It's Tears of the Kingdom time! I played the heck out of Breath of the Wild, and am so excited for this instalment in the series. I am not usually a fan of open world games, but that's usually because there's only a small section of actually interesting and compelling gameplay, that's then padded out with the same 5-10 side quests. Breath of the Wild was different though. It felt more like an immersive sim than another entry in the traditional open-world genre. This is mainly due to the way you could use Link's powers to puzzle your way through all the various encounters and shrines. I'm only a couple of hours in to Tears of the Kingdom, but the familiar clink and clunk of Link's gear as he runs around is drawing me back in to the world of Hyrule. Onwards and ... downwards?

• 
• 
• 
• 

Ok, so next week is another short week. I totally forgot about this one, as it's not due to a public holiday, but rather a company mandated day off to refresh. We get one each quarter (except for Q3) and they're synced up across all our offices so that we don't come back in on Tuesday to a backlog of work that people have been creating while we are out.

It's also Mother's Day this weekend in Australia. To avoid the rush, we went out on Saturday for crumpets!

I've been doing some more work on some of the admin features of this blog over the week. Some notable additions include being able to create trips. A trip has a name and some a date range, and then through the admin UI, I can choose posts that happened during the trip to be part of the trip's timeline view. At the moment, this is mainly checkins and photo posts, since they've all come in from Instagram or Swarm.

I've also spent some time working on creating an image gallery for these post pages. I write posts in markdown, and don't really want to embed HTML in these pages where I can help it. So to overcome this, I am using some Javascript to wrap images in a list in a column layout instead, and then with Alpine.js I am popping those images in to a lightbox when they are clicked. It works well enough for now, and I am hoping the fact that the markdown is unopinionated will mean these posts can remain portable.

Autumn has been turning it up over the last few weeks as the remaining leaves turn. These are my two favourite trees to watch (not clean up after 🙄) as the seasons change (both in to Autumn and in to Spring).

• 
•