Having 100%’d the achievements, I felt like I was pretty done with the game, but one little thing kept bugging me: the last of the three statues, which don’t have an achievement other than the feeling!

I’d managed the 24 Fear Overworld run component while playing through, but the 32 Fear Underworld was pretty darn Hard. After a bit of time off from the game I found myself doing a single 32 Fear Underworld run every few nights, noticing what was making it hard and what I felt like I could deal with, and then tonight after switching weapons and adjusting a crucial component of the Fear, voilà!!

I think the Fear is the bit that most needs “solving” to make this completeable (and to a much, much lesser extent, Arcana), so I’m linking them instead. Arcana and Fear — don’t look (or keep reading) if you wanna figure out what works for you on your own!

ROT-13 discussion of what I found key:

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In no particular order:

• Finally learned Elixir/Phoenix.
  • Wrote this blog engine, nóssa (which I’m slowly giving some love again), chog, and Pipa!
• Finally learned Kubernetes.
  • Went through about 3½ cluster topologies before settling on the current thing. etcd really is a temperamental baby, huh.
  • Wrote enbi, which ties up the [anything]–Nix→OCI–k8s trifecta in an unholy and altogether beautiful way. 5 months later and updating anything I run in my cloud is still just a matter of bumping a SHA and pushing to git; no manual messing around with a registry, building images, pushing images, any of it. It just keeps on running without a care in the world. k8s is the SharePoint you can really love.
• Learned to do simple CAD; designed and printed a bunch of things to improve our home.
• Authored 460 commits on Comrak and shepherded 107 commits from 25 contributors — thank you!!
• Played a lot of games! Long COVID means I have so much less thinking time in a day.
  • 100%’d a few games: Nova Drift, Hades, and Hades Ⅱ. I really recommend them. Hades Ⅱ was such an incredible follow-up.
  • Also got to 5BSC in Dead Cells and collected every outfit (except for Dracula’s because fuck him). Turns out it has an adorable live-action adaptation!?
  • Replayed Cave Story.
  • Started a new Stardew Valley save and actually reached the “end game”. (Year 3 day 1, all candles!) Previous attempts never made it past the first season.
  • Counts as gaming: did Advent of Code for the first time in many years. It was fun and stretched my brain a few times (except for the disappointment that was Day 12), and I topped the work leaderboard. :)
  • Got myself back into Silver in LoL in the first half of the year, largely pivoting into ADC! (16–7 on Ashe in S2025 :3 But also 43–36 on Nami.)
  • As so many others have discovered — the year of Linux on the desktop is finally here, and a lot of it is thanks to Valve! You can’t imagine my shock at some games running better on Linux on chipset graphics than an M3 Max. That which isn’t thanks to Valve is largely thanks to the two corporate competitors being determined to turn their flagship products into complete and utter shit as rapidly as possible. We can only rely on ourselves.
• Saved 512 bookmarks.
• Filed three police reports for theft u_u
• Visited Canberra for the first time.
• Quit medicinal cannabis — cost/benefit crossed the line — and spent months in medication hell figuring out a new way to make sleep possible. Made it, though (guanfacine).
• 25 doctor/specialist/test appointments. No improvements to overall pain incidence.
• Finished up at Radiopaedia. Did a pen-testing contract. Decided to try full-time work again, after nearly 6 years.
• Got a pushbike and used it a bunch!
• Watched quite a bit of 非诚勿扰, lots of LoL, and (new for me) a couple CS2 tournaments.
• Watched consensus reality go to hell.
• Loved my wife.

What’d I intend?

• Keep up Duolingo: did that! I got every monthly badge, meaning I did at least 600 “quests” in the year. I found that was a nice way to ensure I spend actual decent time learning.
• Daily meditation: I saw that through to day 280 or so, averaging 15 minutes a day.
• Home-cooked meals: whew. Mid-year was a bit heck for that, but we’ve been doing so much better lately!
• Deliver the Ava MVP: called that spike in February.
• Secondary project: ended up fielding a lot of those!
• Keep learning: really well done! (Not much from that list, though I did end up using Quint at work to elucidate problems with an existing design and prove a better one, and out of luck encountered a problem where I knew both (a) that an SMT solver would solve it generally, and (b) how to instrument one to do that!)

Two weeks gets incremental improvements.

Not much to report lately. DDR continues to be fun, though I think given these timings I’m past due for replacing the control board in the pad so I can get better than 8ms resolution on steps.