Articles on A71

A game stalling for time

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:57:03 +0300

This article contains heavy spoilers for the entire To the Moon series.

To me, endings are an important part of the story. Any imagined world must end before growing vast enough to contain a shark and someone eager to jump over it. I don’t want endless sequels. I don’t want sequels in the first place. Spiritual successors are great, but another adventure in the same world is an opportunity to ruin something. When I found Dune’s outcome surprisingly okay, I decided not to read the other books.

Games aren't fun anymore?

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The black box on my desk gently hummed as the screen came to life. The ethereal blue of the default Windows wallpaper, the snow-white menus. It was 2020, I just got a computer, and the world looked brand-new.

Confined to the life of a schoolchild, I loved all games. Racing, match-3, I could get enjoyment out of anything. I remember turning on Minecraft and just… playing. Building an underground facility with bunkers everywhere and weird contraptions of my own design. It was ugly, but also sincere. That’s still an option, booting into a new experience is always fun. But occasionally, a voice at the back of my head nags me: “but why?”.

Fountain pens: how it's going

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A bit over a month ago, I wrote about picking up some fountain pens and getting converted. Wanted to give a brief update on how the ~~addiction~~ “hobby” is going.

I currently own 6 pens of various makes, quality, and price. Of the ones not mentioned before, the first two were purchased while others were further finds at home. I’d sort them into three smooth but expensive and/or (each variation is represented here!) fragile pens I try to keep home, two that write sub-optimally and need adjustment or repairs, and KAWECO SPORT. The first category make the hobby worth it, while the second reminds me why these types of pens are quaint to some and archaic to others. (though I still hold that many more people would benefit from trying fountain pens!). I don’t plan to buy more in the near future, though I’d love to have a couple models eventually.

Fountainhead

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Got a fountain pen. YES! I’ve wanted one for a while, and indeed considered shopping on multiple occasions, but it just never seemed worth it. These pens are expensive, need maintenance and proper handling, and on top of it special paper may be required depending on the ink. However, just as I acquired some fountain-pen-friendly paper so my gel pens wouldn’t bleed through, I was extremely lucky to score hand-me-downs – my parents had several fountain pens all along, both gifts from long ago, and didn’t need them! Two are borderline gaudy, expensive Medium-sized nibs. They cost too much for me to confidently bring them anywhere, and I’m not the biggest fan of how one of them looks, at least on first glance. But the third… man. It’s a Waterman Hemisphere and I love it.

Thoughts on Celeste

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

25 October 2023, somewhere in #off-topic-argue-here 14:33 Andrew: I am slightly prejudiced against "hidden gem" """indie""" games
14:33 Andrew: E.g. I will never buy Celeste

…Yet here we are.

New site theme

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently designing a theme for a short story that’s not yet published and possibly never will be. At some point, it became apparent the story’s custom theme was better than the default in all ways that mattered. This made me go ahead and spend a few evenings changing how some parts of the site were formatted and rewriting the whole main stylesheet.

The most obvious change is the new navbar, which adds a splash of colour and allows for further customisation. I try to keep everything minimal and easily modifiable so that custom themes are easy. If you’re seeing this in the winter, the star may have turned into a snowflake!

The Forgotten City review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sun, 11 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There is no game like Outer Wilds. That doesn’t stop fans from search for the elusive Wilds-like. One game that keeps popping up is The Forgotten City. Being very fond of flying into the sun and eating burned marshmallows, I was intrigued to try another knowledge based game.

I’d like to start by stating my expectations when I opened TFC. Because I feel this review, and my experience with the game at large, are in big part a result of them. When the internets sold me on The Forgotten City, I was painted an image of a knowledge-based time loop mystery with lots of philosophy set in the Roman Empire. A period drama whodunnit Outer Wilds meets The Talos Principle?! Count me in! My experience was shot through this lens, with expectations you might’ve not had.

Aftersun post-viewing thoughts

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I watched the 2022 movie Aftersun. I found the title, cover, and a sentence long description that managed to say nothing when browsing some very distant corner of the internet. Inexplicably, that was enough – there was something about it, and I plunged in blind not “expecting” much.

