Doing some proper aeropress stuff gets all the good things that can be got from stale coffee. Great, sweet taste, no bitterness, a fine flavour. The complexity is lost, sure, but it's still amazing how even stale coffee prepared the right way can be great, but fresh coffee brewed in popular cafes is crap. It depends on the cleanliness of the apparatus one is using, including the grinder. I cleaned my grinder from all the gunk and oils and fats from the previously ground beans and the taste was noticeably better.
If you're into specialty coffee, and therefore usually filter coffee, you've for sure heard the guideline -- which some even consider a rule -- that the temperature to use for filter coffee is cca. 92 degrees Celsius. It is not a bad guideline per se, but one should not be afraid to experiment. I used boiling water straight from the kettle, for 18 grams of finely ground coffee (not as fine as typical espresso, coarser than that), and steeped the grounds for 10 minutes. It might sound like insanity, but trust me, try it out if you have the chance.
Relating to the most recent article I wrote, consciousness and free will, I will write a follow up discussing how language relates to that. Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated by the etymology of words. Unfortunately etymological dictionaries for my native language are not as easily accessible as ones for English, but it's understandable since it's the lingua franca. I was reminded of the curiosities of languages when I bought a set of books by a domestic author on survival in nature.
The books in Serbian are called "Преживети у природи", which can be translated as surviving in nature. However, the verb преживети in Serbian is arrived at by adding a prefix to the word живети, meaning to live. The prefix пре generally means over, or through, although as any word or part of a language it is context dependent. Here we can see how in English we have to live and to survive, while in Serbian we have живети and преживети. Prima facie, live and survive look like significantly different words, but the etymology of survive is from Anglo-French survivre, Old French souvivre, Late Latin supervivere, super + vivere, to over live. I believe it is important to study how words in their contemporary form got their meaning, and above that to study language in a deeper way, not only for getting a basic message across, but to grasp how it affects communication and understanding of complex concepts. As soon as I find the energy, I will write a proper article explaining the flaws and benefits of using English versus Serbian (because it's my native language), which will, I believe, have a positive impact on the reader's understaning on communication.
Some of my coffee is getting stale unfortunately, so I have to either increase the brewing temperature, mass of coffee used, or both. It's not ideal, but it makes the coffee salvageable. I hope that if I get creative I can suck out most of the remaining flavour.
Recently I've been playing a ton of Pac-Man, the original 1980 arcade version. However, I also discovered a project someone has been working on to remake J2ME ports of Pac-Man: https://cosmictoons.neocities.org/Projects/games/pacrewritten. I've not yet looked at other stuff CosmicToons created, although they do seem really creative. Back to Pac-Man, the remake of the J2ME port of Pac-Man seems really close if not identical to the arcade version to me. Certainly there are some inaccuracies but I did not notice any during gameplay, maybe they are really small. In any case, super fun to play, and a much better alternative to firing up either MAME or the Pac-Man Museum+ which doesn't run as well as I'd like. The other positive of the remake by CosmicToons is that, unlike Pac-Man Museum+, if you use a vertical monitor it adapts to that. I have only a laptop so it looks ridiculous when I try to play it that way, turning it on its side to balance it, but it's still nice to have better usage of screen space. I plug in a usb keyboard and play around for awhile.
When it comes to games, the last "big" game I remember finishing was probably a decade ago. When I say big I mean a singleplayer game with a story and a long play time. I just don't feel like playing them for that long. I was tempted by MGS2 Sons of Liberty for quite awhile but I found out there's a novelisation of its story so I'd rather just read that. In my native language (Serbian) video games are typically called игрице, which when literally translated means small games. These days the younger generations typically call them игре or видео игре, translating to games or video games respectively. But little games always stuck with me; small games, to play around with. It implies fooling around. Much more preferrable to taking it seriously in my opinion, even though there are games with obviously excellent storytelling. I'd rather just read those stories, though.
A great coffee is back in my favourite specialty coffee shop: Lord Voldemort Pink Bourbon! It wasn't available for months now, since the beginning of 2025. approximately. This is a truly special bean, and the way they make it here is brilliant. If you like coffee, and you by chance come by some Lord Voldemort Pink Bourbon, make sure you try it out.
