Thoughts, comments, and the general words of Aurynn Shaw
6 7 8 1 months ago marked the 10th anniversary of my posting Contempt Culture to this very Particular Finest. Over 10 years since I got called out on my own contempt towards PHP by a friend, and faced a challenge to grow and understand the ways that I was making people feel excluded, unsafe, unwanted, and, ultimately, forced out of my industry. 10 years since I got into a Twitter argument 2 with…
I can’t stop thinking about this sentence. I thought of it while I was trying to write about the grief of my lost tomorrows , a snippet of a phrase shaped just right to fit into the nuance obliteration engine of social media. I adore this sort of poetic language, its texture is succinct yet so evocative. I imagine a sun-soaked trail through a warm meadow, trees in the distance, and a sense of…
Hey. Been a while, hasn’t it? Hope you’ve been keeping well. Me? Oh, a bit of this and that, you know how it goes. Actually, no. It’s been four years, now, since I got sick with what was probably COVID , and I … stayed sick. Four years of living with daily fatigue sometimes so disabling that all I can do is lay in bed and drool. Four years of having lost my ability to code, or write, or think.…
You’ve probably noticed I don’t post much here anymore, with the last two entries being announcements of radio appearances, and the entry before that being almost two years old. The last few years have been the longest few decades of my life. The still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been a level of constant background stress that I never knew I could experience. Watching New Zealand go from one of…
Okay this is ALSO VERY COOL . I was just on Radio New Zealand to talk about Mastodon with Robert Gehl . This is SO COOL . You can give it a listen right here!
Hey, I’m still here! You may have noticed Mastodon exploding recently, and some cool radio folk did too. So I ended up on the radio with the admin of aus.social , talking about what it’s like to run a Mastodon instance. How cool is that? You can give it a listen right here! !
Tech, as an industry, is splitting. On the one half, you have people like me — people who looked at cryptocurrency and NFTs, at the massive environmental costs that these, technologies isn’t the right word, but fine, and saw them for the scam they are. And the other half. The half who have bought into the scam wholesale, and keep shouting how big and important and world-changing their scam is. The…
I am pretty fucked up. New Zealand had a 2-month-long lockdown in March of 2020, and I’d just come off my antidepressants at the end of February. Since then, my life has been on an amazingly nosedive trajectory, and I have pretty much fallen apart. I haven’t put myself back together, yet. I’m trying. But it’s not this last year. It’s the last 3 years, since I had a back issue that kept me from…
So here’s fun Today I learned that Contempt Culture , the deeply important critical look at tech culture, was cited in a study . Which you know not something I expected to find out today, y’know? I’m pretty shocked.
I wanted to write a retrospective on the 2010s, a summary of everything from moving to New Zealand (It’s been about a decade! How weird!), the games I’ve played and the books I’ve read and maybe some rumination on my career and the life I’ve been having. And I can write some of that retrospective, since the 2010s were deeply affecting in so many ways. I started my own company, which was a deeply…
I don’t like Dark Souls 3. I’ve been depressed for a lot of the last, let’s say 4 years as of this writing, often to a level best described as “ nonfunctional”. During that time, as well as playing too much Destiny 2 (but that’s an essay for another time), I played through Bloodborne, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls Remastered. I also watch a lot of video essays on YouTube nowadays, and talking about…
So Spiritfarer , the latest game from Thunder Lotus, came out just the other day. It’s an absolutely beautiful sidescroller with hand-drawn animation and art and it’s just a wonder to look at. The music is an exceptional composition by Max LL , who scored their last game Sundered (which I also loved). It’s got some light Metroidvania elements where you need to unlock new abilities to get to new…
On May 14, 2020, my company Eiara launched Cloud Island , a Mastodon instance hosted entirely in New Zealand. It’s a huge achievement for me to have built something that I’d been thinking about and wanting to have for such a long time, a somewhere that’s not Twitter, with its singular drive towards advertising engagement maximisation. A somewhere that puts its customers first, rejecting the idea…
It’s 2020, coronavirus is Intense Af, social distancing is in effect everywhere, and more and more businesses are making the sensible call of “ Work From Home!” Okay. So, the thing about working from home, since this is touted as Such Amazing Thing, is that it sucks on numerous levels, and that suck is not obvious at the get go. My first rule of “ work from home” is DON’T , but, these are…
I used to write. I used to have a space carved out in my life where words poured through nib gently rested upon smooth paper, and ink stained my fingers. I used to have a space carved out in my life where words tremble into being, a gentle plastic click bringing them glowing to life on my screen. I don’t write, anymore. I lost the space where I wrote when I moved to New Zealand a decade ago, when…
I want to preface this piece with, I adore Metroidvania games. My first was Metroid II on the Gameboy waaaaaaaay back in the early 1990s, and I played it through … more times than I can remember, actually. I loved the Metroid Prime series. I’ve loved other games in this genre space. When the Chasm kickstarter landed in the heyday of amazing indie games on Kickstarter, I was instantly sold.…