Yet it was definitely not what I expected to start off my 2025 movie watching with, yet am all the happier for it. If this word can even be put anywhere near this unassuming story.

Braid review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Braid is a classic, often considered the first to propel indie video games into into the mainstream. It is also a puzzle game with a layered story that parodies Mario (despite not mentioning Nintendo’s game in the inspirations once, naturally), which made be interested in trying it. Pleasantly, it was a very strong start to my 2025 in gaming.

The puzzles are, as it says on the tin, about manipulation of time. The platforming movement is very “basic”, with only movement-related mechanic I can think of being the use of the enemies, “Monstars” (which I can’t call anything but goombas) to boost your jumps. Indeed, all the complexity comes from various uses of and spins on the central mechanic – at a press of a button, everything reverses. That’s how you evade death, mistakes, and solve puzzles (perhaps even save a Princess!).

Goodbye 2024

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well then. Twenty-twenty-five, at last we meet. Fireworks, presents, final exams… But first, a time for me to reflect upon the year past. Buckle up, get some tea, this is a long one.

2024 was a year like no other, which seems to be part of the course ever since 2020. Much happened in the world beyond, though I neither care nor want to list everything here. It was a big enough year for me personally. Having finally finished high school, I set out on the path to higher education – and in fact lucked into precisely the field and university I wanted. I also re-discovered the love for reading – and found more games to play in the process. And, as a relatively recent yet noticeable and welcome change, I at last began re-evaluating how I approach the digital side of life. I can’t even put everything here – it would be an understatement to call this the best year of my life in a while. The best yet? Who knows. What matters is ensuring it doesn’t become the best ever. :)

Back online

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

So, uh, I messed up. Around 3 weeks ago, I was supposed to be moving my servers to a new place. The problem – it had no internet. I was hoping to resolve it over a couple days, and therefore brought them over without a second thought. A surprise awaited me.

I assumed we just had an expired contract with the Internet Service Provider. But what we actually had was a dead cable. I suspect it was damaged when we had some of the wall-mounted furniture installed – though maybe it was something else. Whatever the cause, we had half of the cable short-circuiting. Luckily, you can re-wire a gigabit cable down to a 100mbps one with only around half of it intact. That’s a disapponting speed in our age, but better than nothing – especially when you’re a student short on time. After that, another week was lost because for some unknown reason our ISP needs you to sign documents and send a formal email just to re-connect the internet and purchase a static IP.

Site Updates: 2024 Edition

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Though I don’t write here as often as I wish – mainly because there’s little to write about most days – I’ve actually done quite a lot of technical improvements after moving to Hugo earlier this year. Who would’ve guessed that editing CSS and HTML templates is easier than writing something interesting! This page showcases some notable additions implemented since February. I know it hasn’t been a full year yet, but I’m posting this now because I’d like to implement a “feature freeze” and force myself to actually write instead of tinkering with shortcodes if I want to add something to the site. Therefore, if all is well and good there shouldn’t be radical changes before 2025.

Half a decade of memories

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been slowly chipping away at something I promised myself I’d do eventually – collecting, organising, and archiving old photos. For how much I preach backups and self-hosting, I’ve been rather careless with my own files, simply ditching everything whenever I switched devices or operating systems. After all, much of it was “cringe” in hindsight, so I rarely returned. I’ve always had this living-in-today mentality, though these days it’s slowly fading for good.

First impressions

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With the first weeks of studying over, I think it makes sense to write down my first impressions of ~~the best~~ “one of the best” technical universities in the ~~universe~~ country.

Studying conditions are awesome. I knew about it before – living close by, I went here for extra classes before admission. Especially liking the new buildings, although there are some acoustics issues in one of them, making it hard to hear what the professors say. Our schedule was a positive surprise. I was concerned by how many say students sleep for 6 hours and suffer, but we got an adequate – and more importantly late – schedule. Perhaps because we’re mathematicians and not engineers – others seem to have it worse. So, stable 8 hours of sleep it is for me – beats school, that’s for sure. (and less homework as well…)

TtM Beach Episode review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Spoilers ahead: This review assumes you have played To the Moon, Finding Paradise, and Impostor Factory. I’ve also written another article about this game.