I've been playing a lot of Pac-Man lately, the original arcade game, the arrangement arcade from 1996, and the pac-man 256 on my telephone. Great games, all of them, in their own way. Arrangement is probably one of the most brilliant developments/remakes/improvements of a game. So fluid in its controls, its animation. The music is fantastic to listen to on its own, it's more than just a soundtrack for the background. Pac-Man championship is probably the best modern day Pac-Man, but that feel of arrangement is something else, the vibes are on another level.
I've been so tired lately, partly because of lack of sleep. I'm writing this at 3:40 in the morning.
Wanted to play Cthulhu Wars Duel with my wife, but the rules are quite complex. It seems like a really fun game, but we just couldn't get to playing it. So we decided to play two player King of Tokyo. I'm a big fan of dice and gambling (not against the house, against other players), so even though the game is more interesting with four or five players I still enjoy throwing those dice and trying to get just the right ones.
Since King of Tokyo is just Yahtzee Plus, it's worth mentioning that one can make a variant of Yahtzee to add more scope for strategy. My friends and I added more to the game (it lends it self to expanding it), and it's rather enjoyable as it allows careful balancing the usage of the dice and developing a strategy. It's no chess, but there's more to it. Side note: people who exclusively play perfect information games and deride games which have elements of chance are super annoying (so are the inverse people).
Games with imperfect information, with an element of chance, opens up opportunities for thinking on how to mitigate bad outcomes and setup good outcomes. Typically, people who (almost) exclusively play perfect information games will say that "you got lucky". I love those games precisely because of that. Eventually people realise I'm not lucky at all but just a better player (gin rummy, backgammon, risk). These games are rated incredibly low on boardgamegeek, yet are in reality way more tactically and/or strategically interesting than some of the more highly rated ones.
I made an aeropress coffee a couple of days ago, it was not very good unfortunately (as it cooled down, the slightly bitter taste was becoming more noticable). I should've just thrown an ice cube in to fix it.
A piece of advice for people who drink coffee and their coffee turns out to be not good: Putting an ice cube in it will sweeten it up and make it much better. You can try this by making a terrible cup, it can significantly improve even the worst of cups.
My head hurts from how todays programs/services/software work in general. I just had to help my wife with some presentation, to get it from her personal computer to her business one. First of all, she used canva to make the presentation. Canva is absolute crap, it's like a toy program. Programs like it contribute to form over function, or rather over quality of the message. She said everyone from her division, all cca. twenty of them, were using canva for this project. Now I'm no microsoft fan, but powerpoint does the job absolutely fine, although I would argue even a series of jpegs would be completely fine and the least hassle. That's how I made presentations in college and none of the professors had an issue with it. Not to mention my presentations always worked. Anyway, canva being the proprietary crap it is, can't properly export neither to pdf nor pptx. So that's the first annoyace. Then, the presentation was to large to email from her personal email to her business one, it overshot by a couple hundred kilobytes. I'm not sure how much pdfs or pptxs can be compressed, but I wanted to give it a shot. On her macintosh, it only offers compress. No difference in size whatsoever, it wasnt compressed, just archived. I see macintosh has a program called archive utility, and I start it up expecting some sort of options which would allow me to choose the level of compression. No such thing. Total crap. So, I transfer the presentation to my usb flash drive, deciding this would obviously be the easiest way; I thought to myself "why was I even trying to mail it". Her business computer doesn't allow connecting flash drives... On one hand I get it, it's for security reasons, but on the other hand can't it just scan sandbox the drive somehow and scan it and then decide whether or not to connect it. Whatever, I decide to upload the presentation onto her google drive. I try to login on her business laptop on google, but she doesn't know her password. Fine, let's check the password manager on her macintosh. It shows some kind of crap, doesn't actually show the password (no idea why, I concede that this was on me somehow). Whatever, in the end I remember her password. But wait, there's more! Two factor authentication first! So she has to click on a number on her phone to confirm it's her. I can understand this in a way, but while she's logging in on a different computer it's on the same wifi and the same ip range, why in the hell does it always ask for 2fa, even in this case. I admit I might be missing something, and I am biased in that I hate 2fa, or rather I prefer it was not the default and that I could avoid it. Then, after logging into the business computer, it asks her to input her phone number, her address, her backup mail. For the love of God why can't you just let me log in... And of course the buttons to skip this are poorly visible. It worked in the end.
A bit of a long rant, but I was fuming while trying to just TRANSFER A FILE FROM ONE COMPUTER TO ANOTHER. It is absolutely insane how obnoxious mainstream software has become, how much it gets in the way of the user, and how it's slowly been cooking the user like a frog.
