devon.lol

New Feature: Lists! 🎆

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:18:25 +0000

The site now has a new section: lists! I could have just put lists into the blog (and I kinda did in the past with the old web directory), but they're more evergreen than a blog post. They're pieces of content that are relevant for a long time and will be updated. It made sense to separate them from the blog.

The feature launches with three lists:

better alternatives to popular things (warning: very opinionated; feel free to make your own list if you disagree)
my YouTube subscriptions (warning: massive)
my favorite internet videos

I have an idea for one more list that I'd like to publish soon-ish. Keep an eye out for that.

Hope you enjoy the lists!

Leaving Apple behind after 18 years

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 23:04:24 +0000

I've just "finished" (as much as it can be finished) a project to migrate out of the Apple ecosystem. I'll share with you the why and how, what I gave up, what I gained, and what privacy really costs.

How I got here

Apple has lost a lot of luster for me in recent years, for many reasons I'll leave to your imagination and for others I'll describe here. I recently made the decision to exit the ecosystem, nearly all at once. I had an iPhone 13 and an M1 MacBook Pro, so I probably could have stretched another 4-5 years of usable life out of my Apple devices.

That's generally not how I do things though. I'm not interested in watching the sand fall through the hourglass, hoping the last grain lands at the moment the planets align for me to make a change. I prefer to get ahead of it, figure out what's next for me, and get there so I can get back to doing the things I want to do.

Aging hardware is just one small reason I'm ready to change. I've become more aware of how invasive and destructive surveillance capitalism has become in modern life. That's impacting me right now, even if I only see the effects of it on my psyche. That's the most sinister aspect of surveillance capitalism: if it works well, you'll be exploited by it without even knowing it.

I started waking up to Apple's role in this due of their lip-service privacy commitments and ads. For a while, Apple looked like a privacy champion when they were pissing off Mark Zuckerberg by breaking (some of) Facebook's privacy violation techniques. They didn't wait long though before they revealed why they were so concerned about your privacy: they didn't want other ad companies invading your privacy because they wanted to make the money doing that themselves. Apple is the big brother who won't let bullies beat you up at school because he's going to do it when you get home.

I had already stopped buying new products from them. I had stopped updating my OSes because the new features are for them, not for me. I was still being subjected to their surveillance though. Those aforementioned factors and the fact it was starting to become time to think about replacing my batteries (both phone and laptop) had pushed me just past my tipping point.

The replacement computer

But what about my computer? It's got a ton of cycles on it, but the battery still lasts as long as I would need it to. Flagship phones are fairly similar these days in terms of hardware so that's an easy swap if you're ready to learn new software and leave the old ecosystem, but the same can't be said for the computer. There's really nothing comparable to my 4-year-old M1 MacBook, even today. I can get the performance, but the battery life will suck and the fans will be loud. I can get the battery life, but I won't be able to run comparable workloads. No matter what other compromises I take, the build quality won't be as good.

No, I didn't find the holy grail Linux laptop that was as good a MacBook Pro, but I'm happy with what I ended up with. I'll tell you all about that in just a minute, but first, here are the options I didn't take.

I had already made my decision on Framework until they aligned themselves with politically problematic projects. They weren't able to, to my satisfaction, thread the needle and convince me that they were both apolitical and extremely political at the same time. The prices of their laptops only make sense on the basics of the embedded politics of their repairability, but they are somehow otherwise blind to any political stances of the projects they support? C'mon, folks. You can't have it both ways.
I really wanted to support a company that built for Linux exclusively, but the user testimonials I found were all over the place. (Sorry I didn't save those, but search for people's experiences with System76, Tuxedo, and others like them. I'm confident you'll find the same.) Half of the users were coming by to say everything worked almost perfectly and support was amazing for everything that didn't. The other half were coming to say that they got a lemon and support was slow and ineffective. I wasn't prepared to roll the dice.
Reddit would have you believe you're an absolute fool if you buy anything for running Linux that isn't an old Thinkpad. I had one as my job-issued machine back when I was in IT for a public school system making peanuts to prop up ancient Windows 98 labs. They remind me of that time, but also they're just so boring. I get that's part of the appeal, but it just isn't for me.

It was at this point in my research that I stumbled into some novel options. The AMD Strix Halo platform offered some similarities to Apple Silicon. It has similar qualities to even the later Apple Silicon system, so it would have easily outperformed my M1, which is the benchmark I'm shooting for because honestly, it still does everything I need it to.

ASUS has the ROG Flow Z13, which is a gaming tablet intended to run a full desktop operating system. As cool as it looks, I decided against it because I do think I want the laptop form factor. HP has a ZBook Ultra G1a on the same platform. Both of these systems can game, which was appealing, and both can be specced with a monstrous 128GB of RAM (which, I guess, is apparently worth about as much as a car these days 😅).

When I bought my MacBook Pro, I went way overboard and got almost the top spec they offered. That's why it's still more than I need, and I decided this time to reel it in. My general philosophy is to buy the thing that serves 95-98% of your needs and not to try to hit 100%. This was the perfect opportunity to practice what I preach. Besides, I just can't justify $3-4k on a system nowadays as I'm in a bit of a career slump. Skipping Strix Halo did, however, lead me to another option.

I'd been reading about another HP system with great Linux compatibility on the Intel Lunar Lake platform. The Core Ultra 9 288V outperforms the M1 by a fair bit in some of the synthetic CPU benchmarks and it's about 90-95% of the way to the performance of the newer M3 on those same benchmarks, so it should be more than good enough for any software development or other tinkering I want to do over the next few years. It's 80% of the M5… but it's also a quarter the price of my M1 MBP when it was new (and presumably of a similar replacement). Battery life is great compared to other CISC CPUs, even though it's still not as good as the Mac.

Those traits together are how I ended up with my Omnibook X Flip 16. (Are any members of congress reading this willing to sponsor legislation to limit the number of characters and spaces in these model names? Holy crap, they're so bad. 🤦‍♂️)

New laptop compromises

You can feel the difference in build quality. HP tells me the chassis is made of recycled aluminum, but my hands are desperate to convince me it's made of plastic. Not the rough, hollow-feeling plastic of a Thinkpad but still plastic.

Now, tell me if you've heard this one before: Mac trackpads are very good and the HP trackpad isn't as good. It feels fine, but it doesn't work as well. The palm rejection doesn't always reject my palm. (It had one job.) Multitouch doesn't always track fingers so good. Maybe this is mostly software. I don't know. I just know it doesn't feel great, but it's serviceable. The keyboard is similarly annoying, with very little travel and a space bar so loud you can't really use it next to someone who's trying to sleep. It still gets the job done though.

The absolute worst thing about the computer, with a bullet, is the audio. These speakers sound like I'm listening to audio on a VTech "laptop" I bought for a three-year-old at Target. The gap is enormous — so much so, I broke down and bought a little $100 Marshall Emberton II stereo bluetooth speaker I plan to just tote around with me in the event I need to listen to something.

Thermals are different. The computer is generally quiet and cool, but occasionally the fans spin up and the chassis gets warm, and for no apparent reason. It never gets as warm as my MacBook at its warmest, but the chassis itself is the heatsink there and the fans are never really audible so it makes some sense.

Software comes with compromises too. Obviously, your macOS software is off-the-table. The only thing I really can't replace is the Affinity suite. I think there are ways to run the Windows version on Linux, but I don't need it often and haven't needed it yet. When I do, I'm going to give GIMP a spin and see if I can make it work.

Final Cut Pro is off the table, and DaVinci Resolve has been a problem for me under Linux in the past due to NVIDIA on a different machine. I found I like Kdenlive quite a bit though, despite it being a little grungy to look at. I could name a dozen or so other apps that are not quite as good as what I was using before but the gap isn't wide enough for it to really matter.

The biggest software compromise is the macOS attribute I mentioned way back at the start: the ability to skip tinkering in favor of working. Both Apple and developers who write software for macOS seem to have a focus on selecting good defaults. This is subjective so I'm not going to try to "prove" it since that concept doesn't make sense here. I will give you this one example of what I mean.

My macOS video player has a UI that stays at the same scale, as you might expect, without regard to the window size. MPV on Linux has a UI that, baffliningly, scales with the window, and it launches by default in a tiny window. This means that, in order to go fullscreen with my video after the player launches, I'm having to raise my mouse's DPI like I'm trying to line up a cross-map headshot in Facing Worlds or something.

In order to make this usable, I had to find the exact combination of configurations (just a single setting won't do) in a text-based config file that would keep the UI at the same scale. I then found the settings to change the default window size from 320x240 or whatever the wacky default was. I love that I was able to configure these problems away, but I hate that I had to. Linux gives me so much more flexibility to tinker and then puts a gun to my head telling I'll take advantage of it or suffer. It didn't have to be this way, but it is.

New laptop advantages

Sometimes though that flexibility does work out to a net advantage where my needs are esoteric or where, on another operating system, I just wouldn't be given an opportunity to fix a problem I'm having. In some cases, the opportunity to fix may actually be present outside of Linux but I've been conditioned not to look for it… or maybe it's just that I've been conditioned to always look for it in Linux. Some examples:

I installed the LTS kernel when my computer started, rarely but still annoyingly, rebooting spontaneously while I was working. (OK, it only happened once, but that's once more than I wanted it to. 😅)
I used keyd to do the keyboard shenanigans I do with my dual-repurposed capslock key, and that now works more transparently than any solution I've used on any other OS.
I brought my beloved three-finger drag over from macOS via a wonderful script.
I swap out the hosts file on my computer. When I'm connected to my home network, it points two key domains to services on my home network. This is already done via my self-hosted DNS, but that is bypassed when I'm connected to my VPN which imposes its DNS servers. This solution allows me to access those services properly while on my home network without having to toggle my VPN on and off.
I used systemd-inhibit to keep the screen alive while KOReader is running even though the built-in setting in the app apparently doesn't work, maybe because of Wayland?

Speaking of KOReader, my laptop can now function as an ereader! Sure, nothing was stopping me from loading up a book on the MBP (and I did do that), but the "Flip" in this system's convoluted product name means that it is a 2-in-1 laptop, which is further marketing speak to indicate it doubles as a tablet. It's a feature I didn't go looking for, but it's one I really appreciate since it can now replace my iPad as well. It is comically large for an ereader, but it works really well! I'm also running KOReader on my phone (which I will share more about later), and they sync progress via my self-hosted KOReader syncing server. Works flawlessly so far, and I'm reading even more than before.

It's heavy for a tablet, but it's actually about a half pound lighter than the MBP, which is an appreciable difference.

Maybe the biggest upgrade for me is that, even as much as macOS was just pretty, buttoned-up Unix, on rare occasions that buttoning-up meant things that worked on other Unix wouldn't or not as well. Docker is the poster-child example here where on macOS Docker needs to run a whole VM in the background to do its thing, and you can feel that in the resource usage. Now I can do everything just like the other nerds do it.

Did I say that was the biggest upgrade? Maybe that's true in terms of persistently visible user experience, but in terms of peace-of-mind, the biggest upgrade by far is being on an OS not driven by surveillance capitalism. Rushing around in macOS and Windows (on the rare occasions I'm forced to use it) to disable surveillance anti-features even as I know full well they had already gobbled up everything they can currently know about me in the 50ms after boot is a bad feeling. Knowing the next update will hide another dozen opt-out-if-you're-lucky anti-features is one of the primary drivers for switching in the first place.

Ultimately, I haven't found anything yet that I want to do but can't. Most things I can do better. A few I can only do worse, but I can do them. The same can be said for my phone, although that required a bigger philosophy shift.

The replacement phone

The decision on my phone was much more straightforward. I wanted the most private and secure OS I could get while also maintaining usability. Based on my research, that meant GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel. I didn't want to give Google money or data because that would be counter-productive. I also want the newest phone I can get because, as with first-party phone OSes, phones stop getting updates as they age. This worked out nicely because the Pixel 10s are relatively new and Graphene support hadn't quite been ironed out yet when I was looking. This leaves the Pixel 9 as the newest I can buy, and they're old enough that the second-hand market is relatively healthy.

I picked up a Pixel 9a on eBay. Actually, I started with a Pixel 9 which I returned and swapped for a 9a. (Through this process, I learned there are two levels of unlocking: carrier unlocking and factory unlocking. In that initial Pixel 9 purchase, I got one where, for Graphene and to be able to move freely between carriers, I would need both.)

The transition has been remarkably smooth, but let's first look at the compromises.

New phone compromises

That philosophy shift I mentioned earlier? It actually started a while ago when I first decided I was fed up with Apple. Actually, it may have started even years earlier when I switched to a fully metered cell phone plan. For most people, the cell phone is the primary computing device. It was never that for me, but it had a larger role than it would settle into later. I was streaming music and occasionally video. Then, when I switched to Ting (I'm now on Mint.), I dramatically cut my data usage, and dropped my bill for two phones from $135 a month with Verizon down to $20.

I derived a lot of satisfaction from knowing that I would pay only for what I was using on a given month, so there was an actual incentive to reduce, unlike a traditional plan which only punishes you if you can't guess your usage and never rewards you for using less. My current plan is slightly more traditional but still shares attributes of the pay-as-you-go plan: it gives me a very small allotment of data and allows me to pay more to top up. The new habits I built on pay-as-you-go stuck, so I've never needed a top-up.

That means that most of my media usage on the phone is either local or on wi-fi. This already reduced my dependency on several apps I would have needed for streaming. On top of that, I started to wake up to the fact that doing anything of substance on my phone hampered my effectiveness. On top of that, it felt miserable and cramped. So, I basically stopped doing it. Now, I use my phone for communication, navigation, and some very light media consumption on the web, Mastodon, and Lemmy, along with a few select apps.

When I saw how Apple was abusing user trust to create an invasive ad monopoly on their platform, I further scaled back my phone use and eliminated even more apps. Mobile gaming was off the table for me (It was already in the toilet, but I made occasional exceptions.), and I got rid of everything I didn't rely on.

All of that paved the way for me to be content with just about anything that would give me the privacy I wanted and those few core functions, so my list of perceived compromises may be smaller than a typical user's. Here's what I've noticed:

I miss biometric unlock, and I kinda hate to miss out on a return to fingerprint unlock over FaceID, which I didn't love. This is entirely self imposed. I guess all of these compromises are really, but this one isn't imposed by Graphene. Graphene supports fingerprint unlock, but I have heard that law enforcement can force you to use a biometric unlock where they can't force a PIN unlock. In pursuit of the greatest level of privacy, I'll set up only the unlock method that affords me that. I do worry about my PIN being captured on a surveillance camera, but I'm not sure what to do about that. I think it's less likely someone will be able to use that against me than force me to use a finger to unlock.
I have decided to silo most proprietary apps into their own profiles. As you might imagine, this is inconvenient. Again, it's entirely self-imposed. Graphene does not enforce it. The most inconvenient thing is that I don't see notifications from those apps. Fortunately, they're apps I don't particularly need notifying me. I can check in once or twice a day, and that works perfectly well.
I'm not sure of the ideal way to get apps. There are many stores and other non-store options. The OS doesn't really walk you through any one of them or have an article where they recommend a best practice so far as I know. It would be nice if they did. As it stands, I'm just doing what I think is right and hoping for the best. (It does have an official store, but it only contains the bundled apps.)
I excitedly installed an app that would let me run timers from the… control center? Not sure what it's called. It's the thing that drags down from the top of the screen. Anyway, those timers only work on Graphene when the phone is unlocked. I assume this is related to the feature that hides sensitive notifications, but I'm not sure. (You may notice that I don't know which OS features are coming from Graphene and which are native to Android since I've never used Android in any other context.)
Because you have so much control in Android, you can do some really messed up stuff and introduce a lot of jank. I've added an app called Lockscreen Widgets that does exactly what it sounds. Configuring it is very fiddly. I can place widgets anywhere on the lock screen. They can flow off the screen, overlap other elements or each other, be oddly aligned against themselves or other elements… I can commit all the design crimes I want with no enforcement whatsoever! Even when I do it "right," it's a little weird. Widgets sometimes don't appear when they should and other times they flash onto the screen after other elements have appeared. But it's all worth it because the functionality it gives me is incredibly convenient. I get to make that call whether I'm willing to pay the jank tax to do what I want.
It can be a bit of a puzzle getting some apps to work. Banking apps are particularly fraught since security theater says you're safer if you're in Google's walled garden. Fortunately, this doesn't apply to any of my banking apps, but I have to be aware that one of my banking apps could suddenly break. If I want to use a new bank, I need to make sure to check to see if the app works or if I can do everything I want to do via the web site. (Depositing checks seems to be a common sticking point.)

and the biggest compromise of the new phone:

Navigation sucks. I'm sure part of this is my fault. I'm not entirely clear about all the various location service options and their implications.

I've tried my best to set up something workable with CoMaps. I tried to use it recently for the first time for walking directions (which is my favorite and most-used mode of travel), and it seemed to think I was several blocks away from where I was. I tried to trust it and turned around before realizing I actually hadn't gone far enough. I frequently walk places I've never been to before, so navigation is pretty important to me. I could use Google Maps, but that's counterproductive.

I also use public transit, and I haven't been able to find an open source solution for transit navigation in the US. This pushed me toward a proprietary app I have used for years and really love: Transit.

I isolated it to a profile, but after testing it, it didn't work at all. I learned that it requires Google Play services in order to function. (It launches otherwise, but it won't do any navigation.) I had wanted to avoid Google Play altogether, but this was a function I needed on my phone.

I installed them only in this one profile, which has no other apps installed. I never use the web browser on it. I have never logged into any Google web site, and I did not need to log into the Play Store (The app was downloaded anonymously via the Aurora Store.) or Google Play otherwise. I can't see a way Google can know who I am unless they can match me with my cellular provider.

This is a privacy compromise I don't love, but it's one I'm willing to make. I may end up switching to Transit for walking directions instead even though it's not great for that. It's still much better than my previous experiment with CoMaps unfortunately.

The list of compromises may be a bit long, but, apart from navigation, the actual impact of them on my phone usage is very small. If anything, most of the compromises have worked out to be advantages.

New phone advantages

I switched to this phone to avoid anti-features foisted on me by Apple. The biggest advantage is being able to avoid those, but apart from that, the compromises have shifted my usage patterns even further away from invasive proprietary apps and more broadly, further away from my phone. A proper computer is a much happier, freer place for computing, and I feel good about moving further in that direction.

