babychaos's blog

My "daily driver" machine is up for a refresh, my XPS 13 is almost 3 years old. Since I got it the world has changed significantly. When I got it I was;

So we got a dog. Been a long time coming.

A few things happened in the latter part of last year, and those, combined with confirmation that both our companies were going to be adpoting some sort of flexible working policy meant we finally able to make the move.

All round 2020 was a good year for gaming, however during the traditional "Game of the Year" phase of publications it turned into a close battle between "The Last of Us Part 2" and "Hades", with Hades posibly edging it. It had been on my radar since September when it released, as it ticked pretty much every box for me;

OK, so 2020 was properly fucked up. Let's have a quick game of "what's going to happen in 2021"?

Heres some for starters.

• I reckon that the USA will have it's first ever female president, after Biden is assassinated by a complete MAGA lunatic.
• New Nintendo Switch will be released
• The UK's last lockdown will end in August, though vaccinations will not be complete by the end of the year
• Birmingham will become a desolate wasteland, devoid of intelligent life

Reckon one of those is a sitter...

A part of my mini-project to fill up my in-house media server, I've been hunting down some older stuff I liked. One of the rareties that I found on Youtube was someone had uploaded some really low quality VHS rips of The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman and Baddiel in Pieces.

I've been using Google Music for years...I spent about a week while in Glenrosa ripping and uploading all my CD's across about 4 PC's, having all the CD drives whirring full-time, and I have/had a gloriously curated ~6,000 song/50Gb library of music. I've made a lot of use of the hybrid downloaded/streamed data model on my phone (I spend a fair bit of time out of network connectivity...be it holidays or cycling in the middle of nowhere).

I've previously look at Stadia, which impressed me technically, but I don't really like the business model (pay for service+pay for games on top). GeForce Now is a competitor with a better model (pay for games, and pay for additional features), with the added bonus that (in theory) games you've already purchased from other services can be brought in.

After a fairly stressful week I needed a bit of escapism, so went hunting through the (really rather awful) Switch eStore. One series of games that has popped up on several recommendation lists is the Steamworld series. I've seen them before, but was never really sure what they were about...and the artwork (in stills) looks a little forced.

Like a lot of people, I've spent the last 3 months doing a lot of video calls/presentations/meetings etc. I'm quite lucky that I have a decent setup already (including a HD webcam, a Logitech C920)...however I've found that running OBS alongside multiple apps can give my laptop a hard time. What I'd like to do is run a second machine (I have a spare laptop), and then use that for the video compositing/output, and use my main laptop for doing actual work.

This was going to be a bit of an amble about how various games have marked key points in my life...a bit of nostalgia brought about by playing the Final Fantasy VII Remake (a mere 21 years after playing the original), however as part of the research for that I came across something really quite fascinating.