Jackson Taylor

April Update 2026

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:01:06 -0400

Bull City Big Cubes NC 2026

That’s kind of a long name for a comp now that I’m writing it out.

I’m going up to Durham this weekend to compete and I’m not prepared like at all for it. I’ve been meaning to grind 6x6 all month, but it’s really only been about the past week that I’ve done any meaningful practice. I want to be able to qualify for NAC in 6x6 and 7x7 and I figure with 7x7 there’s at least a larger chance that I’ll luck into a sub 3:20 mean because I have a sub 3:20 single, so I know I could do it if I got lucky. But with 6x6 I’ve never gotten close to a sub-2 single. I’ve practiced a little bit of 3x3, but everything else I’m kinda winging it. Hopefully 6x6 and 3x3 practice extends to other stuff.

I’m hoping for at least 1 PB to keep my streak going, but if I don’t get it then that’s my fault. Maybe I can squeeze out a slightly faster 3x3 single or average. I broke my main 3x3 about a month ago and haven’t gotten totally used to my new main. I was using a Dayan Guhong Pro, but now I’m using a Pro+ I think? It’s got some minor upgrades and more magnets, but I didn’t mean to buy it originally. I meant to get 2 of the same cube I had so that way I could immediately fix my old one and have a backup in case. I dropped and broke the core one night. Hopefully I do well.

New Animes

Last month I talked about finishing up Attack On Titan (amazing story).

This month I started 2 new animes with my friend Hunter. We started watching Daemons of the Shadow Realm and Akane-Banashi.

DOTSR is cool because it’s by the same author of Full Metal Alchemist which I loved. It’s a little tropey right now, but not too bad. I haven’t watched the latest 2 or 3 episodes, but the first 2 did have me interested enough to want to keep watching. Spoilers for the first episode: These twins are born and they’re super important to fulfill the prophecy or whatever, and they grow up in this small village in what seems like hundreds of years ago. But then they’re attacked one day and we come to find out that the girl twin isn’t actually in the village and she’s been off in the modern world (they’re actually in modern times, but the village has ways of hiding from the rest of the world). Then the boy twin is given these 2 demons who protect the village and he’s got to figure out what’s going on. That’s kind of a bad explanation, but it’s decent, go give it a watch.

Akane-Banashi is super interesting, and not something I would’ve thought they’d make an anime about. It’s about this girl whose father is a Rakugo artist (similar to a stand up comic in America). Spoilers for the first episode: She loves watching his shows, and he’s been working hard to become a master in it. He does really well at this one show which is basically his exam, and everyone loves it, but the head of the school/training program he’s attending expels him and the rest of his class for mostly no reason (he mentioned how bad he thought the show was, but everyone in the audience seemed to love it). His daughter (the main character) then decides to become a Rakugo artist and “avenge” her father. Apparently the manga for it is like 300 chapters long, which is kinda crazy. If it had ended with him becoming a master Rakugo artist, I think it could’ve been a standalone movie. We’ll see how it is as it keeps going.

One Piece

Spoilers For Up To Chapter 1181

Elbaf keeps getting crazier and crazier. The Imu reveal was so insane to read live. I know there have been other signs of the series coming to an end, but this is like for real a huge sign that we are absolutely in the final saga, and I don’t think it’s gonna slow down at all.

I’m not gonna say we won’t make a detour or anything, because we could go back to Impel Down or we go to Whitebeard’s hometown of Sphynx (fingers crossed). But realistically, the number of places we could go is dwindling. It all depends on how we leave Elbaf. People are saying this seems like a Sabaody 2.0, which I kind of agree with. We haven’t seen Luffy go fully against Imu yet, so maybe there’s something specific to his fruit that would work way better against him than, but if not then I think we do “lose” Elbaf. I just really hope Usopp doesn’t die. I don’t want anyone in the crew to die, but I worry for him the most and Sanji 2nd most.

I feel like a full Joy Boy reveal might not be too far off. Whether or not that’s in a Void Century flashback I’m not sure. Absolutely wonderful time to be reading this great story.

That’s it for this month, thanks for reading!

March Update 2026

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 11:00:35 -0400

It’s pretty close to the end of the month so I’m going to keep this short and sweet and talk about “Attack On Titan” (AOT) really quickly.

SPOILERS FOR ATTACK ON TTIAN

I apologize for thinking for so long that anyone who watched Attack On Titan was a dork. I still think owning a jacket all the way back in 2013 based on a single season of the show was a little overkill, but I get it now.

AOT is such an amazing story and I enjoyed it very much. Learning the secrets about the walls did make me worry a little bit because it was such a major shift from the original premise of the show, but I think season 4 is actually a 9.5.

I watched it with my friend who hated the ending to the manga when he first read it, and he said for years that the ending was what kept it from it being the best anime of the 2010’s for him. I think he came around after watching the changes in the anime. I’m still sorta ingesting the ending and every sort of philosophy that was included in the show from the anti-natalism and nihilism. It’s an immensely deep show and it’s insane how much detail was put into it.

I don’t think Eren was justified at all. I don’t understand how people hate Gabi but love Eren either. I’m getting caught up on all these memes and stuff after all these years, it’s so much fun lol

There were a few misconceptions about spoilers that I had before I knew anything about the show.

I think I knew that Eren was not a good guy for the whole show, but I don’t think I knew he was the main character. I think I thought that maybe Levi was the main character at some point in my life, but I’m not sure.
I knew the “on your feet, dad” quote, and I figured it was Eren telling his dad and he was going to kill him while he was standing instead of laying down/on his knees. But then I found out that he was dead so I was confused on who it could be. Then it ended up being him and his dad, but in a very different way lol
I have seen memes of Reiner’s near-suicide scene, and his uniform reminded me of Nazis, so I thought that there were going to be Nazis at some point. I was sorta right? I also didn’t know who Reiner was or that it was him, so once Zeke was introduced I thought maybe it was him.

One funny thing that happened while we were watching was that I guessed that the walls were “made of titan” as a joke. My friend had to mute his mic to keep from me hearing him laugh. I guessed it like 2 or 3 episodes before they revealed it, so it’s not like I guessed anything crazy, but it was a total off the wall comment I made. I’m not even sure what made me say it.

My 3 favorite characters are probably Reiner, Levi and Erwin. They’re all pretty equal, but I think Reiner does edge it out slightly.

Reiner had death flags for like ever, I did not expect him at all to survive the series. I think if he died in this crazy redemption scene he would’ve been far and away my favorite character, but I don’t know if there’s really one thing he could’ve done to redeem him breaking the wall with Bertholdt, and he himself knew that. He was my favorite in season 1, I’m not even sure why, I just kinda latched to him.

Once Levi and Erwin started getting more and more screen time they passed Reiner for a bit, but by season 4 I still ended up liking Reiner more. Levi beats out Erwin a little because he’s around longer, but Erwin is fantastic. The speeches he gave were insanely good, and the part where he loses his arm is so insanely hype. Levi going to town on Zeke’s arm was another hype ass moment too, oh my gosh. I wish Erwin had gotten to see beyond the walls, but I’m glad that Levi chose to save Armin over Erwin. Armin was also an amazing character, he’s probably my favorite of the original 3.

I think my least favorite characters were Floch and Yelena. They’re important for the story, but damn were they annoying.

February Update 2026 - Fix

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0400

I’m not sure how many people actually read my blog if any, and how many of those people use rss readers, but I kinda made an oopsie on my last post and used the wrong date. I put 2025 instead of 2026, so if it messes with your rss reader I’m sorry. I didn’t check last night that it got published correctly.

February Update 2026

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 -0400

NxN Nonsense NC 2026

I don’t think I’ve updated the blog on what’s happened with US Nationals 2026 since the last time I talked about it back in July. It’s now become North American Championships! I’ve only ever been to NC State Champs and US Nationals, so I’m super excited to add NAC to that list. I already registered and have a spot, so if anyone reading this is going then I’ll see you there!

The issue with larger comps now that they’re getting to be huge spectator events means that they have to limit the amount of people and they’re doing qualification times. It’s not a hard concept, but I just didn’t understand how the WCA handled it for World Championships last year in Seattle, otherwise I would’ve gone. I didn’t realize that the first sets of cutoffs were going to be eased up because they want the faster people to for sure have a spot. This time I did understand them and I got registered fine. Up until this past weekend I was only registered for 3x3, 4x4, skewb and OH because that’s all I qualified for (no qualifying times for any of those lol). To qualify to compete in NAC for 5x5 you’d have to have an average that was sub 1:08, for 6x6 a mean of sub 2, and 7x7 a mean of sub 3:20. I had none of these officially. However, 5x5 I can get sub 1:08 singles and averages at home pretty easily. It was just a matter of doing it in competition.

In comes NxN Nonsense. NxN Nonsense was a really fun competition that I went to this past weekend on Feb 22nd. It had 2 rounds of all the NxN puzzles except for 2x2 (a near perfect competition, needed 3 rounds of everything but then it’d have to be a 2 day). Leading up to the competition I planned to do a ton of big cube solves to hopefully get to where I could qualify for 5x5-7x7, or have a better chance of getting fluke times that got me the necessary averages (haha).

Unfortunately leading up to this competition I was particularly busy. My birthday was in the middle of February, we were finishing this large project at work, I started “Attack On Titan”, I had several instances I watched my nephews for my sisters. So I think the week of the competition I did a total of 0 combined solves for 6x6 and 7x7. I was super unprepared.

I actually kicked so much ass though! First event of the day was 3x3 and I got my first sub 10 average finally! Right off rip. I’ve been close a few times, and I’ve been able to get sub 10 averages for years now. I’m so glad to finally have gotten it. The WCA exports their database once a week and people have come up with a ton of statistics. I saw a page like a year ago that was “longest time between first competition and first sub 10 average”, and I went and found the sql for it again, and I am now the 25th longest time to get a sub 10 average at 13.5 years (haha). That’s a really funny stat I think. The number 1 spot was someone who got it after 19 years, which is really awesome to see, I bet he was super happy.

On top of that I got a sub 1:08 average (it was actually 1:06.23) for 5x5 AND a sub 1 single (59.84)! I was so excited for this. This was my biggest reaction out of any competition I’ve been to I think (it was still calm though cuz I don’t like drawing attention to myself lol). 5x5 has been my favorite event ever since I first competed in it, and this was a huge barrier to finally break in competition. Next is a sub 1 average, maybe possibly by/at NAC, who knows. I did alright in 6x6 and 7x7, not well enough to qualify though. I didn’t break any PBs for 6x6 this time. I did initially make it into 6x6 finals, but they were running behind so everyone after 16th place got cut and I was 19th. I broke my single and average for 7x7, and I made it to finals so I got 6 solves total which was a lot. I got a 3:17 single, so it proves that I can probably qualify if I work a little harder. I just have to practice more. I bought a 6x6 and 7x7 earlier last year when I was getting back into competing and they’re good, so I think it’s mostly just practice and reducing pauses.

It’s really silly, but I haven’t really watched any tips videos in probably 5 years or more, so I’m trying to watch more. Most of my practice for that time has been working on fluidity and the occasional stint of learning an alg set like ZBLL (still only know 3.5 of the 2GLL cases haha). Which isn’t the worst thing in the world. However, some of the cases I do aren’t the most optimal so I’m just reinforcing bad habits that I’m having to break now. I watched a video on Yau for 4x4 today and realized how inefficient my solves really are. So I’m gonna dive into a bunch of info in the coming weeks.

Talk to you guys next month!

January Update 2026

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Happy New Year! I did really badly on my resolutions last year lol, let’s see how I did.

The big one that I’m hoping to achieve is to lose a bunch of weight. Ideally, if I could snap my fingers and make sure that by the end of the year I was a specific weight, I’d be around 160 or 170.

I didn’t come anywhere near to 200lbs haha

But, to start small and manageable, I want to get below 210. The last time I weighed, which was a few days ago, I was 227.5, so it’s around 20lbs to lose. By the end of the year, this should be manageable.

Manageable for some people, but I did not do that. I’m a little heavier in fact.

If I only lost a pound a week I could get to around my dream goal weight, but that’s incredibly consistent progress. I’m not saying it couldn’t or won’t happen, but I doubt I’ll make that happen. Under 220 should be fine though.

I haven’t weighed myself yet, but I’m positive I’m still somewhere between 230 and 240.

I don’t think this year was a total waste as far as health is concerned though. I’ve started taking my sleep a little more seriously by taking supplements before bed and trying to get a little more sleep. I sleep talk pretty regularly and sometimes have night terrors, but they seem to have slowed a little bit. I try to limit my caffeine intake a little more. I did a bunch of walking, not as much as I should, but I got a smart watch and am more aware of the amount of steps I take in a day.

I think maybe if I plan out things I want to read or watch, in the order I want to watch them, I am more able/likely to do that. So here’s a few things I want to consume this year, in the approximate order I plan to watch/read them.

Oh boy. I don’t even remember writing this so let’s see what all I wanted consume.

Books

Believe In Yourself: The Lee Priest Story - Lee Priest (I’m pretty far into this one already since it was a Christmas present. Hoping to finish it in January.)

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu (This is for PewDiePie’s book club that he’s doing. I’m closing into halfway done with it, but I’m not understanding a lot.)

Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Tremendous: The Life of a Comedy Savage - Joey Diaz

Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Sherlock Holmes Collection - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Greatest Beer Run Ever - John “Chick” Donohue

Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Poor Folk - Fyodor Dostoevsky

Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

I didn’t read anywhere near as much as I thought I was going to. This probably would’ve taken some people like 6 months to do. I don’t make time for this like I should.

I did read the Lee Priest book, and I think I did finish it in late January. It was pretty good, I like him and I was bored at a cubing competition one day so I got it done pretty easy. I kind of got it on a whim, because I didn’t know THAT much about Lee, but I did get to learn a lot about what he’d been through. I hadn’t even heard about his racing career or his time in rehab (not that it’s something you really go around proud about). I liked hearing about the late 90’s and early 00’s bodybuilding stories.

I don’t think I ever finished the Tao Te Ching. I may have, but I don’t remember it if I did. If you haven’t seen, there’s a bunch of monks who are walking as a form of prayer up the east coast (they’re actually by me about a week ago) and I got to thinking about this book, but I cannot remember a single lesson from it. I did not do well with the PewDiePie book club lol, I failed on the first book.

I’ve tried reading Notes From Underground a hundred times and I just struggle so much with the first part. It’s not that it’s boring, it’s just so rambly and I can’t keep up with what he’s trying to say. I get that’s part of the point he’s rambling to us to try to justify his behavior, but I don’t think I’m keeping up with it like I should be able to. I may try this one again soon, I got a couple pages in on a hard cover and it was making a little more sense. I really want to get to the 2nd part where I think there’s more characters than just the underground man rambling. I even went so far as to try the audiobook to see if that would help, but I’ve almost Pavlov trained myself into falling asleep to it as soon as it starts because I would listen to it when I was going to sleep. I didn’t even attempt Demons, The Brothers Karamazov, or Poor Folk (I’ve started this one a few times though). I like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and White Nights, and I think about them often, these others are just really tough for some reason.

The Joey Diaz book would probably be an easy one to knock out. I’ll listen to whatever Joey Diaz has to say so if I imagine he’s the one talking I might be able to get through it quicker.

I re-watched the “Knives Out” movies around the time that the new “Wake Up Dead Man” came out and that got interested in more mysteries, so I did get through the “Study in Scarlet” Sherlock Holmes story. It was pretty good. It wasn’t really what I expected though. It was less mystery than what I had wanted. The facts of the case were presented to me, but it wasn’t something that I think you could solve yourself. Especially not the motive. Slight spoilers, but when it swapped to talking about the Mormons in Utah halfway through I had to check to make sure I didn’t get a bad printing and started reading a different book. Very dramatic shift. I got through half of the next story. I don’t think I really stopped for any reason, I just stopped and haven’t picked it back up. This wasn’t really the kind of mystery I was hoping for. Knives-Out is more my style, you see exactly what happens it just gets re-contextualized later, so you have most things you need to solve the case. Sherlock feels like you’re doing 1 thing, but then in the back of your mind you know that he’s just going to go out and check something and come up with his own solution that you never would’ve been able to because of extra clues or something. I guess there’s a lot of shows and media that do this though. I’m not sure which is easier or harder to write. If you have all the clues at the beginning, it might be too obvious, but then if you wait to show the killer later then you’ll need to do something else to make it interesting.

Anime

Sakamoto Days- Season 1 Part 1 (Fun so far. Not as enjoyable as DanDaDan or Ranma 1/2 yet but I like it.)

Wotakoi - Season 1 (The romance animes finally got me. Already started season 1, just have to find time to finish it. It’s fine so far, but not as grabbing as MDD or Horimiya.)

DanDaDan - Season 2 (I’m so excited for DanDaDan Thursdays again.)

Ranma 1/2 - Season 2

The only thing out of this list that I finished was Wotakoi, and apparently I might’ve missed a big event in an OVA or something.

Sakamoto Days got a little boring, it’s less romance and slice of life and more shonen/fights. Which the fights are pretty good, especially when Sakamoto loses the weight. I don’t like secret societies/groups of people. I’m also not terribly into fighting stuff anymore.

DanDaDan I just kinda lost interest in the last 2 or 3 episodes, but I want to go back and finish the season. I like the romance between Ayase and Okarun a lot. There’s some more characters who I haven’t been introduced to either, so I know I’m missing out.

Ranma 1/2 I started the manga and already knew what was going to happen in season 2 so I lost some interest. I want to pick this back up, or maybe start the 1988 anime at some point.

Manga

Ranma 1/2 - Rumiko Takahashi (I loved the remade anime so I decided to pick up all the 2-in-1s. I’m about 4 volumes in (2 physical books out of 19), but it’s been a bit since I’ve read any.)

My Dress-Up Darling - Shinichi Fukuda (This is a cute story, and the first season of the anime was really fun. I watched it in a few days and I’m excited for the next season that I think is coming out this year.)

Heavenly Delusions - Masakazu Ishiguro (The anime got me HOOKED on this story. I need to rewatch the first season, cuz there was a lot that I missed and now I’d be so tuned into what I should pay attention to. Go watch it if you haven’t seen it, it’s dark and interesting as all get out.)

Goodnight Punpun - Inio Asano (I have this physically, but it was kind of boring and depressing so I haven’t finished it. I’ll need to re-read most of it.)

Wotakoi - Fujita (Probably will read this, but it’s kinda low on my list.)

I think I got through maybe 3 of the 2-in-1 books of Ranma, but it’s such a long story. It’s good, it’s just incredibly long for what it is. I’ll try to finish it eventually.

I got caught up to My Dress-Up Darling exactly 1 chapter before it ended. I read the latest chapter and then I saw a tweet the following day that the next chapter would be the last. I was so sad. It was a great story, I loved all of the characters and the situations they go into. The ending was incredibly cute too. I haven’t finished the 2nd season of the anime yet, but it looks amazing and it’s animated really really well.

I thought I could maybe find the physical editions of Heavenly Delusions easily, but I couldn’t at the time. I never tried to read it online either. I want to go rewatch the anime soon. Still one that I recommend to people because of how hooked I got on it.

Goodnight Punpun is still sitting on my shelf untouched. I haven’t been in the right mood for that much depressing stuff. It’s drawn incredibly well, but it’s a downer for sure. Also the physical copies kinda give me a headache with how much ink is on the pages. It gives off a very strong smell.

I didn’t read Wotakoi either. Overall my manga reading has been way down from what it was at one point, I have so many half finished series. I still read One Piece weekly, but that’s about it. I started a new one though called “Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You” that’s good. I’m about halfway through that, and I’ll hopefully finish that soon. I’m really enjoying it.

TV

Wayne - Season 1 (I’m 6/10 episodes in. Pretty good so far. It reminds me of “End of the Fcking World” on Netflix.)

Squid Games - Season 3 (I just finished Season 2 yesterday, and supposedly season 3 is gonna be the last and it’s coming out later this year. Fun little thriller.)

Stranger Things - Season 5 (If we don’t get it this year, I’ll be super pissed. I understand it’s a graphically intense show, but damn. Surely it’s not 1 editor for all the episodes.)

Wow, I actually finished everything here. I didn’t finish Stranger Things in 2025 though, I was out at a friend’s house for New Years Eve when the final episode came out so I watched it on the 2nd.

Wayne was really good. It definitely had “End of the F*cking World” vibes. Unfortunately it hasn’t been finished yet, and I don’t think that it will. It’s at a point where it’s a fine sorta ambiguous ending, but there’s some other stuff I’d like to see wrapped up. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it does get finished.

Squid Games was ok. The first season was very good. The 2nd season had some good moments and some interesting characters and dynamics. The 3rd season I remember not really liking the ending that much. It’s been a while since I watched it though to remember specific details. I liked Thanos in season 2 a good bit. I forget the actor’s name who played him but I went out and learned about him and I’m glad he’s making a comeback (long story short, he used to be in a boyband and he got caught with drugs and everyone kinda looked down on him from there I think, don’t quote me on that though I think that’s huge simplification).

Stranger Things was pretty rough. I really didn’t like the last season. Like at all. The acting, the story, the release schedule, the ending. I’ve heard people say “they had the entire story planned from the beginning” and that’s just incredibly false. There’s so many inconsistencies with that it just can’t be true. Up to season 3 it was a great show, maybe there were some inconsistencies that I can’t remember, but I think it really peaked at season 3. The dialogue has always been a little cringey, and the delivery isn’t the best, but it was incredibly bad in season 5. The more I think about characters, plot points, or details the more it’s like “wow that doesn’t make any sense” and I can almost bet that the Duffer Brothers don’t have a reason for it either.

As far as movies go, I watched over 100 this year. I really started exploring some stuff too. I watched some low hanging fruit like the Harry Potter series, I watched all of the marvel movies up until End Game except for 2 or 3. There were a number of old school Japanese movies I watched like High and Low, Ikiru and Harakiri that were fantastic to see. I watched a ton of horror movies with my friends during October too, I tried doing a 31 days of Halloween thing but it ended up only being 16 planned, and I watched a couple by myself and missed some others. I might try to mirror my letterboxd on here eventually. If you want to follow me, then my account is jtaylorxyz I think. I’m not sure if

2026 Resolutions

I don’t have any specific goals this year. I want to read more, I want to cube more, I want to lose weight. Setting specific goals hasn’t worked, so maybe having less specific goals will be better.

Gonna go ahead and wrap it up for this month. If I think of something new, I’ll post about it. Happy New Year, hope you guys reach all your goals!

December Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Merry (early) Christmas and Happy New Years everyone! I hope you all have had a wonderful holiday season.

Homelab

I’m going to save the truenas and proxmox showcase mostly for next year I think. I don’t have it setup how I really want yet, and I’m still trying to understand linux permissions when it comes to NFS (Did you know that the ids for a group and a user on a linux system actually matter? I didn’t really know about their existence until recently.), some of that stuff is really tricky.

What I have now is a proxmox install with like 10-12 containers running most of the services I use (jellyfin, radicale, minecraft servers). I have a VM running truenas with an HBA controller with 2 12TB drives passed through to the truenas VM, but it’s not storing anything at the moment. I have 2 18TB drives mounted within proxmox that I pass through to some containers that contain all of my media for jellyfin as well as the container storage. I use cockpit made by 45drives to manage nfs shares to those drives. It’s a fine setup, but I don’t have snapshots and any sort of backups setup (not sure if that’s possible with cockpit or if I’d have to do that in proxmox itself).

The idea I think would be to move all the media into truenas onto the 12TB drives, reconfigure all the containers to use those 12TB drives over NFS for the storage and everything, then once everything is off the 18TB drives I’d put those drives onto that HBA I mentioned and set them up in truenas, then move everything from the 12TB back to the 18TB drives. I think that’s what I’d want to do. I’d move everything from the 12TB to the 18TB drives because I’m not sure if one of the 12TB drives is actually totally working as it should. I used to have just the 1 12TB drive back in the day when I ran Plex on a bare Ubuntu server install, and it started acting funky like where it wouldn’t mount sometimes. All of these drives were shucked from WD external drives, and you have to put electrical tape on some of the pins to get them to work properly so it might’ve just been that the tape shifted or something. Either way, I don’t want like critical stuff on those. I think I might try setting up the 12TB drives in like a raid0 and use them for storage that doesn’t matter or something. Raid0 is used for the speed benefits, but with spinning disks that aren’t 7200rpm I’m not sure how much benefit I’d really get from them.

With all of this going over the network and everything I’ve thought about trying to fully upgrade my network. I only have a modem, a router/access point, and 1 unmanaged switch (pretty sure it’s unmanaged, I use it like a splitter for cables I run under the house). I really don’t know that much about networking so it’s bit me a few times in the past, it would be cool to understand everything going on. That’s probably down the road though.

Cubing

Nothing much in the way of practicing or learning algs, but I’ve started thinking about trying to stream my solves a little bit. I follow a couple of people who go live on tiktok pretty frequently, and my friends go live on twitch sometimes so I have a lot of resources to be able to ask questions. There’s a few issues with each platform, but they’re both solid for cubing I think.

I like the ease of tiktok because I can just open my phone and start it (although I’d want a little more production in it). It’s also easier for some of my friends to watch if they wanted because they’re already on the app. I don’t really like the whole gifts, battling, caring about ranks stuff being the norm though. I’d just be talking about stuff instead of asking for all that, although I think that’s how you get pushed to more people. It just feels like it rewards e-begging.

Twitch might be cool because you’re not limited to a vertical phone screen, and since you’re on a computer (you can stream on your phone on Twitch I think, and you can stream your computer on tiktok if you’re on windows) you can show off your timer and stuff easier. But, I think it’s a little harder to find an audience (not necessarily the worst thing for just starting out and getting in front of a camera though).

I’m not sure if I will or not, this is all just ideas of stuff I might do. I get a little anxious when talking. I heard a good quote recently though that sorta made me start thinking about it a little harder. Not exact, but it basically said “You don’t have social anxiety, you’re afraid of being perceived, you’re afraid of putting something out into the world that could be negatively perceived, you’re afraid that it’s gonna confirm a narrative you have about yourself… Someone made you feel bad for showing up authentically or being yourself, and that’s a wound you have to dig into. Kinda like cleaning a wound with peroxide, it hurts, you dig into it and it stings but then it scabs and scars over.” - Michael Smoak. Which, he’s right, I’m sure everyone has been told to calm down or that they were too much at one point or another but it’s not something that should dictate the rest of your life. Cubing is something I’m pretty proficient in, but it’s kind of a niche hobby that I don’t get to talk about often (except on here really). I think that’d help a lot being able to talk about something I’m very interested in to people who are also interested in it.

I’ll go ahead and wait until next month to write up the results of my resolutions and what they are for next year. I don’t think I hit too many of them unfortunately, but I’ll try to put a positive spin on it. See you guys next year!

November Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I don’t actually have that much that to talk about this month. I don’t know if it’s the weather or what, but I’ve just been down the past few weeks. Sleep has been kinda hit or miss, I’m not enjoying things I used to. I have done some cool things that I might blog about once they’re totally done though (virtualized TrueNAS in proxmox). Thanksgiving was pretty good, my family came over and we deep fried a turkey, and we all had a good time. I hope you guys had a great Thanksgiving day too!

One Piece

I guess I’ll talk a little about what’s going on with One Piece because it’s been crazy.

SPOILERS FOR UP TO 1166

We’re actually going to have 4 chapters this month which is cool. I know Oda usually takes it easy in December (totally understandable) so we gotta enjoy it while we can.

Apart from when I first read Marineford, this has been the best month I’ve ever had as a major Whitebeard fanboy. It was a little sketch there when Whitebeard ran away from Garp, but it was just strategy, not out of fear lol. I love the guy, so anytime he’s in a chapter I’m locked in.

Quick rundown of all the major things that have happened:

1164

Rocks reveals Davy D. Jones was the former king of the world, and mentions Joy Boy to Imu
Rocks gets Domi Reversi’d
Imu reveals that he’s after Elbaf for soldiers
Imu forces Rocks to kill the other Davy family members on the island
Whitebeard tanks a shot from Domi Reversi’d rocks with his bare arm and causes God Valley’s mountain to start falling*
Everyone starts trying to flee the island
Dragon lost track of baby Shanks
Kuma (one of the GOATs) is trying to save as many people as he can
Kuma jumps just in front of Rocks to save Eris and baby Teech, and also presumably teleports away himself
Rocks, facing Roger and Garp presumably uses the Voice of All Things to ask them to kill him

*Only moderately important, mostly included because of the Whitebeard fanboy thing and this is another feat I will be using in my own power-scaling/agenda-piece

1165

One of the coolest panels of all of One Piece is where Rocks is in his Domi Reversi’d form and about to attack at Roger and Garp while he’s asking them to “Please kill me”
Roger and Garp realize Rocks isn’t himself
Garp and Roger decide to temporarily team up, but their attacks aren’t working
They want to try to figure out a way to undo the curse, but they can’t seem to think of anything
Big Mom claims she’s gonna come back for Kaido to get what he owes from him stealing the azure dragon fruit
Polo Graham is introduced
Dragon threatens a navy ship to be able to save more people on the island and bring them along
Saturn (or maybe Imu in Saturn’s body) declares that God Valley never existed, and that it will be erased
The narrator interrupts and declares that all the records of God Valley were purged and the number of people killed is still unknown
Roger invites Garp to his crew, but Garp declines because he wants to protect the Marines
Garp and Roger talk about creating a “mass” of Haki to be able to beat Rocks, basically pouring everything they have into the attack
Roger cries for Rocks as they give the final blow

1166

The attack seemed to work, and even broke the Domi Reversi curse
Roger and Garp are sapped of energy
Rocks is unable to move and thanks Roger and Garp before Garling stabs him, finally killing him
Rayleigh and Gaban take Roger and Garp off of God Valley
God Valley crumbles and seems to sink to the bottom of the sea
The narrator interrupts to highlight the importance of this event on the world and the pirates and players in the following generation
Roger and his crew find Shanks among the treasure they stole from God Valley
Garp is upset over what they’re saying about him in the papers (Hero of the Marines)
Sengoku and Garp have an argument over differing brands of Justice and what they should do in the marines
Garp declares he wants to help the people at the “bottom of the cliff”
Loki learns of Rocks’ death and has a flashback where he told Rocks he thought he was Nika
Rocks didn’t know who Nika was, but said that if anyone had that kind of power it would be Harald
Rocks mentions the Galera (maybe Galley-La depending on translation I think)
Harald has a breakdown and beats a giant who was being mean and cruel to humans
Harald’s desire to join the World Government was the only reason he didn’t help Rocks out
Dragon has been imprisoned for what happened on God Valley, but Garp seemingly breaks him out by giving him a key
Harald declares that Loki and Hajruddin are both his sons and that he wants them to get along
Harald breaks off his horns as a symbol of loyalty and as a pledge to the World Government

Technically I could wait until 1167 comes out since it should be in the next day or so, but I’m gonna go ahead and get this done and out. This God Valley flashback is without a doubt in my mind the most important and probably the best flashback in all of One Piece. So many big names together all in one place, everything in the world of One Piece can be traced back to this single event. Amazing, peak fiction, absolute cinema, Oda is the GOAT. There’s a chance that the void century flashback is more important and introduces some cool characters, but I really don’t know if it’ll top this. (That’s a challenge Oda, please prove me wrong).

Davy D. Jones being the former king of the world was crazy. I need to go back and look at the Harley texts and the mural again to understand how that could fit into it. If he’s the one that started the Davy Back fights, I wonder how that plays into Joy Boy? Could Joy Boy have lost a crew member to a Davy Back fight? Could Joy Boy have been related somehow? Could Joy Boy have been trying to take down Davy D. Jones as king of the world and somehow Imu overcame both of them to get the throne? Lots of questions to be answered still. One Piece is all about misdirection and misinformation so I wonder who the good guys really are. Does Imu serve some higher power beyond themself even? I highly doubt that one though, I hope that isn’t the case.

All of the attacks this flashback have been crazy too, I hope they do well in the anime. I’m super excited for these episodes. I need to watch from Egghead onward to get Kuma’s backstory and this when it comes out. Everyone’s stocks rose these few chapters.

The only disappointment I have is with Harald. For him to go directly to the people who killed basically his best friend and mutilate himself, he really killed my opinion of him. I loved his introduction, but he’s playing right into the government’s hands. I understand his reasoning for wanting to have Giants be seen as less aggressive and nicer. I understand too that public opinion favors the world government associated countries, especially more docile ones compared to Elbaf. But it’s still just disappointing. Garp and Harald have ideals I don’t totally understand or agree with.

Garp I understand a lot better after 1166, I think I finally am starting to understand why he’s so focused on young marines like Koby. I think he’s basically thinking that if he can be an example for great marines who will go to high places someday that they’ll be able to fix the world instead of him fixing it himself now. Some readers think that he’s wrong for not fixing it himself, which is fair and valid, but I think Garp himself knows that’s not a good idea because of how hot-blooded he is. Which is the same reason he doesn’t become an admiral or fleet admiral, he COULDN’T work under celestial dragons. He’d be executed or have to leave the marines at the first sign of them doing anything he doesn’t agree with, which is counter productive to his ideals. He still believes in the system he’s in, so he figures it’s better to try to aid those in the system than to leave it. Which I guess also means he believes that having celestial dragons is better? That’s where it starts getting weird. I guess a small amount of pure evil is the price to pay for world peace? I suppose that’s basically got to be true if people in One Piece are anything like humans in real life, there will always be some evil.

Rocks has climbed my favorite characters list super fast. He has had some of the sickest panels in the whole manga. I hate he wasn’t around for long, he’s like everyone in flashbacks though, they’re incredibly badass and then they die lol. He was Teech’s father, and Teech has done some crazy things so… Rocks’ full introduction and main backstory (potentially/probably his only backstory) has made me question Teech’s motives even more now. Originally Rocks was shown to be kind of an asshole, to go as far as stabbing Loki as a child (although he didn’t seem to mind I guess), but overall he ended up being a guy who just wanted to save what was left of his lineage. Teech I guess just has nothing left to hold on to and wants to watch the world burn. Killing Whitebeard and Ace though, one of your father’s incredibly loyal crew members that stayed and fought against a literal demon (Imu) and your father’s rival’s son (a rival who Rocks related to and respected). I have to wonder how much Teech knows about his lineage and the void century.

October Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 -0400

NCSU Wolfpack 2025 Results

I went to NCSU Wolfpack 2025 on Oct 19th I totally bombed. In comparison to how I thought I was going to do, this was probably the worst I’ve ever competed. I know what it was for the most part, I let my first 3x3 average of the day ruin my mood and it just kept getting worse as the day went on, combined with some headaches that I tried to push through.

I slept decently the night previous, I didn’t have to wake up super duper early, I wasn’t in the car for very long. I had 1 energy drink that was only around 112mg of caffeine. All the physical conditions seemed fine. I did leave my water bottle at home, so I wasn’t paying attention to how hydrated I was, so some of my headaches probably were because of that. The venue being as warm as it was also threw me off. A lot of the competitions I’ve been to have been super cold, so with the weather changing I dressed kind of warm and brought some hand warmers, but it all mostly ended up being useless lol. I thought about using the hand warmers before my solves because I see a lot of people doing that, but with how warm I already was I don’t know if it would’ve helped.

In round 1 I ended up with a 10.36 average of 5, which was super close to official PB (or PR, I still don’t know the difference). It would’ve actually been a Sub-10 if my last solve had been right at 10 seconds or below, but I got in my head too much and ended up with a 12.08 which caused the average to be 0.02 seconds from being PB. I was getting sub 9s like crazy before I went up, so when my first solve was an 11 it shook me a little bit. I eventually ended up getting some better solves, but I was so worried about the last solve (it wasn’t a great solution anyway) that I ruined the average.

The same thing pretty much happened for 4x4, except I wasn’t really expecting anything out of the event. I’d practiced a little bit the week prior, but getting sub 40 times was hard for some reason. I ended up doing pretty decent in the first round. It would’ve been a better average if I hadn’t gotten nervous on the last solve, but I don’t think it would’ve been a PB, I would’ve had to have been a PB single for that to happen. Which, wasn’t totally out of the question because I’ve gotten 3 - 33 second solves in competition. I’m just now realizing how much I popped off and choked at NC champs earlier this year.

For 5x5, I was just not feeling great. This was the event I wanted to do well in the most, and after the first 2 solves I was already over it. I was hoping for a 1:05-1:08 average, and possibly a sub 1 single, but it just wasn’t happening. During the 2nd solve I had like 3 or 4 edges that were already mostly paired, but as I was looking for something to match it felt like a flashbang went off in my brain and I took 20 seconds to recover. It’s not as bad in the video I took, but I can tell when it happened. It was really only a 1 second pause. Unlike 3x3 and 4x4 I actually clutched the last solve and got a PB of 1:04.52. So, for the rest of the competition I didn’t have to worry about trying to break a PB to keep my PB stream going (it’s up to 18 now, which is all of my competitions).

