Hi everyone. I missed last week. I don’t know…just didn’t have the motivation. Cool things happened, I just couldn’t sit down and write about them. As such, I’ll try to include some items from the past 2 weeks as a catch-up.
Ranked Slayer in Halo Infinite.
Ranked Slayer was my bread and butter growing up. 4 v. 4, first to 50 wins. Nothing flashy, just good clean ranked deathmatch. It returned to Halo Infinite for the start of the third season. I’ve really liked it.
Twitter and Reddit, not cool
It wouldn’t be a blog on my site if I didn’t complain a bit about social companies making questionable decisions so here we go! Last week, Reddit moderators took their subreddits dark in protest of the new API pricing that will effectively destroy third party applications. It’s one thing to make a decision like this, which I can understand, but it’s another to do one of the worst PR campaigns for it in recent memory.
Twitter continues to be…Twitter. I’ll take a moment to just say again at once point Twitter was by far my favorite social network. It was once a place where nerds could connect with other nerds and I remember that time fondly. Anyway, Twitter this week started rate limiting Tweets. They also started blocking the site for users to see anything, unless the user was logged in.
Twitter and Reddit showed some very hostile behavior towards users. I’ve done a good job of removing Twitter from my life and it was fairly easy to do. Reddit, has been harder but I’m working on it.
In general, I like that this is leading to an increase in usage for things like Mastadon and Lemmy.World. I can appreciate that those services are harder to use. I think that extra friction is better for the web. We are all better when we intentionally seek things out rather than just mindlessly fall into internet holes.
Iron Banner
I gilded my Iron Banner title in Destiny 2 last week. The Iron Banner is my favorite activity in Destiny 2 and has been…since the very beginning really. I was so pumped when the Iron Lord title came out and this is my second time gilding it. I’m proud of that accomplishment.
Dani and I are professional walkers
According to my watch, over the past week I’ve burned about 700 calories a day exercising. I need to be better about my diet. That’s preventing me from hitting some goals but, on the upside, Dani and I are getting out and moving a lot recently. The little dude can move!
ToLocaleString();
I made a couple of updates to XG-Destiny-Checklist.com this week. I finally got around to adding a ToLocaleString function to some of the activity data so the number formatting is correct. This actually took longer than I care to admit for a very silly reason. When I sat down to correct this, I knew what I needed to add but it wasn’t working. The object actually returns two values.
In the app, I was returning the displayValue. So I kept calling ToLocaleString and it wasn’t working. So I took a look at the call again and went “ah…I need value, not the displayValue string”. Maybe I was just a little tired because that was a very obvious issue.
Secondly, I added a background image to the site. I’ve been kicking around a redesign for awhile but in the short term I wanted to change it up a little. The site usually changes for the season so I added a little seasonal art and I think that looks nice.
So there we go. There is 4 things I thought were cool and then some complaining about social sites, which led to some cool recommendations. Before I go, I did want to share one more thing. I stumbled across an old video this week that put me in a time machine. The video is a part of an ad campaign and it’s about 10 years old at this point.
I’ve been following Chris’s work for a long time. I’ve always thought he did a great job of connecting the technical items to the things every day people care about. The video reminded me of a time on the web where…it was about finding community. Being around other people with the same interests. That hasn’t gone away but it feels like lesser of a priority than say…capturing market space to monetize and audience. I’m not naive, I know business runs the world but this reminded me a time where it wasn’t…I don’t know so aggressive? I’m saying all of this about an ad by the way, which speak to the quality of the ad for sure. Maybe I just grew up a bit since this came out, but a huge part of what I’m trying to do right now is recapture the spark and desire to innovate. The world…mainly certain parts of the web have sucked that out of me but not completely. I’m going to keep building, blogging, and trying to make the web better. It’s who I am. I hope whomever you are as a person, you still feel connected to that mission. It’s a wonderful thing.
See you starside.