I had major surgery on July 13th. The recovery has been pretty rough and I’m going back to work this week. I can’t exactly say that I feel ready to be going back to work yet, to be honest. Being upright is still exhausting after about an hour, and sitting down is kind of uncomfortable too, but I guess I had to go back to work eventually.
During my time off I had planned to do a lot but my energy levels and brain power just hasn’t been there. I wanted to read a book, play more video games, blog more, but the only thing I really did was set up a mini PC for my TV to plug into so that I can play Steam games and streaming apps on the TV (so that I can finally dump the Amazon Fire Stick which is an evil POS), and I also played through LEGO Star Wars (check out my RetroAchievements profile). I used to play LEGO Star Wars with my sister quite a lot when we were children, and the game is still very fun, although playing it co-op would have been more fun this time around. I don’t know if I’ll go through the effort of 100%ing the game, though, since it’s a little bit grindy to get all the collectables.
Speaking of my sister, she wrote a blog post that almost could have been posted on this website (if I were a better and more consistent blogger, that is). The article is called " Remembering browser dress-up games". I didn’t play dress-up games often growing up but I was deep in the Flash games addiction at the time and I even get a mention here for helping her learn Scratch to make her own dress-up games (they still get likes and comments to this day, which is insane). Please check it out and leave nice comments if you use Substack, I’m sure she’d appreciate it.
Another thing that happened recently is that AT&T Fiber went down for a while in Chicago, and after it came back up I resolved to use up at least one of the DVD-Rs that I bought at Goodwill recently to create a gaming care package of varied games I can install off the DVD to play when the net goes down (or really just any time, I just love a good hard copy). I had fun talking with my online friends and deciding what to fill up the disc with, and I resolved to use every last byte on the disc.
The end result of the DVD I burned was:
Anyway that’s kind of all I have for today. It’s a bit of a ramble but I just wanted to post something this year. Hope everyone’s doing well so far this year, it’s been a rough one!
Written by Vel and published on October 10th 2026 at 3:30pm GMT-6.