Existential Dread

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Good morning friends. Every so often on my blog I have a post that I put zero effort into syndicating. This is going to be one of those posts. So if you are here and reading it… that likely means you are amongst my most loyal and devoted readers. In the before times I was your average mild-mannered aging fat software developer and manager, working out of a maze of cubes just like everyone else. My team has NEVER needed to be in an office to do our work, but we existed in a culture that placed a high premium on “butts in seats”. When the pandemic hit we were the first team to go fully remote, and as such acted as the canaries in the coal mine to vet how well it would work. The thing is… it worked amazingly well and at least in part due to some planning and heavy use of the Teams environment… we sort of set the pace for the other teams as they went remote. Now we scan forward and I’ve been working fully remotely for over three years at this point.

For a while, I tried to do a hybrid schedule of a few days in the office and the Lion’s share remote… but the days in the office were just giant wastes of time. I cannot really tell you when I last was in the office, but when I was it was for a very short in-person meeting before going right back to my home office. Next week however I am going to have to be present and in person for a training course that is only offered once a year. So that means I will be in a room with other humans from 8 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday… and I have to admit I am terrified of this. It is summoning forth so much anxiety that I have begun having “Return to Office” nightmares very obviously sparked by it. This morning I woke up about an hour before the alarm was set to go off and just could not go back to sleep. My mind reeling with all sorts of minutiae that I was trying to figure out how to deal with.

The thing that is terrifying me the most… is knowing that I am going to have essentially all of my work peers in the same training class with me. They are all very extroverted folks and many of them have said more than once how much they miss being in the office, or how much they miss seeing me on the regular. The thing that terrifies me the most above everything else… is contemplating dealing with lunch. I know I will need to run away and hide by myself in order to calm down enough to confront the afternoon session. However once upon a time I was really good at masking my antisocial and introverted tendencies. I pretty regularly went out to lunch with coworkers, because it was the sort of thing that was expected. Working remotely for three years has caused me to jettison behaviors that were stressing me out all along… and I am terrified of what this week is going to do to me mentally.

The thing is… it will probably be fine. I do this thing where I make problems out to be way bigger than they are out of the anxiety of actually doing it. The hardest part about attending anything… is getting out the front door. When I am in the situation I tend to relax into the environment and go with the flow, but I know it is going to be way more stressful than it used to be because I am simply not adapted to it anymore. Truth be told I barely leave the freaking house. On the weekend we make a few trips out for supplies, but during the work week, the furthest I am out of the house is hanging out in the backyard with Greybie. I’m trying to tell my brain to calm down and that everything is going to be fine… but my anxiety is working everything up into a frenzy.

The other thing that is stressing me out is… normally next week would be the week I lock down everything into place for Blaugust but it is VERY unlikely that I will blog at all, given the tumultuous shift in my schedule. So I am trying to scurry around this week and make sure everything is finished because next week… is essentially going to be this void. I will come home from training every night and crash, and will likely be unable to summon cogent thoughts… let alone write something worth reading. Anyways… every so often I make one of these posts where I am brutally honest with my readers. I never syndicate them because it feels weird to let you all into my thought process, let alone publicly broadcast my weaknesses to the world.

My blog is often times therapeutic. There is something about writing things down that allows me to turn them over in my head and process them a bit better. Usually, when I make one of these posts I start to feel better almost immediately, and I am hoping that this time it has that effect as well. I shared a picture of Josie in part because I felt the need to do something to apologize for this giant wall of text. Also, I sort of wish I had her life because she does not give a fuck about anything most of the time. Anyways… I’ve wound down this little written panic attack for now. Tomorrow I will likely write about game things. Today however is devoted to existential dread.

All Over the Map

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Good Morning Friends! I was a bit all over the place when it came to gaming this weekend. I did not make nearly as much progress as I thought I would in Guild Wars 2. Essentially I wrapped up Bitterfrost Frontier and Lake Doric, which now plants me firmly in the middle of Draconis Mons. I have some bad memories of this section of Living World 3. Specifically I remember there was a quest chain where I had to change up my keybindings in order to get through it. By default I have an option turned on that makes my ground target effects center on whatever I happen to be targetting. This is super useful when it comes to not having to fiddle with aiming them. However there was a sequence I can remember when I was flying up in the air and having to target specific things on the ground which required me to turn this all off. So I will have to figure how HOW I do that… by the time I get to that part of the quest.

