Everything old is new again. In my teens, one of the more popular RATs out there was Sub7. In one of the later releases an IRC bot feature was added. Fortunately I was neither tech savvy enough nor grand enough in thinking to grasp the implications or I’d have probably set about building my own botnet. To what end? Who knows. Driven more by curiosity than malice, I’d probably have been tickled just kicking back and watching machines pop in and out of my own little digital aquarium. The same way I got a goofy grin firing off an ansible playbook just to watch the LEDs blink on my RPi devices (maybe I’m still not grand enough in thought 😅).

I played a little PSO on Dreamcast but never got far; spotty dial-up made it difficult to enjoy online play. Still a console “MMO” was mind-blowing to me at the time, and it was a beautiful game. (Q3A became my primary addiction. Much easier to just connect, mindlessly frag for a few, and not be upset when someone inevitably picked up the phone and starting dialing without listening for the modem first.)

I’ve emulated Dreamcast PSO on my Steam Deck and I know private servers still exist for Dreamcast (and it can made to get back online with an RPi and a little fiddling) but is Blue Burst the preferred game these days? PC version? I’m tempted to give it a proper playthrough sometime.

Had to look it up myself. The song was used as the main theme to an older web miniseries about a fictitious scene group. Just watched through the first episode and it tickled some nostalgia; mIRC, ICQ and such. Might have to give the rest of it a watch.

Same friend had UT3 for the PS3. We’d rotate stick on it but I wasn’t great at it. I had the keeb and mouse for my Dreamcast, basically cheat mode against controller players, and that led to my switch to PC for the FPS genre. I faintly remember the PS3 version having cross play and/or mod/map support. I’m pretty sure we all played a bunch of instagib CTF on a map that was like a long hallway.

He eventually bought UT3 again for PC I helped him put together. It was a great looking game on PS3 but we were all blown away when we hooked the PC up to the big screen. Good times.

For a very brief moment in time I held the leaderboard for the Bowman in Mech Assault. I think the main contender at the time was a total loudmouth and XBL Forum regular with the gamertag “GeorgeTheGreek.” A certified shit talker, but he was also damned good with that Mech. One of my fondest memories of the game was using the Bowman to stomp someone in an Atlas on the city map (River City?). I hadn’t seen it done before, and most others in the lobby must not have either, because a bunch of them went ape. My team might’ve still gone on to lose, I seem to recall the map meta being “pick a Mad Cat and sit back sniping,” but that moment was worth any outcome.

OG Xbox Live was probably my favorite console experience after Quake 3 Arena on Dreamcast. I wouldn’t own a console after the 360. My next favorite console experience was when a buddy got Mortal Kombat 2 online for his PS3. One regular, whose name I’ve forgotten, would bust out all the old glitches (could’ve been using a macro controller) but it was the first time I’d send Fatality Friendship on the Kombat Tomb stage. Another had a novelty account named “ItsTheToe” that always played as Liu Kang. Anyone familiar with MK2 would know his crouching low kick was this stupid stick-his-toe-out move that was nearly impossible for any of the ninjas to jump kick into. Absolutely hilarious when I first encountered them, then frustrating but rewarding having to relearn my favorite three characters to deal with them.

Now that is an ambition to strive for! Easily one of the most significant communal projects of our time which, despite still remaining almost unheard of to countless people who unknowingly rely upon it, would be such a remarkable honor to take part in.

Unfortunately I can’t help in that regard. I keep everything local/unexposed so my solution for them was just running Jellyfin at their place. I was already rsyncing some stuff to a NAS I set up for them (and vice versa), as off-site backup. Since the files were already there it made the most sense to just give them their own instance.

Same boat except my Arduino and Pi devices are still gathering dust (but I do want to eventually get a general, foundational knowledge of electronics). My own ideas most often devolve into timesinks that leave me questioning how I even convinced myself to start down that road. I like doing dev stuff more if it happens when an update breaks something, like a service or a plugin to some app I host. “Hey, that’s a goddamn puzzle! I fucking love puzzles!” And there’s the underlying fact that, if I manage to solve it, I might be helping somebody else out. Some psychological compulsion to help others that I can identify but still not deny.

Anyway, I might never end up a “contributor” to anything else but one of my biggest highs was singlehandedly debugging, submitting, and having a fix merged to a Jellyfin plugin I use. From first reporting it and thinking out loud about it in the app’s Discord, to poking through the source on GitHub (in a language I’ve never touched), I worked it out in a few hours and even compiled a replacement .dll for my own use until the merge was accepted. To the reception of some compliments and pats on the back from regulars on the server that, at the risk of over sharing, did more for my emotional well being than my last lay. The problem ended up being a simple order-of-operations issue but the experience was the sort of the thing that makes a guy, who hasn’t worked so much as a help desk position, briefly think “Maybe I could hack it.”

Conversely, my biggest low was wasting 45 minutes on an Advent of Code problem because I forgot to switch from the sample data to my actual puzzle data in the second half. It was a first-week problem, probably child’s play for any pro, but I had a working solution fast enough to have landed on that day’s leaderboard. It would’ve been entirely self serving and good for nothing but bragging rights. Instead I wasted nearly an hour to reach the “duh” moment and subsequent self loathing. I wanted those bragging rights!

The TLDR is Programming turns bipolar disorder into a speed run session too easily for it to be more than an on-again off-again hobby or the occasional necessity for me. I can’t fathom how the actual pros, especially those in prestigious and lucrative positions, keep from crashing out or falling into imposter syndrome any time they let themselves get caught up in an off-by-one or some other nonsense.

I don’t have the link(s) on hand but there’s a Tizen build of Jellyfin for Samsung TVs. It runs rather slow on my old tube so I wouldn’t recommend it outside of a last resort. It’s actually smoother for me to just open the app on the TV and then remote control it from a browser/app on another device (my Steam Deck is my homelab universal remote). But you can use the Tizen dev tools or a simpler docker container to push it to the TV.

For my folks I got a cheap Walmart brand Android box (Onn 4k Plus). I installed Jellyfin from the app store then black hole’d the thing because I’m wary of cheap Android apps and their history of supply chain attacks. It’s much more responsive and also leaves me with the option of installing additional stuff like Smart Tubes, Retro Arch and whatnot.