I know that Google Play is bordeline unusable nowadays, but I still use it so rarely that somehow I didn't know is that bad. What I was recently searching for is placed so low that it is mostly covered by the keyboard. What a shitty UI, oh my God. And I won't even start talking about what apps it wants me to download.

(yes, I took the first screnshot at 3 AM... or maybe I screenshat it?)

I don't have anything in particular to say today, I just want to share with you these two screnshots from the Java mobile game Paris Hilton's Diamond Quest (by Gameloft, 2006). It's a surprisingly addicting Match-3 game, but you know. It's the Gameloft title, from back when Nokia was still the most popular mobile phone brand, they didn't make bad games back then.

The second screenshot aged like milk. I used J2ME Loader (F-Droid, Google Play) to play it.

Yesterday, a demo of There Are No Ghosts at the Grand dropped on Steam. I had this game on my radar since its trailer on this year's Gamescom, and not gonna lie, I didn't enjoy it. I liked the House Flipper inspired beginning, but later I felt like the game kept throwing completely unrelated stuff at me, but because everything was so quirky, dynamic, and because didn't take itself seriously, I was apparently supposed to think, "haha, it's funny because it's random".
In the demo, we meet four characters. The last introduced one was the epitome of "quirky random ideas", and that completely killed my interest in whatever was going on, and guess what, what happened next was even more nonsensical.
The third main character introduced in the demo was just plain unlikeable. I don't remember her name, but honestly, I'm not even sure it was ever mentioned, so whatever. She was constantly obnoxious toward our character. At some point, my thoughts toward her were basically, "Bitch, what's your fucking problem? Fuck off". Later, we got two dialogue options to choose from: one nice and one rude toward her. Obviously, I chose… the first one :v Yeah, I'm the type of person who is nice to NPCs in games.
But despite all of that, I have to say the sound design was really good. The song that plays in the middle of the demo was fantastic. People in the Steam reviews mentioned weak optimization, and yes, when it's something they need to improve, I was able to play it at a relatively stable 30 FPS on low settings on my 8-year-old laptop, so it's not that bad.
If you like random comedies and some kind of mystery, then it might be up your alley. But for me, if the whole game is supposed to be like this, I don't feel like I want to see more. I will still check the reviews after the premiere of the full version, but for now, I removed it from my wishlist.

To not end on a negative note, I recently uploaded to Archive.org the Polish translation of the forgotten documentary movie Mega Predators from 2001 - Megadrapieżniki. I spent years of trying to find this crap. Apparently, it was broadcast on TV only once and was lost up to 2023, when someone randomly uploaded it to Dailymotion. So, case closed, I didn't find it because it was impossible to find it when no copy existed online, right? Welp, no. Yes, it was a lost media… when we are talking about the English-language original.
The Polish version, and I'm a native Polish speaker, mind you, was broadcast many, many times on television, up to at least 2015. And even better, this version had been available online for years. But simply during all that time, I never thought even once, "Hmm, maybe I should look for the version translated into my mother tongue", because I just assumed that if I couldn't find the original made in the most widely used language in the world, then the Polish version must be long gone too. Joke's on me, I guess.
But still, I find the whole case interesting nevertheless, the original was lost, while the translation was widely available the entire time.

Today I moved the list of books I like into the form of a visual list? gallery? and with that I have a fun fact about one author of the included books, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz aka Witkacy who wrote Farewell to Autumn was an artist who did all sorts of things. For example, he drew portraits on commission.
He categorized them into a few types based on how many drugs he was allowed to take while creating them. Basically, the more drugs he took, the lower the price of the portrait was.
If you want to learn more about this, I recommend this text: Witkacy: The Scandalising Portrait Artist.

The portait of Nena Stachurska (1929), my favorite portait drawn by him.

