this morning, we went to a large state park to the east of us which is on a peninsula in the long island sound. it wasn't super hot, so instead of swimming we walked around the trails and looked at birds through our binoculars. we don't really know that much about identifying birds or specific types of birds, we just find it entertaining to look at them. it turned out that a number of other people had the same idea of how and where to spend their sunday morning, and we crossed paths with a few of them along the way. it seems to me that people who are into birds are very talkative when they see other people walking around with binoculars. one lady said to us, "i think you just get to a certain age, and then the birds find you. and then you suddenly realize, 'i've become a bird person!'"
afterwards, we lurked around in the nearby towns and went to a bookshop, cafe, thrift store, and grocery store. it was a nice day out and about.
aside from today's outing, i spent most of this weekend making myself a media tracking system for keeping track of what books, movies, shows, and games i want to read/watch/play, are in progress, or have finished, and write notes or ratings and make lists of stuff. it was one of those things that i'm sometimes tempted to do but also have to resist the urge to do for responsible time management reasons. well, after looking around and not finding any existing self-hosted apps that seemed like they did what i wanted, i decided to just go for it this time, and i'm glad i did.
it pulls metadata from open library, tmdb, and steam to allow for quickly adding things, but all the data for the items in my library is stored locally. i started by copying the repo for this journal, since it's also a single-tenant flask app with an sqlite database. but the interface is more dynamic, so i used htmx. i decided not to share the code, because it's very tailored to me personally and isn't very polished, but it does seem to work and does everything i wanted it to do!
i was able to migrate in the data from the past few years of text files where i've been writing down books and movies i've finished or want to get, so now i can use it to add new things as i go. and it didn't really take all that long, and i think it will be very useful to me for a long time to come. it's now running on the same raspberry pi as this journal, and though it's accessible to me from outside my home network, nothing is visible unless i'm logged in. it's purely for my own organizational and memory purposes.
besides that, i've been working on something to share for AV club this month, and that's mostly it. i went to the city last weekend for a thing that ended up not happening, so it was mostly a waste of time. i started playing cyberpunk 2077 again, which i played 90% of over the winter and then stopped. so i decided to finally go back in and finish it. we went to the movies, and walked in the park. it rained a lot, and continues to do so. i dunno, pretty normal stuff. don't have a lot of commentary there, things are generally going pretty well and moving forward. i'm going to be house sitting and caring for two dogs for two weeks at the end of this month, so i need to get ready to not live in my own house for a little bit — but on the other hand, i'll have more solitude for a bit (from other humans, not from dogs though) so i will think about how to best use that time.
oh! and we played a show last week. haha, i totally forgot about that. but i did write about it on my blog.
image is a sneak peek of something i'm making for AV club.
