T w e n t y S i d e d
My writing is generally fueled by whatever experiences I’m having at the moment. If I’m programming, then I talk about the coding I’m doing. If I’m playing a videogame, then I talk about the game. If I’m inflicting my music on the world, then I talk about music theory. And if my health is bad, then I try to find a way to talk about it in a way that makes it funny or thoughtful.
Lately I’m spending a lot of time worrying about my health, but this time around it’s a dull, grim sort of worry. I don’t have anything witty to say about my current predicament and I don’t have any clever observations. Things are just going poorly and there’s nothing to be done about it. My current situation is my new normal and I need to accept that.
My father died in 2000 at the age of 59. For years I’ve been half-jokingly saying that my goal was to beat him and at least make it to 60. He was an overweight recovering alcoholic with epilepsy that lived alone and smoked two packs a day, so outliving him always sounded like a pretty easy goal. I’ve got a decade to go if I want to outlast him, and It wasn’t until recently that I started to worry that I might not make it.
I’m fine at the moment, but I’m dealing with a lot of cascading health complications that began with my high blood pressure and have branched outward since then. I want to repeat that I’m okay right now. I’m not in pain and I’m not dying. But I’m moving a lot slower than I was a year ago, and I need to be very careful with my diet and medications to make sure things don’t get any worse.
Legacy
So why am I suddenly giving so much thought to death all of a sudden? Well aside from the health complications, it’s because I just noticed it’s been a little over a year since my colleague Michael Goodfellow died. He was about ten years older than me, and at this stage in life that feels more or less like the same age.
We weren’t close, but we were both aging programmers-turned-bloggers that traded emails and source code from time to time. I noticed last week that his site at www.sea-of-memes.com has lapsed and fallen to domain squatters. For whatever reason, this hit me really hard. I was sad when he passed, but seeing his personal site and all his projects vanish into the bit bucket has filled me with insurmountable existential dread. I’ve always known that I was going to die someday, but now I’m grappling with the realization that – regardless of how carefully I plan – someday my website will eventually fall to squatters. I can’t explain why this is so much more upsetting than death itself.
Anyway, if something did happen to me then I’m sure my website would be fine for many years. Michael’s problem was that he didn’t really have anyone in place to take care of his stuff when he passed. (He was unmarried, and I got the sense that the rest of his family wasn’t particularly tech-savvy.) But my wife knows how important this site is to our family, and she has a lot of experience taking care of various WordPress websites. She would do fine as the caretaker of Twenty Sided.
The plan is that the comments would be closed across the entire site. This is just to protect against spammers and vandals, since the site would no longer have a full-time moderator. Other than that, not much ought to change. Well, aside from the lack of updates I guess. This site won’t get any new content after I’m gone, unless WordPress introduces a Ouija Board plugin that allows me to author posts from the afterlife. Given what a nightmare PHP is, I really advise against using it to interface with supernatural realm. Those sorts of shenanigans are how you end up opening portals to hell.
The worst thing that might happen is that some future WordPress update would break my custom-built theme, and Heather would need to switch this site to using one of the ugly default themes. That would be sad, but at least the site would stay up.
The other bad thing that might happen is that WordPress might break my custom plugins. I’ve written tools that allow me to use shortcode to create footnotes.Like this one. If that code breaks, then the shortcode would appear in the article text.[ref|Like this one.] Similarly, the image of the graveyard above will look like this once it turns back into a pumpkin:
[img src="stock_graveyard2.jpg" title="Here are the graves of generations gone by. I'll bet their websites have all gone down."]
So if you’re reading this from the futureHopefully the FAR future. and you’re seeing this shortcode appearing in the article body, now you know why. Something broke my ancient legacy code.
I realize that, in the grand scheme of the universe, my gaming blog is barely a trifle. But it’s my trifle damn it. I built it, and I get some sense of personal satisfaction in the fact that it it’s still standing after fifteen+ years. Like a bridge, I don’t expect it will last literally forever. But I’d be very disappointed if it fell over the moment I stopped personally taking care it.
Well, that’s enough dread for one day. Let’s talk about something fun!
The Switch
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I wanted to get my wife a Nintendo Switch. A few people shared the wisdom that Nintendo is probably planning a mid-gen hardware refresh in the next year or so. In early 2022 I’ll (probably) be able to buy a better machine for the same money, or the same machine for less money. Ergo, this is a bad time to get a Switch.
I was grateful for the advice, but also a little disappointed because I wanted her to have one.
For the last six months or so, my wife has been balancing work between three different jobs. She’s a nanny for two different families, plus she took care of an infant for a couple of young doctors still stuck in the “rotating shifts” / “on call” phase of their career.
But alas, the doctors are moving away and taking their adorable baby daughter with them. Heather was crushed. While taking care of a baby is a lot of work, it’s literally Heather’s favorite thing to do aside from playing Animal Crossing. So it was awesome when the doctors got her a parting gift of a Nintendo Switch and a copy of said Animal Crossing. She gets the joy of having the machine right now, and I won’t be plagued by guilt knowing that I could have gotten a better deal if I’d waited.
The Switch has taken the place of honor in the living room, which means the Playstation 4 is returning to my home office. This means I’ve hooked it up to my PC again using…
The Elgato
I’ve always been a little dissatisfied with the technology we use to capture video output. Specifically, I’ve never really wrapped my head around why we need the technology at all.
Back in 2008 or so, I had an Xbox 360. I also had a cheap little $40 TV tuner card that would take the analog output of my Xbox and put it in a little window on my PC where the resulting footage could be captured. You plug card into your PC and plug the Xbox into the card, and now the footage is all yours. That’s how I captured the screenshots for my Fable 2 series.
Like the vast majority of the first-run Xbox 360s, my console died the death after a little more than a year, and it was almost a decade before I had another console I wanted to plug into my PC. When the time came, I was somewhat horrified to discover that the process had become more complicated, more expensive, and slower. That’s the opposite of what we usually see in consumer electronics.
These days, you need to pay somewhere in the ballpark of $200USD for the hardware. That’s a pretty big step up from the $40 I paid in 2008. And once you do that, the hardware will enable you to view the footage in a window… with two full seconds of latency. That makes the game unplayable, so you need to split the signal and send it to another monitor where it will appear without latency. You’ll use the monitor to play the game while the capture software records the resulting delayed-by-two-seconds footage.
This is really obnoxious. My desk is already overflowing with gear and the snarl of cables behind my monitors has already become untenable. The last thing I want is another entire monitorOr to switch one of my existing monitors, which is what I’m doing. that only exists to show me an image that is already on one of the existing monitors! And the only reason I have to do this stupid and expensive thing is that there’s this inexplicable two-second latency when converting the digital output of my console to a digital signal that my PC can display.
So then I have a conversation that goes like this….
I don’t get it. What could it POSSIBLY be doing to the video signal that requires two full seconds of buffering?
Shamus you fool! OF COURSE it takes time to process modern TV signals! Don’t you realize how advanced these images are?
I know that a 1080p image is about two million pixels. Frankly, that’s nothing on the scale that modern computers operate on. What is it doing with them?
Shamus, you sweet summer child. It takes TIME to convert a video feed. These aren’t analog signals like in the old days. This is DIGITAL INFORMATION.
