Oh man, I have been so off this week. I took last Friday off, because I have reached a point in the year where I need to start using vacation days. We don’t really take long vacations for a variety of reasons, but if needed, I can always pull from my pre scheduled Fridays. It turned out my daughter had an appointment in Champaign on Friday, so I went along and we ran around there most of the day. So then Saturday rolled around, and it really felt like Sunday. Except it was Saturday.
Sunday, my wife was going to her mom’s overnight to take care of some things with her sister that I am not getting into at all here. I was going to go on Sunday as well, separately, to take care of some stuff as well, but decided, why not just, also stay over. I have the time to use for vacation. So I last minute took Monday off. Which of course, EXTRA fucked with my sense of time, because Saturday felt like Sunday, but then Sunday felt like Saturday AND Sunday, then Monday was my Sunday.
It also was not helped because I was supposed to travel for work Tuesday, which wasn’t the first day of the week until I took Monday off, but then that also got rescheduled for Wednesday and everything got all goofy for time and what day of the week it was. Hell, on Tuesday, I kept thinking “oh man, weekend is like tomorrow” for some reason, except it was Tuesday, weekend was 4 days out man.
And if you are keeping score, I was not off last Friday anyway, because I had a job scheduled for work and I had to be there.
Toys
Target taketh away, and Target giveth back, or something. A few weeks ago, many Transformers collectors were upset because Target cancelled all pre orders for Prowl and Starscream. I believe both were exclusives, or at least exclusive to Target and maybe Hasbro Pulse. I want to say the Starscream was new, not released on that mold before, I don’t really know, I have the maybe it’s Earthrise?, version, I have all 6 Seekers in that previous version mold. I don’t really care about the new Smooth Starscream.
But Prowl was a reissue, of a mold that was already hard to get. My “current Prowl” was still the old old old Classics version, that turned into the Nissan 350 looking car. This new updated version I believe first came out in a two pack with Iron hard, that I want to say was also cancelled, or at least very short supply. Then maybe in a two pack with battle damage, and possibly part of one of those 5 packs in “cartoon colors” with 4 other molds you already have.
I am starting to get into write up/review length here so I will wrap it up.
Both started showing up in stores. Which was good because at least there was a chance, but annoying because I don’t go to stores much and I am actively avoiding Target still as much as possible. But exclusives are annoying like that. Thankfully, out of the blue, there were emails, “Sorry for recent problems, we have added this item to your cart for 24 hours on hold if you still want it.” Which I did, very much. And now I have the “good modern Prowl” version. I can retire my old Classics Prowl.
Movies and TV
I went and watched the Transformers 40th release in theaters last weekend as well. It’s a movie I have watched many times of course. I think last time though was in a theater for the 30th or maybe 35th anniversary. I forgot how this movie just sort of, goes and goes all t he way though. Just run run run and explosions and shooting for like 90 minutes or so. There was a fun little vignette after the film, which I had only just heard about the day after the show called Optimus Prime Awakening
It was… very nice to look at, It reminded me a lot of the Spider-verse films, may even have been the same people. The plot and point was a little hazy. It felt almost like a set up for something to come int he future. I’ll be hoinest, I would totally love a straight up G1 character show with this animation. It was really nice to look at, in the same way the Spider-verse films are.
Projects
In case you are keeping score, I didn’t post any regular posts this week. I actually have been taking photos, been trying out those new lenses I got last week some. I probably even had the parts, writing and photos, to make posts this week. But I held off in favor of a larger project.
I am working on, as a test, migrating this blog to Hugo, off of WordPress.
I am not sure yet if I am actually going to do it. There are a LOT of advantages.
- I could probably do some cook scripty things with a blog made of flat markdown files
- It’s not any sort of complicated proprietary format
- It makes the flow from writing to archive much simpler
- It’s probably way less overhead on the server both for specs and space
- Everything becomes incredibly portable
- It’s much more secure because it’s a static site
There are some downsides, but they are probably less downside than I think. I am really happy with the layout right now, but I could probably replicate it for the most part, which is what I have been working towards this week. I may need to learn to make a custom theme.
I THINK it’s my local test environment, but the build each change is INCREDIBLY SLOW. I have been troubleshooting and working with AI on this and both Claude and ChatGPT suggest it’s only slow because my test environment is on an old spinning platters drive. But it takes like 10 minutes to build, with 30 test posts, and when I had everything in it, all current 800+ posts, it took like an hour for some reason.
Like I said, I have been using mostly Claude for assistance, making little scripts and working out the syntax for theme customizing, because it seems to vary a bit between base themes. The actual migration of the content was super easy. I got Claude to build a Python script that passed through the WordPress Export and spit out properly formatted Markdown files, and it downloaded the image assets it encountered. There were a few misses for some reason but I can manually fix those.
The harder part is the layout. I likely current layout, but Hugo works way different than WordPress for all that. I’ve had Claude build a custom little code snippet to build my category pages, but now I get to populate them all to mostly match what I have now. Plus it pulled a bunch of old drafts which I have to go pick out now and throw elsewhere else. In general, it’s come down to a lot of massaging content to make sure it flows and looks nice.
Anyway, I am still working on it, and deciding, but it’s a big, complex, project. I think in the long run it would be better for my workflow. Plus frankly, it’s something I have been wanting to do for a while now, years. Kind of needs to be a “rip the bandaid off” moment.