Some other small perks:

I have lighting controls on my home screen now, thanks to the aforementioned Lockscreen Widgets! This is a tiny change that makes a huge difference. I should have a switch on the wall and in fact I do, but it was a casualty of the switch from Apple. I haven't yet figured out how to get it working in Home Assistant. As a stop-gap measure, the lockscreen controls are a huge improvement.
I enjoy the way Android recycles the "back" gesture (dragging right off the left of the screen) to go back both inside and outside the current app. This gesture on iOS will usually take me back in the current app, but it will never take me between apps (unless that was added in a version I never updated to). It's extremely convenient and matches perfectly with the way I want this gesture to work.
Google doesn't own my notifications! This is a massive plot hole in the major OSes' privacy stories. Even if you're using a privacy-focused app like Signal, if your messages are shown in notifications (which is the default), Apple will give up your messages with a subpoena. You can turn off showing the message contents in notifications, which you'll need to do and then convince all your friends to do as well if you want messages to be truly private. You can encrypt all you want, and it won't matter if Apple is just going to hand it over by way of the notification contents. As far as I'm aware, you can't turn off displaying iMessage contents in notifications, so if you want privacy there, you'll need to turn off notifications altogether, which, again, is not the default. Once you do that, you've effectively turned them into something more like email: less instant and more asynchronous, although even email notifies you. So, iMessage may as well not be encrypted although they are very vocal about how safe and private it is.
My VPN connected icon is restored to the menu bar. I had this on old iPhones before every phone manufacturer insisted that the camera needed to be embedded in the screen. (Why?! 😖) My "upgrade" from iPhone 7 to 13 was in many ways a downgrade, including this one. I now needed to drag down the control center to see if my VPN is connected. Google still thinks it's way better to cut the camera out of the screen, but at least it's a smaller cutout that leaves room for my VPN icon.
Almost all of my devices now charge with USB-C! 🎉 So convenient! (Note: I think newer Apple devices also have this, but my iPhone 13 didn't so it's still an upgrade for me.)

The impact profile of the phone's advantages is the inverse of that of the disadvantages: they are small advantages with a lot of impact. I've been very happy with the switch.

The cost of privacy

Privacy can cost a little more money, but most of the cost is centered elsewhere. It costs:

the expertise to know what to avoid and how to avoid it
the cognitive load to make everything you do on your device intentional and to try to anticipate the many and varied methods corporations will use to pry your information away from you
the resolve to keep learning and to keep thinking about every little thing you do, day after day
the strength to know that, even if you don't do everything right all the time and even if you can never be 100% private, doing what you can is still worthwhile

among others.

I'm no privacy expert, but I'm paying the costs best I can to preserve as much privacy as I can. Most people can't pay these costs, and most people that can won't. I hope that someday regulation can protect us against having our data harvested transparently, the reality of what's happening buried somewhere in dozens of pages of an impenetrable privacy policy if it's even made public at all.

For now, that regulation doesn't seem to be in the cards throughout most of the world. It's a tragedy that we have turned privacy into a luxury subscription service for those who can pay these costs. I'll keep paying because, even though it sucks, it's better than being exploited.

Welcome to my literal home

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:26:10 +0000

Get out of my house!

Nah, just kidding. I'm glad you're here. Instead of getting this site from a CDN somewhere near you, you're now downloading each of these files from a server right here in my home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I've been working for several months now to minimize my personal data footprint on the corporate-controlled walled gardens of the internet, and I've made quite a bit of progress. This site was a particularly embarrassing piece of my online footprint that I wasn't yet hosting myself. I'm super happy with the system I have set up right now, and I may take the time to write up an article about it at some point. In the meantime, welcome to my home!

How to Enjoy Video Games in 2025

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 20:29:37 +0000

When I was a kid, I thought of old people as being resistant to change simply because they were stuck in their ways. That's sometimes true, but now that I have become an old person myself, I see myself forming a resistance to certain changes. It's a weird thing to reconcile against my personality because I actually love change. In fact, I start feeling a hint of depression if I get too caught up in a routine. I have to switch things up to get out of my funk.

At 42 though, I can see that some change, even if it looks good on the surface, isn't worth the cost. This is tough to see because the costs are often hidden and play out over months or years. If you haven't seen these patterns unfold in the past, it's hard to see why you wouldn't jump on that new trend.

Take Bluesky for instance. I made my Twitter exit back in 2022 when I stopped being active, logging in, or even visiting the site. I made my way over to Mastodon which offered an alternative, and I've enjoyed the community there ever since. In the most recent round of Twitter exits after the election, Bluesky had its moment, and I was tempted to go see what they have going on over there. I didn't though because Bluesky suffers from the same Achilles heel of Twitter: centralized control. I took inventory of the things that might make me move over or even just try it out: more people to interact with and better features. In evaluating these, I realized I don't care about being on the biggest platform. I don't live in the largest city. I don't try to collect the most friends. So, why would I care about which social network has a higher user count? Then I thought about the countless software products that wormed their way into our lives with "better features" only to then enshittify and make us pay for those one way or another later. The carrot is here now, but you can bet that the stick is coming later. No thanks!

Video games, like every commercial product, are on a similar trajectory. They've become more convenient and at the same time more exploitative. It's left me pining for the simple gaming transactions of my youth:

Go to a store
Find a game that looks cool
Buy the game
Play the game
Move on

Now, games are cheaper and more accessible than ever. I can get hundreds of games for free and play them on my phone anywhere I want! If I had described this to a 12-year-old me, I would have been stoked to get to this utopian future… but I'm here now, and it's not at all what it's cracked up to be.

Fortunately though, the model of the past hasn't gone away. It's just been shunned by the major publishers that embraced it and used it to grow in the past in favor of more exploitative and opaque models. Since they're not the only game in town though, we can let them have it and move on to studios conducting business the way we want to. I've been wanting to write this post for a while to expose some of the pitfalls and help you stay on the path to gaming bliss!

Before we move on though, you should be aware that this post is very prescriptive, and the advice is based on my personal experience. All of the advice may not be right for you. Pick and choose what you like or ignore it all. It won't hurt my feelings a bit! I don't even follow all of my advice all of the time! (What a hypocrite, right?) If you approach this with an open mind though, you can find something in here that may be helpful to you.

If you want a fun way to be introduced to my philosophy, take a couple of minutes and play my Decker deck, created for the Deck-Month 2 jam on itch.io. More than anything, it's a test of how close your existing philosophy about games is to mine, but it's a fun way get the short version of how I approach gaming.

How to Enjoy Video Games in 2025 by raddevon

Now, let's move on to the long version.

Things to Avoid

Major Publishers

I guess it's been at least two decades now that major publishers have been complaining that they don't make enough money by making video games. They continue to inflate their budgets to produce more iterative, often derivative slop and then complain loudly when it doesn't sell three copies to every living human like their sales projections said it should. Game industry CEOs are literally starving in the streets because of this crisis.

Hang on a second. I'm just getting word from my correspondent in the field that the CEOs are not, in fact starving in the streets and are instead giving themselves raises as they lay off thousands of the workers who create the value their salaries are derived from. Weird!

While these CEOs are not creating any of the value that brings in the money, they are devising new strategies to get you to pay more for games while keeping the same price tag on the box. Many times, they can even reduce the price tag down to zero!

Free-to-Play

When they named this business model, they very nearly said the quiet part out loud. People want things that are free, but when you add a qualifier like the "-to-play" in this instance, the lines are right there to read between to let you know that something is not free. What is it? Well, you won't know until you try it!

That's the whole play: get the player invested and then get them to give up the cash. It's the same model email scams have used since the beginning of the internet: get people to invest something, and then they're more pliable to invest more so as not to lose their initial investment. Compare these scenarios:

"Sure would be a shame if something happened to this fine shop of yours. Fortunately for you, we offer insurance!"
"Sure would be a shame if that initial $500 you put in to unlock all this money in Nigeria went to waste. Fortunately, for $5,000 more, we can unlock the original $100,000 I told you about plus another $250k!"
"Sure would be a shame if you weren't able to advance any further in this game you've spent 500 hours playing. Fortunately, we offer a character/item/whatever that can get you to the next plateau for another $100!"

This was the original exploitative free-to-play model, but in recent years, execs have, after looking around to make sure no regulators are watching, said, "why stop there when we could also add gambling?" Take the scenario above. Make the transaction to advance cheaper, but then also put the item into a blind box with a bunch of shit the player doesn't want and make the odds to get the thing they do want 1:25. God bless America™️, *that's a business model!

Reward these jokers for their great ideas by avoiding the business model altogether. If the game doesn't have a clear up-front price you pay, skip it. Some of these games may be OK, but the vast majority are not.

Live Service Games

This is an off-shoot of the free-to-play genre in which you also get charged up-front. Hurray, I guess?

Due to the fact that you are paying something up-front, it seems like you have a much better shot at getting a fair deal with live service games, although I still can't help feeling icky at the idea of buying a game and not actually knowing what my final cost for the game will be.

The biggest problem with these is that they are primarily competitive games. Being competitive games that want to keep selling you bits and bobs, they need to ensure the integrity of the competition. If the game is a joke because a bunch of cheaters are running amok, people stop buying the skins and pets and weapons and whatever else.

The industry has settled on a solution to this problem: all competitive games must install kernel-level spyware on your system that has unlimited access to do anything it wants. What could possibly go wrong?

Would you want Riot, Bungie, Activision, and the others to come into your house and watch you while you're playing? Would you want them there, able to poke around in the bank statements you have laying out on the table or grab the cash you have stuffed in a jar on top of the fridge? If not, then you don't want them in your kernel. It's kinda like they're in your house but they're invisible. That's not any better; it's just that you don't have to be constantly aware of it… which may in fact be worse.

Besides that, most of these games won't run on Linux, which we'll talk about later.

Perpetual Rentals (or Gaming Subscriptions)

All the major publishers are ready for you to stop owning games because once you own them, you don't need to pay for it anymore. This has led to the rise of subscription gaming services: Game Pass, and whatever the things EA and Ubisoft have are called.

These are a fantastic deal… and they will be, until they have converted enough people over and have a service sticky enough to ensure they don't bleed subscribers when they jack the price. Remember when Netflix streaming was $10/month? Enshittification is coming for gaming subscriptions; it's just not fully settled in yet. Game Pass has already nearly doubled their price. Imagine what they'll do once they have games you have to subscribe to them in order to play…

You don't want to be the sucker who invests all your gaming dollars in these subscriptions and has to walk away with nothing when the services are $50 a month and you have to subscribe to twelve of them to get the games you want to play.

Game Consoles

I was primarily a console gamer for many years, but consoles are expensive to make and expensive to publish for. That means the games published on these platforms are more likely to contain all the things to avoid I've previously mentioned: they're very likely to be published by major publishers, and all of those are chasing the free-to-play and live service player-hostile gravy train.

Besides that, a game is generally more expensive on console versus PC when comparing their best sale prices. Besides that, you miss out on many games that are only released on PC due to the cost, among other barriers, of publishing on console. Besides that, most console exclusives are now also released on PC. Nintendo games are the notable exception, but there are ways to play those on PC with even better performance. 😉 If you're buying Nintendo's games, you're funding their campaign of fan intimidation that enables them to sue their players for not handling their games the way Nintendo would like them to. So, don't do that.

Phone Games

Smartphones enjoyed a very short period after the launch of Apple's App Store in which cool games were created for them. Now it's a firehose of the same kinds of games we've talked about above — free-to-play gacha live-service gambling extravaganzas — with an occasional real game sent to die on those digital storefronts. Not worth your time to sift through, nevermind the fact that many of those "real" games are ports designed for a controller. This gaming platform is not worth your time.

Things to Embrace

Linux

The most common post I see on Linux gaming communities amounts to this: "Should I game on Linux given these constraints?" The answer most of the time is, "Yes, Linux just works for gaming now." I'm here to tell you this is 100% false. Linux may "just work" for some people, but for me and many others, it hasn't. The average of "just works" and "is kind of a pain in the ass" is definitely not "just works."

That said, it does work. It just takes a bit more effort than doing the same thing under Windows. To give an example, if I want to install a game I purchased from GOG on Windows, I download the installer, run it, and step through the wizard. Then I execute, and I'm generally good. On Linux, I'll still download the installer, but now I have to do something funky with it. I can add it to Steam as a non-Steam game and run it there. I can download Lutris and let it handle the installation. Once that's done, I'll need to… do something in Steam to have it run the game instead — maybe change the path of the non-Steam game I just added; I'm not sure since I generally don't use this method. On Lutris, I can just run it… unless the Lutris installer for some reason is trying to run the wrong executable, in which case I'll probably first need to discover that by looking at the logs and then change the path in the game's configuration to reflect the actual executable. Anyway, the point is that it just works sometimes and other times doesn't, which again averages out to "doesn't just work."

Steam generally just works. Occasionally I will need to change the compatibility layer in the game's properties, but that's about the most I've had to do. Other storefronts are more or less challenging. I've only ever had one game I could not get to run, and that was a little game jam game I downloaded from itch.io. I probably could have gotten it working if I had given it some more time, but I didn't care enough. This is something I probably wouldn't need to think about on Windows… although I'd be lying if I said I've never had trouble getting a game to run on Windows. I had to return Sekiro because it just wouldn't run on my system, and there was nothing I could do to make it run.

For console players, gaming on a computer is a little more complicated. Sometimes that barrier is too much. For Windows players, gaming on Linux is a little harder still. I look at each step as an investment. Going from a gaming console to a computer, you get out of the walled garden into a more open platform. You have real competition between stores when you buy games and no longer need to pay the console tax for every game you buy. You have a device that can do many things, and you have some knowledge that is useful outside the context of games.

All these same things are true for the next jump to Linux. You get further out of walled garden land. Windows is open, but you're still playing on Microsoft's playground. If you want to talk about knowledge that could be generally useful, in learning Linux, you're now learning the operating system that drives 97% of the internet. These are marketable skills, if that's what you want to make of them. On the other hand, if all you do is make it possible for you to continue gaming without exposing all your credit cards and banking info to some Microsoft AI or staying out of the clutches of their future subscription-based OS, that's well worth the initial pain of making the switch.

Indie Games

While major publishers are complaining that they're having trouble making enough money to fund their CEO's yacht budget with the release of Call of Duty 18, indie developers are quietly turning out games that are actually fun and innovative and offer a simple value proposition: give us a few dollars, and we'll give you a few hours of quality entertainment. Where major publishers are all doom and gloom as they rake in billions, the indie scene is turning out better games on much less. The trends the major publishers are chasing now are rip-offs of the indie games of 5-10 years ago, so go indie now and get ahead of the game.

From the gamer perspective, indie games are a breath of fresh air and a cornucopia of cool new ideas. They make games fun again. The picture is not always so rosy for indie developers though. Did you hear that Steam saw the release of 19,000 games last year? That's a big number, and it would be easy for a game to get buried. Some developers will devote years of effort to their game only to release it to zero fanfare and a handful of sales. This is inevitable, but we can start to counteract it by paying attention to the developers who are focused on making cool things rather than prying open our wallets with another glorified casino. Take the money you would have spent on that and redirect it to make the indie scene even stronger.

GOG, Itch, and (For Now) Steam

To stay off the subscription treadmill I talked about above, buy your games, but you should also consider where you buy them. GOG, Itch, and Steam have shown a commitment to being consumer-friendly. I particularly like GOG since they have committed to offering only games without DRM. That means I can take the installer I get from GOG and install the game from it any time. DRM means my ownership rights are always contingent upon the publisher, developer, and storefront. I effectively own nothing unless all those parties agree that I own it at the time I want to exercise my ownership rights.

In an age where the digital assets people pay for have been yanked back in many instances, this is the difference between buying and renting. Did you buy a DRM-free game, or are you renting a game that will be called back whenever the whim strikes? Itch is a very friendly storefront to creators, but part of that friendliness means that they don't seem to prohibit the use of DRM in your game sold on their platform, although they also don't facilitate it. In practice, I believe most if not all games on Itch are DRM-free. DRM runs rampant on Steam and, although the current leadership of Valve have been pretty good stewards, that's not always guaranteed to be the case.

Steam also has advantages, particularly for Linux users. Having the compatibility layer managed for you makes playing seamless. Deck compatibility tells you that a game works on Linux (although many games that don't hit their mark will still work). The two-hour return window was a revelation for gamers. If they could flip the off switch on DRM platform-wide, this would be the ultimate platform, but that will probably never happen since major publishers demand it. (Yet another reason to stay clear of them! 😁)

You'll be better off with any of these storefronts than with the alternatives, but to protect your investment for the long-term, buy DRM-free whenever possible.

The Upshot

If you ignore the mainstream, you can still have fun with video games even in our dystopian times. I'm still having a blast, and this corner of gaming culture doesn't seem to be fading anytime soon. Stay cool, and enjoy your gaming! 💪

Automating My YouTube Channel List

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 23:20:01 +0000

Up until now, I maintained my YouTube channel list by manually tracking any new channels I subscribed to and any channels I unsubscribed from. I would then, when I felt up to it, update a markdown file with the changes. This was a flexible way to share my subscriptions with people, but it was error prone and required more babysitting than I'd like.

Today, I'm launching a new list that will be updated without any intervention on my part, any time I build my site. Every time I build, Eleventy will use the actual data from my FreeTube subscriptions.

Let's take a quick detour to bring anyone not currently using FreeTube up to speed. FreeTube is a desktop application that has become the only way I engage with YouTube. In the same way the web is largely unusable without uBlock Origin (switch to Firefox or a Firefox fork, kids, to keep using the full-fat uBlock Origin after Chrome turns off extension manifest v2; I'm liking Zen Browser at the moment), YouTube has become a nightmarish advertising and surveillance platform, with preroll ads, postroll ads, and several ad breaks in between just for good measure. Either that or you can subscribe to their premium service for the privilege of only having to endure the ads embedded in videos and a substantial monthly fee.