Great. We need the signal in digital format, so it’s nice that we don’t need to convert from analog first. But what takes all the time? What is the operation being performed on these pixels that requires EXTERNAL PROCESSING HARDWARE, and yet still can’t get the job done in less than two seconds?
Shamus, you naive buffoon, the signal being sent to your television is totally different from the pixels that Windows is drawing in a window. This means that signal must be converted. I can’t believe this is confusing you.
No, I get that. But like, two seconds? My computer – like all modern PCs – is a processing MONSTER. It’s got 8 cores running at 3.6Ghz. Do you have any idea how much raw processing power that is? And my TV doesn’t have anything approaching that level of computing power. And yet my $90 Wal-Mart television is able to display these images with zero latency.
Shamus you bumbling simpleton, your TV DOESN’T NEED TO CONVERT THE SIGNAL, because the signal is already in a format native to the TV. What’s so hard to understand about this?
Whatever the format is, we’re still talking about 2 million discrete pixels. That information arrives in a way that my TV can figure out which pixels to turn on and off, and it does so with primitive hardware that probably costs just a few dollars. I get that the signals are different, but what sort of conversion operations could possibly take two entire seconds? What does it need to do? Convert CMYK to RGB? Re-scale the inputs to a different number space? Maybe handle some compression? None of that is a big deal when it’s a question of 2 million pixels vs. 28.8 billion processor cycles.3.6Ghz is 3.6 billion operations per core, Multiplied by 8 cores gives you 28.8 billion cycles. Of course, this is a grotesque over-simplification. Some cycles accomplish multiple things and attaining full saturation on that many cores is theoretically possible but practically infeasible. This is just a rough approximation to show that we’ve got thousands of times more power than we need to handle this signal, regardless of how much you want to haggle over implementation details.
Shamus, you should stop asking questions that only show how ignorant you are.
That’s how questions work. Just answer me.
You’re failing to understand how COMPLEX a modern video feed is. There’s encryption that needs to be processed!
You can totally turn off HDCP. In fact, you HAVE TO. And even if there’s a bunch of DRM on the signal that needs to be dealt with, your TV seems to manage just fine with its underpowered processing hardware.
Well it just, you know. Needs to… convert the signal.
Yes, but what is it DOING?
And so on. For the record, I’ve never had anyone talk to me like this, it’s just that this is how the exchange goes when people ask about it. Elgato specifically singles out compression as the culprit for why there needs to be an entire second The Elgato site claims one second of lag, but it’s always at least two for me. of output latency. It’s this stupid circular conversation where the conversion needs to take a long time because it’s converting, which is somehow both tautological and a non-sequitur.
Without knowing anything about it, I’m willing to bet that at the heart of this mess is a stupid patent or other obnoxious licensing shenanigans. Someone came up with a video feed format, and they own the exclusive rights to processing that feed, so you have to buy chips from them. But since they have a monopoly on this format then there’s no competition, which means the chips are lame, underpowered, and outrageously overpriced. I’m willing to bet that you could make a better system that has just one or two frames of latency, and that it could run on a modern PC without needing external processing hardware, and the whole setup could cost less than ten dollars. The only reason that such a thing doesn’t exist is because it would be a patent / copyright violation to do so.
To extrapolate further, I’m betting the feed needs to use a patent-inhibited format because these machines can play movies and Hollywood wants to make sure we don’t pirate their precious movies. So all of this horrendous expense and bullshit is their attempt to close the barn door now that the animals have already escaped.
I can’t prove it, of course. I don’t even have any evidence. But there must be some reason for this mess, and this is my guess for why this is so needlessly expensive and difficult.
I’ve Been Here Before
Regardless of the reason, it does make this entire process way harder than it needs to be for the end user. I spent a good chunk of Saturday fiddling around with cables and trying to remember how the setup worked. You need to go from the console, to the Elgato, and from the Elgato to a dedicated monitor. But then also the Elgato needs to connect to the PC via USB. And then I need speakers for the monitor, because even though I already have speakers on my desk, those are for the PC and I need some for the monitor so I can hear the game in real-time rather than on a delay.
So I spent over an hour fussing with things. I’d look something up, and then go, “Oh right. I remember that’s how it was. It’s coming back to me now.” There are a dozen little details that can go wrong, and I had to trip over all of them so that I could remember tripping over them in 2018 so that I could remember how to not trip over them.
Anyway. I got it working again, so it looks like I’m going to get to play the Final Fantasy VII remake soon.
Footnotes:
[1] Like this one.
[2] Hopefully the FAR future.
[3] Or to switch one of my existing monitors, which is what I’m doing.
[4] 3.6Ghz is 3.6 billion operations per core, Multiplied by 8 cores gives you 28.8 billion cycles. Of course, this is a grotesque over-simplification. Some cycles accomplish multiple things and attaining full saturation on that many cores is theoretically possible but practically infeasible. This is just a rough approximation to show that we’ve got thousands of times more power than we need to handle this signal, regardless of how much you want to haggle over implementation details.
[5] The Elgato site claims one second of lag, but it’s always at least two for me.
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Ah, so this will be your first taste of Tetsuya Nomura’s work?
Shamus has played FFX at least – he did one of his earlier retrospective series about it.
Sorry, I meant games directed by or at least overseen by Nomura. He was involved in Final Fantasy X but as a design artist.
It’s been so long since I was first that I wish I could say it was all on the front page. But I can’t. Bummer. My mother just had a health scare as well. She finally admitted to herself that this was the new normal as well. I no longer go up the 13 flights of stairs I have to climb at work anywhere near as fast as I did or without breathing hard any more. Age sucks. I feel your pain Shamus.
Edit: damn beat to it by a minute
He’s a diabolical loan shark that offers loans with no interest or due date and doesn’t even nag you to pay up no matter how long you put it off. He doesn’t even force his loans on you anymore – he did upgrade your home automatically the moment you paid off your mortgage in the older games but he waits patiently for you to come to him now.
I mean, sure, he does look like Tony Soprano but ultimately, he’s a pretty chill guy who will never ever try to break your kneecaps for missing a payment date.
Ah. I didn’t know about his behavior in the newer games. The last time I had a run-in with him, he saddled me with a new mortgage (for goods I didn’t ask for, at prices he chose) as soon as the old one was paid off.
@Shamus, and anyone else who is unfortunate enough to have not read it, I highly suggest this let’s play of Animal Crossing:
https://lparchive.org/Animal-Crossing/
It’s great. If you’ve heard of the Dwarf Fortress Boatmurdered LP story, this is in a similar vein.
Huh?
I am 9 chapters in and I am not sure what I think.
Seems this is already happening to old posts in this site, scrolling through the Elder Scrolls retrospective from the age of Rutskarn when sudden garbles of text interrupt my reading flow.
Can you provide a link to any examples? I spot-checked some of Ruts’ old posts and the ones I looked at were fine.
Just rechecked, doesn’t seem to exactly be the same problem and it isn’t that bad as I remember it to be but some old posts I go through like every entry in the Altered Scrolls series have
interrupting some words.
Not sure if it’s a mobile issue as I browse this site through my phone eh but the issue is pretty minor.
