I finished Tomb Raider (the 2013 version) this afternoon. I’ve got a number of games on the Steam Deck, but this is the first one I’ve gone all the way through. It was a lot of fun. Similar to Jedi: Fallen Order (previously), but with fewer of the contrived arcade sequences that bother me in other games in this genre.

I had the original Tomb Raider on a PlayStation and loved it, but didn’t really try to keep up with the series, so this was the first time I’ve played anything with Lara Croft in it in a long time. This edition is bloodier and more brutal than the original, but it was a pretty good ride: Simple controls and an easy ramp to proficiency.

The Steam Deck

I broke down and bought an OLED Steam Deck. I’ve always been curious, the reviews were great, and winter is here (weirdly, this week).

What to say about it?

The OLED display is pretty nice. It’s surprisingly comfortable to play for stretches on the sofa. The controls feel pretty good. The dock is a little finicky but not that bad.

In terms of fitting into my other stuff:

I tried using the streaming app on my AppleTV, but the Steam Deck dock provides a much better picture and I’ve got a switch in the t.v. room so downloads are way faster.

I tried using my Nintendo Switch Pro Controller with it – which it officially supports – but the Bluetooth connection was super flakey. I can’t tell if something else was grabbing it or what, but I swapped in an 8BitDo Ultimate with a 2.4G dongle and that has worked very well.

There are a few areas for improvement:

Not every game works perfectly with it owing to how many are written for PCs and assume keyboards and mice vs. a controller. There’s a soft keyboard but that can be pretty intrusive. I’ve got my v1 Nuphy Air 60 sitting around that I could probably use, but so far I’ve been happy to just stick to the extensive list of games in the Steam Deck Verified directory.

Sometimes … things … happen. Like, it doesn’t recover gracefully from putting it to sleep and trying to pick a game back up: maybe the sound gets choppy or it stops responding to controls. It’s pretty good about saving my spot in everything I’ve played so far, so it’s no big deal to exit and restart, but it’s a little annoying when it happens.

Sometimes the controller buttons are mapped well but the on-screen prompts suggest a keyboard and you can’t be sure in the moment which button is the right one to mash. Lara Croft may have plunged to her death, had her throat torn out by wolves, or gotten gored by vintage airplane parts a few times as I tried to figure out what the hell I was supposed to be pressing.

By way of comparison to a Nintendo Switch? Chunkier, bigger, performs better. The size difference is lost on me because I ended up buying a grip for my Switch a while back to make it easier to hold, and that pretty much adds all the size back.

But the few glitches now and then aside, I like it a lot: Great library of games, easy to pick up and carry around, comfortable to play in portable mode, looks good on my t.v. I’m enjoying it.

I warned her, going in, “there is going to be some savage nerdery in the audience.”

I saw the Ralph Bakshi animated Lord of the Rings feature when it came out in … 1978? Someone sitting behind me narrated the entire movie (and its assorted successes and failures) for its duration. That was a formative experience for young me. I will talk your face off about a given adaptation once we are clear of the theater, but sit in stony silence during the viewing.

Before pulling further on that thread, just some thoughts about the movie:

I was first exposed to D&D when I was eight or nine. Dad was in seminary and his friends all played, but it was too adult for the kids, and Dad’s frenemy – the local Dungeon Master for Life – told him it was his observation that I had no imagination and wouldn’t take to the game anyhow.

I first played the game in eighth grade. It was an accidental thing. We moved to Indiana in the middle of the school year, and the only tables in the lunch room with space by the time I got there each day were the two “D&D tables” tucked away to the side. Given the judgment of dad’s frenemy I wasn’t sure I could hang, but the alternative was trying to find a spot in the mostly pre-sorted tables away from the edges of the cafeteria.

Each table had a distinct character.

The crew I fell in with preferred a play style that was broadly rules-oriented but privileged narrative flow over correctness. We did not calculate the weight of our equipment or encumbrance rules. Phil, the dungeon master, was a stickler on appropriate alignment behavior, though, and had a conception of how a Paladin should behave that I swear to god George Lucas stole for the Jedi in the prequels.

