Adventures in International* travel.

Posted on October 18, 2026 by baudattitude

I love visiting Japan.  This is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone who’s read any previous posts on this blog, or really to anyone who even glances at the header image.  I acknowledge that I am very weeb-coded.

I don’t, however, love airports.  I’m not quite as nihilistic as the Douglas Adams bit on airports from his Dirk Gently novels, but they’re not really places I want to spend a lot of time, especially when dealing with security lines or the ruinous prices American airports ask you to pay for food.  I’m also not fond of the constant squeeze in economy class.

So, in the last few years, I’ve put some effort into making the process less awful, starting with doing enough flying and spending enough on my preferred* airline’s mileage card that I’ve gotten a bit of a boost in status and can more easily get better seats.  I also have lounge access which is a great perk and solves the food problem and we will not discuss the yearly fee associated with the credit card that gets me this access.

When I say preferred*, by the way, I recently looked at a statement and realized that the reason I have a flier account with them in the first place is that they’re the airline my company used when they would send me places back in the 90s.  So I’ve been flying them for 30 years based on what some HR person decided back then.

So that’s great, but none of it addresses the security lines which are the first source of stress when embarking on travel.

Shout out to Minky Momo for teaching me the word “embarkation”, by the way, though until roughly 10 seconds ago I thought it was spelled with a C.  Anime is educational, y’all.

To deal with those, there are a couple of “Trusted Traveler” programs, and since one of the benefits of my ruinously-expensive credit card is reimbursement for the application fee for Trusted Traveler programs I decided that it would be a good idea if my wife and I could both breeze through security using them.

So, we sent in our applications, got our “conditional approval” emails, and were suddenly faced with the problem of the final step, which is scheduling an appointment for an interview to finish the process.  This isn’t easy to do, because there aren’t a ton of offices where we can get this done anywhere near us and the appointments are booked months in advance and difficult to get, especially if you want to schedule two interviews on the same day.

But, there’s a loophole.  You can do what’s called “Enrollment on Arrival”, which is where you get an interview when you’re returning from parts foreign.  No scheduling needed, just show up with your conditional approval and documentation and sit down and wait for a CBP agent to talk with.  If you find yourself in our situation, I recommend this.  If you live in a major city with an international airport and can schedule an interview locally… maybe do that instead.

Hence, our plan:  We would fly up to Vancouver, which is technically international in that Canada appears to still be a sovereign nation and get our interviews done in the tiny piece of the Vancouver airport terminal that is officially US soil.  All in one weekend, so I wouldn’t need to miss work.  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, it started with damn near missing our flight thanks to a massive security line, which would have been a terrifically ironic turn of events, but somehow we made it on to the plane and landed in Canada and made it to our room at the airport hotel.

I mean, the AIRPORT HOTEL.  Getting to watch planes from the hotel room was pretty neat and the soundproofing was impeccable.

My wife had stayed up all night out of an abundance of caution, so she immediately crashed – that’s probably not a good word to use in reference to anything near an airport, come to think of it – leaving me with nothing to do but explore a strange city’s train system.

Serious kudos to Vancouver for having pretty decent transit, at least from my limited experience.  I had a little trouble getting from the Canada Line to the Expo Line, but that was entirely on me and my inability to notice signs.  I went aboveground instead of realizing that I should be connecting underground, and spent a little time trying to find the next station from the wrong layer of the map, as it were.

I at least got a brief walk around Vancouver’s waterfront and some pictures of neat buildings.

No idea what these are.  Would be hilarious if they were for some really utilitarian process and I’m just taking pictures of, like, a water treatment plant or something.

Why do some of the most evil corporations, ones I interact with on a daily-to-weekly-basis, get the coolest looking towers?

I eventually did figure out the Expo line and took it to a video game store that had shown up on the first page of Google results, which isn’t the best research method in the world but paid off on this occasion.

Just look at that window.  This is a store that commissioned an artist back in like 2001, when someone might have thought that Ulala belonged on the same couch as Chun Li, and has just stuck with it through the years. It’s glorious, and the stock on hand was pretty impressive as well.  I’m not sure anyone will pay Modern Retro Prices for a Vic-20 RAM expansion cartridge, just as one example, but if you’re the target customer for that they have a couple in a glass display case, with enough other rarities that I think everyone is guaranteed to see at least one Holy Grail for their own collection.

I was sorely tempted to drop like $120 USD on a collector’s edition of “Food Girls”, because it’s a quirky little management sim that I quite enjoyed, but common sense prevailed and I just bought a few very cheap Xbox 360 games.

I don’t know that I’ll ever be back to this little corner of Canada, but I’ll make it a stop if any future trips do bring me this way.

The next morning we packed up, headed down to security, got to US Customs and were directed to some modestly-comfortable chairs to wait our turn for an interview.  The space isn’t terrifically private, though they do try to at least give the person being interviewed a little space, so I was hearing just enough of the interview of the person before us to make me worry because she was being absolutely grilled about every little thing on her application.  The officer spent the best part of an hour on her before sending her on our way, and I braced for some serious bureaucracy…

…and then our interview was “give us your fingerprints.  Do you still live on X street? Your cards will be in the mail in two or three weeks”

It was, well, rather anticlimactic.  I AM NOT COMPLAINING.

In the end, it felt like a very good use of a weekend.  I’m sure that the 20 or 30 minutes per trip it saves us on future air travel will eventually add up to more than the time we spent on the process.

 

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In which, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of wanting to say nice things about Microsoft.

Posted on October 15, 2026 by baudattitude

I should probably start by saying that I don’t, in general, have a very positive view of Microsoft right now.  I’ve moved almost entirely to using macOS and Linux at home, and the computer that CAN still dual-boot into Windows does so only because I occasionally need to update firmware on hardware that needs a Windows app to do so.