Pretty sure that’s some unicode mangling right there, which would affect all devices. (Since it’s on the server’s end, with the wrong thing saved in the article.) If I’m not mistaken, that would be a fancy apostrophe. I noticed a few of those back when Shamus first migrated…something else a few years ago, but I thought he got all of them.
Although it isn’t Elder Scrolls, the title in this one is a good example – https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=34458
As well as the title of this one – https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=34159 . Which is weird, because there are other apostrophes in the title where there’s no problem at all.
I’ve seen it in other old posts as well, but I can’t remember which ones right now. Whenever I see it, I’ll comment in the thread…
A couple of days ago, I felt like visiting Goodfellow’s site again. Unfortunately, I only became aware of it a year ago when Shamus mentioned of his passing. And even more unfortunate than that was the fact that – as Shamus pointed out – that website doesn’t exist anymore. It’s still up in Wayback Machine, and I managed to poke around in it. But it’s cold comfort, knowing that in a couple of years that domain will most likely be turned into a 301 Redirect for some casino website, in their ever-lasting pursuit of link-juice. Like Goodfellow’s site, many others still live on in the various Internet archives. But many of those sites don’t look the same in archived form. And I don’t only mean that the presentation is often bugged out. Because an archive is just that – an archive. A copy of a thing that doesn’t exist anymore. So there’s something to a live version of a website (even one that’s not getting updated anymroe) that you just can’t get in the Wayback Machine. And there are websites that don’t really work with the Wayback Machine. Who knows how many pieces of the Internet have been destroyed that way.
And yes, fuck domain squatters. While they may not be personally responsible for any of this, they’re certainly part of the shitty ecosystem that enables it.
“Because an archive is just that – an archive. A copy of a thing that doesn’t exist anymore. So there’s something to a live version of a website (even one that’s not getting updated anymroe) that you just can’t get in the Wayback Machine.”
This sounds like a psychological thing to me.
You say that like that makes it unimportant. Lots of significant things are “psychological” (an argument could easily be made that if it is involving 1 or more humans assigning value, its ALWAYS a psychological thing, given how mediated the human experience of reality is) – including literally all emotional responses of any kind.
“It’s psychological” is shorthand for “I don’t really care about this and don’t care that you care, either”
I’m totally with you on the existential dread thing, Shamus. Death itself never really scared me (although the pain of dying would SUCK); what frightened me more than anything was the thought of oblivion. That when I died, all of my knowledge and memories and goals and achievements would basically just evaporate into nothing. Maybe it’s something similar with you.
And since I’m not likely to be Nobel/Pulitzer Prize winner, a famous celebrity/politician, and have no plans of becoming an infamous criminal, odds are good I will simply vanish from history like I never existed at all. I don’t even have a blog or some other record of my life online (heck, I don’t even use social media, so there isn’t even a Facebook memorial), so when I’m gone, I will basically only live on in the memories of my loved ones and descendants (which isn’t going all that well either, considering I’m still single ;P), and even that will fade within a generation or two.
I think the best thing I could hope for would be some kind of “digital immortality”. I have my doubts that a “copy your brain into a computer” technology will be available and functional within my lifetime (although if it came along, you can bet I’d sign up for it), so odds are the only option I would have would be one of those A.I. amalgamates that takes all of your online history, including social media posts, forum replies, e-mails etc. and uses it to determine how you’d likely respond to somebody chatting to you about a variety of topics. (And apparently, the A.I. is pretty accurate!)
But, on a cheerier note, I hope you enjoy FF7R! I look forward to hearing your thoughts about it. :D I’m still (impatiently) waiting for it to get ported to PC. The Playstation exclusivity period has ended, so it’s only just a matter of time. No announcements have been forthcoming from Square-Enix about when that might be though.
Perhaps it’s a sign that I’m too negatively minded, that I find the idea of oblivion quite relaxing (not that I’m rushing to get there). If I get forgotten then I won’t be harming the future of the universe, I won’t have any responsibility left.
I dislike the way the internet doesn’t provide closure though. Even when a distant real life acquaintance passes away you’ll get to hear about it eventually. But on the internet they may just disappear and you’ll never understand why.
I’ve learned from my friend that funeral directors who offer payments in advance, often have dead people on their books, paying them for a funeral that will never take place. I wonder how many dead people have active Netflix subscriptions and YouTube accounts, or have Twitter comments still getting liked by bots pretending to be humans
It’s weird that my parents have a file that includes the passwords to all their subscription accounts precisely so that, when they die, we can handle all those issues.
It is also a petty personal reason I really hate “change your password every 90 days” requirements. I really hope I don’t die on day 89.
Makes you wonder about Daemien Lucifer…
The chances are it’s something simpler, got a new job, or new life partner, new hobby moved to a new place. There’s lots of reasons why your time fills up and old things get dropped. I’ve never said ‘goodbye’ to any of the communities I frequented and I’ve dropped out of a bunch across my life.
…but you can never know. And that’s the tough part
It’s always weird when I see people make Happy Birthday posts on Facebook for friends who have passed away. Along the same vein, I have another Facebook “friend” who was convicted of murdering his wife and also gets birthday notifications, which is creepy.
You know, I really wish people would stop sharing that “PHP a fractal of bad design” blogpost. Its from 2012 which is 9 years ago. At that age, its pretty much prehistoric in internet terms. PHP has much evolved since then, and at this point sharing that blogpost only attributes to the “lol php bad” memes.
All that aside though, I really wish you well, Shamus. I know health scares are no joke, and watching potentially your entire legacy vanish to a domain squatter is not either.
I mean, I’m sure the technology has changed since 2012 (the last time I was required to use PHP was actually around when the blog post was written) but unless the underlying design principles that brought about those complaints have radically shifted (“error messages are confusing, let’s try to have the interpreter just figure everything out when the user makes a mistake,” or as my old boss used to say “do something, even if it’s wrong”) it still seems valid?
I haven’t used much PHP myself, I assume, given that people who do use it regularly are saying that that blogpost is no longer accurate of the language, that yes, the design principles have shifted and that blogpost is no longer accurate of the language.
Half the examples he uses no longer work the way he describes them and/or have been deprecated.
Most of the examples that are possible, will never come up because if you use a framework, you’re taught differently.
In *ANY* language you can do weird stuff you shouldnt do.
Yes, PHP is a loosely typed language. You can juggle an INT to a BOOL and back. Yes, this is weird if you’re coming from a strictly typed language like Java. But is it a bad thing?
PHP is easy to learn and sparked the joy of coding in a lot of developers. This leads to a lot of amateur code being out there in PHP, but PHP is also running most of the world wide web. I’ve been coding professionally in PHP for over 12 years, and you can absolutely write strictly typed, easily maintainable, well written code in PHP, and with the frameworks and tools out there nowadays, there is absolutely no reason anyone should not.
So can we please move on from this “LOL PHP BAD” thing? (and focus on javascript instead? ;))
I hope your health recovers, are least to comfy-but-careful levels.
Thanks for running Twenty Sided… You’ve built an amazing site with a truely staggering amount of content across various topics in such a way that it’s still interesting even if the topic isn’t.
I often think about what a mess it must be to they and handle someone’s digital life once they’re gone and it does not sound like fun.
^ yes all of this. I really appreciate this site and your curation of it all Shamus.
