In response to a birthday wish blog post by Michael Klamerus, I’m going to talk about an obscure game from when I was a kid - Operation Inner Space!
I played this game at least a dozen times at a friends house back in the early 90s. It originally ran on Windows 3.1 and was a total blast to play.
The premise of the game is that you are “inside” your computer. After a long intro screen where your space ship is “transported” into your computer. You choose the drive you want to play on (yes, back when you had a C, D or E drive) a you then float around in space, similar to Asteroids, blasting random space junk but also at random intervals actual files on your computer. Shooting an icon is fun, but blasting a .exe or .dll file? That’s the best!
But the thing that actually really made me remember this game were the ships themselves. There were dozens to choose from, from animals to funky space ships to even a rubber duck. The novelty of being “inside” your computer, blasting random files as a purple rubber duck was just catnip to my pre-teen brain.
There‘s something weird and wonderful about old PC games like Operation Inner Space. Developers didn’t have millions of dollar budgets, or marketing machines or even the internet. You had to learn about new games from word of mouth or through magazines or BBSs if you did have internet access. And then you could share those floppy discs with friends, games that were written efficiently to maximize disk space. That whole era has a strong DIY vibe that you just can’t find anymore, and is why I love stuff like the IndieWeb nowadays so much.
And the most amazing part about Operation: Inner Space ? You can still buy it and play it! The company’s website has a full walk through on how to get it to run on 64 bit computers, including how to set it up using DosBox for play on Linux or Mac. Yes the full version costs $25 (yes really) but as someone who LOVES old games (I mean, I have a Galaga tattoo for god’s sake) this just hits a sweet spot for me. I may have to get DosBox working and try the shareware demo and relive my summer days from 30+ years ago.
And if you’re curious to see what it was all about, check out this YouTube video showing the gameplay
When I - somewhat impulsively - decided to attempt Blaugust, thanks to an idea from the always amazing Aubrey (gotta love alliteration), I wasn’t really sure how much I would actually do. I’ve had this blog for ~3 years now and had written approximately 8 times before that. How on Earth would I be able to post once a day for a month?
I actually fell into tech originally as a way to pay the bills, but went to school for writing, graduating from Florida State (Go Noles!) with a degree in English. I always loved writing, as a kid and throughout school, and though I knew I wasn’t going to be a writer professionally, it was great to flex that muscle and get better at it. And besides, back in the early 2000s, you just needed the degree to get a job, not always what the degree was IN.
Around that same time, I actually had a personal site where I WOULD blog once a day. This was before blogging was really a thing, but I found it fun to just post random stuff on my mind every single day, because of course who wasn’t asking for the opinions and thoughts of a straight white man? But it also became a drain - I would feel obligated to write, even if I had nothing to say, and after about 2 years of this, I just got fully burned out on writing in general.
I’ve dabbled here and there, writing some stuff that I’ve never shared/published and attempted a blog occasionally, but just never stuck with it. But I think that, now 19 days into August, I think that I’ve finally settled back into a groove and become less burned out on writing. It feels more natural, more normal, and most importantly enjoyable. The topics are all over the place, the posts are varying lengths but it still feels great to just write some again.
I don’t know if I will actually post every day this month, but the difference now is that I don’t feel pressure to do so. If I do it every day, great. But if I miss a day - and based on the traffic stats here I don’t think anyone would even notice - I’ve found ease in getting back into sharing what I have to say in a way that feels way less high stakes and less in my head. I hope I’ll be able to continue to post more regularly after August ends, probably not daily but “more”. That’s a win to me.
I recently read an article about a new app called EasyDMG, that solves a huge annoyance when working on a Mac and installing something from outside of the App Store - the .DMG
Basically the process is:
- Download the .dmg file
- Open it and drag the file to your applications folder
- Close the DMG window
- “Eject” the DMG
Not the worst thing in the world but a stupid song and dance that isn’t needed for sure. That’s why EasyDMG sounded pretty great - it takes over the opening of .dmg files and just extracts the files and none of steps 2-4 are needed. Annoyance solved!
