a swirl of green, pink, blue, yellow, and orange

graham builds

all blog posts rss feed icon

I Went to New Zealand

posted by graham on November 29, 2024

A photo I took of the New Zealand countryside with sheep standing in front of giant limestone boulders colloquially called 'the elephant rocks'

I just recently returned from an 18-day vacation to New Zealand (Māori: Aotearoa). The goal was to celebrate being with my partner for over ten years and also try our best to learn and experience as much of the country as we could in that time. Our trip began in Auckland, and largely consisted of driving to new places, adventuring in and around them, and then driving or otherwise traveling to the next one.

A photo I took from the Sky Tower of downtown Auckland

To help make the scope of NZ easier to grasp for a USAmerican, I also looked up the population size, rough geographical area, and latitudes for the Northernmost (Auckland) and the Southernmost (Dunedin) cities we visited. I’m using latitude because that helps define a feel for the length of days and nights, seasons, etc:

  1. New Zealand is roughly the population of Colorado1
  2. Its area geographically is very similar in size to Colorado2
  3. Auckland is located at 36.8509°S, which is about as far from the equator as the southern edge of Colorado3
  4. Dunedin is located at 45.8795°S, which is about as far from the equator as Portland, OR4

A photo I took of some of the mountains surrounding Milford Sound, featuring one of the touring ships in the foreground for scale

Throughout the trip’s downtime, I often read the Timeline of New Zealand History for a

Phinks, the Racecar Driver

posted by graham on November 26, 2024

A mustachioed Italian-looking man, wearing a stereotypical Egyptian Pharaoh headdress and a green tracksuit with red stripes, talks on the phone apprehensively

Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Phinks, member number 5 of The Phantom Troupe.

Jack: [...] Next to them is a fellow in a racing [unintelligible] outfit.

Sylvi: [laughs]

Jack: Green racing driver’s outfit, uh, uh, white shoulders on his jacket, red stripes, green sort of track jacket, almost. Now, next to this person, this is interesting. This is a character I have seen before. I, I don’t know anything about —

Jack: We have Phinks! With a P-H. P-H-I-N-K-S.

Keith: Yep. [Sylvia laughs]

Jack: Who is a grumpy racing driver. He’s a man in a sort of racing driver.

Sylvia: Oh, okay. That’s an interesting— I didn’t get racing driver from him. I always got, uh, Chris Moltisanti.

Keith: But I get it from the jacket though. Sorry, you get who?

Dre: Yeah, I totally get it.

Sylvia: Chris Moltisanti from The Sopranos?

Keith: Oh, it is.

Jack: Oh, yeah. [Dre laughs]

Sylvia: The, like, tracksuit vibe?

Jack: Yeah, totally. It’s absolutely that tracksuit vibe. I also saw it as, like, a racing jacket or, like, racing colors.

Keith: Yeah. Yeah.

Sylvia: Yeah, no, absolutely.

Some Interesting Links From October

posted by graham on November 1, 2024

I like reading about what other folks find interesting, but I often forget to write down what I myself have found. I’ve been meaning to talk about this first link ever since I came across it, but I kept forgetting to make time until now. I figure a new month is a good a time as any to make a link-retrospective post.

Video Games

This video is not only impressive on a technical level for being able to accomplish what it set out to do, but the animations and ways that the information is conveyed is on par with a pannenkoek video in terms of making complex ideas become understable.

Movies

I had never heard of this and it became the first RSS feed post that I’ve bookmarked since making the transition over from cohost to inoreader as my means of internet browsing.

Fashion

I had meant to share this CJ video because I think it does an incredible job of explaining fashion through the lens of “conversation with community identity,” and I was reminded that I

How my friend and I became Lords of Oblivion

posted by graham originally via https://cohost.org/graham/post/100827-how-my-friend-and-i on September 4, 2022 and reposted on October 11, 2024

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out for the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2006 — almost two decades ago. It launched during an era when there weren’t really game wikis to google, which meant that most of the bugs and strange discoveries in the game for me came from word of mouth in my social circle.

