Lameazoid.com - Weekly Wrap Up (2026.07.11)

Maybe one day I will do real blog posts again. I mean, technically this is probably closer to “real blogging” than silly reviews or whatever. I actually have been feeling… more into the idea again lately, I guess.

Technically the Fourth of July happened after last post, I went down to the bridge and watched the city fireworks as we often do.

No fun travel food this week. I just got QDOBA and another, different Crazy Bowl dish. I did look up and found a ramen place near the office down there, but I’ve been working an hour earlier than planned (because work needs) and I kind of want to go when I am working the normal shift because the place doesn’t open until 11:30 and that lunch feels a little close to when I need to leave if I am working the earlier shift. I normally go get lunch around 11. It’s not much but it’s a little too close.

It also sounds like these trips will continue pretty regularly for the foreseeable future, which I really don’t mind. I have been in the same office here for 15 years now, I could use a change of scenery now and then.

Video Games

I can feel my interest in Droid Tycoon fading. It’s just become… well, too grindy. The new Mythics cost a zillion chips to upgrade across the various levels and they drop very rarely on the Sandcrawler belt and then it just becomes a big competition between the players to be the one who gets it. And there is some sort of new Galactic rarity tier coming, and it’s just… too much. Anyway, last week I hit Rebirth 100, this week I am at Rebirth 128.

It’s not the most pointless game I’ve been playing, though this other one is closing soon, like, in a week or maybe a month or something maybe? This one is the Star Trek lower Decks mobile game. It’s a tappy base buildy thing where you reset each episode. It’s stupid. It’s so bad and I hate this game so much. I could do an ENTIRE post on why it’s bad, but i won’t… probably… definitely not, I can’t even post about shit I care about these days. It’s just… everything is so ridiculously overpriced. I don’t buy shit, and it’s “not required” but if you want to make any progress collecting characters and actually winning the stupid micro events for unique characters and costumes, you basically have to drop $50+ on a 2-4 day mini event. See those “Event Sale” badges, there are three, they rotate, they are like $13 EACH.

It’s stupid. Like even if I tap tap tap and super play and pay attention and catch the little intruder bonus, I still finish at like 100th place in the dumb leader boards. Even a recent one, I was shocked that I was in first place very quickly. I almost ALWAYS am like rank 60 at the start of the events. Since the game is closing I decided to burn my very meager premium currency stash (you get some free here and there). Like 300 gold or so. And I kept up at the top until like… half way, then I dropped to like 6th, and there is basically no way to catch up because I can’t boost anything fast enough within the time limit.

I also broke the main game. The offered a chance to jump tot he final mission, wrap up the story, except now I don’t have the cards or levels to automate anything. I literally cannot proceed.

I tried to play Final Fantasy Endless Crisis, which is some sort of FF7 mobile game I didn’t know about that is closing in October but it would not launch. I don’t know if the problem is on my end or what.

I really need to get out of this rut of playing nonsense games…

Music

Nothing new but I cleaned up my Navidrome a bit, and will probably clean it up a bit more. I’ve been slowly making my way through my library favoriting songs to get a sort of, baseline “playlist” of “songs I like”. I’ve done I think A-B and U-Z. It’s basically become my “I’m killing time on the toilet” sort of activity. One issue is there are some things in the library I don’t care about. Like I have a folder of Comedy acts. I don’t really need some random Robin Williams bit popping up in shuffle. I have a folder of copies that were my daughter’s CDs, so she can find her stuff more easily and directly. But they create dupes int he library. I also have some random audio clips and podcasts saved, I don’t need those in the library either.

Apparently Navidrome has an ignore file that is easy to use, so I stripped those out. Over time I want to add some of the individual albums ot it that have FLAC and MP3 versions, because I don’t need both in the library really.

Anyway, as a “New Feature” I have a script to throw together a digest of my listening this week, so here are my tops for the week.

Top Artists

Aurora — 12 scrobbles
Lauren Mayberry — 11 scrobbles
Sigrid — 7 scrobbles
CHVRCHES — 7 scrobbles
Taylor Swift — 4 scrobbles

Top Tracks

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Taylor’s Version) by Taylor Swift — 2 scrobbles
The Dark Dresses Lightly by Aurora — 2 scrobbles
The Mother We Share by CHVRCHES — 2 scrobbles
IN A MINUTE by TOMORA, AURORA, Tom Rowlands — 2 scrobbles
Head on Fire by Sigrid — 2 scrobbles

Top Albums

Vicious Creature by Lauren Mayberry — 10 scrobbles
What Happened To The Heart by Aurora — 5 scrobbles
Sucker Punch by Sigrid — 3 scrobbles
The Bones of What You Believe (Special Edition) by CHVRCHES — 3 scrobbles
Mercurial World (Deluxe) by Magdalena Bay — 3 scrobbles

Toys

Music kind of bled over into Projects and now Toys is bleeding into Music. This one was really confusion on Amazon’s emails and orders. I pre-ordered the Mini brands mini vinyl record player. Not to be confused with the Miniverse one. Apparently there are two companies doing mini players. From my brief research I did after the fact, most seem to agree this one, Mini Brands, is slightly better functionally though the Miniverse player itself looks slightly nicer.

I had more written here but this whole post got a little long so I’ll save it for a seperate post about just the player. I mostly want them as a prop for toys, even though they are a little large for most of my stuff (they are closer to 1/6th than 1/12th).

I made a trip to Target, which I don’t usually do, and they had a lot of clearance, stuff. Not a lot I really cared about, but I did pick up Hawk Girl and The Engineer for dirt cheap. These were the last two to complete the set, so now I can make the little Build a Figure of Number Four. These aren’t amazing figures, but they aren’t terrible either. All three members of the Justice Gang are pretty decent actually. The biggest flaw is the lack of accessories.

Related to DC Comics though, I found, finally, the main reason I even bother with Target these days. Sonic x DC Knuckles Superman and Tails Cyborg. I think there is a Rouge Catwoman out there as well. Maybe. Anyway, I primarily wanted Knuckles as Superman because well, Superman is kind of central to the whole Justice League thing these figures have going on. I was sure I had missed this wave completely, except I had found the single packed versions of Silver/Green Lantern and Shadow/Batman floating around. I have both of them from the boxed set.

I have a review written up for wave one, but these are nice figures, especially given they are, on average, only $15. They are big and heafty and well articulated. The only real flaw is that like every Sonic toy, they have huge heads, which makes them constantly off balance.

Books

Just to keep the Sonic kick going, Humble Bundle, up through yesterday maybe earlier today, had a bundle of a whole wack of IDW Sonic Comics available. So I went for that. I was a little annoyed because they redeem on a platform I had not heard of, not having straight downloads is annoying, but having to use yet another platform is extra annoying. They could have at least been Kobo books like some previous bundles.

I still need to get a cheapish large tablet for reading these digital comics on unfortunately. It’s probably never going to happen while tech pricing is going bonkers bull shit.

Projects

I used to have a janky Python/HTML/SQL set up that would monitor my home network. I wrote it myself. It was dodgy but it worked… ish. I decided to dig in and found there are better solutions that accomplish this.

So i set up NetAlert. I’m not entirely sold, it really buggy. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. It doesn’t let me edit device names and information half the time because it keeps losing it’s API key. The API key for… itself? I guess.