a lot of things have happened this month that i wanted to talk about so for a short while please humour me as i go back to this format of posts.
from late july to early this month i was at a friend’s house for a week. we were a group of three for the majority of the week and i spent a lot of my time there just enjoying being with that group in person for the first time in years. we went looking for used game deals, i ended up with a sizable increase to my PS4 collection and a used PS5 in existent condition that i’m going to try to make look nicer later on. i plan on using it to get back into buying games used, with some help from an amazing website known as “DoesItPlay?“. unfortunately its firmware wasn’t old enough to be exploitable (which was of course unsurprising), hence why i’m not making a full post on it. i will however talk about my first impressions. in terms of design, i prefer the interface of the PS4 but in terms of usability i do prefer how fast and easy to navigate the PS5 is in comparison. the controller i have mixed feelings about. i love the adaptive triggers loads and feel they add to immersion a lot more than i first thought they would honestly but my hands find the DualShock 4 more comfortable and as a result i find myself picking that up over the DualSense whenever i’m able to use that instead. as for the other things that happened, a lot of music listening, gaming, i repasted my mate’s ps3 (it runs a lot better now) and i walked around aimlessly for a while and found these really nice looking gardens.
not long after i got back home, i found a cheap 1080p monitor on eBay that i bought because i had been wanting a third monitor for quite a while now. it turned up and yeah, my god is a third monitor a really helpful thing to have for the way i use a computer (a lot of multitasking, believe it or not). speaking of multiple screens too, VR. VRChat has decided it’s time to take over my soul yet again and so i’m back in there now. the group that gave me access to age restricted instances back when they were in private beta decided to start actually doing age restricted instances again some time between my absence and now and so that’s where i’ve spent a lot of my time in VRC (along with a couple friends too, of course). upon entering one of these instances, you immediately notice something. something off. in a good way. you’re in a public that’s actually civil! from my experience in the ones i spend my time in, issues are very rarely caused by anyone and when they are moderators take care of them while still giving the people causing issues a chance to stop being a cunt and stay in the instance. my return (along with the third monitor) has gotten me back into avatar stuff a little. i’m working on a different approach to getting the Nia avatar to work on mobile. it’s looking good so far, and said approach means that i don’t have to decimate the model to make it fit within the mobile performance limits. it does mean however that its performance rank won’t be as good as originally promised which is unfortunate cause that was the main reason for making the avatar mobile compatible in the first place. i underestimated the difficulty of making it a good performance rank while keeping it looking and working well. maybe in the future if i get better at this stuff i can optimise it a bit more.
i decided to charge the MacBook while rendering video too. that was a bad idea apparently. i saw a flash at some point during the process that i for some reason just thought was like a notification on my phone. i look at the Mac a few seconds later and notice it’s not charging. i mess about with the charger a little and that doesn’t get it to charge again so i decide to replace the fuse in the plug as a troubleshooting step. i plug it back in and there’s that flash again! there’s your reminder to not use fake chargers i suppose. i tried buying a new charger (an official one this time) and the Mac blew the fuse on that one too, so i bought a new MagSafe port board and turns out that’s the wrong one and the right one for the model i have is like £40. don’t know what i’m gonna do about that one really cause i fear that the issue is gonna be something deeper than the MagSafe port anyway. it kinda just ruined my want to use that Mac and increased my want to buy things that are more repairable going forward if i’m being honest. my final thought on this situation is that this video cost me one 2015 MacBook Pro to make and so you should watch it or something. and while you do that i’ll look at buying a Framework and do nothing more than look for a good while now because of that price and because i want an upgrade to my desktop first. (or do i? it’s Haswell. it doesn’t get much better than that really.)