The other table was way more rules-oriented and were considered the more rigorous party. Jack, the dungeon master, didn’t ease up on much.

Phil ran a light game. His narration had a broad, slapstick style to it. If you really botched a saving throw or had a catastrophic encounter and somehow managed to get completely mugged by a couple of kobolds, you sort of traded your dignity for your life.

Jack, by contrast, abided by every roll and just straight murdered players. Your favorite 13th level Paladin got iced? Suck it. You could keep playing, but with a low-level character who acted as a boat anchor and liability for the survivors. Jack was known to play with some high school kids who ran an evil campaign, and his stories were dark.

The two crews stuck to their tables during the week. Every few months we’d get together for a sleep-over and a one-night campaign, where it was generally agreed that Phil’s “narrative first” approach worked a little better given the time constraints and general punchiness by the time you got to the end-game around 4 or 5 a.m.

I favored Phil’s approach. When I made my own game system it was built around six-sided dice and was pretty heavily influenced by Steve Jackson’s Sorcery!, which was descended from one of his ’70s-era microgames (wrong Steve Jackson, thanks, Ed – mph). It wasn’t about wrapping rules around miniature gaming – Jack had maps, Phil eschewed them – but instead about adding a little entropy to a shared improvisational story-telling exercise.

Over the course of my gaming career I pretty much sorted everybody into “Jack” and “Phil” camps, broadly. After starting with D&D, I moved on to Boot Hill, Traveler, Top Secret, Space Opera, Marvel Superheroes, and a heavily narrative-inflected Car Wars. Some crews were meticulous rules people, others not. Some of them loved their rules but kept the story light, others told pretty dark stories but favored the narrative. Some were very welcoming of newcomers, able to be patient with the sorts of things new players do before they sort of get into the flow. Some were very “only the experienced need apply,” and only let you bring high-level characters into their campaigns if you’d brought them up from scratch.

I’m going into all this diversity, because I went into the movie wondering whether it would make any sense. There are definitely some set dressing things that will be familiar to multiple generations of D&D players, but there’s so much variation in how people play that I’d be hard pressed to write down the criteria for “faithful to the game.”

It managed it, though, or at least it recreated a style of play I’ve seen a lot among dungeon masters who are good at keeping the party moving, turning the pot up to a poil, and keeping control of the situation as an increasingly frantic party cooks up increasingly implausible solutions to whatever is coming at them.

The characters all sort of map to their “classes” without “Use your barbarian might, Holga!” meta-dialogue. There’s an NPC. One of the characters pretty much screamed “hey, emo neuro-divergent zoomers, look how much fun you could have pretending to be yourself, but with a backstory that isn’t contradicted by your Twitter history!”

It reminded me of when some new fantasy movie would come out, and we’d take a little time out from our lunch time game to sit around dissecting the characters (what level? what class?) and any spells (“it was definitely a magic missile, but heavier damage”) or weapons (“that’s an ego sword, for sure … I’d say +1/+3.”) Except it also synthesizes the past couple of decades of fantasy movie stuff (you get the Jacksonesque dungeon interiors and boom-shot landscapes, you get the MCU wise-cracking and one late scene that could have just been different CG models wrapped around Loki and the Hulk) and maps them back into D&D.

So … savage nerdery.

Decades of Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, DC, etc. adaptations have conditioned into me a certain cringing wariness. Not about the properties so much as the fans. Or maybe what the fans will do to the properties. I found the Harry Potter movies incredibly tedious, and fans of the franchise suggested to me that it was because they were simply too faithful. I didn’t get too worked up about Lord of the Rings and the way it inflected from a fairly faithful Fellowship to oliphant-trunk-surfing Legolas because the fans were out for blood the second Peter Jackson was announced as the director and he knew it: He had to keep them from denouncing the first one so he could capture the normies and get on with making an LotR that worked more as action-adventure in the later installments.

But I’ve sat in theaters where you can hear and feel people seething. And I have an internet connection. Even if you don’t care that the gatekeepers and pedants are upset, you can’t help but know they are.

