mx. tozka presents

🎬 The Residence: Created by Paul William Davies. With Uzo Aduba, Giancarlo Esposito, Molly Griggs, Ken Marino. Inside the White House's staff residence and the lives which workers share with the First Family. 🔗

Binge rewatched The Residence today and I liked it much more this time around (tho I still think it's a bit too long).

In my first watch, I was too anxious to get to the solution and it became frustrating when they went on tangents. Knowing the solution and watching it again was much more fun. I enjoyed the humor more and caught some things about the murder motive that I missed the first time around.

I wish they'd do another season, or even a movie! I love the Cordelia Cupp character.

One thing I'll miss while in the UK (besides family obv) is my PBS Passport that I just got at the start of the year. It's very basic UI design compared to other streaming services, but it's chock full of things to watch. So many shows, some of them my favorites (This Old House) and some I've never even heard of (Travels with Yankee). Lots of British and European murder mystery and historical dramas, of course, but also fascinating craft documentaries, travel shows, history, nature, etc etc. AND no commercials in the middle of an episode-- just at the beginning, and they're all local ones which interest me way more (and there's only like 1-2 anyway).

Apparently PBS doesn't have int'l broadcast rights, neither can you download things nor use a VPN to bypass (apparently), so once I'm abroad I'll be cut off. :(

That said, I MAY have access to some of the British stuff because I'll be...in Britain.....

Maybe I can finish the 1983 Partners in Crime show then.

Happy Friday! Here's some links-- deliberately focused on positive things, to give some end-of-year cheer.

Media of Various Types

• LibraryThing has a Winter Holiday Hunt game running through January 6th
• The Daily Spell is a (free, indie) word puzzle game with weekly stories and daily installments
• Public Domain Day is coming up on January 1st! Another Lord Peter Wimsey book is going PD which is exciting
• Here's some Hugo nomination ideas from ladybusiness
• DEMO FEST 2025 is out and there's some great punk songs here you can listen to for free. I put some of my recs here, if you need a place to start

Food & Crafts & Art

• These amazing cookies designed as ancient artifacts!
• Echo Zines has a great list of craftivism Youtube video recs as well as some of their own knitting projects
• MyTeaDB -- so you can track your tea collection! If you go to the New page you can see examples of how it works
• Little Golden Notebook has some amazing fiber art pieces

Social Media

• Green Grimoire (Youtube) is a Druid couple who make videos about homestead-y things and van travel, with a pagan bent
• Ruth Mottram (Pixelfed) is a glaciologist and posts photos of her work! She's currently in Antarctica now! She also has a blog; here's a recent post about heading down to Antarctica earlier this month
• And an event: Fediverse Punk Month (January 2026) -- a call for punks (and other subcultures) to leave Meta platforms and build communities in the Fediverse instead

RSS Feeds

• mixed color (RSS) a great blog about embroidery, sewing, dying, etc!
• Winnie Lim (RSS) writes very enjoyable blog posts about life and the things that happen therein
• sortition social is a community RSS feed reader! It selects a random feed from their (user-submitted?) database and added to the timeline for 7 days

<- previous linkspam | link library | all link posts ->

Taking advantage of the fact that I have a hacked 3DS to try out Pokemon fan games! There's a thriving Pokemon romhacking community where they take base Gameboy/Gameboy Advanced games and edit them, sometimes making entirely new storylines and regions.

This one is a blend of Pokémon, Etrian Odyssey and Made in Abyss. The base game is FireRed, which I've never played.

Here's the description:

On an island in the middle of the sea stands a massive maze known as the "Yggdrasil Labyrinth", which has been attracting adventurers from all over the world for years.
No one knows how deep it goes, or if there's anything at its end.

Some say there's a treasure of immeasurable value hidden within, while others claim the remnants of a lost civilization lie there.

In the game you'll play as Nyx, a young adventurer who joins the guild of Talrega with the goal of unraveling the Labyrinth's mysteries.

But something goes terribly wrong…

The gameplay is heavy on Pokemon with the world setting and some mechanics (like Etrian's F.O.E. bosses) from the other games. So you collect and battle Pokemon as usual, but the storyline is focused on exploring the labyrinth (and the ocean, which has mysterious islands to find) and doing sidequests. There's no Team Rocket or evil organization to defeat, nor gym leaders or champions. Likewise, there's no map to fill out like in Etrian games.

I'm about 4 hours into it and just about ready to progress to the second Labyrinth level! I'm really enjoying it so far. They've done an amazing job making "Etrian variant" Pokemon (which you can see here) and the game design is really fun.

The only thing I'm a little iffy on is they give you a "team" of two other characters, and then they don't do anything. They don't help with battles, or even explore the labyrinth with you! I'm guessing they're re-skinned rival characters from the base game (I didn't look it up) which makes more sense for how they act in THIS game.

Anyway, a bonus for me: the thing I'm using to play GBA roms on my 3DS apparently sucks up WAY less battery than the regular 3DS software. It's not an emulator, it's using hte 3DS hardware/software to run the ROM directly. Sooooo I'm currently able to play like 6 hours straight without having to charge! Maybe longer-- I'll have to keep testing and see.

(I actually replaced my 3DS battery a couple months ago but it keeps blinking low-battery red after like 4 hours, and idk if it's actually low or if the gage is just borked because of the new battery-- apparently it's a common issue. Anyway...)

If you're interested, I've put some of the more interesting Pokemon romhacks I've found so far in my Link Library here. I'm really interested in ones that use the Pokemon games as a base and create totally new storylines or settings-- if you know of any good ones that I haven't added to my list yet, let me know!

1. Removing my data from various Meta sites-- most of them were there for business purposes, but I want to put my business energies elsewhere AND I don't want Meta to have my stuff floating around to use in their horrible AI nonsense. I'm downloading copies of my data and then deleting the posts (which they make you do one by one). I plan to put up a "where to find me" post for people who may come looking, and I'll keep the usernames for business purposes, but I'm going to focus on my (business) blog (and later newsletter/shop) and that's it.

2. Settling into using Obsidian for my personal data stuff. I think I've got a system set up that I like, and now I just need to add in things. For instance, I'm adding my books read for 2025 into the system and I've set up fun views like this:

Which is built from a Base which is a table built from metadata in individual entries. So I'm adding books one by one, making sure the imported data is actually correct, and then copying over my notes/reviews. It's a little slow-going but it's fun to see everything in one place. And I've decided I don't care about counting how many pages I read in a year or even how many books I read in a month, just a general yearly total of books read is fine, so that'll make things easier going forward.

3. Listening to music from DEMO FEST 2025! Some recommendations: Error 804's ANGUISH, Morora's Kosovo, The Carringtons' Wild.

4. Downloading interesting pattern images from the Smithsonian digital collections to use for icons and (if I can figure out how) website backgrounds.