Updates

This is a page for half-baked or brief blog posts that aren't interesting enough for the weblog but took up too much space or I wanted to be more permanent than a social-media post or a Now: update.

• 12.07.24: You Should Hack Your 3DS
• 12.12.24: Despotification
• 01.03.25: The Best Books I Read in 2024

01.03.25

The Best Books I Read in 2024

I wrote that header as "My Favorite Books of 2024" on first pass and then after I spent a minute thinking about it I realized only one of them was actually published this year. So this is the best of the stuff I got around to in 2024.

Anvil of Stars by Greg Bear

Greg Bear rocks. The Forge of God, the book before Anvil, is the first book I finished in 2024. It's really great—a premise that's probably been done plenty (a tiny, random sample of humanity escaping the destruction of the Earth) executed with expert pacing and an overall atmosphere that, being written about the near future in 1987, is only a little dated in a charming way. In Anvil of Stars we get to see the next generation deal with the aftermath: a young crew traversing deep space in a vessel provided by benevolent but mysterious aliens who claim that their mission is to help the survivors of destroyed planets seek revenge but insist that a human must pull the trigger when the time comes. This book is like one of those French sandwiches that's just ham and butter: the two simple ingredients of great scifi (human, relatable characters in an imaginative, engaging situation) in the highest quality you can get 'em. If I have one note it's that the ending is a little more clean-cut than I wanted, but this is still one of the works of fiction I've thought about the most after finishing. Huge recommend on this book specifically and also basically any Greg Bear novel you can find.

Water, Wasted by Alex Branson

In an era where every novel and movie and high-budget TV show has to be about trauma and grief, Water, Wasted is the first thing I've seen usefully explore the contradiction and confusion of it. Set in rural Missouri, the book takes its time walking you around, introducing you to people and their little tics and routines. It's such an empathetic and real telling of the rural experience that I was almost sad when the setup was finished and the plot started happening. That plot is that the accidental death of a high-school boy sends his girlfriend into social exile, and the couple who look after her are forced to relitigate the death of their own daughter, finally reading the amateur fantasy novels she was working on in life. Elements of the fantasy world begin to seep through the cracks into reality, which sounds very silly written out but unfolds in a way that is genuinely compelling. Nested layers of fiction slowly merge until the traditional novel structure crashes down. If you like ambiguity and open-endedness, a resource getting scarcer all the time, pick this one up. I can't praise enough the chapters of fantasy excerpts, which are genuinely so goofy and charming that I would gladly buy a full copy.

You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant by Brad Neely

I don't think I could name another book that I've laughed out loud while reading, but You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant had me honest-to-God cracking up so often that my girlfriend eventually quit even asking what it was about. Written in character as a deranged amateur historian, the book focuses on the life of U.S. Grant from his childhood through the end of the Civil War. It's also a critique of the concept of biography, inventing so much gap-filler and speculation that it strains the label “non-fiction”—but, arguably, only as much as any book claiming to reveal the inner motives of someone long-dead. Neely is just more transparent about the parts he made up—inventing insane dialogue, hypothesizing about how bad it would suck to hike across Panama in the 1850s, making the conflict between Grant and Robert E. Lee deeply personal rather than just political. Speaking of Lee: unlike many Civil War accounts and biographies, Neely treats the backward attitudes of the 19th century and the evil motives of the Confederacy with the correct (total) amount of ridicule and scorn, something sorely lacking in “real” history books on this era. His prose is frequently over-the-top and overwrought on purpose but also manages to be beautiful and transportative in passages describing the horrors of Shiloh or the bizarre character of Abe Lincoln. This might very well be my favorite book I read all year.

The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey

I really liked the Expanse TV show (the first couple episodes are corny but it gets good later on) and for years while it was running I would see these at the bookstore, pick one up and consider it, then decide I just didn't have room in my life to commit to a series of huge-ass paperbacks. Then I got an ereader and books no longer have mass or volume, so I spent most of this year just absolutely ripping through the series. It's great. There's like 5,000 pages total and almost zero filler. The world they (it's two guys) establish feels so real and dangerous and sprawling, and then more than once everything about it gets flipped over. There are some quirks—it's weird how every time somebody new meets Bobbie Draper there's at least once sentence about how hot / intimidating / Polynesian she is—but the big-picture narrative rhythm is unbeatable. It's kind of true that Jim Holden is a protagonist built out of Principles in an almost mythical way (toward the end of Cibola Burn when he refuses to just take out the evil and insane security guy because he believes in the power of courts or whatever I think you're kind of meant to roll your eyes) but I think this is the only way the rest of the thing works: Holden, the crew, and the Rocinante are a stationary vantage point from which you can watch the rest of human civilization shift and evolve. I plowed through the first six books between about July and September, took a break, and then slammed the last three (which are almost their own trilogy because of how far the scope has shifted) between November and New Year's.