Had some lovely cold brew, costa rica, forgot which variety. It was so sweet, and quite strong. Cold brew is seriously probably one of the best coffee preparation methods; there's little acidity, a ton of flavor, and also a ton of caffeine. I could drink a litre of that stuff daily how tasty it is (when made by a specialty coffee shop).
Another coffee, an espresso, also costa rica, also forgot what variety it was. It's an experimental coffee with fermentation lasting 360 hours. The taste was insanely rich, honestly one of the best coffee's I've ever tried. Tasted a bit like rum or sweet liquors. Strong, sweet, almost no acidity, crazy good coffee. The barista said he'd been tweaking the grind size, brew time, etc. etc. etc., from 7:30 until about 15:30, and I arrived at 16:00 to taste his work.
I'm a bit ashamed to say this, but I fell today for the "algorithm" trap on youtube. It recommended me a short film, cca. 20 minutes, horror genre. I watched the whole thing and loved it. I went back to viewing something I usually watch but it recommended me more of these short films. I ended up watching three of these. It's not the end of the world, but after finishing the third film and wanting to watch a fourth one I finally realised it "figured me out" and kept recommending me things to keep me glued to the screen. None of us are immune to this kind of brainwashing. It's not particularly harmful, but it can lead to wasting time online. Watching one of these? Fine. Bingeing? Not such a good idea. I wish everyone reading and not reading this more willpower and selfreflection to break away from consuming too much media.
Since I'm having trouble getting hired to work in a specialty coffee shop, I'm seriously considering opening up my own. I haven't much experience, but people who work with specialty coffee are friendly and helpful in general. Everyone I met was happy to give advice and share resources for learning more about the field, even the people who refused to hire me (it's nothing personal, after all, they just want someone with more experience). It'd make sense to hire someone experienced who wants to head a specialty coffee shop and make the decisions about recipes, coffee bean choices, etc. etc. etc. I know quite a few people in the business who have years of experience but didn't yet have an opportunity to be a head barista.
Played Secret Hitler yesterday with some friends, it's a good game, although it requires a relatively large number of people who are in the mood to play such a game, not an easy task. Board games are a great way to introduce people to each other who don't know the other person particularly well; a game as a closed system with rules offers a skeleton for interaction, so you immediately have something to discuss. This allows you to get to know the person better in a relatively short amount of time and in a comfortable, low pressure environment. The best types of games are card games though, the ones played with a traditional 52 + 2 jokers pack of cards. The reason is simple: you have thousands of games packed into that one game system. Not to mention you can adapt the rules of games to your liking, and even invent your own games (I personally developed variants to suit the groups I played with, and developed one game). I will be posting more about traditional card games here once I find the time.
Had a fantastic doppio today, pink bourbon variety (naturally, look at the website name), double honey processed. Crazy good coffee. I'm grateful to have a proper specialty coffee shop so close to my home. Not to mention that the prices are equal or lower than those of regular cafes which serve subpar coffee, dark roasted beans where it wouldn't matter if they prepared the drink using coffee beans or soy beans from how dark roasted it is. Starbucks is the main villain here, unfortunately the franchise opened several stores in the capital city of my country, selling "coffee" and populating their cafes with people with MacBooks who suddenly need to do all this work at the coffee shop.
Created my website yesterday. I was inspired by several sites I read occasionally on neocities, so I decided to finally start my own, for what it's worth. Frankly I've been reading what daliwali has been posting, from article to article, entry to entry, and I've not been surprised this much in a long time. To read someone's texts and see their interests and realise that it significantly overlaps with my own. Naturally there are differences and things I disagree with what he says, but his writings are so compelling to me personally that I felt I had to read through them.
Anyway, that aside, I don't know much about css so my website looks like crap currently, but eventually I'll make it nicer on the reader's eyes.
Even though it looks like crap I still feel good about posting stuff online. I deleted all of my social media years ago (not that I had many accounts), because as I analysed my usage I noticed that the phrases repeated by their owners, "Connect with friends!", "Share your memories!", etc. etc. etc., are absolute bullcrap. I'm connecting with my friends and sharing memories offline and I'm stress free in general, I don't feel like I'm missing something. But still, publishing my thoughts and more on neocities pseudonymously feels like it'll be good and fun. Verba volant, scripta manent, right?