Yes, I’m sure I could probably make these work using WINE.  This is a situation where I will sacrifice ideological purity for the simplicity of turning on the laptop and trying to remember what key to mash for the boot selector.

I should probably make a label to help with that, come to think of it.

There.  That’s one problem solved.

Despite having purged Windows mostly from my life, I do still have an Xbox console.

Well, two of them.  There’s an Xbox 360 and an Xbox One X.  I’ll ignore the one that’s old enough to drink in favor of the one that is… well, actually, it’s nearly a teenager at this point.  That’s a sobering thought.

One of the first nice things I’ll say about Microsoft is simple: many of the nice things I have to say are applicable even if you have a decade-or-more-old Xbox One console.  There are probably some improvements that are Series-only, but since I no longer own a Series console I’m not sure if I know about those ones.

And, actually, the positive thoughts I have are largely centered around support for older consoles and older games.  This has kind of been percolating in the back of my head ever since I booted up Dead Space to get a screenshot for comparison purposes for an article I wrote a few weeks ago – my Xbox One X happily booted the 18-year old game and downloaded my save data from when I played it shortly after release.  If I’d wanted to, I could have picked up directly from where I left off.

Well, technically I’m not sure if you can do anything in Dead Space after you see the ending credits.  That’s beside the point.

In addition, I took the screenshot using the “Share” button on the controller, and that’s a button that wasn’t present on the Xbox One controller.  Connecting a Series controller to a Xbox One not only works but gives the old console a new feature – granted, a fairly small feature, but I take a lot of screenshots.

That screenshot then showed up in the Xbox app on my phone and also uploaded automatically to OneDrive.  I’m not a fan of Microsoft’s constant attempts to get its customers to move all of their documents to OneDrive, but for the purpose of being a cloud storage platform for transferring files, it’s worth the two bucks a month I spend for 100GB of storage.

Both Sony and Nintendo have feature parity when it comes to “your screenshots automatically show up on your phone” but the process of actually getting them out of their respective apps and into my photo library is annoying and you have to do it a few images at a time.

Going back to the backwards compatibility… I’ll gladly admit that it has some glaring omissions (Why can I not play Soulcalibur IV, or buy Arkham Origins?), but it’s still pretty huge for keeping access to my older games.  I understand they’re even implementing some form of this in Windows, but can’t speak to that myself.

Finally, the new disc to digital thing is neat.  It wasn’t a big deal for my personal needs, because I only owned five physical Xbox One games and only one was compatible with it, but it’s a really nice thing for anyone with a big library of discs and I give them extra credit for letting people get digital licenses for Series games using an Xbox One, considering how many Series devices don’t include a disc drive.

It would be amazing if it extended to Xbox 360 and original Xbox discs, but I understand there are a couple of technical issues there.  These older discs didn’t have the individual serial numbers that Microsoft uses to assign rights to your account, and I seem to recall that there’s no provision to remove rights for an Xbox 360 game from your account once it’s in there – that’s why I still have all of my old Games With Gold licenses despite not having subscribed to Xbox Live in years.

It’s a shame that these very gamer-friendly features haven’t really translated to success, to the point where “Xbox” is almost an afterthought when it comes to consoles now.  In the last forty years, we’ve seen plenty of examples of what happens when the market leader doesn’t feel like they have any real competition, and it’s never a good thing.  The new management seems to have remembered that they actually make and sell gaming hardware, and that they shouldn’t keep paying companies that don’t actually make games, so maybe they can turn things around and become a slightly-more-competitive option.

Look, I’m keeping my optimism to realistic levels here.

Anyway, that’s been a very weird post to write.  I’m sure I’ll have something to rant about later, but for now it’s just good vibes.

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Continuing the true and only slightly-embellished story of my descent into madness; more adventures in home networking

Posted on October 10, 2026 by baudattitude

Yesterday, I commented that an entirely foreseeable and preventable chain of events had led to me spending entirely too much time and money moving my home network over to Ubiquiti gear.

I should note at this point that I tend to use “Ubiquiti” and “UniFi” interchangeably, and I should probably watch that because there probably is a distinction, but at the same time I tend to use “gigabit” without looking up whether it really should be “gibibit” because the only people that care strongly about whether gigabit or gibibit is accurate are the same sort of people who smugly tell you that Pluto is not technically a planet and this is a somewhat strained way of saying that getting it right was going to be too much work.

I also touched on the idea that even having a “home network” as opposed to a simple monolith leased from the cable company that handles all of your home connectivity needs is, in itself, an entirely unnecessary thing for realistically 99% of people in the modern developed world.

Nonetheless, I have one and I decided it needed to be made up largely of components from a single manufacturer that would naturally work seamlessly and in harmony to make our connected home the best possible connected home it could be.

I have never been more wrong.

To be fair to Ubiquiti, the cracks in the system didn’t become obvious until I decided that a perfectly-functional network could be …better.

Actually, if I could just buy a collar that would give me powerful electric shocks whenever I thought or said some variation of the phrase “well, it’s working now but I think I can improve it” it would save me so much time at the cost of only occasional searing pain.

To be specific.  As I mentioned previously, I’d gone from a very small UniFi setup to a rather complex one due to a combination of factors involving having access to a budget that needed to be spent and wanting to have a fallback for the incredibly rare occasions when my primary Internet connection was no longer available.

I feel I have to make that clear – as much as I will occasionally say unkind things about the state of my cable service, if I look at it rationally I need to acknowledge that Xfinity manages a very high level of uptime.

