When I woke up from surgery last week, it was the same day that everyone started freaking out about Resident Evil Requiem and for whatever reason, my drug addled, groggy ass brain decided that I needed to buy that Resident Evil Generation Pack that I should have preordered because its a good value in a nice looking package. But apparently everyone else had the same idea. But after 3 days of stalking, refreshing and reloading, joining discords, signing up for sketchy websites and updating my ipad to iOS26 … I finally got one and its shipped. Hurray!

I’m looking forward to checking out the latest entry and I’m really excited to be able to do it on Switch 2. Looks like I finally need to order a memory card. Hmm….

I guess with the announcement that Yoko Taro & company are going to continue the Evangelion anime/series I finally need to watch it. I don’t know why this is a popular thing that I’ve skirted around but its never really come into my sphere of influence. You know, with the exception of every Japanese artist that I admire citing is as a source of inspiration and all that.

Man, since finishing and obsessing over Romeo Is A Dead Man, I’ve been reading up on and watching videos about Grasshopper Manufacture and Kill The Past. What an amazing colleciton of games. I wanted to play through No More Heroes 1-3 + TSA before RIADM came out but I just didn’t have the time. I think I’m going to noodle around those games again after I get the (or fail to get the) platinum achievement for Romeo.

I watched a great review by GhenryPerez that I pretty much agreed with throughout.It’s worht a watch, and he is clearly someone who loes Grasshopper and Suda, meaning he not only wants to love the game but he’s not afraid to be critical when warranted. It’s worth a gander!

I’ve started a bunch of games recently and I JUST realized that I hadn’t pushed an update to the website. I’ve been so engrossed with Romeo is a Dead Man that I haven’t stopped to write more or update any of the games pages. And since I haven’t been paying attention I realized what I HAD written wasn’t pushed live so I’m doing that now.

Long story short - Romeo is a Dead Man fucking rules, 1000xRESIST is a work of art and Chibi Robo is Buff Certified.

I also read through the first collected works/volume of The Crow and really loved it. I’m going to write that up real quick. Hopefully if you are out there, in cyberspace, reading this, you’re having a good year, you’re safe from the fascist forces that stomp around the US (and the world at large) like petulant, unsatisfiable children and are playing some extremely violent video games.

Just as I published my diary documenting my journey choosing photo management software, Apple released the new “Creator Suite,” a bundle of subscription software that they previously would have either given you for free or sold you for a flat rate. And the reasoning for this change is the integration of AI tools (provided by openAI, mind you) and soft-locking templates behind the subscription service. It’s a disheartening move to see the iWork software pulled from their place as “nice-to-be-included” bonuses of owning a piece of mac hardware. Numbers, Keynote and Pages are just that - nice to have. They do nothing better than any other piece of office software with one, now forgone, exception: free of bloat! But the screenshots rolling around that show the upsell to the subscriptions have put that one advantage down, like a puppy no one wanted. My versions of Keynote, Pages & Numbers will now yell at me each time I boot them up because they needed to sunset these to cram all that bloat in, so I look forward to be greeted by this annoying pop-up.

I think it’s time to switch back to libreoffice, an open source office suite that’s been around forever.

Merry Christmas from CyberBuffalo & AbraCatrena! Each year we do a Halloween and Christmas card and this year I decided to do a little breakdown on how we made it. Our cards are GENERALLY made up of multiple photos that I will comp together using Affinity Photo, this is generally because we’re only 2 people and photographing cats is hard.

Here was this years inspiration. We wanted us to be the adults and the cats to be the stuff the adults dream about.

We shot each of us separately, so we could help one another pose as we were craned up over a small table. It was awkward!

Then we plated the table, upper garland and ornament. Fun fact! This was the only “blank” round shiny christmas ornament we had in our entire house. So we went with it!

Finally, the divas, the stars, the “true talent.” The boys were shot separate as well as together, but these individual shots turned out to work the best. Love their 1000 yard stares here.

And here’s the final comp, layer by layer, in affinity! We layered the ornament reflection on top of the cats to add to the effect. Everything else was pretty straightforward. Light was a 7’ white Westcott umbrella, diffused, behind camera. Shot on my Fujifilm XT-3.

I just started playing Chibi-Robo! on the Switch 2 and as I’m putting together the game page entry I had a thought.. to crop or not to crop? The game is 4:3 and the way the Switch emulators work, they put these unchangeable, hideous borders around the games. And I think that I want to crop them out, but that seems like it could be a lot of work. It also isn’t an accurate representation of what I’m playing? Which makes me want to leave them. HMMMMMMM.

I’m just now realizing that I’m woefully behind on posting photos to the gallery section. I’ve got stuff developed going back to this time last year, including photos we took in mexico when we got engaged (we’re married now lol).

Also while looking through my analog galleries I’m realizing that I need to start keeping track of which film stock I’m shooting on. If I had kept better notes on what I’m shooting I would be able to dump this to exif data, but since I’m not I’ll need to go to the binders and take out the negatives, go right to the source.