Thinking about mortality is one of those odd things that you might do in the abstract when you’re young, but start to do a lot more concretely as the years go by. For me I think it really started when I had kids and realised that me dying would now have a substantial negative impact on other some people beyond the obvious emotional pain.
All the best with your continued health issues. It sounds pretty difficult and you have my sympathy.
Same. I truly appreciate this place.
I wish there was some kind of an option to conserve a webpage. Even web.archive isn’t perfect, since, I believe, it only stores pages by request, so the navigation could be very spotty
Me, too. This is probably my favorite website on the Internet.
My name is Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite site on the Internet!
If it’s a USB 2.0 capture card, then I’d say the latency is caused by compression being required due to a lack of bandwidth.
An uncompressed 1080p, 24bpp, 60FPS video stream would require at least 1920 * 1080 * 3 * 60 = 373,248,000 bytes per second of bandwidth just for the video. USB 2.0 gives you a theoretical maximum of 480 megabits per second, or 60 megabytes per second, so the hardware has to compress the data to less than a sixth of its original size to get it to fit through the pipe. That’s going to require a lossy video compression algorithm.
While I’m no expert on video compression algorithms, my understanding is that they all involve periodically taking a key frame and then encoding the next several frames as diffs from the key frame or preceding frame, until some threshold is reached that triggers the next key frame (either after some number of frames or a large enough change in the image that a diff wouldn’t actually be smaller anymore). I’d suspect this requires the device to buffer some amount of frames or other data so the compression algorithm can compute the differences and judge when to make another key frame. That buffering would create the latency you’re seeing. Also, I’d assume that they’re probably using the cheapest hardware that can handle the load to keep costs down, and once they’re already introducing noticeable latency, they probably don’t care about trying to reduce the amount of it that much.
Most of the newer and/or higher-end external capture cards now seem to use USB 3.x, which actually does have enough bandwidth to send uncompressed video. Those tend to have much higher system requirements than USB 2.0 devices because they’re relying on your CPU to be able to handle the compression in real-time. Internal PCI Express cards also have enough bandwidth, so those also don’t compress the data (at least now that CPUs can handle it; older internal cards might have still done on-board compression). As a result, I think these newer capture cards have much less latency than USB 2.0 ones did.
This makes sense, but also still seems really dumb.
It still doesn’t really explain why we can’t have a $40 capture card with a video input any more…
Who would it be FOR though? My understanding was what drove the first market was everyone wanting to digitize all of his VHS home movies. It is a lot harder to offset the costs of design and tooling if your target market is just ‘Shamus Young’.
Streamers? That seems like a reasonable market, though possibly not to the extent of designing computer hardware.
Oh, no. Streamer-oriented hardware is very much a thing. Try Googling “stream deck” some time. Elgato pretty much owns the search results.
Going over the numbers in my head…
That would be like going from a market of 10,000,000 guys to one of 10,000 guys.
Shamus is seeing costs of about 6x.
That all sounds about right.
I used a TV tuner card all throughout college to watch TV so that I only had to deal with one screen. Granted, this was back in the early ’00s so screens were heavier than they are now (19″ CRT, OMG that thing was HEAVY), but I could certainly see getting one again if I wanted to watch cable without reliable internet (there’s still plenty of the country that doesn’t have good highspeed).
Of course, a new TV isn’t that expensive, but yeah, I can see someone getting a tuner card rather than buying a TV. It’s probably not a huge market, but there is one.
One additional thing I just thought of:
There’s probably some buffering going on at the PC’s end as well in order to enable smooth playback. Each key frame is probably significantly larger than the following frames, so if you tried to view the video stream as quickly as it came in from the device, there might be a noticeable pause every time it sent a new key frame.
If we assumed that key frames are uncompressed (I’d guess they really aren’t, but it makes this easier to talk about), then I think a 1080p key frame would take over tenth of a second to send across a USB 2.0 connection. During the time it takes to send that one frame to the PC, 6 new ones would have been processed by the capture card, but you’d be stuck on the previous frame until it finished sending the new key frame.
I think you’re right; I remember the old PCI TV tuner cards for e.g. Packard Bell Pentiums having barely any latency, whereas the firewire 400 capture device I used to hook the OG Xbox (480i, IIRC) up to my laptop definitely had about a quarter to half a second of latency. Was fine for Morrowind, but it took me ages to figure out why I was so terrible at Rallisport Challenge.
Since you mention it, I have a PCIe TV tuner-capture card in my desktop PC right now. (They’re great, especially if you get the kind where the card does the all the encoding rather than offloading it to the CPU.) I’m not sure, however, that latency is a meaningful concept when it comes to tuner cards. TV is largely non-interactive. If there were a significant delay between the moment the signal from my antenna or cable box reached my card and the moment that the image appeared on my monitor, how would I know? I suppose I could go grab a stopwatch and time how long it took for the signal to resolve when I changed channels, but that seems like a lot of work for no particular benefit.
Latency becomes important when you’re hooking a console to the tuner card, because you’re a few seconds behind by the time you get to react to something happening in the video game.
If you really care it’s actually pretty easy to test so long as you have a video card with 2 outputs. Set the 2 outputs to clone one another and loop-back one of the outputs to the tuner card. The delay you see between something happening on your screen and something happening on your input (try to ignore the infinity mirror effect) is the latency.
If you want to be really fancy, there is software designed to measure monitor latency/input lag for people that care enough about how much of a delay there is between a happening in a video game and the appearance of the happening on their screen, like professional gamers. The software I’ve seen usually functions by having the user respond to a prompt multiple times, measuring the delay between the prompt and the user’s input. Fire something like that up and run it on both “monitors”–the difference in lag is the latency of the tuner card and all its associated drivers/processing.
I understand very well why latency matters for gaming. All I’m saying is that it doesn’t really matter for TV-watching.
And, not that it matters, I don’t think I could connect my video card to my tuner-capture card. That’s not what my tuner-capture card is designed for. It was designed for aerials and cable boxes, so it uses coaxial cable, not HDMI, Display Port, or what have you.
Ohhh, I completely misunderstood you. I thought you were saying “I have a digital video capture card but I can’t think of a reason why I’d care what the latency was”
Sorry, reading comprehension fail
This makes sense. Or to put it another way, the problem isn’t decompressing the output that’s the problem, the problem is the cord doing the actual compression. And if it does work like that, then your computer’s massive CPU isn’t doing anything worthwhile. It’s waiting slowly to get the little bits of information that the cord is sending. Shamus is forgetting that compression involves 2 actions, as the compression side of things does matter, while he’s thinking primarily of the decompression side of things.
On the subject of needlessly complicated tech things, I had cause to try and set up a Microsoft “family account” so my son can play Minecraft with his cousins. This was exactly as bewildering as you might imagine, involving 3 different logins and an exciting jaunt into the Xbox site (I’M NOT USING AN XBOX, MICROSOFT grrrr).
Oh man, I know your pain, and went through it for my son too a few months back. Seriously, why is it so complicated?
On the flip site, I deal with Microsoft logins in the corporate/Enterprise-y world, and it’s not really much easier there either, so maybe they just don’t have a good idea how to make logins easy?
