Hi! Long time, no see!

I haven’t posted here for quite some time. However, I’ve been doing some work on restoring some old content such as my Aonsdát Éireann page, fixing up a bunch of missing redirects, and so on. There are a number of entries I want to restore from my old blog, though I’ve a feeling they’re going to be rather cringeworthy.

Reading back on older stuff you’ve written can be… difficult. If you’re anything like me, your younger self is often an idiot. You’d hope that your older self is a bit more sensible, but I very much doubt it in my case. I’d hope I’m at least less likely to post up random, trivial nonsense, but that doesn’t when I do write something, it’s not going to be random, trivial nonsense¹. For better or worse, a lot of the enthusiasm my younger self had has gradually been drained from me over the years.

I’ve started using my mastodon.sdf.org account. It’s been sitting there for a few years, mostly untouched. After I stopped posting on Twitter, I fell out of contact with a lot of people I’d known there for years, but might be able to strike up some of those connections again. Movetodon helped once Twitter scrapped the policy on linking to other social networking sites. Mind you, there were some disappointments, such as when I had a look through my following/followers lists in Twitter to do some cleanup and found a bunch of people I thought I was a mutual of turned out not to be. Oh, well. I cleared out a bunch of obvious junk followers that I’d accumulated since I left. So far, it’s been better than Twitter was; it feels more like Twitter was when I started using it back in the middle of 2008. I want to avoid two bad habits, though: (1) simply boosting a bunch of stuff and (2) accidentally becoming a reply guy. For the former, I try, while probably not wholly succeeding, to boost stuff that matters and I’ve at least tried to check. For the latter, the nature of Mastodon works against everyone: it’s eventually consistent is a really bad way, in that not all replies necessarily arrive on your server to a thread you’re looking at, and it can take an hour or two to see something that was posted to you or on your main feed by someone you follow. I am, however, trying to make sure I don’t repeat anything somebody else has said on the thread, and I hope that kind of good faith effort is enough. I’ll occasionally fail on this, but I think it’s important to try.

I got a Steam Deck a few months back after my preorder was fulfilled. I’ve been happy with it so far, and a surprising number of my titles work out of the box on it. My laptop, a Dell Precision 5510, while seven years old by now, still works really well as a workstation, but has never really been well-suited to gaming². It’s nice to be able to play more of my library, and also know that my library isn’t going to tied to some aging, unsupported machine as happened with my old 360.

I don’t think there’s much else to say. Happy Christmas though! I’ll probably have a post around New Year’s.