I meant to pack a lunch, but forgot so I ended up eating at this burger place downstairs from the room the competition was in. I ate with a few of the delegates I’m friends with, and it was pretty nice. I was really annoyed with how I was doing, and I didn’t feel great so I didn’t eat all of my food, but it was a decent burger. I’m not sure I like potato buns for burgers though.

The next few averages were mid at best. I wasn’t looking to do well in Skewb, so much so that I forgot I signed up for it until that morning. 3x3 was partly me being in my head, feeling rough still, and just wanting to go home and 4x4 was more of the same.

What I Learned

I think this was a good learning experience and shows more of what I need to do to become a better competitor and what I need to work on in relation to my preparation and mentality. I’ll be sure to bring a water bottle and stay more hydrated to help with headaches and feeling yucky. I struggle with that at home anyway. As far as mentality, I’ve gotten better at not worrying about my placings. When I was younger and faster in relation to the overall competition I did worry about placing top 3 or top 5, but now that I’m pretty far behind I worry more about how my results are in comparison to the last competition I attended. Which is a good thing, I’m comparing myself now to myself back then which is more in my control. That’s the main goal with stoicism, controlling what we can and not worrying/stressing about what we can’t. Now, I struggle with not getting solves as fast as I hoped I would get. I put in all this time practicing and doing thousands of solves to get sub-par solves, and it’s really frustrating. It feels like that practice was a waste. But was it really?

The more you learn with cubing, the more you learn to control about your solve, but really, a lot of the solve is outside of your control. You might not get a good starting cross, you might get an F2L/OLL/PLL/ZBLL case you don’t know, etc. These things you can try to influence, but sometimes you can’t. So you might end up with a time that you’re not happy with. But because that 1 solve was bad, that doesn’t mean the rest will be. There’s nothing stopping you from getting a better time the next solve and finishing out strong. It’s really hard to forget the last solve, but I think you’re much better of if you can figure out how to do it.

One example I have of this is in my Gobbler Cube Day 2017 video. I was already nervous because I was 2nd seed and Keaton was incredibly fast and probably able to bust out a 5 second solve if the scramble was good. I wasn’t doing great for the first 3 solves, and on Keaton’s 3rd solve he got a 6.79. At that point I knew for sure I wasn’t coming close to his time, so all my nerves went away and I was able to pull off a low 9 and a high 8. I stopped ruminating on those 3 not so great solves and did better than what I thought I could.

It’s been 8 years since that competition, good lord I’m getting old lol

It’s really close to the end of the month, so I’m going to cut this one short. I hope you guys have a good Halloween, be safe and have fun! I’m probably going to go over to a friend’s house to watch The Batman to finish up our Halloween movie list we’ve been going through.

September Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Happy September guys! It’s been a heavy few weeks this month. I’m not gonna talk about the stuff that’s been going on in the news, or the supposed rapture that didn’t happen, I know all of your feeds have been filled with that stuff.

Quick Cubing Update

ZBLL

Well, I haven’t learned anymore zblls since last month. I know, I know, “Jackson you said you were gonna do it this time”. I still want to, but I’ve been a little busy, and also the site I was using for my trainer was out of commission for a little while. I think it’s moved domains. Instead of bestsiteever.ru, it’s now bestsiteever.net. I just found it last night and got all my subsets put back in. I’ve been doing a few hundred solves per week, so I didn’t think I lost that many algs, and I didn’t really, but I did lose some of the more basic cases I had absolutely nailed down. This week I’ll probably end up doing major refresh sessions and move on to the rest of the H set.

New PB

I don’t really keep up with PBs anymore, because I hardly break them. I do know my best 5x5 solve is about 57 seconds, and I’ve gotten about 5 sub 1 minute solves now which is awesome. I hope I can do that in competition soon.

For 3x3, my best time was 5.80 for like 3 or 4 years. I think maybe I had 2 or 3 sub 6 times in total. A few months ago I broke through and got a 5.51 solve, which was stupid easy. I think it had an OLL or PLL skip along with at least an x-cross. This month I ended up breaking it again by a huge amount. My new PB is all the way down to 5.04. Again, this one was a pretty easy solve. It was something like R D2 for an x-cross with the slot in the back left filled, R U R’ for the first pair, L’ U’ L for the 2nd pair, inverse sexy from the back right for the last pair, then sune into a G Perm. Not the best PLL, but it’s one of my better algs. I’m a little annoyed I didn’t get sub-5, because it was so close and after trying it another time I got 4.13 no problem. Oh well, it’s a home PB anyway and I’m still happy to have gotten it.

One Piece Happenings

I’ve been severely lacking on writing up my thoughts on what’s going on in One Piece. There’s been some insane reveals in Elbaf that I want to talk about.

WARNING: SPOILERS UP UNTIL CHAPTER 1161

The big thing going on at the moment is the flashback/story that Loki is telling us. Here’s a rapid-fire list of events that have happened so far:

Harald goes to sea to explore and pillage, ends up falling in love with a normal giant (he was an ancient giant) and calms down a lot.
Harald works to make peace with other nations to be able to join the World Government.
Hajruddin is born from Harald and this normal giant, but the elder giants and royal council don’t like it so they set him up with another ancient giant woman.
Ancient giant woman births Loki, but his eyes are disfigured/ugly/demonic so she casts him out to the bottom layer of Elbaf. THEN DAY 1 LOKI CLIMBS HIS WAY OUT OF THAT (one of the absolute coolest feats so far, I love Loki).
Rocks comes to Elbaf to try to recruit Harald for his crew, it’s revealed he’s the father of Marshall D. Teach
Rocks’ crew is full of members who were obtained via Davyback fights.
Before Rocks came to Elbaf, Harald went to a reverie to discuss Elbaf’s standings. Rocks D. Goat (Xebec) is there.
Rocks kills an Admiral and enters Imu’s flower room, tells Imu he’s a Davy Jonesian pirate and that he’ll be back soon.
Rocks and Harald end up having to escape together, this is the event that makes Rocks want to recruit Harald.
We get introduced to the young members of Rocks’ crew, and we also get to see the young Roger and Kuja pirates.
Shakky is beautiful and basically the whole world simps for her. Roger and Whitebeard included.
Rocks takes over pirate island (Hachinosu, beehive island), and Shakky decides to open her bar there.
Shakky is in love with Rayleigh and tells him she’s his whenever he wants, he’s apprehensive because he knows Roger likes her too.
Shakky is kidnapped by the World Government for use in the bi-annual hunting games (the games that basically cause what will be known as the God Valley Incident).
The Rocks and Roger pirates are informed that Shakky is going to be there and they head to God Valley, Garp hears that Roger and the Rocks Pirates are going to be there so he heads there as well.
Garling has a “family” consisting of a woman with 2 twin boys (Shanks and Shamrock) who live on God Valley.
It turns out Rocks is going for a very different reason, God Valley is his homeland and his wife and son are there. He knows they’re going to be in danger because they carry his real name. Davy D. Xebec.
The Davy family is seemingly hated more than those that only carry the initial of D.
Garling wounds the mother of his sons, and claims that he will win the tournament to take Shakky as his wife.
Dragon is on God Valley as a young marine and tries to save Shanks and Shamrock at their mother’s request. Shooting a Celestial Dragon with a tranquilizer dart.
One of the children is taken from Dragon (presumably Shamrock) by the God Knight Maffey. But it seems that Maffey is under the impression there is only the 1 child.
Prime Garp shows off his insane abilities by taking a full blown sun attack from Prime Big Mom and then making a joke about it. Garp’s actions in this event are something I’m incredibly excited to see.
Whitebeard technically runs away from Garp (I say technically because I’m kind of annoyed at the hate he’s been getting, it was a strategic escape, not because he was afraid it would’ve taken too long to fight Garp. He would’ve stayed and fought if he absolutely had to.).
Rayleigh saves Shakky from the God Knight Summers, and they have a super cute embrace at the end of 1161. Gabin and Roger cry in reluctant acceptance.

This flashback has been one of the greatest, and we’re assuming we’re only about halfway through it. I guess this is THE God Valley flashback though, and anything else we get about God Valley will either come from a movie in the future (speaking that into the universe), or maybe small mentions later on in the story. I’m super hyped for the continuance of it, and what happens once we’re out. We’ve still got to figure out what happened to Harald and what Loki’s fruit is. I am so grateful every day that I got caught up to the story when I did. I think the 1st best time to have caught up was before Water 7/Enies Lobby, then Marine Ford, then 1043 with Luffy’s real fruit reveal, and then before the end of Egghead where I got caught up. I’m going to get to experience the absolute peaks of the story in real time. This is potentially the greatest story of my lifetime, and I’m so glad I’m going to be able to witness the end of it.

Whitecastle Challenge

I’ve been watching a lot of movies recently, mostly the Marvel moves, but some comedies scattered here and there. I ended up watching Harold and Kumar go to Whitecastle for the first time, so my friends and I decided to see how many Whitecastle sliders we could eat out of 30. My buddy Vaughn and I were the only ones to actually try. I ended up eating 10, and he ended up eating 21. Mine were frozen and I had had a big lunch, but I don’t think I could’ve eaten anymore than 15-17. I love doing these kind of stupid challenges and stuff with friends just for fun.

This blog is the closest one I think I’ve been to the end of the month, so I’m hauling ass this afternoon to get it out. Hope you guys have a great October!

August Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Cubing Progress

Last month I said I was starting to learn ZBLL algs and was also going to experiment with yau5. I’m still slowly learning more 2GLL, but I haven’t done a single 5x5 yau solve since that last post.

ZBLL and 2GLL

I lost a lot of wind after learning the T and U 2GLL sets. I know them all still (ok actually the ones with the H Perm in them still trip me up at the start, for both cases I use the inverse of the other one and it’s sorta tricky to remember how each one starts), and I can recognize and execute them all in about 2.5 seconds which is about half of what my OLL/PLL time would probably be. I consider these sets absolutely worth it to learn.

I started learning the L set next because I figured that’d be the closest to the T and U sets since it has 2 corners oriented. For whatever reason, it was nearly impossible for me to learn. Recognition was such a pain, I couldn’t remember where the twisted corner had to be when I did the algorithm and I’d end up doing the wrong algorithm about 1/3 times. The algorithms I was trying to learn weren’t totally sticking either. I could do the algs at probably 3 TPS but any faster and I’d end up messing it up, it was rough. I took about a week or 2 of a break and came back and just decided to learn the algs that were sune/sexy derivations. These algs aren’t horrible, so I don’t think it’s an issue that I learned them but I’m afraid all of the L sets are going to be like this. Now that I’m writing this blog post though I’m coming across this page which has a decent way of helping with recognition, and they use the sune algs for the L set, so maybe I’ll peruse this and it’ll help with the recognition.

The H set hasn’t been as bad so far. The recognition is a little tricky since you have to look at a little more than the other sets. This set is sorta similar to the diagonal cases where it’s all opposite colors on top instead of a solved corner permutation. In normal solves this one probably takes the longest for recognition because I have to go “ok, this one is the right set, now where’s the block” and then sometimes I go into “ok there is no block, is this the case that I know?”, and even rarer (but still common) I go “ok, no this isn’t actually the set I know, dang it”.

After I finish up H, which only has 8 algorithms in comparison to the 12 all the other sets have I think I’ll move onto the Pi cases. I’ve heard these are also known to be difficult and probably not worth it. The corner recognition is easy though because this is the permutation I use for my normal OLL alg for this case.

I haven’t decided if I want to learn the sune/antisune cases yet. I keep going back and forth on them. I’ll probably be faster using sune + PLL, but then I haven’t learned full ZBLL. Not really the best reasoning for using it, but if the algs turn out to be decently fast I may end up being faster with it anyway. I’ve never been super fast at executing algorithms, I’ve never been able to sub 1 anything. Even sune is like 1.1-1.5 seconds of execution for me. I’ll probably give the sune/antisune cases a try at least because their recognition shouldn’t be terrible, and then I’ll have at least all of 2GLL learned.

I think once I’m done with 2GLL I’m going to commit to learning all of either T or U next. This way I won’t have to be wondering if I’ve learned an alg or not, I’ll just be able to say “oh a T case, I for sure know this one”.

NCSU Wolfpack 2025

Happy to announce I signed up for a competition this morning. This one should be fun because it’s gonna be in Raleigh which is closer to me and it has 5x5. I haven’t done much 5x5 as of late because I’ve been focusing on 3x3, but for the next month or so I think I’m going to work on 5x5 hard in attempt to get a sub 1:10-1:07 average, and maybe get an official sub-1 single. I got another sub-1 single the other day, so I’m up to 2 singles now which is awesome.

It’s the end of the month already, I’ll try to make another post soon. I just get busy and neglect this writing lol, but I’ll try to block off an hour per week to do updates leading to the competition this time around.

July Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I started this post back in June actually, and was planning for it to be specifically about the differences in how I do yau compared to others, but it started getting really close to the end of the month so it’s all going together.

Cubing Stuff

Since I’ve gotten back into going to speedcubing competitions, I’ve started messing around with learning some more algs and methods. Specifically the idea of switching from reduction to yau5 for 5x5+ and learning a bunch of ZBLLs. I’m never going to be the fastest in the world, I missed that boat a long time ago lol, but I would like to get faster still. I’m a competitive person, so I’d like to maybe get back to where I can get to finals and do well at competitions again. 3x3 and 5x5 are my favorite events and these seem like decent steps to getting fast that I can experiment with. I have a long term goal now to shoot for because there’s a big competition I’m probably going to next year!

World Championships 2025 and US Nationals 2026

I wasn’t glued to the screen for world championships like I thought I was going to be. I was hanging out with friends for most of the weekend, so I only caught a few solves here and there for worlds. I was actually planning on going to worlds because my friends and I were looking for a boys trip and Seattle seemed really cool. We didn’t end up going because I was super dumb and didn’t understand the way the qualification times worked, so we ditched Seattle. I thought everyone had to have a sub-7 3x3 average to compete, but I didn’t realize that they were going to have more groups where they relax the qualification times each time. I thought maybe they were limiting the competition to only the very best. It wasn’t until the spots had already filled up and we had planned our Toronto trip that I finally realized how it worked. Oh well, Toronto was still really cool and watching it was super neat, I was glued to the final round of 3x3 and 5x5. Tymon getting a world record in the final round to win 5x5 was insane, and Yiheng having to clutch the final solve to become world championship was so incredibly hype. Congrats to them both!

Even though I didn’t get to go to worlds, I was happy to watch it. But what really excited me, and I didn’t believe at the beginning, was the US Nationals 2026 announcement. It’s going to be in Raleigh, North Carolina! It’s been forever since I’ve even seen a competition in Raleigh, and I’m so much closer to Raleigh than Charlotte where most of the NC competitions are held these days. Out of the 17 competitions I’ve been to I’ve only been to 3 competitions in the Raleigh-Durham area. I’ll be able to wake up late and drive to the competition without rushing! I’m so excited. Since this was announced exactly a year before it’s going to take place, so I have a long time to decide how and what I want to practice. My goals are to get a sub-10 average and maybe a sub-8 single for 3x3 with ease at Nationals or before, and to maybe be able to get a sub-1 minute 5x5 solve or average at Nationals too. I feel like these are realistic goals because I can get sub-10 averages at home easy, and I usually get at least 1 sub-8 single in an average of 100 for 3x3. I don’t do as well at competitions (like most people), so it’s hard to get good averages sometimes. 5x5 is a little harder, as of right now I’ve only gotten 1 sub-1 5x5 single, and my best average of 5 at home is around 1:03. But these will be fun challenges to see how I can improve!

Switching to yau5?

It’s obviously possible for me to get faster with reduction, but I’ve used yau on 4x4 for at least a decade now so I’m comfortable with the method, and it seems like a lot of people prefer it for bigger cubes as well as 4x4. I’ve tried about 50-60 solves total for yau5, but something seems awkward. First 3 cross edge pairing is probably the most awkward, but centers don’t feel great either. People make the distinction between yau and yau5, so I decided to go look up a few videos about yau5 to see if people had some tips. After a few videos I realized I do yau pretty differently than how a lot of people do yau.

I’ve known that I do yau differently compared to some people for a long time. During the 2nd step where you solve the cross edges, most people will solve 3 correctly in relation to each other so when they place the last one into the empty slot the cross is fully solved. I don’t know exactly where I learned yau to teach me this, but I solve the first 2 cross edges correctly, and then I solve the 3rd one into the incorrect spot. It doesn’t matter which edge it is and it doesn’t matter what order I put them in, I only need 2 in correct relation to each other. The reason I do this comes after center pairing. After 3 cross edges are solved I put them on the left with the U layer having the free space. Then I solve the last 4 centers. Some people will solve the last cross edge and put it on the bottom right side of the cube, because you don’t technically have to use R moves. I find this doesn’t work as well for me because I use Rw moves to do centers instead of only using inner slices, and I don’t want to have to do R/R’ or M/M’ moves to keep the edge on the bottom. I see the benefit in doing it, but it doesn’t work as well for me.

Once all of the centers are done this is another place I’ve seen the method differ. I’ve heard of people going ahead and pairing up the rest of the edges before solving the cross. I don’t think this is quite as popular though, but it does keep your F face free to do some unique stuff with edge pairing. Instead, I (and a lot of other people) will move on to solving the last cross edge. I’ll usually keep my already solved cross edges on the left hand side like I had them when I solved my centers. I’ll match up the edge using Rw and U moves, but I won’t undo the moves to fix the centers back yet. I’ll first switch out the incorrectly placed edge with the newly created edge using a U or a U’ move, this will correctly place the newest created edge in relation to the 2 cross edges that were placed in correct relation to each other from earlier. This takes the edge that was incorrectly placed earlier and puts it into the M layer, and temporarily messes up the centers on the U layer because they are still askew from pairing up the 4th cross edge. Then I’ll do either an L or L’ move to swap the empty slot to the U layer, I can then do a U or U’ move to move the previously incorrectly placed edge into the right spot where it’s in correct relation with the rest of the cross edges now. It sounds sort of complicated, I promise it isn’t. I’ve always done it this way. It makes placing the last cross edge easier in my mind, and it saves me moves.

Other people will pair up the edge, solve the mismatched centers, and then put the edge directly into the right spot. This way I guess has better look ahead because you typically probably flip the cross to bottom and then pair up the last edge, so you have a better view of the cube when you go to start doing edges. Mine seems like maybe it saves some moves, but I do lose out on that view of the rest of the cube so I’m probably slightly slower to start edge pairing in comparison.

After I’ve placed the last edge I will then put my cross on bottom. Because I haven’t fixed the centers yet from pairing up the last cross edge, I can go ahead and begin edge pairing. Way back in the day, I would intentionally have the centers be 2 turns off (Uw2) so I could do 6-2 edge pairing. I would place my edges where I could do either a Uw or Uw’ and have 3 edges solved, then I would move all the solved edges to the U layer while setting up for the next slice. Then I would simply have to do a slice-flip-slice to fix the last 2 edges (once they were mirrored to each other, I could do (Uw) (R U R’) (F R’ F’ R) (Uw’)). That lead to some weird cases where it’s basically too many things going on, and I’m losing out on the benefits of doing it that way. Nowadays I do 3-2-3 edge pairing, which is kind of the standard, I don’t see too many people differing from that. Then I do normal 3x3 except for parity.

In either case if I decide to use yau for 5x5 or not, I should learn my last 2 edge algorithms finally. I know a few of the good ones, but I’ve never committed to learning them. I know I’m losing at least a couple of seconds on some solves to those stupid algorithms. That should be my main focus, but here I am contemplating if I should switch methods entirely.

ZBLL

“Jackson”, you say, “you just said you haven’t learned 5x5 L2E, you say you’re gonna learn 493 algorithms instead? What’s wrong with you?”.

How about you leave me alone.

On a serious note, yes I’m learning some ZBLLs, and yes it is silly but I’m having fun. It is a ginormous amount of algorithms, but there’s ways to significantly reduce the number. For a start, if you don’t plan on learning the sune and antisune cases because it’s almost faster to do sune + PLL, the number drops to 328. Then if you know COLL you already know another chunk for when those cases happen to solve edge permutation as well as corner permutation, so it gets closer to 300. It’s still a lot of algorithms, but there’s a few tricks like that to get the number smaller and smaller. Mirrors can also knock you down by a lot, but that’s not the best approach sometimes and you should probably learn the better algorithms.

I’ve decided to begin with 2GLL U and T. 2GLL is a popular subset of ZBLL where the corners are already permuted, so you’re doing edge permutation and corner orientation. They can all be solved with 2 gen algs that only contain R and U moves. 2GLL is only 84 cases, so it’s a good intro for people who want to start.

I’ve started learning 2GLL in the past a few times, but the algorithms never stuck. It was always too daunting, and the algorithms didn’t make sense or weren’t easy to memorize. This time around I’m learning them pretty fast for what I have in the past, and it’s been really fun. I’ve been using (this trainer)[https://bestsiteever.ru/zbll] and it’s great. I can select which algs I want to practice, I can save them in sets, and it has really good algs on the site in my opinion. Right now I’ve learned about 20 algorithms in about 2 weeks. I’ve been learning them in pairs. Take the 2GLL U set for example, I’ll learn the case that has the Ua Perm edge swap on the side without the headlights along with the one that has the Ub perm. This way has been working for me really well so far. I’m planning on learning the last 3 2GLL U algs in the next few days. I’ve already learned the 2GLL T set and I periodically practice both to make sure I still retain them since I’m learning them pretty quick.

It’s been nice getting some of the cases in actual solves. My recognition in real solves is a lot slower than in the specific practice. I’m normally like “Hey this looks familiar. Do I know this case? Yes, let’s try it.” then I slowly do the algorithm and end up with a worst time than if I had just done (C)OLL+PLL. That will have to come with more time and practice. Practicing ZBLL in real solves kind of stinks because the cases you don’t learn don’t come up that often. I use CFOP and will try to force a cross on top anyway, but the chances of getting one of the 24 cases I know out of the 493 possible ones that there are is kind of annoying. When I know a full set then they’ll show up way more often. I thought about trying to learn ZBLS first, but a bunch of people on forums kind of agree that it isn’t a great idea. It seems like learning ZBLL is putting the cart in front of the horse, but I’m gonna trust the experts on this one.

I don’t know if learning ZBLL will save me any time in the long run, recognition is looking like it might be tougher than I was expecting, but it’s a cool thing to say you know ZBLL. Plus I’m having fun, so that’s what matters.

June Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Hey guys, happy June! It’s getting really hot where I live, I miss when it was early June and I was waking up chilly. This blog post is getting really really close to the end of the month, I’m finishing it up Sunday night June 29th to make sure it goes out before the month ends.

Toronto Trip

Last week I got to go on a trip to Toronto, Canada for about 5 days and I had a pretty good time. I was much less stressed this time compared to Italy. I was flying by myself, but I knew what to expect when going international.

I got in Tuesday afternoon, and public transportation was pretty easy to get where we were staying. Although, about 30 seconds onto the train I ripped my pants pretty bad. They were my favorite pair too. I ended up having to change right there, but thankfully nobody else was on the train. I had met up with one of my buddies at the airport and we took the train from YYZ to Dundas West and then from Dundas West we went all the way to Victoria Park. That afternoon I got a HUGE shawarma plate from “Two Brother’s Shawarma” that was really good. Later that evening our other friends got in so we went to this place that served butter chicken pizza. I didn’t have any, but it looked pretty good. I was still full from the shawarma. The entire area was full of people who I assume were Muslim, because most places clearly announced that they were Halal. This wasn’t an issue for the most part except we wanted to go to a sports bar to watch a hockey game at some point, but the area was pretty much dry.

Wednesday morning me and my buddy got up early and got some Tim Horton’s and checked out a grocery store nearby for any interesting Canadian goodies. I’m not a big coffee drinker, but the jelly filled Tim Bits were really good. When the rest of us were awake we went to go explore downtown and the CN Tower. We didn’t go up it because it was going to be pretty expensive for all of us. I was hoping one of us would get pictures, but none of us ended going up. Still a really cool sight though. We stopped in at the St. Lawrence Market and all got some different food for lunch. I had some chicken katsu from this Asian place downstairs that was really good. Then we also got a pemeal sandwich to split, but that was a little disappointing. It was basically just ham. It was a good sandwich, but just pretty normal.

That afternoon we took a bus to Niagara falls, and that was my favorite place of the whole trip, maybe even my favorite place I’ve ever been. It was a 3 hour bus ride with the weather and traffic and everything, we were expecting at most a 2 hour ride. I was kinda bummed/annoyed cuz it took so long, I thought it was gonna be all this trouble to go see some stupid waterfall, but I was so happy to be proven wrong. I’ve never been super excited about places. I went inside the White House when I was a kid, I went to Italy, I’ve been to Las Vegas, but none of it really ever like grabbed me and made me excited to be there. Sure, there’s been places I’ve been like “wow, this is beautiful”, but nothing like Niagara falls. If you ever have the chance to go, please do, it’s so cool. I’ve never been to the New York side of it, but the Canadian side was mind blowing. I even got to see an Amish family for the first time, which was super cool and something my grandma would’ve loved. I didn’t take a picture of them out of respect, I did want to go up and talk to them, but I was kinda shy and I don’t know THAT much about the Amish lifestyle, so I keep that in the memory bank. We got to see the falls “lit up” when it hit sunset, but since it was the longest day of the year sunset was at almost 9pm. We had to rush back to catch the last bus back to Toronto, so we didn’t get to see them too lit up. The bus back was much more pleasant. They shut off all the lights and everyone pretty much slept. It only took about an hour and a half going back.

Thursday morning, into the afternoon, was the Hockey Hall of Fame. Pretty neat, but I don’t watch much Hockey or know about the history, so a lot of it was lost on me. Our friend Josh who is a huge Hockey fan didn’t get to go, but he probably would’ve enjoyed it more than I did. We got him a small Stanley Cup from the gift shop. Later on that afternoon, 2 of our friends were going to go see a live showing of a podcast for a game they play called Valorant. It was in the Shopify building in Toronto, and I thought that kind of funny. I have used some of Shopify’s back end interfaces, and they’re pretty alright, they get what they need done. But there’s been a few times where I’ve wanted to strangle the people who write them lol. Anyway, my friends were only able to get the 2 tickets, so the 3 of us without tickets just kind of walked around Toronto. We stopped at this art gallery, I forget the name. It had some neat exhibits. There was this empty lot where a school once stood, and during the pandemic people started hanging out there and it was eventually called “Bloor-Dale Beach”, even though it wasn’t near any water. Eventually it got sold and turned into apartments or something, so a bunch of people made tributes to it that were displayed for the art gallery.

Once it got closer to time that our friends were going to meet back up with us, we stopped in at this arcade bar called “Greta”. It was neat, not really my idea of the best time, but they had some cool games and some really good food. Our very pretty waitress, bless her heart, I don’t even remember her name, was the only waitress working after a little while. She actually had a group walk out on her, which was really lousy. So we tipped her well. I had this birria grilled cheese that was pretty good, but it had some parchment paper stuck to some of the cheese still. It was easy enough to peel off though, and I was pretty hungry, so I’d still say I’d order it again. We ended up leaving really late and were at risk of missing the last train home (this week the trains were closing much earlier than normal due to maintenance or something). We had to BOOK it to the station. My legs and feet were killing me, I was about to just call up an Uber and eat the 30-40 minute ride. I was hurting. No sciatica pain though, so definitely a win.

Friday into Saturday was sort of a blur because we were doing a lot and by this point everyone was kind of exhausted. 2 of us went out for breakfast at this places called Mildred Temple’s Kitchen, and I go this absolutely MASSIVE stack of blueberry pancakes that were delicious. They weren’t too sweet, or syrupy, but just perfect. The food in Toronto was actually surprisingly cheap. At the time we went we were pretty much able to use 75% of whatever we were paying in CAD to convert to USD, so the math was easy, and honestly all the prices we saw in CAD would’ve still been good in USD in my opinion. Anyway, we then went to a Valorant tournament, which was the main reason for us being in Toronto to begin with. I’m not a fan of Valorant, so I wasn’t as hyped as anyone else, but it was a decent experience. I fell asleep 3 times in the venue over the span of about 5 hours though, so take that for what you will lol, I was really tired.

Saturday was probably our most chill day, we didn’t have to rush anywhere to do anything, so we just went out to Toronto Islands. For lunch though before we got on the ferry we stopped off and got some poutine (french fries, cheese curds, and brown gravy). I’ve had it once or twice before at this place local to me, but it wasn’t real poutine because they were using shredded cheese instead of full curds. This place was pretty good. My friends got theirs topped with pulled pork, and another got bacon. I wanted it pretty plain, but I was pretty hungry so I got triple cheese. Which in hindsight was just a lot of dairy and could’ve gone very wrong lol. The Toronto Islands were pretty, there’s not much to say about them. There’s a small amusement park on one of the islands, but it’s mainly geared towards children. We were going to stop and get a beaver tail, but it was cash only and we didn’t have any cash on us and I don’t think there was an ATM anywhere. We also got to see some of the houses of the people who live on the islands which was kind of cool. There’s no cars except for the people who work on the island and the fire department there. The ferry to and from the island ran pretty often, it was like once every 40 minutes so we timed our walks pretty well with the departures. After we got back to the mainland we found this Korean BBQ place where you order the meat and cook it yourself. I’d wanted to try this for a while, but there aren’t many places like that around me I don’t think and I don’t have many friends who would want to go. Overall it was a good experience, I’m glad I went, but honestly it was kinda chaotic and overwhelming for me. It’s really loud, there’s this super hot grill in the center of the table, and you’re trying to make sure you cooked your meat where you won’t get food poisoning. I’m fine with some red in my beef, and I’ll eat sushi like nobody’s business, but I don’t play around with chicken or pork. I’ve heard from a few people that pink pork is safe, but I got food poisoning a few years ago and I’m pretty sure I almost died. Chicken also is just something I don’t wanna mess around with. Again, it was fun, and it was actually pretty cheap, I think it only came out to about $25 USD per person, but I’m not sure if I’ll be going back to any one soon. Later on that night still after everything kind of calmed down we went out and got Church’s chicken for late night snack. I’d heard of the place before, but never saw one anywhere near me, so I was sort of excited to try it. I wasn’t the most hungry so I didn’t really know what to get, but because I misunderstood the portion sizes of the biscuits I ended up with a 5 piece tender mean, 7 of their honey butter biscuits, an order of fries and a drink. I’m not mad I got that many biscuits though, I got to share them with my friends. But even if I didn’t get them to share, I would’ve eaten every single one, they were DELICIOUS. They were honey buttered, but it wasn’t like just biscuits with honey over top. The honey butter had started to caramelize over top of them, which may be because they were old or something I’m not sure how they normally come, but these were absolutely the best biscuits I’ve ever had. And I eat a lot of biscuits and have had a lot of biscuits in my day. Absolutely amazing, please go get some if you’re ever near one.

Saturday was my last full day because I was leaving Sunday afternoon. I’m not one for cities in the slightest, but I could’ve probably spent another couple of days there and I wouldn’t have been mad about it. Toronto is a nice place. I left our airbnb at about 10am and got the airport with plenty of time to spare. When I got into the US from my trip to Italy, we were all corralled into the area where the customs officers were so there was no way to leave without going through them. Canada kinda flipped it on me and confused me for a little bit, because there’s actually US customs officers at the airport in Canada so I only had to go through that process in Canada. It made it super quick because there were hardly any people in front of me, and I was only asked 3 questions. I thought I was still going to have to go through the process coming back form Canada, so when I got off my flight and was in this normal gate like I’d take on a domestic flight I was worried I’d not gone the right direction or something. But I’m still a free man, so I guess I did everything right lol.

That’s all I have time for this month, I’m going to go ahead and post this one. I really need to sit down and do a slight overview of everything that’s happened in One Piece recently. I’ve been reading whenever the chapters come out and it’s been insane. Loki right now is very quickly working up to becoming a top 10 favorite character of mine. I’m loving his backstory right now.

Anyways, see you guys!

May Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Getting really close to the end of the month with this one. I’m sick right now, I caught something over the weekend, so I’m not feeling amazing. But, I wanna go ahead and knock this out while I’m thinking about it. There’s really only 1 thing I want to talk about right now anyway.

North Carolina Championships 2025

This past weekend I competed at North Carolina Championships 2025, and I did pretty ok. I got a PB in every event that I competed in, and almost 1 in every round, which is awesome. I was kinda bummed about not doing as well in 5x5 as I had hoped. I choked the last solve and cost myself a sub 1:10 average. But there’s always next time. I was also hoping for something closer to a sub 10 average for 3x3, but I just couldn’t get in the swing during those rounds. The venue was very hot in some places, but very cold where you waited to compete.

Here’s my results:

Event	Round	Place	Best	Average
3x3	2	25	8.87	10.35
3x3	1	34	8.99	10.99
4x4	2	16	33.71	38.90
4x4	1	12	33.60	36.96
5x5	Combined Final	14	1:05.74	1:10.93
6x6	Combined Final	14	2:09.38	2:17.16
7x7	Combined Final	16	3:54.12	3:58.45

I had a good time. I did have to wake up early again, but I was in my truck this time and I knew exactly where I was going, so I was much more comfortable driving there and back. I drove there and back both days, which was kind of a pain, but I prefer sleeping in my bed. Plus I was by myself, so I would’ve just been bored in a hotel room.

I’m not a super big stickler for my pre-inspection rituals, but I did learn some more things about how to set myself up that I think worked out better for me and calmed me down more. I normally would rub my pants to get my hands warm, but if I put them on my neck it works better if my hands aren’t super cold. I also cross my legs and put them behind the chair legs, so I’m basically making a truss-like situation. That keeps my feet from moving and feels good on my back.

I’m not sure if I’ll be going to another competition this year or not. I think I’d like to, but it’ll probably have to include at least 5x5 for me to instantly commit. I won’t be going to South East Champs because that is a very long drive, and it’s too short to be worth flying. Hopefully there’ll be something closer to me like Raleigh, but we’ll see. I don’t mind the drive to Charlotte that much anymore. I go through Albermarle and it’s pretty easy the whole way.

April Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Cutting it pretty close this month. Sitting down this Saturday afternoon and just trying to get this out real quick.

Site changes and New Homelab

I think I’ve mentioned in other posts before that I do a little bit of server stuff at my house. Obviously I have this server here hosting this site, but I had an old computer that I got gifted and turned into a Plex server for my movie collection. I liked Plex, it worked well enough and it was easy to have my movies outside of my house when I was on the road or something. My grandmother could also use it for her Gunsmoke and other westerns, and my sisters could watch movies at their house. Recently they had some changes to their payment plans and decided to stop supporting remote access, which was going to be an issue. The lifetime license also jumped from around $120 to $250, and that gave me the push to just switch everything entirely. Plex is nice, and $250 really isn’t that bad for all the features you get with it (remote access, transcoding, their media collection, etc), but I’ve been eyeballing Jellyfin for a long time.

I had already bought some new parts to rebuild my server (minus the hard drives and the case) from scratch, so it was time to do it. I had been dreading it for a couple months because I knew it was going to be very physically demanding for my back and generally annoying (I hate hardware and I hate building it). The week after Plex announced their changes I started the build, and I was right it was annoying and hurt my back super bad (nothing lasting though). I picked the worst weekend to do it because we were going to be keeping 2 of my nephews who are 3 and 4 years old and don’t listen to directions the best lol. They actually were both really good though, they let me do my thing and watched tv.

I generally struggled at every step. It’s hard to see, it’s hard to bend over and do stuff, my hands don’t fit in the small spots. The cpu cooler attaching to the motherboard was such a pain in the ass especially. Cable management was terrible. But I got it all together after about 3 or 4 hours. And… it didn’t turn on. Took me a few times of checking every connection, testing different parts, different monitors, everything. Long story short, I had to get a new motherboard. The ram light kept coming on with the old one, so I guess some connection from there to the board was jank. Which was a shame because it was an almost $200 board, but because I had waited so long to do anything with it the return window was up.

The new motherboard I bought was pretty similar, I think the same model was sold out so that’s why i went with a different one. I bought it off of amazon and this new one came inside a brown paper envelope with literally 0 packing material. AND IT WAS A RENEWED ONE, which that fact wasn’t on the listing. It’s not like I got scammed too bad, it was cheaper than the other one which should’ve been my first clue By this point I’m 4 days into this project that takes most people like 3 hours max, and I’m so over it and pissed beyond belief, I’m like “there’s no way this thing works, I’m gonna have to return it.”, but it actually worked. The boot cycle is a little strange, but I don’t have to deal with that too often. It’s been about a month or 2 now and I haven’t had any issues with it yet. I imagine that’ll be the first part to go bad if one does go bad.