So, I watched the new Tomb Raider movie over the weekend, and, it was good! It was a silly action-adventure romp that had considerable nods to Indiana Jones, to the videogame reboot, and to the original videogames. It was fun! It also didn’t fall into the obliterating-femininity-to-create-strength trope of the first reboot videogame, which I wrote about here , which was nice. There was the shock…
Well So much for my goal of regularity when it came to these posts. The data is all being collected in the background, but it doesn’t make me sit down and actually write it like I’m supposed to. I’ve started tracking playtime on systems like the PS4 and Nintendo Switch, nothing as advanced as the AWS Lambda that queries the Steam API for me, instead I’m using a bog-standard time tracking app on my…
So. I have some thoughts about videogames I’ve played recently, specifically smaller narrative-centric games colloquially named “ walking simulators”. This post is going to dive into the internal narratives and conclusions for several games, so SPOILERS AHEAD FOR : Shadow of the Colossus Spec Ops: The Line What Remains of Edith Finch Stories Untold Her Story Okay, let’s go. I like videogames that…
Not a lot this week due to BEING VERY TIRED and doing prep work for a talk. Time Played : 6.4 hours Factorio is … I love this game. I hate this game. This game is so much catnip, I often describe it as “ being sad about logistics”. It’s great. I’m playing a new save right now where everything is super hard, takes many more resources than normal, and it’s great but also miserable but also a lot…
Time Played : 55 minutes Yeah, giving up on this game. Might spend the weekend that it’d take to grind out the victory? Probably not. Meh. Scribblenauts Unlimited Time Played : 2.5 hours You know when sometimes you just need a simple, whimsical game that’s sweet and endearing and also lets you summon a furry, friendly Cthulhu to be a pet? Yeah, this game. This is just such a good, sweet, fun game.…
Time Played : 12.6 hours Stellaris is… I think I’m falling out of love with Stellaris. I want to keep enjoying it but every game turns into exactly the same thing, the barren midgame of being unable to complete the Precursor quest, the weak AI , the ridiculous doomstack fleets, the way the framerate crawls like frozen molasses, and the final endless slog of grinding out a win, which I can’t say…
Time Played : 4.7 hours Started playing Stellaris again, after a fairly long haitus. Stellaris is … I like it, ( previously , previouslier ), it’s a fun grand epic space game. It’s sucking me back in for another round, as I get excited for the new expansion. Fallout 4 Time Played : 4.5 hours Started playing Fallout 4 through again, on PC this time around. It’s super pretty, much more lovely than I…
In my last post about gaming stuff, I wrote about how I wanted to write a program to scrape the Steam API and store it so I could look back on the year and see what I’d done. I finally did that thing. Coming in the following weeks will be regular updates on what I played in the last week, what I think about it, and so on and so forth. Should be good times! Stay tuned!
I keep meaning to write these posts, this commentary on the games that most affected me, most touched me, were most present and prevalent in my life through the year. I keep forgetting to do so. I wrote a program to scrape Steam and keep track of what I’ve played, but I never deployed it. I tried to wield the Playstation Network API to scrape what I’ve played and when, but the API no longer…
You might be familiar with tech joke accounts on Twitter, stuff like PHP CEO and I Am Devloper. These are accounts meant to poke fun at specific stereotypes of people in the tech community, in these cases an ignorant CEO and an incompetent developer, by posting concepts that echo strongly within the experiences of people within tech. And I came across a tweet on my timeline today, from the I Am…
If you got to see my talk about Human Driven Development at WDCNZ or LCA , you’ll remember that one of the concepts that I brought up was the idea of “ That Guy”, the team member that has great technical knowledge but no one really wants to talk to. This idea was one of the parts of that talk that resonated really well with a lot of people, where a lot of people could identify where they had had…
So one of the things that I keep getting asked about is when I refer to my past and my future as different people. I speak of the intents of my past, the situations she’s left me in and the struggles I face because of her. I do this because past-aurynn is a real force in my life, a person who had hopes and goals and dreams but with whom I cannot hold a conversation. I can’t talk to her, share my…
This post was originally a tweetstorm! You can find the original tweetstorm right here . Okay let’s dig into this , which is a blog post where he’s talking about the fallout around the recent, ragingly sexist 31c0n (which I’m not linking to from here). Remember, this is the con that thought it was OK to tweet (from the official account) glorifying “ getting wasted”. So, to start with we have…
So you may have noticed last time that I said I’m trying to create complex JSON objects from within Terraform. In this case, I really want to be able to create an AWS ECS container definition, which looks a bit like this (copied from the AWS docs, here ) { "name": "wordpress", "links": [ "mysql" ], "image": "wordpress", "essential": true, "portMappings": [ { "containerPort": 80, "hostPort": 80 }…
One of the things I do as part of Eiara is write a lot of Terraform , an infrastructure definition language, to provide a sensible baseline cloud instantiation of infrastructure and resources. I’m quite fond of Terraform as a tool, even though it still has a decent number of weirdnesses and edge cases. If you haven’t seen it you should look at Charity’s Blog about Terraform for a great rundown on…