I just wanted it to be better.  (see above)

Specifically, I wanted to move the UniFi controller (the “secret sauce” that makes their gear worth the premiums) from one device to another.  I had an Express 7, which is an all-in-one router + WiFi solution and which was rather nice but suffered from its physical location in the house.  By changing the controller to a “Cloud Fiber Gateway” I could have the router near the cable modem and use the Express 7 as a wireless access point at a place in the house that gave better coverage.

There were probably other advantages.  But that was how I justified things.

In my defense, I DID research the process, and read a lot of reddit posts and even Ubiquiti’s own migration documents. They all seemed to agree that the process was as simple as backing up your existing configuration, plugging in your new controller, and restoring your backup during the initial setup.

For all I know, that’s how it works if you do it correctly.

That is not how it worked for me.

The first sign that there were going to be issues came when I tried to set up the new controller with it plugged directly into the UCI – that’s the UniFi cable modem.  The UniFi mobile app would happily detect the existence of the new controller, but would then report that it couldn’t get an internet connection.

At that point, I reconnected the Express 7 to the UCI and plugged the cloud gateway in downstream.  It got a network connection then, and even gave me the option to restore from an backup – with a list of all the Express 7 backups, even!

This failed.   My thought was that it might just need a firmware update, so I continued the process to set it up as new, got a firmware update, factory reset the configuration and tried the setup process again.  Problem was, now it wasn’t showing me the Express 7 backups.  It had made a backup of itself during the update process and that was the only backup it was going to try to restore.

I managed to download a file containing the last Express 7 backup and tried to restore from that, but the cloud gateway was very firm in saying that the backup wasn’t compatible.  There may be multiple KINDS of backups you can make?  Like, configuration only vs. configuration + applications?  I dunno.  I was not going to be able to restore this backup.

I decided to set it up as new.  I didn’t think I had that many customizations applied to the Express 7, after all.  Bring it online, set up the WiFi SSID and password, probably not much else to do.

If you’d like to bury your face in your hands at this point in sympathy, it would be appreciated.  I’ll assume you’ve done so.

So I plugged the cloud gateway back into the UCI and… no internet connection.

I fumed.  I looked things up on the web.  One site suggested I clone the MAC address from the Express 7, and this didn’t work.  Another site suggested I unplug the UCI for 10 minutes and plug it back in before trying to connect a new gateway.

Surprisingly, this last worked.  With the new cloud gateway in place, all of my devices came happily back online.  I just couldn’t manage them from the UniFi app, or even see any of them in the devices list.  As far as UniFi was considered, they were still all attached to the by-now-disconnected Express 7.

I also couldn’t adopt the switch that was connected to the cloud gateway, but fortunately a factory reset took care of that, and after that I could adopt all downstream devices.

I couldn’t, however, adopt the UCI.

I crossed my fingers and did a factory reset, praying that I wouldn’t need to call Xfinity and get the thing reactivated.

It didn’t need reactivation – but now the adoption process was failing with the error

“Console connection failed, we could not connect to your Unifi OS Console, Please try again”

I should have taken some screenshots during this whole ordeal.  If you’ve wound up on this page because you’re going through some similar nonsense and are trying to troubleshoot it, I apologize for the lack of same.  I was very focused on fixing the dang thing and not very focused on documenting it.

Anyway, the solution was to unplug the UCI, wait 10 minutes, and plug it back in.  This should not have been necessary.  I cannot explain why it WAS necessary.  But it worked.

Now I had a working network, admittedly one running on default settings which was going to cause me trouble that I hadn’t anticipated, and it was time to get the Express 7 set up as a WAP.  You know, the whole reason for the new cloud gateway.

I plugged it in, factory reset it, connected it to the switch and waited for it to reboot – and it immediately popped up in the UniFi app and asked me to configure it!

I’ll spare you the next few minutes.  The secret is to close the popup asking you to configure your Express 7 and instead go in to your UniFi devices and adopt it.  It’s trying to set it up as a new controller, NOT a WAP, and this will fail.

After that, all I needed to do was set up the WiFi SSID again.  Oh, and enable 6 Ghz radios.  And my DHCP address space was wrong.  And all of the MAC addresses that I had painstakingly looked up and given human-readable names were just MAC addresses again.  And my firewall rules preventing Android TVs from serving me advertisements had been wiped.  And my region blocking for Russia and similar countries was gone.  And all of the IP addresses I had the DHCP server hand out based on MAC addresses were lost.  And… look by this point I think you get the idea.

Honestly, I have no idea how much configuration I HAD done on the old controller.  But it turns out that it was a LOT, little of it was documented, and I didn’t realize it wasn’t part of the default options until suddenly it wasn’t working.

I can at least report that the network is up and running now.  And it IS, objectively, better than it used to be.

Also – and this is incredibly important – my new UniFi Cloud Fiber Gateway connects to the switch using an SFP, or Small Form-factor Pluggable connector, and it is possibly the most satisfying connector I have ever had the pleasure of clicking into a jack.  Worth the entire headache, really.

Gotta look into that shock collar idea now.

 

Posted in homelab | Leave a comment

Being the true and only slightly-embellished story of my descent into madness, see also: adventures in home networking.

Posted on October 9, 2026 by baudattitude

I feel it’s less of a thing these days, but it used to be a common male fantasy to have a big rack of stereo components that all more-or-less matched and had all kinds of exciting knobs and blinking lights on them and that obviously sounded so much better than the pedestrian two-tape-decks-and-a-record-player stereos that you bought as an all-in-one solution.

In truth, these probably did sound better – but the question of whether the better sound was worth the added complexity and expense was not something asked by a polite observer.

It is in something of that spirit that I have allowed our home network to spiral moderately out of control.

