Leo's

Blog

  • LEGO The Hobbit

    I think this game, alongside LEGO LOTR, was given away at some point (I couldn’t find it in my purchase history). I chose to play The Hobbit first as it’s chronologically the first one.

    I was looking for a game I could play that didn’t demand my complete attention, that I could pause whenever I needed, and that wasn’t emotionally draining.

    Man, this game is fun. The levels are not too long, the stakes are never high (if you die you just respawn right there to continue playing), and the puzzles are silly and entertaining.

    Also, this game is a completionist’s wet dream.

    But before I continue. I’d like to get some things out of the way:

    • I had to install a mod to make the intro cinematic skippable. It was really long and not being able to skip it was annoying. Fortunately, doing this didn’t disable achievements.
    • I had to buy a controller. This game is too uncomfortable to play on keyboard.
    • There were some game-breaking and annoying bugs:
      • The Mythril Catapult schematic was behind a door that requires you to shoot at some switches. But you weren’t able to shoot at them unless a hint-stone appeared, which it didn’t. I searched and found multiple possible solutions. In the end, in my case, fast traveling to Bywater a couple of times made the hint-stone appear and let me do the mini-game to open the door.
      • In the Flies and Spiders level, The Elves of Mirkwood section, you have to fight three spiders to save the dwarves. These are scripted fights. On the third one, the fight would get into an infinite loop. Changing my video settings to 1080×720, 60hz, and low quality textures fixed it.
      • There were a LOT of bugs that would happen if I disabled V-Sync and the game started to run at 1k+ fps. Playing at 240hz never gave me issues (except those described above). Some examples:
        • During fast travel, I’d get stuck in the air hanging from the eagle.
        • I would buy a new character, my carrots would be discounted (you needed carrots to unblock this specific character in Bree), but the character was never added to my inventory.
        • If I tried to switch to a different character, my current character would start sparkling and get stuck in that animation and never change to the character I selected.
        • The map wouldn’t open.
        • Some sounds would get in a loop and play forever.

    Now, the main story was fun in general and, like I already mentioned, the levels are not that long or complex. This is a good thing because if you want to complete everything in this game you will have to revisit the main story in free play mode to unlock and reach all the collectibles. Still, replaying these levels almost never felt like a chore, they still retained their fun.

    The side quests are even shorter, but still entertaining because they’re not your generic fetch quests. They all include combinations of different mechanics the game offers, so in a way a lot of them felt unique (and there’s a lot!).

    The most entertaining part, though, are the red bricks, which are basically legal cheats. After completing some specific quests, each one gives you the option to buy a red brick which gives you buffs like, for example, making each stud you pick up worth double.

    Something that is incredibly satisfying is that these multipliers stack. There are red bricks that give x2, x4, x6, x8, and x10, which give you a total multiplier of x3840 if you unlock them all. Doing a single story level with these multipliers gives you millions and millions (sometimes billions) of studs. At some point they lose any meaning but it’s still satisfying to see the number go up.

    At the end having to do so much (fast) traveling to complete all side quests took its toll and got boring, but fortunately it didn’t last long and I was able to 100% the game.

    It took me 49 hours to finish it (give or take 3 hours: I remember leaving the game open one time).

  • A change of paradigm

    People used to have to go to a library when they needed to research something.

    Software developers used to have to buy physical books to try and learn or debug something.

    And then the internet and search engines appeared.

    Software developers used to have to visit Stack overflow and GitHub issues to try and learn or debug something.

    And then LLMs appeared.

    They’re not perfect and sometimes get things wrong, but the technology changed how we approach problem solving (and they can only get better!).

  • What remains of Edith Finch

    This is a game that was given away in the Epic Store years ago (holy crap, just looked it up, more than 7 years ago!) that I claimed and never really considered playing it. At some point since then, also years ago, I actually decided to download it, my reasoning being that having it there would force me to play it.

    Well, I finally did.

    I already knew it was a “walking simulator” game. Not sure if that’s a derogatory term or not -a game with minimal interaction, basically an interactive movie with no decision making- and I also knew that kind of games usually evokes a wide range of emotions by touching complex themes and subjects. In other words, I didn’t need convincing to play it; just motivation and taking the time to do it.

    I finally played it and, to be straightforward, it wasn’t what I expected. I think I understand what the team behind wanted to show but it feels like they didn’t develop the story as much as they would’ve wanted because the ending felt rushed.

    Usually, when you want to keep things up to interpretation, you give possible explanations or alternatives for people to think about and debate and make up their own headcannon. A clear example is Inception’s ending where we, the audience, cannot say for sure if Cobb ever wakes up or stays dreaming forever. There’s clearly two possible endings the movie presents to you.

    In the case of What remains of Edith Finch, there is no possible explanation or even a remote hint of an explanation for the cause of the untimely deaths of the family members. And the problem with that is any possible explanation you as a the audience could come up with will always feel like a reach. I’ve read some theories saying the old house is a monster that influences the family and causes their deaths, or that Edie was the one behind all the deaths/murders. And the problem is there is no mention or hint of paranormal happenings in the whole game so saying an inanimate object is a monster feels like the biggest reach possible. Edie being behind the deaths also doesn’t seem plausible (Barbara disappearing or dying when Edie was with Sam in the hospital).

    Again, you could somehow make those theories make sense, but the amount of assumptions required for it to work is just too much.

    But back to my experience with the game. Like I already said, the ending felt rushed. I think there was space to share more about Edie’s experience after Dawn and Edith left, or the relationship between Edith and her mother or Edith and Edie. I think doing any of those could’ve given more weight to the ending because to be honest I never felt invested in Edith’s story so her fate did nothing for me.