Another day in 2025, another 35mm film camera has been released. Today we’re talking about the Kodak Snapic A1! It sports a 3-element 25mm glass lens, 1/100s fixed shutter speed, f9.5 aperture, multiple exposures and a built in flash. Interestingly, what separates this from the other recent Kodak cameras, is the auto-advance and powered rewind. At 99$ I think there’s a lot to like about this camera. If it was more than that I think I would find it lacking but for cool hundo it seems like an okay deal. I still think I would rather put the money into the MC-A but also, I would be less worried about this getting knocked around. The fixed aperture and shutter speed is a weird choice - I’m sure it had a lot to do with production costs - it seems pretty limiting. I’m very glad they didn’t slap a terrible LED flash on this thing; they knew they needed the exposure because once the sun starts setting you’ll have to use the flash. And that could be great! I like flash-on-camera style portraiture and think this could work well for some fun bar-shots and nightime portraits. I’ll wait to see more hands-on reviews and impressions but look - any new film cameras coming out in 2025 is a good thing. If this keeps up it’s a sign that the ecosystem is sustaining itself. Film photography cannot exist in a vacuum, you need a lot of resources to keep the hobby alive and if companies are pouring R&D money into, that means it’s got enough juice to keep going. And that’s a good sign to me.

I read this morning that Lomography has announced a new 35mm film camera that has a rather exciting feature set. It’s a small, compact, full frame camera - it feels funny to have to qualify that in 2025 but there have been like three new half-frame cameras sent to market recently, four if you include that insane fuji x-half, which yes is digital but still - zone AND auto-focus and shutter speed controls from bulb up to 1/500. There are a lot of things about this camera that I like, at least on paper; it includes some features of legendary cameras of the past like the Klasse, Contax and Mju. I am going to wait for a few un-sanctioned reviews before I get too excited, I know lomo dances around the build quality line making it a gamble whether or not their products are built to last. With something like this coming off the production line, though, I think it’ll help people find a quality feature-set on an affordable camera without resorting to extraordinary prices for what essentially amounts to a ticking time-bomb. This could replace my Olympus XA or XA-2 as my daily driver, but not unless I know it can stand up to a little bit of abuse first.

I’ve worked out the storage on my home network recently and I’m going to do a writeup on it in the future. The macmini that was sitting on my downstairs desk not really doing anything has become a little server. I’ve attached some USB-C drive enclosures to it and have moved everything off of my failing WD MyCloud NAS. I’ve got calibre, jellyfin and transmission setup as well as a web server. I need to build a smal quick website that will remind me of all the different places on my home network these services reside. like to access jellyfin its ip.address:8096 and I have to look it up each time.

The other thing I have been poking around at is Tailscale. I would like to have access to some of this stuff when I’m not at the house and this seems like one of the best ways to do it. Again, I’m doing a much bigger writeup on this stuff but I wanted to get something up before I forget about everything I’ve done.

Immediately after the 4th of July weekend this year my business cranked up to a pace that I’ve not seen in a few years. Suddenly everyone needed their photoshoots done, all right on top of one another. It’s been a fairly furious pace that has completely consumed all of my attention but as I type this I can see the end of the busy season coming near and I’ll be able to properly divide my attention amongst the hobbies and other responsibilities of my life.

I’ve been working my way through Communion, but it’s been kind of a slog! I’ve had it since the beginning of June and have only gotten through around half of it. I need to hunker down and just finish it! It’s hard to balance all of your hobbies! Especially when you have a few too many.

It’s been a minute since I’ve given a lot of attention to the website. Sometimes, when something is just purring along in the background you need to let it be, and that’s how I’ve felt about the site recently. I just finished Ys Books 1 & 2 for the TurboGrafx CD and made my final update about it. Mostly, Catrena and I have been busting our asses at cleaning, downsizing and organizing the house. We’ve been in this space for 9 years and since our primary source of income is finding, buying or making everyday-to-weird stuff for other people, we can accumulate a lot of crap we don’t know what to do with and feel bad about disposing of. Part of this has also included a massive reorganization of the garage which I will probably make a post about in the future. That’s all to say I didn’t lose any fingers over this past holiday weekend, though we don’t really have a lot to celebrate these days. I did go to a pool party that had a hot dog roller machine, which was maybe the highlight of my month? It affected me deeply and now I think every party should include one of these. More posts eventually, hopefully you are reading this through RSS or, better yet, visiting this site after getting notified via RSS and reading it here. Like a cool person who can cook 12 hot dogs at a time. Until then!

Okay now with Oath of Felghana finished I’m ravenous for more Ys so I think I’m going to watch through the 1989 anime of the same name, Ys! I put this on the plex server a few years ago but I never got very far into it, I think I was working on something. I also am ready to play through the first 2 games in their original form, possibly the TurboGrafx-CD versions, though I did boot up the HP Thin Client and installed the first game’s DOS port. The sound is very bad on that version, though, it’s nostalgic for sure, but its just PC speaker beeps. Ys has such a rich history of music starting with the PC98 FM Sound that it almost feels like a disservice. Hmm… no matter which version I play, I’m going to get some bump combat!

Oh no, I’m thinking about playing an Ys game! I haven’t played one since Ys 8: Lacrimosa of Dana. I didn’t play Monstrum Nox on Switch because apparently it ran terribly but I’m hearing rumblings that’s its running much better on Switch 2. That’d be a good background game to have going for a while. I could also play Oath in Felghana, that’s also on Switch. Or maybe fuck it and I’ll finally play Daemon x Machina. HMMMMM.