I have been playing Monster Hunter 4U these past few weeks and it’s been awesome. I love the whole traveling around with a crew on a caravan concept. All I need in life is the Guildmarm calling me Doodle.

It is really interesting to see how less accommodating the game is compared to World/Rise. I have to be much more deliberate with my glaive attacks and there is less room for error when vaulting up for an air attack. The environments are so pretty too. Walking out onto the Ancestral Steppes is breathtaking.

It makes me want to play Monster Hunter 1. It is apparently even more inhospitable to human life! Lots of gathering, weird monster hit boxes, very careful attacking and repositioning. I doubt I’d finish it but I wanna try it out. I am somewhat still used to the jank from that era of games.

Autosampled a dog sound effect from the QY70 and noticed it could be used as dialogue sound effects a la Animal Crossing.

In addition to the iOS shortcut to post from my phone, I also set up a VS Code snippet that generates the Zola frontmatter each post needs when I want to post from my desktop computer. The snippet is as follows:

"zolaPost": {
    "prefix": "zolaPost",   // the prefix is what you type in and hit tab in order to trigger the snippet to generate the frontmatter
    "scope": "markdown",    // what file type should this snippet be enabled for
    "body": [               // the contents of the snippet
        "+++",
        "title = \"${TM_FILENAME/[0-9]+-[0-9]+-[0-9]+[ ](.*).md$/$1/}\" ",  // this monstrosity takes in the filename using a built-in variable TM_FILENAME and then captures the title out of it
        "date = ${CURRENT_YEAR}-${CURRENT_MONTH}-${CURRENT_DATE}T${CURRENT_HOUR}:${CURRENT_MINUTE}:${CURRENT_SECOND}${CURRENT_TIMEZONE_OFFSET}",    // generates an ISO datetime
        "authors = [\"sarksus\"]",
        "[taxonomies]",
        "tags = [$2]",  // this is a tabstop, when the snippet is generated I can hit tab to move around these locations and type in whatever I want
        "+++"
    ],
    "description": "zolaPost"
}

Note that tab-completions have to be enabled in VS Code to work with this.

This is the frontmatter that was generated from the 2024-10-13 Zola Post Snippet.md file:

+++
title = "Zola Post Snippet" 
date = 2024-10-13T00:35:07-04:00
authors = ["sarksus"]
[taxonomies]
tags = ["Site"]
+++

So I create a new post file, type zolaPost and hit tab and it generates the frontmatter, I fill in the tags and then tab out to the end and write my post!

Note to self, I need to update the code block theming so it matches my site theme better. This is the first time using it and the default theme doesn't match very well.