I assume stuff just keeps getting added, and linked to other stuff, in order to connect all their little ecosystems, and nothing ever gets taken away. It is baffling that such a ginormous company can put so little effort into making the user journey a pleasant one.
You are not sharing too many details (which is fine). I will share my experience, being fully aware that your circumstances might be completely different and that it might not apply to you in the slightest.
I was in a bad place, mentally and physically, some months ago. I decided to go to a psychologist. It still took me several months just to call one after deciding I needed one, but I eventually did it.
I’m still going to therapy. My mental health is improving gradually, but unexpectedly what has improved the most was my physical health. My therapist’s recommendations were simple: concentrate on the basics first: sleep/food/sport/relationships.
I now try to go to bed a bit earlier than before, I eat a bit less, and I do some exercise more or less regularly (I started just having morning walks, I currently jog 5k 4-5 times per week, and I am training my arms and back so that I’ll eventually be able to do pull-ups). I track on a calendar when I jog, when I eat responsively, when I sleep at least 7 hours, when I spend time with my family, when I reach out to friends, and when I spend some time on myself. It sounds like a lot, but it is actually just putting up to 5 crosses per day. I even write a single “diary” line about how each day went.
Now some parts of my health are on an upwards trend instead of on a downwards one. The slope isn’t super steep, but compounding interest now works in my favor as time passes. It feels nice. I’ve lost only a little weight, but I can see my body changing shape, ever so gradually. I won’t become a super model but my knees don’t hurt any more when standing up.
If you don’t want or can afford going to the shrink, the Atomic Habits book + the recommendation on focusing on the essentials might be enough.
1.) Regarding keeping your website going when you die, Matt Shapiro is trying to find a mechanism that will keep his COVID Memories project on the internet forever. I gather it’s essential a small foundation that uses proceeds from an investment account to fund the DNS renewals, and then he keeps a lot of the material on his own hardware. I can’t easily find where he’s talked about this -but I imagine you could DM him on twitter @politicalmath. You and he would probably get along great -geeky, Christian gamers who work in internet development. Even if he can’t help you, I think you’d be good internet friends.
2.) From the dawn of time, I have never been able to get digitized video to work. Somehow my Dad managed it, but every time I tried to digitize old VHS tapes, I always had a problem where the audio and video would gradually desync over the course of 15 minutes. By the end of a 2 hour movie it was like watching a bad dub. Even today, watching videos on my phone while putting the sound through bluetooth speakers results in about a second desync. Heck -the problem even comes up when I record videos on my work computer (for online classes -so a 20 minute lecture). It is the most infuriating thing, and I feel your pain.
3.) I have been going back and forth about upgrading my computer or getting a next-gen console. I think I’ve finally decided to get a PS5 -and Final Fantasy VII remake is a big part of why. Not sure when I’ll go through with it, but I’m looking super forward to the discussion on this website.
Likewise! There is so very much to talk about regarding that game, from several different angles, both within and without the game itself. I’ve seen a good deal of discussion in other places, but I feel like Shamus and the commenters here would have a unique perspective.
I’m also looking forward to this conversation.
Would it surprise you that I’ve thought about a lot of this stuff despite being in my mid-thirties? I’ve thought about putting together a will, though I dunno what I’d do with it, where I’d put it, or if there’s some specific method to make it legally binding. I don’t even know how I’d phrase it. Can you pass a Steam library on to anyone? I’ve always thought “when I have a comfortable paycheck I’ll get a back-up server” and use that to store all the raw text of my blog posts and videos and podcasts that I’ve made, but I’ve yet to have that comfort. I’ve had friends die of cancer and at least one friend die from a motorcycle accident, and it’s become clear to me that the only thing in this life we’re guaranteed is death, and we’re not even guaranteed we get to go out on our own terms. In fact, it’s most likely that we won’t.
I guess this is where my faith should provide a degree of comfort, but it actually begs more questions. Sure, I (believe I) know where my soul is going, but what have I done for the souls of others? For a while I tried to do some writing regarding my faith and thoughts on it on my blog, but it was clear I was still working through stuff and it’s just… not the place for it. I feel far more comfortable sharing my thoughts on video games, anime, and film than I do faith, because faith is complex, personal, and just feels like offense is inevitable and therefore so is trouble. Faith isn’t a hobby, it’s something more than that, and therefore a blog that’s a hobby is not the best place for it. Yet I then sit here, wondering if the volunteer work at my Church is really enough, or if I’m effectively the stranger walking by pretending not to notice the person getting mugged and robbed across the street. So even in the afterlife, that thought of “legacy” plagues me.
I guess I just want to let you know you’re certainly not alone in thinking about this stuff. I’d like to think there might be some ethical solution that could allow for those to pass on to have their work “submitted” somewhere for historical preservation, but that’s a lot of data on the Internet that would require a lot of funding to either host or be willing to pay for a bunch of domains or servers for nothing more than good will.
In the more fun news, glad to hear you got a Switch on good conditions. I actually feel a bit bad for suggesting you wait to purchase one, seeing that you put it into more clear context that it was intended to be something nice for your wife. I think the gesture in which the Switch was received gives it all the more sentimental value, though, no?
I’ll admit, I’m already curious what you’d make to Nintendo’s approach to Breath of the Wild’s open-world compared to other games, but also understand that it would be very, very bad form to immediately start stealing your wife’s system to play it in your own room. Still, if you do choose to cover a Switch game or two (unlikely, I know), I’d recommend purchasing a second Dock for your room. I purchased a second to keep one dock by my work station for easy game recording and another by the living room TV for relaxing gameplay on the couch with the big screen, as well as access to the family for multiplayer games. It has worked out really well so far.
Which leads to the Elgato. In addition to the comment above about USB speeds, I have a sneaking suspicion there’s something going on similar-to-but-not-quite-like V-Sync, where they basically hold onto a bunch of images and audio to make sure everything is properly synchronized. When I was in College in the mid-aughts I took a class on streaming video, and one of the issues we learned about was how easily video frames could go out of sync with audio, with one lagging behind the other. This was a consistent problem when scurvy dogs of the Internet seas would take footage of television shows and redistribute them on a variety of networks, only to discover they never bothered checking their own settings or encoding. Two minutes in and the audio would be slightly off. Five minutes in and it was unwatchable.
What’s the difference between being sent to computer and TV? Again, aside from the USB cable comments mentioned above, I couldn’t tell you, but I’m guessing it’s partially the USB element and partially a security measure, and partially intended to be a “feature” so the “streamer” or recorder is always somewhat aware of what’s about to appear on screen and how it will look.
For me, audio has always been the greatest issue with the Elgato. I bought an audio cable splitter a long time ago to make sure my television and computer audio went to the speakers. Unfortunately, the signal does not always seem to be the cleanest. Simultaneously, for a while there I thought I cleverly figured out how to input my audio from the Switch directly to the computer (my workstation had some major issues for a while), and while this resulted in better audio quality, any stream or recording had audio lag. The signal was still consistent with what was on the TV, but if you went back and watched when I streamed games like Smash Bros., the audio has a slight delay (or the video was slightly delayed?), enough to be noticeable.
