Mid-December 2022 Bullets - Top of Mind

It’s the exciting summary of my currently non-gaming life through the midpoint of December.

We’re well into the traditional winter malaise now, where every day is a desperate search for distractions from the cold, joyless darkness.

• There were a few stressful days when my tabby cat Gracie started experiencing some pretty obvious pain in her mouth over the weekend, which made it difficult for her to eat. It turns out one of her front canines had broken, and after a dental exam she had one other bad tooth removed, and now she’s much better. I ended up switching vets in the process.
• Meanwhile I still haven’t made an endodontist appointment for my own teeth. My toothache went away and with it, the urgency to do something about it. My dental insurance improves on January 1, so it’s better if I can wait a bit anyway.
• Elden Ring videos continue to upload by means of automated scripts. These randomizer mod videos are probably the last I’ll upload for the forseeable future, which is a shame since I’ve setup a pretty nice production pipeline and gained a lot of followers (for me; still nowhere near enough to monetize the channel though). But as yet I have nothing else to upload, since I’ve recorded and/or played almost no games since I stopped playing Elden Ring in June. Every time I sit down to play a game in the evening, it feels like I’m sitting down to do my taxes, so I do something else instead.
• Instead of playing games, I’ve been getting much more entertainment value from binge-watching the UK show Taskmaster. I’ve been watching a lot of UK shows from Dave (which, as far as I can tell, is the best name for a TV channel that has ever been invented) through a VPN in the last month or so. QI, The Outsiders, Question Team, stuff like that. It’s funny to me that there’s an entire biosphere of comedians that just rotate around the different quiz show panels.
• Ran out of energy for listening to Jules Verne books.
• Twitter drama is still a thing, but I don’t really notice it in my little bubble away from the rest of the world.
• Fediverse drama is also a thing, and every day I see more and more reasons to think the ActivityPub-based fediverse is going to inevitably crash and burn as a large-scale platform, and the masses would be better off moving back to plain old 1990s-style message boards.
• Incidentally the people who made ActivityPub, the thing Mastodon is based on, are now starting to promote a new federated social media concept called Spritely and “OcapPub.” This might explain why they seem to have been AWOL on ActivityPub for the last four years. They do a good job of laying out all the inherent problems with ActivityPub that need to be solved, but it’s still a very academic solution sorely lacking in practical details.
• I’ve lost some enthusiasm for it, but I continue to work on an ActivityPub-enabled server to attach to the blog, because I think there are some cool things I can do with it. Unfortunately I keep running into problems communicating with Pleroma and Mastodon, which is annoying.