Living in the gray.
I may or may not post about the games I played this year, however, here are several selected screenshots that I took on my Nintendo Switch this year. I never know what really prompts me to take a screenshot, but they do an encompass a piece of my weird humor. Also, I had to be incredibly careful that not every screenshot was from The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe.
Presented in no particular order.
If you’re here on a blog in the year of 2022, then bless your little heart. I have been using Twitter since 2006 when it was just Twittr, and it was born out of AOL Instant Messenger status culture.
I remember when it was seen as a mostly nerdy thing back then and people had a hard time grasping its differences to Facebook, which had a bit more traction at the time.
I remember when the word ”tweet” starting catching on and how that was divisive.
My point being that any change is usually tumultuous at best and that things will eventually settle.
It is the arrogance of every age to believe that yesterday was calm.
— Tom Peters, Wired 5.12, Dec 1997
I looked into Mastodon about four years ago, when Twitter was making stupid changes to their API that limited the functionality of third-party apps12. The only deterrent of creating an account was: not many people were there.
Well, times are a’changing, and maybe the (my) hope for an actual open web built on standards and interoperability lives on. Many of my tweeps are moving to Mastodon, and I have setup my own server, and it feels like fresh breath.
I don’t anticipate a massive onboarding outside the nerds like me who have been waiting for this moment. One of the points about the fediverse is the decision of choosing a server (community, or home), where your account will live. I admit that was part of my hesitancy at first as well. I just went with creating my own community.
This seems applicable regarding social media sites.
No one owns Mastadon. It will not be subject to advertisers. The whole point is to build connections between accounts. You will not see everything all the time, but you can follow people and all their posts no matter where they are4.
It is confusing at times, messy too, but it’s that hill I’ll die on for what the open web should, and could be.
Find me here: https://social.4score7pongs.com/@jarbochov
With Twitter’s possible inevitable collapse, I find myself wanting to go back to the blog. You know, before the whole microblog.
Twitter was never perfect and maybe it can and will be better. Time will only tell. RSS never died. Podcasting and feed readers still power the truly democratized web envisioned decades ago. Newsletters are also a thing still?
Also spoiler alert for those who gave up on RSS the day Google Reader died… there are a ton of options now and they’re all pretty good. Even local options that don’t require a platform. But the social options aren’t there in most cases, but that’s okay. You can just share what you find on Twit…. your blog.
Recently got to take the new iPhone 14 Pro Max out into a good photography moment of the Columbus skyline facing east during a sunset. If you zoom into the wide angle photo, you might exclaim “that’s a lot of pixels”.
It’s been a while since I just did a normal blog post. My Roundup fame has taken me to new heights of internet content producing. I have moved the roundups to their own section with the intent that this may encourage me to post other types of things. Such as more frequent smaller things like using the aside post format in WordPress, which I feel was the original intent.
I recently got the Playdate from Panic and have really enjoyed just looking at it. It’s the perfect desk companion. I can’t wait for the dock.
I have 98% written a review of a few games I’ve completed recently. So I may post that here soon.
I really enjoyed this comprehensive mini-doc from the YouTube channel This Does Not Compute.
I had three portable MiniDisc recorder/players growing up in high school & college, and I still have the latter two. The format wasn’t the coolest but for the age where music was being downloaded from some… back alley websites it was a great way to copy it on the go and modify playlists without having to re-record an entire tape.
I was able to listen to whatever I really wanted while on bus rides, or even record music from someone else’s CD player or cassette player.
When I was dabbling in music and writing it on my computer I wanted to share it as I heard it on my computer. Although MIDI is a standard file format for recording/playing music, the engine and sound samples are not. A program I wrote them in called MusicTime had a more robust sound catalog and so I was able to output these to MiniDisc and play them on the sound system in the band room at school. When playing them after school a classmate exclaimed “You wrote that?”
I did not know that there were kiosks in Japan similar to the Famicom Disk System where you could download music. Another shared history between Nintendo & Sony.
My last memories of MiniDisc were in college working at the WMSR radio station. Most of our prerecorded audio was done on MiniDiscs. There was a recorder and player in the production studio as well as in the main studio. The systems were tied to the soundboard so when you tapped a button to go live with a source the music would play and only play that track. However, by that time, MP3 DATA CD players were also in use and easily made and that’s what I used to bring music or prerecorded audio from my computer to the station. I also was rocking out my first iPod by that time and loved it.
I should break out my MiniDiscs and see what I still have recorded on those bad boys. I would imagine they are just as susceptible to disc rot as other optical media.