If surveillance and constant bombardment with ads don't match up to the way you like to watch videos on the internet, FreeTube is a way to enjoy YouTube while avoiding all the psychic damage… at least, until Peertube or other more humane solutions are able to catch up. It's so good that, even though when I discovered it, I primarily consumed videos on a mobile device, I've changed my consumption patterns entirely because the experience it offers is so vastly improved. I would rather not watch a video at all than watch it directly on YouTube. Some features that make FreeTube great:

YouTube ads are gone
Support for SponsorBlock to skip embedded ads if you want
Support for DeArrow to replace clickbait video titles with more accurate ones
Proxy YouTube through a privacy-focused YouTube frontend
Import your YouTube subscriptions for easy migration

One great thing about FreeTube is that all of my subscriptions are local. This means I have a file on my system that outlines all the channels I'm subscribed to. I leveraged this to automate my list. Here's how it works:

I subscribe to a channel in FreeTube.
That channel gets added to my subscriptions file.
When Eleventy builds, it parses that file and builds the YouTube channel list from it.

Actually, that's not 100% accurate. Instead of parsing the subscriptions file, I'm parsing a file called profiles.db. This file, like the subscriptions file, also contains all my subscriptions, but it is used for another FreeTube feature: profiles. With profiles, I can create different sets of subscriptions. By default, all of my subscriptions go into the "All Channels" profile, but I can create as many other profiles as I want. If I'm interested in only watching videos about Linux today, I can switch to my "Linux" profile and see content pulled only from the subscriptions I've added to it. This makes it convenient for parsing since I can use the profiles to mirror the categories I had on my manually maintained list. I benefit in FreeTube with better organization and you benefit… well, also with better organization. The point is I get to double-dip. I do the work once, and it helps all of us.

Like I said before, the manually maintained markdown version of the list gave me infinite flexibility. I was limited only by the work I was willing to do. As a result, my list had a few nice features to make it more usable. As part of this transition, I wanted to make my list easier to maintain while also keeping as much of the fidelity I had in the manual list. Aside from the channel links and the category organization, I had two more pieces of metadata that made my list more useful: emoji tags that denoted attributes of a channel, like "I watch this channel's videos as soon as they're released" (👀) or "This channel's videos are relaxing" (😌), and a description for some channels, where the channel name doesn't make the content clear. With this new automated list, I was able to preserve one of those, but the other one didn't make the transition… at least for now.

Emoji tags are still around. For anyone interested in the implementation, I used FreeTube's profiles not only for category separation but also for emoji tagging. In my algorithm, I define special profiles which do not correspond to categories but instead to emoji tags. Any channels within those special categories will get an additional tags attribute containing all emoji tags that apply to them.

Descriptions sadly are gone. If I could have designed FreeTube from the ground up just to fit my use case, I would have added a way to make personal notes about a channel. Then I could have transferred my description into that notes field, pulled it out alongside my profile/subscription data, and displayed it in the list. Sadly, that feature doesn't exist. It's not the only way I could have implemented this, but it's the cleanest, best I can tell. I considered pulling the channel descriptions directly from YouTube, but I'm not wild about the idea of making 300+ HTTP requests each time I want to build my site. I wasn't willing to make any of the compromises an alternative would require, so I let that feature go in favor of easier maintenance.

My entire site is open source, so you're welcome to check out the implementation — I use a universal data file to grab the data and then display it in my list — and use it for your own Eleventy site. You could probably even repurpose it to work with your own site on another static site generator or platform. I'd like to someday parameterize it better, but I've commented it pretty well to make it easier to understand how you might use it. You can also take a look at the previous implementation if you want to see the descriptions or are just curious about how I was maintaining the list before.

Rideshare Renegades: My One-Page RPG Jam 2024 Entry

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 19:54:26 +0000

Rideshare Renegades is my first ever TTRPG. It's an entry for 2024's One-Page RPG Jam. In it, you play as someone who needs to make a living with ridesharing but doesn't own a car. Instead, you'll ferry your passengers around via bus while trying to figure out what level and kind of social interaction they would like. It's a very light story game and won't be great for long-term play. (Not a ton here in the way of long-term progression.) That said, my partner and I still had a fun time playing it. Maybe you will too!

Rideshare Renegades by raddevon

Like I said, this is my first TTRPG, so I welcome your constructive feedback, either through the itch.io comments or on Mastodon.

Outsourcing my memory to Gum

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:37:45 +0000

My memory is notoriously bad. I forgot what I ate today or whether I washed my hair. I walk into rooms and forget why. I tell friends stories they were themselves involved in.

You better believe that, when I return to some sort of web development project after several months, I've long since forgotten how to do anything with it. This is compounded by the fact that every tech stack has their own default way of doing things. For example, some npm project bootstrappers will create a script called start while others will create one called develop, both of which are used to start a local development server. I will sometimes add scripts for various types of deployment, which are different depending on the project, the tech stack it's on, where it's deployed, and how good I am at naming things on that day. 😅

My Crappy Workaround

I usually work around these problems on Node-based projects by starting with npm run when I return to a project to get an overview of the project's scripts so I can understand how to jump in.

(Confession time: in truth, I cat package.json, but npm run is what I should have been doing instead.)

This is cumbersome and clunky though. I'm manually looking at a file or at some output based on a file to figure out what options I have. Then, I manually run the option that does what I'm trying to do. The data that I'm looking at is already nicely structured in JSON, so it seems like a natural fit for the computer to handle the first part for me and just present me with options I can run directly. Now, let's see how to make that happen…

A Cleaner Approach with Gum

That's when I stumbled upon Charm's Gum. Gum is basically a UI component library for shell scripts. Gum has a choose command that outputs a handy option chooser component. This would be a great UI for my use case. I will need to pipe the available options into it and then run the result. Let's start putting the pieces together.

I would like a single command I can run from any npm project. To accomplish this, I'll write a function into my shell's config. In my case, that's ~/.zshrc. I call the function donpm which you can interpret as either "do npm" or "Don P.M." who I imagine as a cool person with aviator shades who only comes out at night (yes, even with the shades; they're that cool) and can figure out exactly how all your npm projects work. 😎

# loads of other stuff

function donpm() {
  $SELECTION=(jq -r '.scripts|to_entries[]|((.key))' package.json | gum choose)
  npm run $SELECTION
}

# loads more stuff

This function has a dependency on jq. I could probably do this with sed, but it's easier with jq and this is just for me to run on my system so I'm going to use it. With jq, I'm reading the contents of package.json and parsing out the scripts. I pipe that over to gum choose to display the chooser component.

gum will spit back the selection. I need to capture that so I can run the selected command, hence assigning the result to a variable (SELECTION).

Once I have that captured, I can then run npm run $SELECTION to interpolate the selected command into my npm run. (I tried piping to this, but that didn't seem to work. Maybe there's a fancier, better way, but this one seems to work well enough… well, almost. 😉)

Adding an Option

This is cool and it (mostly) works, but I want to add a few features. First, I'd like to add a "Cancel" option to make it easy for a user (i.e., me) to change their mind and do nothing.

# loads of other stuff

function donpm() {
  OPTIONS=$(jq -r '.scripts|to_entries[]|((.key))' package.json)
  OPTIONS+="\n🛑 Cancel"
  SELECTION=$(echo $OPTIONS | gum choose --header "Choose a script to run")

  if [[ "$SELECTION" == "🛑 Cancel" ]]; then
    gum log --level info "Execution was cancelled"
    return 1
  else
    npm run $SELECTION
  fi
}

# loads more stuff

Now, I've split things up a bit differently. I need to separate the steps of grabbing the scripts from package.json and piping them into gum choose. I'm doing this to give me the opportunity to add an option of my own. I capture to the OPTIONS variable and then add my "Cancel" option to that variable. Then I can echo the whole thing back to pipe it into gum choose.

This also requires me to make a special case: if the selection is the "Cancel" option, I log out a message (using gum log) and exit with a 1 since nothing was executed here. Not sure if that's the right move since the command was actually "successful" in doing what the user wanted, which happened to be nothing, but it should be fine. In any other case, I run the selection through npm run just like before.

Yeah, but What Happens When I REALLY Forget?

It's mostly good at this point, but there's one more key piece I want to get in here. This whole thing is about me forgetting. So, what happens if I think a project is an npm project and try to run donpm even though it isn't? Maybe it's a Python project or maybe I'm just in the directory where I keep scans of old video game magazines. Let's handle that.

# loads of other stuff

function donpm() {
  if [ ! -f "package.json" ]; then
    gum log --level error "package.json not found in the current directory"
    return 1
  fi

  OPTIONS=$(jq -r '.scripts|to_entries[]|((.key))' package.json)
  OPTIONS+="\n🛑 Cancel"
  SELECTION=$(echo $OPTIONS | gum choose --header "Choose a script to run")

  if [[ "$SELECTION" == "🛑 Cancel" ]]; then
    gum log --level info "Execution was cancelled"
    return 1
  else
    npm run $SELECTION
  fi
}

# loads more stuff

This gives me some safety so I can fully forget almost everything I know and still at least get a solid error message out of this function.

The Final Product

After all of these improvements, here's what my workflow looks like when I come back to a project I've forgotten everything I ever knew about:

Can it Get Any Better Than This?

Well, yes, of course it can! What you're looking at is the function I'm using now, but I have some ideas for improvements I may make someday if motivation strikes:

Add "descriptions" to each script in the form of the commands being run.
Filter out the pre and post lifecycle hook scripts since these aren't usually invoked manually.
Accept an optional argument of the script name. This would allow Don to entirely take the place of npm run, saving me two characters per script invocation if I happen to recall the script name I want to run! If the function gets an argument, just run the npm script named by that argument. If not, show the choices just like it does now.

Feel free to take those on yourself if you're one of those "students surpassing the teacher" types.

Bonus: VHS

I spend a lot of time in the terminal, and since that's Charm's whole game, I poked around to see all the tools they have available. Another one I found intriguing aside from gum was VHS.

VHS lets you build programmatic GIF animations of terminal activity. No more screen recording the terminal emulator. Cool! So cool, in fact, I used it for the GIFs you've seen in this post.

If you want to see how these are defined, check out the code for the two that appear here:

Implementing webmentions is a pain

Thu, 20 Jun 2024 22:23:02 +0000

I just finished implementing Webmentions on this blog! At least, I think it's done. It may not be perfect, but I'll refine it as I go.

I've read lots of posts about people implementing it. Many of them talk about how it's actually very easy. That wasn't my experience implementing it.

If you want to see what it took, check out the commits in the repo. First, I added necessary microformats and set up sending of Webmentions. Then, I added a domain author card. After that, I made the site receive Webmentions and fetch incoming webmentions. The last step was displaying the Webmentions. I could have done this in fewer commits, but that's not really the way I do things. 😅

I worked as a web developer for almost 10 years. Admittedly, I was never a spectacular one, but I was good enough to get paid for it for the better part of a decade. Even so, this was a tricky implementation. I'm glad I had some help from better developers than me:

Stefano Verna's Webmentions implementation was the most complete and easiest to follow. I made some changes to the microformats to better mesh with my existing markup. I wanted to change as little as possible because those changes mean CSS changes too. The checks all passed though, so it seems to still be OK.
I found Robb Knight's post on implementing Webmentions in Eleventy helpful, particularly for the URL filter and their Webmentions Nunjucks template which served as an inspiration for mine.

I'm not whining for the sake of whining, but knowing how difficult it is to implement, I'm concerned that it's not going to be very useful since I doubt many other people have gone to the trouble. That seems like a problem.

We lost the web to Facebook, Twitter, and the rest because making things on the web was hard and they came in giving people an easy on-ramp. Now here we are in 2024 trying to take it back, and our answer is that, if you want to interact with other web sites, just complete these 13 simple steps, sign up for multiple services, integrate with APIs, build a UI… what are we doing here?

But now I have it and, as long as neither of the services I used in my implementation close up shop or make breaking changes, I have it. I own my implementation. It's a lot of trouble, but I think it's worth it. Now, we just need to make it achievable for people who want their identities but can't overcome the barriers on their own.

Web Browser Review, June 2024

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 01:14:35 +0000

I love the Arc Browser, but every time they add new AI features or refer to me as a "member," I feel like I'm teetering over a cliff, about to plunge to the harsh ground that is our current VC-funded software reality. Instead of waiting around for them to force my hand by starting to send me invoices or getting caught using my personal browsing habits to train some generative AI model, I decided to look for a replacement.

To start, I had a vague notion of the parts of Arc that I really like. I'll try to calcify those into something more than a vague notion right now. Here are a few of the features I definitely want:

Vertical tabs- This seems like a small thing, but it's actually one of the biggest. Web sites used to be built for screens with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Now, basically no one uses a screen like that, but web sites are still built for it. Web sites are oriented vertically, so we want our browsers to have as much vertical space as possible. Since tab bars are traditionally horizontal, this means no one wants to give up that precious vertical space to make taller tab bars with multiple rows of tabs, leading to squeezing dozens of horizontal tabs into a thin horizontal strip above the page. By taking those horizontal tabs and stacking them up vertically on the side, you can utilize some of that horizontal space while also making sure you have enough of a label on each tab to see what it actually is. It's a huge improvement, especially if you use a lot of tabs.
Spaces- This has been huge for me in making it easy to keep a separate set of bookmarks, cookies, and history between my work and personal browser usage. I think all of the major browser have something like this, but none of them are this easy. Firefox's profiles are a pain to use, and I have been out of the Chrome game for too long to know what they offer over there. I'm pretty sure it's not as forward and integrated into the experience as this though. A single press of a shortcut key (Ctrl-1 for personal, Ctrl-2 for work) fully switches my browsing context. I even get a separate and distinct set of extensions per space, which is really handy since my extension needs are context-dependent.
Ecosystem- The nice thing about Arc being based on Chromium is that I can have the old with the new. I can pull in all my tinfoil hat extensions to make me a ghost on the web while I still get all the new benefits of Arc. I want something that offers a similarly robust extension ecosystem.

It's actually a shorter list than I might have guessed. There are plenty of other things I like though that would be nice to have.

Bookmarks in the sidebar- Same advantages as for vertical tabs. I don't love the way Arc makes bookmarks and tabs sorta the same thing. I think this is confusing, so I don't really need to replicate that. I do like having them in the same sidebar, just not literally jumbled together as a singular concept.
Compact chrome- I really enjoy the way Arc stuffs everything you need like your toolbar and address bar at the top of the sidebar. It makes for a huge uninterrupted browsing area with virtually none of that valuable vertical space devoted to browser chrome.
Slick UI- The UI in Arc just works like you think it should. It's very slick and has generally great UX.
Pretty UI- Not only is the UX great, but the browser is pretty too. I have to admit this makes me happy to use it.

As I was auditioning alternative, though, I discovered other things I wanted. I'll leave those for you to discover as I analyze the alternatives I auditioned, starting with…

Floorp

This is one of the most frequent recommendations I found when investigating Arc alternatives. It's a pretty cool thing. This is a.. fork? mod? of Firefox with support for vertical tabs out-of-the-box along with some other goodies. As a result, it was one of the first alternatives I tried before getting frustrated by some minor annoyances and trying some others.

Having said that, it's pretty good. I started with their vertical tabs, but I found they didn't allow me to switch between containers with the Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, etcetera keys as I'm accustomed to in Arc. Here's a case where I've built up muscle memory and didn't even realize it until it came time to do the thing again.

This got me to look at Sidebery, a Firefox plugin that implements vertical tabs. At this point though, I figured why not just use Firefox? This led me to sidetrack for a bit to try that. But along with my initial evaluation of Floorp, I was also checking out…

Vivaldi

Vivaldi is an interesting browser that takes a kitchen sink approach to features, but that philosophy lends itself to features not being as well thought out or integrating very well with one another. The thing that really killed it for me was their "workspaces" feature.

Superficially, this sounds like it might be an analog for Arc's "Spaces," but it actually turns out to be very, well… superficial. Where Arc bundles history, bookmarks (as "pinned tabs"), and extensions into spaces, Vivaldi's workspaces are just tab groups. Sure, that's handy, but I wanted better separation between my various browser usage contexts.

This had me discounting Vivaldi pretty early even though it was interesting. While I was exploring Floorp though, I eventually decided I should try…

Firefox + Sidebery

Sidebery was much better than I thought it could be given that it's a third-party plugin to manage browser tabs. I was sure this would be pretty janky, but it worked well. I got cold feet though when I learned the only way to disable the browser's built-in tabs was to hide them with a user stylesheet. I'm pretty sure I could have done this without much trouble, but I smelled trouble ahead. My spidey sense was telling me that I would be punished later for hiding the browser-native tabs and depending on a plugin for this. That brought me back to…

Floorp, Round 2

On the second go-round with Floorp, it looked like it was going to be the one. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good. The only things it lacked from my initial list of features from Arc were the "nice-to-haves."

I did end up switching over to Sidebery because Floorp makes it easy to hide its default tabs and this would allow me to view my bookmarks in the sidebar — not the way Arc does, where they are intermingled with tabs, but in a separate view I can switch to. Ideally, I think I'd like to split the sidebar vertically and have tabs on top and bookmarks on bottom, but I couldn't find a way to do this with any of the tools at my disposal.

Now, I started to discover a few more of my hidden requirements. Not so much requirements, but they ended up being more important to me than my previously listed "nice-to-haves." I wanted to make ⌘-t open a tab in the same container as the current tab. (This should definitely be the default behavior, but it definitely is not.) This is when I discovered it's either really difficult or impossible to change default keymaps in anything based on Firefox. I found plugins that open a tab in the most recent container, but I can't map them to ⌘-t which means they may as well not exist.

The same issue reared its ugly head when I went looking for a plugin to copy the page URL which I do extremely frequently in Arc using ⌘-shift-c: the plugins are out there, but ⌘-shift-c does something else in Firefox. I think it is possible to change this by writing some JavaScript, but again this feels like something I'll ultimately be punished for.

Aside from this, I was finding really weird interactions between containers and existing tabs. If I recall, I was clicking links in tabs that were open in one container and having those open in a different container. I had also set up rules in Sidebery to move tabs to a panel based on their container, and either I didn't understand how those rules worked or they didn't. Either way, it wasn't for me.

This led me to an unexpected candidate that not many people are talking about…

Orion

Plenty of people have talked about Orion, but I didn't see too many recommendations for it as an Arc alternative. Oddly, not as many as Floorp even though I maybe hear more about Orion in general. It's a Webkit-based browser from the makers of the Kagi search engine. I've been a Kagi user since the early days, before they even had an unlimited plan (Those were very dark days. 😅), so it seemed like a natural next choice.

