The Particular Finest

Presented by aurynn shaw

Finding Words

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 that being almost two years old.

The last few years have been the longest few decades of my life.

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I Was on RNZ!

Okay this is ALSO VERY COOL.

I was just on Radio New Zealand to talk about Mastodon with Robert Gehl.

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I Was on the Radio!

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 of aus.social, talking about what it’s like to run a Mastodon instance.

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The Cryptodystopia

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 environmental costs that these, technologies isn’t the right word, but fine, and saw them for the scam they are.

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Resentment, or, on Trains

I

am pretty fucked up.

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I Got Cited

So here’s fun

Today I learned that Contempt Culture, the deeply important critical look at tech culture, was cited in a study.

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The 2010s

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.

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Dark Souls 3

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.

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One Last Journey

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).

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On Cloud Island, Finishing Something, and Federation

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 built something that I’d been thinking about and wanting to have for such a long time, a somewhere that’s not Twitter, with its singular drive towards advertising engagement maximisation. A somewhere that puts its customers first, rejecting the idea that we have to give up our spaces for corporate ends.

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