I installed proxmox on it, and I have a total of 5 hard drivess that total to 64TB of raw storage. I have 2x18TB drives in a mirror, and then 2x12TB drives in another mirror, and 1x4TB drive. I don’t really have any use for that amount of space since my media and files take up about 4TB, but it’s nice to have.

In proxmox right now I have 10 different containers running apps like Jellyfin, Cockpit, Ngninx proxy manager, Gitea, and an admin panel called Crafty Controller for minecraft servers. I’ve also got tailscale running in a container so that way I can access the services when I’m outside my house without having to port forward. I had to buy my sisters some chromecasts to install jellyfin and tailscale on for them to be able to access my server, and that was a cool learning experience. I followed a tutorial from from Wolfgang on youtube on how to get letsencrypt certs for a domain I have that I use for all my services, so I can go to this domain name inside of my network or on tailscale via a domain name and I have SSL! Very cool!

That sorta leads me into the site changes I’m wanting to implement here. I used to run some services on this server that required some extra cpu and extra hard drive space. But these were mostly for me, so I’m able to host these on my new server and access them whenever without them having to be on a beefy and expensive vps. So I’m going to significantly downsize and start paying like 1/5th of the price. This site however may not live on that new VPS. “What?? Where will it live then? Are you getting rid of it?”, no I’m not getting rid of it. I’m not sure how I want to handle it. This site is written in static hugo, so the html can live anywhere. I’m toying with the idea of having it be served by github, but that’s a little lame. I’m also thinking about amazon S3 buckets, but that’s also lame. For the time being when I do switch, it probably will live on the new VPS until I can figure something else out.

That’s all to say there may be some downtime for when you can access my sites in the next few weeks. Anyway, have a good weekend everyone! I hope you all had a good Easter last weekend. He is risen!

March Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I got startled this morning when I realized how far into March I was and I haven’t started on this post. I also thought I forgot the post for February, but I hadn’t. Anyway, onto the post!

Italy Trip

I was very lucky to have been invited on a week long trip to Italy by my friends family. It was so much fun and such a good time, and an experience I’ll always remember and gush over. I was super nervous going into it (that’s the kind of person I am anyway, I worry about anything and everything I can) because this was my first time going out of the country. It was going to be a long flight, a lot of walking, having to deal with getting a passport and going through customs. But, like most times, everything ended up turning out great.

Since it was the first time I was going out of the US, I had to get my passport. Anytime I have to deal with some identification process or doing anything with the government I get nervous. Not because I’ve done anything wrong really, it’s just bad anxiety for whatever reason. Although, one of my friends misspelled his name on his passport. I was a little nervous about that so I checked mine 100 times and had other people read it too. It was a super simple process though. I setup an appointment online, went to a local post office, paid the man, had my picture taken, signed a form and waited a few weeks. That was a huge weight off my shoulders when I got it.

I was really worried about the long flight and all the walking and how my back was going to handle it. I did alright. It was about 7 hours from RDU (Raleigh, NC) to CDG (Paris), and my back only started bothering me about 6 hours into the flight, but it was manageable. Then we went from CDG to FCO (Rome) which was about 2 hours and that was easy, I was really tired by that point so I slept for a little while.

Actually getting into the EU was way easier than what I was expecting. We got off the plane walked where we were told by these really clear signs, got my passport scanned and my picture taken and I was good. I was expecting paperwork I had to fill out, some questions and just a hassle, but it was incredibly chill. That happened in France. Unfortunately with our layovers being so short we didn’t get to step out in France, and where we flew we didn’t get to see the Eiffel Tower or anything cool. The airport was super beautiful though.

The actual walking wasn’t too bad. I got some Topo hiking boots/shoes that I wear and they helped out a ton. I did have some issues with my calves about halfway through the trip that wouldn’t shake even in the morning. But I went into the ocean at one point for a full body dip and that pretty much fixed them. The water was incredibly cold, but it felt so nice and fixed all the soreness on my body. I guess cold plunges do work lol.

The food we had was all so damn good. The food was insanely delicious, the portions were pretty big, and I didn’t have a single meal that I didn’t like. It was all so cheap too, the most expensive thing I think we bought was a pizza for like 20 euros, but it was from the 2nd best pizza place in the world. We spent 5 euros on a pizza that put Little Caesars to shame. The pasta was delicious too, I had gnocchi for the first time at this really small restaurant in Tropea and I’ve been meaning to buy some to fix at home. The desserts were sweet, but they didn’t taste artificial like you might find here. We had like 7 or 8 different tiramisu dishes.

The sights and history there was insane too, I have so many good pictures. We stayed in Rome for a day or 2, then we were in Naples for 2 days, and then we stayed the rest of the time in Tropea. Overall I just had an amazing time and I would love to go back again some day.

New Server

I’ve had a homelab for a while to run things like Plex on for my sisters, but I’m in the process of rebuilding it. The computer is almost literally 10 years old and it was already a little under-powered when it was first built, so it’s been overdue for a few years. I bought the parts for it back around black friday, but only recently had the time to be able to do anything with them. It sucks though cuz I’m 90% sure I got a broken motherboard, so I’ve got another one coming in the mail in the next day or 2.

I’m writing this because the vps this server is running on might change. I host a few sites on here, but I pay a little bit too much out of pocket for it and plan to move some of the services to my homelab in proxmox containers. This web server and my email server (which has been down for months and months now) will still probably be better suited on server that isn’t in my house, so I’ll be looking for alternative hosting. I’m tinkering with the idea of hosting this site (since it’s written with hugo) on github, and then maybe paying someone like protonmail to use my domain with their clients and services. Still thinking though. But, that’s to say that this site might have some downtime in the future.

That’s all I’m going to write about for this month, it’s getting close to the end and I’m not sure if I’ll have time to come back later and finish anything I start. I still need to come back and write up some stuff about what’s been going on with One Piece, cuz it’s been crazy. Thanks for reading!

Charlotte Winter 2025 Recap

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0400

I wanted to come back and talk about my experience during Charlotte Winter 2025 a little bit more. I had a really good time, I forgot how much fun it is to compete. Hopefully I’ll be able to compete again later this year. I’m sorta looking into the logistics of South East Championships, but travel is gonna be a pain, so I probably won’t be going to that one. If another one in Charlotte (or closer) with 5x5 comes up I’ll probably attend.

Recap

I live about 2 hours from Charlotte, so I knew I was going to have to get up early if I wanted to make the 7:30am check-in. I planned on getting up at about 4 or 4:30am so I could leave by about 5am. I packed all my stuff up the night before and laid my clothes out so I’d be ready to go, and I took some melatonin to go ahead and get to sleep at about 9 or 9:30. I woke up a few times during the night, and finally settled on waking fully up at 3:19am. I decided to leave earlier than planned (about 4:45am) since I was so excited and anxious and just wanted to get on the road.

I am not a big fan of driving. I’ll do it if I have to, but I’ll never be the first person to offer to drive anywhere. It was dark for most of my drive there, which was fine. Since it was so early there weren’t many cars on the road. I got there at about 6:15 or 6:30, so I for sure made the check-in time (haha). It took me a minute to find the student union building it was being held in. I was going based off of Google Maps which took a second to get my bearings and which way I was going. On the way in I saw my friend Cady Shields and ran over to talk and follow her in. I got to see my buddy Silas Starling, and I saw Zach Ochs who totally changed since the last time I saw him (neither of us recognized eachother). I got put on a different stage than most of the people I knew, which kinda stunk, but I got to talk to Cady a good bit which was nice.

Fun fact about Cady that I’ll always bring up: the first competition she ever went to was one that she hosted in Charlotte. Crazy undertaking, but it was a really fun one. That was the first time I ever got a podium placement.

Competing was alright, I was really nervous and the nerves never fully shook off. However, I did exactly how I thought I would for everything though, so I wasn’t totally disappointed. I figured I wouldn’t make any finals except for 5x5 (which was a combined final), and that I’d get to 3x3 round 2. I was only there to compete in 3x3 and 5x5 mainly and I had high hopes for them. Skewb and OH are fun but I never practice them so I wasn’t worried too much about my placings for those.

First round of 3x3 started out good with a mid 10 and 2 high 9s. Still possible to get a PB or even sub 10 average. After the first 3 I just got more nervous and finished out with 2 12s. I was really worried about getting a PB for an event so my competition PB streak would keep going, so to miss it for 3x3 off the bat was a little disheartening. But 5x5 was later in the day, so I figured I’d hopefully be warmed up by that time and able to get a PB average or single there.

Skewb and OH were next, and neither of them were anything to write home about. OH was kinda neat because I got 2 sub 20 solves, but it wasn’t enough for a sub 20 average or anything. I haven’t gotten one of those yet in competition. Skewb was pretty bad, I got 2 9s. I had just gotten a new skewb for the competiton since I didn’t think my stickered one was gonna be legal with how bad the stickers were. Instead of waiting on shipping for stickers for a cube I didn’t really practice anyway, I decided to just get a stickerless one and get it set up by the cubicle. It’s nice, but I’m just not good at it lol

During lunch I had a terrible headache, it was pretty gnarly. I brought some tylenol with me, so that sort of helped, but I was kind of miserable, tired and ready to go home by this point. In hindsight, I probably should’ve gotten something to eat since I only had a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, and there was a Wendy’s downstairs. But I went the rest of the comp without eating and had 400mg of Caffeine like a genius :)

Finally it was time for 5x5. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but for all of my solves I got put at station 1 which was where the camera for the Clicky Studios livestream was. I had told my friends and family about the livestream and was texting them when I would be going up so they could try to spot me. While I was competing, I wasn’t allowed to look at the stream, so I couldn’t tell them for sure whether I was on camera or not. Even though I was potentially on camera, I don’t think that really had an effect on my nerves. I didn’t get a horrible result, it just wasn’t what I was hoping for. I was really hoping for it to be a PB single and average, but I was about 2 seconds off of both. I had practiced for 5x5 the most, so this was really annoying. Nothing crazy about any of the solves from what I remember. I think I screwed up my last 2 edges on 1 of them and had to redo some centers.

Then it was on to 3x3 round 2. I was super nervous by this point because I still hadn’t gotten a PB. I had to lock in and get either a sub 10.72 average of 5 or a sub 8.86 single. First solve: 10.99, I’m thinking “ok, not bad, I still got this”. Second Solve: 8.09, “phew, PB single, thank goodness the streak continues”. After that a huge weight was lifted off my shoulders and I could just solve without worrying about anything. Now, I was just going for a PB average, but if I didn’t get it then it’s no biggie. Third solve I pick up the cube to inspect and realize it was the same scramble as number 2. I told my judge but he kept judging like it was a normal solve and called “8 seconds”. Which, at the time I thought was strange, but actually this was the best outcome. If it was a misscramble and he kept juding like normal then I’d get another attempt, but if it was scrambled correctly and I was mistaken I’d probably get a DNF for not starting on time. So quickly I gathered myself back into inspection, did it and then went and talked to Katie Hull who was one of the delegates there besides Cady. She was able to confirm based on the video that I had taken that I did get the same scramble, so they gave me and extra attempt which was really just the real third scramble. I was both nervous and ready to be done now, so I just got the rest of the solves out of the way, nothing really special to finish it out. I wish that hadn’t happened because then I probably would’ve done better, but oh well. I ended up with a PB average of 10.48.

The 8.09 I got is actually a little interesting because I could not remember my solution from the competition. I knew I got a PLL skip and I knew which OLL it was for, but I couldn’t get the right start to the cross. I finally figured it out by slowing the video down, but I really don’t know why I did the cross that way. It worked out cuz it was an easy solve, and the cross I maybe should’ve done turned out to have a not as of a good solution. I can’t execute it as quickly that is. I definitely didn’t do the same solution when I got that scramble for the 2nd time.

After they started inputting my group for 3x3 round 2 I kept checking and saw that I was in 7th place, which was cool but I was so bummed I was going to be in finals. I was so ready to go home, but I was gonna stay if I was going to be in finals. Then I realized there was 1 more group and that there was a chance I’d get knocked out. So I kept looking at people’s solves like “ok, Kerry Creech is in this group, that’s one spot down. Oh he’s getting a sub 10 average, that’s another.” I saw I was 1 spot ahead of Silas, so I said to myself “if I’m in 20th place, I’ll give up my spot for Silas” (I’m not even sure if they bump people to finals if someone leaves). But I ended up placing 24th and headed out.

I was really excited to go home, even though I was having a blast, I was tired and hungry and my back was killing me. So I was ecstatic when I saw that I had been knocked out of finals. I went and said my goodbyes, said I’d see them later and went home. I left at around 5pm, so it was light out for just long enough for me to get back to a point on the road where I wouldn’t be in crazy traffic and wouldn’t have to make a bunch of turns. I did get stuck behind a semi-truck for about 30 minutes which was annoying. It was on this really long stretch of 2 lane road that curved every couple hundred feet. I got home at about 8pm and told my friends about the day and checked the live stream and everything.

It was so much fun, I had such a good time. Thank you to the delegates and the organizers. I hope to compete again soon!

Livestream

Clicky Studios was the one to host the livestream for this competition, and although it seemed like a cool idea, I was a little disappointed with it. I hadn’t looked at any of their other live streams, so I wasn’t really sure how they were structured, which, is my fault since I didn’t do my research to set my expectations right. I thought that it was going to be a nice way for family or friends who couldn’t come to the competition to be able to watch their sons/daughters/friends compete. I thought it was going to be a very wide angle type of view so you could see all the stations and be able to point out which station so-and-so was at. Then at the end during finals they’d change setups so they could do more commentary on those competing, and wrap it up with the awards. Instead it was a pretty narrow view of the same few sections along with some commentary. Although they did film a good bit of finals and the awards ceremony.

I was seeing it more from a family/friendly competition perspective instead of a competitive/professional view. Since getting back into the Youtube side of cubing I’m seeing now how people are working towards trying to make speedcubing into a legitimate sport and trying to give people avenues to watch competitions from home, and get more people watching it. So, in reality they did what they thought was best.

I have to wonder though if combining the 2 models could be better. I think having a few camera angles and switching them during the competition would be much better and you’d at least get more perspectives from everyone instead of just the people that the commentators know. I understand this is a pretty new thing and they don’t necessarily have the funds for multiple cameras or personalities to have behind the camera, and maybe they’re already planning on this for the future. I figured I’d give my 2 cents on it anyway.

There were also a lot of issues getting the stream started and there were a lot of ads. These were probably unavoidable because I’m not sure how early they can reasonably get into the venue to setup, and I don’t really know what sort of issues they were having, but it made it seem a little unprofessional. The ad breaks are also probably unavoidable because they’re trying to make their money and continue doing this. It just seemed excessive. I’m looking forward to seeing how this venture turns out though, and I will be on the lookout for competitions like Nationals and Worlds to be livestreamed.

Happy Birthday Nanny

Today is also my late grandmother’s birthday. It’s the first one since she’s passed so it’s hard to think about. Our birthdays are only a week apart, mine on the 12th and hers on the 19th, so we’ve always celebrated really closely. When I first came home from the hospital my mom surprised her with me. Nanny thought it was something for an early birthday/Valentine’s gift. What a lame present. Love you and miss you lots Nanny.

January Update 2025

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0400

Happy New Year! I hope everyone is having a good year so far, and I hope you all get to do what you set out to do. I’m gonna go over some of my resolutions and plans for the year, the first quarter is already turning out to be crazy.

Resolutions

The big one that I’m hoping to achieve is to lose a bunch of weight. Ideally, if I could snap my fingers and make sure that by the end of the year I was a specific weight, I’d be around 160 or 170. But, to start small and manageable, I want to get below 210. The last time I weighed, which was a few days ago, I was 227.5, so it’s around 20lbs to lose. By the end of the year, this should be manageable. If I only lost a pound a week I could get to around my dream goal weight, but that’s incredibly consistent progress. I’m not saying it couldn’t or won’t happen, but I doubt I’ll make that happen. Under 220 should be fine though. The holidays killed my diet and motivation for the gym, I was over at my friends house all the time and his mom makes amazing food and they’ve always got candy and sodas stocked. I came home and was weighing 230 one day. I knew it was bloat, but I was like “alright, somethings gotta change”.

The other big resolution I have is that I want to read a lot more. With TikTok probably getting banned at some point this year, I will have a lot more time to do outside of it. I don’t think I’ll go to Instagram Reels or Youtube Shorts, though I might spend more time on both of the platforms.

Media I Want To Watch/Read

I think maybe if I plan out things I want to read or watch, in the order I want to watch them, I am more able/likely to do that. So here’s a few things I want to consume this year, in the approximate order I plan to watch/read them.

Books

Believe In Yourself: The Lee Priest Story - Lee Priest (I’m pretty far into this one already since it was a Christmas present. Hoping to finish it in January.)
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu (This is for PewDiePie’s book club that he’s doing. I’m closing into halfway done with it, but I’m not understanding a lot.)
Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tremendous: The Life of a Comedy Savage - Joey Diaz
Demons - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sherlock Holmes Collection - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Greatest Beer Run Ever - John “Chick” Donohue
Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Poor Folk - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

Anime

Sakamoto Days- Season 1 Part 1 (Fun so far. Not as enjoyable as DanDaDan or Ranma 1/2 yet but I like it.)
Wotakoi - Season 1 (The romance animes finally got me. Already started season 1, just have to find time to finish it. It’s fine so far, but not as grabbing as MDD or Horimiya.)
DanDaDan - Season 2 (I’m so excited for DanDaDan Thursdays again.)
Ranma 1/2 - Season 2

Manga

Ranma 1/2 - Rumiko Takahashi (I loved the remade anime so I decided to pick up all the 2-in-1s. I’m about 4 volumes in (2 physical books out of 19), but it’s been a bit since I’ve read any.)
My Dress-Up Darling - Shinichi Fukuda (This is a cute story, and the first season of the anime was really fun. I watched it in a few days and I’m excited for the next season that I think is coming out this year.)
Heavenly Delusions - Masakazu Ishiguro (The anime got me HOOKED on this story. I need to rewatch the first season, cuz there was a lot that I missed and now I’d be so tuned into what I should pay attention to. Go watch it if you haven’t seen it, it’s dark and interesting as all get out.)
Goodnight Punpun - Inio Asano (I have this physically, but it was kind of boring and depressing so I haven’t finished it. I’ll need to re-read most of it.)
Wotakoi - Fujita (Probably will read this, but it’s kinda low on my list.)

Television

Wayne - Season 1 (I’m 6/10 episodes in. Pretty good so far. It reminds me of “End of the Fcking World” on Netflix.)
Squid Games - Season 3 (I just finished Season 2 yesterday, and supposedly season 3 is gonna be the last and it’s coming out later this year. Fun little thriller.)
Stranger Things - Season 5 (If we don’t get it this year, I’ll be super pissed. I understand it’s a graphically intense show, but damn. Surely it’s not 1 editor for all the episodes.)

Charlotte Winter 2025

Getting pretty close to the end of the month as I’m writing this, so I might push more about this competition into a different blog post just so I can get this one out, but I went to Charlotte Winter 2025 and did way better than I expected.

If you want to see my solves, I recorded them all and posted them here. I didn’t do as well as I was hoping for 5x5, and it took all day for me to get any PBs but I finally got some for 3x3 and kept my pb streak going.

That’s gonna be it for this month, I don’t trust myself to come back and fill out anymore before January is over. See you guys next month!

December Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a great time with your families this year and have a safe New Year! This will probably be my last blog post for the year. I’m writing this the day before Christmas Eve which is when my family celebrates a lot of our festivities, so I won’t have much time tomorrow to write.

Charlotte Winter 2025

I’m excited to annouce that I will be going to the Charlotte Winter 2025 competition on January 25th! I’ve written elsewhere on my site about how I used to compete in Rubik’s Cube competitions, but it’s been over 5 years since I’ve competed. With covid, my back issues, and having a full time job I haven’t been able to go to one since 2019.

I’ll be competiting in 3x3, OH, 5x5 and Skewb. Which happen to be some of my favorite events. 5x5 being my absolute favorite event, and the one I’m best at. I don’t expect to break any state records, I think those days are for sure over at this point, but I hope to keep my PB streak of 15 going to 16. A sub 10 average for 3x3 may not be out of the question either. I’ll need to be in the zone though for all of the events if I want to get some PBs. I’m nervous for the actual competing part, but I’m confident I’ll do alright. I got over the nerves of competiting a long time ago, but this time is a little different, so I’ll have to try to calm down.

Since there’s only about a month until the competition, I won’t be learning any new algorithms probably. I’ve been looking for a competition for the past few months and practicing in the mean time, so I’m not really rusty anymore, but I don’t want to add too many new things in case I get tripped up. There’s a few COLLs I’ve learned that I could probably execute, but I might just skip them if I come across them since I’m not super comfortable with them still.

I use CFOP and I know full OLL and full PLL, I know a good portion of COLL, I do some edge manipulation and WV cases, and a handful of ZBLLs. I’ve thought about trying to learn ZBLL before, but I haven’t found a great way to practice a set and remember it for longer than a few days since they don’t show up that often. Depending on how I do and how much I enjoy this competition I might try to dedicate myself to learning 2GLL.

There’s a few of my old friends going too so it’ll be nice to catch up with them. If you are reading this and are planning on going, look for me and say hi!

Real Quick One Piece Recap

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ONE PIECE MANGA UNTIL CHAPTER 1134

Last month I did my blog post kind of early, before the unexpected break we got due to Oda’s health, so a few things have happened since. We did get the chapter on December 1st as expected and we haven’t heard much else out of Oda about the break. I’m hoping he’s doing much better. He had been going to South Africa to help with the live action filming and stuff, so that probably worsened some of his blood pressure issues. December has had a few other breaks for Oda as well as Shonen Jump the magazine. I’m still confused on a lot of the schedules and how that all works, but most of the time I just get a notification when a new chapter drops and then I read it. You’re never disappointed when a chapter doesn’t come out if you don’t know when it’s supposed to come out anyway ;)

Chapters 1133 and 1134 have caused a lot of discussion, like often times new chapters do.

After it was pretty much confirmed that Saul was sill alive during Egghead, we finally saw the reuninon between Saul and Robin in chapter 1133. Some people are unsure about Saul being “brought back to life”, arguing that it’s technically “bad writing”. I’m fine with it I think. I do understand the reasons for it being considered bad writing, but I’m not a stickler for that kind of stuff. As long as this is used very sparingly, and someone like Ace or Corazon doesn’t come back I’m fine with it. Morj compared “fake-out deaths” to “false deaths” in this video if you want to see more about the reasons it’s considered bad.

Chapter 1134 recently came out and adds more to the theory that Shanks has a twin brother who is a part of the Holy Knights. This stems mostly from the appearance of the person who we were lead to believe was Shanks in 907 and this new chapter, as well as a few feats that could possibly be attributed to this new character. In chapter 907 we see “Shanks” meeting with the Gorosei (Five Elders) about a specific pirate during the Reverie. This started many jokes and memes about how Shanks is a rat and has the “rat-rat no mi model: snitch”, because why would a pirate, let alone one of the Yonko (Four Emperors), be talking directly to the Gorosei? And about what pirate? Could it have been Luffy? A lot of people believed it was Shanks keeping the world in balance, which was my belief too at the time. However, many people noticed that Shanks’ scar was not visible in the panel even though we’ve seen his scar in very similar positions before. This was believed to be a mistake originally and that it actually was Shanks, because Oda has been known to miss small details like that (no hate, they really are small, I typically haven’t noticed them when I first read the chapters). But the anime also omitted the scar for that episode as well where it would most likely had fixed the issue if it was actually an issue.

As the story went on, we learned more about Shanks’ lineage and how he is almost definitely the son of Figarland Garling, the (now former) leader of the Holy Knights of Marijoa. We figured that the ability to get a meeting with the Gorosei was due to his connection to Garling. Which leads us to chapter 1134, and the appearance of “Shanks” in a summoning circle that the Gorosei used on Egghead. “Shanks” appears in Elbaf in a flash of lightning with an unidentified woman. However, the scar on “Shanks” face is again omitted in the same position that we saw in chapter 907! Which leads us to believe that there is a case of twins here and we the readers have been duped for YEARS. There’s plenty of videos on youtube to explain this more in depth than I can and that give more examples. I’m not totally convinced, but it’s looking more and more to be true. With the cloning processes we’ve seen in the story so far, it’s possible that this isn’t a twin at all, but a direct clone.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I wanted to talk about this month. I’ll try to do a 2024 recap and yearly goals in January. See you then!

November Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0400

I’m gonna try to get this one out early this month. Thanksgiving and stuff going on, so I’ll probably be pretty busy at the end of the month to be able to get it done.

Fitness Updates

Sorta going along with my back updates, I figured I’d start talking about general fitness stuff that I’m doing. I recently started watching more of what I eat and going back to the gym to try to lose some weight and building back some of the (albeit little) muscle that I had before I hurt my back.

I’ve always been heavier, even when I was a kid I was heaver than people who were taller than me. When I was around 17 or 18 I think I was about the best shape I’ve ever been. I wasn’t skinny, but my belly was much less pronounced and I was a lot stronger. I think I was around 170lbs at 5’ 9", I was eating McDonald’s about every day working construction. When I stopped doing construction and started my current job as a developer, my activity went way down but my fast food eating stayed about the same. I got all the way up to about 210lbs which was my heaviest at the time. Then when I started going to the gym I got down to about 190 going like 3 times a week and I was happy with the progress I was making.

Then I hurt my back, and basically all activity stopped. I was literally on my back for about 11 months, from October 2022 to maybe August/September 2023 I could barely walk and doing anything was really challenging and painful. I’ve talked about it in other posts, so I won’t talk much about it here. A good thing about this was my fast food eating slowed down a lot too because I wouldn’t go out to eat as much or go to the drive thru. I still gained back all that I had lost, so I was around 210 again, but it wasn’t horrible. Now that I’m back to walking and doing things, I feel better, but the fast food intake went up again while the activity stayed non-existent to low. So I got all the way up to about 230lbs.

So, here we are now in November 2024, and I’m finally trying to get back to going to the gym at least twice a week. I’m down to about 224lbs in the mornings when I wake up, so I’m losing a little bit of weight. I’m currently doing a Push/Pull/Legs split (PPL) because that’s what I was doing before. My split probably doesn’t matter so much right now since I’m probably going to have those dormant muscle/noobie kinda gains where your muscles will come back easier after having been away, unless I’ve atrophied so much. But, I think I’m going to switch to doing a full body split 3x a week so I train every muscle more. I could try to do more days, but since I’m easing into it still I want to do 3 days for at least a few months consistently before I up it I think I’m going to try a full body split.

According to some TDEE calculators, my daily expenditure is somewhere between 2100-2700 calories depending on the activity level and the website I use. I am sorta counting calories and protein, I should be a lot more strict about it. I still make some

Unexpected One Piece Break

If you guys didn’t see online, One Piece might be going on an unexpected break for about 2 weeks. This originally spawned from Manga Plus having the next chapter dropping on December 1st, and not November 17th like it was meant to. User pewpiece on twitter (a user I usually have blocked due to twitter consistently showing me his spoilers summary in my notifications) first reported this change on Manga Plus. Many people were worried for Oda’s health as this is very unusual for Oda to not have his breaks planned, and with the rumors around his blood pressure issues. It was actually exactly a year to the date that Oda was unable to finish chapter 1098. I’m not sure if the reason for that was ever disclosed, I’ve heard that it was due to Oda just missing the deadline, I’ve heard health issues, and I’ve heard that he was crying so hard while drawing that chapter that he couldn’t finish it. In any case, I got pretty worried about the unexpected break too, I’m not going to lie. It kinda ruined my Tuesday afternoon.

Other users started to notice that on Manga Plus their dates still said November 17th as planned. Shonen Jump’s website also had not reflected the changes. I’m not sure about how all these sites play a role into the release schedule, and what should be considered official news, but it seemed to be isolated to just the English version of Manga Plus that the date was changed. Within about 12 hours of me first seeing the announcement of a potential break, I checked the English version of Manga Plus and their date had gone back to November 17th and none of the other sources I saw had changed. So, I thought it was a simple mistake and someone had not entered a date correctly or something. Which is reasonable to think, if I flipped the month and date and I entered 17 for the month maybe it would default back to December, and if I missed the 2nd 1 in 11 then I’d end up with December 1st as a date. So we’re all good right? New chapter this weekend? Maybe not

After Manga Plus had fixed their website and people believed it was a mistake, one of the official translators for One Piece has posted on Blue Sky that there is in NOT going to be a chapter this weekend. Stephen Paul is on the official translation team and posted that Shueisha is “fumbling” and that there will be no chapter this week. Unfortunately, this seems like the most official statement we’ve gotten so far. Unless he’s trolling, it’s probably that we won’t be getting a chapter this week. According to several tweets I’ve seen, we should get something official-official from Shonen Jump tomorrow (the 14th). I’m hopeful that it’s untrue, and this is simply just a data entry issue.

Although we’re at a really good place in the manga and I’m excited for each new release, I am totally fine with another break as long as Oda is healthy. I’m not trying to fuel any rumors, but there have been some people speculating around the reason that Oda could be taking the break. The reason for the 2 week break that we just got off of was due to Oda flying out to South Africa in order to help out with the filming of the live action. Some people believe he’s just especially tired from the traveling, some think he may have gotten sick. I’m personally hopeful that he just enjoyed the trip and hanging out with the crew so much that he decided to go back and do it again to ensure the next season is better than the first. But, we’ll see tomorrow I guess.

Reading Update

I finished “Tomie” by Junji Ito at the start of this month. The more I read from this story, the more I enjoyed it. I believe I read this was largely made during his time as a dental assistant. So, as the story went on you could tell he was getting better at drawing and writing plot lines and dialogue. I highly recommend picking it up, I think this one is one that’s on sale pretty frequently. I think it’d be a good starter for people who are looking to get into horror manga. It’s not my favorite manga I’ve read, but I enjoyed it a lot and will look out for more from him. I plan on reading Uzumaki from him next.

I don’t know if I mentioned reading “The Unfettered Mind” by Takuan Soho, but I finally finished that at the start of the month. That one had been on my list for a little while. Takuan Soho was this Japanese Buddhist priest in the 1500-1600s, and he would write letters back and forth to these different samurai. This book is basically excerpts from the letters about Zen Buddhism and how it relates to martial arts. I started reading it in early October when I went on a trip to the Outer Banks. The first part was really good, it was stuff that I could understand pretty well. It was talking about doing things mindlessly and how you shouldn’t keep your mind in one place. It was digestible and I understood most of what it was talking about. The other 2 thirds of the book just did NOT stick. I don’t think this was the best intro to Zen philosophy like I thought it was going to be. The 2nd part was talking about how you interact with your lord as a retainer, or how you interact with your retainers as a lord. It was kind of how you interact with those around you too. I can’t even begin to explain what was going on in the 3rd part. That was super in depth with some Japanese stories I’m not familiar with. One part actually said something like “you’re not gonna understand this unless you study for 30 years”. It was a short read, it wasn’t even a hundred pages I don’t think, but it was hard and took me like a month to get through.

That’s gonna be it for this month’s post. I want to get this out before tomorrow when we find out officially about the break and potentially a reason for why. I might do another post at the end of the month because I’m getting in to watching more anime movies and stuff so I want to give short reviews on them when I have more time.

October Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Happy Halloween! Bunch of news around One Piece, and I’ve got a tin-foil hat theory for you today regarding One Piece, and some small updates with things I’m doing.

Horror Books and Movies

Since it’s getting close to Halloween, I’ve been watching and reading a little bit of horror media. Right now I’m in the middle of “Tomie” by Junji Ito. I bought Uzumaki and Tomie a few months ago and I started Tomie pretty soon after buying it, but I wasn’t really enjoying it. The art was fine, it was really well drawn in some spots, but others it was really strange and almost bad looking. And the story was just kinda meh. Once I started re-reading it though I started to enjoy and appreciate it a lot more. It’s not something that gets me scared, like movies will, but it is a really cool series and I see why Junji Ito is known as one of the greats of horror manga. The artwork improved a lot as the story went on. There were just a few really rough panels to begin with.

I’ll read Uzumaki at some point soon probably. The anime for it came out recently, and the first episode was animated really well, but from what I’ve been seeing the rest of the show is really bad. It has something to do with the budget or the deadline. I’m not sure, I’ve heard it was a lot of management’s fault though and not the artists. Which is unfortunate because I was really hyped for it, and I wish they had at the very least kept the quality consistent (I think consistently bad is better than having a great first episode and a bad rest of the season). Junji Ito’s work is kind of hard to get the same feeling in an anime that you get from the manga. Which is true for a lot of artists, but I feel like Junji Ito is especially true.

I’m not the biggest horror movie enjoyer. I’ll find one every now and again that interests me, but I’m kind of a wimp so I avoid them a lot of the time lol. My older brother and sister love horror movies and are constantly looking for new ones to watch. They’ve actually gotten to meet a ton of actors from their favorite horror movies. I got to meet a few of the actors who played Jason Voorhees myself.

Anyway, I try to find something around Halloween to watch when it comes around. I watched “Longlegs” towards the start of the month because I thought it would be funny. Nicholas Cage dressed up as an androgynous person who sings? Sounds pretty silly to me. But this movie was actually super sinister, and way less funny than what I thought. It was good, but it was super evil and satanic. It was super suspenseful and not very jump-scary which stresses me out while I’m watching it lol. It was good though, I recommend watching it.

I also watched a Japanese horror movie called “House” from 1977. I hadn’t heard much about it, but I saw a few clips and it looked interesting. Japanese horror movies also kind of have a reputation for being pretty scary, so I was excited to watch it. I just didn’t enjoy it though. With 1970’s and 1980’s American horror/slasher type movies, you can tell at one point they might’ve been scary. With this, I don’t know if anyone would’ve ever found it scary. The visuals remind me of a really weird commercial. I guess that’s part of the appeal, but I just don’t get it. I was bored throughout a lot of it and was wanting it to be over. I think I’d still recommend you watching it, because maybe you’ll get it and enjoy it. It is silly, and I think it’s cool to watch older foreign movies because you get to see how the world was in that part of the world during that time.

One Piece Anime Hiatus

In case you guys haven’t seen, the One Piece anime is going on hiatus. The first video I saw almost gave me a heart attack by saying “ONE PIECE IS GOING ON HIATUS FOR 6 MONTHS!!!” and not mentioning that it was the anime and not the manga. I know it’s for clickbait, but it’s a little aggravating lol.

My understanding is that this is partly due to the upgrade in quality in more recent episodes. I don’t watch it weekly, but I will watch some scenes every now and again and the new animation style look fantastic, so I’m glad they’re gonna sacrifice the amount of time in between episodes in favor of quality. I believe this will also effect the pacing of the anime in a good way.

We’re also supposed to be getting a pseudo-remaster of the anime in the following months where they’re redoing a few arcs with better visuals, and removing some of the filler within the fights (making them faster and more concise). They’re going to be re-airing the Fishman Island arc soon in Japan with the new fixes. It’s going from like 57 episodes down to just 21, which is crazy. Fishman Island is an arc that a lot of people struggle to get through, so this should help with that immensely.

We’re still also going to be getting the new remake soon, so One Piece is literally getting so huge it’ll have 3 different versions of an anime all coming out at the same time.

One Piece Fan Letter

There was a new special episode released called “One Piece Fan Letter” that follows this girl who is trying to deliver a fan letter to Nami on the Straw Hat crews return to Sabaody after she figures out the meaning behind “3D2Y”. It also follows some other fans of the Straw Hat Pirates, including some people in the marines. It was directed by Megumi Ishitani and is about 30 minutes long.

This was such a warm and fuzzy kind of an episode. It was so much fun to watch, the animation was great, the story was simple but had some really impactful moments. It fits One Piece so well in that it expands the world and characters without having to change anything or do anything too crazy. I’m not sure if it’s canon or not, but it’s absolutely worth a watch. I’m going to rewatch it soon.

One Piece 1130

SPOILERS: This contains spoilers for Chapter 1130

This chapter was super good and gives me chills thinking about. This sets the stage for Elbaf and shows off how the Giants perceive Elbaf. The biggest thing to happen in this chapter is the reveal of Loki and his absolutely sinister character design. The other very small detail, but I believe important drop was Vivi potentially having left a sign for the Straw Hats.

On the ship with the rest of the Straw Hat crew and the giants, the newer giant pirates explain how Hajrudin is the king’s son and how he is the rightful heir to the throne of Elbaf. But there was another prince, Loki, who killed King Harald in order to obtain the devil fruit that was passed down through the royal line. It took all the giant warriors to subdue him and trap him, and how if he escaped it could mean the end of Elbaf.