A view of Frostcrag spire from above, pulled from the Oblivion wiki

Beyond the more widely-known “horse-armor” DLC launched in April of 2006, there was a number of other DLC items. The only relevant one to this story was the Frostcrag Spire quest for the “Wizard’s Tower”. I did not buy it, but my friend did and we would regularly hang out. We found that if my friend logged in while he was at my house, then I was able to download and play the DLC on my console. However, either because of limitation in the storage of our hard-drives or because you could only associate your Xbox Live account with so many Xbox 360s at once, we got into this mess where I kept having to re-download the DLC every time he visited if I wanted to play it.

This went on for a few weeks until one of us accidentally tried to load

Thought I Saw Someone I Knew

posted by graham on October 8, 2024

I was walking down the street to get some takeout tonight, and out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a huge stuffed animal sitting in the front window of a toystore.

Closeup of a maroon face with black eyes and a black uwu mouth

And it reminded me of an old friend.

Closeup of eggbug from cohost doing the same face with the same sort of coloring

Until I looked again more closely.

Zoomed out stock photo of the stuffed animal from a product page

Bay Area Cohost Wake

posted by graham on October 7, 2024

While cohost’s users were mourning the loss of the website online, Natalie (and Liz and Zandra) organized a Seattle Cohost Wake that happened last week. Additional wakes popped up in Boston, Philly, and a few other cities. Today, I attended the San Francisco Bay Area Wake, cohost-(heh)-ed by Damien, Nicky Flowers, and Diane in Oakland.

We met, N95+ masks on, by Lake Merritt under the shade of a giant tree and sat in fold up chairs, on blankets, and generally about the grass. I brought my fish picnic blanket and an id I had printed out at the library the night before because I was worried people wouldn’t know who I was without the swirly profile picture.

There were a solid 40 people at least, though I didn’t get an exact count and it varied over the hours. It was nice to get to see people, but my biggest takeaway was just how tall everybody was. I don’t know why but I had imagined everyone on cohost being just barely taller than Jae, when in actuality, many people there today were several inches taller than that.

It was nice to hear people suggest turning this into a

A Year of HxH Characters

posted by graham on October 1, 2024

A year ago, a new podcast came out, and with it brought me one of the silliest and most fun art projects I’ve ever been a part of. There’s plenty more art to come, but I wanted to do a bit of a review as I migrated and archived the old art from cohost onto here. Rather than filling up RSS feeds with over 50 drawings one at a time that many of you may have already seen, I’ve opted for this grid approach. Each one is clickable to go look at the original cohost post. Maybe I’ll update them to web-archive once cohost shuts down. Who knows?

Media Club Plus is a podcast by Friends at the Table and its premier season focused on Hunter X Hunter anime based on the manga by Yoshihiro Togashi. I’ve been listening to Friends at the Table for years, and I knew that the group behind Media Club Plus would be fun to listen to, even if I didn’t know anything about Hunter X Hunter (HxH). Part of the conceit of the podcast, after all, was that Jack De Quidt had also never watched the anime nor read the manga, so we would

Wizard Sokoban

posted by graham on September 30, 2024

Today, my friend and I launched another new version of our puzzle game named Wizard Sokoban (working title). You can play it on itch.io for free, though it works best on a computer using firefox:

I wanted to take some time to discuss the journey we’ve been through getting here because I’m proud of what we’ve made so far and I’m excited for what it’ll be after we’ve applied another few rounds of polish.

Our second time game developing

In May of 2024, my friend Jules and I found ourselves simultaneously unemployed for the first time in our professional careers. With no structure to our days, we talked about some side projects that we’d been meaning to try out when we had more time. He mentioned wanting to try out Godot, and I mentioned that I had an idea for a puzzle game that could be pretty fun and simple to make.

We’ve been playing video games together for over a decade, and we most recently took on the idea of making our own when we went on a vacation to take part in Indie Train Jam 2017 from Chicago to Emeryville.1 Surrounded by

Under Construction

posted by graham on September 28, 2024

I’ve finally found the motivation to make a personal blog, and not a moment too soon. It’s slow going, but the RSS feed should work. For now, the feed just contains every post with no filtering options, but I’ll probably separate it out into individually-subscribable tag feeds before I post much else.

Part of why this all took so long was because I wanted to find a url that didn’t include my full name and that did allow me to do silly stuff with it, like the blog link being at “graham builds a blog” when you read the url without punctuation.

tags: #meta