It started out so simply, too.  I wanted to get an additional wireless access point because our home WiFi was, well, a bit spotty and having a second WAP would give us better coverage.  That WAP used a Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) connection so I decided to get a switch with a PoE port on it to save needing to have a power outlet near the WAP itself, and this is where I decided to buy a PoE switch of the same brand as the WAP because that would obviously be more compatible.

That’s the Apple Trap writ anew; the bit where you take a tentative step into an ecosystem and suddenly you notice that the ground under you is crumbling and you’re sliding into a hitherto-unexplored abyss.

Honestly, it’s not even Apple.  Anyone of a Certain Age will think back to when they had to match their giraffe shorts to their giraffe shirts and realize that was when we first got our conditioning.

I think I picked up a couple more Ubiquiti WAPs, but I still wasn’t really getting in too deep.  Most of my home networking needs were being covered perfectly well by an array of Zyxel and TP-Link switches, with the cable modem being upgraded at an almost perfect 5-year interval.

Granted, this was being a little more nerdy than the norm – most people don’t buy their cable modems at all – but it still wasn’t too bad.

Then, I got a new job.  An entirely remote job.  A job that came with a budget to be used for setting up my new work-from-home setup, and I couldn’t pocket any that wasn’t spent so I was incentivized to find a reason to spend all of it.

Suddenly there was a Ubiquiti cable modem.  And a UniFi Express 7.  And a 16-port switch.  And once I’d set those up it didn’t feel too excessive to buy a couple of 5-port UniFi switches because I was starting to accumulate a very few devices that had 2.5GbE ports and the old TP-Link and Zyxel switches were all gigabit.  But, to be clear, it was still mostly under control.  I’d been reimbursed for most of this stuff.  It wasn’t becoming a problem.

Then we went on vacation for about a week, and on the first evening of the vacation Xfinity decided to run network maintenance and our cable modem didn’t come back up after maintenance was complete.  This happens sometimes and all I need to do is cycle power on it… which I couldn’t do as we were several hundred miles away from home.  So all of our home security was offline and I get really paranoid when the cameras are down.

When we got home, I cycled power on the modem and then started considering options.  Obviously the right thing to do was to find a way to set up a Raspberry Pi or a docker image somewhere that monitored whether there was internet access and rebooted the cable modem somehow if it ever went down.  This was economical, used hardware I mostly already had and would just take a little research…

…and that made me discover that Ubiquiti makes a vastly-overpriced power strip that can be network managed and that can cycle power on your cable modem for you if the power goes down…

…and then I found that they also sell a very inexpensive 5G antenna that can be used to give you failover connectivity in a pinch.

Anyway, to make all this work I needed to move the cable modem and the new overpriced power switch and some other network components to a different room of the house, but then the Express 7 was in a spot where it was providing excellent WiFi 7 signal for our backyard and probably the neighbor’s house but not great signal for the places in our house where devices actually live.

Anyway, that’s about the point where a UniFi Cloud Fiber Gateway and a second 16-port switch appeared and I think I can finally rest because I frankly have an insane amount of network capacity for a single three bedroom house that houses two adult humans and one cat.

Making all of this WORK was another story.  Probably go over some of that in the next couple days.

But basically:  When normal people want the Internet, they go to Comcast and they say, “Give me the Internet,” and Comcast gives them a white box, and they take it home and they set it up next to their TV, and they have the Internet, and all their devices hook into the Internet, and they all work and everything works. And if it’s slow, they just say, “Man, the Internet’s slow today”.

Maybe they go back to Comcast and they say, “Give me a faster Internet.”

But they do not spend two weeks’ worth of salary on Network Garanimals.

Why couldn’t I be one of those people?

Posted in homelab | Leave a comment

Yer a Gamer, Harry.

Posted on October 3, 2026 by baudattitude

Last month I mentioned that, despite not really being a big Harry Potter fan, I’d been inspired by some recent donut purchases to give the 2023 game a try, and that my initial reaction was quite positive.

I can’t claim that this is a particularly unique take.  Apparently this sold north of forty million copies, which is an absurd number for anything not named “Mario Kart”, and a bad game isn’t going to move that many copies regardless of how many kids grew up waving sticks at each other and having spirited debates about which house they obviously would have been sorted into.

I was not one of these kids, since the books didn’t start coming out until I was in my 30s and I didn’t actually crack any of them open until having seen the first few movies.  My generation waved sticks at each other pretending they were lightsabers, not wands.

I did, I admit, dutifully trudge over to our local supermarket for the Midnight launch of the final book in the series so I could read the ending without fear of spoilers.  I think that may be the only midnight launch of a media product I’ve ever actually attended, come to think of it.

Oh, and when I found myself in London at one point I did swing by King’s Cross station to get a photograph of Platform 9 3/4ths.  It’s just a shopping cart stuck halfway into a brick wall that’s not even inside the station, so it’s not much to write home about.  I was more interested in visiting Fenchurch Station and seeing what kinds of hijinks I could get up to in the Left Luggage office.

So I went in with a bit of a jaundiced view, and I confess there were a few moments where I groaned at one particularly silly name or another, but it didn’t take too long for its overall charm to break down the cynicism I brought to the table.  I may not have spent my formative years growing up with Hogwarts, but I absolutely DID spend my formative years as a boy-type person getting into all kinds of trouble with friends and Hogwarts Legacy is the best “getting into trouble with your friends” simulator I can remember playing.

