The Spirit of Exploration

Week 2
Sun Jul 27 2025
gaming

I used to play games like Tomb Raider and Uncharted when I was small. I have sunk countless hours exploring these beautifully and painstakingly..

Video Games and drinking coffee

I used to play games like Tomb Raider and Uncharted when I was small. I have sunk countless hours exploring these beautifully and painstakingly crafted worlds with 2 polygons. Lara Croft looked like someone slapped together some cardboard and duct tape and made it walk, but that didn’t really matter. The developers and designers put so much love into their games that just exploring the different parts of the world was completely gratifying. Looking back, it’s really amazing how much they could squeeze out from the limited computation of that time.

Of course, like with all things, games are much different now. There are over a million polygons in each frame. Boulders fall on you if you mess around. There are 50 more NPCs on the screen who will give you some bullshit quest if you talk to them. Cats meow, dogs bark, and there are 400 more bugs. Truly impressive. All this jazz and an overheating GPU mean the explorations are much more fun. You walk into a cave, you solve 10 puzzles, avoid traps, find the treasure, and swing out of the cave with a rope hanging from an enormous tree. Fun times.

I always wanted to explore dingy ass caves in real life like in the video games, but as time goes on, you realize it’s not really possible living in the ultra-urbanized city and changing config files for work. There are 500 NPCs that will give me a bullshit side quest, but they are always asking me for money. Folks, I have my reservations. But keeping the spirit of exploration alive, while walking around the unremarkable streets of HSR to kill time, my friends and I walked into a small, completely empty, devoid of barista, coffee shop. It surprised me that I pass through that road every day, but I had never seen it. Fun little place. The barista spawned out of nowhere and started taking our orders. I did not have anything, but my friends say it was good, so there’s that. The place is called kappu. 9/10 decision: always walk into dingy coffee shops.

Birthday time

Teenagers are very scary. For a very long time, I thought that I’ll always be caught up with everything in pop culture, but I met 13-year-olds at my nephew’s birthday who were talking about things I could not even understand. The only person of my age who could possibly out-lingo them is my friend Mdvc. The brain rot is too much. I could only understand gooning (don’t look it up), which is not even something I want to hear from a 13-year-old. On the subject of kids saying things I don’t understand, one of them said, and this is verbatim, “I don’t even want to be a part of this,” and left. Guess what was going on… my nephew was about to cut his cake. What? Isn’t that like the major birthday hallmark, landmark event? No cake = No birthday. It’s not the fact that teenagers say things that I don’t understand what makes them scary; I know a lot of people at work who do the same thing. It’s the fact that I cannot relate to them. To be honest, maybe I am the problem because it seems like I have fallen out with every generation. I could not understand what the adults were talking about at that party either. What is Saiyaara and why are you hyping it so much?

Weekend is for overeating

So my friends, JFK and AK-47, and I had decided to go to IKEA on Saturday. AK-47 wanted to book a new bike for himself, so we planned that it would be done by 12 PM and we’ll go to IKEA to have lunch. Well, someone did not wake up on time; by the time we were done with the bike, it was 1:30 PM, so the IKEA plan had to be canned, sort of. We got baked instead and decided to go to IKEA in sometime when another friend called to ask if I want to have lamb steak with him at Boteco. I asked my two other friends the same thing, and we all decided to go have steak.

We rode through the city traffic; the weather was really great, so we kept zipping through everyone, so well that we also zipped past the place we were supposed to go and could not turn back, nor was there any parking, so we just kept riding until we found a spot and walked back to the place, only to realize they had parking. Beautiful place though, really. I was expecting a very low-key place that puts meat on the grill in front of you and serves it, but this was all very upscale with Koreans and White people.

Picture of a cafe — Picture of Boteco from internet

But that is not going to stop us from what we came for. Loved the steak. I forgot to take a picture and took one when I had almost finished mine, but it’s okay; we are not professionals here.
I ate too much, man. Then I also had a shake thing and a beer, after which my friend asked me to join him for matcha.

I obviously agreed, but like I was FULL from all the things I just ate. I also want to set this in stone here and now: I do not like matcha, nor do I understand the hype behind it. It’s like drinking piss water, and yeah, beer for some is piss water, but it’s fine; I like it. I don’t like matcha; stop roping me into drinking matcha. Now that that’s out of the way, we went to Sakura Matcha Bar, and I’ll be honest, guys, it’s not a place I would go again. The matcha was fine, but that 10x8 feet room was just full of girls in green sweaters and tops talking about some white girl things while doing white girl activities. Yeah, man, no, not for me. I am falling out with every generation. My friend and I were the only guys there. But the place was cool. There was a dog sleeping next to our table; he is just chill like that, and the woman running the place had really well-done and ornamented nails, but I did not compliment her on that because I was focused on not puking after finishing the matcha. I was so full that I would have puked had I inhaled a particle of dust, but yeah, good times. I almost wore a green sweater that day, so I would have perfectly fit in.

Two green glasses with matcha drink — Our Matcha drink

Song segment

Config, Config, Config

This section is just for nerds; you can skip it if you want

Other than all this, I spent most of my week configuring shit I don’t need, like setting up a terminal prompt that tells me the current weather and configuring my neovim to look as bloated as possible using lazyvim. I have also set up umami to track visits to my site, and while I was working on the weather-in-terminal thing using wttr.in, I thought, what if I make my blog curlable????? Ask and you shall receive:
Now you can run curl news.whereisanirudh.info in your favourite terminal to… I don’t know what you will do with it. It’s there and it’s cool, shut up. I’ll add more things to it later; I don’t have time. Also the week numbering is moved to 0-indexed numbering don’t ask me why.