I’m tempted to say that people don’t seem to have issue with it because they just wear headphones, and perhaps that is true for most set-ups, but not only do I dislike wearing headphones all the time… AH! That’s what it was. I got wireless headphones whose transceiver was plugged into the PC via USB, and thus I needed all audio to go to the PC in order to hear it on my headphones for streaming and such.
Either way, the biggest headache (and I haven’t had to mess with it in a while so I don’t recall all the specifics) is always the audio for me. The next time I move, I’m planning on doing a major upgrade to my audio system, and intentionally looking for one where the speakers can accept multiple inputs or something.
I’ll be interested in seeing your thoughts on FF7 Remake. I’ve got plenty myself. Perhaps I should do something with ’em.
It’s pretty much a open-world immersive sim, all of the systems are capable of interacting with and affecting each other.
The problem is that the open-world itself is really barebones and the magic of the game starts to wear off once you get out off the “Link surviving out in the Great Plateau” phase of the game.
A good open-world game needs depth in variety and worldbuilding which BOTW mostly lacks.
I understand this was Nintendo’s first outing in the genre and the first attempt was actually quite solid but it leaves a lot of room for improvement to be truly great which is why I think it’s a good idea for Nintendo to be making a direct sequel.
BOTW mainly took inspiration from Skyrim while the sequel is apparently being influenced by Red Dead Redemption 2 so here’s hoping the story and world will be stronger and have more personality.
I’ll need some citation regarding those inspirations.
I feel like you’re also assuming what an open-world “ought to be” being universal. For me, the Breath of the Wild open-world was a far, far better playground than most any other and lasted me 90 hours of playtime. Most open-world games I play for anywhere close to that long is more for completionist sake, and by hour 30-40 I’ve already grown tired of the formula. That never happened with Breath of the Wild, and it was mostly because they seemed to really cleverly design it around player-controlled exploration, discovery, and objective setting. I used my map to create my own markers, and frequently tell friends about one of my favorite memories: hearing about an eighth, massive Gerudo statue somewhere in the world, examining the way the seven smaller statues were drawn on the map, and then looking over the map for that same type of drawing, but larger. With a vague sense of “north” to go off of from a villager’s comment, I soon found it, placed an objective marker, and then began the journey up and across the mountains to find it.
There was no side quest, nor did the game tell me precisely where to go, and I wasn’t prevented from making my way via invisible walls that led me to a specific path (looking at you, Horizon with all your invisible walls and unreasonably impossible to hurdle or climb thigh-high obstacles).
Simultaneously, wandering into a fortress ruin with collapsed walls and tons of dead guardians tells a very specific story of what happened there. Sure, the lore isn’t very deep, but it certainly told a story.
I get if the approach to the open-world wasn’t to everyone’s taste. I have several friends that prefer Ubisoft’s list of errands as it lets them know exactly what to do so they don’t waste time, getting right to the gameplay. Breath of the Wild is far more my preference, however, since all the control is in my hand. Turns out that was fun for a good 90 hours, and if it weren’t for being 90 hours I’d have gone back long ago (I did start a new game again a couple years ago to get some footage, and was very tempted to keep on playing the game, but knowing the time investment and everything else on my pile I opted not to).
Here and here
I don’t disagree with you about BOTW’s player-driven design, it’s why I said the game was pretty solid. I don’t have a problem with the approach Nintendo took to the game.
It’s just for me, more backstory or lore really adds to the locations that you discover and explore. Ruins you repeatedly see throughout the game could have a touch of enviromental storytelling that could tell a more specific story than just the basic “Ganon killed everyone”.
I like open-world fantasy games to be fully fleshed out as the whole point is that you can look through every nook and cranny. Hyrule has some of that but it’s bare, not to say it doesn’t have some personality, a bunch of the NPCs you meet have some quirks and there are many locations that look great and are interesting but there isn’t much to do in them.
The game also lacks in enemy variety, most of them are just colored/elemental variations of each other. There could have been enemies exclusive to a region and more unique sub-bosses you could encounter while traversing the world.
In short, I feel Nintendo made a good template and now all they need to do is add on top of said template for the sequel to be truly great.
Unfortunately the second link didn’t work.
Nintendo words things in such a way that Skyrim “inspiring” Breath of the Wild can sound misleading to what actually happened, though the biggest reason I’m skeptical is that I know folks like Miyamoto don’t actually play a lot of other video games, and they’ve gone on record in the past as not looking to hire big time gamers to their company. Or to put it another way, they like to hire people that enjoy things other than the typical games and anime. They basically try to avoid hiring strictly Otaku developers.
I think that shows both positively and negatively in their approach to games, but in that interview piece we can see that, the younger generation at least, isn’t wholly averse to looking at what other companies did. So they examined Skyrim in order to get an understanding of what an open-world game is like, and then considered what they wanted to avoid and what they wanted to learn from. That’s a bit different from saying “inspired by”, though it certainly indicates they wanted to learn from it. If they took the same approach from Red Dead 2, it’ll certainly be interesting.
As for the lore stuff, I get it. I suppose I’ve always been a “drama first” sort of fellow, where I appreciate lore but lore itself is not the story for me. It can enrich a story, but I feel these days there’s a lot of leaning on lore to be the story (see: Destiny 2 having excellent lore but awful, awful story-telling). So for me, I’m looking at Link’s memory flashbacks and talking to the folks that help him defeat the divine beasts, and I’m picking up on a narrative about how heroes aren’t chosen, they emerge on their own through tough times because they made tough choices. It may not be much and most people I know think the story is meh, but for me, that it has such a consistent idea told throughout (and excellently done in a non-linear fashion fitting for a playground open-world) makes it one of the best Zelda stories told (Twilight Princess and Wind Waker are fascinating in their own right, too).
We’ll see what Breath of the Wild 2 has in store, but seeing as Nintendo has largely been gameplay first, story second, I wouldn’t have much hope for deeper lore.
The Morrowind-esque approach to exploration was one of my favourite aspects of BOTW. Vague directions from villagers beat quest markers every single time, in my book.
I’m also extremely glad they didn’t turn it into a survival sim. Shame about the weapon degradation, though.
It is so weird to me that so many people still complain about weapon degradation. I was so concerned about it when I first saw the gameplay demonstrations, but playing the game, I came to appreciate it a lot. It forced me to be resourceful and to get used to a lot of weapons that I otherwise wouldn’t have, or to get clever with my abilities in combat (or avoid combat whenever possible). The strangest thing is that I played a huge chunk of the game (I think roughly two divine beasts) without ever finding the guy that expands your inventory, meaning I completed about half the game with the base, starting inventory permitted.
If that weapon degradation wasn’t present, I’d have just stuck with whatever the most powerful weapon was and barely experimented, like in most games. Breath of the Wild forced me to experiment, and in the end I found a lot of weapons work in interesting ways.
I also learned that Lizalfos can catch a boomerang you try to throw at them. It’s neat, but also a sort of “how the turn tables” moment of panic.
I never found weapon choice even remotely interesting in BOTW. There’s effectively about 4 different weapon classes (5 if you include bows) with differing stats, and it barely matters what weapon you use for each encounter. Bash four or five times and then chuck it. Dark Souls it ain’t.
The weapon degradation expands the “potion so powerful that you never use it because you never know when you might need it” problem to weapons, which I’m pretty sure nobody wanted. It also means the player has to spend more time engaging with the inventory, which sucks the excitement out of the combat.