I am still playing a bit of Honkai Star Rail every day, and still slowly working on trying to get Coffin Guy aka Luocha. It is not necessarily that I even like him as a character, but I want access to a second healer. In my travels of trying to pull for him, I did manage to pick up Pela which is cool. I bonded with her as a character during the whole Museum event. Speaking of events there is a new one starting today that gives you double Calyx rewards. Like as far as events go it is boring… but it is a decent time to stock up on resources. Unfortunately only the first 12 Calyx battles count towards the double rewards, so I guess I know what I will be doing for the next few days at least… stockpiling resources.

One of the cool things about Mastodon in general is that it has a heavy indie dev presence. The other day the very awesome Megan Fox (the game dev one) was doing a thing where she was boosting indie devs that had less than 100 followers. One of these was Craig, who works on a game that recently hit early access on Steam called Trinity Fusion. So I picked it up and have played quite a bit of it over the weekend. Essentially it has a lot in common with Dead Cells and Hades, and there are some really interesting options. I think maybe the difficulty curve might be a bit overtuned especially if you choose the “easy” mode because there isn’t really much of a difference from the normal mode. The art style reminds me a bit of Flashback for reasons I can’t fully explain. There are a lot of interesting weapon options, some of them clearly better than others but that is always going to happen. I will be interested to see how this one evolves over time.

I also spent some time this weekend screwing around with Yuzu the Nintendo Switch emulator. It had been quite awhile since I last touched it, and lord has it improved during that time. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the emulator is capable of latching onto the gyro sense in my Dual Sense PS5 controller. I remember when I was playing through Breath of the Wild on Cemu I had to use some monstrocity where I latched into the gyro in my android phone to complete those puzzles. I mean I could just play all of these games on my switch, but I know with Cemu the ability to remove weapon durability from Breath of the Wild made that game infinitely more enjoyable. I need to dive into the mods for Yuzu and see if I can find something similar for Tears of the Kingdom. I have to say playing on my 3080 equipped PC… is so much prettier and smoother than playing on a native Switch.

Lastly I spent some time this weekend screwing around on the Mage in Last Epoch. I’ve decided to follow a build guide and go all in on lightning damage. So far it is just immensely fun to shock everything to death and watch the lightning damage arc between oncoming monsters. I am not sure how far I will make it with this character. I spent the entire podcast on Saturday playing it and am now around level 21 ish. I’ve chosen my specialization and went Sorc but am still picking up basics from the Mage tree. I am curious to see how this character feels once I get a decent amount of ward preservation on it, because at the moment it feels a wee bit squishy.

Last week was a bit of a slog, in spite of only being three days long. I am hoping this week will be a little less compacted and stressful. I know I essentially have to prepare for being in training all week the week after next. I’ve not done anything in person for that many days in a row for awhile, so that will be its own sort of stress. I hope you all have a pheomenal week, and I hope that maybe I can pick one of the many things I have been doing to actually focus on.

AggroChat #441 – Shackled by Tradition

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Featuring: Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are down Ash and Ammo but carry on with what we originally thought would be a short show.  The curse of saying that means that without a doubt we end up going over. We start off talking about Tam’s new toy, the PlayDate Console, and some of the interesting design choices it presents.  From there Bel talks about the Diablo 4 reveal trailer and the weak reception.  This leads to a larger discussion about issues with Blizzard as a whole and how everything somewhat feels like short-sighted decision-making. Bel and Tam talk about Trinity Fusion a game that feels like a halfway point between Deadcells and Hades that Bel stumbled upon through Mastodon. We dive into a large topic about how games end up shackled by specific traditions and how they have limited various designs. Then we get into a few shorter topics like Gamepad.Club is a lovely community if you are looking for a place to land on Mastodon.  Then we all give you a plea to watch Nimona.  We are likely going to talk about that movie in a full spoiler sense next week.