Like Floorp, Orion has a lot of the pieces in place:

Vertical tabs
Profiles (their "Spaces" analog)
Ecosystem (Orion supports both Chrome extensions and Firefox plugins)

and it does much better on some of my hidden requirements and secondary wants:

URL copy shortcut matches Arc by default
Profiles are basically an entirely separate browser instance (in fact, they go a bit too far with this one; it's literally a separate entry on the dock, and windows in other profiles can't be switched to with ⌘-` like windows in the same app typically can)
Default shortcuts are customizable (although the feature is hidden behind some obscure steps in the system's Keyboard settings panel)
The UI/UX, while not Arc, are better than Floorp

All that has earned Orion the nod as my current default browser. I'm having a really good experience with it so far. That said, it isn't perfect. Here are some minor annoyances:

The way profiles seem to spawn a whole entire new app instance from the OS's perspective, as I mentioned earlier.
Plugins/extensions are predictably a bit clumsy. Many don't work at all like NoScript, and some that do work don't work fully. LibRedirect does work, but for some reason my Reddit pages open in a Reddit frontend but without any styling. uBlock Origin works but the feature to zap elements doesn't seem to work, or at least not reliably. When I click it, I get nothing. When asked about NoScript, the developer suggested using the browser's built-in JavaScript blocking, which is a nice feature, but doesn't allow blocking per-domain like NoScript. Also, blocking JavaScript on the current page annoyingly leads to none of the extensions working. If I have blocked JavaScript on the page and then click on, for example, my 1Password extension to log in to the site, the 1Password extension UI does not show up. Nothing happens. I hope these issues can be fixed because they are really annoying caveats on top of the otherwise awesome feature of Chrome/Firefox extension support.

Those are the biggest things. I'd love to have more flexibility around my sidebar so that I could split it vertically between tabs and bookmarks as I described earlier and around the toolbar so I could move most of the chrome over to just the sidebar space a la Arc and allow the page to occupy the rest of that vertical space. These are relatively minor things though, and I can live without them. I'd also love to see a Windows and Linux version, although I don't use those OSes very heavily.

For now, Orion is a great way to escape the seemingly imminent transition to a subscription model ("members" 😱) and the incessant march into an AI minefield. I'm happy with my browsing again, and I don't feel like I'm on the precipice of having to switch on someone else's timeline. I'd much prefer to see what's coming and switch on my own. Maybe Arc never jumps the shark… or maybe Orion does instead. If nothing else, I feel like I have a fuller picture of the browser landscape in 2024, and that's got to be worth something.

Right? 😅

What If "Good Enough" Is Actually Great?

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 21:21:53 +0000

This is my first time participating in the IndieWeb carnival. I've enjoyed working on my blog, but it very much feels like an island. I'm excited to make it part of a larger community. If you found me through this, welcome!

The most common argument I hear for "good enough" is that the pursuit of perfect leads to less work overall, and that's a bad thing — the idea that quantity leads to quality. I find this idea compelling, and it's partly why I decided to take the approach with my video channel of producing as much work as I can as consistently as I can at the expense of intricate production. I don't know if this is the right way, but it's the way I'm trying right now.

But as progress marches, I find an even more compelling argument in favor of "good enough." It may be one of our best defenses against having our monopoly on creativity destroyed. This occurred to me when a YouTube video pointed out that many popular YouTube personalities now hold their lavalier microphones. Before the video, I had seen this phenomenon, but I hadn't perceived it.

"Being held" is not the proper mode for using a lavalier microphone. They're explicitly designed not to be used this way. These are the style of mics that are meant to be clipped on to clothing. If you're holding one, it means, in a strictly technical sense, you done fucked up. Except these instances aren't mistakes or misunderstandings. At least, not always.

The video positions this as a reaction to a changing YouTube culture. (I'm going to spoil a lot of the video now, so if you want to hear if from the horse's mouth first, watch that and come back here when you're done.) YouTube started out as a platform for non-professionals and has evolved into the exact opposite. It's a sort of quiet act of protest to intentionally be unprofessional on a platform that has evolved to be a more professional one. It's not just an expression of dissatisfaction with the change of the culture, but it's a signal that, "I'm one of the real ones."

I use "real" here to mean "I'm one of the authentic ones," not "I'm one of the ones who exist…" but we're fast approaching a day when fucking up — whether that's intentional or whether you just make a conscious decision not to edit your work — might be a critical tool for identifying "us."

Generative AI produces work that is a brand of "perfect." We've made a lot of noise about all the factual inaccuracies it spits out, and it does spit plenty of those. What it can do though with great ease is present an almost perfectly produced output on the first iteration and in seconds full of text that is all spelled correctly and makes sense and lines that are all drawn precisely. Humans are capable of achieving the same level of perfection given a limited scope and enough time… but time is exactly what we rarely have enough of. AI effectively folds that time by learning only from our already perfected works and producing outputs based on it.

Maybe "good enough" is our best beacon to help other humans find our creative work in the sea of generated content the internet is quickly becoming. I should make an editing pass or two on this post to fix any mistakes. I should punch up this conclusion to make it more impactful. I should do these things to make this post a higher quality one… but I won't because I think you can understand my point and I think you can see that I am a human being like you. I hope that's good enough.

I'm on YouTube (Hurray, I guess?)

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 15:19:17 +0000

I love experimenting with video. I love to try out new video games. What better way to join these two things than to record myself trying them and share the videos on the internet?

That's all well and good except that I'm not a fan of YouTube… or really of Google more generally. I spent a lot of time and effort a few years back prying open Google's clutches and clawing back basically everything from them. They don't have my email. They don't have my calendar. They don't have my files. They don't get my searches. (Note: Except at work where we use them for email, calendar, and files. 😖) It's been a wonderful experiment, and my online life has been much happier without them.

So, when I decided to start doing video, I naturally decided to continue using an alternatives. I had a few criteria I wanted to hit:

I don't want to host video myself, so I need someone else to handle the hosting.
I don't mind to pay, but I also don't want to pay much. I'm trying for longevity, so cost will make that harder. More cost = more harder. 😅
I want some capacity for organic discovery on the platform. I'm not expecting anything remotely close to the reach of YouTube, but I want it to at least be possible for me to break out of the bubble of people I could tell about it.

Being a big fan of the Fediverse, I started there. I knew about Peertube, and last time I was paying attention, a new instance called TILVids had popped up and seemed to be getting some traction. I took a look at an instance list though to see if any others had gained more traction since I was last plugged in.

I couldn't find another viable option. Besides that, I was concerned to see that TILVids was running an older major version of Peertube which suggested to me maybe it isn't being actively maintained. (Checked the instance list just now, and it looks like maybe they're running the current version now.) I tried to look into it, and I saw somewhere that the maintainer may be having health problems. It's an unfortunate fact of life and the other edge of the double-edged sword that is community maintenance of these platforms. Besides all this, my videos don't exactly fit into TILVids' stated documentary video niche. I'm a squircle peg trying to fit into a round hole.

I did a quick search for other platforms besides Peertube, and I couldn't find anything that seemed even a little bit viable. That all left me back at Google's door setting up a channel. That channel is called Try Trove.

I ran a channel in the past on a different subject. I uploaded weekly videos for a year and never really got significant traction. It was a fun experiment though. I decided to change my approach with this one.

The last channel was part of a business strategy. This one will be about a personal interest.
Videos on the last channel were heavily produced. On this one, I do very minimal editing.
I would feature on-camera on my last channel, in almost every video. On this channel, I won't.

On my new channel, I capture the by-product of the thing I already do for fun: try out video games. I make each video however long I think it should be. I pull it into my non-linear editor, fade in and out, make sure the audio sounds OK, and ship it. Editing generally takes longer the longer the video you have. On this channel, editing takes about 5 minutes regardless of the video length.

All of this is designed to insulate against burnout. If I make the friction minimal for me, I can do more videos more frequently, and I can stick with it for a long time. Will anyone else like it? No clue, but that's not really what I'm optimizing for here.

It's been a lot of fun so far. I may have even discovered the niche I fill by way of my first user comment:

You have a very calming voice. I am enjoying your videos.

It's more than just them too. A close friend told me they use my videos to fall asleep at night. Am I the Bob Ross of video games? But Devon, you say, Bob Ross taught people how to paint. You aren't teaching people how to video game. This is true, but I would argue that Bob Ross's most prominent legacy is not actually around teaching people how to paint. Bob Ross taught many people how to paint, but many more people watch him with no intention of ever painting anything. These people buy the actual product Bob sells: something at the intersection of relaxation, "OK"-ness, and hygge.

Maybe I could be that for people who like to explore new video games. It wasn't my intention, but I definitely set my tone as a reaction to the "reaction" trend on YouTube — videos that are about people reacting to something with outsized emotional responses, whether it's fear, anger, or excitement. I'll never be able to elicit those same cozy Sunday relaxation feelings Bob can, but maybe I am close enough.

Ultimately, reacting to that prevailing YouTube gaming aesthetic of turning everything to 11 happened because it's what I wanted to see on YouTube and have struggled to find. The other thing that's hard to find is anything that isn't a so-called "let's play" series in which someone plays a single game over and over for dozens or even hundreds of videos. As much as dialing back the emotion sounds like a more mature approach to content, I go in the opposite direction when it comes to novelty. I crave it, and I can't stick with anything for too long. I understand the merits of exploring every nook and cranny of a favorite game, getting really good at it and really knowing it. I understand it, but I so rarely feel the kind of love I would need for a single game to actually get there. I like to sample everything and see what it all has to offer. That's what I do on the channel!

If you have any suggestions for other platforms I should explore or games I should try on my channel, please reach out to me on Mastodon. If you want to watch some chill videos and see what games are out there, drop by the channel and say hi! 👋

Covid Comfort Report Card, October, 2023

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 13:59:18 +0000

Not long after the height of Covid, I found myself relatively suddenly untethered from the anchors that had stabilized my life for many years up to that point. Losing those anchors also untethered me from the city I lived in and pushed me out to find where I should live next. I chronically optimize my life, so there is no "default" option.

This has sent me on a month's long expedition. I've done some limited international traveling and a fair bit of traveling in the United States. I mask basically everywhere I go, and it's paid off: I've still never had Covid despite traveling tens of thousands of miles in just the last few months!

I've experienced both ends of the spectrum with regard to Covid comfort. I almost hesitate to call it a "spectrum" because it really comes down to communities being OK co-existing with Covid-conscious people and communities not being OK with it. There are some other factors that add shades of gray between, but the comfort or discomfort resulting from those is less palpable.

I'll be looking at some subjective factors like my own experiences existing in the city as well as more objective factors like vaccination rates. Let's do it!

Braga, Portugal

No one here was anything but nice to me. I never got a sideways glance and no one ever accosted me — at least, not in English! 😅

I don't have per-city vaccination data on Portugal, but 86.1% of the country is fully vaccinated making us in the US look like a bunch of bumbling buffoons.

Chicago, Illinois

Chicago is one of the friendliest US cities I've been to for the Covid-conscious. Masking is relatively common, especially on public transit. Lots of masking in the airport which is great to see.

70.9% of the city has received the initial vaccination series and 24.3% has received a bivalent booster. I wish this number were higher, but, as you'll see, this is pretty good for a US city.

Knoxville, Tennessee

The South maintains its reputation of being friendly… as long as you're exactly like them. In this case, that means that you are anti-vax and certainly not masked. I was accosted no less than three times in a few weeks in Knoxville while masked. If you're wearing a mask here, even in a crowded public area, you'll very likely be the only one. Moving around in downtown, I would see a handful of people in a given week who were also masked.

Knoxville has a site for Covid vaccination data… but unless there's something wrong with my browser or internet connection, that site is literally empty. I see boxes with labels where data should be, yet those boxes have no numbers in them. I thought the site was just broken and maybe I could download Knoxville's data as a CSV, but, again, unless there's a weird problem on my end, this link produces a CSV with only column headers and no actual data.

It's safe to assume this means the number is embarrassingly low — so low, in fact, Knoxville is willing to literally kill people by giving them insufficient information about whether or not they should visit in order to avoid sharing it. We can extrapolate from the CDC's data on Tennessee as a whole: only 56.4% have received the full series and an abysmal 10.6% have received a bivalent booster. Maybe not worth killing people over — that problem will take care of itself — but certainly worth getting embarrassed over.

So, if your path happens to intersect with Knoxville and assuming you value your life and your health, be prepared to mask up… and then to be harassed about it.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Milwaukee seemed generally accepting of masking. I was shouted at once out of a moving mini-van — a great way to be taken seriously when delivering medical advice. I didn't see many other people masking. Perhaps more than a town like Knoxville, but not by much. Comfort level in general was still much higher though.

Milwaukee's health department web site seems to be participating in a sort of alternative present ARG — think of it like an alternate history, except this is an agency that performs critical functions for its citizens pretending that right now is not actually the way it is. They seemed to post weekly news releases for a while. Those soon became bi-weekly. Then, at the end of last year, they stopped altogether releasing updates. The last one I can find is the December 9th, 2022 update which doesn't paint a very rosy picture. At that point, 54.2% of residents had completed their initial series and 10.4% their bivalent boosters. Sheesh!

Each of the updates links to a Covid data dashboard that is now a broken link, so those are probably the most current numbers we can get for the city. The state of Wisconsin's numbers are actually much better, so I'm not clear if we would be seeing better for Milwaukee if only they had kept reporting their numbers or if they're some kind of weird outlier — an urban anti-vax sort of inverted oasis, where instead of water it's nothing but scorpions.

At any rate, be sure to wear your mask here. You won't have much trouble except maybe for the occasional drive-by epidemiologist.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Like most places I visited, mask usage was sparse in Minneapolis. People were generally nice though despite the fact I was masked. I did have one incident though.

In a moment of weakness, I allowed myself to be convinced I should visit the Mall of America. I had debated whether I should see it and decided I'd be fine without it, seeing as how shopping malls are not places where I tend to thrive. After an encounter with a canvasser in front of Target, though, I decided I might as well see what it's like. Besides, I wasn't finding much to do in Minneapolis, so why not that?

I made my way through the mall. It was relatively uneventful. It was about like I thought it would be. I did think that, since it's the Mall of America, it would probably be packed to the brim with cool stores. Instead, it seems to be suffering like most malls, with lots of empty storefronts and stores that almost certainly couldn't have afforded the rent in the mall's heyday. Anti-vaxxers though can thrive in even the most downtrodden shopping mall.

I was walking through the mall, masked, minding my own business, when a man called out to me, "nice mask." I felt the corners of my mouth turned up. "A compliment! How nice," I though to myself, but this was a Trojan horse. Now that my guard was down, the guy dropped his bomb: "THE PANDEMIC IS OVER, YA KNOW!" It's the last time I ever drop my guard and expose my soft underbelly to a man wearing a camo t-shirt and a baseball cap to cover up a "business in the front" haircut while leaving his luscious "party in the back" exposed.

Minneapolis doesn't, as far as I can tell, expose its own vaccination numbers, but Minnesota does still expose vaccination numbers divided by county. Either what they expose and the way they expose it is really weird, or their numbers are the worst in a country that is already bad. The only number they give me is the number of people who are "up to date." That number is 11,314. For the whole state. Or 0.2%.

I assume "up to date" means you've had all of the doses, including the one that came out a couple of weeks ago. That would make this number make some sense. I can't compare apples to apples though since, best I can tell, no one else on my list so far is sharing this number, and Minnesota isn't sharing anything but this.

If I had to guess, I'd say we're hovering around the 55% mark with some of the others, based on the similar level of mask usage I saw when I was here. That means you should probably wear yours.

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Montreal was lovely and everyone there was lovely to me. No one blinked twice at my mask, and if they delivered any Minneapolis-style sick burns, they were in a language I did not understand.

Montreal seems to have had their own vaccination page with rate data once upon a time. When I try to go to that page now, it shows me an error that makes it look like I've broken the law. Quebec does still share vaccination data, but the percentages are bucketed either by age group or by priority group. I can't find an overall percentage of the population who have received their initial series, and downloading the CSV data for these charts does not do what you think it does. Since I don't know what proportion of the population belongs to each of the groups, I don't think I have a good way to work backwards into the overall number. That is, if I know anything about math. (Narrator: He doesn't.)

What I can see though is that the adult age grouping that surely represents a large majority of Quebec's adults — 18-59 years old — is sitting at 52.4%. Now, this goes well beyond the city of Montreal, but I would have expected quite a bit more from Quebec. Note to cities: if you don't want your numbers being made to look bad because of the rural areas around you, publish your own numbers!

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

No one has ever said anything to me or treated me differently in Philadelphia because I was wearing a mask. In fast, I've had quite a few lovely interactions while masked. Lots of people are still masking in the city, especially on public transit. I didn't notice quite the same levels of masking at the airport as I did at O'Hare, but it's still a very comfortable place to be Covid-conscious, at least on this "feel" metric. Let's see how it compares on the more metric-y metrics.

Philadelphia makes its own vaccination numbers available through their OpenDataPhilly site. Way to go, Philly! They don't give me any handy dashboards or show me nice percentages… but I can figure those out for myself with what they do provide.

I was thrilled to see that the data was current as of yesterday, which means not only do they provide them, but they are still taking this thing seriously. 1,294,969 in Philly are fully vaccinated, which I take to mean they have received their initial series. Philly's population numbers are well behind the vaccine data's October 16th, 2023 freshness date, so I'll have to do what I can to get a percentage. The census estimates Philly's 2022 population at 1,567,258. That would give us a vaccination percentage of 82.6%, which, if accurate, would be spectacular! Philly population seems to have been in decline since the start of the pandemic, so I would guess, if anything, the population might be a little lower. That said, I have no business to be making guesses about this. A coin flip would be nearly as effective.

Sadly, I don't see any data about uptake of the bivalent booster. Unless Philadelphians had a major change of heart, we can assume it would be similarly high.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

By the time I got to Pittsburgh, I was on a bit of a hair trigger after having been harassed for masking in so many American cities. My head was on a bit of a swivel. I was out one evening getting bubble tea, and a frat bro shouted at me out of a car. Aside from that, people were very nice. My experience was colored more by the accrued psychic damage from months of harassment up to that point than it was by Pittsburgh itself.

Pittsburgh outsources its health data responsibilities to the county… so they'll have to suffer for Allegheny County's sins too. (I could filter this down by locality, but I think the city encompasses multiple localities and I'm not sure which they are. Also, that's hard whereas not doing that is easy!😅) For some reason, I can't find data on the original series which I would like to have to make an apples-to-apples comparison. Instead, here I get only data on the bivalent booster. County citizens have taken it at a rate of 21.3%, which you can see is much better than many other cities/states on the list. It's safe to assume Pittsburghers are vaccinated at a higher rate than many others as well, but how much higher is anyone's guess.