Sure, there’s a Big Plot about a goblin rebellion or something, but it’s kind of one of those stories that I made sure to get back to every once in a while because I needed to progress the main story to unlock new chapters in the stories involving three fellow teenagers.  That’s one problem with a game set in a prequel timeline, after all – if goblins had actually successfully risen up and overthrown wizardkind, the events in the books couldn’t possibly have happened, meaning there’s no risk of a bad ending, so while it was an enjoyable enough path from “welcome to Hogwarts!” to “congratulations! you saved the day!”, I got much more invested in the lives of my friends.

One other thing I loved was how much the castle itself is a character.  It’s massive, and incredibly confusing to get around, and you are constantly stumbling across collectibles or little bits of set dressing designed to push your childhood nostalgia buttons.  Fortunately, even though it is absolutely awful finding your way to places the first time on occasion, there is a generous supply of fast travel points that unlock as you find classrooms and points of interest.

For a few hours, I tried to get around the school WITHOUT using fast travel.  Eventually, I gave up.  If you’re reading this and have played the game and managed to learn the castle well enough that you didn’t do the same, consider me impressed.

The world outside the castle isn’t quite as memorable, with the exception of the Forbidden Forest which I found to be creepy in all the right ways, but I need to give the developers some serious credit for the way the open world changes with the seasons.  Hitting Winter term inside the castle and then leaving and discovering that there is snow everywhere was quite the surprise – I can’t think of any other open world games that do that.

Is it perfect? 

No.  I have a couple of very specific gripes that I think are reasonably objective and a third that is unmistakably a Me thing.  Let’s get those out of the way.

First: While the level requirement for the final story quest is something like 27, there’s an epilogue that requires level 34 – and this is a lot of grinding, because levels come quickly at first but slow down considerably after hitting 20.  Looking at PlayStation trophy statistics, 27.1% of players finish the story but only 15.9% grind their way to the epilogue.  Seeing that kind of drop-off makes me feel just fine about calling the story done where I ended it.

Second: I’ve been doing a fair number of platinum trophies recently, and I’d had a lot of fun with the game, so I looked up the trophy list to see if I could get that shiny orb on my account without too much extra effort.  It turns out that the platinum is a big time sink that involves finding every collectible, doing every quest, checking off every one of the 95 little puzzle shrines dotting the map… one of the trophies even asks you to cast a specific spell on every single enemy type in the game, with no way to track your progress.

So the post-main story grind is pretty intense, especially if you’re a trophy seeker.

Though, after some reflection this is mostly an issue if you’re the sort of person who wants to feel they’ve finished a game at around the same time they’ve finished the main story.  If you’re in love with the world and just want to be able to keep running around it doing STUFF, having another two or three games worth of content available is arguably a positive.  So this is less of an objective complaint than I’d initially thought.  Needing level 34 for the epilogue is dumb, though.  Going to stand by that opinion.

The “me” complaint is that, well, I started out playing the Windows version and almost immediately fell into the trap of tweaking settings trying to get the absolute best image quality without dropping below the minimum acceptable frame rate and I wasted hours with this before I had the presence of mind to check whether the PS5 version was included with my PlayStation Plus subscription.

FOR THE RECORD, IT IS.  And I booted it up, picked one of the presets and happily played the rest of the game without even wondering whether it was really 4K or whether the frames I was seeing were fake ones.

This isn’t really a Hogwarts Legacy thing, though.  It’s just the slowly-dawning realization that I may be, at heart, a filthy console peasant.

In something that I initially thought was a complaint, I was a little taken aback by the presence of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese instructors who didn’t seem to be at each other’s throats, but checking the specific year the game is set showed that, whether by chance or by very specific choice, it’s set in a year where none of the three were actually at war with or occupying the others.  So, on the assumption that it was deliberate, some more kudos to the writers there.

Finally, I was happy to discover that I could apply my “Assassin’s Creed Protocol” to some of the dungeons in the game.  That’s a habit I have in any Assassin’s Creed where I pick one guy in a camp to leave unstabbed while I perforate every other single dude I can get my knives into.  In Hogwarts Legacy, this presents as selecting a single goblin who is NOT a load-bearing goblin (one who needs to die before a door can be opened) and then carefully sneaking past said goblin to turn all of his buddies into smears on the cavern walls so he has a little shock waiting for him when he gets off shift and goes to clock out.

I’m not sure when I started doing this.  Maybe with Assassin’s Creed: Rogue?  Anyway it’s a habit of mine and it was just as fun here.

Bottom line: Awesome game. Poppy Best Girl.  Ominis Best Boy.  Professor Garlick Best Mildly Unhinged Gardener.  Looking forward to Hogwarts Legacy 2: Hogwarts Harder.

Posted in PS5, videogames | Leave a comment

And now, something completely different.

Posted on September 19, 2026 by baudattitude

I was up in Canada a couple of weekends ago, and Tim Horton’s is running a collaboration with the Harry Potter franchise that includes some very tasty donuts and some rather tacky merch.  I ate a lot of the donuts and didn’t buy any of the merch.

If they’d had a T-shirt, I might have gone for one because the collab logo is kinda neat.

I mean, they did have T-shirts with the logo on them but they were employee-only things and I wasn’t going to mug a Canadian for their shirt.  That’s how you wind up tied to a tree with a syrup tap wedged in your sternum.

Nonetheless, it reminded me that I’d gotten Hogwarts Legacy as a free game from the Epic Games Store a little while back, and while I’ve never been the world’s number one Harry Potter fan I enjoyed the movies well enough that I thought I’d take a dive into the wizarding world.

I also looked at this as my opportunity to finally play one of the hundred+ free games I’ve gotten from the Epic Games Store.

This… didn’t work terrifically well.  I don’t have a system running Windows currently, so I play games either through CrossOver (on the Mac) or Proton (on Linux) and CrossOver is typically a bit hit-or-miss whereas Proton is typically rock solid.

