for me to reason about.
And lastly, I went to the hair salon again! My colour from the last time faded some time ago so I’ve been meaning to make another trip and finally got around to it on Friday. This time I had my hair bleached for the first time ever, so that the colour would be more vibrant and noticeable, and I also got a sidecut done because it’s a hairstyle that’s been on my mind for a while so I figured I’d give it a try, and I’m seriously loving the outcome of everything! It looks and feels great and I don’t regret it at all!