A few days ago, I added a brand-new page featuring itch.io games I like. I spent about 2 or 3 weeks on polishing it to make sure I will include everything I wanted to show for now, so I wouldn't have to update it anytime soon. However, on the very same day I posted it, I discovered a page on this site that shows you the games you have played but didn't rated. And apparently, I didn't rated a lot of them for some reason, so I didn't included the masterpieces like HoloCure or GaGa's Bizarre Adventure: Lesbian Tendency. Heresy, I know.
But one game gave me a headache. For some reason, it wasn't on the list mentioned above, neither in my browser history, even though I have backups back to 2018. Everything I remembered were some very vague memories of a white character (which turned out to be incorrect, as he is actually black) on a white platforms in an atmospheric 3D environment. To make it worse, I thought I was looking for not one, but two games, because I incorrectly believed a segment in the character's home was a completely different title. I thought it was a lost cause, but fortunately, I finally found it using Google Images by guessing the tags that game might use based on my very imprecise description. So the game (or I should say demo) in quetion was Mallory and the Marble Sanctum.
To be honest, when I see a title on itch.io described as "demo", "alpha", or something like that, by default I assume this is the final version we will ever get. Still, I really hope this one will eventually receive a full version, because it's one of those demos that has stuck with me even after all these years.
To conclude this post, the idea of creating list of itch.io games came to me after the recent news about the newly discovered vulnerability in the Unity Engine. Also, earlier this year, itch.io infamously removed a lot of adult games from its platform, so the new news made me worry "what if a similar scenario will happen again?". So I wanted to have a record of the stuff from this site that I liked just in case of any of them will be removed in the future. And hey, I have a website, why not use it to give these apps a bit more recognizability? (btw I wasn't aware until now that there is over a million apps on itch.io, Christ)

Just when I was offline, because I was sick, so many people decide to follow me and/or write something in my Guestbook :v. It's a really nice thing to find when I opened Neocities for the first time in a week, thanks all!
Well, Reflections at 2:00 AM was supposed to be posted during the last month, now they will be posted soon™ (btw, that name sounds misterious, isn't it?).
I appeared also because I want to recommend to check the demo of Lands of XON that dropped on Steam recently. I follow this project since it was annouced, because I was a huge fan of the original four Android games. If you like a logic games with the exploration and walking simulation elements, I think you should play it!
At the end, Neocities recently decided to start showing apostrophe as "'" and it's bugging me.

I think I have reached the point where I have to rethink how the list of my favourite stuff (on the “About Me” page) looks, because I'm not sure if just a plain text list is still the best approach, especially since I keep adding entries that I forgot to include when I originally made it. I can't believe I forgot about Interstellar and Grizzly Man when they are in my personal top of the best films ever made! Well, Interstellar is 10/10 for me, but only if I skip the first 40 minutes of the movie, when they are still on Earth… Returning to the list, I added * to Polish movies and books that don't have an English translation.
You know, Bionic by Christina Aguilera is also 10/10 to me (yes, this infamous Bionic), just when I skip a few songs, because I can't stand with ballads as whole :p #justiceforbionic
Recently I started rewatching BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs/Monsters/Beasts. I forgot how brutal this series was. Dramatic music, the dying animals' agonal screams, blood and flesh. I'm kinda surprised I basically perfectly remembered every episode, even though I watched this series more than 10 or 15 years ago last time. And I watched it in English without subtitles and understood the whole thing, which is always a some kind of achivement to me!
Despite its age I think it's absolutely still worth watching. The narration and music didn't aged at all, and visuals aged like fine wine. The educational part aged like you can expect from a series that's over 20–25 years old, but fortunately there are multiple summaries/reviews with updated info:
- List of scientific errors
- WWD Accuracy Review by Red Raptor Writes
- WWD Reviews by Ben G Thomas
I need to finally watch Prehistoric Planet, because I heard it's the new generational defining dinosaur documentary.

I had some plans for this page but as you can see, it's long dead and forgotten. Basically, I wanted to keep certain structure of the posts, but at the end, it only killed my energy and willingness to maintain it. However, because I still want to write something from time to time, I've started this miniblog, so I will be posting random thoughts here sometimes (probably lol).
So it's hot outside today, I'm adding stamps to my Deviantart stamp collection (close to 500 at this point) and playing The Crew thanks to the Unlimited mod.