Aquarionics

It is a fault, universally acknowledged, that to sit on a vertically scrolling site for a long time will waste your spare time like nothing else. My original “Social Media” was Usenet, which had the advantage that it moved relatively slowly. You would sync your groups to your client, read & reply as necessary, sync back to your server, which in turn would sync upstream to other servers. Twitter…

Today is the first day of something. For me, it’s a new job, for you it’s probably something else. It’s been a rough few years on planet Aquarion, to be honest. In 2024 I parted ways with a job I was expecting to grow with for a long time, and ended up in one of the worst job markets I’ve ever seen. Six months and most of my savings passed, and I got a new job, but that didn’t last beyond May of…

When the dog owners of the world are asked for the wonders of winter in this country, they may talk about bright crisp mornings where the world seems brand new, of hounds galavanting across hill and plain, of doggy snow angels in fresh drifts of fluffy white bullshit. Rylan, a bearded collie, helpfully on the opposite bank of an unseen stream to the photographer. It is unlikely, however, that…

2022 in Video Games

I’ve played some computer games in 2022. Here are some words about some of them. Final Fantasy 14 – Endwalker My FFXIV Character. Okay, so yes, by numbers this is the game I’ve spent most time playing. I’m enjoying FF a lot, the story for the most recent few expansions has been incredible, and the latest one is a powerhouse concluding a storyline of the last ten years, most of which they…

Sgt Pepper. Trad. Audiophile is not my usual brand of geekery, but over the start of the year I got a record player. I’ve no illusions of my ability to distinguish sound quality, warmth, digital compression, etc, but it does push my units of music towards the Album rather than the Track, which works for me as both a continuation of mood thing and a time measurement thing. That is, I use systems…

Another even year, another odd Geekcode. The Geekcode is a very old tradition. It was written by Robert A. Hayden and last updated in 1996, It’s a formated series of codes that are not unlike the kind of at-a-glance keyword biography you now get on Twitter, only… well, geekier. Here, it’s a kind of milestone marker. I’ve published my geekcode every other year since 1999, each year updating it…

Pupdate - Introducing our new dog, Rylan.

This is Rylan. Rylan is 12 weeks old, he’s a Bearded Collie puppy, and he’s currently occupying… a lot of my life right now. How (Not) To Buy A Puppy There’s a meme wandering around Twitter/Facebook at the moment: … though to be fair we have been planning this for a while. One of the considerations for this house was it has a nice garden suitable for a dog. I’ve wanted to have one for a…

Hot takes on an 11 year old game: Mass Effect 2

I completed Mass Effect 2 a couple of days ago for the first time. This article contains spoilers for ME1 & 2. I played it on release, but for some reason didn’t get more than about halfway through, so these are my hot takes on an 11 year old game, albeit the slightly remastered version bundled with the Legendary edition, which smoothes out the levelling a bit, and has altered a lot of the…

Bripe and the world Bripes with you

This is, without doubt, the stupidest coffee device I have ever bought. But I have bought it.

Wk3/4: Better late than dead

The difficulty of this weeknotes things is that entire weeks can go by without anything interesting happening. That’s not what happened last week, but the things that did happen I can’t entirely talk about, because… well, because talking about security things in public is a good way to need to look for a new job, and I quite like this one. So this is combined Wk3 and 4, Work Launches coming…

Wk2: Knows the Grindstone

Work My current office setup 2021 at work started in a fairly typical way. Over the course of the christmas break our central IT team had updated the VPN to add a secure traffic proxy. This was mostly transparent to the entire group, except for our development environments, which don’t have the corporate certificate trusted, and therefore were – correctly – throwing errors about possible Man in…

Another year, another attempt at keeping track of what I’m doing. The weird thing about this site is that it has a fairly complete record of my existence for about 10 years, and then a gradually less useful one for the following 10 years. I find the bit where I’ve got actual documentation of my life really useful, but not – apparently – enough to keep doing it. So, let’s try a new…

This website is 21 years old today. It’s possible that this is the year I get around to writing more on it. But I’ve said that before. 21 years ago, it was a direct copy of my old netmanor site, and therefore looked roughly like this. Happy holidays.

Thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 may not be generically reviewable. When I’ve mentioned I’ve been playing it, and I’ve been asked what I think, I’ve tended to refer people to Kieron Gillen’s 2005 review of Boiling Point: Road To Hell, a game whose ambition was obscured by its execution (and a review that entertainingly breaks the Eurogamer site every time they update something on the back end). It reminds me a…

On accidentally creating a new vampire game

I tripped and wrote an RPG.

It’s not a big one, two A4 pages printed out, and it’s called To Stifle the Light, and it was written for friend Jessie.

I like giving RPG one-shots as birthday presents, as discussed recently, but in this case Jessie actively solicited a vampire style game, for they had never played one. Since I’ve never run one, I stepped up, because that’s a thing I do.

Vam…