Don’t even get me started on the lore implications of “please take this priceless legendary sword which has been passed down through countless generations and is the most valuable artefact our culture possesses, it will represent the struggle of our people in the fight against…. Oh, you broke it already.”
BOTW weapon degradation “works” specifically because all weapons are interchangeable. There’s nothing in the system to be interested about.
Armor has the same problem, which was intensely disappointing to me. Most of the game is about collecting and upgrading your armor (which doesn’t degrade). But once you’ve done it, you learn it was pointless; armor choice boils down to “do I need the heat-resistant armor because I’m in the volcano area, or can I wear the high-defense armor instead?”
There’s a huge, involved quest to find Link’s traditional armor, which is much more difficult to collect — and also worse in every way — than the armor you already had.
(My model for how equipment selection *should* work basically comes from Angband, in which there are a couple dozen player flags and several numeric bonus that can be granted by equipment, and you’re trying to interlock all your equipment (8 slots) to maximize (a) the number of player flags [e.g. “see invisible”] that are active; (b) your numeric bonuses [“+9 constitution”]; and (c) your weapon damage [1d4 dagger of resist everything will keep you alive, but it doesn’t have the impact of a 6d8 mace].)
For a will, you can start by writing something up, signing it, and sticking it in your fireproof box (which is something you should own in general). It doesn’t have any force of law, but it can give guidance to whoever gets stuck actually managing things, and you don’t need to do anything special. You can write this up in an afternoon, without needing to do much research.
I would suggest putting together a living will, not just a standard will. This includes info on what to do if you’re in a coma or otherwise almost but not quite dead, and what you want to happen to your body (particularly if you’re an organ donor), as well as the “who gets my stuff” bits. I would also suggest a list of accounts, a list of people you want informed of your death, and anything else that you feel is relevant to your particular circumstances. (Pets, for example.)
Once you know what you actually want, you can look up the actual rules. These vary by state; a search for “STATE living will” should get something useful. Here, you need two witnesses to sign it, neither of which stand to inherit anything, which is normally reasonable to manage. (Although probably annoying in COVID times.)
Yup, making it all legally airtight can be hard and vary wildly from place to place (my wife was witness for mine and I was witness to hers, and we both inherit everything from the other if one dies first, no problem). But if there is a clear, hand-written message in a lockbox/fireproof box with clear instructions, most judges in most jurisdictions will be tempted to allow it to stand as long as the meaning is clear and does not seem forced. If Bob the Nextdoor Neighbour suddenly pops up with a will saying he gets everything despite everyone knowing you hated Bob’s guts, that’s not very likely to stand unless it fulfills all local legal requirements. if your Neighbour Bob shows up with a will saying he gets $10K and your bike, and everyone knows he’s been taking care of you for ages, went shopping for you, and he’s been riding your bike for years ever since you couldn’t anymore yourself, while the rest is distributed equally among your children, a judge is more than likely to let it stand.
Not that I know whether it matters any, but doesn’t that Elgato thing transfer audio as well?
It does, but directly to the TV/monitor or to your PC, and in your PC it’s transferring to the input-lagged stream/recording “output”, so to speak. If you have your speakers connected to your PC but not your TV/monitor, then you end up hearing all the audio out of the TV/monitor instead of the inevitably superior speakers. So you then need to get the audio from your TV/monitor transferring to your speakers, and I have a feeling most speakers (for PC in particular) don’t anticipate needing multiple devices hooked in. Even in a “home theater” set-up, all your devices are plugged into the TV, and thus you’d just take the audio from the TV and connect to the speakers.
There’s no way it’s a unique situation, but when I’ve looked online for solutions it feels like there’s no good way to solve it, and for how many people are using these things for streaming and recording, you’d think there’d be some sort of solution provided that didn’t feel like trying to MacGuyver something into place.
Maybe this will also mean circling back to Horizon: Zero Dawn? Since you won’t have to deal with the PC port, buggy as it was at first. Did they ever get it patched to a usable state?
Yes! It’s fully stable (at least for me) when I played it a few months ago.
I understand your worries, finding a dead blog is kind of sad when you resonate hard with the writer. It’s even worse when said blog can disappear forever. The other day I was thinking about Total Biscuit, I miss him fiddling with the setting options of a game.
Sweet you got a free Switch, it has a lot of games to chill and relax. I know it’s not what you like, but you might find something interesting.
I took the day off work today so I could go to a funeral for a friend’s father so to come back to “Let’s talk about DEATH” here is surprisingly apropos.
In a lot of ways, today’s funeral was tragic: he wasn’t all that old (mid-60s), had a painful multi-year struggle with cancer, and died a little more than a month after his mother, and less than a month before the wedding of his only child. I know this isn’t easy for the family.
But in a lot of ways, it wasn’t tragic, they introduced it as a “celebration of his life” and it’s one funeral where that really didn’t feel like an empty euphemism to me. In part due to the religious conviction of most who were involved in the ceremony, but also, it was clear from both the people who spoke, and perhaps more-so from the constant stream of people coming in for the visitation that he had impacted a lot of people. (I was at basically the entire visitation due to arriving early so my wife could get to work on time)
His legacy wasn’t a physical thing or some great achievement or financial success, it was in all the people he had ministered to, and all the effects he had on those around him, direct and indirect. My friend spoke at the funeral about how much of who he is came from his father, and while I had only met his father a handful of times, I know my friend well enough to know the truth of that, to the point that it didn’t feel weird for me to be at a funeral for someone I barely knew – as his life had an impact on my own, however indirectly.
For Shamus, I feel it’s the same; the legacy isn’t specifically the website and the jokes and his opinions on the narrative failings of Shoot Guy The Third. For me, it’s not really about the bridge itself, and about how long it’s able to withstand the forces of Wind and Weather and WordPress compatibility, it’s about how many people walked over that bridge and enjoyed it in its time.
I bet the two second delay is because it needs to check if you are trying to use it to make illegal copies of media. Try making a copy of a commercial Blu-Ray with it (especially a Sony Blu-Ray) and see if it stops at some point in the process specifically to shame you for trying to use it in that fashion.
EDIT: No wait, you did mention that possibility. I don’t know how I overlooked it the first time. Anyway, it seems I really agree with you on that point.
EDIT 2: As for me, I’m 100% relying on archive sites to preserve my writings when I finally get around to publishing something worth reading. I might have to specifically give blanket permission for anyone to archive my published works just to make sure? But in any case, that’s my intention.
My existential dread moment came when I was being stalked by vultures for a month. Three vultures would greet me each morning. Nothing quite makes like you consider your own mortality like being stalked by vultures.
Like… outside your bedroom window? Or, glimpsed for a moment perched on the shoulder of a co-worker?
Well then, good news! China doesn’t give a shit about patent/copyright violations. Get thee to AliExpress. There’s got to be something on there that will do the job and cost peanuts.
The blog is your Creation. It’s a Life’s work. It’s a Magnum Opus.
Besides your kids, this blog is probably among your greatest accomplishments – millions of words written, thought over, rewritten, etc. It’s (a large part of) your legacy.
Wanting to maintain this, and worrying about what will happen after your death is perfectly logical.