Portland, Oregon

I always felt comfortable masking in Portland. It seems people mask at a higher rate than in other cities — comparable to Chicago and Seattle. I can't recall ever being harassed about it.

Portland does not, best I can tell, publish its own data, but the Oregon Health Authority maintains a nice dashboard of vaccination data, updating it monthly… although not all data is updated that frequently. I downloaded their all-ages CSV and ran the numbers myself for Multnomah County. As of April 10th, 2023, Multnomah County had received their initial series at a rate of 79.5%. That's pretty great. Not as great as Philly, but remember also, this is the whole County, not just the city of Portland (and it's amazing how quickly attitudes about all sorts of things, including vaccines, change as you get outside the city). Their bivalent booster rate is equally impressive at 30.8%. Nice going, Portland!

Porto, Portugal

I don't have much to say about Porto that I didn't already say about Braga. People were kind and no one hassled me during my time here.

Salt Lake City, Utah

Salt Lake City wasn't my favorite place to be — their downtown is made up primarily of endless criss-crossing highways — but I wasn't accosted a single time about my mask. I even got a haircut here while masked, and the barber was very friendly. I was here for a conference, and the conference required masking which was awesome! That led to SLC being one of my most comfortable places, along with Philly, Chicago, Portland, Seattle… and anywhere that isn't the US. 😅

Salt Lake County has a promising-looking Covid data dashboard, but it ends up falling a bit short. It tells me that 13.4% are "up-to-date," which they define as having had the primary series plus bivalent booster. If we compare this to other bivalent numbers, it's certainly not the worst, but it's not great either. They direct me to Utah's IBIS data explorer where I learn that 822,714 people have had their "complete" Covid vaccination. (I take this to refer to the initial series, although "complete" is an odd word to use with this still-evolving virus.) The census estimates the county's population at 1,186,257, which puts the county at 69% — not quite enough to evoke a "nice," even though we've seen much worse. These numbers are current as of October 19th, 2023.

Seattle, Washington

I love Seattle. I've spent a lot of time here, and I've never felt uncomfortable masking. Masking is still relatively common, and I know from my time living there that vaccination rates are sky-high… but let's see exactly how sky-high they are.

As with most of these cities, we're going to be getting our data from the county — King County in the case of Seattle. As of October 1st, 2023, 85% of King County has received the initial series and 33.2% have received the bivalent booster. 😮 I mean, if I'm being honest, it still feels low to me, but compared to the competition, it's an incredible rate. The entire county here has bested the vaccination rate of the city of Philadelphia, which itself is 12 percentage points higher than the nearest US competitor on our list. That's quite an accomplishment. To beat it, you need to go to Portugal where the entire country's rate beats it.

Comparison Table

Let's take a look at all the numbers we have:

City	Initial Series Rate	Bivalent Booster Rate
Braga, Portugal	86.1% (Portugal) 🤩	?
Chicago, Illinois	70.9%	24.3%
Knoxville, Tennessee	56.4% (Tennessee)	10.6% (Tennessee)
Milwaukee, Wisconsin	54.2%	10.4%
Minneapolis, Minnesota	?	?
Montreal, Quebec	52.4% (Quebec)	?
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania	82.6%	?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania	?	21.3%
Portland, Oregon	79.5% (Multnomah County)	30.8% (Multnomah County)
Porto, Portugal	86.1% (Portugal) 🤩	?
Salt Lake City, Utah	69% (Salt Lake County)	13.4% (Salt Lake County)
Seattle, Washington	85% (King County) 🇺🇸	33.2% (King County) 🤩

I visited only three countries, but among those, Portugal is the clear winner, especially when you compare them against other countries. The US overall rate of vaccination with the initial series is 69.5% — again, not so nice.

Inside the US, though, you can be around people who care enough to protect themselves and to protect you. You'll be relatively safe in Seattle, Philadelphia, and Portland, with Chicago not terribly far behind.

The Old Web Onramp Status Updates for October 1, 2023

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 13:53:21 +0000

These old web links drop like flies!

Links what done broke

refined.blog
itsevergreen.rip
Beeep’s Linkies

👋😢

Updates

"God bless the internet" was previously on a site called clouded. It's now on a site called marea.

YouTube channels update for October 1, 2023

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 13:40:21 +0000

I did some pruning of some channels that needed to go. I also went down a CRPG rabbit hole and added some relevant channels.

Removals

Most of the channels I removed were just because I found myself ignoring their videos more often than not. This happens from time-to-time: what I think I will want to watch is not aligned to what I actually want to watch when the time comes.

I want to call out one removed channel in particular though that doesn't fit this mold: Lucky Ghost. His content has always bothered me a bit. It's a little clickbaity and can lack much substances. I subscribed anyway though because not many people are talking about MMOs, and that's a focus of the channel. The most recent video was the final straw for me though. This channel frequently produces advertorial videos and buries the disclosure. I was watching that most recent video which sure seemed like an ad. Looked at the comments and discovered the disclosure was two minutes into the video. Is this legal? You're going to gush about the game for two minutes before you tell me, "oh, by the way, this is an ad?" There's no good reason to bury this disclosure unless you're trying to mislead your viewers. If they haven't already, the FTC should more strictly define what constitutes proper disclosure of a sponsored video.

Others that came off the list for much more benign reasons:

The Daily Show- Just not watching it much.
DeepBlueInk- Was subscribed for the MBMBaM animations, and the channel seems to have mostly left those behind.
Life Where I'm From- Very charming, but I'm getting my fill of Japanese culture content from other channels I find more engaging.
DistroTube- Did a video recently about "woke"-ism/cancel culture that seems disingenuous. I don't need that in my life, and I'm not as interested in Linux content as I was when I subscribed.
Valefisk- This content is too memey/screamy for me.

New Stuff

Stoneaxe Tabletop Gaming- This is very relaxing, but I'm also always interested to see how people approach solo tabletop gaming. I find it practical and enjoy being a fly on the wall to witness the process.
Noodle- Love the extra touch of original animation in these videos. The content is interesting too, albeit infrequent.
Parallax Abstraction- Always looking for indie game reviews. Everyone wants to do let's plays, and I want something tighter to help me decide what to try.

The CRPG Bloc

AesirAesthetics
Matt Barton- We'll see how long this one sticks around. Seems like a great guy, but his presenting, production, and editing are a little more casual than I usually look for in YouTube content. I like something slightly more polished.
Mortismal Gaming
MrEdders123
PatricianTV

How to Stop Feeding AI

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 18:00:14 +0000

OpenAI is a 30 billion dollar company whose value comes not just from the language model that allows it to write convincingly but also from the limitless text it was trained on. You and I wrote that text. I've kept watch on the mailbox, but I haven't yet received my stock options. As a result, I'm taking the step to ask OpenAI not to train on this web site.

You can too! All it takes is adding a file to the root of your web site called robots.txt. As the extension implies, this is just a plain text file. Add this to it:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Heck, while we're in here, why not just go ahead and block Google and Microsoft too. I doubt I'll ever rank since I'm not doing any SEO, but I'll be proactive on the off chance they decide they will offer any of my content as an answer directly on their results page.

User-agent: Googlebot 
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bingbot
Disallow: /

I'm not depending on these mechanisms to be discovered anyway, so there's really nothing in it for me.

Let these robots feed their insatiable hunger on someone else's content.

About Devon.LoL

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 11:03:58 +0000

I added an about page with some information about why and how this site was built and some cool buttons you can use if you want to link to me. Someday, this may be the home to my links out to other sites and potentially some web rings? Not sure yet.

Apologies for the duplicate RSS entries

Sat, 29 Jul 2023 07:11:16 +0000

If you're an existing subscriber, you may have noticed that all of the feed items have resurfaced in your feed reader as new. This is because I discovered the data I was using as each feed item's guid, the field used by readers to determine if an entry was unique, was not sufficient. This caused a couple of my recent entries not to be surfaced by readers.

The fix required changing the formulation of the guid, which will then cause RSS readers to believe every entry is new again. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it had to be done to ensure all future entries are surfaced. Fortunately, there aren't that many items on this feed.

Hope you enjoy the new stuff! 🤘

YouTube channels update for July 28, 2023

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 23:11:04 +0000

Found some cool new channels and added them to the list.

Grickle

Grickle makes creepy animations. I found this through a Metafilter post. If you're played the Puzzle Agent games, you'll recognize Graham Annable's style from that series. If you haven't played those games, give them a shot. Very cool and very creepy!

I Finished A Video Game

I love really long videos, and I Finished A Video Game has them. They make long and exhaustive retrospectives on game series. Watching the Castlevania retrospective as I type this. Found this one through Super Eyepatch Wolf's latest "Things I like" video.

Michael MJD

I discovered Michael MJD through one of my web revival communities. Videos on retro technology, software, and web.

tangomushi

tangomushi tells you about old survival horror games. I've never heard of some of these, and I'm way too plugged in to what's going on in video games (and have been for many years). 😅 This is another find from Super Eyepatch Wolf's latest "Things I like" video.

The Old Web Onramp Status Updates for July 28, 2023

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 15:18:00 +0000

Just a couple of updates this round of sites that dropped off the list.

Links what done broke

IndieSeek.xyz directory
Maya's subscriptions

👋😢

Favorite internet videos update for July 28, 2023

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 15:13:00 +0000

You probably noticed that the original RSS feed item for my favorite internet videos list did not embed the videos. Honestly, I'm not clear why that didn't just work, but I have implemented a fix. If you don't see the embedded videos on this one, call your member of congress (or just let me know on Mastodon).

These videos got my attention since the original posting of the videos list.

Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town

how to find a street in 2 minutes

🤯

What Fish Feel When They Are Killed for Food | NowThis

New List: YouTube Channels

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 09:50:04 +0000

Most of the YouTube channels I subscribe to, categorized. I'll provide descriptions of channels that need it.

Key

👀- Instant watch
🤌- Online video virtuoso
😿- Seemingly (and sadly) defunct
😴- Good for sleepytime (This doesn't mean the content is bad, just that it's relaxing.)
⏱️- Quick hits

Bikes

Bike Shop Girl- Teaches you about bike shopping and recommends accessories.
Shifter- Issues around biking for transportation.
ElectricBikeReview.com
The New Wheel Electric Bikes- Reviews of electric bikes by charming people.

Crafting

🤌😴 52 Miniatures- Makes magic with miniature models.
Bobby Fingers- Makes detailed dioramas and buries them for viewers to find.
😴 Boylei Hobby Time- Makes cool diaoramas.
ClayClaim- Watch a cool dude with great energy make incredible clay models of Fortnite characters or other pop culture characters and scenes.
🤌😴 TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin- Love this guy's voice, and he's an extremely talented crafter too. You get a feeling you're getting the real person in videos even though he obviously pays a lot of attention to the craft of the videos themselves.
🤌😴 Craftastrophe- Makes all sorts of things and walks you through them. It's not quite that straightforward though: more surprises within.

Funny

😿 Abby Dearest- Like a children's show that grew up slightly damaged.
brian david gilbert- Funny songs (and occasionally other things).
The Daily Show News, but it's funny because it's sad… also because it's funny.
Dan Ryckert- This guy is a real goofball and he plays video games. The humor is really the thing though, so it goes here instead of in "Video Games."
DeepBlueInk- I subscribe for the My Brother, My Brother, and Me animations.
The McElroy Family- The Monster Factory series is a laugh a minute… maybe even more frequently.

Japan

🤌 Abroad in Japan- This guy shows you cool things about Japan, but he does it with an artistry that is pretty incredible. He's hilarious and a natural storyteller. Production value is off the charts!
Life Where I'm From- Man and his family share what family life is like in Japan.
Matt vs Japan- This guy learned to speak Japanese while in the US mostly by watching anime.
Micaela ミカエラ- A fun English-speaking vlogger in Japan.
Rachel & Jun's Adventures!- A cute couple living in Japan and sharing bits of their life there.
Sharmeleon- A charming English-speaking vlogger living in Japan.

Pop Culture

12tone- Explains why popular songs work in an accessible way.
Afterthoughts- Media critiques.
🤌 Anthony Vincent- Talented musician who plays popular songs in the styles of different artists.
Big Joel- Critiques of TV and movies.
The Cursed Judge- Critiques of popular media including video games and TV.
Defunctland- Features theme parks, TV shows, and products that used to be but are no longer.
Eddache- Essays about popular media — mostly retro children's media.
😿 Get In The Robot- Fun anime videos.
Good Blood- Infrequent pop culture essays.
GTV Japan- Videos about Japanese video games and other media.
👀 In Praise of Shadows- Thoughtful criticism of horror media.
👀 Izzzyzzz- Explores 2000s youth and teen culture. Their series on The Sims is great!
🤌 Mother's Basement- Anime reviews. Really good stuff!
Michael Saba- Essays about games, TV, movies, anime, and sometimes where those intersect with the rest of the world.
PostmodernJukebox- Popular music remade in older styles.
PushingUpRoses- A lovely person who reviews episodes of Murder She Wrote and Are You Afraid of the Dark, and occasionally, point-and-click adventure games. Also sometimes ventures into mental health topics.
Ray Mona- Searches for lost media and shares the story of the search.
😿 Screen Therapy- Media criticism from a perspective of psychology.
🤌 Secret Galaxy- If you were a child in the 80s or 90s, there's plenty of nostalgia for you here. Documentaries of children's toys and TV from the era.
Stoked- Video games, TV, movies, and tech from around Y2K.
👀🤌 Super Eyepatch Wolf- Every video has a compelling angle, and he tells the story deftly. Wrestling, video games, TV, anime… he will make you fall in love with all of them.
TyFrom99- Media analysis from a Gen Z perspective.
Under The Scope- Videos about anime.
What's So Great About That?- Essays centered around games, TV, and movies.
Wisecrack- Pop culture + philosophy.

Software

Curtis McHale- Productivity videos, with a focus on personal knowledge management with Obsidian.
A Better Computer- Loads of channels cover productivity software, but this is the only one who consistently shows me things I didn't know about.
The Browser Company- Makers of the Arc web browser. They seem to love the web, and their videos reflect that. They also give updates on their browser here.
DistroTube- Entertaining videos about Linux, including explorations of distros.
InfinitelyGalactic- Linux how-tos and explorations of distros.
The Linux Experiment- News and commentary about Linux.
Linux For Everyone- Linux hot-to videos.

Tabletop Games

A.A. Voigt- Tabletop RPG reviews with rich context.
Actualol- Solid videos for discovering board games. Most videos share a number of different games around a single theme.
Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews
Dicebreaker- A bunch of affable British folks tell you about new and upcoming board games and tabletop RPGs.
The Gaming Table- Tabletop RPG reviews.
geek gamers- Focuses on solo tabletop RPG play, which I find fascinating.
🤌 No Pun Included- Wonderful, funny reviews of tabletop games.
Polyhedron- Reviews of tabletop RPGs.
🤌 Shut Up & Sit Down- More funny tabletop game reviews.
Zee Bashew- Animated stories from and explainers about tabletop role playing.

Tech

The 8-Bit Guy- Fun videos about old technology. Sometimes does restorations.
Cathode Ray Dude [CRD]- Deep dives on retro tech.
Christopher Lawley- Tech videos with an Apple focus.
🤌 Dave2D- Tech reviewer with a focus on gaming laptops. Insightful and has great charisma.
ETA PRIME- Tests hardware performance with emulators, with a focus on handhelds and small form-factor PCs and SBCs (single-board computers).
LGR- Retro tech channel. His mailbag videos are great because you get to see and learn about lots of obscure retro hardware.
🤌 MKBHD- Smart analysis of gadgets.
Rene Ritchie- Tech videos with a focus on Apple.
Retro Recipes- Retro tech videos.
Straszfilms- Videos about VR and the metaverse.
👀 suckerpinch- Does things with computers and technology that you really aren't supposed to do… but I'm really glad they do it anyway.
TechDweeb- Retro gaming handhelds and other gaming hardware. They have quite a distinctive voice.
TechHut- Videos about Linux, self-hosting, and gaming.
Techkhamun- Tech reviews with an Apple focus.
Techmoan- If learning about old gadgets sounds like fun, this is your guy.
The Verge- Technology and the culture that orbits around it.
VWestlife- Retro tech videos.

Urbanism

Adam Something- Critiques of modern society, particularly urban planning.
Alan Fisher- Focuses on transportation.
Cities 4 People- Shares good examples of urbanism in North America.
City Beautiful- High quality videos about urban planning. He goes around the country and shows great examples.
City Geek- Each video gives a quick overview of a city.
👀🤌 CityNerd- Great themed lists of North American cities. His delivery, as if he's been swimming up the urban planning stream for 40 years, is perfect.
👀 Not Just Bikes- He hated North American urban planning so much that he moved his family to the Netherlands. Now, he makes videos about urbanism.
Oh The Urbanity!- Canadian duo exploring good urbanism in North America.
Peter Davies- Has started a series around building a city in Cities Skylines without car traffic. Cool premise!
Strong Towns- A movement to support "a model of development that allows America's cities, towns and neighborhoods to become financially strong and resilient."
Thomas Y- Videos pushing back against North American urban planning.

