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The Raspberry Pi that was powering my house number has died. Sadly, a power outage managed to ruin the SD card I had the software running on. I don’t have any surge protection on the house number Pi, so I guess this was kind of expected.

CD Projekt Red launched their oft delayed sci-fi first person role playing game on December 10th, 2020. The game hit basically every platform, including Stadia, where I spent my 70 or so hours in Night City. In short, the game was under cooked, and the marketing team was clearly not pitching the same game the developers were making.

With the release of Lit 2.0, the Polymer Project has entered maintenance mode. The project was a push forward for web components by a team at Google, and came with a pretty high quality set of Material components. The world of web components look a lot different now than they did six years ago, and we probably have a lot of that thanks to the Polymer Project.

One of the many advantages of spending a year working from home, was that removing the commute time from my day left me with a ton of energy. That extra energy meant that I was able to pick up another new hobby over the year: cooking.

The Medium is an Xbox Series and PC exclusive, released by Bloober Team in early 2021. The game launched day one on Game Pass, and was met with some middling reviews. Having just got my hands on a Series X console, and considering that the series consoles took more of a cross gen approach for the launch, I was more than happy to jump into a game that was developed with the Series consoles in mind.

Everyone seems to do a obligatory year in review post, so here is mine. 2020 was a weird year. For myself at least it started off pretty normally. We had a big 20s themed party, everyone had a good night, and everything was decidedly normal.

The Gardens Between is a puzzle game originally released in 2018 from Australian developer, The Voxel Agents. In November 2020 the game was released on Stadia, and was included as a free pro title. This game had been on my radar for a while, but the inclusion as a pro game finally got the controller in the hands.

Earlier in 2020 Microsoft announced that EA Play was coming to Game Pass Ultimate, and along with it Respawn’s 2019 soul’s like Star Wars game. I had been waiting to grab the game when it came to Stadia, but the free addition to Game Pass was too good to pass up.

Late in summer 2020, the hype train for Marvel’s Avengers was running at full speed. The company was slow dripping information in a lead up to a couple open beta weekends. I started to get the super hero vibe and decided to jump back into the arcady Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3, on Nintendo switch, to get ready for the newest AAA experience.

This entry will cover three things I have been playing around with over the last month: dual booting Manjaro Linux, the arrival of my PinePhone Postmarket OS edition, and some thoughts on Stadia after playing through Rage 2. Dual booting Manjaro: First off will be my move to dual booting Manjaro Linux.

That is right, after thirteen - almost fourteen years I finally beat Final Fantasy XII, and in my opinion it is one of the better Final Fantasy games. First let’s start off with a trip down memory lane, way back to Halloween 2006 when the game first released.

Game Pass continues to make my gaming backlog way too big. Streets of Rage 4 was day and date released on Game Pass, and I’ve been slowly making my way through the few hour long campaign. I ended up playing through on my PC.

At the end of March Half-life: Alyx was released. As a somewhat early adopter of VR, I was eagerly waiting for a high budget, triple A title. Don’t get me wrong, there are a ton of excellent experiences out there, but the market was really missing that full, fat game.

While I enjoy painting, I actually can’t really paint. I don’t know colour theory, I don’t fully understand when to use what type of brush, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying it. That doesn’t mean I still won’t try. Earlier this month we had some acrylics in the house, so I took a stab at painting a chibi Aeris, based on an image I found on the Internet.

Finally, after years of teasing, rumours, and development drama, the Final Fantasy VII Remake has been released. Given my few qualms with the last mainline entry, I was worried that I would have to struggle through the combat just to enjoy the story, but the remake is a marketable step up from Square Enix’s recent developments.

At some point over the last three years I had decided to make an LED matrix display number for my house. I think my reasoning was something like: “what if I can’t find a font I like? Wait! I can just make a screen do this”.

I thought I was done with Final Fantasy XV, but then along comes Episode Ardyn and the PC release. I have jumped back into the world of Eos, and I can honestly say it is a much more pleasant experience on the PC.

