I am pretty fucked up. New Zealand had a 2-month-long lockdown in March of 2020, and I’d just come off my antidepressants at the end of February. Since then, my life has been on an amazingly nosedive trajectory, and I have pretty much fallen apart. I haven’t put myself back together, yet. I’m trying. But it’s not this last year. It’s the last 3 years, since I had a back issue that kept me from going to a co-working space. It’s the past 8 years, since I burnt out so hard that I had...| The Particular Finest
I wanted to write a retrospective on the 2010s, a summary of everything from moving to New Zealand (It’s been about a decade! How weird!), the games I’ve played and the books I’ve read and maybe some rumination on my career and the life I’ve been having. And I can write some of that retrospective, since the 2010s were deeply affecting in so many ways. I started my own company, which was a deeply pleasing thing to get to do and experience. I love being able to do this, and I’m thankf...| The Particular Finest
I don’t like Dark Souls 3. I’ve been depressed for a lot of the last, let’s say 4 years as of this writing, often to a level best described as“nonfunctional”. During that time, as well as playing too much Destiny 2 (but that’s an essay for another time), I played through Bloodborne, Dark Souls 2, and Dark Souls Remastered. I also watch a lot of video essays on YouTube nowadays, and talking about Dark Souls is a point of fascination with a number of those essayists. Any number of v...| The Particular Finest
So Spiritfarer, the latest game from Thunder Lotus, came out just the other day. It’s an absolutely beautiful sidescroller with hand-drawn animation and art and it’s just a wonder to look at. The music is an exceptional composition by Max LL, who scored their last game Sundered (which I also loved). It’s got some light Metroidvania elements where you need to unlock new abilities to get to new areas and collect new resources. It has a crafting loop of collecting resources and building ne...| The Particular Finest
It’s 2020, coronavirus is Intense Af, social distancing is in effect everywhere, and more and more businesses are making the sensible call of“Work From Home!” Okay. So, the thing about working from home, since this is touted as Such Amazing Thing, is that it sucks on numerous levels, and that suck is not obvious at the get go. My first rule of“work from home” is DON’T, but, these are inescapable times where we cannot apply this first and most important rule.1 My first real job was...| The Particular Finest
I want to preface this piece with, I adore Metroidvania games. My first was Metroid II on the Gameboy waaaaaaaay back in the early 1990s, and I played it through … more times than I can remember, actually. I loved the Metroid Prime series. I’ve loved other games in this genre space. When the Chasm kickstarter landed in the heyday of amazing indie games on Kickstarter, I was instantly sold. Beautiful pixel art, innovative and interesting roguelike and procedural generative concepts, and I ...| The Particular Finest
So, I watched the new Tomb Raider movie over the weekend, and, it was good! It was a silly action-adventure romp that had considerable nods to Indiana Jones, to the videogame reboot, and to the original videogames. It was fun! It also didn’t fall into the obliterating-femininity-to-create-strength trope of the first reboot videogame, which I wrote about here, which was nice. There was the shock and difficulty of the actions she had to take to survive, but it wasn’t … gratuitous, or done...| The Particular Finest
Well So much for my goal of regularity when it came to these posts. The data is all being collected in the background, but it doesn’t make me sit down and actually write it like I’m supposed to. I’ve started tracking playtime on systems like the PS4 and Nintendo Switch, nothing as advanced as the AWS Lambda that queries the Steam API for me, instead I’m using a bog-standard time tracking app on my phone to manage it. There’s some variation in the times that are going to be provided,...| The Particular Finest
So. I have some thoughts about videogames I’ve played recently, specifically smaller narrative-centric games colloquially named“walking simulators”. This post is going to dive into the internal narratives and conclusions for several games, so SPOILERSAHEADFOR: Shadow of the Colossus Spec Ops: The Line What Remains of Edith Finch Stories Untold Her Story Okay, let’s go. I like videogames that play with the idea of player morality, and the gray morals of the things you’re doing. Spec ...| The Particular Finest
I keep meaning to write these posts, this commentary on the games that most affected me, most touched me, were most present and prevalent in my life through the year. I keep forgetting to do so. I wrote a program to scrape Steam and keep track of what I’ve played, but I never deployed it. I tried to wield the Playstation Network API to scrape what I’ve played and when, but the API no longer publishes that information. (Thanks Sony. Thony.) Games have been the most meaningful and intense e...| The Particular Finest
You might be familiar with tech joke accounts on Twitter, stuff like PHPCEO and I Am Devloper. These are accounts meant to poke fun at specific stereotypes of people in the tech community, in these cases an ignorant CEO and an incompetent developer, by posting concepts that echo strongly within the experiences of people within tech. And I came across a tweet on my timeline today, from the I Am Devloper account: https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/869931002076028930 and my first (and contin...| The Particular Finest