Video Games

⏱️ 60 Minutes in 60 Seconds- One minute videos, each covering the first hour of a game. Cool concept, and full of fun puns. I could do without the "you know what to do" at the end of each video.
👀 A Critical Hit! | "Critical Kate" Willært- Documentaries with a wonderfully unique perspective. Just reading the video titles makes my eyes go big with excitement.
👀🤌 Action Button- His reviews are many hours long… and I will watch every second of them, starting as soon as they are released. He's hilarious, but not the way a stand-up comedian is hilarious, and his reviews are filtered heavily through his life experience. Incredible stuff. I hope I someday create something as awesome as any one of his reviews.
Adam Millard - The Architect of Games- Thoughtful essays about game design.
👀🤌 Ahoy- Incredibly well-produced documentaries that are all too rare.
AI and Games
ambiguousamphibian- Makes their own fun in sandbox games by adding their own wild restrictions.
Arcade Archive- This person is building an arcade.
😿 Arcadology- Essays about gaming with really good topics.
Ars Technica- A weird mix of videos here, mostly centered around tech and gaming but with quite a few videos of YouTubers in those areas reading their comments. I've put them here because their "War Stories" series is the standout for me.
Atari Archive- Focuses on Atari 2600/VCS games.
Basement Brothers- Learn about cool games for old Japanese computers.
Bismuth- Cool speedrunning documentaries.
Blast Processing- Video essays with a concentration on Sega consoles.
Bluesuit- Reviews of indie games.
Boulder Punch- Essays on and reviews of games with horror and other heavy themes.
Bowl of Lentils- Shows off Japanese RPGs and visual novels.
😴 Britta Food4Dogs- A charming woman in New Zealand shares her love of collecting games.
Chariot Rider- Interesting video essays.
Chris Davis- Focuses on CRPGs and immersive sims.
Cinnacal- Infrequent video game analysis.
👀 Classic Gaming Quarterly- I love watching this guy flip through old video game magazines. He talks about the games and edits video footage of the games in. It's a lot of fun.
CGQ+- An offshoot of ☝️ .
😿👀🤌 Cloth Map- Wonderful videos about the places in games and the gaming culture of places. By everyone's favorite blinking white guy.
codex- Documentaries about gaming secrets and cheat codes.
😿 Coding Secrets- The technical feats used to achieve "impossible" effects in Sega Genesis games. I'm calling this one defunct because the most recent video is an ad for a Funko Pop game and is nothing like the videos that got me to subscribe. The last one of those was in 2021.
😿👀🤌 Cool Ghosts- This seems to be defunct and it makes me sad. It gave me the feeling of an old video game magazine because episodes were released infrequently and each one was an event that would teach me about cool new video games.
😿 Corrupted Save- Game reviews and essays.
Critical Path- Interviews with game designers.
Cult of the CyberSkull- Game reviews.
Dan Waterfield- Game reviews.
Darkfry- Video essays with a quirky sense of humor.
👀🤌 Daryl Talks Games- Games through the lens of psychology. Great storyteller and great editing. All his videos are day-one viewing for me.
Design Doc
👀 Errant Signal- Great reviews and documentaries. I like the "Children of Doom" series quite a bit.
👀😴 eurothug4000- Wonderful and thoughtful game essays by a person who has a taste for cozy games, among others.
Face Full of Eyes- Deep dives on games' aesthetics.
First Five- Bite-sized reviews.
FrameRater- Retro gaming news and information plus historical documentaries.
FUNKe- Video essays with gorgeous animation.
GC Vazquez- Video essays with a heavy focus on the Yakuza series and adjacent games.
😿 Game Brain- Documentaries about the making of video games.
😿 Game Design Foundry- Explorations of game design.
👀🤌 Game Maker's Toolkit- Awesome videos about game design and development.
😴 Game Sack- Themed lists of retro games.
😿 Game Score Fanfare- Great videos on video game music.
Gamedev Adventures- Essays about game design.
Gamers' Garden Retro- Retro game videos, mostly on the Sega Saturn.
Gameumentary
👀🤌 Gaming Historian- Incredible documentaries on old games and hardware.
The Geek Critique- Video essays focused on retro games.
Giant Bomb- Its best days are behind it, but even so, it's still good. Tune in to get the latest scoops from Jeff Grubb or to be shocked by what normal everyday concepts Dan Ryckert doesn't understand.
gillythekid- Video essays.
Graythorn- Video essays with a unique perspective.
Grim Beard- Stylish, fun "reviews" that are half review/half documentary. A lot of the games featured contain horror themes.
GVMERS- Gaming documentaries that are seemingly read by a voice actor. Maybe I'm wrong, but I find the style of delivery a bit off-putting, like I'm watching an A&E documentary or something. Content is somewhat pedestrian but sometimes interesting.
Hard4Games- Mostly short documentaries about classic games. Not sure about the channel name though…
HeavyEyed- Video essays.
History Respawned- History in and through video games.
hotcyder- Nice videos with a concentration in Rare and Nintendo.
Hungry Goriya- Reviews of NES games.
i am error- Smart video essays.
I Dream of Indie Games- Indie game reviews with great personality.
Indigo Gaming- Documentaries and essays. They seem to like the cyberpunk milieu, so a lot of the videos are about that.
Iron Pineapple- Plays all of the obscure Soulslikes they can find on Steam. Seems to give each one a fair shake and has smart criticism of them.
🤌 Jacob Geller- Great video essays.
The Jeff Gerstmann Show- Founder of Giant Bomb. Really funny guy who has been covering video games forever.
JennDjinn- Reviews of indie games and round-ups of Steam Next Fest demos.
Jenovi- Great retro gaming content with an emphasis Sega and somewhat grating newscaster-style delivery.
👀 Jeremy Parish | Video Works- Walking through the history of game releases for various retro consoles. Production is fairly poor but content is great.
John Learned- Annotated playthroughs of video games, giving you all sorts of interesting extra context.
Joseph Anderson- Infrequent video essays.
Josh Strife Hayes- Videos about MMOs.
Kester's Forest- Repairs gaming hardware and flips through old magazines.
The Killer Bits- Reviews of games that aren't the major mainstream hits. This channel recently came out of a few years of dormancy. Seems like they're doing some tabletop content now too.
KingK- Video essays with a focus on Japanese mega hits like Mario, Sonic, and Pokemon.
Kruggsmash- Tells and illustrates stories from Dwarf Fortress. Fascinating that a game can generate these stories!
👀 TheLazyPeon- Really good MMO videos. Keeps you up to date on the current state of long-running MMOs and reviews new MMOs too. I love the WoW Hardcore series he recently started.
LambHoot- I'm not sure what else to say about these channels that do video essays. Please don't take that to mean any of them are worse than the others. I like them all. That's why they're on this list.
Leon Massey- Essays about game design.
Let's Game It Out- Breaks sandbox games for your amusement.
😿 Leonardo Da Sidci- Essays with pretty cool perspectives.
Liam Robertson - Game History Guy- Teaches you about games that were never released.
Liam Triforce- Lots of Legend of Zelda videos with some other Japanese games and the occasional Western game thrown in for good measure.
Lucky Ghost- MMO review and guide videos.
MandaloreGaming- Smart reviews of games that might have 20 years ago been thought of as PC games, back before console gaming gobbled up everything. Lots of strategy games here, but there's other stuff too.
Maraganger- Video essays exploring some odd corners of gaming.
Mark Flynn- Deep dives into character designs.
MashTec- Reviews of retro gaming devices. May be defunct. Hasn't released a video for a while.
Matthewmatosis- Video essays and reviews.
Mega Drive Profile- Reviews of Mega Drive (or Genesis if you're in the US) games.
MetalJesusRocks- Retro game collector who loves to show his collection and take you along to cool retro game stores. I saw him once at a festival on my street when I lived in Seattle.
Modern Vintage Gamer- Technical deep dives on retro games.
😿 Mr. Gentleman- Home of the History of RPGs series.
mrixrt- Video essays slanting toward the negative (e.g., this or that game "sucks," "what's wrong with" a game, etc.)
My Life in Gaming- They play retro games and will show you the best ways to do it too!
😿 N64 Glenn Plant- Game reviews, themed lists, and magazine look-throughs.
Nerrel- Game reviews.
NESComplex- Videos covering games of the 8- and 16-bit eras. My favorites are the "Declassified" series: deep dives into the secrets of a particular game.
NES Friend- Short videos describing NES games.
NeverKnowsBest- Mostly interesting video essays. Their recent "Entire History of Video Games" is pretty great.
New Frame Plus- Explores animation in games.
Next Level Narrative- Essays about storytelling in popular media — primarily games.
Nextlander- Giant Bomb alums Vinnie Caravella, Brad Shoemaker, and Alex Navarro play games together. Great if you want to see new releases played by good people.
Noah Caldwell-Gervais- Epic video game essays, along with some occasional travel content.
Noclip- Video game documentaries. This guy used to work for GameSpot and has loads of access as a result. Great dude too.
Noclip Game History Archive- Danny ended up with a bunch of old tapes of historical significance and is digitizing them to this channel.
Noclip Crew- Same crew as proper Noclip, but these aren't really documentaries. More freeform but still enjoyable.
Noisy Pixel- Reviews of indie games. The reviews aren't great, but they make this list because they review games not many others do.
Now in the 90s- Which games came out 30 years ago?
😿 On Doubt- Stories about people who make video games
onaretrotip- A wide variety of retro game videos. There are several about Lucasarts adventure games.
PandaMonium Reviews Every U.S. Saturn Game
PC Gamer
Penney Pixels- Creates fake de-makes of modern games or retro game adaptations of modern media.
Pepp's Picks- Reviews of indie games.
😴 PeteDorr- Videos about game collecting.
👀🤌 People Make Games- The best games journalism going. These people are exposing the dark underbelly of gaming.
😴 Pixel Architect- Demonstrates pixel art techniques. Also logs development of their RPG.
Polygon- Major game site with videos that often skew silly. Still pretty good though.
PostMesmeric- Video essays.
Press Start To Continue- Explorations of creepy or mysterious aspects of games… plus several Mother videos.
PrimeHylian- Lots of game essays about Metroid, among others.
ProbablyJacob- Game reviews and a few videos about paranormal stuff.
Quest Marker- Cool gaming essays and reviews of indie games.
quwebs- Quick reviews of 8-bit and 16-bit games.
Raycevick- Cool video essays.
Razbuten- All of his stuff is good, but I particularly enjoy the videos that analyze games from the non-gamer perspective.
RemovableSanity- Indie game reviews.
Retro Dodo- Retro hardware and games.
🤌 Retro Game Corps- The best retro hardware reviews and how-tos around.
RetroActive- Videos about retro games, including a couple of videos exploring the history of ska music in games.
Retrohistories- Historical documentaries about games.
RetrospectiveGaming- Retrospectives of old CRPGs. Kinda goofy delivery that makes me chuckle.
😴 RMC - The Cave- A British guy with a soothing voice shares retro consoles and computers and their games. He has a real museum you can visit, and many videos focus on restorations of donated items.
Rock Paper Shotgun- Keep up with what's going on in PC gaming.
Salokin- Reviews of games I don't often see reviewed on YouTube.
Same Name, Different Game- Sometimes, the same game is different on different platforms. This channel compares them.
Sean Seanson- Rounds up obscure PS1 games and games that were never released in the US.
Shesez- Has some great series like "Boundary Break" which shows you cool finds out of bounds in games and "Region Break" which shows you the differences between regional releases of a game.
😴 Shirley Curry- Grandma Shirley plays Skyrim and makes up her own personal lore to flesh out her characters as she goes. She opens ever video with "hello, grandkids." Wholesome.
🤌 Skill Up- Great reviews of the big releases. He also does a weekly news roundup that is highly entertaining and informative.
Skyehoppers- Video essays.
SNES drunk- Short videos describing SNES games.
🤌 Snoman Gaming- Videos about game design.
SoberDwarf- Game design documentaries.
Stop Skeletons From Fighting- Dynamic videos about the oddball side of video games.
👀 strafefox- Awesome documentaries focusing on Japanese games.
Stylized Station- Analysis of game graphics and art.
👀 Summoning Salt- Walk through the history of speedrunning records.
😿 Sunder- Game reviews and game design videos.
Super Bunnyhop- Reviews and thoughtful essays.
😿 Sushiperv- The JRPG innovations series is pretty cool.
Table 53- Reviews of indie games and video essays.
Taki Udon- Previews and reviews of retro gaming handhelds.
Tama Hero- Deep dives into aspects of the elements of Pokemon games.
Tanner's Game Museum- Awesome short videos about retro games.
Tehsnakerer- Long videos about games.
That Trav Guy- Fun, well-edited documentaries on games, sometimes new but mostly retro.
Three Minute Gaming- Short game reviews.
Timothy Cain- Shares his experience working on seminal CRPGs vlog style.
tomatoanus- Your tour guide through record speedruns.
Turbo Button- Analysis of game mechanics.
Unseen64: an Archive for Beta & Cancelled Games- Unearthed footage of canceled games.
VaatiVidya- Learn the lore of the Soulsbourne games.
Valefisk- Games as masochism.
Video Game Animation Study
Video Game B-Roll
Video Game Docs- Video game documentaries exploring retro stuff.
The Video Game History Foundation- Infrequent but good and interesting videos.
VZedshows- Interesting takes on games.
wizawhat- Gaming video essays.
😿 Wrestling With Gaming- Videos about retro games and the hardware and culture surrounding them.
Writing on Games
Xygor Gaming- Mostly short retrospectives and reviews of old JRPGs.
YourFriendJacob- Exposing new and upcoming indie games.

Other Stuff

おもしろ雑貨コレクター- This person shares the cool and strange items they collect, while wrapping their videos in some fun storytelling.
anadvora- Quirky fun songs.
👀🤌 Answer in Progress- Great explainers!
😴 The Art and Making of- Reviews art books.
Atomic Frontier- Fun science videos.
😿 baracksdubs- Obama sings pop songs.
🤌 Captain Disillusion- Fun videos about visual effects.
🤌 CaseyNeistat- C'mon, you know this guy, right? Incredible storyteller. I enjoy when he looks at micromobility tech.
😿 Chokkan- Custom computer keyboards.
🤌 Climate Town- Funny videos about climate change.
Code to the Moon- Cool software development videos. Lots of Rust stuff, but there are also tools and workflow stuff that could be helpful to any developer.
ColdFusion- Tech and current events explainers.
Cool Worlds- Science videos focusing on space.
Crypticc- Videos about cryptids and folk legends. I don't buy that this stuff is "real" in a meaningful sense, but I still like to watch it occasionally.
🤌 Dean Bog- Wonderful short films about Pittsburgh neighborhoods.
Direct and Dominate- An action/comedy animated series incorporating retro 3D graphics and plenty of references to video games.
😴 EasyPcRepairs- I'm not particularly interested in the content of this channel, but the delivery of that content is relaxing.
Einzelgänger- Videos focused on self-improvement through philosophy.
exurb1a- Fun philosophical videos.
Fascinating Horror- Stories of horrific accidents and other real-life horrors.
🤌 First We Feast- Unless today is your first day trying YouTube, you probably know their show "Hot Ones." It really is as good as everyone says.
Folding Ideas- Documentaries on lots of things, from pop culture to regular culture to commerce.
🤌 hbomberguy- Lots of essays about video games, but also social commentary and other explainers. His exposé on Tommy Tallarico is a standout.
HealthyGamerGG- Mental health and personal growth.
👀🤌 The Hood Internet- Great video mashups of hit songs. Each video has hits from a particular year.
Internet Historian- Tells the stories of things that happened online but also sometimes about things that happened in the world.
🤌 Jay Foreman- Silly (in a good way) videos about maps and bridges.
Jeffrey Kaplan- Videos about learning techniques and philosophy.
🤌 Johnny Harris- What if the news actually explained things?
👀🤌 JxmyHighroller- Awesome videos about NBA basketball. Loves to dive deep and derive conclusions from stats.
Kaz Rowe- History videos with a focus on LGBTQ+ folks.
🤌 Kyle Hill- Fun videos that make science accessible.
🤌 LegalEagle- Whoever thought the law could be fun?
🤌 LEMMiNO- Researches mysteries, like the origin of the cool 'S,' Jack the Ripper, and D.B. Cooper.
😿🤌 LOCAL58TV- An early and wonderful example of this style of "analog horror" — horror content that presents as real found footage from the era of the VHS tape.
🤌 Miniminuteman- Accessibile and engaging history videos.
misterdeity- Good critiques of religion.
More Perfect Union- Social commentary and anti-capitalism.
Mr. Beat- Great history videos from a passionate teacher.
🤌 mugumogu- Beautiful, soothing videos of three cute cats, including Maru, the box cat.
Nerdwriter1- Such a variety here it's hard to categorize. Let's just say that all of the videos are interesting.
😴 Odd Tinkering- Watch someone restore old objects — often gaming-related but not always.
Oki's Weird Stories- Odd stories about people.
Overly Sarcastic Productions- Videos about literature, mythology, and history.
Premodernist- Micro history documentaries.
The Punk Rock MBA- Engaging videos about the business side of music.
Qxir- Stories of people in peril.
RobWords- Fun and funny videos about language.
Sakura Stardust- Exploring Japanese internet culture, often with a horror bent.
Secret Base- I'm not huge into sports, but I do enjoy their videos. Really great at giving you the context around important plays or rivalries.
Simone Giertz- Formerly the "queen of shitty robots." Now, Simon makes all kinds of stuff besides just shitty robots. Always a fun watch.
Ska Tune Network- Mostly ska/punk covers of pop songs. Their energy is infectious.
Some More News- Funny left-leaning news show. Like The Daily Show if it really dove deep.
Something Different Films- Videos about geography and the culture that comes out of it.
🤌 Special Books by Special Kids- Charming interviews with people with disabilities.
🤌 Stewart Hicks- Awesome accessible architecture videos.
🤌 Stuff Made Here- Makes incredible devices. Less crafting and more invention + engineering.
Tasting History with Max Miller- Cooks historically accurate dishes.
The Thought Emporium- Weird science.
Thoughty2- Cool short documentaries on a variety of topics. You will learn things you weren't aware you wanted to know.
🤌 Trash Theory- Great music documentaries showing the history of various aspects of popular music. The one about the first punk rock Christmas song is a standout.
🤌 Veritasium- Masterfully entertaining and well-produced science videos.
Versed- Current events and politics videos with great thumbnails.
vewn- Cool and kinda creepy animation in a very creepy aspect ratio.
VICE- News with a focus on sex, danger, and youth culture.
vlogbrothers- The prototypical vloggers. Two smart guys talking to the camera about interesting stuff across a variety of topics.
🤌 Vox- High-quality explainer and current events videos.
Vsauce- Exists somewhere at the intersection of history, design, philosophy, and science. Always interesting.
Weird Paul- Retro media, thrift store finds, and Paul's home videos from his childhood.
🤌 zefrank1- Off-the-wall nature documentaries.

New List: Favorite Internet Videos

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 09:50:04 +0000

These are some of my favorite internet videos. I'll add new entries to the top and mark anything added since the last update so you can easily keep up.

ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial

An epic review of a game I was totally unfamiliar with. Tim's interviews are more about him and his life than the games he's reviewing… and I'm here for it.

This video is great, but honestly, I could put every Action Button video on this list.