Luffy separates from his group to go look for this power source he’d been sensing all the way inside of Rodo’s room. He knew it was absolutely massive. He comes across this giant with a devilish smile who is chained up and blindfolded. He claims he is the “Sun God” who will destroy the world.

There’s been a lot of discussion around what he means by him being the Sun god. There’s a few people who are called the Sun God, or call themselves the Sun God. Nika, Joy Boy, Luffy, the dragon in Skypeia, Rodo and now Loki all are called Sun God in different ways. People think that maybe his devil fruit is actually the Sun-Sun fruit and he can literally turn into a mini sun, which would be an insane power. Other people think maybe it has something to do with the sun, like radiation or maybe heat. My friend brought up the idea that maybe it’s the rubber-rubber fruit and they thought it was the gum-gum fruit. Like what if the giants have been passing down a fruit they think is the human-human fruit model Nika thinking it’s super hard to awaken, but they actually just have the wrong fruit. I’m not sure what I think yet. He is blindfolded, so I’m wondering if maybe this has something to do with his fruit at all. Like does he need to be able to see to use it? Or does he have some ability that requires sight, like maybe Saturn’s death stare.

Based on some certain dialogue from Rodo and Loki (separately, not together), it seems as though they both don’t hold Elbaf as highly as others might. Rodo is upset that the new giant pirates joined up with the Straw Hat Grand Fleet and are serving humans, and Loki says that Elbaf “once lived and breathed warfare”. So reading into that, my conclusion is that some giants probably do not think as highly of Elbaf as they once did. Especially now with King Harald having been killed, Elbaf is probably in a state of political disarray and a civil war may be brewing. Nothing new for the Straw Hats though, this is like the 10th war they’ve been a part of.

While on the ship, Robin points out that Luffy has an x on his arm that isn’t normally there. It’s also not as blurry as the rest of his body in the photo. She says it looks familiar but she can’t place it. The x is significant because this is part of the secret sign that the Straw Hats used in Alabasta to keep track of eachother. It’s also what the crew showed to Vivi as they were leaving to signal goodbye, but keep Vivi’s affiliation with the crew a secret. It makes sense why no one who is looking at the picture understands the meaning behind it, because none of them were on the crew during Alabasta. Robin joined right after the events of Alabasta and would probably recognize it, but not know the meaning or that it was tied to Vivi. Brook, Franky and Jimbei have never seen it before.

Since the sign is in the newspaper, it’s almost guaranteed to be a sign from Vivi and Big News Morgans. What this sign means is yet to be determined. I’m sure it’s probably her trying to let them know that she’s ok, and to potentially come help her out. Because as we know, the Nefeltari family is in hot water with the world government and Imu specifically. So is Wapol for that matter. We’ll just have to see when we cut back to her what is going on.

Tin-Foil Hat One Piece Theory on the Origin of Devil Fruits

SPOILERS: This includes spoilers up to the end of Egghead. I thought I could get away with chapter 1044 and episode 1071, but there’s some medium sized spoilers in Egghead that I have to mention.

This isn’t going to be a total shot in the dark, but it is really big stretch (lol, you’ll get that joke in a minute, that’s kind of a slow burn). I’ve never heard anyone mention a theory like this, and it has to be a newer one since we only learned about Nika around 3 years ago. I think it’s an interesting idea, even if it doesn’t turn out to be true.

We’re probably going to learn a lot more about Joyboy, Nika, and the ancient kingdom in Elbaf, considering they have most of the work that was written in Ohara and saved by Saul. They also seemingly worship Nika, so the lore behind him might be common knowledge on their island. What if we also learn the origin or cause of devil fruits?

There’s 3 important trees in the world (The Adam Tree, Sunlight Tree Eve, and Yggdrasil). Since we know that devil fruits grow like normal fruits on trees and bushes, could the trees be important to the origin? Some people believe that Yggdrasil could be a potential origin for them having been brought into the world. I think that’s a more likely answer than what I’m about to propose.

What if it wasn’t any of the trees? What if the fruits aren’t really fruits at all? What if all devil fruits are actually pieces of the original Nika’s body?

Don’t get the straight jacket yet, let me explain a little. It’s an insane theory and has a huge likelihood of being proven false, but it’s something I thought up the other day and have a few pieces of evidence that point towards it being possible. My general idea is that Nika’s body was split up and turned into these fruits with great power, be it to spite someone, because he was bored, or maybe he was forced to. The main points of evidence I’m going to bring up are the almost bookkeeping like nature of them, the taste of them, and then some of the folklore surrounding them being apart of imagination.

We learned a little bit about devil fruits and the ability to recreate their powers in Egghead from Vegapunk, we know that they change you at the DNA level to have these powers. So Vegapunk was able to recreate a fruit such that 2 nearly identical fruits existed at the same time (Kaido’s Fish-Fish model Azure Dragon). Why did it take this kind of science to achieve this effect? Why aren’t there huge fields of devil fruits that all have the same abilities? They have a sort of bookkeeping nature to them where 1 fruit can exist until the user dies. How can fruits keep up with this sort of thing? What if Nika decided his own rules for them and split himself up and keeps track of that himself. He realized that certain fruits could cause mass destruction, so he decided to keep it as a limit to 1 fruit each. This could also be some run of the mill limitation of the magic or system that was used to create devil fruits, but I have yet to hear a theory surrounding this particular aspect of the devil fruits.

All we know about the tastes of devil fruits are that they taste horrible. It’s never been really described what the taste is apart from bad, but could it be that they taste like rubber? Or a rubber/human mixture? Again, this is a reach, but what purpose is served by them tasting bad? Normally, plants or fruits will taste bitter to make animals avoid eating them. But devil fruits can only be eaten the 1 time, so the taste wouldn’t really make animals avoid eating them. They’re also super rare, so animals would probably rarely get the chance to eat them anyway.

Nika is a being that embodies imagination and freedom, as we’ve seen from Gear 5. Luffy is able to do most everything that Luffy wants. Partially (in my opinion) because Luffy has such a big imagination, he was able to awaken his fruit. What if Luffy’s imagination wasn’t as great? Well then he might not have been able to awaken it. What if what we know about devil fruits also follows the same rules? What if they work on a belief system. We’ve heard that if you were to eat 2 devil fruits you would explode, but what if that’s just what everyone believes? What if the key to having multiple fruits is simply believing that you can eat them. Blackbeard is a character that believes in dreams and may have just believed that he could eat multiple fruits. This is probably going to be disproved so hard when it comes out that Blackbeard is actually 3 people.

Most of this is sorta half finished, but I want to get this post out before the month is up. I haven’t thought through my theory in its entirety, but I think it’d be cool if I called the theory that turns out to be so vital to the story of One Piece. I hope you guys have a fun and safe evening trick-or-treating!

September Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:27:23 -0400

Happy September! I can sorta feel that this is gonna cut it close to the end of the month, even though I’m starting this on the 16th (I finished it on the 26th, so not too bad).

Back Update/Small lesson

Small lesson I got reminded of these past few weeks: If you know you should do something and it takes literally 20 minutes to do, go ahead and get it done.

I hadn’t done my MB3 exercises for a few weeks. I’ve been sort of busy and my friend has been really busy so we haven’t gotten together to do them. He goes to the gym pretty regularly, and he’ll do some sets of them between his other sets of exercises, so he’s a lot better about doing them than I am. I, on the other hand, am relatively lazy and don’t do much outside of what I have planned for a day, and that unfortunately includes my exercises (I’ve been trying to go back to the gym regularly though, but haven’t succeeded yet). I started feeling some sciatica pain this past weekend and was like “here we go”. Thank goodness it hasn’t progressed to anything major. I did a quick half workout on Sunday and probably will do another half today. There’s no good reason for me to skip them. They’re easy enough to do, you don’t need much space, you don’t need equipment (except for a pillow or a soft surface), and I feel great after doing them. Don’t be like me, just do the thing you know you should do.

Reading

I’ve been trying to read more this year, and I think I’ve honestly read more this year than the 6 years since I left high school. It’s fun, it’s a good hobby.

This month I finished “At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P. Lovecraft. I’ve had this books for years but have never read it or tried to read it. It’s tiny, my copy is only 84 pages long. But I’m pretty sure it’s his longest work, so that’s why it’s its own book (at least the copy I have is its own book). I read this so that way I could read the manga version by Gou Tanabe, since I bought the deluxe version. I really should’ve waited to buy the deluxe edition instead of pre-ordering it, because as soon as it came out it dropped like $10. I also realized I’m not the biggest fan of the story. I’m horrible with having scenes described to me, especially when they’re as intricate as some of Lovecraft’s. I wish I liked cosmic horror too, but I guess I just don’t get it. I’ll still read the manga version, but I may sell it or give it to my friend. It’s about as thick as a Berserk deluxe edition, so it might just be taking up space.

I’m also starting to read some Kafka, I bought a book of a compilation of his stories that I plan to read that include ones like “Description of a Struggle”, “The Metamorphosis” and “The Judgment”. I’ve only read the first 2 introductory parables in the book called “Before the Law” and “An Imperial Message”. Kafka is kind of known as a sad man, and a lot of absurdist/existentialist authors (Camus) have read and enjoyed. So I figured I’d pick it up and try it. I’d like to read “The Trial” as well, that one sounds very interesting and reminds me of “The Stranger” by Camus which is one of my favorite books. I’m kind of all over the place when I read though, I’m technically in the middle of like 5 books, but I don’t recommend that.

Grave of the Fireflies

I’ve been on a little bit of a Studio Ghibli kick the past few months. I’ve always heard they were super good, but until this year I had only seen “Spirited Away”, “Ponyo”, and “My Neighbor Totoro”. I’ve been really enjoying watching them all though, they’re so much fun. So far I’ve watched:

Spirited Away
Ponyo
My Neighbor Totoro
Howl’s Moving Castle
Princess Mononoke
The Boy and the Heron
Kiki’s Delivery Service

I’d heard that “Grave of the Fireflies” was really good, and really sad, so I’d been kinda pushing it off. I was actually planning on watching it towards the end of the list, but it recently came out on Netflix and I decided that it was time. I was going to watch it with someone, but Netflix didn’t have the English dubbing and they won’t watch stuff where they have to read subtitles so they didn’t watch it. I had already mentally committed, so I watched it by myself. Which I think was probably a good thing, I’m not normally picky about subbed vs dubbed except for a very few select movies/shows, but I don’t know if the English version would’ve hit as hard as the Japanese one did.

With a lot of confidence, I can say this is the saddest movie I’ve ever seen. It beats “Boy in the Striped Pajamas”, “The Cure”, “Christmas Shoes”, and “Marley and Me” in my opinion. From the start to the end I was on the edge of crying my eyes out. The story follows a boy named Seita and his little sister Setsuko in Japan in the 1940’s during WWII. Their home is bombed and they have to move around to be able to eat and survive. This movie shows off the effects of war in a way I’ve never really seen before in a movie (though I haven’t watched many war, or war-adjacent, movies). Please, set aside some time to watch this movie and some time afterwards to cry.

One Piece Chapters 1124-1127

Spoilers: This will have spoilers for chapters 1124-1127 of the One Piece manga

Some crazy stuff has happened the past few chapters. I’ve been incredibly slack with writing about the chapters coming out. I don’t necessarily want to write about every chapter that comes out, but this set has been insane and we’re on our way to the next island.

Chapter 1124

This chapter wasn’t too too crazy in terms of events, but it did give us a glimpse into the thoughts and emotions of Kizaru that we haven’t seen before. We knew that Vegapunk was a good friend of his, and he wasn’t super happy with having to kill him. Most of his time in the arc he seemed hesitant and less enthusiastic about his mission. In Sabaody for example, he was sorta making jokes when he was trying to capture/kill the Straw Hats, but in Egghead he was much more somber.

This chapter also shows some of the relation between Kizaru and Akainu. We don’t have a lot to go off of in terms of how the admirals get along. Akainu and Aokiji obviously went head to head during the time skip to decide who was going to be fleet admiral. But, in my opinion, we have no idea if they were enemies/rivals before that. Obviously they had differing ideas, otherwise there may not have been a need for the battle, but as for how they acted towards each other on a daily basis I’m not sure if we’ve ever seen that. In this chapter, Akainu being fleet admiral and very mission-oriented snapped at Kizaru telling him he better not have screwed up. Kizaru snapped back at him because he’s really hurting in this moment and couldn’t care less about Saturn or anyone else’s well being. And in maybe a moment of empathy or sympathy that I don’t think we’ve ever seen from him, Akainu apologizes. Being that this is in relation to Kizaru having killed a friend, this could be the start of the buildup for Akainu’s backstory. We know that he has a deep hatred for pirates and everyone who helps or sympathizes with them. Exciting little development.

A slightly unexpected bit of dialogue was Zoro complaining about Luffy crying over not having been able to save Vegapunk. He doesn’t think it’s very emperor like. At first, this seems sort of uncharacteristically heartless of Zoro. He has to know that Luffy is very sensitive, right? Yes, but Zoro has always been incredibly careful and aware about how a crew/captain should act. One of the best and most well known examples of this is when Usopp left the crew in Water 7. Zoro wasn’t going to let Usopp back on board if he didn’t apologize for going against what Luffy said. Zoro knows how a crew should act and how letting a crew mate disrespect the captain would look and what it could evolve into. This is just a similar situation. To be an emperor in the New World means that you have to be ruthless to an extent. If Luffy is going to be the Pirate King, he can’t care about “some old scientist”. I don’t think this is Zoro being totally heartless, but he realizes that it could make them look weak. Especially in front of the giants who are close with Shanks. Luffy’s despair doesn’t last for very long before Lilith explains that Vegapunk is actually still alive. At the time this was believed to be some technological trickery, where Vegapunk uploaded his consciousness to a computer or something. This is enough for Luffy to get out of his slump and start partying.

At the end of the chapter we get a small glimpse of a silhouette that’s caused some talk online about who it could be. One theory that I really like is that this silhouette is the same person that Crocus was talking to on the cover of chapter 631. All we know about this person is that they know Crocus, in a decently familiar/friendly way, they drink, and they would also have to have the ability to go up reverse mountain. This doesn’t narrow it down a lot, but it could potentially point to a former member of Roger’s crew. With the way the hair looks, it could be Scopper Gaban who was potentially the 2nd mate on Roger’s crew (given the order of the colors/metal theme that they had going on with Gold Roger, Silvers Rayleigh, Scopper Gaban). For a long time now it’s been theorized that Scopper would be either at the final island (very doubtful though), or Lodestar which was thought to be the final island before Roger found Laugh Tale. However, not knowing how much longer we have in the story, this could be Oda bringing Scopper in earlier than we thought and we just skip Lodestar all together.

Another theory is that this silhouette isn’t the same person from chapter 630 at all, and instead this is Loki the prince of Elbaf. We know that this silhouette is of someone on Elbaf, so it being Loki isn’t totally out of the question. The top of his head could be cut off to hide his crown, because that would definitely give it away. It would make sense if Loki was intentionally waiting for the Straw Hats to come and it’s more of an impatient “Come on”. I’m not totally sure. Hopefully we find out soon. I’d love for it to be Scopper.

Chapter 1125

This chapter had everyone going crazy. This one has one of the biggest events of Egghead for sure, and it’s one that the general world of One Piece don’t know of.

To start with, Lucci tells the government that he has killed Stussy. Whether or not this is true is to be determined. It could be that Kaku has lied to Lucci and said she succumbed to some injuries. Or that Lucci lied himself to protect Stussy. Or it could be that during some unseen scene, he actually did kill her. Everything is to be determined at this point. The Stussy stuff is something I haven’t paid enough attention to this arc. I have been needing to do a big re-read of Egghead because there’s a lot of details I personally missed because I was so concerned with trying to catch up. There isn’t much I can say on this point, but there’s a lot this could mean for Cipher Pol.

Here’s where stuff starts picking up a ton of speed very quickly. During a status check of what’s happened and how the navy is meant to proceed, in a flash back it’s confirmed that Saturn was alive 200 years ago and told the scientists then NOT to trash Emeth and to instead research him. This is a huge drop because we’ve been wondering about the life cycle of elders forever. Especially since the information regarding the God Valley incident was revealed during this arc. Saturn looked identical 38 years ago, so we assumed they had a longer life span. It wasn’t clear (and still isn’t 100% clear) if the elders were normal humans and would be replaced when they died, or if they were immortal or near-immortal beings who have been around since the void century, or maybe something in between. This at least confirms that Saturn had an extended life and was around since 200 years ago. It heavily leans into the idea that they’ve always been by Imu’s side.

Saturn tells the vice admirals not to chase the Straw Hats for now, and instead clean up the resulting chaos from Vegapunk’s message. After this status check, Doberman asks Saturn “Since this was considered a failure, does that mean Vegapunk was telling the truth?”. Saturn then uses his death ray vision (unknown ability) to incapacitate and maybe even kill Doberman.

The Vegapunk satellites who were killed during this arc are then shown to orchestrate an effort to move Vegapunk’s brain, aka Punk Records. Lilith was telling the truth and Vegapunk is still alive at least inside the computer systems in Punk Records, and they are able to then rebuild themselves into a frankensteined version of themselves using spare parts on the piece of Punk Records they stole. York will still have access, but not physical access. This is very vague in what it means, but I think this gives York a reason to at least stay alive for a while longer. Punk Records then heads to Weatheria which is where Nami trained during the time skip. Weatheria is also the first instance of us seeing that knots could be used for more than just tying things, right before the time skip the wizards show Nami a rope that stored wind and would be useful for navigating. This could be where we learn how Joy Boy was able to store all that haki in the rope inside of Emeth.

Now for the huge reveal. We cut to Marijoa and see Figarland Garling, former leader of the Holy Knights, take a seat with the rest of the elders who were transported back after Joy Boy’s haki was released (an ability we aren’t sure is central to Imu or if it’s something to do with the elders). The rest of the elders are confused and shocked that Garling would have the gall to approach them like this. He then reveals he’s been promoted to be the head of science and defense. The title that Saturn held. We cut back to Egghead shows Saturn in pain and rapidly aging while the vice admirals freak out and call for medics. Saturn asks for mercy from Imu, but it’s too late and he falls over as only bones.

This bit was WILD. To see Saturn perish after having done all the evil things he did to Kuma and Vegapunk was very cathartic in a way. I’m a little sad it wasn’t at the hands of Luffy, Kuma, or Bonney. But it’s not surprising that Imu would want to kill him after what happened. Garling replacing Saturn was sort of out of left field, I was super surprised about that. This shows off a little more about the hierarchy of celestial dragons and Marijoa. It also gives us an idea of how strong Garling potentially is, to be next in line to the elders means that he’s either very well respected or he’s super strong. Could it be that Saturn was the head of the Holy Knights before? Were all the elders some higher up in their class system before they became elders? All very interesting questions. This means that the spot of Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights is open, so who will take over that position? Could this be the setup for another Garling son reveal (meaning that Shanks has a brother, potentially a twin)?

Lastly, we see the Revolutionaries reaction to the message and their resolve to finally make their move. Finally, Dragon is gonna do something besides looking to the east and saying “…”. Seeing that the world is about to go nuts and many more people are going to be looking for the One Piece with malicious intent, they presumably decide to go after it themselves. It’s not 100% clear that they’re going to go after it, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they only had a small task force attempt to go after it. Or maybe even only try to stop people from going after it. There’s a lot they could do in this situation. I think the surefire way to keep the weapons out of other hands would be to get it themselves. But, we’ll see.

Chapter 1126

Again, this is a chapter filled with a ton of stuff that’s very important to the story and how it will move forward. This is potentially the catalyst for what leads to a Davy-back fight between Luffy and Shanks. Something about this chapter had a different feel to it. I’m not sure what it is, but out of my friends I’ve been the only one to feel this way. I’m not sure, I’m probably just being weird. I really enjoyed this chapter though, this isn’t a bad feeling. It felt new, but old at the same time.

It starts out on the Giants’ ship where everyone is still partying and catching up. Dorry and Brogy’s battle never finished, their weapons just broke and they didn’t want to keep fighting each other with their fists. So, eventually they will return to Little Garden to continue the fight. I personally think it’ll be after the story is concluded, but it could very well be in the next few chapters and we just don’t see them again.

Everyone is having a great time right now, they’re drinking, they’re dancing, they’re singing. Robin is smiling (my bby girl), Franky and Chopper are dancing to Brook playing music, and Bonney and Kuma are catching up a little bit. Kuma is still smiling which is wonderful. With Vegapunk still being around in a sense, I wonder if the satellites will be able to reverse his cyborg surgery. I can’t remember the specifics about it, if Vegapunk said it was irreversible or not. Really, Vegapunk could have put a reverse switch in without Saturn’s knowledge and just not told Kuma or anyone. That might be too wishful of thinking. In any case, right now they’re chilling and they’re happy.

One of the giants mentions that they’re drinking absinthe. I don’t know much about alcohol, but I’ve heard that absinthe is pretty crazy stuff and will make you hallucinate, which is mentioned in this chapter. This is 100% an example of Chekhov’s gun. It wouldn’t be mentioned that it was a hallucinogenic unless someone will hallucinate from it. I think this may come in to play later on in the chapter, so I’ll explain that in a bit.

Now for the precursor to the Davy-back fight that I mentioned. A hundred chapters ago or so in a cover story, we saw Bartolomeo burn down a Red-hair pirates flag in one of Shanks’ territories and replace it with a Straw Hat flag. This was obviously going to cause some issues because emperors can’t let other emperors stroll in and steal their territory, so Shanks was forced to retaliate. He did this by beating up the Barto club and giving them the task of poisoning Luffy. Barto was to give Luffy this bottle of poison within 1 month and that would be considered the payback. But, this wasn’t really poison, it was a test to see what Bartolomeo would do and test Luffy’s allies. Bartolomeo, being the absolute chad that he is, drinks it without a second thought. Feeling a huge sense of responsibility for what happened he drank the poison, but then feels despair over never being able to see Luffy become the Pirate King. But, it turns out it was fake and they’re sent on their way…except not really.

Bartolomeo is a huge Straw Hat pirates and Luffy fan, and with him being a part of the Straw Hat Grand Fleet (SHGF) he’s gonna be proud of Luffy. For him to go and “claim” one of Shanks’ territories, I honestly don’t think he realized what he was doing. Bartolomeo is a HUGE fan, so he’s just a giddy guy and wanted to show off his loyalty. He’s a pirate, so he knows the significance of the jolly roger, but I think he was seeing it more like a poster of his favorite captain. Like Shanks’ said in the chapter though, he can’t just let that kind of behavior slide. It puts his friends in danger. Shanks and Luffy are very similar in that regard, they don’t put up with people hurting their friends. Literally in the very first chapter of One Piece, Shanks had beer spilled on him and was made fun of, but he didn’t bat an eye. But as soon as Higuma and his men started messing with Luffy, it was on. Even though what Bartolomeo did wasn’t a direct attack on Shanks’ friends, it could easily lead to one. I doubt it would come to it, but it technically could lead to a lot worse. Some pirate could just start destroying all of Shanks’ territories. Bartolomeo realized what he had done was wrong, but was immediately ready to face the consequences.

Once he was given the task to poison Luffy, his idol, his hero, he immediately decided to take the poison himself. I don’t think many people in universe know that Luffy’s immune to most poisons after what Magellan did to him in Impel Down. Since it wasn’t actually poison, it didn’t matter, but I figured I’d bring that up. After Bartolomeo is set “free”, Shanks and Beckman have this short conversations where Shanks reveals he’s thrilled that Luffy has people who care for him that much. We see moments like this every now and again where Shanks is super proud of Luffy and how far he’s come and how he’s on his way to becoming a great pirate. It always makes me smile. Then the biggest bum of a father has to come and ruin it.

All we’ve seen Yasopp do up until now in the story is be a horrible father to Usopp, a great uncle/father figure to Luffy, and be worried to see Usopp because he knows how crappy of a human he is. I didn’t really believe/feed into the whole Yasopp being a horrible dad thing, because there could be a bunch of reasons he didn’t go back to get or see Usopp. Him being on a emperor’s crew means that he’s a high profile target for both the navy and potentially other pirates, and he may not have wanted to put Usopp into danger by taking him on the ship with him or frequently visiting the home town. These are very similar reasons for Dragon not being a very good father to Luffy. Given these legitimate arguments for Yasopp not being a good father out of necessity, I hate him and want him to bite the curb.

Kidd had already challenged Shanks and lost before for very similar reasons. Kidd has always been hard-headed and has tried on 3 separate occasions to try to take Shanks down. The first time he lost an arm, the 2nd time he formed an alliance with Hawkins and Apoo and they got thwarted by Kaido. The last time his ship was destroyed with 1 attack by Shanks after directing an attack at Shanks and his friends, the 2nd time he directly attacked. Now he may not be alive, he probably is but there’s a chance he is gone for good, but it took him 3 times to get injured that seriously. 3 distinct attacks against Shanks. Bartolomeo on the other hand, got a little careless and too gung-ho and made a mistake. One which he was immediately apologizing for and ready to take responsibility for. I don’t think the 2 cases are very equal. Out of the 2 I think that Bartolomeo should’ve been given the leeway that Kidd was given. Not saying that I want Bartolomeo to lose an arm, but I think that’s a much more fitting punishment compared to his ship being sunk.

Now, if Shanks were to have given the order to take down the Barto club ship, I’d probably be mad at him, but it would make sense being a message for Luffy and all the other worst generation pirates to stop screwing around with an emperor’s territories and friends. Yasopp could’ve also acted in this way because it was coming from an emperor, and not just any one of the worst generation. Since Yasopp did it though, seemingly because he wanted to (or at the very least because he thought he had to), I’m not sure what to think.

Chapter 1127

When I first read this chapter I thought to myself “ok, this is a pretty easy intro to Elbaf chapter, I won’t write about this for the September blog”. But then people started noticing some inconsistencies in the chapter and it could be super interesting in what it means for the direction of Elbaf. There ere so many issues it’s made people start to question Oda and his editors. So many inconsistencies that it has to be intentional, or the One Piece team is being held up at gunpoint and are trying to send a message.

If it weren’t for the weirdness of the chapter, this would be pretty standard introduction to an arc. A slightly boring/slow chapter that’s getting us acclimated to the island, and splitting up the Straw Hats. The callbacks to Alabasta were cool. A pretty simple chapter with a little bit of what’s going on in Elbaf being shown off as well. The Yggdrasil, or the World Tree, is shown to be very important to the people of Elbaf and may be on fire currently (due to the Straw Hats or not). Lots of people in Elbaf live in what actually seem to be Lego houses. At the end of the last chapter it kinda looked like Nami was in a Lego house, and people were extrapolating that this was a reference to the country of origin of Lego, Denmark. Denmark has some ties to vikings, so it makes sense that there would be some ties to it, but Lego is a bit of an odd choice.

People started noticing that there were a few inconsistencies with what the characters were wearing, and how they acted. A few times someone would be wearing a sword on their back and in the next panel it was an axe, or it was totally gone. Nami’s tattoo was missing, thought it could be that it was supposed to be covered up by her clothing. Luffy isn’t wearing his straw hat that we can see, he called Gear 3 Gear 4, and HE TURNED DOWN FOOD. Now, all of these in isolation are minor things that could have been overlooked. Oda has made mistakes in the past. But, the fact that they all happened in the same chapter after having landed on a new island and after having mentioned the potential hallucinogenic effects of the booze they were drinking seems very intentional and some mind trickery Oda would try to pull. If this is intentional, a lot of people are wondering if it is the absinthe or if it’s potentially Loki, the prince of Elbaf. Loki in Norse mythology is known to be a half giant as well as a trickster, so it would be fitting that the prince of Elbaf (the land of giants) was a trickster. I personally like the idea of it being Loki more than it being absinthe, though I do think absinthe would have to come into play at some point later on during the story. Or at least some hallucinogenic situations.

Lot’s of cool implications for it.

August Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Pretty good month for me, to be honest. I’ve done a little bit of traveling, done a little bit of reading, done a little bit of exercise. I’m pretty much just going to go over the Disney trip in this post though. Might make another one soon about the end of Egghead in One Piece, which has been insane.

This was the coolest thing of August. I took a week off of work and went to Disney World in Florida with a bunch of friends. Three of the people going had birthdays within a week of our trip, and a different three people had never been to Disney before. It was a really good time.

Traveling to Florida

Traveling was the roughest part of the whole experience. Firstly, there was a hurricane/tropical storm (Debbie) right in our path that we were all a little concerned about. My family would’ve preferred I hadn’t gone at all. Second, we weren’t sure what car to take. It was between my friend’s Chevy Volt (hybrid sedan) and their F-150 lightning (full electric truck). We went back and forth for a bit, but we decided on taking the Volt. Even though it wasn’t as comfy, we figured having the ability to use gas would be easier to get around with. Also stopping in a storm and having to charge for 30-40 minutes with the truck would be a little cumbersome. We also figured if the storm knocked out electricity, the gas stations would be up quicker than the EV chargers and we wouldn’t be as easily stranded. The Volt had different plans for us though.

We left at about 6:30am and had to stop for gas. We got about 20 minutes away from where our friend lived, filled up, and then the Volt wouldn’t start again. It wasn’t wanting to switch from the electric mode to the gas mode, which is an issue they just had fixed on this same car. We were stranded at the gas pump. We called up support and eventually just decided we’d have to have it towed. So my mom came and picked the 3/4 of us up, while Kai waited with the volt, and took us back to the house so we could get the F-150 and then go back for Kai. It was about 8:30am before we actually made it out of our county and were officially on the road. Which, sounds like a pain (and kind of was in the moment), but was actually a blessing. If we had broke down in Florida then we’d have been totally screwed without a car, and they’d have to get it towed all the way back to North Carolina. Which could’ve taken a whole day off of our Disney plans. But, once we were on the road everything was good. On the way home we found out the Volt’s issue actually totaled it. It’d be like $6000-$8000 to fix, and they’d already spent $1.5k like 2 weeks before for maintenance and to (supposedly) fix that issue. So it really worked out that we didn’t take it.

In the charge we had to stop and charge several times, but that gave us time to stretch our legs and use the bathroom. We ran into a few bad spots of weather from the storm, but overall it wasn’t horrible. We stopped at 3 different Buc-ees gas stations, which only 1 of us had ever been to 1 before. We stopped at 1 in South Carolina, and then 2 in Florida. We would’ve hit the one in Georgia, but that was in the middle of the state and would’ve made our trip at least 4 hours longer. For those who don’t know, Buc-ees are these very huge, clean (very very clean), stores basically with gas pumps. It’s kind of odd to call them gas stations because they are so much more. I got a pulled pork sandwich, like 3 burritos, energy drinks/soda, and some mints across all our trips to give you an idea of what I mean. I wish I had gotten a hat or something, but I’m sure I’ll go back again. They have so much more stuff that I should’ve looked at, but we were already running way behind.

After leaving at 6:30am on Monday morning, we got to our Airbnb at 12:30am on Tuesday. What would’ve been an 8-10 hour gas car ride, turned into an 18 hour EV drive. Nothing we could’ve done though, weather and EVs were not on our side. It really could’ve been a lot worse, we got lucky in a lot of ways. But, at the time I was annoyed I hadn’t taken a 12 hour train ride for $80 like I had looked into. I seriously considered taking one home and ditching my friends, but that ended up back firing because the trains home weren’t running the day we were meant to leave. I’m glad I didn’t though, the car ride conversations were great. I got to hang out with our buddy Carson more than I really had before which was cool. A huge shout out to Kai though, he drove the whole trip, all 18 hours by himself.

The Airbnb was pretty nice. It was Disney themed to an extent, they had wifi, showers, a really comfy couch, and it was in a decent neighborhood. We ended up walking about 15-20 minutes away to a Walmart one day for lunch, and it was kinda in the middle of a lot of cool stuff.

Disney

Disney was super fun. I’d been one time in 2018 for my cousins 20th birthday. We flew down (also during a hurricane, which is a story for another post) and spent a week at Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios (I think). Since it had been 6 years since my last visit a lot of stuff had changed and was a really good time. Our tickets this time didn’t include Magic Kingdom so we went to Hollywood Studios, Epcot and Animal Kingdom. I wish we had gone to Magic Kingdom because that’s like the Disney park and it has a lot of cool iconic rides, but all the others were really good. The weather was great for the most part, there was some torrential rain when we were leaving Animal Kingdom on the last day, but 99% of the time it was sunny and warm.

At Epcot we went and ate around the world. A really cool experience if you get to try it. There’s a lot of good food. It’s not necessarily the most authentic thing I believe. You can tell it’s kind of Americanized, or they don’t use the best ingredients. It’s a good time though. I bought a straw hat from the Japanese section and was wearing it for the rest of the day. I wish I had both something Ghibli related now that I’m home. They have pretty deep ties to each other, so there was a huge section of Ghibli stuff. In Germany I was getting a bratwurst and met a German man who liked One Piece and was caught up with the manga! He recognized the hat and asked me if I was a fan, and we talked for a second. I kinda fibbed to him because I thought chapter 1123 was coming out that week, but I was mistaken and it came out the next week.

We didn’t have a lot of time for anything else besides Disney and 1 rest day. We did go to an all-you-can-eat seafood buffet that included lobster one night. It was $80 and you could get as many lobsters and crab as you wanted. They also had all you can eat sushi. I was sort of excited because I’d never tried real crab or lobster, but the process of cracking them and eating them really turned me off of the whole thing. I like watching them get cracked, but I didn’t want to do it myself or eat them. They’re giant bugs that live in the water. Creepy. Everything else was decent though, they had more besides just seafood. I love sushi, but I’m not a huge fan of shellfish or fried fish, so my plate was high with barbecue and sushi. My friends also had me try part of an oyster which wasn’t bad. It just creeps me out. Those things are hell-bent on staying closed, why did we as humans decide to open them and eat them. Super strange.

Everyone took pictures and videos, and our friend Carson is going to edit it all together and upload it to Youtube. I’ll post a link once it’s ready. His channel is here.

Traveling home

Friday was the day we designated for Animal Kingdom because we knew we were leaving and that’s the park we didn’t mind leaving early. The last ride we rode was the one for the Avatar movie, which we waited in line for like 2.5 hours. As soon as we got off of it, it started POURING rain. I’m not sure we saw more rain anywhere else. All the way to the entrance of the park it poured. My feet were totally soaked. We actually got separated from our other car of friends. Which was mostly fine because they were going to drop off 1 person in northern Florida, and continue driving to Illinois. In our truck, from Animal Kingdom we were going to be going straight to the airport to drop off our friend who lives in Minnesota, and we were gonna take the original 4 of us back to North Carolina. His flight was at about 6pm and he was checking the whole day to make sure his flight wasn’t gonna get canceled or delayed or anything. Ten minutes away from the terminal he got a notification it had been delayed 3 hours. We debated not dropping him off so we could do one more thing and meet back up with the other car for a real goodbye. The McDonald’s in Orlando is actually the biggest one in the world and they sell a lot of unique food, and that’s what we were planning on. But looking at the map and traffic it would’ve taken 3 hours to drive there and back, and we’d need a charge, so we decided it wasn’t worth it. We dropped him off at the airport and then met the other car about an hour north of Orlando. They had made the stop at the McDonald’s and kindly bought us some pizzas. The pizzas were really surprising. They definitely weren’t my preferred style, but the quality beat my expectations. I was expecting the smaller pizzas you’d get at like Pizza hut for finishing a book. But they were more like legit pizzas, they were thin and crispy, and the sauce was decent. I give them like a 6.5/10. If I have the chance to go I’ll probably try some of their pasta.

After that we finally began the trek home. On the way down to Orlando, and all the 4 days that we were in Orlando we never had issues finding a charger. On the way home, Northern Florida turned out to be impossible to find a charger in. We stopped off at a Wawa (another gas station that people rave about, it was fine, but it wasn’t a Buc-ees) to charge. Kai, who was driving stayed behind to hook up the charger, but had issues because this one required you to download an app. We fussed around and finally figured out that these chargers were for people who used FPL (Florida Power and Light) as their utility provider, and also subscribed to their EV program. There was no way to just put our card in and pay to charge. This was super annoying and kinda scary because we couldn’t find a non-FPL charger close enough where we would make it with the charge we had. We were close to an apartment building, but it was also right next to a gas station which was super misleading. They have a monopoly of fast chargers in Northern Florida too it seemed. FPL sucks basically. We decided to chance it and went on to Georgia and found a charger right at the state line, thank goodness. We had like 10 miles left or something ridiculous. We pressed on and on and Kai drove most of the night. He took a break from about 3am to 6am so he could sleep and Josh drove because he had been sleeping. I made it home at about 8am, so this time the trip only took about 14 hours.

