Go Install SteamOS on your ROG Ally Right Now

Saturday, February 7, 2026

That title probably feels strong to you and I get it, you’re like, “But Madison, you 9-foot-tall sex goddess, I bought the Ally X for Windows!” And to that I say: I’m not even 6 feet tall please get your eyes checked, but more importantly, I did too, and I’m here to tell you: it’s SO much better with SteamOS and proton.

Let me explain.

If you’re here and reading this you likely know what a ROG Ally, Steam Deck, and SteamOS are but just in case you wandered off of the streets of Blusky and are now looking around like a lost Travolta here’s the breakdown. All of these things are planets around the sun that is “gaming handhelds,” or, if you’re really new here, taking an entire gaming PC, stuffing it into a unit roughly the size of a Nintendo Switch, and then filling any remaining space with battery because boy are you gonna need it.

Read More →

Halo Infinite -or- How to Screw up the Open World Formula

Monday, February 2, 2026

A note going in…

Before I start talking about this, I want to lay out my bonafides. I’m part of the sick and twisted portion of the gamer^TM audience who actually fucking loves open world games. Yes, It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

Having said that for what it’s worth, I don’t particularly enjoy that every goddamn AAA game is now an open world. While I enjoy an Ubisoft sandbox, seemingly everyone wants to make yet another Ubi-open-world map-covered-in-icons repetative-grindy-same-damn-mission-over-and-over mess. As fun as I find those, they are big commitments and as such, I only play a handful of them. I mean good grief I just bought S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, and I’ve already sunk nearly a hundred hours into the thing. But I digress.

Read More →

The UX Hell of Just Logging In

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Welcome to a rant!

What’s turned into my unofficial “thesis” of my blog if you will is that technology, despite the current awful state of it, is good. Or at least, it has the potential to be, if it’s built and maintained by people who not only care but who are instiutionally empowered to turn that care into excellent products.

However, despite that core optimism, I would contend (and I don’t think it’s a controversial opinion) that tech is in an utterly horrendous place right now. And that impression is crystalized daily by a number of little incidents. As Ed Zitron put it so well:

In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.

From “Never Forgive Them”

Here are two examples from merely the last 24 hours centered on “signing in”, an utterly benign task that, depending what you’re signing into, can quickly devolve into a farcical Kafka-esque nightmare.

Read More →

Fixing up some Creature Speakers

Saturday, July 5, 2025

So recently I wanted a set of these creature speakers for my secondary (work?) desk, because… I mean they’re just so fucking cute, look at them. These are JBL Creature Speakers from the 2000’s, and they can be had pretty cheaply with one caveat: They’re now over 20 years old, and boy did JBL not build these for the long haul. But you know, nobody does, and yet we fix things anyway because pushing back against the tide of inevitable flow of time just makes some of us feel alive.

So, I grabbed a set of these off Mercari. The seller helpfully (and quite honestly) let me know they had aged even further since he had listed them for sale, letting me know that the speaker units within the satelites had now fully deteriorated and they were effectively mute. That said, I had specifically known this was likely, and reassured him that I knew this and my plan was to fix them.

Read More →

Synergy Would Like Me To Buy a Worse Version Please

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

So I’m taking the advice of one of my favorite creators at the moment, Ed Zitron, to take a bit here to write about software that, while useful, has gotten measurably worse over time, though also for a side of hilarity, has demanded I pay to access a newer version that I definitely, 100%, cannot overemphasize enough that I don’t want. Which is funny in the cosmic sort of way to me.

Along the way I’ll be explaining why what it does is so great, why the new version fails on it’s face to accomplish the same thing, and at the end I’ll go find out if you can actually buy the old (working) version or not. I hope for your sake you can.

Read More →