Yes, the Expanse is about big and important questions concerning the future of humanity and its inherent flaws, and the dueling existential horrors of highly-advanced alien technology and spacebound capitalism. It handles these questions with idealistic but serious consideration, and I'd like to believe in its conclusions. It's also just a total blast as a piece of writing: everything that happens is important, every character is unique, every side of the conflict and conseqence of its unfolding is thought of. Like a good spaceship, it's wickedly fast and totally airtight.

Strange Disappearances by Brad Steiger

I have a little collection shelf of paranormal literature: almost all UFO and alien-abduction stuff from the 60s through the 90s. Most of them I have read or attempted to read. None of them brought me as much joy as this one. Strange Disappearances is basically a book of newspaper clippings about weird stuff happening separated by completely baseless “explanations” through which the author attempts to pitch a theory that sometimes people or cars or Bermuda Triangle-bound airplanes fall through a hole to another dimension and disappear from ours. Of course Mr. Steiger also wraps in flying saucers, Bigfoot, whatever else you want from the grab-bag of goofy beliefs; he attributes the epidemic of people's windows cracking in 1950s Washington to some extradimensional creatures basically shooting spitballs at cars for fun. I can't stress enough how delightful this book is in its writing style and complete disregard for facts.

Some Honorable Mentions:

Morphotrophic by Greg Egan

The Three-Body Problem & The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

The Descent by Jeff Long

12.12.24

Despotification

Thanks to homie cones for coining the term, or at least being the person I first heard it from.

Yesterday I canceled my premium Spotify subscription, which I had for a little over four years. Spotify is ubiquitous and universal for good reasons: the app is, or was, really easy to use and had just about anything you could think of. Their focus on playlists and “release radar” and the social aspect of music listening was a good idea (or is still a good idea, I don't mean to talk about an app like I'm at its funeral).

Like all apps, the company behind Spotify has done a bunch of evil shit. Most famously, their payout rate for musicians is basically nil, which has been the main argument against using it since almost day one. Its founder has invested undisclosed millions—statistically including a few of your dollars—in an AI firm that licenses its software to militaries.

But you don't need me to tell you Spotify is bad. It's worth billions of dollars, of course it's bad. I would love to tell you I stopped paying for it entirely because of the dinky payouts or the defense contracting. But while those are big factors, the thing that pushed me over the edge is that it's just annoying now.

Their annual “Wrapped” thing for 2024 (my top artist was allegedly FM Skyline, by the way) was bare-bones at best—I appreciate them dropping the “you ate the assignment this year, no cap” copy style but everything else about it stinks of “we laid off all the data guys six weeks ago.” Instead they pushed everyone an AI-generated “podcast“ where (I guess, I will never listen to it) a gratingly-cheery fake voice tells you what songs you like. Everything generative AI touches immediately takes on, for me, the sheen of creative bankruptcy. I've already been fastidiously avoiding tapping on the "AI DJ" icon for months, while also dodging sponsored recommendations, inline video content, and a general UI experience that resembles 2018-era Snapchat more every day. People who make an app that's installed on a critical mass of phones love to forget what their app is actually for.

There is stuff I will miss about Spotify, most of it playlist-related: making them seasonally, sharing them, etc. But I also think Spotify did a lot to shave down the minimum unit of music from the album to the song to, in the age of TikTok, the ten-second highlight. MusicBee does playlists and does let you shuffle your whole library, but I find something satisfying about seeing a big page of album covers, picking one, and just listening to the whole thing. It feels like I'm rebuilding my online-addled attention span.

And speaking of the age of TikTok, I'm increasingly sick of letting a computer decide what I should like, especially when that computer has a vested interest in funneling me toward the most popular and profitable stuff it has. Maybe just ask your friends what they're into.

Now I'm gonna talk about my new setup, with links to all the (free!) software so you can do this too, if you feel inclined.

