Weekly Wrap Up (2025.10.25)

It’s a Trove of Transformers Edition. Or something like that. I’ve got two main things this week, Toys and Coding, so we’ll go with those first.

But first, in general random rambling.

A while back I randomly wrote about my nice Water Bottle. I got it, last year I think, with some gratis credit in the work.brand store. We got another credit this year, and I was going to get a nice hoodie but it sold out between adding to my cart and checking out. So I just got another water bottle, one for home, one for work. Its not the same water bottle though, that was not available.

The new water bottle sucks. It sucks a lot. I used it once, filled it with ice and water and its basically not insulated in anyway. The bottle itself became freezing cold to hold, and it sweats like crazy when cold, leaving a nice liquid outer finish. At this point, I will probably just throw it on my desk shelf somewhere as a display thing for work, since its branded.

The spout mechanism is also to as nice and smooth as the Owala bottle I already had.

Toys

Because Ultra Magnus was expiring, I shipped my Pile of Loot on BBTS. No Omega Supreme yet, but, what do you know, it dropped in like, right after Magnus was due to expire. I swear they were waiting or me to send it out. This box had 3 items in it, and 4 Transformers.

First was, Commander Ultra Magnus. I would say I don’t know why I skipped on him the first round but I do know, I think he was a bit hard to find, and I probably didn’t have the money at the time. I’ve seen like, one Commander in a store ever. And I miss out on pre-orders for them a lot. I was also pretty satisfied with my Combiner Wars Magnus. I still am but… This one is definitely better. I should probably add that Ultra Magnus is one of my favorite Transformers Characters. I only have two helves with “Mostly dedicated to one character” space, one is Optimus Prime, mostly because I just have a bunch of Primes, the other is Magnus. Though it’s not all Ultra Magnus. I also have some adjacent characters (Six Shot, who kills Ultra Magnus) and Shattered Glass Soundwave (because he is the same colors and looks cool). I think Gobots Puzzler is on that shelf too, because I didn’t have anywhere else to stick it.

Anyway, the box also had the Dramatic Capture whatever it’s called set with the Cybertronia Bumblebee, Wheeljack and Jazz. I’ll repeat it when I get around to writing the set up, but I rarely but Transformers for their Alt Modes, but I just, really like these alt modes. They also have this really fun fidgity and complex transformation schemes going ont hat I enjoy.

Skipping the last item, when I picked up TF One Prime last week on clearance, they only had Primes on the peg marked down. When I went back a day later there was a lone TF One Bumblebee. I liked the Prime enough I decided to give the Bumblebee a go too. My only real gripe is that him and Prime are not at all in scale with each other. Oh well I guess, they were cheap on clearance and are still cool toys.

I also stopped into Target just because it’s been a bit, this is the third time this year, something something boycotting. They had the reissue of Sideswipe, in TF Devastation colors. Like Magnus, I ended up not getting Sideswipe or Sunstreaker before, and I’ve come to accept that my Classics pair isn’t really great and they could really use updating. There is also a reissue of the newer Sunstreaker coming around the end of October.

Lastly, in the BBTS box was Gargantos, aka “totally not Shuma Gorath for legal reasons wink wink”. This si a character that I was really wanting ages ago, like 25 years ago give or take, when I was trying to make a Marvel vs Capcom 2 line up. I didn’t think we woul dever get him. He’s pretty neat. Big tentacles monster He’ll also be fun with other figures like the D&D stuff I have.

Coding

I made another blog.

But Ramen, you just killed a blog.

Not that kind of blog, I mean, like, blog software. I’m probably going to do a separate post on it… eventually right? (Anaking_Padme.meme). Anyway. I made a basic blog back during my 100 Days of Code run, it runs on Python Flask. I had it hosted for a while but never really used it. This new one is, WAY better. Like 1000x, and I will probably put it somewhere, either on BloggingIntensifies.com or just microblog.lameazoid.com, or something. I have not quite decided.

It’s a Microblog though. It’s basically, my own hosted Bluesky/Mastodon thing, with all the things I want from it. It lets me post links, it lets me post images, it lets me post just text. I can stick my FreshRSS feed into it and directly share from the RSS feed. Note to self, this will be a problem when/if I post it publicly since Fresh RSS lives inside my home network. Anyway, It also takes what I post to it, and spits it out as it’s own post on Mastodon and Bluesky. Maybe more in the future. It’s a POSE (Post Once Share Everywhere) style system like that. It even creates my little digest posts that I share with these weekly posts. It’s basically the old digest/sharing post that only worked on the CLI with a fully fleshed out Web GUI. It’s super cool, I’m excited for it.

Gaming

Five more days left in BeatStar. I am never going to finish the 150-200 Deluxe tracks.

I will probably finish the last 40 or so Standard tracks. Probably. Problem is, I think 5 or so are ones I previously failed, before the closure announcement, so, 5 out of 200 or so older songs. Its not a big haystack, its probably on the low end of the score, and easy to find, but I still need to find them. There is no indicator.

Problem is, I think, THINK one is a higher score. I vaguely remeber a song where I failed, right at the end, but was out of gems to continue, and thinking “This is going to haunt me later when I am trying to completionist all the songs.”

It’s also Halloween week in Pokemon Go. Which means goofy costumed Pokemon. Look at this adorable shit. I love it. I need to catch more so I can evolve them with hats.

Interesting Links for the Week

I should come up with a better “clever name” for this.

Link List for Saturday 2025-10-25