Eurovision was last weekend and I still have some thoughts.
More accurately, I started writing this a month ago but still felt compelled to finish the thought.
I didn't actually watch the Portugal national final, but when the winner was announced, I went and watched their performance.
And I... wasn't impressed. Sure, it's pretty, but kinda boring, you know?
I think it was ESC Gabe who pointed out in his livestream that these guys are singing Cante Alentejano, one of two Portuguese music forms that are recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO. (God bless you, UNESCO). (The other one is Fado, which has been at Eurovision a few times). This is the first time Cante Alentejano has been at Eurovision.
As I mentioned briefly in the New Year bullet post, I've been messing with Home Assistant a bit at the new house. I'm trying very hard not to fall down a rabbit hole of just continuously buying crap.
I do like the idea of lights on timers. And, rather than some noisy timer switch or something, I can run a whole Home Assistant server and have it do the timers!
But honestly, Home Assistant is up there as one of the best open source projects in the world. There so much it can do, you find yourself making big, insane plans for what it could do. And then you gotta wonder is whether this grand plan you have is actually going to improve anything in your life or is it going to be a frustrating, fragile headache that you constantly need to fiddle with.
What's worse is the hardware side is an absolute mess of competing and compromised standards from companies whose primary goal is to get you to fully buy into their ecosystem, collect as much data as they could hypothetically monetize and top it off with a monthly subscription fee.
We managed to clear out the remaining stock of Leviton Zigbee switches for most of the smart switches in the house. Leviton has mostly moved over to connecting to their own centralized service with Wi-Fi. Terrible. Matter is the new emerging standard, but "standard" is a bit of an overstatement. Support is spotty and a significant fraction of devices require Wi-Fi. I bought the ZBT-2 Zigbee and Thread (which is the non-Wi-Fi Matter mesh radio protocol) hub, not realizing that it only supports one protocol at a time. And since we've got Zigbee switches in the wall, it's a Zigbee hub. If I want to do Matter, I'll need another Thread hub. Annoying. My bad, but still annoying.
The whole home automation thing is full of gotchas, and I think my plan is to take things slow, take on a small project here and there and avoid the temptation to just go on AliExpress or Amazon and buy a tonne of gadgets that probably aren't going to work.
I finished Hades to my satisfaction and then tried to find another game. I tried a few things, but none of them were clicking for one reason or another. So I decided I'd jump straight into Hades II after all.
And, you know what? It's great. Not a huge surprise. They took Hades, kept the essence but changed the flavour a bit, and then added a whole nother Hades on top. It's two Hades! Hadeses? Hadii? Hadeae?
Anyway, I liked it. I'm was gonna come out here and say I was done, but, coinciding with the console launch, apparently they've added a whole new game mode. I should probably give that a try, at least.
I have played a bit of Star Trek: Resurgence, and I intend to make a blog post about that at some point, but I find Telltale-style adventure games a bit stressful. So I keep needing to put it down. Apparently it's no longer for sale, which is a great shame, since I feel like this is closest to what a Star Trek game should be. But maybe I'll save that for its own blog post.
So I guess I'll go back to Hades II for a bit, as I was missing it.
