The Art Of Not Asking Why

Question for you weather gurus out there 🌞 ⛈️. When you look at the radar map in a weather app and you see the clouds in all these pretty colors, is this a prediction or is this what already happened? Am I looking at a forecast or what happened earlier with the clouds?

“Yes your dog can come in. Yes we have a restroom. Yes you can use it.”

I don’t think we’re in NYC anymore.

On my way to a short fireworks escape vacation for a couple of days. Took the camera bag with me, and excited to see what photos I take this time.

For the last hour or so, I tried to get VMware working on my Windows desktop. My Linux mint VM, which I had installed and worked perfectly fine for a long while (I’ve used VMs for the last 8 years or so), is unusable. VMware is extremely sluggish, so much so that keyboard input can lock and result in characters duplicating. Watching videos is impossible: the video itself barely moves, and the sound breaks down to sub-levels of slow motion.

Apparently, this is the result of a resent-ish Windows update (what a shock 😤) that changed how virtualization works. Long story short, if I understand this correctly, there is another layer of isolation that VMware needs to work through. VMware uses whatever MS introduced and not the VMware component, and that is what causes the issue.

So far, my attempts at fixing this failed. There are various places showing how to disable this feature (Hyper V), but nothing seems to work. As a matter of fact, I noticed some of the mentioned features were off already, so I tried to turn them on to see if it made a difference. Nothing. My VMs are still unusable.

I do have Linux installed directly on my desktop, but this means no Windows, which I still need for some games I play (World of Warships stopped working on Linux for me for some reason, and Diablo 4 is a no go on Linux for now).

Looking forward to Cities: Skylines 2 🎮 coming this October

Cities: Skyline is a dangerous game if you’re into city building. You can design your cities down to the level of the pavement of the sidewalk, apartment buildings from around the world, and your local coffee shops, all thanks to a thriving modding community.

They’re coming up with a sequel, and they are intimidating us with an even more realistic model. How dare they threaten us with a good time.

Another grey rainy day with some 75% humidity until the afternoon… At times like these I think I was made for deserts.

Pride 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️at the Westfield World Trade Center

Back in 1984, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, a book that gave birth to the Cyberpunk genre along with Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D, or DnD) was already in the geek scene for ten years at the time. I’m a little surprised that it took Shadowrun, ten more to show up, and still somehow miss the point.

I’ve spent the last week or so reading up Shadowrun rules. I want to bring up the DnD gang back together to explore a new world, one that I’ve been cooking in my head for months. It takes place in the far future. Human cloning failed unexpectedly and spectacularly, giving birth to a certain form of “magic” in the process. I wanted a roleplaying game that brings into play huge corporations, cybernetics, and computer systems, and Shadowrun was an obvious spot to revisit. But I dropped it pretty quickly.

First, we already know and understand DnD 5e. Learning a new system of rules, especially a confusing and complex one like Shadowrun’s, is not appealing. That, and the fact that I don’t think the human hand is meant to roll 12 dice at once (a bad Shadowrun joke).

Second, I don’t like the lore of Shadowrun. Magic is fantastical, Dragons are real, and dwarves and elves show up because of some sort of disease… eck. I already have my own story, as I mentioned above. I wanted the system to adopt my world, not the other way around.

Third, making your own rules is fun. I am not an experienced DnD DM and I will never memorize all those rules. I count on my players not just as guests to my creation, but also equal in its making. We will shape and adjust rules as needed. Taking out the Big Book of Rules and searching if something can be done and how or is not as fun.

So nowadays I’m expanding on my rules and lore where it makes sense: my wiki. It’s mostly DnD rules that will remain unchanged with a couple of twists influenced by Shadowrun and my own inventions. My goal is to get to a “beta” point where we can test it, perhaps during a session 0 of sorts.

My niece graduated from kindergarten, and I wanted to send a reply in a short video. I don’t usually use my iPhone on a whim for personal messaging, but my sister is deep in Apple’s world. Here’s the process:

1. I Recorded a short video using the iPhone’s camera app
2. Realizing I wanted to cut two parts out, I sent it over to the Mac with Airdrop
3. On the Mac, I opened it in Snagit and edited it to my liking
4. I dropped the MP4 into Messages and sent it to my sister

I haven’t done this before, but the process was so intuitive and seamless that it blew my mind. As a person who uses Linux on a daily basis, I forget how nice it is that technology is so seamless these days. 10 years ago, this was all science fiction.

When I read the pro and con arguments about Facebook federating, I feel the same way. Maybe Facebook’s integration with ActivityPub means I could reach my friends from college who never left Facebook and will always stay there. Maybe they’ll see my posts on their feed, and I could communicate with them without ever logging into Facebook Messenger. To me, that’s a win.

Does this mean Facebook’s motives are anything but profit and closed walls? No. This is the same way I think about Apple and Messages. But I like having options.

It’s easy for me to say, “Join Mastodon! Chat with me on Signal! It’s easy!” But to my sister and my college friends, it’s not. And yelling louder would only make me more obnoxious and these alternatives even less appealing.