The Art Of Not Asking Why

The old and the new. NYC.

Out of nowhere, I bought Diablo 4 🎮 yesterday for full price. It came up to about $75 bucks, tax and all. It’s Blizzard, so I know I’m not going to see a sale anytime soon, and I was tired, and it looked pretty… I’m working my way up slowly from regretting it.

The game’s good; it rolls out like a classic horror story of gloom and doom, which I enjoy. The combat is as simple as it can be (point the bad guy, the good guy bonks him on the head, rinse and repeat), though I’m learning there’s more to it slowly. There’s also multiplayer, and I saw some dude kicking ass near me yesterday, so I sent some bad guys that were giving me a hard time up his way, and my silent friend ate them for breakfast.

It’s going to be one of those games that pull me in and do not require much brain power, which is going to be perfect for my training breaks - study a bit, play a bit, and in the end, you end up cramming more knowledge in your head you knew is possible.

Can I play on Linux? Maybe, probably not. Game launchers are the bane of Lutris and the others, and AAA games all (pretty much) have their launchers.

Meanwhile, in NYC… I skipped my morning run today. Sitting here with an air purifier we just got by chance (I ordered one last week) on full blast. 😦

Not specifically an Apple thing, but Apple-emphasized. To put it simply, it’s Money. The way Apple splits people into can-haves and can’t-haves is financially clear and functionally obvious. Much of what Apple sells is.

Google is another example, with the state of their affordable phones/laptops (Chromebooks). They can utilize these better, but since it isn’t profitable to the company, these devices get the backseat. Meanwhile, tech journalists publish the Oohs and the Ahhs because most tech journalists are in the can-haves camp themselves.

I’m probably more agitated because in the past I wasn’t able to afford “luxury tech,” and later I was briefly a teacher to kids in similar situations. It’s also important to mention that Apple and other big tech companies kill independent shops which offer repairs and used devices for affordable prices.

Still, it gets worse. After we buy expensive tech, we keep buying it a bit every day by selling our data. The amount of information our tech spews about us to advertising companies is mind-numbing. I’d bet that if we had a law forcing companies to only sell data from people who opt-in for, say, 5% of the profits, a lot more people would be able to buy luxury tech.

So once again Apple “introduces” technology people can’t afford to do something they don’t need.

The last post makes me think I should write an update on how life’s been without (well, almost without) Google apps entirely on my Phone. Turns out it’s quite possible, and I barely miss it. And no, I didn’t switch to iPhone as a personal device :)

This morning I re-discovered the Wikipedia of digital maps: Openstreetmaps. I had an account there, but I haven’t used it in a while. Turns out the community is more active than I thought: a certain edit I made to a coffee shop a day ago was updated and adjusted an hour after I posted the extra information. It makes me consider contributing to the local maps in my area.

To recap: I’ve been using Organic Maps on my Android (thanks to Adam), which I recently wiped to install GrapheneOS.

self-portrait of NK by NK - from Florence

Added some of my old posts from the old blog and realized that the time on those is all around midnight. I use the schedule post option in MB, and while I scheduled a day for the past, I didn’t schedule a time.

Another thing I learned: footnotes, which I used to use on my old blog, still work here in MB. Emacs converts those to lines of HTML when I export to markdown and it works fine. I need to adjust the CSS around those a bit, but otherwise it works fine.