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| This was the other picture I took of the Little Book of Sound Chips that would have been posted to Twitter. I don't have a reason as to why I chose the one taken on the desk, but I'm glad I saved this one! —Taken with an iPhone 8 |
So usually, if I did more polls like the one from last year, I'd blog about it before leaving it to the social networks. However, with Twitter being erratic under new management—from sudden changes on a new linking policy to the first major outage under Musk—I was hesitant in making a blog post. It's a bit weird, but the first draft of this thing would have been a lengthy ramble regarding the blue heron with lengthy praise about the ancient mammoth heard (Mastodon).
So I went ahead and dropped the poll anyway with four choices to consider in the new year to write about or review: The Little Book of Sound Chips Volume 2 (pictured above), Live a Live, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cowabunga Collection, or continue on with metroidvania retrospective ending with a double-bill review of Axiom Verge 1 & 2.
The last option was essentially the reason for said poll since I put off the thing to the point where I started ruminating on other ideas. I might come back to that one eventually.
For now, with the results tallied, we change course. We will start out 2023 with a book review of the Little Book of Sound Chips Volume 2: 1982—1986.
This is a nice change of pace and it's a book I've been looking forward to for awhile now since it covers both the Commodore SID chip and the Paula chip on the Amiga. That, and it also covers the chips used in arcade games like Outrun and Space Harrier, making this trip into gaming history an exciting one.
It shouldn't take too long to read, but I'm going to give myself until around mid-February to write out and post the review. This is more or less in case I get distracted or if something comes up in my personal life (admittedly, it's more of the latter). Goodreads will get a condensed version, but the full review will be here along with a brief look into the first volume as well.
Speaking of Goodreads and Twitter, we need to talk about social media...
It's nothing bad, but the rapid decline of Twitter's made me feel uneasy for various reasons—for both technical reasons and political ones.
At the same time, I don't want to lose touch with the people I've met through the social network—especially those who I conversed with in mid-2018 and later. Of course, there are accounts that solely continue to do business on the platform whose tweets keep me in the loop whether it deals with the world of video games, writing, Doctor Who, or current events in general.
So starting next year, my Twitter focus is going to be on solely those people. Or rather, I'm limiting my Twitter usage to keep in touch with those people.
If you just stumbled upon this blog and would like to network with me elsewhere, you can find me on both Mastodon and Goodreads. The former social network is a decentralized service that I joined five years ago, but has been gaining rapid traction in response to Elon's Twitter acquisition and mishandling. It's a lot like Twitter with the only major difference being that, because of its decentralized nature, you join the network by signing up for an account in one of many instances. In short, these instances are a part of a wider network called the Fediverse that make up Mastodon proper with each one having their own set of guidelines among other things.
What I also like about Mastodon is the fact that, if you don't feel comfortable adding a new social network to your growing roster, you don't have to. There's a little-known fact that Mastodon supports RSS feeds for individual accounts as discovered by the father of RSS himself, Dave Winer. As he points out himself in the link, all you have to do is add a .rss to the end of a profile's URL and paste it in your feed reader of choice. I took a couple screenshots of my feed as seen in NetNewsWire below as an example. Feed URL: https://mastodon.social/@PromptedInk.rss
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| Above: NetNewsWire highlighting my first post on Mastodon. My Ello account still exists in a dormant state with the same handle as Twitter. Below: NetNewsWire highlighting a post with a content warning label—Mastodon has this built in for individual posts—where I talk about deleting tweets due to Musk's policy preventing mention or linking to other social media accounts. Both captured on an iPad Pro (11in, 3rd Generation) |
The only issue with the RSS feed is that it does not include anything I boost (read: retweet) on the service so you might miss something that I thought was amazing–like Say Mistage's doodle of Mario, Olivia, and Bobby from Paper Mario: The Origami King for example. I might link to those in the random entires, when I get around to doing them again.
Either way, I get good vibes from Mastodon and that's where I'll mostly be on social media alongside Goodreads.
Even if I didn't get as much writing done as I'd like, I'm still proud of the long-form reviews I did throughout 2022. It's been a personal year of amazing highs (traveling to Boston and seeing my sister graduate college) and minor lows (mostly day-job related, but nothing new) that have helped make me aware of aspects of my life I could temper and improve on for the year to come.
No matter where you are, I hope you have an amazing 2023!
