Dwarf Fortress monthly update
Tarn's been doing these monthly updates for many years now. He shares his income for the month and was asked after the steam release if he would continue to be as open with his finances. January's update was a little strange.
On Vampires
Broke: vampires are vulnerable to the trappings of Christianity only, particularly Catholicism, no matter how dubiously applied. (See: Van Helsing’s Communion wafer grouting).
Woke: vampires are vulnerable to sincere faith of all kinds, and atheist vampire-hunters need to believe very strongly in the Power of Friendship or their love of Star Trek to get by.
Bespoke: vampires are vulnerable to the faith that they followed when they were alive, and hunters tracking down an ancient vampire are obliged to learn about Neo-Babylonian theology or Middle Palaeolithic bear cults.
From here
Sir Thomas Browne - On Dreams
Half our dayes wee passe in the shadowe of the earth, and the brother of death exacteth a third part of our lives. A good part of our sleepes is peeced out with visions, and phantasticall objects wherin wee are confessedly deceaved. The day supplyeth us with truths, the night with fictions and falsehoods, which uncomfortably divide the natural account of our beings. And therefore having passed the day in sober labours and rationall enquiries of truth, wee are fayne to betake ourselves unto such a state of being, wherin the soberest heads have acted all the monstrosities of melancholy, and which unto open eyes are no better then folly and madnesse.
Steam Deck
I got a steam deck. It arrived as a happy accident and wasn't something I would have purchased for myself but I was surprised at how much I like it.
The steam deck is a handheld gaming device like the gameboy or nintendo switch but it's connected to steam and provides access to your online steam library. The device runs on an x86 AMD processor with a beefy video card capable of playing modern PC games smoothly. It runs arch linux and is completely unlocked and open. By default it runs the steam games portal in full screen mode but gives you a button to drop into the KDE desktop and use it like a standard linux OS.
Having a open handheld gaming platform is unheard of. Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony are particularly protective of their IP and spend lots of effort making sure people don't use their devices for anything other than playing their licensed games. Valve takes a kickback for most games sold on their store but decided to adopt the open source ethos for their hardware. You don't know how long I've been waiting for someone to do something like this. I know a lot of people bought the device just because they could use it as a portable linux desktop and now they're finding they're playing a lot more games.
Valve have been putting in a lot of work the past few years fixing windows emulation, taking a linux project called wine and extending it with graphics fixes and other changes targeted at gaming but also pushed upstream as good open source advocates. I'm not super happy with these efforts because it encourages developers to avoid writing games for linux but it's definitely worked. Valve is one of those rare companies that no one hates. Considering the post-capitalist hellscape we're all trapped in, this is unheard of.
One effect of having a fully open hand held device running linux is you can run emulation software. Everyone who tries says the same - it's perfect for playing all your favorite xbox, nintendo, playstation games and they're wondering how valve hasn't been sued into oblivion.
I have a 'large' steam library of ~700 games. Most were acquired in charity bundles and over 70% are unplayed. Some I've avoided because they're genuinely bad, but often I haven't played them because they're not something I want to explore while sitting at my desk. Platformers, shoot em ups, and hard twitch games are not as fun with a keyboard. I recently finished hyper light drifter on my deck. It's a hard game with an abstract interface that requires the player to get used to dying over and over again until they figure out enemy attack patterns. I have absolutely no patience to play something like this on my desktop pc but on the deck it becomes doable. I bought Hades in the steam sale because it knew it would be the same.
I still have to explore my old ROMs, GOG games, and itch.io. There are portal apps for linux that will run in desktop mode and give me access to those libraries but I just haven't had the time to set them up. Just the idea that all of my games (thousands in total) are just a few clicks away on a portable handheld is crazy.
The hardware is great, though the battery life ~4 hours could be better, but the thing that has been revelatory is the hibernate button. Even my top of the line linux laptop doesn't get hibernation right. In fact, before the steam deck I didn't think it was possible for an x86 to hibernate this well.
On the steam deck, at any time, you can press the power button and the device will go to sleep (usually in under a second). Press it again and it will wake up in a few seconds bringing you back to exactly where you left off. It works for any game, you don't even have to pause. You'll see this mentioned in reviews but I think this is the steam deck's killer feature.
With a fast hibernate button you can put it down and pick up again in a moment. There's no friction. Got a minute or two? Pick up the deck and play a while. The device draws so little power in hibernation mode there's no reason to turn it off so it's always available. It means you can just keep the game running. On a PC there's the tendency to shut down games between sessions because the music will continue to run in the background or they take up too much RAM. Waiting for shutdown and boot up is painful. I haven't played as much as I'd like RDR2 because it takes ~2min? to boot into the game each time I want to play. Being able to put down the game at any moment and pick it up again in a few seconds is crazy.
Though valve hasn't commented on it, it's believed they've sold over a millions units and that's before they started shipping to Asia. They seem to be pleased with how it's developed and I agree. If you have a large steam collection get a steam deck, you won't be disappointed.
Do not make eye contact with the dog
We were out on a bike ride around santa cruz and saw this missing dog poster. Apparently it's the doggie equivalent of hannibal lector.
The infrequently updated blog.