The Now Page

Of course I have to steal this excellent idea that I heard from David Sparks (MacSparky), which he stole from Derek Sivers. It's great for sharing what I'm doing with my life that can be viewed outside of a blog post.

Revisiting old favorites

I'm all-in on Animal Crossing again after the Nintendo Switch 2 update. It's such a fun game with a simple yet fulfilling daily event cycle.

For some reason, I also dove back into Kingdom Come Deliverance II. It has some new content that sucked me in and I wasn't expecting it. You get to run and upgrade your own blacksmith shop, and the way they've organized that quest line feels immersive and time-consuming.

I've found myself thinking about KCDII when I'm not playing it. It's been addicting in a way other recent games haven't been.

I'm sure I'll get back to Claire Obscure: Expedition 33, but the story and gameplay loop haven't captured me. I spend most of my time while playing that game thinking about how other games did different things better, and there are portions of the story that just take me out of it.

Perhaps it is French humor or storytelling, but I don't know. The game was overhyped for sure, while it is beautiful and an achievement for the team, it's still just not this amazing thing I was led to believe.

Maybe people just need to play better video games so they're not swept away by their first time experiencing a story with heavy themes, beautiful voice work, and RPG mechanics.

The other game I jump in and out of for a few minutes at a time is Silent Hill f. It's got the creepy factor down and the gameplay is great, though it's stressful and exhausting in a way that makes a half hour feel like plenty.

It looks like 2026 could be a big year for games. I hope I can clear out some of the back log before something new takes over my life.

I got married in October!

I proposed to Natalie on our fourth anniversary and she said yes! We got married on October 18th and it went perfectly.

The weather didn't want to cooperate, so it was a bit warmer than we'd have liked, but otherwise, it was an amazing day. We wrote our own vows and Natalie's were just beautiful while mine felt flat by comparison. Though, I've been told mine were good too.

I had a lot of fun setting up the tech for the wedding. We used Apple Invites for the digital invitations, recorded plenty of spatial video with my iPhone, and even did karaoke using Apple Music Sing. Even when I'm away getting married, Apple seems to find ways to creep in.

We're a few months on and it's been great. Our next goal is buying a house, which we're trying to do as soon as it is financially possible.

Revisiting Kingdom Hearts

A podcast from Mischa Stanton and Mayanna Berrin started a few weeks ago about Kingdom Hearts, and needless to say, it's right up my alley. Kingdom Hearts is one of my favorite game series of all time (competing with Final Fantasy VII) and this podcast helped reinvigorate some of my hype for the series.

As we await Kingdom Hearts IV, I've started replaying the original series from the start thanks to every game being easily available on PS4. I do wish they were enhanced for PS5, which is where I'm playing, but their load times aren't long anyway, so it's been a bearable revisit so far.

Maybe I'll write about Kingdom Hearts here one day, but for now, I'll enjoy just playing through Sora's crazy story of his fight against darkness and emo kids in hoods with his buddies Donald Duck and Goofy.

I'm playing through Kingdom Hearts 2 on Critical difficulty, and I forgot how punishing the beginning of the game is since you can't grind at all. Excited to get to the meat of the game where the battle system is just chaos.

Natalie really enjoyed the watch-through of the entire series with me. No kidding, we watched every cutscene of every game over a few weeks. Now that she is all caught up, she's just as excited as I am to see what's next for the series.

Buy me a coffee?

I've resisted using any kind of monetization for my blog so far, but one year on, it's clear I want to do more with it. However, the blog has just too time consuming and cost prohibitive to invest in.

So, I'm turning to my readers. If you guys like the weekly news summaries and want more content centered around my thoughts with tech, video games, and life, then I'll need a little help. If I can make this blog at least break even, it would mean being more motivated to put more into it.

Don't worry, I'm not leaving AppleInsider, but I do want a place that's just my own where others can enjoy this side of things from my perspective. Social media isn't what it used to be, and I honestly believe more people should just have websites where they share, create, and be themselves. And no, not all need to be monetized either.

I just think that too much of social media is fake or fleeting. At least with HilliTech, it's just me and it's here to stay. No feed to scroll through, no ads to interrupt, just my tech commentary, photos, and whatever else.

If you want to contribute today, I can't promise anything other than my gratitude for now. But if I get enough to pay for the blog (Ghost, Hover, etc) then I can at least say that I'll put more time in.

What I'd like most is for this to become something closer to Daring Fireball in somewhat regularity. Short link posts, longer commentary posts, and my weekly summaries.

I've turned on memberships, commenting, and newsletters in an attempt to make this more of a total operation. I'll continue doing the weekly posts and send them out as a newsletter. I hope this is a way to do more short-form content during the week in a separate page.

Thanks for visiting my Now Page. I'll keep this up to date with new projects and life updates. And yes, I'll be sharing tech-related stuff here as well, especially once I get the new iPhone.