The Art Of Not Asking Why

Piracy, preservation, and the devs who don’t mind if you have to pirate their game

“The video game industry started essentially mimicking Hollywood,” says Cifaldi. “There’s basically five companies that own everything now. That sucks in a lot of ways”.

It’s no longer about stealing (how can you steal something you can’t really own is another problem), it’s about losing games that won’t exist without piracy.

It’s been too cold to spend time outside for the last week or so, and I managed to give myself a light case of cabin fever. I did go on a small self-date yesterday and worked on a new project in one of my favorite local cafes/bars, but that was it for the outdoors.

At home, I added another day of exercise last week because I was too restless. It helped. I also got deeper into Fallout New Vegas, which I somehow skipped when it came out. It’s a good game, but it still suffers from some familiar open-world annoyances like obnoxious invisible walls, and the combat system is too basic, but it’s still a lot of fun.

It seems I’m done paying some of my student loans (hooray!), at least the private portion of it. I say “seems” because I still can’t believe it. I’ve been paying them for so long (even though unemployment and lack of financial stability) that not paying them seems unreal.

I’m also itching to try DnD once again, bring the gang together, and see what we can do about it.

Couldn’t handle it anymore. Braced the cold and went for a self date, treated myself to a vegan burger and a couple of drinks. Good times, glad I went ☺️

Last week, I stopped in front of a place I must have passed a hundred times before in my neighborhood. In front of me was a closed fence leading to the backyard of a building, and inside it, a smokestack that I assume belong to a heating furnace of some sort.

Two thoughts collided in my head at the same moment. The first is how I had passed this place so many times before without noticing this tall smokestack; the other is that I had to take a picture to convey what I saw in my mind.

This is not the kind of picture you put on Instagram because Instagram is a social place for the masses, and the masses expect pictures of smiling babies and cute cats. Who wants to open their Instagram and see… this?

The fact remained that I took this picture to express an idea, and as a photographer and a person, that’s the point. The why might be more elusive, depending on who you are and what goes on inside your head at the moment (I am reading Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl 📚 right now). Not every photo is meant to bring smiles, even if “the people of Instagram” (who are just an idea I have in my head as guilt) say otherwise.

Who was I, though, when I took that photo? Not the same person who passed this building 99 times previously, if to judge from the fact that I didn’t even realize this structure existed. At that time, I was a descendant of holocaust survivors and a Jew. Tomorrow… who knows? But a part of me will always be in this picture. After all, it’s just a smokestack, and it’s just a fence; It’s me who made it into something else and then into this picture.

This was originally handwritten in my journal and converted to a post

To continue the whole “why do I care” and me writing things down and explaining is a personal life goal (I need to write about that as well), consider yesterday’s virtual meeting at work.

It went as expected. My supervisor was a bit late, as they usually are, because of back-to-back meetings they have (I guess this happens when you’re on the top of the food chain for IT).

I had a couple of issues I wanted to bring up, but what matters here is an issue that concerns information security for our institution. More specifically, I found technical information that should be internal on our public-facing website instead. While no patients were exposed (it would have been much worse!), that information belonged in our intranet, meant for our users only, not everyone on the World Wide Web.

The people in the meetings were unaware of this issue, which I knew beforehand, which is why I wanted to bring it up to begin with. Writing information and putting information into the right place is my job, but this particular article pre-dated when I started my role.

The obvious question: why bother?

I could have easily ignored it, and if something had gone wrong, I’d have the lack of knowledge around me as CYA ammunition; after all, no one told me this was a problem, so why would I know?

But, see, the problem is that I care. And no, this is not a compliment, trust me. When you run into people who roll their eyes at you and sigh or joke about “always with the questions!” about me, it’s not a quality you’re proud of. Caring is not enough. I also like it. I’m passionate about it. It’s what I do.

If I were to use this energy in my own projects (which I do when I can), I would enjoy it more because there would be less friction from other people (delays, disagreements, etc.). as long as I didn’t dig holes in the ground and fall down the cliff like the coyote in Road Runner.

Sometimes I wonder though, if I should care less and keep quiet.

A comment from 2025-01-19: I believe that seeing potential problems and “caring” is one of the things people like about my work. The other part is that with this “caring” comes organization and instructions they didn’t have before.

Microsoft complaint #1204:

On a Mac, Outlook is a second-class citizen.

Something as simple as having dark mode working with the system theme is not working right: the reading pane remains harsh white when everything else is black.

Apparently, there’s a little icon that must be turned on for the reading pane to also work in dark mode. Otherwise, why would it work as expected? 🙃

• JTR;GBM

Ye Olde Blogroll - Blogroll.org blogroll.org

Reader: blogroll.org

Someone brought this great website again (I forget who), and I’m thankful. A human-made list of human blogs. Awesome.

Morning thought: can we make stock selling illegal for certain public companies that have their customer’s lives at stake, like, say, Boeing?

Think of it: the average Joe down the street from you who has stocks in the company has more deciding power regarding the airplane that’s going to fly you to your vacation next month than the engineers who built it.