With To the Moon, it’s always been about the journey rather than the destination – at least, that’s what we’ve been telling ourselves. But the end is still there, and over 10 years later, the reverse train wreck has finally reached end of the line.

Much like Neil and Eva, the series has been running away from confronting something. Doubles of characters walking about, Faye manifesting into the “real world”, doors closing on their own… it has been increasingly harder to wave away evidence there are more layers to the onion than our eye ducts would prefer. With dozens of dead and nonexistent characters sitting by the sea and enjoying the scenery, the Beach Episode is set at the event horizon of it all.

Summer Retrospective

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I am in bed, with a laptop, ready to type. Having just returned from a trip organised by my university, I can now definitely call myself a student. Strange – having spent a week in a forest with two thousands fellow freshmen, it’s almost like my whole life was that. And not sitting in comfort with an electronic device in hand.

Surviving in relative wilderness was challenging. Having to cook your own food, sleeping four hours a day in a cramped tent, forgetting what is a shower, it was all an experience. But it is these kinds of hardships that bond people together. I learned more about the university I chose to spend the next six+ years of my life with, the kind of people who’ll surround me there, and those who will teach us. And in the end, I regret nothing.

Hollow Knight review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania that needs no introduction. If you’ve been on the internet for long enough, you’re borderline guaranteed to have run into either a small thing wearing a white mask and brandishing a ~~knife~~ nail, or madmen screaming about a “silksong” being released any second now. Safe to say, it’s a *beloved indie hit*.

Which makes it all the harder to say that having finished it with the Dream No More ending and 100% (not 112%) completion, I didn’t enjoy it that much due to a few – perhaps controversial on my end – gripes. But let’s start with the positives.

Before Your Eyes review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

…do you ever try time travel? I know this sounds silly, but sometimes, when on a vacation or somewhere with a long journey ahead, I stand still and imagine it’s already over, and I am looking back. I think in a way, it helps remember and cherish these fleeting moments of happiness – by reminding me how quickly they pass. When I try hard enough, it works.

I vividly remember the first day of a summer camp, as our counselors told us how the next month will flash before our eyes. And just as vividly I remember sitting by a campfire 30 days later, feeling like not a second has passed.

University is beginning

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is a life update of sorts.

Sooo… guess it worked out in the end. It is now July 30th, meaning I have *officially* been a university student for a few days. Managed to squeeze out the needed exam scores (even more than I expected! :D), and the rest is history. Seriously, I’d rather forget how much time I spent updating applicant lists in fear somebody would come along and knock me down from my spot…

Steam Deck review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I just realised that today (22nd of May, 2024) marks exactly one year since I acquired the Valve Steam Deck¹. Since I love this device, I figured it would be a great first non-game review to post. Maybe a bit late (y’know, a few years), but then again which review here wasn’t?! :D

The Steam Deck is… a console? A Computer? A bit of both. Though it is definitely tailored towards using Steam and comes with a neat joystick-centric UI, it is much more open than Xbox or PlayStation. It literally runs Linux!!! That means that even if Valve closed down tomorrow, I could just move to another Linux distribution (or stay on SteamOS) and continue owning an amazing portable machine. There are people already using it as a normal “laptop” or “desktop”, installing third party stuff through flatpak. How useful would a Switch be in a world without Nintendo? How many drawing suites can you install on a PlayStation 5? That might not matter to some, but I love being confident in a device that I paid money for being future-proof in terms of software, not just hardware.

School is over

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

School is over. I’m not sure what else to say other than these three words – kind of mind-blowing, really. For the past eleven years, it has been this constant in my life – every week I spend five to six days at school and have tasks to complete there. Schedules, hobbies, friendships, all had to be built around this idea – at nine in the morning, I go to a specific building and leave after around seven classes.

