Adam Jaamour∎

I watched more movies in 2024 than I did in 2023, but went less to the cinema (13 times in 2024 vs 18 times in 2023), likely due to more interesting movies releasing in 2023. But I did go watch Dune 2 twice at the BFI IMAX (why not?)

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know my hobbies often shift between sport challenges, gaming, stamp collecting, data visualisation and many more. But lately, I’ve been devoting some of my free time diving into the world of launching small software startups, a concept you might be familiar with from @marc_louvion’s Shipfast, or from @levelsio or @dannypostmaa on X. This shipfast philosophy of prioritising speed and execution over perfection is what led to the creation of my latest project, GlobeFlix.

Earlier this year, I set myself the goal of tackling a triathlon, despite being a terrible swimmer and cyclist, and having only completed a single half-marathon so far. Read more about my journey below.

After playing Pokémon Crystal on my modded GameBoy Color for the past months, I wanted to share some of the maths that made me appreciate this classic even more.

Bugged Catch Rates of legendary Pokémon Lugia

I play most when travelling, commuting or on vacation. After almost finishing in the span of 3 months, I reached the point where I needed to catch one of the legendary Pokémon: Lugia. However, I knew from my vast experience playing Pokémon since the age of 7 that they are really hard to catch without a Master Ball (for context, a Master Ball guarantees a 100% success rate - but I had already used it for another Pokémon, and you only get one per game). The ideal strategy consists of bringing the enemy to 1 health point remaining, alter its status (e.g, to asleep, frozen, paralysed, burned or poisoned) and use Ultra Balls (the best one available after the Master Ball) to increase the catch rate per attempt.

So that was my approach, but little did I know that a bug unknown to me at the time would make it much harder to catch Lugia…

As stamp collector, I wanted to find a way to get more stamps and use nice ones in postage. Therefore, during the Covid pandemic in 2020, I stumbled upon PostCrossing and gave it a go to attempt getting more stamps to add to my collection. Postcrossing ended up becoming a very enjoyable hobby, at first during lockdown, and more recently when travelling to another country as it allows to discover their postal services and stamps from the POV of a local. Today, I have sent enough postcards to almost cover the distance to the Moon and back!