Topics Discussed

  • The PlayDate Console
    • Interesting Design Ideas
  • Diablo 4 Season 1 Reveal
    • Weak Reception
  • Problems at Blizzard in General
  • Trinity Fusion
    • Deadcells meets Hades
  • Shackled by Tradition
  • Join Gamepad.Club
  • Watch Nimona

Eternal Beta Tester

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Yesterday Threads came out which is the Meta/Facebook/Instagram equivalent to Twitter. I tried it so you don’t have to… but let’s be honest I also sort of sign up for every social network that comes out. Someone might view this as me being fickle or indecisive, but it is just in my personal mindset to want to get in and poke around with a lot of different things. While I was a WoW Tourist for years, it did not stop me from playing every new MMORPG that came out even though I had no real intentions (until Rift that is) of actually leaving that game. Threads is not exactly what I would consider good, but it does seem like there are people who love the damned thing. My spouse is a teacher, and apparently among her friends… they are completely enamored with it. It also seems to be a big hit amongst the celeberatti types.

At its core… Threads is essentially “what if Instagram was Twitter”. My core complaint with Instagram and part of why I only use it for idly scrolling… is that most of the posts that I end up seeing are not from people that I followed, and even then nothing is in chronological order. Twitter for me was very much an “in the moment” experience, and focused entirely on the people that I followed and the things that they might have been retweeting. There was a sense of immediacy to the platform and if something was more than a few hours old… you might as well not respond to it because it was already “old news”. Instagram and Threads are applications decided to have some algorithm feeding you content, in the order in which it deems most relevant. On the day Threads opened… most of my feed was made up of completely random people that I did not know at all. On day two it started to feed me more of the people I was following… but also still a lot of randomness. None of this is conducive to a reasonable replacement for Twitter.

I feel like it is VERY important to understand that I have never used official apps with Twitter. Algorithmic fucking about and promoted Tweets were never part of my user experience. Instead, I had a very user-crafted experience and I was able to tweak the site and my TweetDeck layout to match my interests. This is also why I use Mastodon and what I expect out of a social media experience. Coming from that background… Threads is a completely unusable mess of an application. There is also the problem that it is mobile-only… and I really don’t use social media that much on a mobile device. Sure it is great for idly browsing while laying in bed waiting for sleep to claim me… but during the day I am almost always using it on a computer through a web browser. I didn’t start using Instagram at all until I could access it and upload through a browser… which I did by tricking the browser to think I was on an Android phone. I am not willing to jump through those sorts of hoops for Threads, because it just doesn’t add anything of value to my life. In fact, I had uninstalled it from my phone until this morning when I decided I wanted some screenshots… and now have uninstalled it again.

Blue Sky on the other hand… is charming. There is something about that platform. It has a vibe not unlike what those heady early days of Mastodon felt in 2018. Granted it is a different type of user that is hanging out on the platform than the deeply FOSS/Anarchist vibe that was on early Mastodon, but still it has a unique thing going on. Right now I am mostly there because the handful of friends that were unwilling to convert to Mastodon seem to have taken up residence there. It is still feature-limited, and I still think the At Protocol is the Betamax to ActivityPub’s VHS and will ultimately lose… but it is interesting enough to keep me logging in periodically. There is still an awful lot of “talking about other social media networks” going on regardless of your platform. Things are in a state of flux and I guess it is natural… but I also was sort of happy to have reached a point on the Fediverse where it was coming up less and less.

I think my core problem with Blue Sky or BSky as most users seem to call it… is the interface. I hate the default Twitter interface and BSky seems to be a carbon copy of it. I never understood how people could use that interface… or the default Twitter app… and was always shocked at how few people used TweetDeck or any of the third-party apps like Fenix or even HootSuite. Among the options I have found so far with Blue Sky, I think TokiMeki is maybe the best. It essentially allows you to create a multi-column view like you would it tweet deck. Some of the layout of the site bugs me a bit but I have gotten used to it. What I don’t love however is the lag involved with using any of the third-party options.