Bandcamp is huge, obviously. I figure if I was paying $12 a month for Spotify and Bandcamp Friday (when the website waives their usual sales cut) rolls around every 3 or 4 months then I can afford to drop 50 to 60 bones every time and still break even, except that now 100% of my money will go to the artists I listen to instead of 0.002%.

Merch Table is one of the best websites I've ever seen: paste in the URL of a Spotify playlist and it'll find the songs on Bandcamp and give you links to purchase them. I actually made a bespoke "Moving Out" playlist, threw a bunch of my likes on it, and ended up with hits on like 90 percent of them.

Nicotine+ is a frontend for Soulseek, which is a peer-to-peer filesharing network (like Napster but nice). It basically lets you search for and download music from thousands of people's hard drives around the world, and share what you have on yours. I should note that getting all your music this way is the only way to benefit artists less than Spotify. I'm only using Soulseek to download music I already own physically or by deceased artists.

MusicBee is the player I've moved to. It's, if anything, a little too feature-complete, and kind of dense with menus and options compared to Spotify's dead-simple UI. But you can install custom skins and really customize the hell out of it in general.

mp3tag is a super-capable little program for editing metadata on audio files so they all have the right tags and album art and stuff. MusicBee lets you do a lot of that too but this is lighter and less confusing.

MusicBee doesn't have an official mobile app as far as I can tell, so on my phone I'm just using VLC Media Player. MusicBee does have some way to sync your library across devices, but I haven't gotten too deep into that yet, so I'm just copying the files onto my phone the old-fashioned way. Might go ahead and buy a dedicated mp3 player once my storage fills up.

Anyway. I know that ditching Spotify is kind of the veganism of music, and I promise not to be annoying about it. I've given you everything you need to make the jump, and now I'll shut up.

12.07.24

You Should Hack Your 3DS

I don't know who this post is really for, because it seems like almost everyone who still owns a 3DS has modded it by now. But if you have one sitting in a closet since the eShop shut down, I am urging you to spend the 40 minutes it takes to install custom firmware.

I know the word "firmware" makes this sound like I'm asking you to switch to Linux or root your phone or whatever, but I was genuinely amazed by how easy and straightforward it is. The first step is the only mildly tricky part, and everything after that is just downloading files to an SD card. There's a clear, concise and complete website guide to the whole process that you just have to follow step-by-step, and even though they warn you that there's a non-zero chance of bricking it's pretty safe if you keep backups.

Visit the 3DS Hacks Guide →

Once you have your system running custom firmware you can install homebrew games & apps to the home menu. You can rip any physical cartridges you have, including save data. You can sideload ROMs off the SD card. You can (this made me do a full evil laugh when I realized it's possible) use the 3DS's WiFi connection to put files on it over FTP without even touching it.

I think most of the thrill I've derived from this process comes from knowing it's the result of a dedicated community working really hard for years on software that's all totally free. It's the kind of love-of-the-game stuff you just don't see in a lot of spaces, especially spaces where it's possible to monetize at all. I don't know anything about real programming, far less writing raw assembly for a device not designed to let you do that. But lots of people just enjoy the challenge. The Homebrew Launcher is full of tech-demo type stuff (a pi calculator, an MP4 decoder) that seem to have just been made to prove their possibility, the same way people make crazy demos for other old consoles. And they're all generous enough to let unskilled chumps like myself use their work to improve my life. My 2DSXL was a paperweight before I decided to pull the trigger on CFW and now I've got a new battery on the way and will probably keep it around for years.

This specific project intersects with my personal principles pretty heavily. For one, I am trying to look at my phone less by replacing it with other, nicer screens. A choice between spending a bus ride scrolling through posts designed to make me go insane and spending a bus ride playing Peggle: Dual Shot is pretty easy.

Second, I love to rescue a device from getting thrown away. Even if the device isn't very sleek or powerful by current standards, if it works, why chuck it? And if it can become useful again by being modified beyond the original manufacturer's intent, the original manufacturer can eat it, in my opinion. A company wanting you to buy their new thing doesn't mean you're required to throw the old thing away just because it lacks “official support.” Why whould you give up (there are loads of emulators a jailbroken 3DS can run) hundreds of games that'll never be legally available again?

“Videogames are built on, and kept alive by, acts of crime.”
 — myfriendpokey