Then I went to the EasyDMG website and got that same sinking feeling I get more and more these days - the site was clearly AI vibe coded.
I know that Web Development Is Not Everyone’s Passion, but in the grand pantheon of programming languages, HTML and CSS are pretty damn straightforward. So it’s not that hard to really make a website anymore, either by hand or through one of the six bajillion free themes and tools out there. And yet the creator of EasyDMG couldn’t be bothered, they just outsourced it to AI. AI sites have a particular “smell” to them, and you can spot them a mile away. I won’t link to any but I know you’ve seen them - all you have to do is look at Claude or OpenAI or Grok or any other LLM out there and, surprise, they all look alike!
Which of course begs the question, if they didn’t take the time to make a site for this product they are offering (free or otherwise), how much time did they take to actually develop the product itself? Do I REALLY trust something that would overwrite a default Mac OS process to a possibly vibe coded app? The idea might be the best in the last 20 years but if you don’t take the time to even put how you present it to the world how can I ever trust that you didn’t just rush the process to get something out there?
These days, I’m more likely to trust a plain white page, written in Times New Roman with blue links and default browser text, over any of the cookie cutter bullshit that is taking over the web more and more.
Spin up a Drupal or Wordpress site with the default theme. Write 10 lines of HTML yourself. Hell, buy a Squarespace or Wix site. Just don’t disrespect me with something that AI spit out for you in 10 minutes. Have some pride.
I don’t really collect a lot of things, but one thing that I do collect is soccer scarves. Even though I live in Florida and don’t exactly have many reason to wear them (though if I go to a match I try to bring one if the team is playing), I love the colors of clubs from around the world and the creativity shown in the scarves.
If I go to a match with a team I haven’t seen play before, typically a home match, I try my best to find a scarf to add to my collection, which is up to about 21 as of this writing. And for some of the European teams, these are just clubs I follow/support and so they were procured online (but I hope to make it to their matches at some point!) As this is in my office, they always make for a colorful Zoom background and a conversation piece while waiting for meetings to start.
So I wanted to share some pictures of my collection and the teams represented in each.
The entire collection
Here’s a breakdown in two pictures of each team, from left to right:
- World Cup 2026 Atlanta scarf (from my trip to the World Cup)
- World Cup match day scarf between Uzbekistan and Democratic Republic of Congo
- Generic World Cup 2026 scarf
- St. Louis City (MLS)
- Florida State Women’s Soccer
- Detroit City FC (USL)
- Atlanta United (MLS)
- FC Koln (Bundesliga)
- Southampton FC (England Championship)
- USL Women’s League (featuring local club, the Tampa Bay Sun FC)
- Tampa Bay Rowdies (USL Championship)
- Unused Substitutes (former Tampa Bay Rowdies podcast)
- Tampa Bay Rowdies (USL Championship)
- Club Astudio Deportivo (a tiny club in Spain, purchased for me by a Spanish co-worker, not even sure the league)
- Real Valladoid (La Liga)
- Orlando City FC (MLS)
- Gotham FC (NWSL)
- Minnesota United FC (MLS)
- Kingston Stockade FC (The League for Clubs)
- Waffle House (from a pop-up shop at the World Cup. I couldn’t resist!)
- Florida Cup (a defunct tournament in Florida)
- United States Mens National Team
I love all of my scarves because they each have a story behind them and hope to continue to grow the collection!
Do you ever have a dream where you wake up and some fact or thing just keeps rattling around your brain and when you wake up, you are convinced it’s either totally true or the best (or worst) thing in the world and you just have to do something about it?
Yeah that happened to me last night. When I woke up, I had the phrase “Curly Brace Face” stuck in my head. In my half awake/half asleep state, I was trying to decide if that phrase would be the name of a nerdy indie pop band, or some sort of front end super villain and can’t quite decide. I think it could work either way and now I can’t get the phrase out of my head even though it’s really dumb and pointless but yep, my brain glommed onto it.
Hopefully writing it out will kick it out of my brain, like the way of getting a song lyric out of your head is to just listen to the song. We’ll see, and make sure to check this super exciting blog again to see how successful I am.