I quickly came to find out that there is a massive caveat to that last one, which should include “as long as you’re playing Steam games” because trying to run something off the Epic store was a mess.  I’d either get no controller support, or the game wouldn’t run at all, or the game would run but crash after a few minutes, or cloud saves wouldn’t sync, or…

like I said, a mess.

It was fun during the moments it worked, though!  I rather appreciate their decision to set the thing a solid century before Harry wound up at the school as that lets them stick in a few familiar names in the forms of ancestors of book characters but not go too heavy on the fan service.  Really, the castle itself is the biggest source of that.  AND IT DELIVERS.  The staircases alone!

Oddly enough, the experience on CrossOver was completely plug and play.  Told it I wanted an Epic Games Launcher Bottle, let it set one up, pushed play and off I went.  But I wanted the ability to go between the Linux box hooked up to our TV in the living room and the MacBook Pro on my desk and, well,

Fanatical hooked me up.  And technically this was six bucks for the Digital Deluxe Edition so it comes with …a cool mount? and maybe some other cosmetics? I dunno.

Transferring the same from Epic to Steam was a matter of digging it out of AppData\local in one bottle and dropping it into AppData\local in a different bottle, so that at least was easy enough.

Anyway.  It’s a nice change from horror games.  I’m having a bit of trouble with the combat which is a little too twitchy for my liking, but I am playing on the third difficulty setting so if it gets too overwhelming I can take it down a notch or two.

 

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OK, let’s talk Cronos: The New Dawn.

Posted on September 19, 2026 by baudattitude

The most important thing you need to know about Cronos is that it lets you find hidden cats in the world, and they go back to your base and you can pet them and have conversations with them.  Honestly, that alone is enough to put it above almost every other survival horror game I’ve played recently, but I wanted to ramble on about it a bit more because after I got over the initial learning cliff it turned out to be something rather special.

I’ve seen it compared to Dead Space, and this is a fair and obvious comparison.  Both games have you controlling rather hulking protagonists in armor with an impressive stomp move and Very Specific Instructions for dealing with the fleshy horrors that are trying to kill you, with these Very Specific Instructions scrawled in blood on a wall somewhere for you to read:

Only one of them has instructions written in Polish, mind you.  Now I’m wondering how Dead Space was localized.  Subtitles?  Different texture?  Not curious enough to look it up.

Side note, when I went to load up Dead Space to get that screenshot it happily found and loaded my save from 2009.  Seventeen years ago.  Regardless of whatever else you think about Microsoft they are leading the pack with regard to letting you play your old games.

Both of them are also very, for lack of a better word, goopy games.  Lots of ick factor.  If you don’t like ick factor, you are advised to steer clear.  Eviscerated bodies hanging from walls that are also somehow still alive and trying to eat you are a pretty common enemy and unless you are very good at checking corners before walking into a room or down a hallway you WILL eventually get grabbed and dragged into one of them.

In addition to Dead Space, Cronos had some features that reminded me of Prey (2006) and Singularity, both of which are pretty good games to crib from, and a couple of puzzles that made me really wonder whether the developers ever worked on hidden object games because boy I had to find a lot of fuses.

It definitely retains its own identity, though.  Not just because you can find cats, but because mechanics alone really don’t define how you experience a game like this.  It’s more about the mood, and there is a particular edge to the flavor of hopelessness in this specific post-apocalyptic future that I haven’t experienced before.  Things are bad, and it’s not entirely clear that anything you’re doing is really making them better, but you’re still pushing forward.

Mood aside, while the game can be very obscure when it comes to some basic mechanics, it is good at teaching you lessons during the moment to moment gameplay with occasional tests to see if you have been paying attention.

The game’s first boss is a great example. To get to him, you need to navigate through an apartment building full of things that need to be set on fire to progress. You technically can do this by burning each obstacle and then retreating back to the nearest safe room for another flamethrower charge, but what you’re supposed to do is find the environmental object that you can shoot or punch to make it explode and clear the obstacle.

Then you get to the boss, and you’re warned in advance that he’s weak to fire.  You’ve just spent an entire sequence setting things on fire so you should be ready for this.

Again, you can come in with a flamethrower charge – or possibly more, if you’re willing to spend enough resources – but what you should be doing is looking around the apartment you fight him in to see all the things that will handily catch fire when shot or punched so you can use them against him.  During the fight, he even occasionally retreats to give you a chance to regroup and find the next hazard.

A later boss is a crowd control fight where you’re swarmed with fairly weak enemies that don’t present a ton of threat individually but that you will probably be overwhelmed by if you can’t figure out how to deal with the mob.  And, curiously, the level leading up to the boss has had a lot of little arenas full of lots of enemies to juggle.

Not all the bosses are so interesting. Some boil down to “kill them before they kill you” but even the less interesting ones have some interesting quiz questions for you to see if you’ve properly understood the situational uses of the game’s four basic weapon types, or whether you’ve gotten the hang of the game’s traversal mechanics.

tl;dr: I have seen a lot of different encounter designs over the years and the ones in Cronos felt absolutely top tier.

I don’t think it’s for everyone, because it IS on the difficult side and it DOES demand a lot of patience and seems to derive a sadistic glee in making sure that you always feel just a little short on resources, but if you can approach it on its own terms it is a heck of a ride.

 

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In which, I learn the value of giving up.

Posted on September 16, 2026 by baudattitude

A few weeks back, I checked Cronos: The New Dawn out from the local library, without knowing much about it.  It looked like it would do nicely as a follow up to my Resident Evil binge from last year, and the nice thing about borrowing a game is that you can try it out and not feel too badly about dropping it if it doesn’t gel with you – after all, you didn’t pay for it.