And as to the other…Don’t ask me. Screen mirroring my phone to my TV or to my PC introduces about 1/5th of a second of lag, and that’s wireless over a crappy WiFi. Doubling my computer output to one screen or two screens or half a dozen takes literally no time. I don’t see why your console shouldn’t simply be able to plug into two outputs and supply both with the same info at the same time.
I wonder how feasible it would be to publish the whole blog as a bound set, like those old sets of encyclopedias.
You know, I think the whole “conversion” thing might be a patent issue as well, but it’s less related to Hollywood trying to protect their movies and more to “we realized just how much money we can make from streamers and damn it if anyone’s going to take that away from us”. I have no way to prove it, but history is on my side in this kind of thing. It’s far more likely that the reason is insidious than technological.
Also, I’ve said this before, but you really should try the Switch for yourself. Borrow it from your wife some time and as soon as you find the exact game that’ll make the console click for you you won’t be able to put it down. OK, hopefully you just buy your own so you don’t have trouble with your wife, but you get what I mean.
About the subject of death, I find myself curiosly thinking about it a lot, but rarely to this point. I haven’t had a friend dying yet (though several family members have), and I haven’t had an eye-opening visit to the doctor (except for the optometrist, hahaha, … haha… OK, I’ll go). I have been naturally gravitated towards healthier eating on my own. Though I confess I’m still too light on exercise.
You should take solace on the fact that at least you have a bunch of published books, so your legacy will always be there. Even if the website ceases to exist, your books won’t. And the last one in particular has its entire identity written in your blog voice, so that’s at least part of the blog that’s been rendered immortal.
That Snarl footnote made me unreasonably happy, and I don’t know exactly why. I guess it’s nice to see the content dudes I like enjoying each others’ content too.
I had my own adventure with “why is this set up this way!” trying to figure out if I could dual-box Outward. I got everything working, but for some reason it wouldn’t read the joystick on my keypad controller as the mouse, so I couldn’t change which direction I was looking! It was driving me insane! I eventually had to download a program that lets you translate joystick directional movements into mouse movements–found one that could actually work with my controller on the THIRD try. Then I had this obnoxious problem where using my joystick would move both the pov AND the character at the same time.
I finally figured out how to disable the movement controls in the game, so now it’s working. Except I’m so annoyed I don’t want to deal with it any more.
I played FF7 a long time ago. I remember it being… WEIRD.
Your memory serves you well.
Like, you fight a haunted house by slapping it with your swords while it tries to chew on you.
HEY! HEY! HEY!!!
It was a really, REALLY big sword!!!
And, lets be fair: Sephiroth is still considered one of the best video game villians ever no matter what list you look at. And when you realize that hes usually the only one older than 2007(ish) you realize how much staying power the game really has.
Weird? Certainly. Groundbreaking, iconic and one of the greatest games ever made? Yes, yes and absofuckinglutely.
Hi Shamus, if you want to preserve your website for posterity, have you thought about preparing a conversion of your WordPress website into a static website? You could convert each page into the exact same HTML/CSS/Javascript/image files as now (no visual changes at all), but the HTML/CSS/Javascript/image files do not get assembled by the PHP/Wordpress webserver for each visitor, but are just files in a file system. The database is not required anymore.
After all, once there is no way to leave comments, then the pages don’t need much WordPress functionality and are almost completely static, right? The only dynamic elements I see are the “From The Archives” section, the background image and the frontpage on shamusyoung.com. If these elements become static, that is not as bad as when other things break due to WordPress incompatibilities.
I’ve converted a WordPress site into a static site for a client, but that site consisted only of 6 pages or so. For some reason I didn’t use a WordPress plugin for this purpose (there are several for this purpose). I used HTTrack / WinHTTrack, which loads pages, optionally converts the same-domain-URLs in the HTML to relative URLs, and saves the files to disk. It took me a couple of hours to do everything correctly, but it was straightforward. In your case, it would surely take much longer to convert all pages and adjust the procedure to fix all errors as they crop up, but I think that this approach should still be a safe bet. (It’s an interesting topic for a couple of articles, too. ;-D)
Advantages:
– Cheaper hosting. Maybe even free hosting when using something like Github Pages, which also supports custom domains.
– Secure (it’s just HTML, CSS, Javascript).
– The files can be kept as they are forever – no need to upgrade anything at all.
Disadvantages:
– The “From The Archives” section, the background image and the selection on the frontpage will become static. I think the order of the selection on the frontpage could be randomized with client-side Javascript. The “From the Archives” section on each page would be static, but since every page would have a different static selection, that’s not that bad.
You could regularly do the whole conversion and save the resulting webpage in a folder, or maybe try it live on a subdomain. Or you could write a script that does this automatically every week or so. Then when the time comes (hopefully that’s still several decades in the future), your relative need only switch the domain to the static site and continue paying for the domain and the hosting.
Additionally, you might be able to have your whole website archived at the Internet Archive. I think that the “Archive Team” are the right people to ask about this.
That’s a good suggestion. I have been thinking about this as well. My uncle died and had a website that he hosted on his personal web space provided by his ISP. It was http://users.telenet.be/mydotcom. I did a google search and I found that there were some people still referring to this website.
My uncle learned himself some computer skills, then got a formal education about it and went to work for a municipality as a sysadmin. In order to organize his thoughts when learning a new skill he wrote an article about it on his site. He also published his scripts and software there. Besides IT stuff there was some “random” stuff as well (which he called “Useless Publications Unlimited”).
Anyway, his site is well preserved on the web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200127103520/http://users.telenet.be/mydotcom/ . I would like to highlight this article on faking Linux: https://web.archive.org/web/20200127213815/http://users.telenet.be/mydotcom/upub/fakelinux/fakelinux.htm .
I checked shamusyoung.com on the web archive as well. The search bar field does not work anymore (that would need the database). But the archives and categories pages both work. Also the comments seem properly archived. The only disadvantage is that it is a bit slow, but at least the legacy remains.
And about the health: have you considered a standing desk (one that can move from sitting to standing position and vice-versa), Shamus? My hobbies and work are all computer-related, so I recently bought one. The option to stand at times instead of sitting all day is very welcome.
I’ll take over the site. I can post about video games, but with humor and wit rather than…well whatever it is you think wit and humor are. I could always write more about how I’m still not playing MLB 13. And you did say what a different kind of site this would be if I ran it. So yea….I’ll do it. How hard can it be? Aside from apparently destroying ones kidneys and causing hair loss, blogging seems pretty easy….
What a way to consolidate that whole section of the post. I gladly abdicate my whole future to people brave and/or stupid enough to keep putting up with this crap. I just don’t want it and they can damn well have it : /
I was just reminded of this post thanks to the comments on the last Diecast. I was really only interested in the first section, and had completely forgotten about the fact that he had talked about two other topics as well.
I read about the Switch, because Heather talked about it on the podcast.
And then I saw that the last section was something about hardware, and I initially wanted to skip it – I wasn’t in the mood for a technical topic. But after I read the first sentence, I naturally continued reading, until I had devoured the entire rant, with a pleasant smile on my face!
How silly of me, assuming that a Shamus post about hardware was going to be something I DON’T want to read….