Conclusion

Long trips in EVs isn’t easy, it’s still probably better to take a gas vehicle, but it is possible to use one. You just have to plan for the charging stops, and then to be safe double that time. Disney is always a good time with the boys though, I’d do it all again for sure. I highly recommend taking a trip to Disney with a bunch of friends.

July Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Slam Dunk Review

TLDR: Read Slam Dunk, it’s great, it’s so hype. Even if you don’t like sports, give it a try.

I finished reading the Slam Dunk manga on the 14th of this month. I thoroughly enjoyed the series and I give it a 9/10. I think it’s underrated and should be talked about way more. Takehiko Inoue’s art and ability to make you care about all the characters is superb. I think this is probably my favorite finished manga as of now.

I have yet to find a story that made me as hyped to read the next panel as Slam Dunk did. One Piece has its moments, and I think it is my overall favorite story, but Slam Dunk had me grinning like an idiot when Shohoku would pull off a good play.

I really wasn’t sure if I was going to like a sports manga; the pictures aren’t moving, I don’t like sports, and how can high school basketball games be deep. I mostly wanted it to have something from Inoue in my collection. I was gladly proven wrong, I loved every minute of it. The entire story is great. It starts out being about a dumb guy who picks up basketball to impress a girl, and it morphs into a story about the entire team and their struggles, their strengths and weaknesses, learning to play effectively as a team all for this single goal that they share for different reasons. It’s a really beautiful story. Don’t let the fact that it’s a sports manga turn you off to it, I think it’s a genre that more people should try.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING

I think my biggest issue with Slam Dunk is the ending. This is mostly because it ended way sooner than I thought it could’ve and it didn’t end how I wanted it to lol

As I was reading and getting closer to volume 31 I realized the Sannoh game was probably going to be the last game we saw in full. Before I finished, I was on youtube and saw a video that was titled “Why Slam Dunk was canceled” (or something to that effect) which scared me because I really wanted to see how it ended. I realized there were going to be a few different ways this could end.

The series just ends on a cliffhanger never having been fully finished. (Super doubtful, I hadn’t heard of Slam Dunk never having been finished.)
They win this game against Sannoh and they ride that high to win the national championship. (Doubted it. Although Sannoh won the title last year, I didn’t think they’d have an easy ride for the rest of nationals. You can’t not show the last game.)
They lose the game, but they’re happy with their progress and go on about their lives. (Not horrible, but I’d prefer they win)

The real ending is kind of a mix of 2 and 3. They win a very heated match against Sannoh, but because they literally gave everything they had to win it, they then lose the next match and are sent home from nationals. It wraps up by showing a little bit of everyone’s lives afterwards.

Sakuragi is pretty badly injured in the game against Sannoh when he goes for a loose ball and crashes into a table. His back is so badly injured he ends up doing rehab after the story is finished. You guys know I relate to that with my back issues lol, I didn’t think it was “cool” that he got hurt, but having something real like that in the story was cool to see. Sakuragi’s injury wasn’t explicitly explained, but it didn’t seem entirely serious because he wasn’t paralyzed, unlike another character in Takehiko Inoue’s series “REAL” who has his spinal cord severely damaged/severed.

I really wish they would’ve won nationals. They tried so hard and there were so many people who were beaten by Shohoku, I think it would’ve been nice to see them show up to the final game supporting them and their progress. I honestly could’ve read another 30 volumes just of nationals to finish it up. But, I read somewhere that Takehiko Inoue didn’t think he could draw another game that was as good as the one against Sannoh, which makes sense. They struggled so much in the games leading up to the game against Sannoh, they hit a wall. Akagi really wanted to win nationals, but making it to nationals and beating a team that had won it before was amazing to see.

I think I would’ve liked to see what happened in the year following Sakuragi’s first year. Akagi, Kogure and Mitsui wouldn’t have been at Shohoku anymore, but that could’ve been a new opportunity for more characters with their own struggles. I basically wish there was a Slam Dunk 2. I’m highly doubtful of that ever happening though since it’s almost been 30 years since the series finished. Haruko and Sakuragi never got together either. They were friends and she was writing him letters while he was in physical therapy, but that wasn’t what I wanted :'(

Overall the ending was fine and to be expected. I’ll just keep my own head canon about what should’ve happened. Very good series.

My Next Series

I’m not 100% sure what series I’m going to read next. I’m only 2/3 of the way through Goodnight Punpun, I got the Monster perfect edition volumes this month, I just got Vinland Saga 1-7, there’s a few different things I could pick up.

I got Monster spoiled like crazy by reading an amazon description of the perfect edition set. So, be careful reading descriptions on amazon I guess. My buddy says that it doesn’t totally ruin the story, so hopefully I still enjoy it.

I really need to slow down on my manga collecting. I checked my savings account the other day and it’s lower than what I thought it was going to be lol. Nothing major, I’m not bankrupt, but just kind of had a reality check. The past few months have been a little expensive outside of manga collecting.

I bought the last volumes of One Piece I need and I got a really good deal on volumes 1-7 of Vinland Saga, but overall that was pretty close to $350. I’m going to Galaxy Con Raleigh this weekend, which has a lot of manga and collectibles. I’m just going to have to exercise some self-restraint and not spend a ton of money.

Anyway, this blog post ended up being a little weird with its contents and structure. I’m going to end it here though. I want to make sure it gets out in July, and if I wait until next week there’s a chance it won’t. See you guys in August!

June Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 13:05:59 -0400

Not too much going on in my personal life this month, thankfully. It’s nice to have a few calm weeks every now and again. My family has a lot of birthdays next month, so that’ll be a crazy time for us.

I guess this month I’ll just talk a little bit about the stuff I’m reading and watching.

Slam Dunk

I am still enjoying Slam Dunk tremendously. I don’t see why it’s not talked about more, to be honest. I think this is a really good anime/manga to recommend to people who are just getting started with it. If you’re reading this and you haven’t read it or watched it before, go watch an episode or 2 or read some of the manga and see what you think. I think it’s very good for beginners because it’s a straight forward story that is centered around something very popular in American culture. Dragon Ball and One Piece are great, and I do recommend them, but they have whole new worlds to learn and understand. It’s nice to turn on something and understand most everything that’s being shown. Most shonen are also very long. Slam Dunk’s anime doesn’t cover the whole story I believe but it’s only 101 episodes, compared to Dragon Ball’s almost 600 (for DB, DBZ and DBS, it’s more if you count the movies and GT) and One Piece’s 1118 and growing. The only bad thing is the anime is kind of old and it doesn’t have a very good English dub from what I’m seeing.

SPOILERS: The rest of this section contains spoilers for up to volume 21 of the manga, not sure about where that is in the anime.

I just finished up the Shohoku vs Ryonan game for the 2nd nationals spot. It was so hype, I was very excited the whole time I was reading it. This game was so bittersweet because you wanted so badly for Shohoku to win so Akagi and Kogure could go to nationals, but then they showed Uozomi’s backstory and his drive to want to go to nationals too so you wish they both could’ve won. The parallel of Sakuragi going up to Akagi when he was crying happy tears at the end of the game and the time Akagi told Sakuragi to stop crying when they lost to Kainan because of a bad pass was so amazing, I almost shed a tear. I love this series. They’ll be going to nationals next and have already been teasing some of the teams and aces for the tournament.

I’m going to take a little bit of a break from reading now, maybe a few days, just to kind of digest it all and watch some more of the anime. I have all the volumes collected now, so I can finish it whenever I want, which is really nice. The volumes are super nice, the covers have really nice art that changes from volume to volume. A lot of them are done in what looks like water color. They don’t reveal too much about the story either, which I love.

I’ve put REAL on a little bit of a hold too. Partly because keeping up with it and Slam Dunk was a little tough, REAL is much more depressing and a little more dense. I also don’t have volumes 4 and beyond, they sell out on amazon kinda frequently so I haven’t had a chance to get them. I’m going to buy some new bookshelves soon, so I’ll have the room for more and might collect the rest of the volumes.

One Piece

SPOILERS: This contains spoilers for up to chapter 1118 in the manga

These chapters with Vegapunk’s message have been crazy. Unfortunately, in true Oda fashion, it was cut short before he could finish it. There’s a few theories going around about what he was going to say based on the word that was cut off, but I don’t know how much that really helps. Obviously it was about the “D.” clan, but was he going to reveal the full initial? Was he going to explain why they’re called demons? So much mystery around 1 letter. And it has been like that for 20 years! But that’s what makes it fun, I’m happy to be reading at a time we are going to be finding that out. I wish I had started reading back before Whole Cake like my friend did, but I think I got in just in the nick of time to see the best mysteries being revealed.

In 1118 we also see Bonney use her powers to essentially unlock a gear 5 transformation. This has SPLIT the community, and many people are mad that this happened. I’m personally not mad at it. I think it’s been built up pretty well, and I don’t think it’s as powerful a transformation as people might be thinking. Saturn said that her powers will diminish in strength as she ages and her future is more set in stone, so it’s not like this transformation will get much stronger if at all. I think it’s just a nice thing to include, having a child born of a slave become liberated by THE king of liberation, Nika/Joy Boy/Luffy, and become as free as him.

I think everyone will just have to wait for 1119 or maybe even 1120 to see how it plays out. If her transformation continues to grow and be strong, maybe it’ll be better explained as to why that’s possible. If it’s short and weak, then hopefully a lot of people will stop complaining lol.

Monster

No spoilers in this section. I just wanted to say that I’m starting to watch the Monster anime. One of my friend’s favorite authors is Naoki Urasawa, and he’s told me several times about how he wants to collect his works (Monster, Pluto and 20th century boys specifically). I finally got curious enough to start watching it. It’s ok so far, I’m not very far in. The art is definitely unique, but it does have that 2000’s kind of animation style to it (not a bad thing). I think I’m gonna give it about 15 episodes (about 20%) and if I still like it I might start collecting the manga.

Relatively short and sweet post this month. I’ll see you guys in July!

May Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Back to regularly scheduled programming

The past few posts have been kinda bummers, so I’ll keep this one cheerful.

I’m going to talk about what’s been going on in One Piece, and a few of the things I’ve been watching and reading.

Movies

WARNING: These do have spoilers, so please be careful.

Smokey and the Bandit 1 and 2

These are some movies I didn’t really think I’d like, but really ended up enjoying a lot.

The general premise of both of them is Bo, aka Bandit, played by Burt Reynolds, has to drive some far distance in a ridiculous amount of time. The first one he has to take a truck load of beer from Texarkana to a party in Atlanta across state lines (which is illegal bootlegging), and in the 2nd movie he has to take an elephant to the GOP national convention. Both times they are chased by Sherrif Buford T. Justice and son, among other law enforcement.

These movies are silly in a good way. They’re cartoonish situations, but funny because they’re funny, not because they’re trying too hard to be. I had a lot of fun watching them, they are very quotable. I think my favorite one is the first one. The 2nd one is still pretty good, it’s more silly than the first because of the elephant.

I’m just now finding out there’s actually a 3rd one that I have to watch at some point.

Rocky I - V

Again, these are some movies I didn’t think I’d like. I saw the first one for the first time a few years ago, and it was ok. I wasn’t crazy about it like some people are. I’m decently fond of Sylvester Stallone. I love First Blood, and I really liked his new show Tulsa King. I just didn’t like the first Rocky the first time I watched it for whatever reason. I was reading David Goggins’ book “Cant Hurt Me” and he talked about how he used Rocky as fuel during his navy seal training, so I figured I’d give it another try.

Overall, I think these movies are pretty good and if you haven’t watched at least the first one you’re doing yourself a disservice. I wondered how they were able to keep making them, because “it’s just Rocky boxing right?”, but they aren’t as simple as that. Each of the movies have shown Rocky going through different situations, be it financial troubles, self esteem issues, growing old. They’re much more different from each other than I originally thought. It’s not just “Rocky gets beat, does a training montage, and then he wins” (except for the 2nd and 3rd one, but they’re not even 100% like that).

My older brother and sister, and a few of my friends say say that the 4th movie (the one with the Russian, Ivan Drago) is their favorite. So I was pretty hyped by the time I got to that one. I was a little disappointed in it though, I’m not sure what people see in it. Apart from Apollo, I think that Drago is the coolest antagonist that Rocky fights in the ring. But, it just wasn’t my favorite, it seemed the most unrealistic. Which, that might be the reason that some people call it their favorite because it is a little over the top.

I think Rocky II is my favorite, because most of the movie is just Rocky being goofy and buying a bunch of stuff, and I just think it’s funny. Rocky III was also really good, that one was probably the best all around one. It had the best montage in my opinion, some funny bits, and the emotional side with Mickey. But that one also seemed kinda long with the Thunder lips fight near the start. Rocky V is probably my least favorite so far, because it shows Rocky at his worst, and it was all so preventable. Paulie is such a jackass in that one.

I plan to watch “Rocky Balboa” and the 3 Creed movies soon, I’ve heard all of those are really good.

Manga/Anime

WARNING: These do have minor spoilers, so please be careful.

This isn’t going to include One Piece spoilers, that will be the last section.

Slam Dunk

I mentioned in a different post that I’ve been starting to collect manga (and that I’m going a little crazy with it). A series that I’ve wanted to collect but been super hesitant about is “Vagabond” by Takehiko Inoue. It’s about a swordsman/artist/philosopher from 17th century Japan, Miyamoto Musashi. I’m very interested in Musashi’s legacy, and have read a little bit about him before. Vagabond is incredibly well drawn and incredibly popular. But, Inoue has had it on hiatus for almost 10 years now I think. Vagabond is a pretty philosophy-heavy work, so the reasoning I’ve heard from online is that Inoue wants to go live more of his life and learn more. Which, I understand, but I have been burned on series not getting finished before. So I’m hesitant to start it or collect it. Although the story up to this point can probably stand on its own. I may end up collecting it, but who knows.

Anyway, I still wanted something of Takehiko Inoue’s work so I thought I would try out “Slam Dunk” and “REAL” that he’s authored. Slam Dunk is about a guy named Sakuragi Hanamichi, who’s around 6’ 2" tall, a first year in high school, and has just asked out and been rejected by a girl for the 50th time. Totally dejected going into high school, he’s heartbroken and moody. Until a girl in his class, Haruko, shows introduces herself and asks if he plays basketball. He lies and says “of course I do”. Then the story goes from there where he ends up joining the team and becomes a “genius basketball man”.

I don’t watch much basketball (the Timberwolves game 7 win recently was cool to watch though, shame they’re doing bad against Dallas right now though), sports have never really been my thing. But this manga was interesting because its popularity is known as one of the causes for basketball becoming so popular in Japan, leading it to become one of the top watched sports there. Inoue played basketball in high school and wanted people to experience it as well, and he himself was a fan of a baseball manga when he was younger.

I bought the first 3 volumes of Real and Slam Dunk, but they were taking a little while to get here so I ended up watching the first few episodes of Slam Dunk’s anime. It’s incredibly 90’s lol, it’s animated pretty well but it has those old techniques that make me nostalgic. After the first few episodes I was hooked on this series. I think it’s hilarious. I’m currently on volume 9, but I have up to volume 15 already waiting for me to read. The art switches from very serious and very detailed, to very silly and much less detailed, and I love that so much. You can tell when things are serious and when Sakuragi is being a goof.

Where I’m at in the story it’s getting more serious, and it’s going beyond just Sakuragi’s growth at playing basketball. There are some deep themes that you can tell it’ll go into later. It’s also starting to get more violent, so more of Inoue’s artistic abilities are coming through, which is awesome.

Another reason I thought to try this one is that it’s the Omnibus Collector’s favorite series of all time. My buddy thinks very highly of his opinions, and I think very highly of his, so I figured I’d like it too. As of right now, I’m loving it and I see why he likes it so much.

REAL

Real is another one of Inoue’s works, and is still being published. Very slowly though, it’s been being written since 1999, and it also goes on lengthy breaks (Yeah, I know I said I wasn’t going to collect Vagabond for that very reason, I’m a complicated man).

Real is about wheelchair basketball. I’m not sure about Inoue’s ties to wheelchair basketball specifically, if he has any ties, but it’s a neat concept that lends itself to deep subjects. I’m only finished with the first 2 volumes so far, but there are 3 main characters essentially. Nomiya Tomomi who is a high school dropout that was in a motorcycle accident that caused his passenger to lose her ability to walk and talk, Togawa Kiyoharu who lost a leg when he was younger due to cancer, and then Takahashi Hisanobu who was hit by a truck while on his bike and turned into a paraplegic.

This one is way less funny than Slam Dunk, so reading them both concurrently is kind of jarring. But, that’s just how I’ve been perceiving it since I’ve been reading both. Real is incredibly good so far, and you can see the progression in Inoue’s art style.

Real is a little more dense than Slam Dunk, and I feel like I more often read back panels a few times before I totally understand them. I’m probably going to keep collecting this, but I might wait until I’m done with Slam Dunk so that I’m not getting jarred as easily.

Funny side note, in Real there’s a scene where these kids are watching an anime and it’s actually Slam Dunk. Neat little easter egg.

Undead Unluck

This is a new anime that I picked up after my buddy showed me the first few episodes. It’s ok, I’m kinda losing interest in it the more it goes on. The first few episodes were very good and very funny, and they’re very interesting. Essentially, this girl, Fuuko, has a power that whenever she touches someone they experience bad luck (in varying degrees). She meets this man, Andy (kinda sounds like undead), who is hundreds of years old and cannot die, because he can regenerate. Everyone who has powers in this series has the ability to “negate” something. So, the 2 main characters have the powers of “Unluck” and “Undead” because they negate luck and death. They are on a quest to kill Andy because he wants to die, and he feels like she’s the only one whose powers would be strong enough to kill him.

The first few episodes were great and they did get me hooked; it was funny and cute, and it seemed like a cool plot (one that I could guess the end of maybe, but still cool). But as it’s gone on the powers have gotten strange and much more abstract. There’s also a secret agency, and there’s like a video-game/quest type aspect, so I’m just not enjoying it as much as I was originally. I dislike the secret agency trope for some reason. Chainsaw man was ok, but I didn’t like it there, and I’m not crazy about JJK for the same reason.

I think I’ll try to finish the first season eventually, but it’s just kinda been meh. The animation is very good, and I can see why people would like the story, but it’s not my cup of tea.

One Piece

WARNING: This section has spoilers up until Chapter 1115, so please be careful.

It’s been a minute since I’ve written about the One Piece manga. I try to write and have an opinion, but it ends up just being a recap more than anything. Which, you could just as easily go and watch a review if you wanted. But, these past 2 or 3 chapters have been pretty significant (most of Egghead has been, but these few specifically). Several characters have made a return, including Saul which was nice confirmation that he is indeed alive, and the GOAT Foxy.

Vegapunk has confirmed that the sea levels are rising (through man-made means), he’s confirmed that Joy Boy was the first pirate to go out to sea, he’s confirmed that Joy Boy’s defeat was the end of the void century, and he’s confirmed that the war that Joy Boy fought is still going on. We even got the very first silhouette of Joy Boy ever!

There’s been so much evidence pointing to the water levels rising: Long Ring Long Land, Water Seven, the old Wano, and the destruction of Lulusia causing water levels to rise by a meter. This was really no surprise, but it’s great that we at least have a scientific mind to confirm that they are indeed rising. This potentially opens the idea to a time limit on the One Piece world. I’m not sure if Oda would use it like that (think like the comet from Avatar the last airbender), but maybe? The fish men would be safe regardless lol

All the Joy Boy drops have been totally insane. This is the most we’ve ever really learned about him, until now we’ve just known that he lived during the void century and was tied to the ponegliffs. He was the last person to awaken the powers of Luffy’s fruit (that we know of at least). We also got confirmation finally that Joy Boy and Nika are not the same person, it’s kinda like the holy trinity going on. Luffy is not Nika, Joy Boy is not Nika, and Luffy is not Joy Boy. But Luffy is the new Joy Boy? I’m still not 100% sure if Joy Boy was a title or his name. Maybe it’s similar to how Luffy is called “Straw Hat Luffy”, maybe he is “Joy Boy…something”. He was the first pirate after all, so maybe that’s what his crew went by.

Him being the first pirate is super cool, because that’s one more piece of evidence towards the ancient kingdom being named something related to “pirate”. The theory goes that since Professor Clover was killed for almost saying the name of the ancient kingdom during the destruction of Ohara, the general public might understand the name and some things might start to make sense to them. Tekking talked about it in this video, and he explains it better. Because the word “pirate” had to come from somewhere, Joy Boy being called one could be related to where he came from. Just a cool thought I think.

The silhouette of Joy Boy raises some questions for me. I think up until now I believed that Joy Boy was going to be a Buccaneer, but now I’m not 100% sure. The Buccaneers believe in and pray to Nika, and that’s one of the reasons that they are persecuted and nearly extinct (also they committed a great sin, which I believe is them having built the Noah). Since we know now that Joy Boy is not Nika, that doesn’t mean that Joy Boy has to be Buccaneer. He never really had to be, but it made sense that he could’ve been. He still could have been a Buccaneer, but his silhouette doesn’t fit that same body shape that Kuma and his father, Clapp, have. Some people have the theory that he was a Mink, which could be true, but I’m not as convinced on that one.

Those are the biggest things I can think of that have happened recently as far as lore goes since I last talked about One Piece in depth. I’m really excited for 1116 this week, maybe we get a little more of Joy Boy, or maybe we even begin the final exodus from Egghead.

See you guys next month!

April Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve been struggling for most of this month, I’m not going to lie. I’m going to keep this post pretty short.

My grandmother passed away a few weeks ago, she was 91 years old. It’s been an incredibly difficult time for my family and I because she’s literally always been there for all of us. I lived with her for about 17 years, which is over half of my life, so anywhere I look I remember something about her. She was the only grandparent of mine that I got to meet.

She was a hell of a woman, she lived through so much in her life. She grew up poor and worked farming tobacco for a lot of her life. She didn’t get her license until she was 36 years old. She lived through WWII, the civil rights movement, us landing on the moon, 9/11, the rise of the internet, just so many events. She went from a time where having indoor plumbing and a radio was a luxury, to cars driving themselves. Although she was 91 years old, used Facebook quite a bit, which some 40 year olds don’t have a hold on like she did. She was incredibly goofy and we picked on her all the time for it, but if I make it to 91 I’d be ecstatic to be half as coherent and smart as she was.

I generally believe that everything happens for a reason, and for the longest time I could not understand the reason why I hurt my back so badly, or why I wasn’t getting better like everyone said I should have been. I had to work from home and skip out on a lot of trips over the past year, I couldn’t help her with her flowers or anything like I had been able to before, I felt totally useless. But then I found the reason. I was having a rough few days of back pain, and was being kinda emotional over everything. I was talking to my mom about how bad I felt, how I wish I hadn’t hurt my back, and how I should’ve been able to help her with more than I was able to. She said “Well, think about it, if it hadn’t happened then you wouldn’t have got to spend so much time with her. She didn’t have as many flowers or get to do as much, but she wasn’t alone very much like she would’ve been had you been going to work like normal.”. That made it all click. God knew I would regret the time I didn’t get to spend with her, so he let me work in the same room with her for almost her entire final year. God also knew she wouldn’t rest seeing me in such pain all the time like I had been, because she did worry about me and hated to see me hurting as much as I did. She got to see me start getting better and get to go places too, so she knew I’d be ok. That single conversation totally changed my entire view on my back problems. I used to say I’d give anything to go back and undo what I did to my back, but now I’d go back through that pain 10x to keep it the way it was. It hurt, very very badly, but I’d give anything to go back and live it all exactly the same way.

Last month I talked about Baxter and Thievin passing away and I ended the post by saying you how you should tell those you love that you do love them. Every time I left to go somewhere and every time we went to bed I would tell her I loved her, and she’d always say it back. Even though I told it to her every day, several times a day, I wish I had told her more. But, I’m incredibly blessed to say that my last words to her were “Goodnight, I love you. I’ll see you in the morning.”. Please, reach out to those you love and tell them that you love them. It takes so little time, but it’s such an important thing. And if your grandmother or grandfather is still around, hug their necks tight for me. That’s what she would always say when I would leave for a longer than average trip, “come hug my neck”.

I’ll try to get back to regular posts next month. Thank you for reading about my Nanny.

March Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0400

Galaxycon Richmond 2024

This is probably the most Karen-ish I’m going to sound on my blog. I’m going to be constructive with my criticism and not expect unreasonable things. This was my experience from what I saw and have heard from several sources who attended the con, and things that I think could’ve improved the experience.

My brother, his 2 friends and I all went to Galaxycon Richmond on Saturday March 16th. My brother has been to a few different conventions across the US, and I’ve been to the Galaxycon in Raleigh a few times, but I think this was all of our first times in Richmond for one. It honestly ended up being a pretty bad time for our group. It took about an hour to find a decent parking space and about 3 hours just to get into the building. Then, by the time we got in my brother and his friends had missed all their photo ops which was really aggravating and disappointing. My photo op was later in the day, so I was lucky to be able to still get it, but it wasn’t as enjoyable since they didn’t get theirs.

I’ve never waited for more than an hour at any of the Galaxycon conventions in Raleigh, even when they were checking our bags. My best guess as to why it was so hard to get in is that they overestimated how many people they could handle. There were very few registration booths for what I heard was a sold out convention center (I’ve heard numbers like 30k-50k people showed up), and there was only 1 door to come in to get your badge, and I think 1 or 2 more doors you could come in if you already had your badge.

They focused very heavily on where the lines needed to be going outside instead of having that planned beforehand and working on getting people through the line faster. Maybe the path the line was meant to take was planned beforehand and it just wasn’t communicated well enough to the people showing up, so they were having to fix it as they went. Or they didn’t realize how much space would be taken up by all the people and they had to rearrange it on the fly to get us all to fit into the 1x1 city block by snaking us up and down. There were very few signs indicating where the door even was, you basically just had to look at where the people who were dressed up were going. The people who were guiding the lines probably could’ve/should’ve been inside checking people in instead of having to organize the line. They also probably should’ve had a louder and more commanding tone, it seemed like the person that was directing us was kinda timid and had to call out the directions several times. I understand that due to city ordinances and rules they probably couldn’t block traffic or anything without getting shut down, but the line situation seemed like it could’ve been a lot better prepared for.

I found a reddit post where someone was complaining about the lines from 2023 also taking around 3 hours to get in, so maybe this is just the usual experience. It was pretty quick to check in once you got up to the desk. I’d say it took at most a minute or 2 to get your badge and be able to go where you wanted, unless you had questions or some special circumstance. If they had more spots for people to check people in, or even mailed out badges beforehand, then it could’ve been significantly faster.

The food lines I don’t totally blame them for because there’s only so many spots to get food in the venue, they were going to be crowded anyway after waiting in line for a few hours near lunchtime. I feel like there could’ve been better organization around the lines for the food though. There were lines that stretched 50-100 people long that blocked some areas of the convention. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to try a Korean corn dog, they looked really good and I’ve wanted to try one for a while. I’m sure it was all pretty expensive, but that’s something I expected.

The lack of wifi was really annoying, but that’s because I couldn’t mindlessly scroll social media while I waited in the lines. I’ve heard the vendors wifi was acting up so people couldn’t pay by card, which made the ATM lines incredibly long. Then due to the long lines of the ATMs the machines were getting bogged down and started acting up or ran out of money. I’ve seen a few people on reddit complaining that they were double charged for things they paid for. I guess because they’d try with their card first, realize it probably wasn’t going to work and switched to paying with cash, and then when the vendors systems reconnected it would make the charge again. We were lucky not to have ran into any of those issues because we brought cash.

My brother emailed the organizing staff about how disappointed we were about missing the photo ops, the speed of the lines, the lack of wifi and the general poor experience, and they kinda turned it on him saying that he could’ve gotten his time slots switched once he got into the venue and how the food/lines/wifi weren’t their fault because that’s handled by the convention center themselves. It seemed sort of unprofessional and like they were just passing the buck instead of owning up to their shortcomings and coming up with a plan for the following years. Just sucks to hear their response. I’ve also seen on reddit that several people have had their comments deleted on social media after complaining. If that’s true, that’s really bad.

Overall, I think having a much lower cap of attendance and probably twice as many people working would’ve solved most of the issues and made the experience much more enjoyable. I understand they have to pay their expenses and make some money, but there’s gotta be a better way to handle an event this large. I probably won’t be going to another Galaxycon Richmond for a very long time, unless there is someone I’m really interested in seeing, in which case I’ll be waking up at 5am to get good parking and a spot in line. But even then, I’ll check the Raleigh Galaxycon site first to see if they’re going to be there lol.

Emily Rudd was the saving grace for my experience, if I hadn’t gotten to meet her I would’ve called the entire trip a bust. I was super excited to meet her and she was every bit as nice as I’d hoped she’d be and more. I was really nervous, tired, I hadn’t eaten or drank anything all day, I probably smelled really bad from sweating in line, and I was ready to go home. But she was incredibly sweet, shook my hand and introduced herself. She was like that with everyone I saw her interact with, it was so great to see that she was nice in person. I highly recommend getting a photo op with her, or stopping by her booth to get an autograph if you get the chance. If she’s coming to another con around me in the future I might get another photo op or an autograph to redeem myself. Here’s my photo op with her.

Back Update

After talking about walking and standing for 3 hours, you might be wondering how my back held up. I actually did WAY better than I thought I would.

I’m not gonna say it was comfortable the entire time, there were several points where I was bent over in a weird way to get the stress off my back, but I did stand the whole time. I only started sitting down once we were in the venue.

The ride there and back was about 6 hours total, and that was a little rough. On the way home I wanted to cross my leg but some muscle in my leg didn’t like that and started cramping. It wasn’t the same as nerve pain but I’m not sure if that’s related to the sciatica or if it was just because I was working muscles that hadn’t been worked recently.

I’ve gotten really slack about doing the MGB3, I only do it about once per week now when I go to my friends house. Thankfully I haven’t felt too much pain from not doing it as much, but I should probably get back to doing it 2 or 3 times a week.

Manga Collecting

My friend has gotten me hooked on collecting manga, specifically box sets. I never thought I would try to collect them because it’s expensive, I don’t have a lot of room in my house anyway and I can read a lot of them online for free. But, it’s been super addicting. I already had a few volumes like Dragon Ball Z volume 1 (I got this 10+ years ago, RIP Akira Toriyama) and the Berserk deluxe editions 1 and 5. But, he pointed out a few really good deals on box sets that I couldn’t pass up. A Silent Voice was like $50 for the entire series, the 4th One Piece box set was $100, Assassination Classroom was $100. I also got Goodnight Punpun for $160, but that’s about retail. I just wanted to read it badly (it’s really good so far).

I’m going to have to buy another bookcase or something soon, I actually have no more room on the shelf that I bought last month. I’m looking into getting the 1st One Piece box set soon (when it goes on sale) and maybe Fullmetal Alchemist if this ebay listing I’m looking at pans out. I like knowing that I kinda like the series before I actually buy it so I read a few chapters online and look at reviews. I also hate getting spoiled, so I have to be really careful about where I look things up. I’ve been burned by looking up certain series on social media and then having a spoiler come up in my feed.

I might make a new page on my site for a collection showcase or something. I’m experimenting with images in Hugo, and it’s a little bit of a pain. I’m probably just being dumb.

RIP Baxter and Thievin

I scroll tik tok a lot more than I should, but you find a lot of interesting creators on there. Two of which were Baxter Hosley and Garret MacDonagh. They both had fitness accounts that they would post on almost daily. They both lost a significant amount of weight, documented their journeys, made fitness content and worked with a supplement company called Ekkovision. I hadn’t really watched either of them consistently in a few months, but, I was still incredibly sad to see that they both had passed away on March 10th. They were both slightly younger than I am, which breaks my heart.

They were very loved by their friends and fans. To hear some of the stories that their friends from Ekkovision are telling is really sweet. So many people are pouring out support for them, it’s bittersweet. Ekkovision’s owner, Em, has come out and said that Ekkovision will be taking care of their funerals in full which is really really awesome to hear. I know it won’t replace the hole that they left, but I hope they stay close with the guys from Ekkovision and are able to hear all the stories they have with them.

This is not something that I would normally talk about, but I liked these guys and it struck pretty close to home in a lot of ways so I wanted to pay my respects to them. Last month was really busy and I was complaining a lot and not having a good time. This month has been pretty busy and sad, but very eye opening and I’ve been a lot more thankful for what I have and the experiences I’ve gotten. It can all be ripped away from you in an instant. Tell your friends and family that you love them, because they’ll be gone one day, and more importantly because they’re here now and it never hurts to let them know you care.

February Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0400

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.

January Update 2024

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 23:17:15 -0500

Happy New year everyone! Like I said last month I’m going to try to keep that 1 post a month going into 2024 as well.

One Piece and Monsters

Spoilers: This has some minor spoilers up to Thriller Bark. Both about one of the villains of Thriller Bark, and the “gimmick” of the island. Nothing major. There is some more that is revealed with him in the Wano arc, so DON’T go to any wikis to look him up if you’re not caught up because it’s like the first thing that appears. What I will talk about is only from what happens in Thriller Bark and Monsters.

My blog is pretty much turning into One Piece updates, but I don’t have that much going on apart from it haha.

This month is actually pretty exciting for a story that isn’t One Piece, but is related. Before Oda wrote One Piece he wrote a few one-shots, one of which is called “Monsters”. Monsters is the story of a man named Ryuma who fights a dragon, and it is getting an anime adaptation on Netflix tomorrow actually (in a few hours).

You might recognize this name and description if you’re caught up to the Thriller Bark arc as the samurai that Brook and Zoro fight. Without spoiling anymore than that about the One Piece side of Ryuma, Monsters is the story where he becomes the well known samurai that he is in One Piece. I think a lot of people have it wrong where they think that this story is canon to One Piece, and only parts of it are. The character Ryuma is canon in One Piece, the fact that he fought a dragon is canon in One Piece, but the exact details that are going to be shown may not be canon. It looks like some things are actually changed from the original Monsters to be a little closer to One Piece (notable what sword he uses). I’m excited for it. I have a replica Shusui sword that I plan on holding while watching it lol.

I think I might wait for a few more chapters to talk about what’s going on with Egghead. It’s getting hella spicy right now. If you’re not caught up, you need to get caught up soon, you’re missing out on peak fiction and vengeance plots.

I’ll see you guys next month!

December Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 10:38:49 -0500

It’s getting close to the end of the year and I want this blog post to go out so I keep my streak, but I feel a pretty bad cold coming on so I’m going to shorten this pretty significantly compared to my other end of year posts. I’m happy I was able to put out 1 blog post every month. This new year I might try to do more, but I will for sure try to stick with the 1 post a month at least.

Looking at 2023

Merry Christmas everyone! I’m writing this the day after a really good few days of Christmas celebrations. I hope all of you were able to spend time with your family and have a wonderful holiday.

This year has been incredibly hard and full of challenges, but I think it’s been good for me. While I’ve been dealing with my back I’ve realized what’s most important in my life, and things that don’t matter have stopped bothering me as much. I wish I hadn’t hurt my back, but it’s happened so I have to deal with it and with all the consequences from it. Life goes on. “You’re gonna carry that weight.”

I also started reading One Piece which has taken over my life in a very fun way, I love theories and reading into the depth that it has.

I unfortunately did NOT get a YouTube Music recap this year. I’m not sure why, but I’ll try to give some recommendations next month maybe in case it does eventually generate mine.

Plans for 2024

I think my biggest goal right now for 2024 is to go on a trip somewhere. I missed out on some really cool trips in 2023 and I have some vacation that’s going to roll over. This year I already have semi-solid plans to go to Minnesota in April and I was invited to Iceland (though I think I’m gonna skip that one). My biggest fear with trips is paying all this money and using vacation time to go somewhere, and then once I get there I push too hard and end up not being able to do anything for the rest of the trip. Or worse, having to go to the emergency room because I’ve developed Cauda Equinas. But, I think Minnesota I’ll have the best chance of being ok throughout it.

One Piece Chapters 1095 - 1102

Kuma’s flashback is over and I loved every bit of it. This has far surpassed everything I thought a flashback about Kuma would include and how it would make me feel. The depth of these characters and their sufferings is immense and you could sit for hours debating the questions that arise during it.

Kuma is the best dad ever, and honestly one of the best stoic people in fiction. He had every reason to drop everything and hate his life and become the tyrant he was made out to be. From losing his family, to being a slave, to losing his best friend, to being the government’s dog and slave for a 2nd time, he just kept going all with the best attitude.

This is my favorite One Piece flashback, I think Robin’s is still super iconic and provided a major shiift of our understanding of the One Piece world, but Kuma’s is so deep and sad.

I might try to make a post dedicated to my interpretation of the flashback soon. But for now, just go read it for yourself! (Or if you haven’t read any One Piece, go start for the new year!)

November Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 17:47:26 -0400

General Updates

My kindle is actually making me read a little bit more, like I had hoped. I finished up David Goggin’s first book “Can’t Hurt Me” after having started it a few months ago. It’s incredibly interesting and full of good motivation and advice. His life as a whole has been filled with hardships and pain and he doesn’t sugar coat it at all. His dad beat him, he was bullied, he went through a lot of physical pain during his 3 hell weeks, etc. It’s a really good mix of biography and self help, because it’s not just “look at what all I’ve done and what’s happened to me” and he’s also not just preaching lessons at you. He’s using those experiences and taking you through his thought process during them, where he failed and what he learned and how he’s applied it moving forward. I highly recommend it. I will be reading his 2nd book “Never Finished” at some point.

Right now, I’m reading “Clean Architecture” by Robert (Uncle Bob) Martin for work. I’ve read most of “Clean Coder” before, and have followed his advice and teachings for a while. I don’t totally practice TDD like I should, but I’m getting better at it. I’m already able to put some of the things I’ve learned into practice which is awesome.

I’m also trying to finish “Crime and Punishment” by Dostoevsky. I got through about 2/3rds of it earlier this year, but fell off reading it. Now I’m about caught back up to where I was originally, where Raskolnikov is talking with Sonya in her apartment.

Back Update

I beat 2 of my goals for this year and I am very ecstatic and excited to share them. I went to work every day for a week, one of those days was also a whole day. The McGill big 3 has been so incredibly helpful and I am so grateful for the progress I’ve been making. I feel so much better, my leg doesn’t hurt all of the time now (and when it does hurt it’s much more minor), I sleep much better. My quality of life has improved so much. Mentally I’m doing a lot better now too. I still struggle sometimes where I think of all the time I lost because of the stupid mistakes that caused this problem, and I still have that fear where one day I’ll wake up and be in the same shape I was a year ago. There’s nothing I can do about the time lost, but I know I can rehab myself much easier out of it if it happens again and I hope I’m smart enough not to do anything stupid again. So, I’m doing much, much better.

I’m even planning a trip for the spring to go visit my friend in Minnesota. I missed out on our “boys trip” to Dallas this year, and also a trip to Hawaii. This will be my 3rd trip to Minnesota, but I’ll be meeting some new people and will be out of my town for a while so I’m incredibly excited.

One Piece Chapters 1096 - 1099

Now for the weeb stuff. Spoilers are imminent.

1096

These chapters are still going incredibly strong with Kuma’s backstory, like we’ve expected. This chapter, however, did not show as much of the Rocks’ pirates or the incident at God Valley as I would’ve hoped, but it was a strong chapter regardless.

We got to see all of the Rocks’ members, except for Rocks (bummer). We even got knowledge of a character who we met ~600 chapters ago being on the Rocks’ crew, Gloriosa. She is the former empress of Amazon Lily, 3rd empresses before Boa Hancock, 2nd before Shakky. I’m not sure how much this really effects the story, but it’s a nice inclusion and leads to some cool theories. If Gloriosa was with the Rocks’ pirates during this time, who was taking care of Amazon Lily? Was there no empress at this time, or was the unknown empress there? Stuff like that.

Another HUGE event in my eyes is finding out how Kuma got his devil fruit. Ivankov and Kuma rushed the prizes for the human cleansing event that was happening on the island, and they seemingly grabbed their fruits at random. Ivankov grabbed the Fish-Fish fruit model Azure Dragon and Kuma grabbed the Paw-Paw fruit. Ivankov was not able to eat his before Big Mom stole it, and we know that later on Big Mom would feed this fruit to Kaido to save his life, but Kuma was able to eat his. This opens up a lot of really fun ideas to wonder “what if”. Since Ivankov and Kuma grabbed the fruits at random, they could’ve easily been switched. Which means that Kuma could’ve had the Azure Dragon fruit and Kaido could’ve had the Paw-Paw fruit. There’s also the scenario that Kuma was the one attacked by Big Mom instead of Ivankov in which case Ivankov could’ve had the Paw-Paw fruit or the Azure Dragon fruit. Or perhaps they both were able to eat the fruits before Big Mom got to either one of them, then 2 of the top Revolutionary Army members would’ve had the most broken fruits (provided they went on to join the Revolutionary Army) and Kaido possibly would’ve died. This was only a few panels, but it was so much fun thinking about these possibilities.

Like I said before we don’t get to see much of what happened at God Valley. But, we do find out that Kuma, at only 9 years old, was the GOAT and resolved to save as many people as he could so he could be like Nika. He saved over 500 in total, but still prayed and regretted not being able to save more. This really shows off Kuma’s selflessness and sense of duty as a child. Looking back it makes me tear up a bit, for a kid who already had been through so much he still just wanted to help people. Kuma and Ginny then continued living together in a church in Kuma’s home of Sorbet Kingdom.

1097

Overall I’ve been incredibly fortunate about the spoilers I saw while reading One Piece. I generally knew about the arcs to come, the time skip and some of the villains that we already met. This trend has continued pretty well while I’ve been reading weekly. Except for 1097, I got totally spoiled for 1097, like the entire plot and the “big” reveal. I thought I was reading a theory on why Dragon could’ve been in the navy, but it was actually just a 1097 summary and Dragon explicitly said he was in the navy in the chapter. So that was a bummer.

That’s been a theory for a long long time, and it’s always made perfect sense. The one thing we’re still not sure of when it comes to Dragon being in the navy is what he saw that made him want to quit. In 1096 we thought it was going to be the God Valley incident, but we still haven’t gotten confirmation on if he was there or not.

Back to the start of the chapter though, because Dragon’s navy reveal was the 2nd to last page. This chapter shows off a lot of Kuma’s life after God Valley and makes you love him even more.

Kuma and Ginny are shown to have aged and become really influential within their community. Kuma’s been taking the pain from everyone and then secretly taking it on himself, so that way he can see everyone in his village happy. This is another show of Kuma’s selfless nature and how much he sacrifices for others.

Kuma and Ginny’s relationship also gets furthered. Ginny is obviously in love with Kuma, they’ve been living together for almost 15 years at this point and they both understand the struggles the other has been through. Kuma is afraid of imposing the burden of his bloodline on anyone though. He doesn’t want more of his loved ones to be enslaved or killed because of their relationship to him. He’s seen this happen first hand because it happened to him and his family in chapter 1095. Kuma still holds a lot of baggage from his time as a slave, but he still holds his virtues and ideals close to his heart.

The rest of the chapter is showing how Sorbet Kingdom was changed by the current King Bekori and people from the southern part of the island are able to be enslaved. Kuma, Ginny and their friends fight back but are jailed for their crimes. Ivankov and Dragon then arrive to break them out, and that’s how they join the Revolutionary Army. During their time in the Revolutionary Army, perhaps right after they got out of prison, King Bekori was overthrown and removed from power.

The last few pages of the chapter show how Kuma and Ginny are doing as Revolutionary Army members. Then the chapter ends with Ginny being captured by an unknown person. At the time of reading this there were many theories floating in my head about who it could be. I thought perhaps it was a famous pirate or the navy. There wasn’t much to go off of so the time between this chapter and the next were agonizing. In the current time (on Egghead island) we hadn’t heard anything about Ginny so we could assume the worst and that she was already dead during the timeline of the story.

1098

When I tell you that this chapter is tough to read, I mean it. This is absolutely the saddest I’ve ever been while reading anything. This chapter already had high expectations going in because we were going to find out who kidnapped Ginny. There was also disappointment and fear because this is supposedly the first chapter that Oda was unable to finish by the deadline (I haven’t confirmed that, however). People thought Oda was losing his touch, that he was getting old or getting bored with One Piece. After reading the chapter this is totally understandable, because Oda was probably crying his eyes out drawing it. He has answered in SBSs that he does occasionally cry while drawing emotion heavy chapters (Robin’s “I WANT TO LIVE!” I’m pretty sure was one he’s said he cried at).

Ginny was captured by a Celestial Dragon, which was not in my mind at all of who would’ve taken her but it totally makes sense. Many people of Sorbet Kingdom had a crush on her, and she’s known as one of the prettiest women any of them have ever seen. She was taken to be the Celestial Dragon’s wife.

A lot of people were angry with Dragon immediately with this chapter because there’s been a 2 year time skip and Ginny is still captured. People see this as Dragon failing to keep his people safe and being lazy or not a good leader by not going after her. This has had a lot of talk in the community since this chapter’s debut, and one take I really like is that people are incorrectly comparing the Revolutionary Army to that of a pirate crew and being upset that they don’t act the same. I’m not going to spend too much time on this because there’s more to talk about in this chapter, but revolutions are much different than a family/crew in that they’re all working towards a goal and that’s the end all be all of the army. Doing things that directly jeopardize the goal of the army, like attacking a Celestial Dragon or Marijoa too early, is a great way to ruin everything they’ve been working towards. Dragon loves Kuma and Ginny, but he knows the things that are at stake by going after her and chose not to. Kuma is upset at her kidnapping, but it’s been shown to me that he understands and trusts Dragon and doesn’t run gungho after her.

After 2 years Ginny is finally “freed” and comes back to Sorbet Kingdom with her child, Bonney. She was let go as a slave because she was incredibly sick and pregnant, she served no purpose for them anymore. Once she made it back to Sorbet Kingdom she called the revolutionaries to say her final goodbye. Kuma knows exactly where she is, so with his powers he immediately rushes back to see her, but in doing this he misses her final words to him which were “I’ll always love you”. When he gets to the church he finds that she’s covered in these blue sapphire stones and he finds little Bonney and resolves to raise her for Ginny.

This entire sequence is horribly sad, and I cannot wait until it’s animated, it’s gonna be so great. This entire backstory is one of the most tragic stories of any character in One Piece, and in fact all of the fiction I have read or seen myself. Kuma has been through so much in his life, he’s been a slave, he lost his family, now he’s lost his best friend and we still aren’t even to where he gets turned into a cyborg and then becomes a slave again. I can only imagine the feelings of regret he has that he wasn’t able to help Ginny and how he never got to truly say goodbye.

For the first 5 years of Bonney’s life they live a normal life and she does normal kid things. Kuma is reminded of Ginny because of Bonney’s large appetite which is really sweet. They do normal dad/daughter things. Bonney has to sleep in an iron cage while in Kuma’s bed so he doesn’t squish her which is a nice touch and made me giggle a little. Then tragedy strikes again and Bonney is found to have the same disease that killed Ginny. Kuma quits the revolutionaries and begins his search for a doctor to be able to identify and cure the disease. During this time Bonney has to live a life of seclusion from the outside world. She’s allowed to see people, but a lot of her peers bully her for being a “vampire”. Kuma is really protective of her for obvious reasons.

During these panels we get a few callbacks to certain things. Kuma asks Bonney “If we went on a trip where would you want to go”, which is what he asked Perona before he swatted her away in the Thriller Bark arc. Kuma also learns about Sky islands from Bonney, and she says that maybe Nika is on one. Bonney would obviously know about Nika since Kuma is a pastor for a church that is, presumably, for the religion Nika is the figurehead.

This chapter ends off with King Bekori making his return to take the crown back in a non-peaceful manner.

1099

Overall Kuma’s backstory has rocketed Kuma to being one of my top 10 favorite characters. The sorrow that Oda has made me feel for this character on a page is nearly unforgivable. But I’m going to keep reading week to week because I’m addicted. This chapter was a little disappointing at first read, but that’s because it was following 1098. Overall it’s a really strong chapter, and much lighter in tone which is a nice break from the melancholy.

This chapter starts out showing Kuma at his most badass yet (in my opinion) by fighting through the flames that were started in Sorbet Kingdom by Bekori, a technique that was inspired by what happened with the Grey Terminal in Goa Kingdom (where Luffy grew up). Kuma enacted his own solo revolution of Sorbet Kingdom and overthrew Bekori for the 2nd time. I’m getting goosebumps re-reading this chapter. Kuma is “elected” as king of Sorbet, although he doesn’t want the title and the king before Bekori is really the one in power.

Bonney is then shown using the powers of her Age-Age fruit, not knowing that she’s even using them. This has caused a bunch of discussion on where she got her powers. Could it be that she unknowingly ate a fruit? Was she fed one as a baby while she was with the Celestial Dragons? Is this somehow Saturn’s doing? One theory that I’m not sure I 100% agree with yet, but is worth discussing is the idea that fruits have their own wills and they choose their users more than we think. Randy Troy is better at explaining it, so here is the video for that idea. I think my favorite theory is that she was fed her fruit as a baby by Celestial Dragons, but I see issues with that. Surely Ginny would’ve told someone if she had known/seen it happen, but maybe she didn’t. Bonney wouldn’t do well in baths because of the water, but that could have just been missed. I’m not sure if we will learn where she got her fruit, I’m not sure how much it really matters.

Kuma’s epithet from his first introduction is the “Tyrant King”, and now we know that this was just a hit piece from Bekori lying and trying to regain control of Sorbet Kingdom. This dude will NOT accept defeat, so Kuma decides to sink his and the navy’s ships that are coming to attack Kuma. This is where he gets his bounty of 296 million berries.

Apparently Kuma’s fruit powers were foreshadowed via his bounty amount because the numbers 2 and 9 can be read as “ni” and “kyu” in Japanese, and his fruit’s name in Japanese is the “Nikyu-Nikyu”. I haven’t confirmed if it was foreshadowing, or if it’s just a pun. I think maybe his bounty was revealed in one of the data books, because his bounty was not revealed when he first debuted in 233 or on Thriller Bark in 472/473. Oda likes playing with numbers though, so I’m pretty sure that this is not a coincidence.

Another mystery finally solved is how Kuma knew about the islands that he sent the Straw Hats to during the Sabaody arc. In this chapter Kuma goes to all of those islands in an attempt to find a doctor who could cure Bonney. I’m not 100% sure/convinced that based on what Kuma knew about the islands he could accurately pick where the Straw Hats should go. I don’t think he would’ve known enough about each of the crew members to make that decision. Maybe it was fate, maybe he knew more than I think he did, maybe it was a total accident (doubt that though).

While traveling, Kuma happens to come across Dragon and Dragon tells him about Vegapunk and how he could potentially cure Bonney. During this conversation we also learn that Ivankov and Inazuma were imprisoned in Impel Down during this time (that’s where they still were in the Impel Down arc). Belo Betty also reveals that Dragon has not yet reassigned Ginny’s old position and will only do so once Kuma approves it. This, I think, is Dragon trying to show that he did care about Ginny in case there were any doubts in Kuma’s mind. I’m not personally a Dragon-hater, and never thought he just forgot about Ginny like many people probably think, so this is kind of nice to confirm that Dragon does care about those closest to him, even if he’s not the best at showing it. Though, he is also shown drinking and talking about the new recruits, which is also nice to see because he’s opening up a bit.

Once Kuma reaches Egghead, Vegapunk explains that he can cure Bonney by a process using stem cells. However, since the process is so expensive, in exchange Kuma will have to allow Vegapunk to clone him. Kuma is somewhat apprehensive to begin with, but ultimately is willing to do anything to ensure Bonney is cured.

There’s a lot of really nice little small things and “easter eggs” you can find throughout the chapter. It’s getting really close to the end of the month though, so I’ll leave this as what it is. Chapter 1100 came out today, and there is not going to be a break next week, so I will write more about the flashback as a whole in my next blog post. Chapter 1101 is supposedly going to be very big.

Happy belated Thanksgiving!

October Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 17:47:26 -0400

My internet is down at the time of writing this (Saturday), so I figured I’d go ahead and try to knock out this month’s blog post.

General Updates

Not too much going on with my back. I’ve been back to work once, I kinda want to start going back a more frequently. I’ve been pushing myself to sit up more at home. It’s rough at the end of the day, but it’s not too bad while I’m doing it. The “McGill Big 3” is really helping, if you are having any sort of back issues I would highly recommend trying it if you can.

I started reading “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, which talks about making good habits and getting rid of bad ones, and reading consistently is one that I want to start. I had set a timer to read for about 5-15 minutes every night at 7pm so that way I would get used to reading at a specific time, instead of doom-scrolling on social media. It was going well until I got sick, I’m not sure if it was Covid or what but it was rough. I had been going about a week or 2 strong, but I felt so bad I stopped. Which isn’t really a good reason, but what’re you gonna do. I bought a kindle and loaded it with a bunch of books so I will hopefully start reading more on it.

One Piece Chapter 1094 and 1095

This is the part of the blog post where I start talking about One Piece, so if you’re not caught up with the manga I’d stop reading. Some major things are happening right now.

Egghead is very quickly rising to become one of my favorite arcs in One Piece.

A real quick note about the terms I use. I sometimes switch between the official translations and the versions that are more common in the online communities. So in case you don’t know what I’m talking about and I use one word or the other this is what I mean:

Official	Alternate	Example sentence
Five Elders	Gorosei	“Jay-Garcia Saturn is one of the Five Elders” or “Jay-Garcia Saturn is one of the Gorosei”
Emperor of the Sea	Yonko	“Shanks is an Emperor” or “Shanks is a Yonko”
Marijoa	Mary-Geoise	“Marijoa is on top of the Red Line” or “Mary-Geoise is on top of the Red Line”
Supreme King Haki	Conquerer’s Haki	“He has Supreme King Haki” or “He has Conquerer’s Haki”

If you’re caught up to 1094 or 1095 you probably already know these words and their variations, but sometimes I use them interchangeably. I will typically use the alternate versions because they’re shorter. Except for “Mary-Geoise”, I do use “Marijoa”.

I also use the following names for the (former) Navy Admirals: “Akainu”, “Kizaru”, “Aokiji”, “Fujitora” “Greenbull”. I think that’s pretty common, except for maybe Aokiji also being known as Kuzan. Greenbull’s real name (Ryokugu) is hard to remember how to spell and say, so “Greenbull” is how I’ll mention him.

Anyway, on to the discussions.

Chapter 1094

This chapter was INSANE. We finally got shown in detail one of the Gorosei’s alternate forms, and got to see Luffy WHOOP Kizaru. We’ve known for a while that the Gorosei all had alternate forms (since Sabo went up against them when Cobra was killed), and for even longer I think we’ve all questioned if they had devil fruits or haki. This chapter doesn’t really answer if this transformation is devil fruit powers, or something new entirely, which is what makes it so interesting.

One theory a lot of people have is that it’s a mythical/ancient zoan devil fruit transformation, because he matches a certain demon (that I can’t think of the name of) from Japanese folklore. I think this is entirely plausible and probably closest to the truth. From what we know, the Gorosei seem to be immortal/eternally young based on flashbacks from many years ago and their appearances looking identical, so it’s entirely possible all the Gorosei have insanely powerful mythical/ancient zoan fruits.

Another theory that I like is that he himself is 100% a demon. He shows off a fraction of his power by killing a low rank Navy man by just looking at him. This could potentially be haki and his skills with haki are at a level we haven’t seen before, it could be a part of his devil fruit abilities and specific to Saturn, or it could be a new form of demon power entirely. During the time skip when Brook was sent away by Kuma, he was sent to an island that happened to be holding a satanic summoning event where they then believed Brook to be king of the demons. So, we know that demons exist in at least folklore of the One Piece world. I personally like the idea that he’s a demon, but I think it’s more probable that all of the Gorosei are devil fruit users with the eternal youth surgery having been performed on them by the previous Op-Op fruit users.

Kizaru getting punched was really satisfying to me. I don’t dislike Kizaru, but he got a good beat down from Luffy. It was a little touch and go, but Luffy punched him so hard he made him see stars and that was really awesome. I don’t know if Kizaru will walk away from this fight like he’s done before. Right now he’s knocked pretty much cold for a little bit.

Chapter 1095

It’s very possible that I don’t finish this blog post before chapter 1096 comes out, or I see spoilers. So this section is written as though I haven’t seen chapter 1096 (because as I’m writing it, I haven’t).

Chapter 1094 was already insane with the reveal of Jay-Garcia Saturn’s transformation. Now in chapter 1095 we got some of Kuma’s backstory, and he was someone who was on God Valley 38 years ago. Which matches up with the God Valley incident. These next probably 5-10 chapters are going to be so incredibly important and show off the history of the modern era in the One Piece world, and I am so hyped for it.

Originally it was thought that God Valley was where the celestial dragons lived, given the name. We know now that God Valley was the island that they chose to host their “native cleansing” game that year. It seems similar to other popular stories, think Squid Games except there’s probably no monetary prize for the ones being hunted.

There’s so many theories this is going to prove/disprove, this may go down as the most important flashback apart from any Void Century reveals. The God Valley incident has so much mystery surrounding it. It’s only been known about for 4 IRL years, and we’re already getting more information on it. We’re most likely going to see the following:

Rocks D. Xebec in full (for the first time).
The Rocks pirates’ motives and goals for being on God Valley.
Garp in his prime.
A rookie Roger.
Shanks’ relation to Figarland Garling and the other celestial dragons on the island.
How Shanks came into Roger’s care.
Ivankov’s backstory.
More about the Buccaneer race.

The theories surrounding the next chapter are so much fun to think about. There was a break this past week so lots of people have had time to discuss their ideas. Most of them surround what the prize of the native cleansing was going to be. We saw there were 6 small chests, so a lot of people think this is where many of the characters, who are confirmed to be on God Valley at the time, got their fruits.

From Boa’s time as a slave for the celestial dragons we know they like to feed their slaves devil fruits for fun (I think that’s really odd to give slaves powerful abilities, but to each their own), so this could be where they got the fruits to feed their slaves. We also already know from a conversation between Big Mom and Kaido that she gave him the Fish-Fish Model Azure Dragon devil fruit on that day, so that could’ve been 1 of the prizes. Kuma did not have his bear ears or paw pads (from what I could see) so he probably didn’t have his fruit that day, which means that could’ve been another. Ivankov was on God Valley but we don’t have any confirmation on if he had his fruit or not, so his Hormone-Hormone fruit may have been one. Whitebeard’s Tremor-Tremor fruit, Marco’s Bird-Bird Model Phoenix fruit, Dragon’s unknown fruit, the list goes on. I think that devil fruits being the prizes is the most probable theory as of right now, but I doubt that certain people got their fruits that day (Whitebeard specifically).

Since Kuma and Ivankov, 2 of the 3 founding members of the Revolutionary Army, have been shown to be on God Valley, another prominent theory is that Dragon will also show up in some capacity. The treatment that Kuma has experienced (and Ivankov has probably experienced) is surely the driving forces behind their decision to revolt against the government and celestial dragons. Surely the leader of the army also has seen terrible incidents involving the celestial dragons to make him want to go against them too, this would be an incredible time to expose that. One of the biggest theories right now, that I don’t disagree with, is that Dragon was at one point a part of the Navy and after serving for some time became a revolutionary. There’s at least a few pieces of evidence to support that idea. But there’s a few bits of information we still don’t know. Dragon created the Revolutionary army after the Ohara incident, but before that he was a part of a team called the “freedom fighters” for an undisclosed length of time, so we have no idea when he left the Navy (if he was a part of it).

It’s now Monday morning as I write this, so sometime this week we’ll see 1096 drop and hopefully some of this will be answered. I’m so incredibly excited and I hope it keeps going up from here. Egghead is amazing, and One Piece is one of the greatest stories around.

September Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 10:27:23 -0400

This blog is cutting it a little close to the end of the month.

Back Update

Ok, I know I said I wouldn’t make any more updates about my back until something big happened, and this isn’t huge, but I’m feeling a lot better. God bless Danny Blakely, my friend and 3 of my good friends’ father. He’s been telling me since I hurt my back that I should go to yin-yoga with him and how it’s changed his life and he’s feeling great. He’s been suffering with a bad back since he was 19, so he knows what kinda stuff I’m going through. I went over for his wife’s (my friends’ mom) birthday and we got to talking about the McGill big 3 and how he does them twice a week during his gym sessions and how we should start doing them together. I went over a week later not expecting much, and pushed it as hard as I could without hurting myself. I woke up thinking “Man I haven’t done anything that intense with my arms in so long, they’re sore.” then I thought a little bit more and said “Wait, my leg doesn’t hurt”. I was in 0 sciatica pain. We’ve done 3 sessions so far, and slightly tweaked them each time, but I’m getting better. Some days are still harder, but overall I feel a lot better. I even went to Walmart with my family for the first time in a year, which used to be a weekly event.

One Piece Live Action

The Netflix One Piece live action adaptation came out on August 30th, and it’s actually pretty good. There are minor spoilers in this section up until the end of Arlong Park in the original story, so if you aren’t caught up to then with the manga or the anime I just wouldn’t read the rest of this post at all (lol). I discuss some important changes that effect things all to the chapters in the 400s.

Overall it was enjoyable and it’s leagues well above other adaptations that I have seen. If you’re hesitant about watching/reading One Piece and haven’t seen it before, I recommend it as an introduction. If you have seen One Piece before, I still think it’s worth to watch.

I’m not the biggest fan of some of the changes that the live action included, but the creators have ok reasons for why they did what they did. Oda was pretty close to the project, and Matt Owens (the showrunner and executive producer) is a huge One Piece fan so I think that’s a big reason why it was so successful. One Piece’s story is very calculated, it’s not something that you can mess with for the most part. Small things add up later on.

The casting was really good, I think everyone who played the straw hats did well. There were certain aspects about the characters traits I didn’t like; like how Luffy was a little too smart and “aware” of certain situations instead, and how Zoro was too edgy and not as arrogant (at least in my estimation). I’m certain this is just how they were directed as the show seemed very well put together and intentional with the direction they wanted to go. I’ve never watched the anime, so my understanding of the characters might be different than others anyway.

The side characters were probably my favorite part about the casting. Mihawk and Buggy are some of my favorites; these were also the 2 that I thought could’ve been messed up the easiest too. The Mihawk/Zoro fight on the Baratie was my favorite part. Buggy was a little more vulgar and Joker-esque than I had hoped, but it was still a really good performance. His chop-chop fruit powers were some of the best CGI in the show for sure, they did him a lot of justice (Buggy stays falling upwards).

My 2 least favorite casting choices were probably Arlong and Shanks, unfortunately. I think Arlong wasn’t built up enough as a character, and overall seemed more bark than bite, which in part was due to his size. He was a lot smaller than in the manga. I don’t expect someone to actually be 8’ tall, but he was like the same height as Luffy (who’s canonically 5'8", Iñaki Godoy is a little shorter at 5’ 6" according to IMDB). All the fishmen were a little janky overall though, so that might’ve compounded the issue. Shanks wasn’t quite as disappointing, but he still just didn’t seem right. Part of it, in my mind, was that he looked like someone cosplaying Shanks more than someone playing him. Shanks is a character that can be very kind and goofy, but will get super serious when he needs. I don’t think Peter Gadiot hit that mark quite right.

Overall the good far outweigh the bad, and the bad is mostly me being picky. I definitely recommend the show. Even if only to see the lovely Emily Rudd who is my new celebrity crush (email me if you like nerdy guys with bad backs Emily 😘). They’ve recently been greenlit for a second season, and they have plans for up to 6 seasons right now. I think this is a really good project to get people into One Piece, I have seen a lot of people already starting the anime after the live action which is awesome.

Spoilers About Significant Changes in the Live Action

If you don’t know the story of One Piece up until around chapter 480 of the manga (~421 of the anime) then I would skip this. Some of this is revealed in the live action, but not all of it.

Marines and Garp

There were a bunch of changes overall to the story, some pacing changed, trivial characters removed, etc. Nothing to make it totally unrecognizable, it’s mostly the same story. The BIG change that I was confused about, and a lot of other One Piece fans were too, was the inclusion of the B plot for Garp’s crew with Koby and Helmeppo; and also the reveal that Garp is Luffy’s Grandpa. The live action only covers to the end of Arlong Park, but Garp isn’t shown in full until after Enies lobby in the original. From several interviews, this was included because a lot of western television shows include a B plot that creates a feeling of tension for the main characters, so the marines coming after Luffy is meant to create that tension.

On one hand, this story with Garp was happening off screen (in cover stories in the manga, I’m not sure about the anime) at the same time as the arcs from Baratie all the way until Enies Lobby. If they had included it but never let Luffy and Garp clash or interact it would’ve seemed incredibly pointless and confused a lot of people. So the fight between them in the final episode had to happen.

On the other hand, I think they could’ve done much more with Arlong. He felt really underdeveloped to me and nowhere near as menacing or powerful as he did in the manga. In the manga, as with many of the villains during their respective arcs, Arlong seemed unbeatable. There was just so much going on in the live action that he didn’t get enough buildup to make the stakes high. We see him capture Buggy, and we do see what happened with Nami’s village but that’s it. With the theme of fishman discrimination being huge throughout One Piece, they could’ve replaced most of the marine stuff to include new examples of that. It was a good chance to introduce that form of racism early and make you see more of the world.

Revealing Garp is Luffy’s grandpa so early is kind of crazy. They might clash again at some point, but Garp is one of the only people who know that Dragon is Luffy’s father (before Marineford). The start of the next season should include Dragon, so I’m not sure if they’ll reveal that at Loguetown or not. Dragon and Luffy still have not directly interacted at all during the entire story, so having that happen first in the Live Action sounds like a huge gamble.

Very Important Missing Character

For some reason, they totally removed Hachi from the Arlong Pirates. Hachi is the only one (that I can remember right this instant) who appears later on in an important way. He’s the one who introduces the straw hats to Rayleigh and Kamie, and directs them around in Sabaody.

I’m really not sure what this means for that part of the story, I feel like if they didn’t want to use him later then they could’ve had him not reappear. It’s better to have him and not need him, than to need him and not have him is where my head is at basically. I’ve heard a few times that the CGI in the show was already hard to do and costly, so it could’ve been that Hachi was just too tough to pull off, but the fishmen were mostly practical effects anyway. Or perhaps they didn’t want to cast him too far ahead, and promise a part like that so early on. I’m not sure, I just didn’t like the implications of what happens by not including him for the story.

August Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Back update

I think from here on out I’ll stop doing back updates as often unless something major happens like a surgery, a procedure, or I go back to work consistently. I’m finally working into a routine and good habits so there probably won’t be much change from month to month to be interesting enough to blog about. I have started doing the McGill big 3 slowly, which are a set of 3 core exercises that are commonly recommended for low back pain. Personally, the McGill crunch has seemed to be more helpful to temporarily relieve pain than a cobra push/press up has. That might be due to my genetics. I didn’t know that genetics and the actual shape of your vertebrae are factors in what cause herniated discs and what can aid/restrict healing.

I’ve also been trying to limit my caffeine intake, and that has seemed to help a fair bit. So far it’s helped with having less anxious feelings and mood swings, better sleep, and I am staying hydrated better. Drinking 300-400mg of caffeine a day was average for me, which is not quite lethal but really not good for you. I went cold turkey 0mg for about 3 weeks before I “fell off the wagon” again, and have been drinking 1 energy drink (about 180-200mg for the brands I drink) every other day and I am really starting to feel the negatives again.

Moderate caffeine intake is not harmful or negative, there’s a lot of research on the nootropic effects of it. But because of how much caffeine I would have and when I would drink it it’s a negative experience for me. While off of caffeine I have much better sleep which leads to better recovery. Better sleep also leads to more regulated energy levels and better mood. Caffeine is a slight diet suppressant and diuretic so I’m eating a little more and also hydrating better by drinking water, which is good for your discs (as well as your mental health and general feelings).

I’m making better choices than I have been, so we’ll see how it goes.

One Piece

MINOR SPOILERS UNTIL THE CURRENT CHAPTER 1090 OF ONE PIECE

I think I caught up to the story the day after my last post. I read like crazy for about the last 30 chapters, which is sort of a bad thing because there’s going to be some stuff that I missed. To be totally honest I’ve forgotten the last 10 chapters at least. Overall One Piece is starting to ramp up really quickly with Egghead. I’m incredibly excited for Elbaf, another island that has been in talks since around chapter 115, it’s the one island Usopp really wants to go to, I’m just so hyped.

I’m so glad I finally decided to read it, it’s been such an awesome story. I was never sold on One Piece, I thought an anime that was about pirates that lasted for so long was stupid. I thought “why do they need 1000 episodes, that’s gratuitous, there’s no way all of that is important”, but I was SO wrong. Everything is important, even when you don’t think it’s important, it’ll come up again later. I want to eventually go back and read it and catch up again (if it’s still not finished). I’m incredibly proud that I stuck with it and caught up before it was finished. One Piece will go down in history as one of the most complex and intricate pieces of art ever made.

I kind of hate to say it, but I’m getting a little excited for the live action that’s coming out in a few days. I HATE live actions, and see almost zero point in them. A lot of them are horribly done and are just trying to make money off of a medium that does not translate well to human emotions, and I thought that was especially going to be true for One Piece. One piece is very cartoony (for lack of a better word), there’s a lot of ways the characters exhibit emotions that don’t translate well into normal human reactions if you were to see someone do them in real life (take for example Ed’s personality in the Cowboy Bebop live action). I think this will still be slightly cringe, and I think reading the manga or watching the anime first would be the smarter choice. A video came out a few days ago with Oda telling Iñaki (the actor playing as Luffy) that he was the person closest to Luffy he’s seen. Time and time again I have questioned Oda and been unfaithful, and have always been proven wrong, so I’m going to sit back and trust him this time. I’ll be watching at least the first season of the show and maybe reviewing it. There’s a lot of stuff I want to review, but never make time for.

Vinland Saga

SPOILERS UNTIL HALFWAY THROUGH THE SECOND SEASON OF THE VINLAND SAGA ANIME

I also started watching the Vinland Saga anime again. I watched the first season 2-3 years ago, and I thought it was ok. I didn’t understand/care for the politics stuff of what was going on between Denmark and England, which is what the first season is mostly about. Keeping track of all these places and their motives was boring to me. I finally decided to rewatch it, and I paid a lot more attention and enjoyed it much more. The politics are actually stupid simple, I was just being dense.

I’m almost done with the second season which I think is really good too. I’ve heard that people don’t like it as much as the first season, but I’m not sure if they mean the animation or the story. It’s animated by Mappa, so it’s up there in quality in my opinion. The story is definitely a tone shift compared to season 1, but that kind of tone shift is what made me want to rewatch it. I knew that it started centering around Thorfinn becoming a pacifist and more of the ideas presented in the bible. I think having Thorfinn really sit down and wondering what he’s going to do after Askeladd died is an amazing side of the story, and one that doesn’t get explored enough in other anime/manga. Berserk for example, Guts is after Griffith and is basically all hate and fear. He’s spent his entire life fighting in one way or another, so what’s he gonna do if and when he gets him? I don’t know, I really like Thorfinn’s progression and growth. Thorfinn is struggling to be a pacifist and to find the “first solution” instead of violence, which is much better than him never putting his hands up again, it shows he’s human and still makes mistakes. I think I like it better than season 1. I miss Askeladd, but it has Snake who is really interesting.

I might buy the deluxe editions of the manga that are coming out later this year and early next year. I’ll probably try to read it before then, but One Piece still has me in a weird spot with reading manga right now.

Zach Bryan - Zach Bryan

On August 25th, Zach Bryan released his self titled album and it’s pretty good. I haven’t given it a thorough enough listen, I’ve been slacking a little. My favorite songs right now are “Hey Driver” and “East Side of Sorrow”. It’s still Zach so it’s good and definitely worth a listen.

I cut the blog pretty close to the end of August this time, I’m gonna try to be earlier next month.

July Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 12:47:19 -0400

Back Update

The probability of me avoiding surgery for my herniated disc were already slim, but now they’re pretty much non-existent. I started going to acupuncture to try to help with the pain, thinking maybe if I could get the pain to subside that I could start walking more and it would start to heal on its own. On the very first visit, even before I got on the table, the acupuncturist was saying how I was probably going to need the surgery. Based on where the pain is in my leg, how intense it is, and how long it’s been there, he wasn’t expecting much out of my visits.

Acupuncture has been a cool experience overall. I’m not afraid of needles, but this was a little scary since they’re sticking needles into your nerves based on things they feel in your skin and muscles. After the first visit, all of that fear was pretty much gone. The needles still hurt and make you jerk a little bit when they go in, but it’s more like “Ugh, I gotta go get poked” feeling than fear. My acupuncturist is really nice and explains what he’s doing and why, and is overall a really cool dude.

On my first visit he put about 10-12 needles in my leg and low back for about 30 minutes, then he stretched my legs out and cracked my hips/back a little bit. When I got home I was sore, but not in too much pain. Since it was on my back and leg I couldn’t tell if there was much bleeding. My second visit was significantly worse. That time, he hooked the needles up to a machine so they would have electricity pulse through my back and leg. I drove myself to and from that visit, and I almost intentionally drove over a bridge on the way home. There’s no doubt that’s been the most pain I’ve ever been in, and hope to ever experience. The pain shot down my whole leg and stayed there, it made it so difficult to focus. It’s not the acupuncturist’s fault at all, I just didn’t realize how strong the electricity really was, and should have told him to back it off a little. Driving myself was also a bad idea and I haven’t done that since. I’ve been 2 other times and those were much better.

