Darcy Casselman's weblog. Just like old times.
Alternatively: YouTube Music Playlist
It’s that time again! Grab a cup of cocoa, relax and enjoy some festive music to keep you warm on a cold winter night. And strap in, chummer. Maybe we’ll even jack into puterspace between the sleighbells and carol sings. Those flashing lights on rackmounted servers are just as festive as those on snow-covered trees.
Cover image is Christmas Tech Tree by siulzz. Liner notes under the cut.
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
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.