I really like this piece by Graham Smith at Jank: “Tinkering with games is as good as playing them”. Having spent so many hours working on my own Destiny 2-related data and stats tools, there is something very resonant in the notion that the computer is not just the vehicle for playing the game, but for doing things about the game:
I’m defining tinkering broadly here as anything that involves reaching beneath your computer’s glossy façade. The machine, which may be in front of you right now, is pretending that it is a tool of simple productivity, an obelisk of user-friendly efficiency. It is not. Your computer is 8000 rats in a burlap sack. To tinker is to reach inside the bag, remove a rat, and make friends with it.
If you’ve ever spent several weeks trying to build the perfect collection of Skyrim mods only to then not follow through with playing the game, you might be a tinkerer, too. Perhaps you’ve spent several hours curating your Steam Wishlist, sorting your library into categories, and selecting the perfect bootup video for your Steam Deck, and now you still spend more time browsing your game collection than actually playing it. Don’t feel bad! You, too, are a tinkerer.
My tinker-to-play ratio is pretty high, and tinkering has been one of the ways for me to learn a bunch of my current skills quite deeply. I think affinity for the tinkering is also one reason I’m just not attracted to the AI-enabled shortcuts to the product. I don’t want to simply have made a thing; I want to work through the making of the thing.
Iris does some really nice things for unifying catalogs, but IMO this key feature is nearly worth the price of admission all by itself.
I know I’m ostentatiously late to this understanding, but boy, Tailscale is pretty cool. I had been tinkering with making Navidrome available via Synology’s reverse proxy, kept failing to get it working, and finally just installed the Tailscale package. I logged in on the Synology, logged in on my phone, and — just like that — can reach my server from the grocery store parking lot on my iPhone. This living in the future is pretty good, sometimes.
Doing some cable accounting in the network cubbyhole, I found that the previous homeowner here had run a cat5 cable with an ethernet plug at one end to a phone socket at the other end — my office! One RJ45 jack later, I have wired network at my desk.
Today at Crucial Tracks: Monster Ballads, by Josh Ritter
I have a live version of this song from Josh’s 2020 Hell Yeah! album that’s so deeply searching and beautiful, with Sam Kassirer performing this delicate piano part that just lifts me up.
Today at Crucial Tracks: Sabotage, by Beastie Boys
What’s your go-to song for getting ready in the morning?
This is more of a gotta go, gotta go now kind of song, but it’s definitely right for some kind of mornings.
I got into a Destiny 2 raid with friends for the first time in a while, last night. We pretty much breezed through Garden of Salvation until the final encounter, which took quite a while of trial and error, as we are all a little rusty with it (some of me rustier than others). It’s great to hang out for a few hours together, and finishing the raid (eventually) was a really nice bonus.
Today at Crucial Tracks: Across the Wire, by Calexico
Share a song that sounds like your favorite weather.
What a provocative prompt. I think one of my favorite weathers is a clear sky in pre-dawn light, a cool morning before a warming day.
Alternative photo apps haven’t really stuck for me, but I am really appreciating a lot of what No Fusion does, so far. The interface feels pretty good, allowing for fairly natural feeling adjustments, and it has a nice set of film-like modes. It also claims to have a unique processing pipeline that improves detail and color. Does it? I don’t know; I’m not making direct comparisons, yet, but I do like what I’m getting from it. It feels deliberate enough and produces good enough output that it scratches a little of the same itch as using a bigger camera like my Fuji.