I had some pretty good days after going to some of the appointments. There was one day I had like 0 pain, I was standing straight and only felt a little pressure in my leg which was really nice. I still hurt pretty bad some days though. Even with the good days it’s probably weird to say to people who haven’t had this issue, but I can feel that something is wrong with my spine. It’s an odd, almost hollow feeling when you’re sitting or walking around. It messes with your brain to have a weakness like this. Even if I do get the surgery, my back will always be weaker than it was. There’s a lot of feelings of despair that come and go. Some weeks are better mentally than others, it’s kind of dependent on how I’m feeling and what else is going on (how un-stoic of me).

I’m trying a few last things to hopefully avoid it, I’m doing more exercises, being way more aware of my movements and changing how I sleep (I removed some pillows). I’m also looking into a peptide called BPC-157 which is a chain of amino acids that are produced naturally in your gut and promotes healing. Athletes and bodybuilders use it to help out with their workouts, and I think the NFL banned it not too long ago (maybe because it works so well). I’ve read in several places that it doesn’t help with herniated discs, but if it can help nerve damage or nerve pain I’m in.

“So we’ll see” - Theo Von

One Piece Update

On a lighter note, on to One Piece! I forgot to add a spoiler warning last time, but I don’t think there were any spoilers besides maybe the progression of islands. This time I’ll include the warning.

POTENTIAL SPOILERS UNTIL CHAPTER 1060

I’ve been reading A LOT of One Piece since last month, it has been getting so good. Last time I posted I was almost done with the Dressrosa arc, I’m not sure where I was exactly. Now, I’ve just finished the Wano arc and am currently on chapter 1060. There’s been several days where I read from the time I got off work, 5pm, until about 12am (10-20 chapters). I finished a good hunk, like maybe 30 or 40 chapters, of Whole Cake in a single Saturday.

Since Dressrosa we’ve been to Zou, then Whole Cake, and then there was a cutaway to the much hyped Reverie, and then Wano. I’ve been excited for Wano since maybe Baratie because my friend was telling me about it and how stuff was getting intense (it gets so intense).

I have been loving the lore drops and chapters that follow what’s going on in the world. Sanji’s character development was great, I loved hearing about his family. My friend had kind of hinted to me that Sanji had some major stuff going on later on in the series, and pointed out that to get from the North Blue to the East Blue he had to have crossed the Red Line. So I thought as a kid he’d crossed this desert, but what ended up being the real thing was much cooler.

The Reverie was really cool because in IRL time it’s been maybe 10+ years since it was first mentioned. Seeing all of the world powers come together and revisiting older characters like Wapol and those from Alabasta was really nice (not for long though).

The stuff about Rocks’ Pirates was insane too, 956 and 957 were amazing and right now are my 2 favorite chapters. 957 specifically because of the stuff about Rocks and Garp being a badass. I really hope Oda draws out the God Valley incident, I will go feral if it’s not. I think that’d be a really cool idea for one of the One Piece movies.

I have only been reading for about 7 months and I cannot imagine what I would have done when reading it weekly. My friend got caught up towards the end of Dressrosa, so he’s been reading for 8 years. I’m really excited to get caught up, and I will probably finish before August is here. Then I can really start getting into the theories and I can finally watch One Piece content without being spoiled.

I swear, anytime I watched anything I would get spoiled. I had to be really careful on the wiki, I inadvertently got Ace’s death spoiled for me because he didn’t have a post-time skip image. I also got spoiled about Whitebeard being a part of Rocks because it was the first sentence on the page.

Anyway, back machine broke, One Piece is great. See you guys next month!

June Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 13:05:59 -0400

Last month I said I was going to try to keep up with my blog this year with at least one post, so I figured I’d go ahead and knock it out early-ish this month.

I haven’t done too much with the site since last month. I’m still working on the Red Dead Redemption review. I started playing Red Dead Revolver because I wanted more information on a theory of mine. But it’s way different than both of the Red Dead Redemption games and kinda boring, so I’ve been playing Silent Hill instead. Since it’s hard to record with my back issues I’m just scrapping the series on YouTube and will eventually private the first video. Maybe I can come back to that in a few years.

I’m almost done with the Dressrosa arc in One Piece, I hope to have that done with in the next week or so. It’s a pretty good arc, I think it’s my favorite so far, but Water Seven/Enies Lobby was pretty good too. It’s kind of a toss up. I guess it really depends on how this arc ends. I’m only about 300 chapters behind until I’m caught up and can start reading it as new chapters come out. Something I keep thinking about while I’m reading it is how it must have been for those who were reading as it came out this whole time. People who were reading through things like Alabasta or the Paramount War and waiting each week to read it (or whenever they could). This series is older than I am, and it’s still going. I know people who were born and died during its run. I can pick out certain dates of my life and see what was going on in One Piece as it came out. An odd way to think about it, but that’s how I’ve situated the series in my head. It’s a large story that will go down in history, no doubt.

The friend I mentioned who has read One Piece before decided to read Berserk at my recommendation finally, and it took him 1 week to read it. It took me a few months. I don’t think I’m a slow reader, but I don’t sit down to read as much as him. He’s got way better comprehension though. I can read something a few times and it’s hard to retain it.

I have done a lot more with my vim setup. Most notable is more work with LSPs and the keybinds for that. I understand better what all of the pieces do, so when stuff breaks or I get an error I can diagnose it. Using it more and more during work has been better, because I fix issues as they arise instead of pushing it off. I have all the updates pushed to my repo so far at https://git.jacksontaylor.xyz/nvim-setup.git . If you want to go learn from it, steal some code, or use it in its entirety be my guest.

That’s half the year done, see you guys next month probably.

May Update 2023

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 26 May 2023 00:02:21 -0400

Back Update

If you aren’t aware, I herniated a disc at my L4 and L5 vertebrates. This came about mostly from my negligence, and not going to the doctor when I should’ve. So if you have back pain or sciatica that doesn’t go away after a few days to a few weeks, don’t wait a whole year until one morning you can’t walk (shakes finger). That’s very dumb.

I’m still in a good bit of pain sometimes, but I’ve gotten a lot better at managing it without medications. Exercises don’t totally help still, but I have found positions to stretch in which seem to help with decompression, and cold showers seem to help. I got a steroid shot back in March that helped straightened out my contralateral shift, so I stand much straighter and have a lot less really bad days because of it. I used to not be able to sit for more than 5-10 minutes, which caused me to work from home (My company has been very awesome about the whole situation). About 2 weeks ago I actually went in to work for 3/5 days of that week for half the day. It’s not much, but it helped my mental state a lot to see different rooms and faces. I thought I was going to develop agoraphobia.

I did cancel my trip to Texas, which was upsetting, but I think it was for the best. The people I was going with were going to be very accommodating, but there were a lot of variables to plan for. I also didn’t want to slow them down from having fun while I’m irritable or unable to focus. There’s also the risk of the herniation getting so bad I have to have emergency surgery, so I really want to avoid that.

The probability of me having surgery to correct this is growing and shrinking, if that makes sense. On one hand, I’m making a lot of progress, but on the other hand I’m ready to be pain free. The surgery is an outpatient procedure, but it’s still back surgery. Some people claim it doesn’t help. There’s also the possibility of me having permanent nerve damage in my legs, with or without surgery.

I’m doing better, but I’ve still got a long way to go. My next planned milestone is either staying an entire day at work, or going every day of the week. Whichever feels right at the time, I probably won’t know which I’m going to try until I do it.

What I’ve Been Up To

This year I’ve tried to read more. I started One Piece around the start of the year. I’m all the way up to chapter 654 (end of Fish Man island) and I really enjoy it. I have a good friend who has been reading One Piece for several years, so it’s really nice to have someone to talk to about it and clarify things where I’m confused. It’s not really a confusing manga, but I have poor reading comprehension sometimes. My goal for One Piece is to catch up and be able to read the ending as it comes out. It’s way better than I originally thought it was going to be. I thought it was gonna be about the same quality as Dragon Ball, but it’s so much more. Don’t get me wrong Dragon Ball is good. The action and characters are super iconic. But One Piece is so much deeper than Dragon Ball with its themes. Finding small things mentioned hundreds of chapters ago that turn into plot lines is like a drug, Oda is a genius and he will go down as one of the best writers for it.

I’ve also started reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”. I got into a little Dr. Jordan Peterson phase for a bit, and this is one of his favorite books so I decided to try to read it. I’m about a quarter of the way through, and it’s pretty good. I’ve only recently started annotating it to help keep up with characters and draw out a little more meaning. I’m reading the Peaver and Volokhonsky translation, which I’ve heard is better than the Constance Garnett translation. I think I will try to read more of Dostoyevsky when I’m done. The main 5 of his are “Crime and Punishment”, “Notes from Underground”, “Demons”, “The Idiot” and “The Brothers Karamazov”, so once I’m done with this one I’ll move on to “Notes from Underground”. I might review the books, or I might not. There’s a lot of stuff I’ve been wanting to review but haven’t yet.

I don’t normally have so much that I’m reading at any given time, but I am also reading David Goggins’ “Can’t Hurt Me”. David Goggins is the hardest man alive, this dude is crazy. He’s a former Navy SEAL and a pretty good endurance athlete. His book details how he dealt with childhood abuse, racism and the holes he’s drug himself out of during his life. I’m about halfway through his book, this one is an easier read for me than Dostoyevsky because it’s a lot simpler (in a good way). There’s a lot of good messages in it, and he’s living proof of how mentally fortified someone can become. He thrives off of pain and suffering and finds more out about himself. He’s ran until his feet were broken and he was peeing blood, that kind of pain and suffering. It’s really good motivation and a really great example of discipline. He’s got another book that came out in 2020 called “Never Finished” that I also plan to read.

Apart from reading I’ve been doing more behind the scenes with my site. I’ve got a few reviews that will be coming out soon, and a little more site reorganization. I played through the “Red Dead Redemption” games for the first time and absolutely loved them. That review is massive so far and contains a lot of stuff related to the games and lore so it’s taking a long time to finish up.

I’m also planning to watch a bunch of classic movies that are really popular, but I’ve never seen. I started a list of movies I hear are really good, and plan to give them small reviews. Like a score out of 10 and a few notes, nothing major like the Cowboy Bebop and Red Dead Redemption reviews, unless it deserves it.

I’ve kept a streak going of posting once a month, so I’ll try to keep that as best I can. That’s another small goal for the year.

Deer Tick Announce New Album - Emotional Contracts

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 13:37:11 -0400

I don’t think I’ve actually mentioned it explicitly on my site anywhere, but I consider Deer Tick to be my favorite band of all time. I don’t listen to them as much as I did a few years ago (I used to listen to their whole albums over and over), but I don’t skip their songs very often. I found them after watching an episode of “Son’s of Anarchy” and their song “Goodbye, Dear Friend” played. Google play music (at the time) started playing radios with more of their songs, and I was hooked. My favorite songs of theirs are probably “Sea of Clouds” and “Don’t Hurt” of off their albums “Deer Tick Vol. 1” and “Deer Tick Vol. 2” respectively. They also play my favorite cover of all time of “Unwed Fathers” by John Prine, which is just outstanding if you haven’t heard it.

Anyway, that’s to say I keep up with them and this is a big deal! Today they announced a new album called “Emotional Contracts” set to come out on June 16th and released 2 songs from the album! The songs are called “Forgiving Ties” which was accompanied with a video, and “The Real Thing”.

Deer Tick’s sound has changed over each of their albums pretty drastically. They are not afraid to do things differently than they have before, and that have been done by others before, which are some of the reasons I love them so much. They seem like they are gonna keep that up for this new album. Although none of their records really sound the same, “Forgiving Ties” is the most “Deer Tick” out of the 2 new singles. It’s upbeat, and has Ian O’Neil on vocals with the rest of the band coming in throughout the song, and reminds me of their other song “Mr. Nothing Gets Worse”. “The Real Thing” is a lot slower and gravely with John McCauley singing it, it’s also the longer of the 2 at exactly 9 minutes long. I think out of the 2 I prefer “Forgiving Ties”, but both are awesome. The song “If She Could Only See Me Now” will also be on the album, which appeared on their “Live From Fort Adams” album from 2020. It’s a good song. This one is sorta boppy and is a big middle finger to the girl he’s talking about, and how he’s doing better now that she’s gone. I’m glad it’ll be getting a studio version.

They’ve also posted tour dates for the album, but the closest one to me is in a different state, so I may have to do some traveling to go see them. I was robbed of seeing them in 2021 because the venue either changed their vaccination policies or didn’t advertise them well enough, and I didn’t have enough time to get it done. I was so bummed.

If you aren’t sure who Deer Tick is, or you’re just curious go listen to them! John McCauley also has a few side projects like Middle Brother (I think they are disbanded unfortunately, but this band will introduce you to Dawes which is a phenomenal band as well), Diamond Rugs, as well as some solo stuff. Ian O’Neil also has a few solo albums which are really good as well.

Updated Vim Config

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 14:49:16 -0400

TLDR: I made a lot of changes to my neovim setup. You can find them here

Intro

I’ve been using vim as my editor at home for a few years now. I’m comfortable with the motions, functions, and have started using vim modes in other programs because they’ve become ingrained in my muscle memory. It’s also really fun to use.

I didn’t use strictly vim at work until recently. I work as a typescript developer, and with the tooling our team uses, it made more sense to just use vscode like everyone else (I’ve actually been using vscodium, but same difference). I used a vim extension in it and customized a lot of the keybinds to what I would use in vim anyway, so I finally decided to pull the trigger and use vim exclusively.

This week I sat down and got neovim working pretty well and wanted to let you guys know about my setup a little bit.

I’ve written about vim before in one of my first ever blog posts which you can find here if you need convincing on why you should at least learn vim.

Neovim vs Vim

Vim is actually in a family of text editors that come from Vi created by Bill Joy in 1976. Vi and vim are modal text editors, which means that you utilize different modes to edit text. They’re primarily used in the command line, and are known for being light on system resources.

Vim (stands for Vi-Improved) was created to iron out some of the bugs seen with vi, and to add features. Neovim is doing the same thing to vim what vim did to vi. Neovim has slimmed down the code base, and now allows for lua as the configuration language along with VimL (the standard config language).

I use neovim, and this setup will NOT work with normal vim because most of it is written in lua. I currently use v0.9.0-dev, but I think this will work with v0.7+ maybe, you’d have to check if you want the exact same lsp setup.

My Setup

Most of my lua setup came from this tutorial and ThePrimeagen’s other videos. I’ll leave him to explain how to get started with a “vimrc” if you want to write your own, but I’ll go over certain parts that are more specific to my setup.

Some of my remaps and settings come from Luke Smith’s vimrc, like shortening <C-w><C-l> to move to the buffer on the right to just <C-l>, and adding spell check with <leader>o (o for orthography). He also uses nvim, but he uses the traditional VimL form of config files. His init.vim file is here.

Vim’s syntax highlighting by default is pretty good, it bases it on the file extension and applies it that way (if you have highlighting turned on). Sometimes though you want files read a certain way, or you want them to have specific settings. I normally have an indentation of 4 spaces and have vim convert the tabs to spaces, but for files that end with js/jsx/ts/tsx it uses 2 spaces instead.

With the workstation I’m using currently (me lying down on the couch), I don’t have a separate keyboard and mouse, so I use the one on the laptop and always end up pressing on the touch pad while I’m typing. This causes issues when typing because it ends up moving me somewhere totally different. So I just disabled mouse use entirely. I don’t use it in vim anyway, so it’s no big deal for me.

I have a few keybindings (that I don’t use that often actually) which call out to programs that should be on your path if you intend to use them. They come from Luke Smith’s scripts, and they have their own dependencies themselves.

If you read the lua/jacksontaylorxyz/remap.lua and after/plugin/which-key.lua files, you’ll probably notice I try to keep the binds simple and easy to remember. E.g. <leader>ff is (f)ind in (f)iles, <leader>bc is (b)uffer (c)lose, etc.

Plugins

I used to use Plug, but have switched to packer, just because it was used in the tutorial from before. You can find it here. I don’t have an opinion on plugin manager, but packer works pretty well, and is similar to Plug in syntax.

Quality of life things

vim-commentary - Really nice commenting ability (gcc comments a line, and works with motions like gc20j comments 20 lines down)
vim-css-color - Highlights color codes with that color
nerdtree - Folder view
delimitMate - Auto delimits characters
telescope.nvim - Finder bar
nvim-web-devicons - Icons for other plugins
tagbar - Ctags but in memory *
todo-comments - Highlights TODO comments

* - tagbar uses your local ctags installation. ctags is a program that parses out the elements/tokens from your code and creates a file that has them all indexed so another program can parse them. tagbar just loads the current file into a buffer and lets you jump without having to create a file. The version of ctags you use does seem to matter. I use exuberant-ctags, and it does not have typescript support by default. You can add to the regex patterns that it uses, but it doesn’t really work that well. I’ve read universal-ctags does have typescript support, but haven’t tried it yet. I also don’t use this function very much anyway, so I’m not in too big of a rush to get it fixed.

Anything to do with git

fugitive - Git wrapper
vim-signify - Marks line changes and additions
blamer.nvim - Git blame on the current line as you move

I still commit and push mostly from the command line, because it’s just second nature. But adding this to my config shouldn’t be too hard. Right now I also still use vscodium to stage hunks when I want to break up commits. I’m not sure how easy that is to do, I don’t know the syntax of the git command for it on the command line, otherwise I could probably add it now.

Different vim modes

vimwiki - Diary and wiki suite

Vimwiki is a really nice way to keep documentation or keep notes on tickets and projects. It’s just markdown which isn’t very special, but Vimwiki gives you tools to jump to different files through the links and gives you tools to create tables nice features for editing. I’ve thought about trying to make a website with it because you can convert it to HTML. I don’t normally launch Vimwiki after I start vim though. I’ve got an alias on my machines called wiki that runs vim +VimwikiIndex which will open the index page.

Fancy stuff

vim-airline - Fancy status bar
vim-airline-themes - Fancy status bar themes
vim-startify - Fancy startup script *
which-key.nvim - Fancy keybind menu **

* I use mostly lua for my configuration, but there is 1 file that would be time consuming to write in lua, and I don’t care to do it right away. I have a plugin for a startup screen if vim is called without an argument, and it has a bunch of ASCII art and quotes in these arrays and stuff. It basically takes an ASCII drawing and puts a random quote from a set of quotes. I may try to convert it to lua and have it read a file and use fortune, but for now it’s VimL. I think you can use the startup screen without these fancy ASCII art things, but I like them. Apart from that plugin, everything else is in lua.

** Which-key was mostly what I was fussing with to get my setup right. It’s not that hard to use and setup really, but I combined 2 different tutorials and that was getting messy. It’s basically a menu that pops up when you push your leader key, or a key that requires another one after it such as g or '. It just shows you what options you have. Right now my leader key is space, so for things like finding searching the entire project where I can push <space>ff and it will bring up a text input. But if I were to stop at just <leader>f it would show me all keybinds that start with that combo. You can also include descriptions for the keybind, or leave it as is and it’ll show you the command it’s gonna run.

Themes

ayu-vim - Nice theme

Language supports

vim-polyglot - Syntax highlighting for a ton of languages
vim-gemtext - Syntax support for gemini markdown (because of course vim-polyglot doesn’t have a language I want, smh)
gotests-vim - Better Golang Testing (I don’t write that much go anymore, but maybe I will)
nvim-treesitter - Even better syntax highlighting

LSP

LSP is an area that I struggled getting right because it’s still relatively new for neovim, but lsp-zero made it really easy to use. LSP stands for Language-Server-Protocol, and is a way to get autocompletion and diagnostics while you’re writing code. Your editor calls out to a program (a language server) on your machine and it gives the editor instructions on what you’re trying to do.

My setup is still not perfect, but I am able to jump to definitions and get errors near real time (takes about 5 seconds to update on some larger files). I want to mess around with snippets as well for things like tests in typescript and common things I use at my job.

lsp-zero.nvim - A super simple lsp setup Instead of using lsp-zero you can setup the following plugins yourself (lsp-zero.vim uses these, and you can still customize them yourself, so I don’t see much of a reason to not use lsp-zero).
nvim-lspconfig - LSP protocol for neovim
mason.nvim - Package manager for LSPs
mason-lspconfig.nvim - Manages the connection between what’s installed with mason and the lsp config

How to use my config?

I haven’t totally tried to install it anywhere else, but I think that if you clone the repo to ~/.config/nvim/ and run the install steps from packer’s github, and then run nvim +PackerSync it should work? I know it doesn’t play nice with windows, I’ve had some issues trying to get vimwiki installed as well as some other plugins. That’s dealing with installing a c compiler and node, which is kind of a pain that I have to have node installed to use my editor.

You can also just read it and pick out what you want. That’s easy too if you have a setup already.

Why not emacs?

Emacs is a well known “editor” (people meme about it being an operating system in a way). There are many pre-configured builds and versions of emacs like Doom and Spacemacs which include Evil-mode (vim keybinds) as well as many other tools and programs, so why not just use those? I’ve tried Doom, and it’s ok, and I might try it again eventually. The most basic answer that I can give as to why I don’t use it is that I don’t know lisp well enough to configure it how I want, and I didn’t really find the documentation all that user friendly for those who don’t know lisp. That’s fine, I don’t think that’s an issue, it’s just more work than what I feel like doing. If I wanted to relearn all my binds and use their defaults then I’m sure it’d be fine.

There’s also the debate over what all should be in an editor, because emacs is so large and so feature dense you don’t need much outside of it. I’m kind of in the camp that my editor should really only edit text (or do things that revolve around that), which my setup follows pretty closely. With emacs you can have a browser, an xmpp client, games (literally DOOM), discord, and so so much more. From a tinkerer’s perspective that’s pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t need that much in my editor.

Conclusion

That’s pretty much it. I’m enjoying using nvim, and have more ideas on what can be done with my setup. So if you’re interested, you can clone my repo and keep up to date with it.

Hugo Transfer Done

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 18:37:53 -0500

Hugo move

Having started this transfer a few months ago (maybe more than a few months), I have finally completed 90% of what I set out to do when transferring to Hugo. Go enjoy the new hotness!

I’m just kidding it’s the same basically. That’s by design though. I wanted this to be seamless, with the inclusion of some small nice features. Hugo is nice for the most part, I struggled a lot with this project because I didn’t want to read the docs. I found a string of tutorials that helped me out though.

I custom made my own theme which uses the color scheme I’ve always used. I want to eventually put the theme out for others to use and make the colors configurable. I got the original scheme from https://terminal.sexy, and it’s called “gotham”. My theme is nothing special, I don’t use any shortcodes or anything yet, but it’s simple enough where someone could probably use it and start their own site with it.

The RSS feed was kind of hard to get configured how I want. It used to keep track of every single page on the site, which I didn’t like. There’s probably some RSS.xml files on here that I don’t want, but I’m too lazy to figure that out right now.

General update

I talked about my herniated disc in my last post. Overall I think it’s about the same, or maybe a little worse over the past few days. I thought I had found an exercise that was helping, but I think I overdid it. I woke up last night to my calf feeling like it had gotten torn to shreds by a large dog. This ordeal is definitely the worst pain I’ve ever been in, and it’s been pretty continuous for 4, almost 5 months.

I’m in the process of getting an appointmment set up for a prednisone shot, which is supposed to treat the inflammation, and could work 2 days or 2 years. It’s different for everyone. If this doesn’t work, or doesn’t last for very long I’m going to commit to the surgery. I’ve got a plane ticket to Texas in June already, which I really don’t want to miss. If I miss it because of my back I’m going to be severely upset, I already missed a Hawaii trip.

Anyway, on a lighter note I’ve been taking my time up with some fun things. I finally started reading One Piece, and I’m already up to Chapter 300 or so. I played through Red Dead Redemption, and I’m about 75% done with the second one. I bought a PS2 slim and a few accessories to mod it. I plan to do reviews or tutorials on some of these things. One Piece I might not, just because there’s so much to cover, and so many other people do better jobs than I could.

I also posted the first episode of a series I might complete on Youtube. I played about 30 minutes of Silent Hill. I don’t know if I find it entertaining enough to continue posting it. I’ll probably finish the game eventually though.

Overall, some good and some bad. Just how life works. With Hugo I hope posting will become easier, and I might write more (probably not).

2023 Plans

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 -0400

Happy New Years! If you’ve followed some of my other blog posts you’ll know that I like posting my new year goals and music year-in-reviews.

I mentioned last year that I hurt my back on a trip to Virginia beach, and that has significantly worsened unfortunately. Long story short, I have a herniated disc between the L4 and L5 vertebraes in my back. It started out as mild discomfort, then leading to major pain one morning, then to mild sciatica that I let go undiagnosed/untreated for over a year. I then went kayaking and could not walk without severe pain the next day which prompted me to go to the doctor and after about 3 weeks was told I had herniated the disc. That was in October, and I am still in pretty severe pain. I plan on making a larger article about my recovery process when I’m able to return back to normal life.

I’m 10 pounds lighter than last year though, so I didn’t let my diet totally go out the window. I’ve been maintaining that weight for the entire time.

Overall, 2022 was not a very good year for me. Personal matters, along with this injury have really just brought me down. Music wise, it’s been awesome though. Zach Bryan, Koe Wetzel and Tyler Childers all put out albums, and I found a bunch more artists I love.

I use YouTube Music for the moment, and I did get a year in review thing. It was really buggy, but it claimed that I am in the top 4% of Zach Bryan listeners, and “Starved” by him was my most listened to song. It still does not count downloaded songs because it would have put “Burn Burn Burn” way higher. Koe Wetzel was also high up on my list, and so was Charles Wesley Godwin.

It’s hard to sit and write for a long time, but I plan to make an in depth review of my year in review.

For 2023, I want to finish the transfer of my site to Hugo. It’s mostly done at the moment, but I am still fighting with single pages and the rss feed.

That’s pretty much it for this year. My main resolution/goal is to fix this disc issue, then I will reassess when that is normal.

2022 Summer Music Recap

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 00:00:01 -0500

My job picks up during the summer and beginning fall months, so that’s why I haven’t been as active with posting on this site. I’ve got some plans for the site, mainly converting it to Hugo. Which I’ve gotten decently far with, I just have some decisions to make because it won’t be a 1:1 copy over from what I can tell. I was hoping it would be ezpz and if I weren’t to announce it, no one would be able to tell the difference.

Anyway, since I’ve been busy with work I’ve been listening to a lot of music. And this year has been AMAZING for it. I said I was going to do another post about my summer recap if it came out. From what I’m reading, it did come out, but I missed it :(. Oh well, I’ll catch the next one. I’ll just go over what I’ve been listening to and liking. These won’t be in depth reviews like the American Heartbreak one, but I’m going to list out the albums that I was excited for and what I thought about them. If anyone wants an in depth review on any of these, email me.

The End, So Far - Slipknot

I love Slipknot, and most of whatever Corey Taylor does. I haven’t finished listening to this one yet. Adderall kinda shocked me, it had a groovy kinda feel to it that wasn’t bad, but I didn’t think Slipknot would try (Corey Taylor, maybe, but not Slipknot). I thought their last album was ok, I didn’t like it as much as their previous ones. But I’m always happy to see them do stuff.

Hell Paso - Koe Wetzel

I think someone needs to check on Koe. This record was so incredibly sad. It’s got so many great songs, but they make me question Koe’s mental health. I give it an 8/10. Favorite song is probably “So Low”.

Summertime Blues - Zach Bryan

Zach Bryan can pump out some songs man. A whole new album less than 6 months after American Heartbreak is insane. This one has some really good ones on it that he includes in his concert rotation (I saw him in September). I really like “Motorcycle Drive By”, “Oklahoma Smokeshow” and “Jamie (feat. Charles Wesley Godwin)”. I give this an 8/10 mainly because it STILL doesn’t have “Sunday Afternoon” on it.

Here are some albums that I hadn’t heard before, but aren’t really new.

No Vacancy - Treaty Oak Revival

I hadn’t heard of these guys before until I heard their song “Missed Call” the other day. These guys are super underrated, and they’re going to blow up, there’s no way they don’t. This album is so good, it’s crazy this is their first one. They have a sort of familiar sound, but not at the same time. I highly recommend giving this one a listen.

How the Mighty Fall - Charles Wesley Godwin

I’ve known about CWG through Zach Bryan for a while, and I really liked the song “Seneca Creek”. I wasn’t really a fan of his singing style, it was kinda shaky or warbly or whatever, and wasn’t my cup of tea. I went to a concert with CWG opening for Zach Bryan, so I figured I’d listen to his new album so I wouldn’t be totally lost. This has some really good songs like “Temporary Town” and “Jesse” that I love and was very excited to hear at the concert. This is a smaller artist that I think deserves more recognition. Super fun concert.

I’ve also been listening to more of Keith Whitley, Conway Twitty, and will probably add some Loretta Lynn to my playlist in the next few days (RIP).

2022 Spring Music Recap

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0530

YouTube has started doing seasonal music stats so you get a lot more throughout the year.

Spring seems totally off for me. My most listened to artist SHOULD be Zach Bryan. Because I listened to his new album for at least an hour or 2 a day for about a week. I have 2 theories on why it seems off: They stopped pulling information before Zach’s album came out, and they don’t count downloaded songs in the listens. It could be both, but I think the second explanation is definitely the most plausible and would make the most sense. I didn’t listen to it via radios/the non downloaded versions much/at all.

Anyway, here are some of my stats:

Top Artist: Hank Williams, Jr.

I use to not like Hank Jr. I had only heard “Country Boys Can Survive”, and wasn’t the biggest fan of it, so I just kinda wrote him off totally. But he is actually a really really good musician, and I really like a lot of his other songs. So I got on a Bocephus kick for about a month.

After watching interviews and stuff, I don’t think we’d get along hanging out much (apart from the age difference). He’s really vocal about politics where I’m not, and he used to be a pretty big party guy which I’m not. But I’ll listen to his music all day.

Top Spring Songs:

Stars In The Sky - Kid Cudi
Weatherman - Hank Williams, Jr.
You Should’ve Seen The Other Guy - Nathaniel Rateliff
Do it, Try it - M83
O.D.’d in Denver - Hank Williams, Jr.

Stars In The Sky is a decent song, I’m really surprised it was #1 on my list, I haven’t even seen the sonic movies. I think O.D.’d in Denver should have been higher in the list, because I listened to that song on repeat for like a week.

Do it, Try it was up there because I went to a Letter Kenny live show in Durham and they played it a few times. I guess I listened to the version that wasn’t downloaded more than other songs. It’s good, it gets stuck in my head really easily. Most of the songs on this list do actually.

I love In Memory of Loss by Nathaniel Rateliff, it’s such a good album. I’ll get on a kick every couple weeks and listen to most of the album.

Top Spring Artists

Hank Williams, Jr.
Deer Tick
John Moreland
Dawes
Lucero

There isn’t really anything surprising here, except for the exclusion of Zach Bryan, but that might be for the reasons I mentioned earlier. I’d love to see all of them in concert if I can at some point. Deer Tick is by far my favorite artist on this list, I love everything they put out. I hope they put out another album soon.

Lucero is the one I’m least familiar with, but their self titled album has a ton of great songs. Their singer has a super gritty voice.

Top Spring Genres

Country Music - 47%
Independent Music - 27%
Hip Hop - 8%

I like to thing I listen to a wide arrangement of music, but apparently the numbers say otherwise. But, nothing surprising here to be honest.

There are some neat stats here, I feel like the way I use YouTube Music might be skewing my results a little bit. I might have to do some experimenting in the next few seasons to see if I can narrow down how they generate their stats. If the summer one doesn’t include Zach Bryan, I’ll know they don’t count downloaded plays. If it does include him, I’ll know they stopped gathering data before spring actually ended.

We get to keep struggling!

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 00:00:00 -0400

The team behind Berserk just announced that they are going to continue the serialization, we get to keep struggling along with Guts!

According to the “berserk_project” twitter page, a close friend of Miura had been told the ending of Berserk and a lot of the major plot points that were to occur to get us there.

Link to twitter post

This is really cool timing for me, considering I just got caught up a literal week ago.

Kouji Mori had been friends with Kentaro Miura since they were in high school. They both worked on various manga and anime projects over the years, and would frequently consult each other on their works and get feedback. Miura told Moji that he was the only one to know the ending of Berserk. I think this shows how good of friends they actually were. Based on the statement given from both Moji and Young Animal Studios, I think this is going to be the best shot at doing what Miura would have intended. I know it’s going to be a project filled with love and respect for Miura, and they are going to try to stay as true to the material that Miura had left, and told Moji. Miura’s apprentices are going to be working on it as well.

Though it might not be exactly what Miura had planned, I don’t think anyone else would be qualified to work on this and continue it than the ones that have stepped forward for this monumental task. I am very excited to see more.

Even though I have caught up, and was beginning to write my review, I am going to hold off on until it’s finished. I’m sure I’ll still really like it, and I definitely already respect what they’re doing. But I will probably break it down between Miura and Moji portions just to compare the 2 to see if they are able to keep that same feeling.

Happy Tuesday!

Zach Bryan American Heartbreak Review

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Last Friday (May 20th, 2022) Zach Bryan released his album “American Heartbreak” to the world. I’ve had it as a todo on my reviews page for a while now.

The review is done, you can find it here:

Review

The record is a little long, but I would suggest listening to it for yourself as well (preferably before you read any review).

I'm Reading Berserk

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 10 May 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Despite my better judgement, I decided to start reading the manga “Berserk” by Kentaro Miura, and I am loving it.

I don’t read very many mangas (Is the plural of manga, mangas? Or is it like moose, and it’s still just manga?). When I do read, which isn’t that often, I am usually reading non-fiction philosophy, or some programming/tech book or something. The only manga I’ve actually ended up reading was like the first volume of Dragon Ball Z, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure - Stone Ocean. I enjoyed both of them. I had already seen a little past the Raditz arc in the DBZ anime at the time so I knew what happened. Stone Ocean is really the only one I’ve read and it’s been all new.

It’s not that I’m against reading manga really, I’m just bad at committing to reading or watching long running pieces of media. Dragon Ball is the longest thing I can think of that I’ve watched, which is 567 episodes and like 15 movies, and that took around a year or 2 to finish completely.

Berserk is (currently) 374 chapters, each around 20 pages with some exceptions at the beginning, so 7480 pages roughly. It’s a chunk of books to read. So why did I decide to start reading it?

Berserk is pretty well known as a really good series, and has been running for over 30 years. It has inspired a ton of other projects, such as the Dark Souls series. I felt like I was missing out on some references. I’ve heard the Dark Souls games are pretty fun too, so I may end up playing them at some point.

Ok, if it’s so good, why were you against reading it?

Unfortunately, last year Kenato Miura suddenly passed away due to an aortic dissection at the age of 54. This is very unfortunate for his family and friends, from what I can tell he was a very good person and loved by many.

That being said, Berserk is currently unfinished. The editors would like to be able to continue the series, from what I’ve read, but I’m not sure if Miura had any concrete plans on where it was going. I’m only about halfway through, so I have no idea where they left off. I hope that more content come out for Berserk in some fashion.

I’m probably going to be really sad once it’s over, if they don’t make anymore. For now though, I’m really enjoying it, and am planning on writing a review once it I’m finished.

Something that I do frequently with manga and anime/TV, is I try to finish them too quickly. I’ve sorta gotten to that point with Berserk, and am probably going to have to go back about 5-10 just to make sure I’m understanding everything that’s going on. I’m on chapter 176 I think (depending on where you read it, the numbers can change it seems). I may start writing notes about individual chapters just to keep everything in my mind.

This also opens the door to me potentially trying to read One Piece. My friend has tried and tried to get me to read it for years now, but I’ve always been against it due to the length. I might finally give it a shot, not sure yet.

Stone Ocean delayed

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve talked a lot about Cowboy Bebop on my site, but I have watched some other animes. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is probably my second favorite.

Netflix worked with David Studios on part 6, Stone Ocean, and they were going to release it in sets of episodes over a course of unknown time. The first set was 12 episodes long, and probably like many other people I had it finished in less than a week. This past week, Netflix announched that the next set of episodes will be releasing in the fall of this year…

This is pretty dissapointing. I’ve already read the manga for part 6, so I know what happens, it’s just unfortunate for those who haven’t/don’t want to. This is almost an entire year for 12 episodes.

From what I’ve seen so far, it looks pretty up to par with the rest of the animated parts though, so I hope they are able to keep the same quality throughout. Towards the end, this part was hard to follow (at least for me), so I hope the anime is able to help with that and make it more clear.