Another option is something called SkyFeed, and thus far I do not love it. I might learn to love it eventually though if I ever figure out how to make my own custom feeds. Part of the claim to fame with this interface and Blue Sky, in general, is you can roll your own feeds and assign some pretty detailed filtering parameters to them. You can then either publish your feed globally or simply use it privately. I’ve subscribed to a GameDev one and a Cat Pics one and they both work pretty well. Skyfeed has a helper tool for generating feeds so even if I don’t end up using this as my final multi-column UI, I might use it to help build some feeds.

I think the biggest challenge for me personally with Blue Sky as a whole though… is that I don’t really feel like I belong there. I mean I am sure this is partially just a me thing, but as a platform goes it seems to be dominated by the most charming shitposters. All I really want to do on social media is spout off my random nonsense about the video games I am playing, and comment on other people’s random nonsense. While I can in fact do this thing, it also doesn’t really feel like that is the vibe of the platform as a whole. There is a certain oily sheen of Twitter clout that I recognized when stepping aboard and does not really fit what I want anymore. I kinda want a bunch of unabashed geeks talking about their super grognard and arcane exploits. I have no interest in appearing cool anymore, and I am just not sure I fit into the community that is gathering there.

Part of that is absolutely on me though, because I am not sure if I want to fit in. I found a home and it is a delightful one, and while I keep poking around looking at other things because it is my nature… I am always happy to return to the blue-grey interface of the default advanced mode Mastodon client. I think what I daydream about is a future where maybe my sticking around on Gamepad.club doesn’t mean not being able to hang out with the friends that didn’t connect with the Fediverse as a whole. My hope with the focus on federation among the current crop of platforms… means at some point they will all standardize on a single federation method, or at least that there will be gateways and bridges that are built between them. I dream of an era when we all get to settle into whatever social platform feels the most comfortable to us… and also still get to share conversations freely.

I would love to say just create an account on Gamepad.club and hang out there with me. I’ve helped with this instance in order to have a comfy place for my friends to land, but I also am tired of being the guy who is constantly trying to recruit folks away from whatever platform they are enjoying. I had come to realize that I was just going to lose access to a number of friends, and I had been okay with that… but the last few weeks and the continued dumpster fire that is Twitter sorta ripped open some old wounds. However, I am sorry to say… I won’t be coming to Threads and while I am lurking there… I won’t be adopting Blue Sky as my new home. My home is and will continue to be Gamepad.club. That is where I feel most comfortable and honestly feel most loved. I’ve tried almost every social platform that has come out over the last few years save for the more toxic ones like Gab or of course Truth.Social… and none of them have done it for me. On Gamepad we have a little over 100 users and most of them are active, and it just feels comfy.

The Fediverse can be a wild place, but it also feels like home. I love gamepad and I love all of the other bright little hubs out there that folks have coalesced. I love how open and free folks seem to be in their discussions. I love that folks seem to be genuine with each other and are willing to tear down the layers of defense that we threw up while using Twitter. I don’t want to be cool anymore, and I am not sure if I ever wanted to be. I don’t have to even give the slightest fuck about what my follow count looks like as compared to someone else. I just want to be me, sitting on my virtual porch waving at other delightful geeks and nerds as they pass by. Maybe that is a weirdly utopian viewpoint of the Fediverse, but it represents how I feel about it most of the time. Sure there are little wars that get waged between instance admins that are diametrically opposed on a given issue… but being on our small little island we are often insulated from a lot of that. I trust Gazimoff, Aywren, and Scopique who I share admin/mod duties and I am always happy to welcome a new face that shows up on our shores.

It isn’t perfect, and I realize our little corner of the internet won’t be for everyone. However it is where I live now, and while I might visit other places… it is the only place where you can always find me. I still hope for a day when a bridge gets built between my home and wherever you call home, but I’m not willing to abandon my peace of mind to keep looking for a mythical realm that everyone will simultaneously decide to call home. Like I said the other day… there is no new Twitter, that time is over and you have to figure out where it is that you call your home.