And, yeah.  I dropped it pretty quickly despite digging the overall vibe of the game.  It’s a crazy atmospheric post-apocalyptic survival horror game, low on the narrative but heavy on the creepy environments , and that would normally be right in my wheelhouse, but the pressure it put me under was just a little too much.  I spent a lot of time scrounging for ammunition, which was in painfully short supply, and then it would just evaporate the next time something jumped out at me.  I decided it wasn’t my thing and quit.

After a little time to consider things, I resolved to start over on the game’s “easy” mode.  In “easy”, you do double damage to enemies while taking half damage from enemies.  That seemed to promise a pretty breezy experience.

It was not a breezy experience. I felt like I was having just as much trouble finding supplies on easy as I was on the normal difficulty, which made no sense at all.  Enemies soaked up fewer bullets before falling over, but I was still always short.

I gave up, ejected the disc, uninstalled the game and put it back in the box to be returned to the library.

…but…

Something didn’t feel right.  I looked at the trophy percentages for the game and read some reviews and while the consensus seemed to be that, yes, it’s a hard game, I had also dropped it before getting the first main story trophy.

That is a trophy with a 61% achievement rate.

I didn’t like the thought of giving up when so many other people had gotten further than me.

So, I found a Cronos discord and I posted something along the lines of “guys, what am I doing wrong?”, fully expecting to hear a chorus of “git gud, noob” as the response.

In contrast, I discovered that I had accidentally stumbled into one of the more helpful and healthy internet communities I’ve ever come into contact with, because what I got instead was pages and pages of “so the game doesn’t tell you this, BUT…”

I won’t go into details, because this isn’t really a guides sort of site, but the limited ammo the game gives you is intended to be a hint that there are a LOT of ways to get through encounters without specifically inserting Bullet A into Fleshy Horror B.  Not by running away from them, but by using environmental damage or by taking extra time to set up a charged shot that does more damage and stuns the enemy so you can get a couple of free melee swings in… that sort of thing.

Short version, the game went from “this is impossible!” to a really fun experience in finding out exactly how many resources  I REALLY needed to get from point A to point B and in making do with what I had at any given time.

I’ll probably write a separate post up talking more about the game’s setting and mechanics, but the real thing I got from it was a life lesson in how sometimes giving yourself permission to give up on something can lead to examining why you gave up on it and whether you might have just needed to ask for help.

 

 

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I tried to play a silly meme game, and wound up accidentally learning something.

Posted on September 7, 2026 by baudattitude

So, X – or at least the feed served up to me by the Almighty Algorithm – has been buzzing about a very silly “jump rope roguelike” called Scarlet Skips recently. I think that’s partially because the concept of a game based around jumping rope is very silly and partially because it looks like it was developed by someone who has somewhat impure thoughts about Princess Daisy and decided to express them in the form of a game featuring a legally-distinct version of said princess.

To be clear, I can’t entirely fault them.  I would consider Daisy the superior princess as well, though that may mostly be from learning most of my Mario lore from the 1993 live-action Super Mario Brothers movie.

But I digress.

Anyway, when I went to Steam to look this thing up to see if it there was a trailer, this is what I got just from clicking into the Search field:

Note that I hadn’t typed a single character and it was still at the top of the list of popular searches.  I suspect the author is currently enjoying a certain degree of financial success.

It doesn’t have a Mac version, but I use Crossover to run Windows-only Steam games on my MacBook.  I wouldn’t say outright that this betrays a certain masochistic streak, but I wouldn’t fault you for inferring this was the case, because when I ran the thing I got a very vexing error that I’m pretty sure would not have come up if I were running it under Windows as it was designed to:

For Google’s sake, I’ll just reproduce the text from that error message below:

The Following component(s) are required to run this program:

Microsoft Visual C++ 2015-2022 Redistributable (x64)

Now, Crossover lets me install the Visual C++ Redistributable into its bottles as needed, and I was pretty sure I didn’t need to but tried anyway.  That failed with an error saying that a newer version was already installed, which was no shock.

It turns out that certain Unreal Engine games do a check for dependencies when they launch, and they check for the presence of the redistributable files in a way that won’t work on Crossover.

The solution is to change the launch options in Steam to launch a different executable.  This may apply to other Unreal Engine games, so this may be helpful in the future as well.

This is the actual game executable, rather than the stub that Steam launches that does the dependency checks.  So if you legitimately are missing a dependency, then running this directly may turn out very poorly.

Also Steam seems to have trouble realizing that you’re running the game, so you may not get playtime tracking or achievements at first.

Nonetheless, it runs, and creating a file called “steam_appid.txt” containing the game’s app ID in the same directory as the ScarletSkips-Win64-Shipping.exe file seems to get playtime and achievement attribution working.  That app ID is 4513480, by the way.

There’s not much there once you do get it running, to be honest.  Scarlet – I assume her name is Scarlet, based on the title – is shown as someone having a really bad time of things in life until she notices an award she received in her younger years for jumping rope and sets off to the nearest park, rope in hand, to recapture the fires of her youth.

and it’s cute!  You stand in the little patch of bare ground in the park and press a button to jump. Birds fly around. There are cars passing by on the road in the background.  Scarlet bounces.  After enough successful jumps, you level up and can pick from a selection of power ups.

After enough of these, you start to straight-up defy the laws of physics with regards to how high humans can actually jump.  “Ignite Jump Rope” gives you flaming jump ropes, doubling your score but with certain risks, and there’s also an option to reinforce your rope (or ropes, plural) so a single misstep won’t end your game.

I’m told there’s an ending once you get high enough, but I don’t think I’m good enough to see it.  I have gotten to see a variety of failure animations, though, and those are almost worth the price of admission by themselves.

