I have a French Press

SM57s still can get roughed up pretty bad with the plastic covering on the front of the mic (especially if miking a snare drum with a less than precise drummer). SM58 will survive a nuclear war.

Radeon 7770.

FFXIV!

Puzzling Places has been an unexpected joy after I got it in a bundle with Tetris Effect.

There needs to be a film about the FOSS movement that matches the vibes of 1995’s cyberspace masterpiece Hackers.

Definitely a long way off from how active they were a year or two ago.

My early impressions are certainly quite positive, I love how experimental it is and very willing to explore new gameplay styles. Certainly curious to see what the metascore ends up being, probably higher than Link’s Awakening HD?

I had a very interesting experience watching Network recently, a film from 1976 about the influence of television, and I had a strange realization that TV then was nearly as old as the internet is now. This just feels like a natural point in the history of a communications medium that people begin to think critically about its effect on people and the way we think.

I think about this all the time, I really could see myself getting into computer education ten years down the line.

What I would do is this:

• Focus on recreating styles of computing that produced our most digitally literate generation: Gen X (for context, I was born in 2000).
• Give everyone in the class a Raspberry Pi and a MicroSD card. Guide them through the setup process. This recreates larger, more complicated computers in microcosm.
• Start out with the Lite version of the Raspi OS, allow students to discover the different components of an operating system: Bash, window management, sound, the desktop, office applications. Take them through some common Raspberry Pi tasks.
• Do not allow the class to become the Adobe/Microsoft power hour. This is the number one way we are failing our students today.
• Have a unit focused around free software and the open source movement. Focus on social media literacy as well. Ensure that students understand how social media algorithms work, how these companies make money, understand that users are the product.

There’s probably more I could come up with if I sat down to really plan out a week by week lesson plan, but this is off the cuff where I’d put the focus. So many of these topics have Connections-style related points. “Why is my computer at home different from a Raspberry Pi?” gives you a great opportunity to expand on CPU architecture, which leads to how computers actually “think”. I remember when I was a child one of the things that I was most confused by was how a computer was able to turn Python into something it actually understands, that can be a fascinating lesson in the right hands. How does a computer know where to look on the disc when it boots up? It’s great!

Kids already know how to use phones and tablets. Take concepts from those, concepts they are already familiar with, and then explain the deeper process behind it. Computers are engineered by people, you can understand them, it’s not magic.

I’ve been a big Bethesda fan for years, no one else makes games that quite come close to their very simulationist style. I like Starfield, and now that it’s a year after launch I have finally found my angle on it to get the enjoyment out of it that I wanted. I think it’s a good game.

But it’s also a flawed game, it’s clearly not for you, and that’s okay too.

I want to play either Skyrim or Breath of the Wild for the first time again, knowing nothing about what’s out there to be discovered or the limits of the sandbox. Those games cast a special spell in their first few dozen hours before you know where the boundaries of the world are.

I can recognize that I love the Star Wars prequels for bad reasons.
But also they’re still masterpieces actually.

Do vinyl records count? I really like that they make beautiful noise from a simple electromechanical process.

If the Play Store becomes required like that then Android’s already-shaky status as an open source base platform is going to go out the window. I’m glad there are non-Google distros of Android but there really needs to be more of a push to make a completely FOSS phone platform.

The tech savvy will just buy a Raspberry Pi and install yunohost on it.

It was the early days of a new technology and way of listening that was completely different compared to the past 60+ years of recorded audio. I guess as a more modern analogy it’s like those cheap 3D films at the height of the fad that felt the need to gratuitously shove objects directly in front of the camera to get the most out of the 3D effect.

Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who produced Pet Sounds, was actually deaf in one ear. Despite that, he got along just fine in a monophonic world, but the switch to stereo completely left him behind. It was a huge change in how music was mixed.

You have to understand that mixing consoles from that era were supremely limited in channels (think four, eight, later sixteen), to the point where they would often have to mix one section (say, the drums) and then record that mix to tape so it would take up a single channel and then do the guitar, bass, and vocals on another channel. The idea of having two of the same thing going through two channels was an exorbitant luxury they couldn’t afford!

Hey just so you know in many people’s minds SW doesn’t stand for software.