The title pretty much says it all.
The announced date of the Russian invasion came and went. Some of us took it more seriously than others. Me and my family are not preppers (despite all the preaching about resilience in Gemini spaces), so we really only did minimal last-minute preparaion: put together some first-aid stuff, documents, cash, some spare clothes, etc, put them in a bag; prepared *some* food and water, but obviously not enough to last through some kinda siege or anything like that.
Anyway, so one of the things that I thought about was backing up my digital stuff. I don't own spare hard drives or DVDs or massive cloud storage or anything, my most important things are either synced to my phone (thank you Syncthing!) or to Git repositories (thank you Github and SourceHut!)
(I also put my private keys on a USB stick)
One tiny thing that I had no backups of were video game save files. So I thought, hey, my chances of dying in the near future are rising a bit, but this does not mean that I have to forget about having fun.
I prefer to buy DRM-free games when I can, which means I get nice .sh and .exe installers, but no convenient cloud storage. So I made my own.
https://git.sr.ht/~gardenapple/gamefiles
Literally the same concept as a dotfiles repository, but for games instead of configuration files. You can manage them in any way you like, I prefer GNU stow, as it seems to be the "standard" way of handling this sorta stuff.
Not only do I get cloud storage, but also version control, I guess! Though I can imagine the history growing too big, storing unnecessary binary data from games I completed years ago. That process will be pretty slow, as I'm not *too* big on gaming, but we'll see.
I say this when I literally have a "Linux and low-spec-ish gaming log"...
(in my defense: of the 5 games I have backed up right now, only 2 have been actually launched in the past few months...)
(...though I'm also developing a Minecraft modpack)
Am I using singleplayer video games, and my gaming log, as escapism a bit too much?
Did I write this whole post just to clickbait those who are worried about the Ukraine situation, so that they will check out my gaming log, and thus justify my consumerism?
Meh, I mostly just like the idea of storing game save files like dotfiles.
One last link for today:
The PCGamingWiki has been pretty useful for searching for those save file locations
It's not so bad for Linux games, with everything in either .config or .local/share, but navigating Wine file trees is painful.
People feel threatened by Russia, but the younger, more Internet-savvy generation is also concerned about Western media stirring the pot. Obviously, only crazy people want war. Even the more nationalist people I know are saying "if they want Donbass so badly, they can keep it, it's full of Russians anyway".
Reuters set up a YouTube livestream with a live feed of Kyiv's Maidan. People immediately memed it by playing some Sea Shanties (not on TikTok myself, so I have no idea), then the Soviet anthem, then launching a drone. Nothing else happened besides car traffic, the stream is now over, after getting 500,000 views. What a world.
The "invasion day" is also over, my studying goes on as normal, and the new thing that Ukrainians are talking about is some Eurovision drama.
-- gardenapple 2022-02-17