In first half of July we continue our crazy weekends with mountain hiking and Exit Festival. Afterwards, we settled down and started to relax after 2-3 months of traveling, festivals and other stuff.

July starts with Sergey Orlov standup show — great as always, with one of the best “medium” roasting I’ve seen.

We’re hiked to mountain Midžor, on a border between Serbia and Bulgaria. It was difficult, but doable. And as reward — many great views, during the path and from the top.

Enjoyed Exit Festival in our town. Black Eyed Peas, Oliver Tree, Tom Morello (main disappointment because of vocal) and others. Best discovery is Altın Gün — turkish psych-folk band.

Returned to our Gloomhaven campaign (three players: me, my girlfriend and my brother). Rerun two scenarios that we lost before, this time successfully. Next one is tricky (with vocal cords), good luck to us.

Went to VRT winery. We’ve been only at degustation room, now we’re visited a winery itself. Great wine and food, nice folks, such a good time (with a light hangover on the next day).

Configured self-hosted services for RSS - RSSHub (to fetch telegram channels) and FressRSS as rss-server itself. Made it as another task to simplifying things. From one point of view, it complicated things — more tools, support of new services. From another — Reeder app fetch only new things from server, without consuming traffic for 100+ sources.

Also I replaced youtube/mastodon subscriptions, telegram channels and subreddits to RSS.

Blog

• wrote three new posts, including June highlights;
• translated old posts about year movies from Russian to English;
• updated Hugo version and fixed capital first letters of tags by that.

Games

• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Eldtree — finally beat it, great Souls-experience as always. Made it on “easy” level — with phantoms, but without any multiplayer. And now I need a break… Movies
• Team America: World Police — cringy non-tolerant dark humor movie. Nice slice of early ’00s.
• The Watchers — boring not-so-horror movie with some Irish folk motives. Director also added “what a twist” at the end like her father. But for debut movie it’s decent.
• Deadpool & Wolverine — that’s what I’m waiting from comics movie. Light comedy, many characters, fan service, and most important — just a simple story in context of whole universe/multiverse, without any serious consequences. You don’t need to check previous N movies — yes, you can’t understand all references, but it’s ok. And you can miss this movie too. And as a nice addition — advertising campaign is a piece of art sometimes.

Series

• Cyberpunk Edgerunners — solid anime, but without something new. It nicely shows world of cyberpunk, but in a nutshell it’s just a simple shounen.

Books

• Read last two books of “Expanse” series — “Tiamat’s Wrath” and “Leviathan Falls”. A good finale, without classic happy ending. Love this sci-fi series, even with boring Inaros arc.
• The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt — it was my work reading for some time. Good explanation of theory of constraints, now the second book.

P.S. Suddenly I’ve got an idea for short story. Maybe it will be never written, but even fact that I had a new idea motivated me in a good way.