#hardware ^RSS

I read, watched, and re-watched Kiki’s Delivery Service. Well, kind of. The cartoon and the book are delightful, and more or less the same story (the book doesn’t have a dramatic finale). But the live-action movie… I couldn’t finish it, it’s cringe-worthy.

I bought a Mini PC. It solves a few problems:

• it uses a lot less electricity;
• it is silent at low load and slightly noisy at high load (I can compare the noise level to Nintendo Switch or Xbox Series S) – I have become more sensitive to mechanical and electrical noise lately, so this is a big plus;
• it gives me a reason to daily drive Linux, since it can’t run “heavy” games (so installing Windows doesn’t make sense);
• but it can run some games, which gives me an opportunity to test games on Linux;
• not a problem, but tinkering is fun!

I’m not here to promote a specific brand, so I’ll say it’s an AMD Ryzen 5 5560U machine. AMD has served me well with my latest PC, since it is better with Linux, so that was one of the reasons I bought it.

So, yes, now it is my main work, media, some gaming machine. The worst thing is that it’s so small that I don’t have room to put a sticker of Chihiro on it. At this point, I name my machines after characters from Miyazaki’s works: I also have a big PC I built last year called Nausicaä, and a small laptop-tablet hybrid called Kiki.

This January marks one year since I started this blog. I have been tinkering with it ever since, but for this occasion I added a light theme and a search. Static sites have one disadvantage, they don’t do search themselves. You can mitigate this in a number of ways, I decided to go with DuckDuckGo. It seems to work well.

When you’re young, everyone is very eager to tell you that you’ll lose your strong opinions when you get older. I’m still waiting.

What actually happened to me is that I realized that it is impossible to have a strict rule – of law, moral, or any other kind – without many exceptions. Sometimes so many that it’s better to turn the rule on its head (from “it’s good unless” to “it’s bad unless” kind of thing).

I’ll use games as an example.

Let me put it this way, I’m not fun at parties: if you say to me “hey, remember that cool game?” I’m going to remember that it was published by a company that thought it was a good idea to advertise on 8chan, or that the developers were harassed and crunched a lot, or that despite having, like, two female characters, the game was both sexist and transphobic.

I also never thought that games were better back then, or that they ruined it, or anything like that. I felt like I evolved with the games, more or less. (To be fair, that has changed a bit in the last, say, 5 years or so, where I feel there are not enough games that challenge me with something new, but that is another story.)

Basically, what I’m saying is that I don’t do nostalgia. I don’t put old games on a pedestal. I rarely replay games.

But.

I spend about a week replaying the Quake II campaign, and playing all three mission packs, old and new, for the first time. I can’t deny that there’s a pleasure, a comfort in that experience. Q][ is my Doom. I played all the versions – PC, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. I found excuses to replay it a few times, like playing it with a Steam Controller.

Nostalgic? Sure. Old? Definitely. Replay? Absolutely.

I’ll talk about the re-release in the monthly summary, for now I’ll just point out that I have complicated feelings about it. There’s a lot not to like about the game, and I can’t really come up with an argument for someone who’s never played it to give it a try. I don’t think there’s any undeniable value in it. But I like it, I still do.

I’m not writing this to make excuses. I’m not writing this to say that it’s okay to have problematic faves. I still believe there are hills to die on, and I have plenty of them. I’m writing it to say that you can only hope – I can only hope – that you have a decent grasp on those very fuzzy good and bad things and can apply them as best as you can. Because I’m pretty sure there is no alternative.