I've been playing SWTOR as a light-sided Sith Warrior, which is understandably a confusing concept to most Star Wars fans and requires some explanation. The basics are that he believes in the Sith Code and views the Jedi as ignorant and responsible for many of the tragedies that have occured throughout the galaxy including both the Force Wars and the Mandalorian War. He also despises the Empire and sees most Sith as those who blindly sacrifice their passion for power rather fully engaging in their passion as the code teaches. He is therefore subtley working against the Empire and Darth Baras whilst being his apprentice, which means not engaging in any missions that sabotage the republic when avoidable and picking the light side option in most cases. He still has contempt for the Jedi and their blind order. I see the character as someone that is closer to Luke's philosophy of what a Jedi should be (in Legends). It does make the game somewhat harder as the Sith Warrior's main enemy in a lot of locations are the members of the republic but it makes the story more interesting
RSS Feeds allow you to subscribe to a website and be notified of its changes when updated. You can use it to, for example, follow youtube channels you like without having to create an actual youtube account and to also follow blogs in general. Instead of a notification being pushed to your device and trying to compete for your attention, you intentionally enter the RSS Feed Reader application and reload it to get all of the updates you want instead. I use Emacs' Elfeed as my RSS Feed Reader alongside Elfeed-Tube to watch youtube videos without having to access the website (and as a bonus, it pulls the transcript for the videos that you can save or reference in your notes, and also highlights them in realtime. Works with sponsorblock and all the other usual youtube add-ons) and Elfeed-Org so I can manage and tag my RSS feeds in a single org-mode file.
I got extremely bored with the Jedi Consular story in Star Wars: The Old Republic, so I decided to try to make the game feel more interesting by first creating a new character that's a light side Sith Warrior and second, also commiting to a self-imposed permadeath rule. I have died 3 times now (all stupdily from fights with enemies much higher leveled than me.) This experiment has resulted in what I want so far, I've found myself actually reading more about the abilities in the game and not selling off all of my medpacks. It still doesn't capture the feeling of KOTOR but it's a lot closer now. Playing with permadeath has also given me the ability to try out options I wouldn't usually touch since I know I'll be back there again anyway. I probably won't stick to this long but it is fun so far.
After being pretty disappointed with the story of the Jedi Consular class in SWTOR, I decided to try out playing as a light-sided Sith Warrior instead. The first thing I noticed is that the Sith Warrior has the storyline that I wanted the Jedi Consular to have, with him engaging in more of the political and philosophical side of Star Wars. It's weird to me that the Jedi Consular didn't have a storyline closer to this as I was expecting something similar to the interactions Luke had in the Thrawn Trilogy with him contemplating what a Jedi would do in various scenarios and also learning that the Jedi also frequently served as mediators in random civil disputes. Diplomacy (the non-aggressive kind) is one of the primary roles of the Jedi and its a shame the Jedi Consular storyline did not really show this side of them.
I continously strive to improve my interactions with computers, aiming to remove as much friction as possible between having a thought or intention and being able executing it. This has led me to try out various different keyboard-driven interfaces and at this point, it has become extremely frustrating to use a web browser where I don't have a vim keybinding plugin like Vimium C installed. To give a quick example of some of the keybindings (assuming you use a qwerty layout): You can press "f" to highlight all of the links to select ("F" to open them in a new tab), "G" to go to the bottom of a page, "gg" to go to the top of a page, "j" to scroll down, "k" to scroll up, "J" and "K" to scroll through the open tabs. These keybindings are based off of the bindings you'd find in the vim text editor and they're second nature to me in the browser at this point (although my browser experience is also further customized but I'll write about that in a later post). I highly recommend trying it out even if you have no interest in vim, if not for anything, just to simply be able to navigate links without reaching for the mouse, but you'll probably find some use for all of the other keybindings and commands it'll come with.
Imagine a world where you get consistent keybindings across all of your applications and the ability to define macros that work across all of them as well, coupled with a cohesive interface that integrates with your favorite text edidor. That's what EXWM essentially is. The premise is to run every application inside of Emacs and treat them like they're normal Emacs buffers, meaning they can be navigated and interacted with in the same way you interact with them. EXWM allows me to get my emacs keybindings in every application I use and also lets me have my normal vertico/consult/posframe etc. interface act as the menu system for my desktop, letting me navigate through all my different windows alongside my other buffers. It can also be integrated with perspective.el which, among other things, lets you group different windows together in their own space depending on the project or task you're working on. The result is a highly customizeable, coherent, and productive environment.. and also the sole reason I haven't switched to Wayland.
Although I found this game to be a fun and short beatemup, I felt like something was just missing until I tried a self-imposed permadeath rule after being inspired from a few posts I've seen on the internet praising that feature in other games. The permadeath rule made the game a lot more enjoyable and arcadey to me, especially when you turn on the tougher or maximum enemies modifiers. It also gives the game's "continue system" a reason to exist rather than just being basically useless since losing your continues will force you to restart at the beginning of the game. I also added the rule that once I beat a stage, I can't go back, meaning if I don't get an S-rank score or get all the collectables, then I'll just have to try harder in my next play through. Made this short game a bit more fun, now I just need an actual arcade stick.