Internet isn't here forever

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Thu, 16 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Content on the internet isn’t eternal. I think this is something I bring up quite often, but even then it never feels enough. These past few weeks I’ve been getting into Quintessence: The Blighted Venom, a game from 2006. How is that relevant? I think its a good example of a victim to link rot and tides of time.

One of the biggest indicators is the download page – located on the Internet Archive. You were supposed to download it from Freebird games forum/website, but what about it?

Hibiscus.txt

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Decided to share my experience writing a personal web service. This was my first time making a “serious” standalone app that I would actually use, and not just a proof of concept or an assignment.

I wanted a self-hosted diary for a while, but couldn’t find one that was… basic enough. Something like Joplin or BookStack had too many features for the task, and local apps like jrnl and Obsidian weren’t ideal because I use multiple devices too much to spend time synchronising. This might sound weird, but I found that having to open and/or maintain these (relatively) enormous apps was too much friction/distraction and just made me stop writing after a bit. So, long story short, I decided to make my own!

Rakuen review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It is impossible for me not to look at this game through the lens of To the Moon. Just like practically any other game I play, it’s also a case of being unable to properly review it to people who didn’t already play the game – most of my favourite moments and/or gripes are far into the spoiler territory. But I will try anyway!

Rakuen is a game about a boy in a hospital, who goes on a magical adventure with his mom. They enter a parallel world and interact with alternate versions of other people in the hospital and magical creatures such as… worm llamas?! Our main objective is to help fellow patients’ alter egos in order to grant the boy a single wish. You can already guess that this is a recipe for a sad game.

OneShot review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had OneShot on my radar for a while. I saw it recommended a lot in some parts of the internet, and found the idea of a game that heavily breaks the fourth wall appealing (but was yet to find one where I liked both the genre and the story). It took some tinkering with computers and nagging from friends, but here we are.

The gist

A cat-like child, Niko (who insists on not being a cat) wakes up in a strange dark house. Eventually, the kid makes it out of there, and finds a… lightbulb? A robot turns up and explains that this is the sun. And that Niko is the messiah. And that you are a god. What follows is a funny, well-made adventure about saving a ~~dying~~ dead world. The music is great, the art style is charming. And you get to go into your PC’s documents, yay!

Fresh coat of paint

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After months of writing my own website’s code in Go with templates and routing, I’ve come to a funny realisation – I was re-inventing the wheel.

Because what I ended up with was basically a… dynamic static site generator? And since I wasn’t using the dynamic part of it at all, it was time to migrate to a proper solution. I picked Hugo because it ~~was written in Go~~ has large support and seemed simple enough.

Thoughts on Disco Elysium

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sun, 12 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In dark times, should the stars also go out?

Disco Elysium. For a CRPG of its type, it is surprisingly well-known -- perhaps for its brilliance. The unique dialogue system with witty political humour, the beautifully ruined world, the post-impressionist art -- it all comes together in a one-of-a-kind game… no, *experience*. Chances are, you know all of this already, and don’t need me to repeat it. Instead, this article will be about how I played it.

I got an e-reader!

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Never thought this would happen. Aside from not exactly being the reading type (I mean books, of course I read news and documentation), you’d think one could just read on a laptop or phone if paper is not an option. Apparently not.

A week or two back, I had an opportunity to get an electronic reader for myself. We had a generous gift card at an electronics store expiring, and with the school year having a lot of assigned reading ahead an e-reader was a natural choice. Got it practically for free. Turns out, when your device cannot have any distractions by design, it becomes much easier to read. Who would’ve thought. :D

Outer Wilds review

andrew@a71.su (Andrew71) — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Outer Wilds is the poster child of seemingly growing in popularity (unless it’s confirmation bias from me) genre of knowledge-based games you can only play once. In fact, it seems to be the only such game some people know, proudly claiming “There is no other game like Outer Wilds”. It’s built around flying around a model-sized solar system as a space archeologist and discovering the story by yourself. While being stuck in a time loop.