Making the time
It's been almost a month again since I last posted to this blog. Whilst I have been busy, upon reflection it's not that I haven't had the time to blog. I just changed the title of this post to better reflect that.
There have been many instances where I could have put something together for this blog. But I didn't. This has been for a mixture of things. Mostly it was down to energy/motivation. Whilst I have had ideas for what I could write about, I just couldn't bring myself to do so, and it's not as if there is much friction to actually writing something.
Part of not actually writing something has in large part been due to tiredness. I've mostly been on top of other things (despite doing long term cover for staff sickness [which is rampant everywhere at the moment]), but with that comes the exhaustion when those other things have been done.
I'm currently on annual leave over the majority (but not all) of the Easter break. This is mostly going to be used to catch up on the academic writing I am working on (which has been delayed due to the aforementioned cover). Except this week, the tiredness has truly caught up on me. This kind of thing usually happens when I have time booked off. Except in this instance it was more to give me breathing space from teaching and admin (the admin responsibilities have become increasingly Kafkaesque this semester), so I was hoping it would get to me after I had done the writing. But no, it's come now. So I have leaned into it. Writing next week when I have essentially nothing else on. Whereas for the past week I've been playing more videogames. Specifically older videogames.
I've been getting more out of my Steam Deck as a result, finally installing RetroDeck on it (I have tested it previously on my old Dell laptop running Bazzite). Because RetroDeck is essentially one big (but not actually that big) Flatpak it is much easier to get up and running. I've been using it to play either games I used to play or alternative versions of those games to see if they run better. For example, True Crime: New York City for the GameCube was a bit buggy, but when I was younger I had the patience (and the time) to put up with it. Now though, I wanted to see if the PS2 version (which apparently was the original version) runs better. On the whole it is still mostly tweaking things within the emulators that come with RetroDeck, but it's been an interesting experience and has given me some thoughts around the wider discussions of emulation.
I'm going to end this post for now. I'm still writing things in Obsidian which continues to be a great tool for writing and researching. I still feel I can get more out of it (without delving into other community plugins), the daily notes function could be useful for me. But for now I've got other writing to look at.