In yesterday’s matinee, though, the crowd ate it up. I could hear people comparing notes whenever a new creature appeared or some particular location was mentioned from the established lore. People name-checked spells and relics. Al sat next to two people who were engaged in running commentary the entire time. I couldn’t quite hear them except when something really delighted them and they started cackling and bouncing up and down.

I don’t judge. It was fun. It leveraged the strengths of being of a property – some aesthetic stuff, creatures from Monster Manual, locations, classes, spells – but preserved the strength of D&D (and RPGs generally), which I would argue is its capacity to accommodate all those diverse playing and narrative styles. Where comic book movie properties have harnessed the multiverse hack that comic publishers were forced into, both to permit constant re-creation and renewal of their IP, and to slip out of the unforgiving canon pedantry that makes Star Wars and Star Trek difficult, D&D simply is a bunch of different things to a bunch of different people. It is not hard to imagine an MCU-like multi-format franchise wrapped around D&D.

When we walked out – me as someone who’s been around D&D and RPGs for 42 years, Al as someone who has never played a minute of anything – I was saying “that seemed to capture the spirit and it was a fine light fantasy movie,” and Al was saying “that was fine. I expected some sort of comedy/adventure thing and that’s what it was. Was it like the game, then?”

Sure. Somehow, it was like the game.

Seems like “mission accomplished.”

I, gamer

The fun part of the PS4 has just been catching up on whatever has been going on in console gaming over the past while. I remember being a very avid gamer once upon a time – during the PS1 and PS2 era – then I was just really into the Nintendo DS, and then I didn’t play much anymore. My 3DS never saw a lot of use, and I don’t get much time in on the Switch. It has always felt like games on the Switch are too big to just pick up and put down between meetings, but too small to really invest discretionary time in.

So I got a PlayStationPlus membership and I’ve been taking advantage of how cheap everything I’m curious about is.

I took a detour into the Doom remake, and I am not sure if it’s okay to say so, but I find it hilarious.

I remember Doom from when it was the slightly grittier evolution of Wolfenstein 3D, and it always to me to be solid execution with an excellent vibe. The remastered version I downloaded to my PlayStation is also pretty well executed, and the vibe benefits from the graphical advancements.

The first time I killed a demon by running up to it, tearing its arm off and beating it until it spilled ammo and health like an infernal piñata made me howl.

The whole thing is sort of hilarious that way. You end up in hell fighting demons to a grinding, thrashing soundtrack, there are demonic runes everywhere, bodies, flames, blood all over the place. It’s just hilarious.

I, handyman

I just fixed our garage door sensor for the third time in fourteen years. I predicted it would go differently this time the last time I fixed it, because the recurring problem is a pair of wires leading to the sensor that periodically get snagged by … something — a yard tool, a piece of bicycle, a carelessly plopped laundry basket — and one of them breaks.

Whoever built the house and installed the garage door provided as much wire as was needed to connect the sensor, then covered the wiring in dryall. If there is any spare wiring available up there in the wall somewhere, it is smashed in place behind the drywall and I’ve tugged at it as hard as I dare lest I break off the remaining bits coming out of the wall.

So I’ve known for five years now that there was no more wire coming out of the wall … that the next break would be the one where I’d have to splice more wire in, because there wasn’t enough left to cover the space from the wall to the sensor and still get it wrapped around the post.

Anyhow, this time Gorilla Tape is involved in making it all sit there more snugly and less likely to be snagged and I can close the garage door without standing there holding the button. That has created a surprising amount of friction where taking my bike anywhere is concerned.

I had the time to do this today because the half of the house that hosts all our networking infrastructure and my office sits shrouded in darkness. The breaker for that circuit failed last week as the winter storm was happening. It didn’t fail in the “it just blew, you can reset it” kind of way, but in the “fails and doesn’t even seem to have blown and you can’t even trip the test switch” kind of way.

I felt it coming – the UPS for all the infrastructure was making the click it makes when the supply is getting frisky, but never tripped over into “I’m running on battery power now.” When everything did finally go dark I went down to the garage, couldn’t seen a tripped breaker, flipped the two candidates (both are labeled the same thing and I’ve never taken the time to label them “front” and “back”) and went back upstairs to … nothing.