People on twitter have started making petitions for Netflix to release episodes weekly, which would be cool I think. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t, unless it could effect their watch times or something.

Funny Reddit Comment

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 03 Feb 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I tried really hard to not look at too many people’s opinions on the live action Cowboy Bebop remake, that way my opinion was more my own and I wouldn’t be parroting the same things thousands of others have said.

But I started browsing r/CowboyBebop today just seeing what was top rated, and found this really funny comment regarding Gren that I wanted to share.

‘Gynecomastia doesn’t really jive with the Twitter crowd, and Netflix really wanted to tick that box’. - Eternal_Indifference

This was in response to a joke about a headline from an article where Mason Alexander was talking about how the live action was “fixing the problems in the anime”.

It made me laugh pretty hard. This is a good joking way to explain my thoughts on the Gren situation (sorta). If you want to read my full opinion, it is linked on the home page of my website.

Reviews Section

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve decided to add a “reviews” section to my website, for general overviews over things I like and want to talk about.

The first thing I’ve decided to review is the live action Cowboy Bebop series. So go feel free to read it.

I’m not going to link it in this post because I’m thinking of moving some stuff around, and I don’t want to have too many broken links in my RSS feed. It’s just on the home page.

2022 Resolutions and plans

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 04 Jan 2022 00:00:00 -0400

Like 2020, 2021 was “…a year”. I think 2021 was slightly worse than 2020 for me personally, but good things did happen, so it’s not all bad. For instance, I had a nephew born at the very end of 2020 and one born in July, so new babies were big wins for the family. They are awesome.

Several friends moved away, unfortunately. But they are moving on to better things and are all going to do really well, I’m very proud of them. They say they’ll come back and visit, I can visit as well, and I still talk to them very frequently.

I didn’t become as involved in this site as I think I wanted. But, I did learn more about systems administration when it comes to hosting services (libreddit, nitter, xmpp, email, etc.), and messed around with OpenBSD and GPG. I haven’t kept up with the blog that well because I don’t have that much to say, and we’ve been really busy with this very large project at work.

Personal goals turned out alright. I’ve grown a little bit as a person, so I think I’m able to look at things in a more healthy way, and can let things go more often. I still struggle with certain things, but I’m able to better identify what about them gives me trouble. I’ve been reading more philosophy books, such as Marcus Aurelius’s meditations, and trying to apply different ways of thinking to my life.

As far as fitness goals, I’m about 5 pounds heavier compared to the start of 2021 (I weigh 205 now), which puts me 35lbs away from where I want to be. I hurt my back on a vacation to Virginia Beach, so I haven’t been going to the gym as often or working as hard while I’m there. Then Christmas also messed my diet and sleep schedule up, which doesn’t help.

That’s my recap for 2021, now on to 2022: I’m going to try being a little bit more lenient on how/when I achieve my goals, and take smaller baby steps.

I want to go to the gym more often and do more cardio, ideally 2x a week.
I want to start eating less and control my portion sizes more. A box of zingers at 1am is not a snack, that’s close to 2 meals from McDonald’s.
I really want to go to SOME concert, every event I’ve tried to go to in 2021 was cancelled. This isn’t something in my control, but I’m holding hope for Zach Bryan or Koe Wetzel.
Finish all the books I have started but not finished.
Begin learning AWS.

I want to keep the list small and manageable, so I’ll leave it at this. Happy New Years everyone, thank you for reading.

2021 Music List

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Last year around this time I posted a couple of the songs that made it into my playlist for youtube music’s-spotify wrapped clone playlist. I said I would do it again if they did. Which they do technically have the playlist for some users… but mine hasn’t been populated yet. I am able to go to the page where it should be, but nothing is there besides a message saying “Nothing to see here”. I’m not sure if this is me being impatient, or if I’m just not going to get one this year. I believe I had watch history turned off on youtube for a while, so that may have had something to do with it according to other users.

Oh well, I know pretty well what I listened to and they don’t give the same sort of statistics that Spotify does anyway, so I’m just going to give you 20 songs/albums that I like and listened to a lot this year. This isn’t really in a particular order, but the ones that come first on the list are the ones that I think of first, so take from that what you will. These also aren’t albums/songs that came out this year, just the ones I listened to a bunch.

Live at the Austin Outhouse - Blaze Foley. Overall a REALLY good album. Can’t recommend it enough.
And It’s Still Alright - Nathaniel Rateliff. I haven’t listened to the album in its entirety, but the song that shares the name is outstanding, very sad and dramatic (in a good way). I think he wrote it after his friend passed away.
Broken Window Serenade - Whiskey Meyers. One of my mom’s favorites. I can sorta play this on guitar too. Follows a guy who likes a girl who has an amphetamine addiction.
Sellout - Koe Wetzel. “Outcast”, “Drunk Driving” and “SideChick” are some of my favorites.
It Gets The Worst At Night - Lucero. You can kind of see I like sad music, this one reminds me of early summer a lot.
In Memory Of Loss (Deluxe Edition) - Nathaniel Rateliff. I’ve been listening to this one a lot recently, I’ve listened to most of it a few times. “Once In A Great While”, “Shroud” and “You Should’ve Seen The Other Guy” are my 3 favorites.
Quiet, Heavy Dreams - Zach Bryan. This is a really good short EP for anyone wanting to get into Zach Bryan. Favorite song is probably “Traveling man”.
Gribblecore - Jeff Squires. I think this was only released a few weeks ago, but this is the funniest thing I’ve heard. Super easy listening, especially if you love King Of the Hill.
Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2 - Various Artists. I don’t think I’ve listened to the first volume all the way through, but I like John Prine’s originals better anyway (except for Unwed Fathers, Deer Tick’s version is my favorite song ever). This was really good, definitely a good tribute. Favorite song is probably Tyler Childer’s cover of “Yes I Guess They Oughta Name A Drink After You” and Sturgill Simpson’s “Paradise”.
I Don’t Mind - Sturgill Simpson. Another sad one, but so good. Sturgill is pretty varied in the kind of music he makes, really good artist. I had already liked one of his songs, but Post Malone covered “You Can Have The Crown” and I did a deep dive on him.
Die Midwestern - Arlo McKinley. I’m not sure if this is something I actually listened to totally in 2021, but I come back to it a lot so I’m going to count it. “She’s always around” is one of the most “old-country” sounding songs that I have heard in a while. “Bag of Pills” is also fantastic.
Elisabeth - Zach Bryan. Both this and DeAnn have some real bangers on them. This one has my favorite Zach Bryan song though, which is “Messed up Kid”. I’ve been listening to DeAnn a little bit more recently though, I think my favorite from that album is “Godspeed”.
Weymouth - Fade Away. I’m a little biased on this one because I work with the drummer, but this a really good song from this year. Definitely a band to keep an eye out for.
Acolyte - Slaughter Beach, Dog. I only found this one about a week ago, but I’ve listened to it around 30 times. Sorta slow in lyrics, but fast in music, it’s weird. I really enjoy it.
Dublin Blues - Guy Clark. This guy is really underrated. This song is super fantastic. He unfortunately passed away in 2016.
Somewhere Along The Way - Dawes. I originally found Dawes on accident, not realizing the lead singer was one of the guys from Middle Brother, but I’m so glad I did. This one is sorta sad, but catchy and I’ll probably have it in my head the rest of the night too.
Pitchin’ Fits - Drayton Farley. I found this guy on TikTok originally I think. “Stoic Faces” is a good one off the same album, but it doesn’t have the punch this one does.
Mercury in Retrograde - Sturgill Simpson. If some of his other stuff didn’t prove how out there he is, and how versatile too, this one probably will. Super catchy.
Drunk Again - William Clark Green. This is a fun one to sing in the car at max volume.
Hotel in Minsk - jonatan leandoer96. One of the most ethereal feeling songs in my collection, I listened to this probably 30 times on repeat for about a week.

If I get my playlist back from youtube, I’ll come back and do another post about it to update it. If not, then I’ll just do something similar to this next year. I’ll be doing a recap on my resolutions from this year in the next few days too, so keep an eye out for that.

Cubing Section

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 30 Oct 2021 00:00:00 -0400

For those who only know me through this website, you may not know that I love Rubik’s cubes and speedcubing. I have added a new section to my site covering some stories and stuff. My friends have started getting more interested in the hobby, so I’ve started remembering stories, and started getting back into some of the community aspects of it. I’m not sure how much of this site I’ll dedicate to cubing stuff, but I may spend some time and write down all the algorithms and stuff I use for OLL/PLL in case anyone wants to know.

You can find the new section here

Luke's newsboat config is amazing

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 21 Sep 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Since I last talked about RSS, I’ve gotten waaay more into it, and it just keeps getting better.

Like I mentioned in my last post from July, I use newsboat as my RSS reader. It is so extensible and cool. Luke Smith has such a nice config setup if you like vim keybindings and kick ass features. You can download videos right from the command line.

I know he made a video about his setup like a year ago, and a year ago before that, but he didn’t actually go into how it works or what dependencies you need I don’t think.

Obviously you’ll want newsboat installed, that’s a given. If you want to use Luke’s config found here, the other dependencies I can think of off the top of my head are as follows:

curl
dmenu
lynx
mpv
sxiv
transmission-cli
urlscan
xclip
xsel
youtube-dl
zathura (and then the addons for it to view pdfs)
task-spooler (AUR)
youtube-viewer (AUR)
Luke’s linkhandler script
Luke’s qndl script
Luke’s dmenuhandler script
Luke’s transadd script
Luke’s peertubetorrent script

I don’t think I’ve missed anything, but it’s possible I have. If you run into an issue, figure it out lol (or email me and I’ll attempt to debug it I guess ;) ). His setup might include some specific things for dwm/dwmblocks which you will probably have to get around if you aren’t running it (I am)

His config is sort of easy to read once you have all of this setup. All of the commands are simply comma and then another key.

I haven’t gotten a few of the commands to work, because I don’t really use them or see a point in me using them.

t - runs the qndl script which downloads the media
a - downloads the video as an audio file
v - opens the video in mpv
w - opens the page in lynx
d - opens dmenuhandler script (I haven’t been able to get this to work, not sure what the intention is)
c - copies the link to the the clipboard (again, I haven’t gotten this one to work)
C - I think this opens just the comments of youtube videos, I don’t see this as all that helpful, but I haven’t gotten it to work and don’t really plan to.
p - runs the peertubetorrent script and downloads the video at 480p I’m assuming.
P - runs the peertubetorrent script and downloads the video at 1080p I’m assuming.

There are other readers like I’ve mentioned in the past, but I think newsboat is perfect. Having all of these features is so cool and handy, you can do all of your content consuming from this one program. GO GET ON THE RSS GRIND NOW!!!

Server maintenance is finished

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0400

After a few weeks of incremental changes I think everything is moved to my new server and working. If something is off/not working, I’ll find it eventually lol.

I lied about downtime

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0400

So if you’ve noticed, the git site and everything is still up and running. I have been pretty busy so I haven’t gotten around to moving everything. I moved Montana’s site over as a test, but when I went to get an ssl cert for it, certbot failed, so I just copied over the cert and keys from the server it was on (not sure this is best practice, but I didn’t want it to be “not secure”).

I’m certain this probably isn’t a certbot issue, but I drop my files in the nginx directory like 99% of tutorials say. I wondered if it had anything to do with a cert already being registered for the site, but I don’t think that would matter. I just had a thought as I was writing this that it might be a permissions thing… damn. Might try during work today with a dummy domain or something. I’m pretty sure certbot just places a file in your sites files and ensures it can find it based on the domain.

I’m going to Raleigh Galaxy con tomorrow with my sister. We were supposed to go meet Corey Taylor, but since Joey Jordison passed he cancelled, which is unfortunate but completely understandable. Even if only for the fact that probably all of his fans that would meet him would want to talk to him about it. Hopefully we’ll get to meet him in the future. This is actually the second time Slipknot/Corey Taylor has cancelled on us, last time was for covid (again, understandable). And Saturday I’m going to a party at my old boss/mentor’s house. So I may not get around to doing any of this stuff until Sunday or maybe mid August.

More About Downtime

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Ok actually, the git site and mail site will be going down, so yeah. Mail will be the first to come back up, but can’t say when the cgit instance will. For now just check me out at these links:

I’ll work on getting all the repos on my site onto these later today probably. The git site probably won’t be down until later this afternoon/evening.

Moving servers

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Hi guys, I’m attempting to move all my websites onto a better server in the next few days. There should be no downtime, but we’ll see.

I’m moving all my jacksontaylor.xyz sites to this new server, along with a friend’s website and my new domain of sbgotg.xyz. I’m hoping to have more services on this server. It actually isn’t anymore expensive than having the 2 servers I have now, but it should be a little bit faster. And it will make everything much simpler to manage.

RSS is really cool

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 -0400

If you’re reading this, obviously you know I have a blog. I don’t post very often, so people probably don’t check my site very frequently. But if “Jackson’s #1 fan” wanted to keep up to date with me and my website, checking my page every single day would probably get annoying. It would get even more annoying if “Jackson’s #1 fan” was also “Tommy’s #1 fan” and was checking his page every day. Checking these pages every single day would be very tedious, and since they’re different platforms there is no way to aggregate them into one feed like YouTube or Twitter is there? RSS feeds and RSS readers are the solution.

RSS - Real Simple Syndication is a format for creating feeds of information, and readers are just programs that read these feeds and present you that information.

RSS is conveyed in XML, and for an example you can go to https://jacksontaylor.xyz/rss.xml. Most feeds will follow the same format and include the same meta tags (date, title, etc.). I say mostly because each site probably does it slightly differently. As in there are some meta tags they use/don’t.

There are many different RSS readers you can use. I have used QuiteRSS on windows, and I use newsboat on linux currently. Both are really good free software programs.

QuiteRSS is a full GUI application, with pretty good customization options, and if you’re just getting started reading RSS this is a pretty good option.

Newsboat on the other hand is much less user friendly, and geared towards more technical users as it is a terminal based program. It’s not that it makes RSS hard, it’s still really simple, it’s just that operating newsboat can be a little unintuitive and a little bare for most people who just want to read their blogs. That being said, it is still my favorite RSS reader.

I won’t go into how to set these up, as QuiteRSS is pretty basic and mostly “click this, click that” and Luke Smith has already made a good video on how to configure newsboat.

As far as actually creating an RSS feed, there are many programs out there (and you can probably just write your own in a text editor), but the one I use is Luke Smith’s lb script. You just write your blog in a text editor, then it generates the necessary links on your site for the html pages, and updates your RSS file.

The more I use RSS for reading blog posts and keeping up to date with different sites, the more I really love it. It is so nice to not have to check 80 different sites to even see if someone has posted, let alone read/watch them.

Odysee (a frontend for LBRY) recently implemented RSS feeds for their channels, which is a big step in getting me totally off of YouTube. I still watch some people on YouTube, so I have their feeds in my reader, but I don’t HAVE to have an account to subscribe anymore.

RSS also has changed my content viewing habits. I look for more niche blogs around the internet. Lots of people have really cool things to say, and sticking to one platform is sort of dumb.

So anyway, go and use RSS! Here is a list of people I enjoy and follow. You can put these into your reader, or visit their site manually.

http://stonetoss.com/comic/feed/ “~StoneToss”
https://xkcd.com/atom.xml “~xkcd”
https://odysee.com/$/rss/@BrodieRobertson/56e86eb938c0b93beccde0fbaaead65755139a10 “~Brodie Robertson”
https://odysee.com/$/rss/@DistroTube/2332c0df0bd5e046db04fe7e3e79f756d35a1523 “~Distrotube”
https://odysee.com/$/rss/@Luke/70d0495ea46072bead82429fb405d60438036524 “~Luke Smith”
https://odysee.com/$/rss/@AlphaNerd/8d497e7e96c789364c56aea7a35827d2dc1eea65 “~Mental Outlaw”
https://odysee.com/$/rss/@RobBraxmanTech/68044a0cf5ed7534872af5149d4e0c43a9a1d06a “~Rob Braxman”
http://www.kroah.com/log/index.rss “~Greg Kroah-Hartman”
https://jacksontaylor.xyz/rss.xml “~Jackson Taylor”
http://lukesmith.xyz/rss.xml “~Luke Smith’s Blog”
https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/feeds/videos.xml?videoChannelId=2 “~Luke Smith’s Videos”
https://notrelated.xyz/rss “~Not Related”
https://wowana.me/blog/feed.atom “~Opal”
http://blog.cleancoder.com/atom.xml “~Uncle Bob”
https://www.romanzolotarev.com/rss.xml “~Roman Zolotarev”
https://www.archlinux.org/feeds/news/ “~Arch site news”
https://landchad.net/rss.xml “~Land Chad news”
https://suckless.org/atom.xml “~Suckless news”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCJHA_jMfCvEnv-3kRjTCQXw “~Binging with Babish”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCfbnTUxUech4P1XgYUwYuKA “~Cold Ones”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC9-y-6csu5WGm29I7JiwpnA “~Computerphile”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCmh5gdwCx6lN7gEC20leNVA “~David Dobrik”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC4USoIAL9qcsx5nCZV_QRnA “~iDubbbzTV”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC-tsNNJ3yIW98MtPH6PWFAQ “~iDubbbzTV2”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtHaxi4GTYDpJgMSGy7AeSw “~Michael Reeves”
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCsnGwSIHyoYN0kiINAGUKxg “~Wolfgang”

One note about the YouTube channels, if you understand how url parameters work you can use the channel ids and format your own if you want to follow other people.

June Update

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:00:00 -0400

If you saw my last youtube video(which I haven’t posted to odysee yet, oops), you’ll know that I’ve been reading some Uncle Ted recently. I’m planning on doing some more videos about his writings, specifically some of the later paragraphs in ISAIF and then a video on “The System’s Neatest Trick” as I think they are pretty interesting.

Ted was very afraid of genetic engineering it seemed. Nothing wrong with that, I believe that being engineered beings would be an awful situation. It was just something that sort of struck me in a weird way, and was something that stuck out while I was reading.

GNOME sucks

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 -0400

That’s pretty much it. Not a big fan. I tried switching to xfce on my work laptop and had a bunch of issues too. Once things kind of calm down I might take a day and just install arch and use dwm.

March Update

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Last time I updated the site I was having some issues with nginx and all that jazz. I’m still having issues with that from what I can tell, it’s doing some redirecting it shouldn’t be, but I’ve kind of put that on the back burner for now. I still host my git site, my libreddit instance, this site, my mail server and a friend’s website I made for her. I wish I had a nitter instance still, but I’ve been usng a different one for now. I also ventured and bought another vps for a wireguard vpn. I don’t use it for anything nefarious because it’s still in my name, it’s mostly for when I’m connected to a network I don’t necessarily trust. That was dead simple, I’m not sure if that’s me getting better at following directions or if the software is just that simple, but I have spun it up in less than 20 minutes on 2 separate occasions.

Besides trying to get that sorted, I got 99% of my music downloaded and tagged from youtube music. Something like 3000 songs to tag was a huge undertaking, and I’m still gathering more. I’m looking to write something to help with sorting what I download into folders of artist - album - songs, and then going back and applying the right metadata. Youtube-dl cuts off part of the title, so it’s impossible to use that to tell what song it is (I think), and there isn’t any metadata about the song.

I also would like to keep my song in sync on 2 or 3 computers (thinkpad, server, and a usb drive for my vehicle). This I think I can rig something together with git/patch and a shell script for telling what’s changed, and only transferring the songs that have actually changed. I’ll probably make a post about that when I have the solution in my head. Or if there is already something for it, please let me know.

As for work stuff, I’ve started working on a large typescript project. It’s also in a more agile fashion using some new ticketing software and processes. I can’t say I really like typescript yet, but I can say that this project got me a linux laptop at work (which I’m over the moon about, WSL is ass and a pain in the ass to use). I might do some posts on things I learn over the course of this project. For instance, instead of keeping like a repo with all the sql and how the tables are laid out, we’ve essentially written code to make the tables for us (I think migrations is the word). Not sure how big a benefit this is, but it can help with reproducing errors and exact setups maybe?

Git site is going down first

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0400

The git site is probably going to be the first thing to go down. I don’t think this is the actual problem, but it’s at least part of it. So I’m going to try redoing the entire thing. CSS and everything shouldn’t be effected.

Probable downage

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I’m going through and trying to clean up/fix my nginx config and stuff. So probably a lot of my services are going to be messed up and stuff. Email is included in this. For the time being, you can email me at jacksontaylorxyz at protonmail.com

I’ll make another post when I’m finished messing with stuff. Hopefully I’ll have a nitter instance by the end of it.

Libreddit and more

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Hi guys, for probably a few years now, people have been talking about the “Big Tech Exodus”. This is essentially a move from using large centralized tech platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google among others, to using smaller decentralized platforms. The move is for reasons such as privacy and fear of censorship (in the case of social media). With the recent ban of Trump on all major platforms, Parler from Amazon’s web services, and the Facebook Cambridge Analytica situation, this move isn’t without reason (Stallman warned us!).

There are new social media platforms being made like Mastodon and Peertube, which are Twitter and YouTube like. These sites are examples of federated software. With federated software you can host your own instance, and have it “talk” to others. So people on my instance of mastodon could still see toots(tweets) from your instance. But I can never really be banned from the platform totally. I can just join a new instance. Federation is one benefit, the other is that these platforms are libre software. So if you host your own instance, you know exactly what is happening to your data.

But some people don’t want to delete their social media accounts, or they have friends and family that won’t switch, or whatever reason. There are solutions that allow you to still use/view these sites while having better privacy. There is free software that you can host yourself to act as a proxy between you and the original website. Libreddit, Nitter, and Invidious are some examples. These instances provide better privacy because if you host it on a vps or some other way: your actual IP isn’t shown, a massive amount of data isn’t sent to these companies, and if you have multiple users using the same instance then the browsing habits are much more erratic and obscure. There are public instances that you can use too.

I have decided to host my own instances of some of these sites. I currently have Libreddit working, which is for Reddit, but I will have to wait for Nitter and Invidious because I messed up while making the certs. You all reading are most welcome to use it. If it becomes too much of a bandwidth hog or anything I might have to figure something else out.

I want to make a Video talking more about the Big Tech Exodus, but I’m still getting my thoughts together on it. For now, here is a good link of some videos and alternative platforms and videos detailing the dangers of big tech.

First Video Posted

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I posted my first video on LBRY and YouTube. I’ll probably try to post another one this weekend with some substance, and I’m going to work on the contact me page that I menitoned in the video as well.

If you’re using a terminal rss reader or something, here are the links in plain text: YouTube: https://youtu.be/kgn_0prtuSY LBRY/Odysee: https://odysee.com/@JacksonTaylorxyz:d/welcome_to_my_lbry:6

Thank you for checking them out, I hope this turns into something that can help some people.

I Might Start Posting Videos

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve been thinking recently about creating videos to go along with the site. Not many people like reading long drawn out posts about stuff. So some people might like my voice being drug out for several minutes instead. I would be using my phone and potentially recreating the same feel as Luke Smith’s boomer rants in the woods series he has.

One of the main questions I have is where I would post these videos. I will most likely use YouTube AND LBRY. This is something I’ll probably talk about more in my first video, as I prefer libre software and more open platforms. I would really like to have a peertube instance, but that’s a lot of work/money for somethign that I haven’t even started.

Once I setup my channels, I’ll include them in a contact me page or something on my home page, and make a post about it. If you have any tips, opinions, topics you want me to talk about you can email me at jackson [at] jacksontaylor [dot] xyz

2021 Resolutions and Plans

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Happy New Years (6 days late)! 2020 was… a year. It wasn’t all bad for me to be honest. Despite the pandemic and quarantines, I had some very cool experiences and have met a lot of people. Some of which I consider to be very dear and close friends, and hope to continue to know for years to come. Both professionally and socially I was challenged. I went to Vegas for work, and Minnesota for pleasure. All while managing to avoid the virus. 2020 humbled me in many ways that I am still learning from, and expect to be learning from for months to come.

I hope 2021 has more cool adventures and more opportunities to grow. This will be the first year that I am really hosting this website, and hope to become more involved in it.

Here are some of the things I want to do with it specifically:

More blogs on my thoughts and beliefs in technology
Workflow showcases
I really want to set up my own searx instance. I have had so many issues getting it going, it’s insane.
Host my own IRC server?

I don’t expect this site to get much traction at all, it’s really just a learning project. If it helps someone out in some way though, that’s cool.

A part from site specific things here are some more general computer things I want to accomplish this year:

Learn more about general security with Linux (GPG, kernel hardening, system administration)
Look more into BSD(Probably GhostBSD or OpenBSD)
Better manage my home server(RAID, Backup solution, Plex->Jellyfin, local git(lab) server)
Finish and publish more personal projects for my git site

For personal/fitness goals, if I end the year feeling better physically than I do now, and don’t lose any friends or anything, I’ll be happy.

Until I setup an IRC server or a mastodon instance or something, you can contact me at jackson [at] jacksontaylor [dot] xyz if you have any suggestions for the site or questions. Thanks for reading.

2020 Music List

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Up until this year, I had been using Google Play for all of my music. I had to switch because of the platform going away, so my family switched to YouTube Music maybe in the summertime, I can’t remember. Something that’s cool about this platform is they do the “Most listened to artists” generated playlist. I really love music, and I’ll always want to talk about what I’m listening to. Here are the top 20 songs from this list (99 in total).

Come Join the Murder - The White Buffalo
Afterthought - Joji
Sweet Music Man - Waylon Jennings
Seven Spanish Angels - Willie Nelson & Ray Charles
Harlem River Blues - Justin Townes Earle
Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain - Willie Nelson
Cherry Red Wine - Max Gomez
The End is Not in Sight - The Amazing Rhythm Aces
Blue Umbrella - John Prine
Mr. Hollywood - Joji
Mennonite Girl - John Gorka
Patient is the Night - The Blasting Company
Crazy As a Loon - John Prine
Nutshell - Alice in Chains
Break My Heart Sweetly - John Moreland
Late Night - Shakewell
Today I Started Loving You Again - Merle Haggard & The Strangers
Speed of the Sound of Loneliness - John Prine
Black Eyes Blue - Corey Taylor
Lemonade - Gucci Mane

I’m assuming that these are songs that I listened to online, and not my downloads. Deer Tick (my favorite band) isn’t in here until maybe 30-40, and I listen to them most every day. This was pretty cool to see though, if I keep this site up for a few years, and I keep YouTube Music, I’ll keep doing this.

Git Hooks

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:00:00 -0400

I’ve been looking for a good way to develop this site for a while. Since it’s all static HTML, I really didn’t want to setup jenkins or any sort of massive CI/CD solution. I wanted to do a bunch of things that ended up having security issues(I think, I’m not actually sure), or were just overall dumb.

I finally found out about git hooks, and that is what I’m going to continue using for now. You can set up scripts both on remotes and locally to run on specific events. For example you can run unit tests when you go to push to a remote, and if they fail you can stop the push from going through. The way I am using it is to copy my repository into the folder I’m serving whenever new commits are pushed.

It seems to be working well, it’s kind of messing with my rss feed because I would write my blog posts on my server and post it there. That’s why my last blog about my year end playlist results is probably seen as updated or something.

This makes writing blog posts way easier. So I might start posting more, for real.

I got my pinephone

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 00:00:00 -0400

This ended up being way longer and way more review-y than I intended. I’ve been writing this for a few hours…

TLDR: it definitely isn’t average consumer ready yet. The software is VERY buggy. The hardware isn’t terrible though. But it was worth what I paid I think. If you know and love Linux, you may be interested.

I am in no way a phone reviewer, or tech reviewer. I am literally one of the worst people to ask anything about hardware. This is just something I think is interesting, and wanted to share a little bit about. I might write something later on if there is something cool I find out about it, or I do something cool with it myself.

I ordered a manjaro edition pinephone a while back and I actually didn’t realize I had gotten the tracking number back in October, so it was kind of a surprise to get it. I thought they were going to be shipped out in mid-late November. I’ve had it for 2 days, and I’ve messed around with it a little bit, but nothing too extensive yet.

The build quality of the phone surprised me a bit. It is made of plastic, but it doesn’t feel as cheap as I would’ve thought. I remember reading that it was the same size as my phone (OnePlus 7 pro, 6.7"), but that didn’t really register in my mind, so I was surprised at how big it was. It’s lighter than my phone, but that’s probably due to the plastic. I love that it has a removable battery, hardware kill-switches, a 3.5mm headphone jack, expandable storage, and USB-C. It’s nice that these features exist, and are sort of a standard on Linux phones currently (Librem has them as well). Hopefully this sets a standard for other phones to come. The LCD screen did have 1 dead pixel, which isn’t noticeable. Only when the screen is black can you really see it. I got the convergence edition, which came with an extra GB of RAM (3GB total), and a “dock”. It’s more like a USB hub than a dock. It’s made of metal, has 2 normal USB ports(I think they’re USB 2.0), an HDMI port, and ethernet. And connects to the phone via USB-C. It also has a port to charge it while in use (I assume it charges it, though the USB ports may be powered from this). The battery life is kinda meh, it takes a while to charge. I haven’t used it in a setting to drain it completely yet. The cameras aren’t great either, but that’s expected. They take pictures though, I know that wasn’t a thing until pretty recently.

Like I said at the start, the software is REALLY buggy, but I’ve only used the manjaro phosh build. There are other operating systems and interfaces you can use. On my list to try is a pure arch variant, Postmarket, and probably UBPorts/Ubuntu touch. I don’t think I will be happy with the software until it’s waaaay more lightweight. Something like xfce maybe, or a tiling WM would be cool (Though using a tiling wm on a phone would be really weird). Anyway, the software is actually faster than I thought it would be for sure. But it can be really hit or miss when it crashes, or which apps actually work. For example: I haven’t been able to change the background because the file manager used doesn’t fit to the screen of the phone. I’m assuming it’s trying to decide the resolution and gets hung, because it eventually does close. The file manager on it’s own is fine, so I’m not sure if this is specific to the settings app. I haven’t plugged a sim card into it yet, so I can’t comment on the quality of calls and texts. Web browsing is kind of slow, but usable I guess. Since manjaro is arch based, you have access to pacman and even the aur. The included terminal emulator I think is the same you’d find on regular GNOME, it’s ok. I think it’s hilarious I can install Go and vim on my phone though. I don’t really recommend using vim with your phone’s keyboard though, that is really strange and kind of a pain. I think if I were to find a lightweight distro and interface, I would probably just use it like a laptop/mini desktop. With the dock, I can hook it up to a keyboard, mouse and monitor. This is also severely buggy. On first boot, it did not work. After a reboot, it works sometimes. It’s probably just an issue with Xorg or Wayland(not sure which it uses). I may just be missing something with keyboard shortcuts or something, but if an app opens up off screen (Which usually happens), I can’t move it. Crashing and resolution issues are my main concerns though, other than that the performance is decent.

If you care about privacy (incremental anyway, all phones are surveillance devices by nature), then this is probably something you’ll want to at least keep up with a little bit. Purism, the creator of the Librem 5, is coming out with a “private” celluar plan as well. Not sure if that will work on phones besides the Librem 5 though. I imagine it will, but I can’t confirm. With the inclusion of the kill switches, and the potential to run 100% libre software, you can be reasonably sure that your data isn’t going anywhere it shouldn’t be.

I’m happy with what the phone offers currenlty, and I’m pretty confident it will get better with time. If I decide to test a sim card in it, and the calls are alright, I think I’d call it worth the $200(I can’t say for sure the extra GB is necessary, but 50% more is nothing to scoff at) for someone who wants a cheap phone. It’s overall not really any worse than an android phone like 5-10 years ago. If you’re not familiar with Linux, you probably won’t have any issues picking up the phosh interface, they make it kind of hard to mess anything up. If you are familiar with Linux, I see some cool possibilities for its use.

Cgit is awesome

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Hey guys, I don’t really have much to say in this post. Just letting those who care that you can now actually clone my repos from my git site. I figured this out today. Normally, if I wanted people to push and make changes I’d have to add their ssh keys to the site. But until now, I didn’t know how to set it up to allow “anonymous” clones via a git or http link, and I couldn’t figure out the right way to explain what I wanted to people. I thought I was gonna have to do something weird with gitolite or some other program to accomplish this, but if you use the clone-url and enable-http-clone options in your cgitrc file, it allows you to clone over https. So now if you run shell git clone https://git.jacksontaylor.xyz/repo.git it should work. I haven’t tested it with all of my repos, but for dwm it works.

For dwm, my changes are on a different branch (jackson_additions). So if you’re interested in my changes specifically, when you clone it you’ll have to checkout that branch.

I also have realized that the css still isn’t quite right in some spots on the git site, I’ll have to go back and fix that too.

Changes mostly done

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0400

The change over to cgit was actually pretty painless. Even the server configuration was actually really simple too. I’m still not terribly happy with some of the styles on the page, but it definitely matches closer than the white did. I’m probably going to be messing with that later on today, or tomorrow. One of my friends recently has started doing logo designs and stuff, so I may commission something from them for a very simple logo.

Changes to the git site

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0400

I’m planning on switching to cgit from gitweb today. Gitweb is ok, but cgit seems a little cleaner and easier to deal with. I’m trying to integrate it with my stylesheet for the main site. This may break stuff in both places.

I may make a post about it once I am finished.

Why I think learning Vim is a good idea

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Wed, 19 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0400

I said that the next blog I posted was going to be about the technology I use at work. I do use Vim, but I don’t use it as my main editor, although I’m pretty comfortable with it (I’m using Vim to write this right now). C# is just so connected to Visual Studio it is unfeasible to switch. I do use vim everyday for changing configuration files or reading code when I’m already on a terminal. But I’m not here to explain my tools or processes yet though, and this doesn’t pertain specifically to vim.

The title is a little misleading, as I really want to explain my thinking in learning the basics of the tools that are available to you. Vim being a very common example. This isn’t about the bump in performance you can gain as a developer (you’ll probably be way slower at the start than with the tools you use now), and this also isn’t targeted specifically to developers (though I use that term a lot). This is about being prepared for the situations you can encounter, knowing what tools are at your disposal as well as their use cases, and expanding your knowledge to make you a better developer.

In this case when I say learn the basics, I really mean the absolute minimum for how a technology works. One of my favorite teachers would say “enough to be dangerous”. With the example of vim, I consider the basics as knowing how to open a file, write some text, navigate the file, and save your changes. Going further is totally up to you and your workflow, that goes a little further than point 3 and this post. I may go specifically into how I feel about vim in a different post.

In software development specifically, we can get very complacent and used to our tools and although I am a firm believer in knowing your tools inside and out, and customizing it to exactly what makes sense to you, there are situations where you won’t have your normal set of tools and configurations. When you are connected via ssh to a server or working in a tty, for example. Having knowledge of the common tools that are on every Linux distribution (or at least in their repositories), and knowing the use cases is a big plus in never being surprised and remaining productive.

In the past, when Unix was large and the GNU project started, there were only command line tools. A lot of the GNU tools(which were remade from the tools included in Unix) are still very applicable and useful in my every day work. Instead of spinning up a huge program like Visual Studio, or even a comparatively light tool like VSCode, to search for an exact string of text, you can just use grep and find the same text based on a general pattern, all without leaving the terminal. There are many more examples, even for more specific use cases like reversing text or sorting it. Instead of reinventing the wheel, or doing it by hand, knowing that these tools even exist can save a lot of time(I said this wasn’t about any performance gains, but I kind of lied).

My last point is learning for the sake of learning. I really like learning about computers, and how different technologies work. Anytime I see a situation where I know I can use a new tool, I get a little giddy. So on one hand, it is for fun, and to satisfy my need to tinker. On the other hand, learning these tools keeps your options, and mind as a developer(or general computer user), open and helps you with your problem solving skills. This is more of a lifestyle point because personally, I believe you should be constantly learning, even the most basic concepts, because you’ll never know where it can come in handy.

I’ve never been a strong writer (or been able to explain my points in a way that makes sense to most people), so excuse the awkwardness of this first post. I can’t really say it’ll get better from here, but I’ll try. If you aren’t someone who is familiar with much of what I’m talking about, but still read the whole thing, I really appreciate it!

New Blog

jackson@jacksontaylor.xyz (Jackson Taylor) — Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0400

New Blog Hello everyone! I’ve decided to start writing a blog. This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for a few months now. When I say blog I don’t mean like a “keep up with me” sort of thing. I’m really a boring person. I’ll probably write about varying topics, and sort of whatever I feel like. It’s my blog, I’ll write what I want.

I think for my first real blog post I may write about some of the tools I use when programming or getting work done, and what I think about them. I may stretch into some further concepts such as software bloat and the dangers I see in it.