I’m out of town for the weekend for a celebration of life (more on that probably next week), so this post is coming to you from the future OOoooooOOo. Or is it from the past? I don’t know, I just scheduled it to post when I wasn’t going to be able to
In the meantime, since it’s a quick trip I packed pretty light. Sadly though, these two didn’t come with me, but they would have if they could have.
Check back tomorrow for some “funny cat pics”, as no matter how enshittified the Internet gets, everyone still seems to love a good cat pic.
Happy Caturday all!
Since switching to Apple Music from Spotify, I’ve started totally fresh with what they recommend. This is helpful because it’s a clean slate, but it also makes it hard to discover stuff that you might like based on your preferences. A clean slate is nice but I still need to have somewhere to start if I’m going to jump into music fresh.
I like a lot of indie rock, mostly leaning more towards indie pop, but I’m open to most styles of music in general (except 99.999999% of country)
Anyway, I was browsing the new releases in indie and came across American Football, a band that I’ve never heard before. On their newest album, American Football (Lp4) , they seem to mix some excellent backing sound with a bit of rock, a bit more orchestral sound and great song writing that is somewhat muted behind the music.
I really liked it and need to give it another listen or three. I’m really bad at describing albums/music so I’ll just say the standout tracks that caught my ear are Patron Saint of Pale , Wake Her Up and No Soul to Save . Here’s an embed of the album if you’re on Apple (or just want to search on Spotify or wherever for them), check it out!
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.