Then eight hours later it all lit up again. Then failed again.

Same symptoms: Not tripped, can’t test.

I called the home warranty company and they promised a 24 hour window for a contractor, but by then Portland was covered in ice. They finally texted this morning, asked for availability, and are on their way.

For now the router, Wi-Fi, and switch are running off of a long extension cord running out of my office, down the hall and into an outlet on the not-blown upstairs circuit.

The last time we had an electrical problem like this was maybe 10 years ago during a pair of 100-degree-plus days. A light fixture that was a little heavy pulled itself free of a softened nylon anchor and the clash of wires tripped the arc breaker (on the same circuit that’s bothering me now). That was when we learned that whoever wired the house had run the range hood in the kitchen downstairs into the same circuit as the two bedrooms and bathroom on the other, upstairs end of the house.

“Some Russian, probably,” opined the contractor who came to have a look.

I destroyed an Airport Extreme that week by bringing it down from my office and putting it the only place it could rest near the only open outlet, in a window.

I say “destroyed,” but what really happened was that the Ethernet port stopped working.

The “Progress!” note in all this is that during the period where all the networking and Wi-Fi was down, we just flipped to the 5G hotspots our phones provide and carried on with our business. It doesn’t outperform the new MOCA/EdgeRouter/CenturyLink setup, but it is faster than our Xfinity/Eero-as-wireless-only-mesh setup was.

Last time, I would imagine all we had was 3G, and there was no “all you can eat.” I remember because we burned through our cap, decided to go to the mall for the air conditioning, and my attempt to transfer some spending money to Ben using the mobile bank page took five minutes because AT&T dealt with data hogs by dropping them to EDGE speeds until the month was over.

TickTick

I’m giving TickTick a try this week. Stuff I like about it:

• The interface looks as simple or busy as I want it to be. Something I appreciate about Things 3 is its ability to fall back to “just a nice todo list app” during those times when I don’t feel like messing with it.
• It has a habit tracker that integrates with the rest of the app. If you set up a habit and it’s due, it turns up in the “Today” list, or you can interact with it in its own “habits” area.
• It has a built-in Pomodoro timer. That method works pretty well for me (using it now!) and it’s more than a superficial integration: You can specify what on your list is getting the time.

Stuff I’d rather it not:

Everything is framed as “how productive” you are. I’m just tired of that language.

I am tired of that language because after a couple of years of watching people burn out and then thrash around trying to figure out what was “wrong” with them, I came to the conclusion that as much as the gentrification of mental illness annoys the living hell out of me, it doesn’t outrage me the way the modern workplace turns workers on themselves (and deepens that gentrification feedback loop, because the only help you’re going to get as you thrash around, worrying that you’re falling behind your peers in the company’s “performance culture,” is a non-ironic invitation to take your woes to the EAP).

And, more importantly, not every single thing you want to do has to be “productive.” It is not, for instance, a matter of “productivity” to remind myself that I want to read a chapter of a book every day, or learn how to make my own mayonnaise, or take a picture every day.

Anyhow, it’s pretty easily ignored if you stay away from the reporting, which I intend to. I just want something more ergonomically sound than Apple’s Reminders, and the purpose-built habit and pomodoro stuff rolls a number of things into one context.

Tailscale

I spent a while not bothering to play with tech stuff, so when I heard about Tailscale I never did anything with it. Once I got my new network stuff going I decided to start doing more with my Synology NAS just because it’d be easier to network and secure with a decent router in place.

Poking around the VPN packages available for it I saw the Tailscale app and thought “oh, that.” In just a few minutes I had all my stuff added to it and talking to each other, and a whole set of problems I was willing to create for myself went away.

I haven’t done any testing with it out in the world yet, but internally it integrates fine with my internal DNS. It’s so smooth.

Design fiddling

I spent a little time fiddling with site design today, too, just to make the front page a little more lively. I took a swing at some responsive design, as well. It’s crude, but the front page is way more “just the essentials” on a phone, were someone to wander out to it.