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This post is kind of a brain dump / rant of seemingly random musings, but they all stem from the same thing: entertainment.
After a long hiatus, I am back into both a reading (books... Gemini reading has still been daily) and a gaming kick. The reading was still going on a bit, just at a snail's pace because I just could not get into the novel, The Scarlet Letter. I read this years ago and hated it and struggled to understand it, but wanted to try again. This time, the only thing I struggled to understand was the author's intro, detailing some of his life and how he came to write the book. The plot, however, gave me little trouble this time around (from the comprehension perspective, at least... the plot itself is awful, hence the pace). I simply didn't have the vocabulary when reading it all those years ago. Now I am reading a sci-fi novel and it is sucking me in, which is refreshing.
For the gaming that I mentioned above, I'm back to retro gaming on my PSP. I'm grinding my way through Monster Hunter Freedom, and having a blast fighting dinosaur-esque monsters, gathering materials, crafting and farming (both in the 'off the land' sense and in the gaming sense of collecting crafting materials).
Part of me wants to play some modern games, but I'm not sure I will, much. Reasons being:
Retro nostalgia
Distaste for consumerism
Impracticality of growing my large entertainment backlog
Privacy
Modern Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)
Minimalism
Burnout on creative personal projects
There's a satisfying nostalgic feeling when playing childhood games on the same system you've had for years or decades.
Having a large collection of games and books is stimulating to admire, but they take up a lot of space in aggregate. I'd also like to be able to look at my collections one day and say to myself:
> I've read / played all of those.
This'll never happen if I keep expanding my collection. Life is also simpler when you make an attempt to stop accumulating possessions, even just a little.
I've touched on the privacy aspects of retro gaming before in another post.
The state of modern DRM is also disgusting. I forget the specifics, but I was reading up on some of the anti-features of the Nintendo Switch, and from what I can tell (I'm referencing this from memory, so I could be mistaken here), you have to have user account(s) on it and if the same user is signed into more than one Switch, then only the Switch marked as the 'main' is allowed to be played offline for that account. While not surprising, that is a bunch of shit. If I buy it, I don't want anyone's 'permission' or network to play it. What if someone wants to return to this system after it being in storage for a couple decades, meanwhile Nintendo has sunset the backend, or the networking interfaces are no longer compatible with the hardware? Wi-fi standards change. I don't plan on signing in to more than one Switch, but that's a turn-off solely on principle. Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy, but I think I'll stick to the good old 90s / early naughts gaming technology for the most part (famous last words ... I may end up changing my mind here, knowing me).
The burnout is odd this time: it is only affecting personal projects, not professional. Every time I try to pull up `smolver` or MUD code, I just can't bring myself to do anything. No interest. At the same time, I miss working on the MUD, but I know better than to push myself here because that'll only exacerbate the burnout / simple lack of interest / whatever you wanna call it. My interest seems to be solely in consuming entertainment.
In other news, apparently summer is hot! Who knew?
For posterity, the previous line is me making fun of the climate fear cult. Too hot? Climate change. Too cold? Climate change. Severe weather? Climate change. Pleasant weather? Climate change. You stubbed your toe? Climate change, of course!
I'll never understand how so many people just believe it without question. Wait a sec, yes, I think I do:
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