Recapping October 2023
Well now. What a month. Lots of things happening in my professional life that I'll be announcing next month. Also our second kiddo is teaching themselves to crawl, often while they are still asleep at 4am, which has meant quite a few restless nights. I've been playing fewer games, but listening and reading to plenty! We've also been fitting in some fun autumnal, halloweeney adventures.
? Listening To
The poster's guide to the new internet from The Vergecast
I was blown away by this pithy take on one way to think about the future of the internet. At first it sounds a bit absurd, then kind of lazy, and then finally not just brilliant but essential.
Arnold Schwarzenegger on WTF
I knew him from movies, and as the Governator, but I realised I knew very little about Arnie, and had never heard him being interviewed before. He's a fascinating guy, much funnier and smarter than I gave him credit for. I was glad to hear Marc challenge him on some of his political positions, and I came away really respecting him, even though I largely don't agree with him.
KOTOR on A More Civilized Age
I discovered this long-running podcast last year. When Andor was blowing my mind every episode, they were there to help me pick up the pieces with great critical analysis. With the AMPTP continuing to fail to resolve the SAG-AFTRA strike, they've paused coverage of struck work and instead are doing a serialised playthrough of 2003's Knights of The Old Republic. Two of the four hosts have never played it, so it's been fun listening to them visit the story and mechanics for the first time. I'm enjoying the trip down memory lane, but also realising that this game is much deeper mechanically than I ever understood when I played it nearly twenty years ago.
Hard Fork
A tech podcast by the New York Times, it's funny and usually insightful. I think I am less excited about generative A.I. than this show, but all the same, an easy recommendation.
? Grooving To
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- Olivia Rodrigo – just discovered her recently, so fun and sharp
- Tune-Yards – I've been sticking this on on shuffle for a bit of energy, really interesting production and so deeply, fluently musical
- NIN – New (to me) album With Teeth, one of their first. Some incredible bangers* (* bleak, compelling music)
- Muse – I was really into their dark emotive music in my moody teenage years but I think that as they've aged, they've leaned into the silly fun of their vibe and I realised to my delight recently that I still enjoy 'em.
- Dark Horizon by James Swallow – ably-written pulp thriller with a couple of generic twists and a good sense of pace. A not-very-guilty-tbh pleasure.
- The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorow – I've been aware of Cory for years, mostly as a tech journalist, but this book and another recent one (his output is bananas) Chokepoint Capitalism were mind-blowing, both in their clear, stark explanation of just how bad it is, but also their hopeful notes on paving a way forward and building a new, good internet that works for everyone.
- ✉️ Garbage Day – funny and insightful analysis about the internet and internet culture in a newsletter. Free version is great.
- ? Fuck you, we're not paying – I've been waiting for this! An inside scoop on what went down in Unity in the aftermath of runtimegate.
- ? Unsung Secret of Great Games – nice article by musician and games journalist Kirk Hamilton about the inherent musicality of gameplay.
- ? Pluralistic – Technopolitical firebrand Cory Doctorow's blog, posts at least once a week.
- ✉️ Installer by The Verge – Weekly newsletter. Like this blog but better.
- Baldur's Gate 3 – I'm about 2/3 of the way through the first act I reckon, but need to give it more time.
- Shadows of Doubt – On paper this is a game created for me, but I found the input and text size a little difficult to handle on the Steam Deck in handheld mode, so I'm going to try this again soon with keyboard and mouse on a full-size screen.
- Psychonauts 2 – I loved Doublefine PsychOdyssey earlier in the year and picked this up a few months ago but haven't gotten into it. Yet.
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? Apps and That
I've been trying a few great bits and pieces recently.
First of all, the new MacOS Sonoma has some nice features, letting me "install" web apps onto the dock. I know Electron has existed for years, but this is much easier, more stable and the native OS support really helps. Different profiles in Safari is nice too – again, nicking a beloved feature (of Chrome, but without the data harvesting).
I've spent a lot of time this year trying to get my internet habits in good working order. While I've been subscribing to some interesting newsletters and RSS feeds (more on that below) I've been struggling with my Wallabag instance; a self-hosted Read It Later app. It's incredibly slow and clunky, and so I've switched to Omnivore, a more modern open-source alternative, which has lovely iOS, MacOS and web apps, tracks reading progress, can read articles aloud, gives you nice tools for labelling and highlighting text.
Speaking of internet habits, it's not lost on me that I'm doing this while the internet is going through an incredibly creative and destructive upheaval. One of the horses I'm betting on is Mastodon, or at least ActivityPub. I haven't found it as fizzy and sticky as Twitter, but I love its crunchy distributed open-source vibe, and I'm continually tweaking my Following list to improve my experience. This just got easier and nicer with the release of the open-source Ice Cubes app for MacOS and iOS. Free and pretty; it's in its early stages so there are some slightly rough edges, but so far so great.
I've been juggling a lot of deadlines recently, and so installed xbar, a little taskbar utility for MacOS that does a deceptively simple thing; it will run a script (python, bash, etc) in a given location at a frequency you specify (seconds, minutes, hours, days etc) and if that script returns a string, it'll output that value on the title bar. Sounds dull, but they've a gallery full of cool scripts you can plug in and tweak.
Another great MacOS utility I picked up recently was Raycast, a recommendation on Installer, the great newish newsletter from The Verge. It's like Spotlight with an App Store. It's got oodles of prewritten plugins that work great. I've been using it to rapidly lash notes into Logseq, update JIRA tickets, jot down wee notes. Hopefully when (if!?) life calms a little I'll probe its other offerings.
? Not For Me
I tried and bounced off of Thunderbird this month. It's a powerful open-source Outlook-replacement; a mail client, usenet client, contacts manager and calendar app. I found it unintuitive to use and overloaded with features compared to the very chilled-out experience of Apple Mail. Maybe I'm doing it wrong? Lemme know!
? Reading books
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? Reading online
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?️ Playing
As I mentioned at the top, I haven't had much time or headspace for playing games this month (more on that next month), but I was lucky enough to nab an invite to Puzzmo, the new project from Zach Gage and some other very talented folks. Reading their manifesto, I was reminded of this great design teardown I read a few months ago by veteran game designer and author Raph Koster: Why NYT's Connections makes you feel bad. Crosswords and puzzles have been huge for years, but Wordle really kicked things into the mainstream, and yet I've been disappointed by projects rushing in to fill the demand. Zach is a really thoughtful designer and artist and unsurprisingly myself and Nathalie have been really enjoying making our way through Puzzmo's puzzles every day.
Oh! Not a game, but after over a decade of struggling to use Steam on a Mac, it's amazing this year to finally have a GPU-accelerated version running like butter. Thanks Valve!
✅ My current backlog
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? Next month:
? Might pick up Super Mario Bros. Wonder? If not, I definitely owe Baldur's Gate 3 another shot.
? Still doing my annual "will I? won't I?" vacillation on NaNoWriMo. Currently considering a simple piece of interactive fiction using Ink with the same word count.
✂️ Likely getting ahead of Christmas with some christmassy crafts.
OH, AND BUT ALSO
I shared the Arnie interview with a friend of mine who pointed out that he has a well-known and respected daily newsletter with evidence-based health advice.