I write essays to no one about video games, technology, the internet, and other things in the world.
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
Just a couple of updates this round of sites that dropped off the list. Links what done broke IndieSeek.xyz directory Maya's subscriptions 👋😢
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
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…
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. cinni's links Links - Kalechips Links that are weird now Most of these have…
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…
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…
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…
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…