    I still enjoyed the game, I felt for the family and the permanent state of grief they must have been in. I’m glad I played it.

  • I’m starting to dislike early 2010s entertainment

    Maybe dislike is not the right word.

    Entertainment from that time exists in a weird place where it feels modern due to high definition content and references that people still get today.

    But it also feels outdated. I’ve only recently started to feel this way and after trying to figure out why, it was obvious in retrospect: the lack of smartphones and modern social platforms.

    When I watch a movie from the early naughts and before and the plot includes issues locating someone (e.g. Will Hunting not showing up to his scheduled session with the math professor) I understand it and give it a pass. Obviously, they only had landlines, and early cellphones were too expensive to be common. It was understandable that it was a real problem if someone didn’t show up.

    The opposite happens with movies from the late naughts and early 10s. A lot of people already had smartphones, although it still wasn’t a given.

    I feel like they should have access to more modern stuff, although I clearly and obviously know why they shouldn’t.

    They should be able to facetime someone if they need to chat with someone without having to travel all the way to the other person’s location.

    They should be aware of any big events just because everybody talks about it in social media, which includes the most viral thing ever: memes. When they act surprised, and they actually are, about some big event that another character tells them about, it feels fake and not believable.

    It just feels wrong.

    That’s it.

  • Silence in movies and TV

    Thanos’ snap in Infinity War and the final scene of Game of Thrones’ Hardhome.

    Right after the most intense moments (the fight against Thanos and his army and the attack of the Night King while discussing if the clans should unite), the heroes lose and the music stops.

    It sends a message of hopelessness: that the heroes weren’t good enough, that the situation is more serious than you would think (as serious as a movie or tv show can be), and that there’s no evident solution to the threat.

    That’s it. I tried to search for other movies or series that do this but haven’t found anything so far.

  • Oh man

    15 years ago, having a 1 Mbps internet connection was the norm. Progress.

  • Bare bones Docker containers

    Ever since I started using Docker, six years ago, I’ve wanted to use it for every single thing I work on, be it a project from my day job or a hobby project I’d like to start.

    Back in January, I wrote about wanting to learn React and automated deployments using GitHub Actions. I learned about the latter and tried to do the former but got stuck in the initial setup and gave up.

    How are these two things related? Well, I got stuck trying to create and run a node environment with Docker. A downside of getting used to Docker is that it now feels dirty installing and configuring stuff directly in my host OS. There’s a lot of valid reasons to avoid doing it but that’s not the point of this post.

    I’ve tried to learn React, Node, Go, and Python, and every single time I would get stuck trying to create a Docker environment for each of those languages and frameworks. It was a combination of a lack of experience with them (and their ecosystem) and a lack of information on using Docker for development. There actually is a lot of info out there but for some reason most of, if not all, the examples and tutorials are directed to containerize existing applications, which I don’t have because I’m starting from scratch.

    I’ve been looking for a way to setup a container with a Linux OS and just the language installed so I can tinker with it and install anything I need inside… and I finally found it.

    It turns out I wasn’t using the right terms when searching because the information was there.

    By adding these two lines to a container specification in the compose.yml file, it makes it an interactive one where you can log into and do whatever you need to:

    stdin_open: true # docker run -i
tty: true        # docker run -t

    This helps me because the last line of my Dockerfile would look like this:

    CMD ["/bin/bash"]

    That’s not a long lasting process so if you try to run the container the normal way, it’ll automatically stop and exit.

  • New year, same goals

    Since my last post where I talked about my short to mid-term goals, I haven’t really made any progress. But, with the new year here, I finally found some time (and the motivation) to dig into setting up a GitHub Actions workflow for automating deployments in my project. Managed to set it up so that tests run whenever there’s a commit or a PR waiting to merge into the stage branch.

    Now, when it comes to frameworks, let’s just say I haven’t made any headway. I tried getting into a React.js course, but my excitement for it faded after a while.

    So, to fix this slump, I decided to come up with a plan. The main issue? I struggle with self-discipline and rely too much on having the motivation to keep going. Here’s where I usually lose that motivation:

    1. Tutorials and courses that start from square one, assuming the reader has zero knowledge of programming. Gets me bored just thinking about having to go through stuff I already know.
    2. Even when they assume some basic knowledge, they tend to move at a snail’s pace, explaining every tiny detail. That, too, makes me lose interest.
    3. I’d rather spend my free time gaming than continue programming.

    So, here’s the plan to turn things around. The solution to the first two issues is pretty straightforward. There’s this public GitHub repo loaded with app ideas ranked by difficulty (beginner, intermediate, and advanced).

    I’m gonna build each of those ideas first in a language/framework I’m already comfortable with (for clarity). Then, I’ll replicate it in the ones I’m aiming to learn, like Node.js + React.js.

    For the third issue, I’m committing 30 minutes of my free time to this. If, by some miracle, I catch a good flow, I might extend it a bit (but keeping an eye on not burning out).

    Let’s see how this goes.

  • What to write about

    This is my personal blog, so I can literally write about anything. Still, I’d like to set some expectations (for myself).

    I work in software development, and what made me want to open this blog was the idea of recording my progress in different areas of it. For example, I plan to solidify my knowledge in infrastructure and also learn some popular frameworks for both backend and frontend. Having this blog kind of gives me a sense of accountability, which I really need.

    Buuuuut, I would also like to write about more personal stuff, like hobbies or general thoughts on general stuff.

    I think I’ll keep the software related stuff in English and write the rest in Spanish. Or maybe not, we’ll see.

  • Hello world!

    I finally bought a domain and rented a VPS.

    I’ve always wanted to start, and maintain, a blog. I actually have, but I always used free services and they weren’t as good as having your own server.

    Let’s see how it goes.