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I really thought about skipping this month because it has just been one thing after another, and I didn’t want to deal with writing a blog post. But, I have a good streak going so I’m going to keep at it. I’m also not going to half-ass it.
Reading
It’s kinda weeb-adjacent, but this month I’ve been off and on reading “The Lone Samurai: The Life of Miyamoto Musashi” by William Scott Wilson. I have a bunch of samurai books I got from a humble bundle deal, and I’ve read 1 or 2 of them and this one stood out to me. I’ve been interested in Miyamoto Musashi for a while because I’ve heard he was a little bit of a troll in his duels. He would use wooden swords and he would show up late to make his opponent mad. The book is a little hard to read because a lot of it is the history of this person or that shogunate, so the names are a little hard to keep up with. Same with the locations. I may or may not finish this one. I have attempted “The Book Of Five Rings” by Musashi himself, but never got super far into it. Eastern philosophy and concepts are difficult for me to understand.
I’ve also sorta started reading “Goodnight Pun Pun” which as far as I can tell is about this little bird creature in school. I haven’t finished the first chapter yet, but I might do that after I finish this post.
It was my birthday a few weeks ago and I got a bunch of One Piece volumes as presents. I bought a bookshelf to store them and it’s already about half full. I got all of Water 7 and Enies Lobby for my birthday, and about a week later I saw a deal on the 4th box set for about $100 so I nabbed that too. That box set includes all of Dressrosa, Zou, Whole Cake Island and the Reverie (70-90 I think).
Tech Troubles
Computers have not been agreeing with me this month.
With my back being hurt for a lot of last year, I stopped using my x220 laptop and started using a different one. With it not being used for so long the battery wouldn’t hold a charge anymore, and it became super out of date (it would still work, but it’s arch so literally every package had an update). I tried updating it and the power cord came uplugged in the middle of a kernel update. It wiped out the important parts of my boot partition. To fix this in the past I would copy the kernel and initramfs from my t420 (same settings) and that would at least let me boot and finish the updates. But that didn’t work because I think it wiped out a lot of my root partition’s executables, which was weird. I couldn’t chroot to do anything because it had a format error, which usually means you’re running x32 on an x64 system or vice versa. But I eventually saw that my /bin/bash file was empty. I had my home partition separate from root, so I still have all my data I’ve just been trying to install the base arch system back to the root partition.
I had to reinstall ubuntu on my work machine in the middle of the work week, which was a pain in the ass and cost me a lot of time on this project I’m working on. I actually got back to a working dwm build pretty quick and painless, comparatively speaking though. But it won’t be totally right for another few weeks.
Back Update
Not much to update here. I’ve been doing the MB3 exercises at least 1x a week for the past month. I like to do them 3x a week, but I’ve been super busy this past week or 2 and haven’t done them. I’m hurting a little right now, so I need to get that going again.
One Piece Chapter 1108 mini-review
Obviously this is going to contain spoilers for 1108, so pleas skip this if you aren’t caught up.
Holy. Shit.
This chapter has gotten me so hyped it’s unreal. It felt like a shorter chapter, but it contained HUGE things.
Saturn is looking so menacing, his eyes are super expressive and have been getting crazier as the arc has gone on. His new eyes look non-human now, which makes sense being that he’s turning more into his demon form. They don’t even look like they’re expressing human emotions anymore. They used to express apathy, and then with Kuma’s punch they looked absolutely terrified. I really like this aspect.
Kizaru killing Vegapunk wasn’t something I really expected. I don’t think I expected Vegapunk to get off of the island, but this was really quick. I feel sorry for Kizaru in a way still, but this was pretty bad. I hope that Luffy continues to whoop his ass.
I’m not sure what the message that Vegapunk is releasing is going to be. The way the unofficial translation was phrased makes me think it’s something about the geography, or the science of the world. Meaning that we could get confirmation that the Red Line is artificial and the sea-levels are super high compared to what they are naturally. Once the official comes out, maybe it’ll be more clear. Because it could be that Vegapunk knows all about the void century. I don’t know which is more likely. I feel as though it could go either way, but knowing Oda there’s another way that’s been hidden in plain sight the whole time.