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Pretty Good Hat

The bow of a yellow paddleboard sits on very calm water, with somewhat hazy air.

I got out for a paddleboard session early one morning this week. The water was perfectly calm and the air was hazy from wildfires, but had improved some from the day before.

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.

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.

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.

My Destiny 2 hunter reclines in an opulent emote, surveying a landscape of otherworldly plateaus studded with flowers.

A few Destiny 2 characters arrayed against a backdrop of flowery plateaus and strange Vex structures.

A close cropped photo of part of a keyboard next to a coffee cup.

A couple of bees rummage for pollen in the purple, anemone-like flower at the top of a blooming artichoke.

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.