Projects
Little to no progress was made on projects this week.
Personal
The main event of this week is the Outer Banks trip.
The Outer Banks
Though technically part of Week 23, Sunday, June 8, 2025, is included here as it marked the start of the trip. On June 8, 2025, we went to the Outer Banks, to the same beach house as the 2021 trip.
The trip was not nearly as emotional as I expected; multiple factors contributed to that.
Day 1: Sunday, June 8, 2025 (Week 23)
This was the first day of the trip, memories of 2021 were coming back hard when we arrived. Very little things changed about the place.
It felt surreal that the last time I was in this house, the specific bunkbed room was July 2021. At that time, I had not graduated high school, had not gone to Fort Myers Beach yet and was still using that dual-socket X8DAi system as my main desktop among many, many other things. One thing was the same though: I was still working on MediaCow Touch 2, albeit now the Lite variant, on the same ThinkPad T430s.
Day 2: Monday, June 9, 2025
On this day, Instagram became absolutely vile and as a result, I am taking a break from it. One of the main reasons why I stuck with it for so long mainly because it was the only way I could contact certain people. I was able to contact one of them, in particular someone who has been quite important within the last several months, on Discord, a step in the right direction for ditching Instagram for good. Since I started using it in March 2020, it has not done much other than make my life miserable. I don't doomscroll, but I see the results of others' doomscrolling in their Stories; something I thought was useful for being able to find out about upcoming events around Richmond, Virginia.
Day 3: Tuesday, June 10, 2025
Despite being off my ADHD medications for a few days, I started to do some work on MediaCow Touch 2 to show that I am still working on the same project in the same beach house room, on the same computer as the last time I was here in 2021.
Starting this day, following the discontinuation of Instagram, I have turned to Discord for meeting others online.
Day 4: Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Not much was done on this day, like on the other days, I took pictures I might use for MediaCow Touch 2's included wallpapers.
Day 5: Thursday, June 12, 2025
On this day, I finally did something I'd wanted to do for a long time: Play through the Aviator cutscene in OneShot Solstice while mid-air on a Cessna 182 Skylane. I brought the Steam Deck with me onto the airplane. Once we reached altitude, I took out the Steam Deck and played through the Aviator cutscene in OneShot (World Machine Edition). I made sure to have the device in sleep mode right before the cutscene played, minimizing the amount of time that the Steam Deck would have to be out so I can enjoy the rest of the ride and take pictures.
I literally had only one shot to do this. I got lucky that we went on a C182 specifically as it was originally planned to be another aircraft. The idea is that in OneShot, Niko is in the system that the game is being played on so in this case, Niko was on the plane with me. Niko had their first flight while I revisited my own first small aircraft experience, symbolically reliving that moment on the same plane, the Cessna 182 Skylane.
Due to actually having better cell service on the aircraft than on the ground since I am in direct line of sight and altitude of cell towers, I was able to look at the aircraft on adsbexchange.com while flying.
Day 6: Friday, June 13
This was likely another day of hanging out, going to the beach and swimming.
Day 7: Saturday, June 14
This was my last day here and I made it count: I spent the most time on the beach this day out of the other days of the week. Following the thunderstorms from the night before, the waves were a little higher. This made riding the waves more fun and effective.
Day 8: Sunday, June 15
This was not really a good day for myself but it still had some interesting experiences. I lost my wallet somehow, it practically disappeared from existence and after hours of a combined search effort, it did not turn up.
We made it home after a three hour drive.