Blog Shorts
This is a section dedicated to smaller, less structured thoughts and observations that I thought are worth sharing but not worthy of a dedicated blogpost.
2023-06-02
Happy Birthday to me! although unrelated to this short :)
2023, for me, is the “year of the linux desktop”. While that saying is fairly amusing to me, but I finally (after dragging my feet) got around to putting Linux on my desktop, namely Pop_OS!. In reality, the only thing really chaining me to Windows was gaming - and while that has typically been a true-ism, I’m not so sure it holds up any more, given the amount of time and effort invested into the Windows emulation layer (WINE has always been decent, but Valve’s Proton is certainly making emulation dead simple for dumb end-users like me). With tools like protondb I can easily see that the vast majority (80%+) of games either have a existing linux version or run right out of the box using Proton. Of course, it doesn’t all revolve around Steam, but even dipping my toes into configuring WINE myself for certain games has been pretty straightforward. Using my laptop as a testing/proving ground for Pop_OS!, I was able to get stuff like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Civilization 4 and Dungeon Keeper working - usually with just a little bit of trial-and-error and googling, certainly no less effort than getting some old Windows games to run nowadays, or wrangling with DoSBoX. Yes, it takes some fiddling, but a combination of realising that said fiddling isn’t all that much and my general distaste of Microsoft’s behaviour/direction behind Windows, made me happy to take the plunge.
Yeah, “year of the linux desktop” may be both a cliche decision and never be true (backwards compatibility counts for an awful lot!) in general - in my opinion its fairly sensible to conjecture that there’ll be a decent shift over to various linux flavours because of how active the scene is in making Windows game Linux-friendly now.
2023-04-27
This website isn’t dead! Honest! ‘Tis a fate of a lot of personal websites, spending a lot of time building the shelves to place content, writings etc. and then have nothing to place on said shelves. I’ve been largely full speed ahead on various personal projects, writeups et. al. but have found a few things while plugging away at things, which I’ll note here:
- Having lots of different projects is somewhat a double-edged sword…
- Found it to be good for personal productivity, lots of different things to work on means there’s always something to do, can work in small bursts, or try and regiment it to working 1 day on a project per week, and all being in different states of “done” means you can jump between different ones depending on current preference - sometimes I want to be just exploring the early stages of a project, produce lots of rough notes and code and content to clean up later, brainstorming and seeing what already exists etc. - while other times you want the satisfaction of putting the finishing “good enough” seal on something, even on a small part or section of the project.
- Invariably though, sketching things out is, well, far more enjoyable, and hence I’ve produced a whole lot of stuff (e.g. I’d estimate I’ve written around 10,000 words in the last month alone, notwithstanding other non-writing projects) which is helping to prove, to myself mainly, that I can definitely get into the swing of putting thoughts into words. The hard part is putting thoughts to words that doesn’t read like word salad.
- A second part is that a lot of what I’m doing with this writing is reflecting, and so there’s a huge backlog of stuff to chip away at - even just a few sentences worth of thoughts on all the books I’ve read, games I’ve played, music I’ve listened to adds up to an awful lot of sentences overall, and while that again gives me a lot of ammunition to work with, going back and tidying up the various brain-dumps is another question.
- A tertiary concern is well, releasing it out to the wider world. I’m pretty much writing for myself, and just publishing it out in the open (more like the void/aether but /shrug) in case anyone else is interested - so I have no plans to have any kind of consistent release schedule, nor do I want to put myself to any kind of release schedul - but in the absence of one, when does it go out, after sitting in various draft files? Will have to work this out and find a cadence, and will likely become more clear with a more consistent and manageable personal backlog.
- There’s also just plain ol’ peaks-and-valleys to this sort of thing as well, and there are days, weeks, months where you get a lot done, and days, weeks, months where I have to chill out more because getting through the working day is hard enough.
All in all, still just working it out, and maybe it’ll just be something I perpetually just “wing it” unless I can turn into something beyond just some pet project(s).
On a completely unrelated note, I read a very good blog post/“manifesto” on making good small games and has definitely given me some extra inspiration/motivation to finally start hacking away and making small little games or even just game experiments - I’ve been looking at rot.js and inkle for cobbling together a roguelike and Interactive Fiction game using those, having sketched out some pie-in-the-sky ideas beforehand. I expect to be playing around with these in the next few months, and perhaps might write something up about my experiences developing etc.
2023-03-18
A few notes, around ubiquity of art, and the speed of experiencing it.
A combination of the new Steam Sale, combing through my backlog to see what I’ve played and haven’t (and there’s a lot!) for review purposes - and it got be thinking about how, no matter how much time dedicated to intaking art, even subsections of art such as literature, paintings, music etc. it’ll be physically impossible to ever cover everything, let alone analysing, critiquing or taking inspiration from said art, or even just appreciating it.