White Guy Speaks Perfect Japanese from watching Anime. Here's how he did it.

This guy shares his approach to language learning, which is really cool and different from the typical advice in this area.

The Unreality of Pro Wrestling

Eyepatch Wolf will make you fall in love with pro wrestling, no matter how fancy you are. Here, he tells the redemption story of Roman Reigns.

why america is addicted to cars

Children of Doom 1998: Half-Life

An exploration of all the shooters released in 1998, including Half-Life.

The Entire History of Video Games

I Tracked Down My Anonymous Landlord... Here's What Happened.

This is the world we live in.

How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream | Climate Town

This is the world we live in.

The Nostalgia Of Old YouTube Horror

We Entered the World of Microsoft Excel eSports & Got Our Asses Beat

This is a thing?

Making puzzles for my indie magnet game

Before My Chemical Romance: How Emo Became Emo

This is a great history of an era of music that was a major part of my coming of age.

How I Got into Gaming :: An Old Lady discovers a Wonderworld

action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi

What a charming game!

A terrible guide to the terrible terminology of U.S. Health Insurance

This is the world we live in. Feels like I've said that before… 😁

This video is an indictment of healthcare in the United States.

Making $1.5M/month on OnlyFans and Twitch: Amouranth | My Life Online

Her life seems… kinda miserable.

HOW TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER CHANGED MUSIC FOREVER

A formative game of my childhood, both for the game it was and for the music that was in it.

My Strange Obsession With Gaming Elevators

The System Behind Hades' Astounding Dialogue

Last Witness to President Abraham Lincoln Assassination I've Got A Secret

A Paper Panty-Clad Horse, a Jailbreak, and Turtles - Written by a Kid ep. 3

This was a short-lived series on the Geek and Sundry network which had several good shows for nerds. In Written by a Kid, a kid writes a story that then gets animated as they re-tell it. This little girl's delivery of her story is hilarious. Such a precocious little kid, and her story is amazing!

New List: Better Alternatives to Popular Things

Sun, 16 Jul 2023 09:50:04 +0000

These are things that are secretly better than their alternatives, although many of the alternatives are much more popular. Some may be controversial. If you disagree, please make your own list and share it.

handkerchief > tissue
bus/walking > car
Mastodon > Twitter/BlueSky/Threads/whatever
Lemmy/Tildes > Reddit
Kagi > Google
Arc > Firefox > Google Chrome > IE 6
commercial displays > cheap smart TVs
Futurama > The Simpsons
Calvin and Hobbes > Garfield
bidet > wiping your dirty ass with a dry piece of paper a few times
gaming desktop > gaming laptop
urban living > suburban living
being sincere > being cynical
hard way > easy way
being kind > being cool
flexible > rigid
sharing credit > hoarding credit
admitting faults > hiding faults
optimizing > settling
casual > "professional"
people > things
cats > dogs
pizza with pineapple > pizza without pineapple
quiet evenings with people you care about > partying
loud keyswitches > quiet keyswitches
investing > instant gratification
not having a yard > having a small yard > having a big yard
dumb home > smart home

Which Dominoes Fall After Reddit?

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 12:58:04 +0000

It's a story as old as the commercial internet. Sites fail and are closed all the time. But surely popular sites with tons of engaged users will stick around, right? That's what many of us thought before Digg fell.

When that happened, we could write it off as a one-off occurrence. This sort of thing really didn't happen much. Well, there was Google, closing down reasonably popular services even back then like Wave… but that can easily be ignored because Google seemingly shuts down 10 services every month. They're an anomaly.

Late in 2022, we saw Elon Musk take over Twitter and start gutting it, dismantling the few protections users on that platform had against harassment (e.g., killing its "safety board") and misinformation (e.g., no longer enforcing their COVID-19 misinformation policy). Employees who expressed concerns were fired and journalists who said things he didn't like were banned in the new "free speech absolutist" era of Twitter. But this was one disenfranchised billionaire taking his proverbial ball and going home. Right? Then, Reddit started on it's own death spiral.

As it turns out, this will keep happening forever because it's all part of the playbook. I'm certainly not an expert on economics nor business, but I'm seeing some connections — maybe some that aren't actually there — between what's happening here and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the economic climate that caused it, and this new big tech ethos. It looks to me like we're in a moment right now where the pressure is on tech companies to become profitable. This may be because interest rates are high, inflation is high, and the economy is in a bit of flux, causing investors to hold onto their wallets tighter than usual. The way I understand startup investment is this: your put a little money into a lot of different startups to spread out your risk. You keep putting more money into the ones that are seeing results. You keep doing that until you've pumped up its value as much as you think you can. Tech companies do this by whispering sweet nothings into their users' ears. It's the "free lunch" period, when the company is giving you a great product and not charging you what it's worth so that, by the time they do start charging you, you're already hooked.

Then, investors cash out by selling the company to another company or by offering an IPO that will allow anyone to buy stock in the company. When investors aren't going to invest more to try to grow, they're probably ready to cash out. That time is coming for many of these tech companies. This is when the sweet nothings stop and the company is ready to extract anything they can from their users, so long as it has a dollar sign in front of it. In this uncertain economic climate, profitability is what people want to see, so that will ensure the most lucrative exit for investors. It's at this point in the life of a social media company's lifespan they inform their users to stop talking to each other and start buying things.

That's why all the protests in the world won't help. The "best" you could hope for is that a company "capitulates" to your demands by delaying the inevitable and/or disguising it as something else and/or rolling it out in a graduated fashion, possibly more quietly if they can find a way. Maybe they'll find some different way to separate you from your money. Whatever the result, you can bet it's not going to be good for you. This is because your goals are mismatched with the goals of the corporation. You want one thing; they want another, and the two are pulling in opposite directions. In terms of Reddit: you want community; they want profit. The community will continue to exist so long as it makes the greatest profit it possibly can. Your protests will be ineffective because the people who care are a small minority, and for every mod that's ready to hold strong, there are 100 who will gladly cross the picket line for a taste of the sweet power that comes from ruling over a subreddit with an iron fist.

This will erode trust in Reddit, and it will experience a brain drain as a result. A lot of its free moderation workforce will need to be replaced. Many of its best contributors will flee to other platforms like Tildes and Lemmy. Eventually, the site will collapse. If it does survive for a long time, it will begin to look like a husk of its former self. But the profits will already be realized at this point, so the people making the calls now that will desstroy it in the future couldn't care less. This is what being an "adult" looks like under capitalism.

Some of us have now fled to federated alternatives where we have more control, like Mastodon and Lemmy. Others have found smaller generalized communities or more specialized forums. Sometimes, we've done both. They're not perfect. These communities are having growing pains. They're not a one-to-one replacement for the platforms we left them for, but they can be a two-to-one replacement for the needs we satisfied on those platforms by allowing us to build more authentic relationships with other people online without constantly wondering what bullshit we're going to have to endure next and by allowing us to own our spaces online. We're opting out of profit-driven communities since that's what's burning us now. We're tired of opting in to being corraled so we can be efficiently monetized.

But the real lesson of this whole situation is that it won't stop here. It's time to take a look at where you hang out online. Which of those see you in true alignment with the owners and operators? Which are just still whispering sweet nothings before they betray you to fulfill their own needs a few months or years down the line?

This isn't just a rhetorical question. I have created a handy list! 😁 Here are a few that came to mind for me, in no particular order, as well as some alternatives you might want to start exploring! Note that, you'll almost never be able to match the commercial behemoth in features or user experience — they just have so many resources, it's impossible for the small fry to keep up — but you'll gain advantages if you can tolerate what you have to give up. Someday, when they start squeezing users, you'll be ahead of the mass exodus!

Discord

Fidelity has been marking down its value (that is, lowering its estimates of the value of its holdings) in two well-known social media companies. One is Reddit, and we've seen how they decided to handle it. The other is Discord. How will they respond?

Matrix

Matrix is decentralized and federated like Mastodon and Lemmy, meaning anyone can run a Matrix server and you can talk with people across servers. Here, I'm using "server" in a more traditional sense, not in the way Discord uses it. What Discord calls a "server" really doesn't represent a real server at all but is instead an organizational unit that can contain channels. In Matrix, this is referred to as a "space", but channels can also exist detached from any space.

To quickly get started, you could try Element, the most popular Matrix client. This will, by default, funnel you into account creation on the official instance.

Revolt

Revolt is a more blatant attempt to clone Discord, although it's definitely not there just yet. It's still pretty slick though. The main features lacking are Discord's video features. You can host your own instance, but they aren't federated like Matrix. You can also join the official instance, but they themselves admit to not having a business model (as of June 2023).

GitHub

GitHub is now monetizing your open source software without compensating you by selling it back to you and others as GitHub Copilot: a generative AI for developers trained on the work of other developers. Maybe it's time to start giving them free training data…

Forgejo/Codeberg

Forgejo is a self-hosted open-source GitHub alternative with a terrible name (Seriously, how do you pronounce it? 😅) that, as is usually the case with these things, has most of the features of the software that inspired it and misses some of the more complicated stuff. Best I can tell, it doesn't have CI, but it does have a lot of the other ancillary features like wikis and kanban boards. Codeberg is both the official instance and where development of Forgejo happens.

Gmail

Gmail probably isn't going anywhere, but Google is struggling right now to keep up in the face of an AI-shaped existential crisis. It's easy to switch search engines. Email providers? Not so much. When the time comes to juice profits, you can bet they'll come for the users that will have the hardest time leaving them.

I'm not going to recommend any self-hosted alternatives here because I think email hosting is hard to get right, but there are still some solid alternatives.

Fastmail

I use this one because it works within the workflow I was already using with Gmail. I would like encryption, but it makes everything too complicated for me to deal with right now. This service works great, and I never miss Gmail having switched. I'm running basically all of my personal email through them at this point, and it works like a dream. They even let you generate forwarding addresses for when you need to register an email address somewhere but don't want to reveal your identity.

Tutanota

This is the encrypted service I would probably recommend, although I haven't used it myself.

Google Apps/Drive/Dropbox

Same as the story with Gmail. They've already made user-hostile changes in the past, and you can bet it will happen again in the future. Dropbox is a whole other set of problems.

NextCloud

NextCloud is a self-hosting Swiss army knife. It has plugins to do just about anything, most important in this context, file sharing and document collaboration.

Photo Stuff (Imgur, iCloud, Whatever photo thing Google has, Flickr... does anyone use Flickr anymore?)

We've already seen bad things happen to photo services, so why would the future be any different?

Pixelfed

Pixelfed is to mainstream photo hosting as Mastodon is to Twitter. It's self-hosted. It's federated. It has a slick UI and a mobile app. Since it's part of the fediverse, you can even use it to follow Mastodon users (and Mastodon users can follow your Pixelfed account).

Plex

They've just laid off a bunch of employees. When cost cutting measures have been exhausted, they're going to want their users to part with more cash.

Jellyfin

Jellyfin is just a pleasure to use. It's like Plex without all the cruft and upsells. Wonderful interface and a reliable, full-featured media center you can host yourself!

Steam

I like to think Valve has been a pretty good steward, and part of that I attribute to their private ownership, but all good things must come to an end.

GOG.com

The pitch for GOG is that the games you buy are DRM-free. This would protect you in the event the platform decided to start being evil.

Itch.io

Itch isn't quite competitive with the others. The Itch pitch is that the barrier to putting up a game and selling it is very low, so you tend to get more experimental stuff. They offer a very generous revenue split too compared to other platforms.

Twitch.tv

Twitch has already been monkeying around with their revenue split, and streamers are not pleased. If they leave, there'll be nothing to watch. If Amazon decides to leave the streamers alone, they may come for viewers instead.

Peertube

Peertube is really more like YouTube than Twitch, but it does allow for streaming content.

Owncast

Owncast is more directly comparable to Twitch. It is self-hosted live streaming with chat. It's part of the fediverse, so it can interact with other services that are, like Mastodon.

YouTube

YouTube has begun penalizing users for using ad blockers. Next, the privacy-focused front-ends will go away. Then they'll sell even more ads… unless you pay them $10 a month for YouTube Premium. But just think how much more they would make if they charged $15/month instead…

Peertube

Peertube is Mastodon, but for YouTube. Anyone can set up an instance. Instances are federated, so you can subscribe to anyone on any Peertube instance from yours. It's very cool, but it hasn't had the spotlight shined on it like Mastodon has yet. Its day will come…

The Old Web Onramp Status Updates for July 1, 2023

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 12:57:21 +0000

A very nice person contacted me on Mastodon to inform me their site was going down for a while as they rebuild. Also, Terra is back, which is great! I didn't do a comprehensive check on this update, so there may be some problems. Get in touch with me on Mastodon if you find them.

Links that rose from the ashes like the phoenix

Terra

Links that are hibernating

phosphor's link library

The Most Influential Game in History

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 22:26:39 +0000

It's hard to overstate the influence of Minecraft. The entire survival genre that is all over games today owes a great debt to Minecraft. A generation of gamers has an affinity for chunky pixel graphics that they wouldn't have had without it. Sandbox games got big in a way that they never had before. YouTube empires were built by streaming the game. It normalized games not holding your hand, even requiring you to find out how to play outside the game — the polar opposite direction of the last 30 years of gaming that is scared to death you'll miss something or be bored for half a second. It normalized selling games before they were finished, which is now commonplace and a feature on nearly every gaming marketplace.

You could make a case for plenty of other games being the most influential too. Super Mario Brothers showed games could be more than just score chases. Pitfall opened the door for developers not employed by the console maker to make games. Mario 64 was the template for 3D platforming. Rogue has a whole modern genre named after it! But in spite of everything these games and Minecraft brought to the table, none of them is the most influential game ever. Instead, that title belongs to another game with Minecraft's pixelly graphics and a first-person perspective. It's a game that, like Minecraft, was PC-first and created incredible longevity by fostering an enthusiastic modding community. It's a game that planted the seeds for some of the innovations Minecraft brought forward.

Quake was the Minecraft of its day, and its day was about 15 years before the release of Minecraft. Let's take a look at the staggering number of innovations Quake brought gamers in the mid 90s.

Modding

Modding was around before Quake, but it came of age with Quake. Many community map and mod makers were ultimately hired as level designers and game developers. Valve recruited early employees out of the community and brought the team behind Quake mod Team Fortress in-house to build its sequel on Half-Life… which was itself built on the Quake 2 engine.

Twitch

Quake made it possible to watch others play nine years before YouTube, in a time when most people were still connected to the internet via dialup. It’s less that online video was impossible because no YouTube and more that YouTube was impossible because no broadband.

Quake got around this by allowing players to record gameplay into so-called demo files that were not video but could be played back in the game engine. They took the data they were sending across the wire when you played online and instead wrote it to disk. That made the files small enough to download relatively quickly, even over dialup. You could play them back in the game client to watch recorded play.

We used these to watch matches to get better, but we also used it for other things like the next three items in my list.

Benchmarking

More than a decade before we asked "Can it run Crysis?" we were asking "Can it run Quake?"

Not really. Quake was pretty easy to run. It was only when you jacked up the resolution and started caring about framerate — which you almost certainly did because you needed every edge you could get in a deathmatch — that benchmarking became important.

I posted a Mastodon thread about the influence of Quake, and user Locksmith reminded me that Quake was also used to figure out how good — or how bad — our hardware was. These were the early days of 3D gaming and hardware 3D acceleration, so it's one of the earliest games where this sort of thing would be relevant. The ability to measure your framerate against a recorded demo was included out of the box.

Since the game included a few demos, you could run your benchmark against one of them to give yourself a common baseline of comparison to other players. It was a simple innovation that wasn't applauded much at the time but that helped create the culture of tweaking and maximizing performance that we still enjoy today.

Speedrunning

Quake’s demo file format was great for watching others compete in deathmatch or capture the flag matches, but it was also used to records speedruns through the game’s levels.

If you wanted to watch Quake speedrun demos, the best place to find them was on the Speed Demos Archive. You might have downloaded a series called “Quake Done Quick.” Does that name sound familiar?

That site evolved into the more general speedrunning community Games Done Quick and went on to host the worldwide speedrunning events “Awesome Games Done Quick” and “Summer Games Done Quick” that today raise millions of dollars each year for charity.

Machinima

Just because you’re recording in a game engine doesn’t mean you have to record gameplay. Players soon started adding stories to their speedrun recording. In some of these demos, the speedrunning went away altogether in favor of the stories, popularizing what we now call "machinima."

The medium spread to other games and ultimately gained mainstream appeal with hits like Red Vs. Blue (a Halo machinima). Fun fact: the original music video for Old Town Road was made using footage from Red Dead Redemption 2. I guess that's not really machinima, but it’s pretty dang close.

WASD + Mouse

Quake’s predecessor Doom only asked the player to worry about two axes. Enemies could be above you, but if you aimed and fired in their direction, the game would handle aiming on the vertical axis for you.

Quake changed all that by asking the player to aim on the vertical axis as well. By default, keys were mapped to vertical aiming. Players would move around with the arrow keys and aim up and down with two other keys — page up and page down by default, if I recall. Players quickly figured out this wasn’t the best way to play.

This was the dawn of the WASD + mouse control scheme that is standard among first person games on the PC to this day. In its time, though, it was controversial. I recall a fan site — I believe it was called The House of Mouse — devoted to persuading Quake players to switch from keyboard only to keyboard and mouse. (Sadly, I can't find a single shred of evidence that it existed.)

The Multiplayer Server Browser

Before Quake, multiplayer gameplay on PC required either a game client that could dial up directly to another user’s modem or entering another player’s IP address in the game client. Enter QSpy, a Quake server browser that made it easier to find and connect to multiplayer games.

Side note: QSpy later became QuakeSpy and then GameSpy, which eventually became an editorial site that operated until 2013.

Client-Side Prediction for Online Multiplayer

This method of compensating for network problems — still a key feature of online games today — was pioneered by John Carmack with his QuakeWorld port of the Quake engine optimized specifically for multiplayer.

And More

There's probably something I missed here. I almost included "Development in Public" and mentioned "plan files" which were a sort of proto-blog where the designers and developers at id shared what they were working on. Maybe that does deserve to be on this list. Maybe not.

One of the wildest things about Quake is that it still holds up. It’s on a very short list of early 3D games that are still fun to play today. If these innovations get you fired up, fire Quake up and run through a couple of maps. You’ll have a blast!

