Category: Uncategorized

So I’ve been playing Starfield for the last 2 months and overall I got to say I do enjoy it. It’s a Bethesda RPG and I played the daylights out of Skyrim and Fallout 4. Starfield however has had one thing that is bothering me and it’s bothering me enough I want it on the internet.

I was doing a main story line mission and had to “acquire” an object central to the story line of the game. Well I murder hobo’d the ship “acquired” the item and on returning to the main system to turn in the quest, I got stopped and sent on this whole other story line… in the middle of the main quest. It was like watching Better Call Saul and swiching to Malcom in the Middle.

This is the “Crimson Fleet” quest line, and there isn’t a way to opt-out. You must do it or at least the initial piece of it. Which really broke the flow of the main story because when I got back to turn in my main quest thing, some really big story events happened! And they would have hit way more emotionally if I didn’t have some random dude sending me on a errand that I had no interest in.

Normally Bethesda is pretty good on letting you “Opt-In” in quest lines, this one was odd since it was pretty much foisted on to me. There were some other things about the quest line that I didn’t like. Such as “I’m a deep cover agent, but I can’t shoot my out of things” I get it from the side of I’m working for a law and order agency, but dude you hired a murder hobo… murder hobo gonna murder hobo.

Contrast this with my table top game… I sent my GM a note an hour before game on somethings I had been thinking about for my character and she sent my character on a glorious trip. It was my choice, until that point I had just been a bump on a log because that is how I wanted to play and I made a leap and I like where the initial result landed. And if I don’t like it… I can always opt out.

Unlike Bethesda and the Crimson Fleet questline.

So I’ve been thinking about retirement a lot recently. But not in the have a boatload of money and stop working sense, but more in the uh hey this piece of equipment that still works fine isn’t getting updates anymore sense.

Specifically my 2016 era MacBook Pro, which I bought a couple of months after the refresh came out. As Macs go I think it’s the peak John Ivy design and hubris trying to push the market forward. Innovative new features like the keyboard switch design or the Touch Bar thing. Neither of which survived the transition to the Apple M series of ARM processors. In fact when the first proper mac book pros on the M1 came out and they went back to a dedicated mag safe port and HDMI thats when I knew I had a bad design. Also that apple dropped OS support for it in 2022 which is in the 6 year time frame that you normally see apple drop support on some lower end products. Not on a flagship laptop though.

All in all it’s been a good laptop, I did have to get some work on it and did get a keyboard replacement along with the battery when it was still under warranty but even by then the writing was on the wall. At the end of the day though it got me through a masters program, multiple work trips where I couldn’t use a work laptop, 4 moves, covid, and a bunch of other things. At the end of the day it’s still a laptop and it probably has another good 2 or 3 years left in it. But because of the keyboard and the known thermal issues with intel macs (did you think about doing work? OK the fans are going to kick on now) I can’t in good conscious give it or sell it someone I know… I basically don’t want to be responsible for when it craps out.

It’s a me thing… just roll with it.

The other thing is that I’ve gone back to a desktop as my daily driver across the board. When I use a computer I’m doing a thing I’m not just using it. A laptop still has it’s place in my workflow, just not a primary place like it used to be. So it’s odd to me that I have a piece of equipment that’s good enough for backup work, but I don’t trust it enough to do that. Not good enough to sell because I don’t trust it and so it has sat on my desk for the last year randomly used.

6+ years is a good run for a laptop for me, I got 9 years out of Anubis and 5 years out of the two preceding mac laptops. About the only thing that gets replaced before it’s time is my phone and honestly I may keep the current one another year just because it’s doing all the things I need it to do. Unless usb-c and something else just really drives me over the edge.

So with this post, I retire “I-Am-Groot” you were a good laptop. You did actual work and never complained and I didn’t upgrade you at all… mainly because you were the first Mac I bought with everything soldered on so I didn’t have a choice. Honestly outside of storage and ram I almost never upgrade my computers anymore.

“BruntFCA” MBP M1 14″, welcome to the shit show.

So one of the things that made me re-light this blog… or attempt to relight this blog is Wil Wheaton has started posting on their blog on the regular again. The reasons are documented over on Wil’s site but sufficete to say the reasons are very similar.

So in addition to being general all around uber-nerd for all things Star Trek. Wil Wheaton is also a table top gamer, which is something that I’ve gotten into in the last couple of years (one day I may even write about it) until then here is a link to Wil’s site that covers some of the basic’s of getting into table top. The only thing missing that was key for me was a group you enjoy playing with. If I don’t like the people I’m hanging with the thing isn’t worth my time, if I do like the people I will absolutely make time.

It’s amazing what a bit of new hardware will do to change a setup.

Like finally buying monitor arms and damn it’s a difference.

The end of a third football season in not Arizona, and at somepoint the local team does start to infect you… I mean I still bleed red and white, but there is a drop of blue in there above 5k feet…

So yeah… I still have this… space… I guess until I truly let it go… which since it’s been 21 years since I first started posting isn’t going to be anytime soon. Things really haven’t moved that far from the old geocities and frontpage site to this. Well there was the whole migration to GoDaddy and then to the current provider but that’s not something we talk about.

Anyway… since May of last year things have changed but haven’t?

• I finally got a proper Mac Desktop (Mac Studio) that I’m very happy with… and have finally come to terms with the fact that I only use my Mac for office work and web browsing. So hopefully the M1-Max is supported for a good while.
• The Mac in the closet from 2012 finally was retired has a home server in favor of a Synology NAS. It was a good move on all fronts.
• Solar Power and batteries are awesome.
• I’ve made some changes to the home office setup as I’m now fully “hybrid” but that’s another post.

Since it’s the new year one of the things I’ve decided to start doing is to try and post on here like it did back in the day. Once a week on just whatever…. I’ve given up on most social media. I haven’t been on facebook since the summer of 2020 (and haven’t missed it), I deleted twitter on my phone after Elon bought it, and the others I was never into except for instagram. And with IG I rarely post.

So here we are, back in circa 2002 tech… just way better processors and connections.

Still running WindowsNT though.

Weather report for April is 0% wet stuff from the sky…. so so much for it being the second snowiest month…. and so much for the skye cracking

This site has popped onto my radar as the domain associated with it has email and an office suite that are about to be charged for. I have a plan for the email portion of the backend services… I’m still on the fence with the rest of it. Since it’s really just burner email addresses I’m thinking that is all that needs to be done, but part of me says I must maintain.

That’s the funny thing about mid-life, you feel that you must maintain but it is the ideal time to start anew… you are not lacking for resources or knowledge. Just lacking for direction.

The turning of the seasons in Colorado is still a new and wondrous thing to me. While I did “seasonal” weather in Kingman and Flagg in the 1900’s and early 2000’s it wasn’t as dramatic as it is in Colorado in terms of weather. In my mind the fall starts in September but in actuallity it starts somewhere in October… this to my desert rat mind does not compute. The days being almost 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night in september tells my brain that things are turning, but the green leaves and the mostly green grass tells another story.

I think this is a side effect of a throughly western mind that must categorize and classify everything presented to them, and it’s a bit of a disconnect. On the flip side my birthday is in early April, and it’s always pretty good weather around then in Arizona. In Colorado it’s dealer’s choice.

it’s the little things of getting used to in the second winter in Colorado, knowing that there is time. But it will still come sooner rather then later but there will be days of sunshine and days of cloudy it’s all a crapshoot.

The thing that still boggles my mind is that March is the snowiest month and April is number 2…. W. T. F. ?

Did you just read a entry about the weather… yes. yes you did. And I make no apologies.