December Days 11 - Technology at Play
Dec. 12th, 2016 12:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]
My previous self had issues with their geek cred. Because my friends' interests and expertise in electronics and circuit building, radio transmission, and computers and programming are the sort of thing that are solidly in the pocket of the nerd culture of my upbringing. I, on the other hand, was not so much fascinated by these things, much to the...something of my father, whose profession involves working with such things for pay.
My pursuits of technology have been mostly in favor of entertainment and playing games. Much of the things I have learned in pursuit of technology have been in the service of getting games and things to work. Which is why I know how to assemble a computer from parts - if I wanted to have a machine with sufficient power and memory and hard drive space, that meant putting it all together myself on the cheap. Which is why I know about things like boot disks, about arcane command prompts to make programs work, and is the reason I ended up learning command line things - because menu programs took up too much memory to run the games. I know console tricks and have seen game guides and performed some very cool things. I've hacked savegames, hexedited, used cheat devices, probably voided more warranties than I particularly want to count, and practiced the time honored craft of following in the footsteps of others with a fuckton more technical skill than I have. I have learned how to do research to find all of these things and their usage guides. I learned why to install anti-virus software, and the importance of backups.
And then, as time progressed, I learned that tools exist to unlock smartphones and root devices, and practiced with those tools during their copyright exempt statuses, against the difficult ones, and the ones that made it much easier. I learned Linux to capture tools that aren't available on Windows. I learned website programming and a little bit of scripting, and a lot of bits and pieces of where settings go and what they do.
Almost none of it was learned formally, just as needed to accomplish the next task or to make the game more enjoyable. It provides a prodigious amount of useful knowledge to use to tweak things here and there or to help a user get out of a jam.
But I'm still the kid who plays games. Not one of the people with the eidetic memory for shows and their minutiae. Not one of the people who can build a proton pack - whether as a prop or as a prototype. Not even, until somewhat recently (...well, sort of), that kid that wrote new stories for their world and shared them with others.
And while I play games, I'm not good enough to be the competitive circuit kind of player, so even in the place where my time invests, my results aren't top tier. It's the blessing and the curse of the Hufflepuff. We are best together and create all sorts of things. Individually, though, we're not necessarily the standouts in our field, and we've often got some weird secondary abilities that help us move things along paths more efficiently. But a lot of Hufflepuffs occasionally or constantly crave something closer to real credit and recognition for their work. And I've almost always felt like geek-adjacent for much of my life.
But I do have a damn good time playing all those games.
My previous self had issues with their geek cred. Because my friends' interests and expertise in electronics and circuit building, radio transmission, and computers and programming are the sort of thing that are solidly in the pocket of the nerd culture of my upbringing. I, on the other hand, was not so much fascinated by these things, much to the...something of my father, whose profession involves working with such things for pay.
My pursuits of technology have been mostly in favor of entertainment and playing games. Much of the things I have learned in pursuit of technology have been in the service of getting games and things to work. Which is why I know how to assemble a computer from parts - if I wanted to have a machine with sufficient power and memory and hard drive space, that meant putting it all together myself on the cheap. Which is why I know about things like boot disks, about arcane command prompts to make programs work, and is the reason I ended up learning command line things - because menu programs took up too much memory to run the games. I know console tricks and have seen game guides and performed some very cool things. I've hacked savegames, hexedited, used cheat devices, probably voided more warranties than I particularly want to count, and practiced the time honored craft of following in the footsteps of others with a fuckton more technical skill than I have. I have learned how to do research to find all of these things and their usage guides. I learned why to install anti-virus software, and the importance of backups.
And then, as time progressed, I learned that tools exist to unlock smartphones and root devices, and practiced with those tools during their copyright exempt statuses, against the difficult ones, and the ones that made it much easier. I learned Linux to capture tools that aren't available on Windows. I learned website programming and a little bit of scripting, and a lot of bits and pieces of where settings go and what they do.
Almost none of it was learned formally, just as needed to accomplish the next task or to make the game more enjoyable. It provides a prodigious amount of useful knowledge to use to tweak things here and there or to help a user get out of a jam.
But I'm still the kid who plays games. Not one of the people with the eidetic memory for shows and their minutiae. Not one of the people who can build a proton pack - whether as a prop or as a prototype. Not even, until somewhat recently (...well, sort of), that kid that wrote new stories for their world and shared them with others.
And while I play games, I'm not good enough to be the competitive circuit kind of player, so even in the place where my time invests, my results aren't top tier. It's the blessing and the curse of the Hufflepuff. We are best together and create all sorts of things. Individually, though, we're not necessarily the standouts in our field, and we've often got some weird secondary abilities that help us move things along paths more efficiently. But a lot of Hufflepuffs occasionally or constantly crave something closer to real credit and recognition for their work. And I've almost always felt like geek-adjacent for much of my life.
But I do have a damn good time playing all those games.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-12 08:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-12 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-12 07:19 pm (UTC)It me.
no subject
Date: 2016-12-12 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-12-13 01:18 am (UTC)(the pro gaming that I follow is mostly just Heroes of the Storm, though I'm a bit behind on it for reasons of having had some internet trouble this fall)