the flying squirrel

Playstation Played Out?

There’s been a shift. I can feel it. Things are changing. Nothing will ever be the same.

A very long time ago, I got a Playstation. Actually, my parents got it for me near the end of my university career when I was generally pretty miserable. I played some games. It was fun.

A few years later, I got a PS2. That died, but I got another one. The second one died in the middle of my Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas play-through.

(I vaguely recall finishing that, but I’m not sure how. I didn’t get another PS2, and the PS3 I got didn’t have backwards compatibility. I guess I can play it on my phone now…)

(Second aside, I kinda miss my old blog. I definitely miss friends reading along and chiming in on my nonsense. I turned off comments a long time ago, because ugh, but you can always hmu on mastodon…)

I held off a bit on the PS3 because it was stupid expensive at launch. I asked my parents to buy me one for Christmas when they stripped out PS2 support and dropped the price a bit. (I got them a Wii about the same time…).

I held out about a year before buying a PS4, eventually lured by the call of Dragon Age: Inquisition.

I haven’t bought a PS5 yet. I’ve been kind of assuming there would be an attractive mid-gen hardware refresh like the PS3. Or even a game I just needed to play like the PS4. Neither has really happened. The mid-gen hardware refreshes came out, and they introduced a “slim” model that actually raised the price. Then they just announced the PS5 Pro, which is like $1000 and doesn’t seem to be that much better.

I’ve never been that much of a self-declared “gamer” or anything, but getting a Playstation and playing games on it is something I’ve been doing for a rather long time. And when I switched over to Linux (something like 17 years ago), my whole thing was that it didn’t matter that I couldn’t play games on my computer. I’ve got a Playstation for that.

And Nintendo consoles too, but they’re kind of a different thing in my head.

The interesting thing is now I can actually play games on my computer. I just did a hardware upgrade on my desktop that has the side benefit that games play really nice now.

Valve, as much as I’m not super-keen on their DRM, has been putting a lot of resources into making sure I can play games on my computer. And I’ve got a few hundred games in my Steam library already, without even really trying.

So the conclusion I’m rapidly coming to is maybe I’m not a Playstation guy anymore. (And yeah, it feels like an identity thing). And maybe I’ll just put the money I’d planned to blow on a PS5 towards a Steamdeck instead.

Featured image is 64/365 PlayStation generation by Ninac26

YouTube Channels I’ve Discovered Via My Two-Year-Old

Look. I’m well aware of Raffi’s admonitions about screentime. Sometimes you need to distract a kid long enough to get things done. We can’t all be perfect parents, okay?

The little guy’s relationship with YouTube has evolved quite a bit over his short existence to date. We started off in the YouTube Kids ghetto, with your Sesame Streets and your Teletubbies and your Cocomelons and your holy trinity of Ms Rachel, Blippi and Meekah. YouTube Kids, tho, is a terrible interface. And as he’s started to develop interests beyond nursery rhymes and alphabets that YouTube Kids was wholly uninterested in satisfying.

I’ve made a channel for him under my account, so he can have his own subscriptions and playlists and history. That is to say, so that I can have that for him. I’m calling the shots here, although his interests and preferences are asserting themselves more and more.

2023 Wrapped

I can’t even remember the last time I did bullets…

Reader, I apologize. I haven’t really been keeping you up to date.
I’m not going to really get into a lot of detail today, tho.
But maybe some broad strokes.
2023 was basically a continuation of 2020.
2020 Wrapped:
- Bought a house
- Decided (with Ellen, of course) to (at least stop trying not) to have a kid
- Other stuff you’ve probably heard of. It’s not over.
About the house…
- It turned out 2021 was a terrible year to get anyone to help you fix up a house.
- 2022 wasn’t much better, but we were able to engage a buider and, by the end of the year, gut the place, cleaning up the mould (most of which we knew about when we bought) and the mouse droppings (which we didn’t).
- So 2023 was spent getting a design to the point where we could submit a building permit and finding people and materials to do the job of giving us a place we can actually live.
- 2024 will, with any luck at all, be the year my wife and son and I will live together in our own house.
- We are, of course, blessed to have a place to live. And especially to own a house. And to be able to even attempt all of this. It’s not been easy.
- But, you know, I sold my house in 2016. (That’s a blog post I wrote for friends and family at the time. I decided to unprotect it for context-related linking). It’ll have been an eight year journey to moving into this house.
About the kid…
- He’s an absolute, goddamn delight. And exhausting. But utterly delightful.
Not sure what more to say.
Work’s fine.
Doctor Who is back.
I played a lot of Picross. And Spider Solitaire. And Sudoku apps.
And Pokemon Go.
You should really listen to my Christmas mixtape. It’s good, I promise.
Happy New Year.