- This can then be extrapolated to basically any type of experience, no-one will visit everywhere, eat at every restaurant, play with every programming language etc.
- I can see taking the “90% of everything is crap” approach, and making copious usage of critical and general reception, on top of being willing to try and drop something quickly (make a judgement on the first 50 pages/first 3 episodes of a show/first two hours of gameplay etc.) - but for said filtering to be quick and dirty enough to allow a wider experience will invariably cause false positives/negatives.
- And yet there’s a general acceptance of this fact, either begrudgingly or happily (you’ll never run out of good books to read/music to listen to/games to play!), and I’ve certainly not really thought about it much before, and I’m intruiged why, other than a general observation that being unhappy at missed experiences is a “worse” mindset than revelling in the few experiences you actually participate in.
- Lastly, are there words/phrases that describe this feeling, other than “FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)“? There’s the Japanese word “tsundoku” that got popularised, for those who buy books but never read them, but it only sort of fits. Maybe someone smarter and/or with greater reach will come out and coin a pithy word/phrase summing this feeling up. Or perhaps we have too much else going on to worry about.
A separate tangent is that by looking back, and going over past experiences, means there’s the opportunity cost of not seeking out new experiences, either waiting undiscovered or being released brand new.
- I’ve always been “behind” the times, so to speak with a lot of the art I intake - I rarely listen to an album/read a book/play a game in the same year it releases, heck even a few years down the line. Not something I’ve done intentionally, I think it as a convenient way of letting art filter down critical and popular concensus and avoids a lot of the FOMO aspects - and while I’d classify a lot of FOMO as irrational (and the way its played upon through e.g. advertising really reinforces the irrationality of FOMO), but is it entirely unfounded? I’m unsure of the generality of this (its generally easier to discuss a new piece of art soon after its release, as its fresh, new, and may have a bubble of excitement around people wanting to get immediate thoughts out, and it can avoid awkward public social coversations), but I was mainly thinking in the context of games.
- For example, live-service games have a limited shelf-life, and can only be up so many years before inevitably taken offline, multiplayer focused games can only survive with an active playerbase (although bots can somewhat help in this regard). I tend to play singleplayer games, so this doesn’t affect me all that much, but I have felt it when looking to get into card games/card battlers.
- For example, I’ve been looking to get into a CCG (collectible card game), atfer having enjoyed and then soured on a few digital CCG’s, such as Hearthstone and Shadowverse, and here I feel there is a lot of benefit getting in on the ground floor, so to speak. However there haven’t been many options (Valve whiffed super hard with Artifact, Legends of Runeterra was fine but no better than that).
- Options are also limited in physical CCG’s, with all the established games being decades old (Magic is 30 years old, Yu-Gi-Oh is 24, Pokemon is 26), and, uh, where the hell do you start with something like that?
- Although saying all this wrt. CCG’s, I am trying to get into Flesh and Flood, a new-ish CCG (3 years old at this point, did not release at a great time given, uh, covid) so fingers crossed it satiates my CCG appetite.
- For example, live-service games have a limited shelf-life, and can only be up so many years before inevitably taken offline, multiplayer focused games can only survive with an active playerbase (although bots can somewhat help in this regard). I tend to play singleplayer games, so this doesn’t affect me all that much, but I have felt it when looking to get into card games/card battlers.
- For what its worth, I don’t think my habits will change anytime soon (unless I start a job writing about newly released art, which is… unlikely), just an obversation I’ve had bubbling around.
- I’ve always been “behind” the times, so to speak with a lot of the art I intake - I rarely listen to an album/read a book/play a game in the same year it releases, heck even a few years down the line. Not something I’ve done intentionally, I think it as a convenient way of letting art filter down critical and popular concensus and avoids a lot of the FOMO aspects - and while I’d classify a lot of FOMO as irrational (and the way its played upon through e.g. advertising really reinforces the irrationality of FOMO), but is it entirely unfounded? I’m unsure of the generality of this (its generally easier to discuss a new piece of art soon after its release, as its fresh, new, and may have a bubble of excitement around people wanting to get immediate thoughts out, and it can avoid awkward public social coversations), but I was mainly thinking in the context of games.
That was… a few words more than I expected. Maybe this’ll get a more refined treatment at some point.
2023-03-05
- This was initially conceived for housing small reviews for music/games/books, but I thought the concept was worth replicating here also.
- Interesting thoughts and observations will go here on the ‘when-I-have-interesting-thoughts-and-obversations’-basis.