The calendar claims it’s October already but the temperatures are still in denial. I can’t remember ever experiencing the start of this month that warm. It’s getting scary! See what I did there? Because of October? Spooky month? Scary? No? Worth a shot. What happened in September? More letter writing! The snail mail project is going well. I keep track of the amount of outbound letters: the grand total for the last two months is 20 handwritten letters. If you’d like to chime in, please let me know so we can become pen pals! More than 50% of these offline conversations fizzle out after one or two letters so it’s only the die-hards that are willing to invest some time that get to see the best I’ve got. Previous month: August 2026. Games I’ve played Contrary to the summary of August that listed two board games, I have finally picked up video gaming again after a summer holiday hiatus—which in case of a lecturer is two months. Yup. Come join us! I also started (re)playing some older Castlevania games in anticipation of Belmont’s Curse. The Telwynium Book 1-2-3 is an episodic eighties Sierra-on-line inspired high fantasy game crafted by the same person that gifted us the The Drifter experience. They’re free on itch.io and will be bundled as one big adventure when the final episode releases somewhere in 2027. I enjoyed playing through them but there’s nothing especially remarkable here. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood does not need an introduction. When it comes to the release window and the platform it was released on, is the black sheep of the ‘Vania family. Luckily, it got a remaster on the PSP although I’m not a fan of those graphics. Review to follow soon. The venerable Jeremy Parish recently worked through Rondo as part of his Turbo Works Gaiden 01. If you’re interested in the weird history of this game, I recommend you watch his video instead of reading my crappy review: Castlevania: Dracula’s Kiss, also known as Dracula X in the US, is a “port” (although not really) of Rondo of Blood for the SNES. It’s… not good. The “NES Hard (TM)” part here borders to the unfair, the level design is bland and the best parts of the original didn’t make it to Nintendo’s console. Castlevania: Bloodlines is a very good 2D action game that feels a tad different—perhaps mostly because you’re technically playing it on SEGA’s MegaDrive? It also released a year before Vampire’s Kiss here in Europe. The soundtrack took the obvious hit but is still surprisingly catchy. I started playing Eastward as a break from ‘Vanias. The pixel art and music is amazing! And so is the first chapter but then it suddenly changes pace. The endless blabbering that even the “skip dialogue” button can’t fully fast-forward is a bit painful. I’m 8 hours in at the end of chapter 4. I still want to know where this postapocalyptic strange tale is going; but wow this game has pacing issues… Selected (blog) posts Speaking of Rondo of Blood, I liked Indie Gamer Chick’s review and analysis of the game. This one’s from 2019 but I didn’t know about it yet: Piers Cawley ran a micro bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL! Lyteforce Games writes about Combolands, an indie game that he summarises as “Balatro with buildings”. I have yet to check it out. The Ruby/Rails world has a big problem: DHH. What to do when your favourite programming language has a fascist problem? I feel for every Rails fan. Please stop the ridiculous Omarchy investments! The list of fashware keeps on growing and growing. The amount of people I know—including myself—truly being excited about software development keeps on shrinking and shrinking. See also Chad’s I am retiring from tech to live offline. Perhaps Chad wants to write me a letter. You know, using a thing called a pen that emits not HTTP return codes but ink? Nick also writes about the end of a craft. I think you can see this one coming. More AI drama in the KDE world as explained by Nate. Not a blog but a very cool online fountain pen catalogue by George Starcher. Notchoc rebooted their blog and started using Makko. It’s always interesting to see new small tools like these pop up. I don’t feel the need to change my setup just yet. Jason Murphy talks us through a pen nib swap: switching one architect grind for the other. Toni writes something bang-on: having kids changes everything. I really liked Paul Taylor’s morning routine checklist system that leveraged Alfred to the max. Did you know that freeing up memory in C/C++ by calling free() does not necessarily free memory? Daniel Lemire explains why. Lee Reamsnyder writes about friendship and thanksgiving aptly calling it friendsgiving memories. Other random links In case you need to quickly look up a Race for the Galaxy card: use the RFTGPics service. Tourist World for the win. I had to jump through a few more hoops than usual to get SDKMan to work with the Fish shell. Related topics: / metapost / By Wouter Groeneveld on 2 October 2026.  Reply via email.