Christmas Mixtape 2023

Here we are, in the bleak midwinter. What better time than now to put on some fun music while we crank up the IR heater to take the chill off.

Cover image by DaPuglet (Tina) Santas Secret Weapon used under it’s Creative Commons license. CC-BY-SA.

The Christmas Mixtape is back for its seventh incarnation. It’s up on Youtube Music and on Mixcloud. And Mixcloud gives me a handy little widget so you don’t even have to leave the page to listen:

I’m also going to dump Youtube music videos of the songs where I can find them. They’re not necessarily the same version, but given that I’ve listened to these dozens of times already, it’s kinda cool to see visual interpretations…

Thoughts on Social Media 5/?: X-it

When I started this series, I had a rough outline in my head about what the posts would be, but that was weeks ago and Elon just re-christened Twitter as X and who even knows anything anymore?

I’ve pretty much resolved that the Fediverse, in some form, will be my main hang. I’m on mastodon (mastodon.social, even! The main one!) but I’m not necessarily wedded to it. I fee like, right now, the software comes closest to what I want out of a social media site. Actually, that’s not true. Based on my limited experience to date, I think my preference lies with Hometown, which is a mastodon form with a couple features I really want. Like exclusive lists.

Exclusive lists were a 100% requirement for me on Twitter, because I feel like my main Twitter feed is about what I want it to be, but I also want to kinda follow discourse in things that make me happy. Like Doctor Who or Star Trek. So I have Doctor lists. I don’t necessarily want the people on those lists in my feed, tho. With vanilla mastodon, you need to have someone in your feed to put them in a list.

You can make hashtag columns, tho. That’s what I’m using right now to make up that functionality. And my timeline isn’t really busy enough yet that just following anyone who seems interesting is a problem.

It’s not my intention to stay on mastodon.social. The plan is to run my own server with Ellen, but that’s not making a lot of progress, despite the fact that we’re paying for the server hosting. I should figure that out sometime.

I see a lot of people complaining about this or that thing they don’t like about some social media site and I can’t help but think that, ultimately, the solution to whatever that is far likelier to actually happen in the Fediverse than any walled garden, VC-funded social startup. Not least because, if you have the time and skill, you can just make it yourself.

Granted, this is an argument only a software developer is going to love, but, you know, guilty as charged. While I’m not personally going to be forking mastodon any time soon, it just seems to me that if you’re going to move to a social platform, nothing else seems worth the energy.

This is doubly true of media entities and institutions that actually stand to benefit by owning their media platform. JFC, why go to Threads? I know why, it’s because you already have an Instagram account. But you know how that story is going to end.

I get that it’s a little complicated to get started, because the first thing you need to do is pick a server. If you’re reading this, you could probably join my server when it’s up and running, but it’s not, so that’s no help. I’m happy enough with mastodon.social for now, but I’m not 100% convinced it is the best place to start. So maybe here are a few suggestions:

If you’re in Ottawa, ottawa.place. It’s run by cool, smart people.
If you’re elsewhere in Canada, mstdn.ca. I don’t know the admins personally, but they seem cool. And it’s got some level of backing from CIRA, which is not nothing.
If you’re Canadian and don’t mind paying a bit of money and being party of something, cosocial.ca. A member-run co-op social media site is a fascinating experiment, and again, it’s run by cool people.

If you’re not Canadian, I guess I don’t have an answer for you right now. There probably is one, but I don’t have it. Check the moderation policies. Check the home feed. See if you like the vibe. Moving servers isn’t that hard. So maybe just sign up for mastodon.social and get a feel for things.

One last note, as this has gotten over-long, I’ve gone to the trouble of talking about the Fediverse, but only actually talked about Mastodon. That’s most of my experience, although I will say I really, really like Pixelfed, if you’re into an Instagram sort of thing that isn’t being bled to death by Meta. I’m @flyingsquirrel@pixelfed.social, if you want to follow me there (or on Mastodon. Or RSS…)

Featured image is X by Janet McKnight. CC-BY.