Outside

Running

Running since 2022 — mostly road, with some trail. Several half marathons so far and a marathon in training, plus the local parkrun when I want the shorter version of the same thing.

It is for fitness and general wellbeing more than anything else, but having a race in the diary is what actually keeps it going. I am competitive enough to mind how it goes, which turns out to be the useful part. Strava has the log, and parkrun keeps the Saturday results separately.

Magic: The Gathering

Mostly Commander, which is the four-player format where games run long and everyone is keeping track of rather a lot at once. Some draft alongside it, prereleases when a set is worth turning up for, and a bit of Standard online. I build more decks than I get to sleeve up; they are on Archidekt.

The life tracker on the projects page came out of playing Commander — a scoreboard for four people turns out to be a more interesting problem than it sounds.

Games

Mostly on Steam, and a long stretch of Destiny 2 in particular — enough of one that the Discord bot on the projects page ended up with a Bungie API client behind it, largely so I could stop answering the same questions by hand. Destiny Tracker has the hours, which are not a figure I would otherwise volunteer.

Backloggd is the other half of it: what I have actually played rather than what I own, which on Steam are never quite the same list.

Counter-Strike is the other long-running one, CS:GO and then CS2, with csstats keeping the record of it.

The YouTube channel is mostly an archive. A few Destiny 1 montages cut years ago sit there because the place they were originally posted no longer does; the Counter-Strike clips alongside them are raw captures that never got the same treatment.

Reading

Mostly fantasy. A good share of it as audiobooks — that is what the running and the commute are for — and the rest read properly, which is one of the two things I do to stop thinking about work. What I have got through is on StoryGraph.

Music

The other one. It takes the runs and the commute on the days a book is not what I want, and it is what goes on when I am winding down rather than concentrating. What I have been listening to is on Last.fm.

Wildlife

What I find outside gets logged on iNaturalist: a photo, where and when, and an identification that people who know far more than I do can confirm or correct. That second part is the point — it turns “some sort of bird” into a species, and once enough of them agree, the record goes on to the research datasets instead of sitting in a camera roll.

Wildlife photos