While your normal “game over” state is just a faceplant, you get a rather more shocking one if you have a mishap with a flaming jump rope.

I also loved the animation if you miss a jump but are saved by your reinforced rope.  Scarlet does a somewhat exaggerated looking around as if to check whether anyone saw that before continuing.

And that, barring the ending that I haven’t seen, is all there is to the game.  There’s very little there but it really does push the “wait, one more try” button in the back of the brain very well.

Oh, and I learned something about Crossover.  That’s really the value I take from the experience.

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Brave X Junction: In which, I play Blackjack for ten hours straight.

Posted on September 6, 2026 by baudattitude

Yes, the “X” is part of the name.  I assume that it’s silent, like the X in Hunter X Hunter, Spy X Family or Highschool DXD.  I really do wonder where this style of naming came from, sometimes.  It’s not important for the sake of this post, though.

This is not a game I would normally have thought I’d enjoy, and it’s not one I had ever heard of until the Switch’s eShop dropped it in to the middle of my “recommended” list.  At Y1650 (or about 11 freedom bucks), I figured it was worth a try.

All that out of the way,  Brave X Junction is a very abbreviated JRPG with a really interesting take on combat – it’s Blackjack.  The card game you learned when you were in grade school.  Every fight consists of you trying to get as close as possible to 21 without going over, with your opponents doing the same… usually.  Sometimes they are capped at 19, so you have a considerable advantage, and sometimes they can go as high as 23 without busting which puts you in a much weaker position than you’d think.

Fortunately, you get to cheat.  You can save cards for later and shuffle them in and out of your hand, and do things like steal cards from your opponent’s hand or swap your cards for theirs.  There are all sorts of skills and powers that make the experience considerably more engaging than I expected going into it, and by default all of this is happening with a timer going – let the timer run out and you may find that you were halfway to your perfect hand but now you’re staring at a 13 or something and hoping the other guy busts out.

(You can turn the timer off, but you get fewer rewards from combat if you do.  I liked having the timer on, myself.)

I should actually correct myself  a bit on that last part.  The game has three playable characters that are unlocked over the course of the initial couple of dungeons:

You have the Fighter, who is very much a tanky character that can block attacks and has lots of hit points and generally muscles through things.  She’s who you start with, and if you want a little lower stress experience I think she’s pretty good.

And despite what you might think, she’s very protected, with the power of God and bikini armor on her side.

The Magician is the glass cannon and one of the best examples of that I can remember.  Her play style actually encourages trying to get the opponent to go over their limit and bust out, while having a low scoring hand herself.  Since damage calculated at the end of a turn is partially based on the difference between your two hands, you can either hit something very very hard or you can get crushed – there’s little middle ground.

Also she has one of those character introductions that really brings home the low budget translation on offer.

Finally, the Thief.

Did I mention that the translation was a little dodgy?

Like, to the point of quotability sometimes?

Anyway, she has a lot of skills revolving around chipping away at the enemy’s health while manipulating your hand and theirs and trying not to be physically present when the other guy attacks.  I’m not usually a fan of this play style but when you combine it with the timer it makes for a surprising amount of tension.

Sometimes you don’t dodge in time though.

Finally, she’s the token glasses girl and has an outfit you might conceivably see someone wearing in public.  All around positives for the character.

While there’s not much depth to character customization, you can collect playing cards that increase your hit points or give you new skills.  These come more or less naturally while playing and I had almost all of them before unlocking the final dungeon.  You have a lot more going on with the equipment system.

You get a weapon and an accessory, and both can have multiple skills slotted.  I was fond of this combination of skills that let me get double damage if I won the initial hand of a combat and that let me “win” a tie condition – meaning that if both me and the other guy had a hand of 20, for example, I’d get a hit in.

The combination of the opening-round double damage and the occasional double damage (and flashy animation!) from drawing a blackjack makes for some very, very satisfying big numbers, as an aside.

The point is, it’s not super complicated!  There aren’t a ton of stats to keep track of or a complex skill tree to debate over where points are placed.  It’s just enough to keep the loop of fight-monster-play-blackjack fresh.

Dungeons, likewise just the necessary:

Every floor of a dungeon is a bunch of spaces, each with their own encounter.  There are traps (sometimes you can luck out and not trigger them), treasures, and enemy squares.

Some of the treasure squares are also enemy squares.  If you see two or three treasures in a row, at least one will probably be a Mimic.

Major points for the bit where you open a chest with a potion in it and just immediately use the potion if your inventory is too full to pick up more potions.

More rarely, you’ll run into a merchant who will sell you gear you can’t get in town and offer you the option to buy healing items at exaggerated prices.  You can’t exactly complain that this isn’t made very clear by the merchant’s name, however.

There’s no way to spend just one coin, and I am sad to lose out on the meme potential here.

While there is some post-game content that unlocks after you defeat the Demon King – oh, right, that’s your goal, defeat the Demon King, not a whole lot more to say there, I don’t think I’ll dive into it.  It seems mostly there to make for a few very grindy trophies and I am playing this on the Switch which has no trophy support.  Kind of glad about that.

The game’s credits came with one final surprise…

…and this is how I learned that there is a Kenichi Sonoda who is a game producer in addition to the legendary character designer.

This isn’t the first time I’ve played a game where the combat was… quite this unusual.  Puzzle Quest had you playing Bejeweled against giant rats, and I vaguely remember a PC Engine RPG where all of the fights were mahjong battles.  I didn’t wind up enjoying either of those, though, because the fights were just very long and tedious affairs.  It turns out that, at least for me, having to do very simple mental math with a timer ticking down is just the right sort of thing to tickle my brain.

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