The Old Web Onramp Status Updates

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 22:55:57 +0000

I added a key to the top of the onramps section to explain the link status icons, and I updated a lot of the statuses. Here's what changed:

Links that died ☠️

Terra
Nerd Listing
DOKODEMO LINKS

Links that were fixed/updated

I'm not sure if I had the wrong URLs to begin with on these or if they changed since I added them.

Links that are weird now

Most of these have expired SSL certificates, but one of them has a bunch of broken links. Maybe they'll be fixed someday, or maybe they're on their way out.

Rapid Fire Game Reviews Holiday 2022

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 19:06:21 +0000

These are my thoughts on some games I've played over the last few months, in no particular order.

Spookware

The microgames of WarioWare paired with the cute and self-aware irreverence of Undertale (featuring skeletons just to complete the analogy). I really like the vibe here. The one surprising thing about the game is that a lot of it isn't the WarioWare-style microgames. There's a old style adventure game bridging between the somewhat rare microgame segments. That part can be tedious. I'd like to see a sequel that de-emphasizes this aspect of the game and leans harder into the microgames. Still a lot of fun though. It had me laughing out loud.

Neon White

One of my favorite things to do in a game is to refine my skill. I like to throw myself against a challenge over and over until I finally overcome it. I think a lot about an old PS2 game that I never hear anyone talk about anymore: Stuntman. You played a stunt driver going from movie to movie taking on-the-fly direction as you pulled the stunts needed for various movie scenes. I don't hear people talking about that game, but it was a favorite of mine. This is that but with an art style that screams "Japanese video game!" I'm pretty sure this isn't Japanese, but it could pass. Lots of fun to be had here. I look forward to getting deeper into it and refining my times!

Timespinner

More than any game I've tried, this game reminds me of Symphony of the Night. That's one of my favorites, so I'm excited to play more of this. It feels right in all the ways Symphony did.

Teardown

The destruction is so cool. Not too sure about the game they've wrapped around it. It's neat, but setting up a route to race out of a level once I start destroying stuff wouldn't be my first choice of activity. I want to take my time and bask in the destruction.

White Lavender

A really charming and fun Souls-like. It's stripped down, but it has the stuff it needs to get the job done. I want to play more of this.

Days Gone

A competent but boring open-world game that boils down to a big to-do list in the form of a giant map littered with icons. It looks nice, but I'm bored with this kind of game.

The Quarry

I just finished Dark Pictures: Little Hope a few weeks back. That was fun, but the story was weird and I didn't buy any of the character interactions. This one feels much more natural, although it's still a cheesy teen slasher flick. I'm here for it.

Persona 5 Royal

Slick, stylish, and beautiful. Tedious and not very fun to play. A soundtrack that parks itself in your head well after the meter runs out.

Delta Manifold

I wish I liked this one more, but it needs a lot of polish. Some better sign-posting would be nice too. I don't want literal signposts, but I need something more than the game is giving me to tell me what to do next. The levels are just random hallways and rooms connected together with tons of dead-ends. I can't tell if I'm missing something or if someone just banged these out really quick in Unity and left all the parts where they landed. The description on the game's Steam page says it wants to be Metroid Prime. I want it to be too, but it's not there yet.

Dread Delusion and Lunacid

I'm lumping these together because they're both first-person RPGs that call out King's Field as an influence. Dread Delusion has a fun surreal art style but feels a bit more aimless. Both games have you wondering around a fair bit, but I felt the pain of it more in Dread Delusion. Something about the sparseness of the world and the same-ness of the environments I've been going through so far makes me feel this game is the thinner of the two, even though I'm pretty sure it's the one that has been "released" while Lunacid is still in early access. It's cool and I want to play more, but I'm not in love.

Lunacid feels different. There's something about the darkness of it. Everything is darker. I'm spending a lot of time in tight corridors. It's a lot different from the bright environments of Dread Delusion, and I like it. I feel like I'm really discovering in this game. I'm poking at walls and finding things the game wants me to think I wasn't supposed to find. Yesterday, I found an item that was very surprising, and I'm exciting to see how it fits into this game. When I level up in Dread Delusion, it doesn't really feel like anything has changed. In Lunacid, I feel like my character is actually progressing. There's a lot I'm excited about here.

Immortality

I love what this game is in my head, but I'm not sold yet on what it is in reality. Because of the way I play games, I'm scared to death about the prospect of trying to come back to this game in four months when I remember I want to play more of it but don't remember anything that happened in it. I hope the game has a mechanism to ease me back in at that point, but very few games actually do have something like that. When that day comes, I'm probably going to feel like I need to restart... and there's zero chance I actually do that. The anxiety about the way this game will fit into my life fills me with dread even while I've enjoyed my time with the game so far.

Update: Played a bit more of this to grab a screenshot for this post, and another layer has opened up. I'm all the way in now. Part of it was that I learned the game will use controller vibration to give you hints. I was playing with keyboard and mouse, so I hadn't been getting these at all. It would be nice if it communicated this to you.

Haak

This Metroidvania is just really well executed. Moving around feels great. The unlockable abilities are paced well, and I haven't felt stuck so far. Just a nice experience with fun art and a cute cat helping you find your way, at least in the early parts.

Midnight Fight Express

The Arkham Asylum combat works in an isometric game. I thought this was going to be great, but I think it will be ultimately forgettable. I nearly forgot to include it here!

South of the Circle

Neat game but not especially fun to play. I like the way it flips back and forth between time periods. I feel like my character often walks in a direction other than the one I'm pressing. I played about 45 minutes, and I don't feel the need to play any more.

My Friend Pedro

A flashy action game that's a bit awkward to play. Maybe it would get better if I gave myself time to get more used to pulling off the tricks, but I don't think I have the patience. The pull just isn't there. The environments and enemies are pretty boring, and there are only so many different setups I need to experience of shooting two dudes at the same time in bullet time.

Pentiment

This is another one that I'm in love with the idea of but not yet the game. I'll give it some more time. I've just played a few minutes at this point.

House Flipper

Tedious and zen at the same time. I love it and hate it. It feels like I'm wasting time when I play it, but I can also relax. It's a nice balance of creativity plus prescribed objectives. Seems like it was made by people who don't quite know what suburban houses are like... or maybe this is just what they're like somewhere else besides where I'm from.

Astalon and Phoenotopia

Both of these were good, but they weren't good enough for the prices they're charging right now. This has nothing to do with the games and more to do with how I play games. I like to sample everything, which means I don't pay very much for most games. These are games I enjoyed but probably won't ever finished. I might like to have them around and play more when they are cheaper. Both quality games but neither is a real standout.

The worst thing about Phoenotopia is that I can neither pronounce nor spell its name. 😅

Betrayal at Club Low

This one was a surprise. I went in expecting nothing. Actually, based on the... scrappiness of the interface, I expected this to be janky. It isn't. It's simple but polished. It's a point-and-click adventure with some tabletop RPG-style dice-rolling mechanics laid on top. The dice rolling is surprisingly deep. You're allowed two re-rolls per action, and you can select which dice to re-roll. Outcomes on the dice can add other rules as well like allowing you to re-roll opponent dice or swap results with your opponent. The art style is funky. It almost looks like it doesn't all belong together, but it works. If you want something quirky and charming as heck, this is a good choice.

Curses Ain't All Bad

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 23:34:09 +0000

I was very bad at the video game Curse of the Dead Gods at first because "curses" were, in my mind, something to be avoided at all costs. I thought of them as punishments for doing poorly, and I didn't want to be punished.

You can't avoid them, though, and once you've played a few times, you realize curses aren't all that bad. In fact, the rewards you get by making blood offerings generally outweigh the problems the curses introduce. The curses usually even have a tiny upside.

Corruption (or lack of corruption really), a meter that grows as you play and ultimately leads to being cursed, is just another currency, not that much different from the game's money. When you spend the money, the downside is just an opportunity cost: you can no longer spend the money you just spent on anything else you might want to spend it on. When you make a blood offering, increasing your corruption and inching closer to a curse in exchange for some reward, it's a little bit different. Yes, there's an opportunity cost – the corruption you're incurring now can only be incurred once – but the real cost is that you're creeping toward obtaining a curse, which will have some adverse affect on your character, making the game more difficult. So, four aspects of "spending" corruption that make it different from the game's money:

The consequences are usually delayed
They entail more than just an opportunity cost
They are unclear until you are already suffering them
The name of the consequences – "curses" – is stigmatized

For me, this had the effect of discouraging me from using this valuable resource for a while.

Real life has stigmatized currencies too. Some of them are stigmatized for good reason, like your health so that you can live a long happy life. We could all be drugging ourselves 24/7 in exchange for feeling euphoric all the time, but it would decrease the overall satisfaction of our lives by shortening them and eroding our relationships. Others are stigmatized for reasons that may or may not be justified.

comfort- We can give away our comfort for all sorts of benefits. Johnny Knoxville built a career trading his comfort (and his well-being) for money. You can spend my comfort to have an experience I've never had before, like trying a new food or traveling somewhere I've never been. You can trade some comfort to learn a new skill or work out instead of watching Netflix every night.
credit- We're told to get out of debt and stay out of it when it's actually extremely valuable if used responsibly. If you can borrow money at an interest rate less than what you can earn by borrowing it, that might be a good idea.
social capital- We spend time and effort building relationships, and sometimes it can be useful to "cash in" some of that trust we've built to tell a close friend they're wrong about something, to try to convince them to stop behaving in a certain way, or maybe to ask for their help.
sex- I'm not equipped to make a judgment on whether or not this is a good or bad stigma. I think it can probably be either depending on the context. I generally think that, if you keep yourself safe and go into it with eyes wide open and without any coercion, it probably doesn't deserve the stigma it gets. It can be a way for people to get what they want and need when they don't have many other levers to pull on.

Back in the game world, once I embraced curses and started making blood offerings, I was able to build my character's strength much more effectively. I went from dying early and often to clearing tombs and reaping those sweet digital rewards.

There's a lesson for life in there too: don't be afraid to use the resources you have, in some cases, even if using them is stigmatized. Look at those stigmas through a critical lens and try to figure out if that stigma is making it harder for you to fail or harder for you to succeed.

The Old Web is still there… it's just hidden.

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 22:48:57 +0000

tl;dr- I got tired of the commercial web, so I went looking for the Old Web. I found it through directories, blogrolls, webrings, and some weird search engines no one has heard of.

My First Love on the Web

The first web site I ever loved was called Illucia: The Town of Final Fantasy. It was created in 1995 by someone named Tatsushi Nakao, who I assume either worked for or attended the University of Colorado. (I believe this to be the case because of Illucia's URL: http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~nakao/fftown.html)

You'll have to imagine what it was like because the site is gone, and I can't find a single image of it. (I've found a couple of reddit posts mentioning it, and a single article on Andore Jr. that mentions it.) The first thing you'd see when visiting Illucia is a pixelated (in the style of the Final Fantasy games of the era) rendering of the town. This image was an image map – a single image hooked up to a CGI script that, given a set of coordinates clicked by the user, would send them to the correct page. (At least, that's how I believe it worked as a web developer now who was not a web developer in 1995 at 12 years old.)

Each building in Illucia had content that made thematic sense. I wish I could reinforce that with some examples, but I don't remember any. I'm pretty sure there was an inn and maybe a cafe, but the remaining buildings and what each of them contained is lost to me. You'd "wander" the town by clicking the buildings on the image map and gobble up all the information you could find about Square's storied RPG series.

Thinking back on Illucia, and the rest of the 90s web, it stands out against today's web because of what it wasn't. Illucia had nothing to sell me and none of the dark patterns that come along with that: no timed email subscription modals, no calls to action, and no free courses that would then upsell me to a paid course on how to fully level all my characters by looping around the Lethe River over and over with a rapid fire controller and a book holding down the button. Many of these marketing techniques hadn't been invented, but that's because there was very little marketing or selling happening on the web at all. Illucia never showed me a GDPR tracking consent popover. Sure, there was no GDPR, but that's partly because there weren't a lot of sites tracking their users to necessitate protective legislation.

What's Happening Now

These differences have been cast in starker contrast as Google search results have gotten increasingly bad in the years since they won us over as the first search engine that could consistently deliver relevant results. That Washington Post article points out a few issues in the results, but there's a big one they miss: organic results are being gamed. SEOs have tuned their techniques, and the rankings that were once a decent reflection of who had the best information for the query are now a reflection of who is best able to manipulate Google's ranking algorithm.

SEO is kinda expensive. It's constantly evolving, so doing it well requires a significant time commitment. For that reason, organizations that undertake SEO efforts are usually hiring consultants who focus on this one area to come in and apply what they know to their own properties. Because of the expense, most of the fully SEOed sites devoted resources to it because they have something to sell. That means almost all of the top results are there because they make money. Traffic equals dollars to them which allows them to either pay Google directly for placement or to pay SEO consultants to improve their organic (non-paid) search placement.

I'm able to say all this because… I'm part of the problem. I market a book and a course that I sell through my web site, where I would also very much like people to sign up for my email list. In addition to being a web developer, I'm certified in SEO, and I want the sites I work on to rank highly in the search results so that I (or whoever I'm doing work for) can make more money. (To be clear, I don't make a living from the products I sell online, although I would very much like to.)

I've taken courses to learn how to better market myself through the web… and I've felt icky about some of the techniques they've asked me to employ. In many cases, I've gone ahead with them only to remove them later. (To be clear, I'm always honest about my products. The things I've engaged in that I didn't care for: a single modal popup and false scarcity around my course. Not the worst things at the end of the day but still don't feel quite right.) All this to say, your capacity to hate something goes up as you yourself get closer to it. I've been very close to internet marketing… and I don't think I like what's happening in that space very much.

Defining the Old Web

Occasionally, I find a web site that seems like it's been ripped out of that era of the non-commercial web (which goes by many names but which I will refer to as the "Old Web"). When I started having this crisis around the state of the modern web, it got me thinking: are there more sites out there like the Old Web? So, I started looking. Before I take you on that journey, let me articulate my definition of the Old Web.

To me, the Old Web is not about a particular aesthetic. The 90s and 2000s web was kitschy – often crossing the line into garish. That’s fine, and there’s definitely a feeling of nostalgia when I see a site that tries to ape that aesthetic. I find some sites in that style almost unreadable, and I’m too old to suffer through reading red text on a blue sparkling background, no matter how good their content is.

If I’m picking an aesthetic, it would be something that evokes the freewheeling designs of that era while avoiding its pitfalls. I think about how, when old video games get remade, they look the way the originals look in your memory, but when you actually compare them, they look way better. I’d like to see web sites that look the way I remember the Old Web looking rather than sites that look the way they actually looked.

What I’m more interested is the ethos of the old web. I want to find sites that exist, not to make money, but because a human being was compelled to create them. They had so much passion for the subject inside that they were about to burst. The release valve for that pressure is building a web site and sharing that passion with other people.

Searching for the Old Web

Paradoxically, I started my search for the old web at the very search engines I just finished dumping on. I came up mostly empty and was starting to get frustrated until I had an epiphany: The Old Web is invisible to search engines.

Search engine visibility is contingent on search engine optimization – a series of techniques used to tell search engines about the content of a page they're indexing. The Old Web doesn't care about this. It can't afford to because it has nothing to sell you. As a result, the Old Web is buried deep within search results, where most searchers will never see.

There was a time when search engines didn't return consistently relevant results. Somehow, we were all still able to find cool stuff anyway. I tried to remember how, and surprisingly, I started remembering how it used to work. The first thing that came to mind: Yahoo.

Nowadays, Yahoo is a boring search engine mostly like any other, but it started life as a directory – a site that sorted other web sites into various categories. You'd drill down from the top-level categories until you got to the specific category you were interested in. Then, you'd browse a list of human-curated links on that topic.

Once you found a page you liked, you'd see if it was a member of a webring or if it had a "Links" section (after the advent of the blog, a "blogroll") – all mechanisms of exposing other sites visitors might be interested in and of sharing traffic with other site owners. Discovery used to leverage the "web" facet of the World Wide Web – the interconnectedness between sites. Modern web sites are much more siloed because sending you to another site means potentially losing any revenue you might generate. In the Old Web, there was no revenue to lose!

I shared all of this on Mastodon, and it seemed to strike a chord with people. I was feeling pretty good about myself, thinking I was some kind of "thought leader." (Yes, even as I'm in the process of pushing back against the modern web, I'm still subject to the gravitational pull of its twisted incentives. 😉)

Being able to recall the modes of discovery on the old web allowed me to break through and learn that, not only is the Old Web still there, but it's experiencing something of a resurgence!

Then, I found sadgrl.online. Their internet manifesto and article on how to surf the web (the old way) articulated pretty much everything I had learned so far and more eloquently expressed every "novel" idea I had on the subject. If this is interesting to you, their web site is required reading. Finding sadgrl was a watershed in my own research. Many of the links I've collected came either directly or indirectly from them.

Now, I'd like to share what I've found with you, so that you too can experience the glory of the Old Web, but new again. Sadly, this giant list of links isn't great for RSS, but you should take this opportunity to check out this post on my site and see all the links I've collected!

RSS is pretty rad

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 22:48:29 +0000

Since I discovered RSS back in the early 00s, RSS has been my favorite way to consume the web. It went even a step beyond ad blocking to remove a lot of the annoyances of the web — like having to maintain a bunch of bookmarks and navigate to each one each day, searching around for what has changed.

That's why this RSS feed is really important to me. I feel like the trend with new personal sites is to outright reject everything that happened on the web after 2000 or so. I understand the design to get as far away from the new commercial web as possible, but some of it is actually good. Also, RSS isn't really part of the commercial web anyway. Google proved that years ago when they killed reader. Commerce generally doesn't happen over RSS, and RSS is a safe space for us to play in. It allows us to consume the web on our own terms.

That's why I'm taking a different approach. I'm going in the opposite direction and paying more attention to my RSS feed. I'm going to try to hand craft each RSS entry to make my feed super useful and interesting. I want to build a site that ultimately isn't just a blog and incorporates some modalities of the olden times, like "shrines" and that sort of thing. Content that isn't necessarily timely, but it does get added to my site at a time. The job of my RSS is to let people know what's been added as it gets added, and to do that in a fun way.

The downside is this means every post I write, page I update, or shrine I… enshrine, also needs another piece of content: an entry in the feed. We'll see how long that holds. Wish me luck! 🤞