If you got to see my talk about Human Driven Development at WDCNZ or LCA, you’ll remember that one of the concepts that I brought up was the idea of“That Guy”, the team member that has great technical knowledge but no one really wants to talk to. This idea was one of the parts of that talk that resonated really well with a lot of people, where a lot of people could identify where they had had to work with That Guy, and where they had unfortunately ended up as That Guy. I used an example...| The Particular Finest
So one of the things that I keep getting asked about is when I refer to my past and my future as different people. I speak of the intents of my past, the situations she’s left me in and the struggles I face because of her. I do this because past-aurynn is a real force in my life, a person who had hopes and goals and dreams but with whom I cannot hold a conversation. I can’t talk to her, share my triumphs or my failures, can’t ask her if it’s everything we hoped it would be. She can’...| The Particular Finest
This post was originally a tweetstorm! You can find the original tweetstorm right here. Okay let’s dig into this, which is a blog post where he’s talking about the fallout around the recent, ragingly sexist 31c0n (which I’m not linking to from here). Remember, this is the con that thought it was OK to tweet (from the official account) glorifying“getting wasted”. So, to start with we have pretty classic tone policing, while grudgingly admitting that we have a point that, yes, it was ...| The Particular Finest
So you may have noticed last time that I said I’m trying to create complex JSON objects from within Terraform. In this case, I really want to be able to create an AWSECS container definition, which looks a bit like this (copied from the AWS docs, here) { "name": "wordpress", "links": [ "mysql" ], "image": "wordpress", "essential": true, "portMappings": [ { "containerPort": 80, "hostPort": 80 } ], "memory": 500, "cpu": 10 } The important part for me here is making a module to create these JS...| The Particular Finest
One of the things I do as part of Eiara is write a lot of Terraform, an infrastructure definition language, to provide a sensible baseline cloud instantiation of infrastructure and resources. I’m quite fond of Terraform as a tool, even though it still has a decent number of weirdnesses and edge cases. If you haven’t seen it you should look at Charity’s Blog about Terraform for a great rundown on those issues. It’s quite powerful, and really works well with how I think to enable me to ...| The Particular Finest
The tech industry is an interesting place. On the one hand, we have the old guard, the 80s-driven “hacker culture” that drips with contempt culture and ivory tower silo mentalities. On the other hand, we’re seeing a revolution in our culture in the form of DevOps. a DevOps is interesting in that it looks like it’s about tools, but in a complete head fake we see that nothing about DevOps is about our tools, but instead everything about how we work and how our teams function, both inter...| The Particular Finest
Impostor syndrome is rife, endemic even, in the tech industry, leaving so many of us feeling like we don’t belong, like we’re just one minor screwup or lack of knowledge from being outed as the frauds that we feel we are. At the end of February, 2017, a Twitter thread started happening, where people in the tech community, prominent individuals who are widely seen as experts speaking up on all the things they can’t do, that they have to regularly look up, ask about, or otherwise make the...| The Particular Finest
)) “publication of Fly, A Collection”, I wanted to talk about the process of making a book of| blog.aurynn.com
You’ve probably noticed I don’t post much here anymore, with the last two entries being announcements of radio appearances, and the entry before| blog.aurynn.com
Okay this is ALSO VERY COOL. I was just on Radio New Zealand to talk about Mastodon with Robert Gehl. This is SO COOL. You can give it a listen| blog.aurynn.com
Hey, I’m still here! You may have noticed Mastodon exploding recently, and some cool radio folk did too. So I ended up on the radio with the admin| blog.aurynn.com
Tech, as an industry, is splitting. On the one half, you have people like me — people who looked at cryptocurrency and NFTs, at the massive| blog.aurynn.com
So here’s fun Today I learned that Contempt Culture, the deeply important critical look at tech culture, was cited in a study. Which you know not| blog.aurynn.com
I used to write. I used to have a space carved out in my life where words poured through nib gently rested upon smooth paper, and ink stained my| blog.aurynn.com
Not a lot this week due to BEING VERY TIRED and doing prep work for a talk. Time Played: 6.4 hours Factorio is … I love this game. I hate this game.| blog.aurynn.com
Time Played: 55 minutes Yeah, giving up on this game. Might spend the weekend that it’d take to grind out the victory? Probably not. Meh. Time| blog.aurynn.com
Time Played: 12.6 hours Stellaris is… I think I’m falling out of love with Stellaris. I want to keep enjoying it but every game turns into exactly| blog.aurynn.com
Time Played: 4.7 hours Started playing Stellaris again, after a fairly long haitus. Stellaris is … I like it, (previously, previouslier), it’s a fun| blog.aurynn.com
In my last post about gaming stuff, I wrote about how I wanted to write a program to scrape the Steam API and store it so I could look back on the| blog.aurynn.com
On May 14, 2020, my company Eiara launched Cloud Island, a Mastodon instance hosted entirely in New Zealand. It’s a huge achievement for me to have| blog.aurynn.com
So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages| blog.aurynn.com