Old software

A couple weeks ago I started playing Neverwinter Nights (NWN). The original game is from 2002, and I remember playing it back in... 2007? It's a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game, and you can build and run your own campaigns, so for a while I was excited to try it with my group of childhood friends, since we used to play D&D together when we were teenagers. Unfortunately I was never able to get enough people excited for an online campaign back then, and I stopped playing it.

I don't remember why, but I decided to give it another try, and I've been having a lot of fun playing the original campaign! This is a game that's almost 20 years old, but the graphics are still pretty good! Granted, this is an enhanced version running on modern hardware, but when my girlfriend first saw me playing (on a 34" ultrawide monitor) she said "this is gorgeous!" The game has a cool effect that your character is never occluded as you move the camera, and many of the in-game locations are beautiful.

And one thing hasn't aged that much: the game play. And that's the great thing about old games: the ones that we still remember are still great, because they had great stories.

Something about playing NWN makes me happy. I don't need a PlayStation 5 to have fun with games. In fact, I never played on a modern console, so the graphics from NWN are one of the best I've seen in a game. I like the idea that there's is enough content already available for me for free or cheap, enough for a lifetime: books and movies from my local library, music from independent artists on Bandcamp, games that cost a few dollars on Good Old Games.

I'm writing this blog post on a 10-year old laptop. It works great! It runs a reasonably secure OS, and I can do everything I need: write blog posts, interact with other people's content, develop software. There's no need for upgrading my computer every 2 years. Why should I? Laptops don't change.

Recently I started using Mopidy to manage my music collection. It runs on my other laptop, which I use for music production and is connected to nice speakers. I use a command-line application to interact with Mopidy, searching for songs, adding them to the queue, and playing/pausing the music. I can do that from any other computer, usually my work laptop during the day.

The thing I love about Mopidy is that it aggregates everything. My local MP3/FLAC files are there. But also my 160+ albums on Bandcamp. And if I want to listen to something that's not on my collection it will search on Bandcamp (first) and YouTube Music (second) for it. I feel that for the first time in 5+ years I have some control over what I'm listening -- I'm listening to my music collection.