Recently I found myself blazing through Children of Morta. If the game was a buffet, I kept going back up for more until I threw up. Children of Morta is your typical roguelike with randomly generated levels, randomized loot drops and even randomized events.

While I wasn’t holding the controller for the entirety of these playthroughs, I did get to experience the HD remaster of Shenmue I and II. These two games are an amazing window to the past, but often feel dated despite the up-rez’d graphics.

Life Is Strange: Before the Storm is a prequel to the 2015 time bending adventure hit from DONTNOD Entertainment. It was first released on August 31st 2017 and was developed by Deck Nine. While Deck Nine delivered a solid three episodes, the game largely fails to feel like more than fan service.

What Remains of Edith Finch was developed by Giant Sparrow and originally released in 2017 for the Playstation 4 and PC. The game also saw a release on Xbox One later in 2017, and came to the Switch in 2019. You play as Edith Finch, the last living member of the Finch family.

Simply put, prefers-color-scheme is the new hotness. Okay, well maybe it isn’t, but dark modes certainly are. A dark mode option has actually been added to the more recent releases of iOS, Android, and Windows 10. Hell, the Edge team is also bringing a high contrast media query to Chromium.

Recently, a series of events left me with a completely borked computer last week. I am still not very clear on what happened, but the end result is one dead drive, and a boot drive that no longer has a boot record.

Gears 5 is the most recent game in the Gears of War franchise. The cover based third person shooter series was originally developed by Epic Games until Microsoft bought the franchise in 2014. Development was handed over to The Coalition, who developed the fourth and fifth entries.

The Turing Test was released in 2016 and was developed by Bulkhead Interactive. It is a first person puzzle that takes place in a colony on Jupiter’s moon Europa. The crew has disappeared and in their place is a series of puzzles that Ava and the colony’s AI, TOM, must solve.

With the recent news that GitHub Actions will now be supporting continuous deployment for free, I figured I would try my hand at setting up some continuous deployment for my site. As of writing, my site is hosted on Firebase using their generous free tier, what little javascript code that runs on my site is vanilla paired with Material Web Components, the site itself is a Hugo static site, and my source code is stored with Bitbucket.

Every once in a while, I get the itch to paint. It is a calming hobby that I picked up a few years ago. A few years back, apparently in 2015, Bob Ross ran a Twitch marathon, and I, like many others I am sure, tuned in for this weird and oddly entertaining event.

Quantum Break is a third person shooter from Remedy Games, and is currently available to play on game pass. I remember being hyped up by a faux Sam Lake to play as Jack Joyce and create dimensional rifts, but somehow this game never landed on my shelf.

I recently picked up an Xbox One X since my launch system was starting to look a little long in the tooth. Included was a free month of Microsoft’s Netflix of games, Game Pass. So, welcome to my new series, Game Pass it up.

Spiderman had sat unfinished in my catalogue until this weekend. Despite being one of the best games of 2018, the open world complete-a-thon left me burnt out shortly after its release. Interestingly, it’s not the open world, graphics, or story that makes this game so great.

Honestly, it already doesn’t hold up. After years in development and two demos, the game launched on November 29th, 2016. I had played both demos, and was eagerly awaiting my physical copy of the game. I was all geared up for its release too.

Over the last little while I have been slowly adding in bits and pieces to improve the site. Most of these are recommendations from web.dev. Web fonts Web fonts are expensive, and their initial load can be quite costly. Traditionally, web fonts will render invisible text on load 🙀.

No, not the character from Final Fantasy VII. Aeris is my puppy, who turns one-year-old tomorrow. She might be spoiled, but she is a very well behaved pup. Aeris eating a toy. After a haircut.

Okay, this time I am totally going to get it. Seriously you guys. Oh. I am McKenzie, and this is a website. Seriously though, this is the inaugural post on mckenzielong.info. The template isn’t finished, but I think it’s reasonable enough to look at for the time being.