Gaming & Retro Tech
When it comes to gaming, I greatly prefer PC games as I feel I have more control. But recently I've gotten into a mood where I want to be able to play games on consoles that I never grew up with, like the SEGA Genesis, Nintendo 64, PlayStation 1/2, GameCube, NES, Gameboy, etc.
So I had an idea: I'll make my own. Well... I'm not actually coding my own console games (other than a simple game I'm trying to make in GB Studio for Gameboy Color games) but, rather, utilizing an emulator called EmulationStation. It was very fun setting up. What I did was install DiePi OS (a minimal Linux-based operating system) onto one of my 2017 Dell OptiPlexes, then I installed EmulationStation on top of it.
It works perfectly for my setup with all the games I downloaded, yet I realized that I had more fun setting it up and doing all the difficult (for me) terminal work on it. It spurred my desire to get real retro tech, like a cassette deck, record player, and CD player and receiver all from the 1980's. All this is to say that I want to use the tech I have for creative, learning purposes and keep those devices alive for as long as possible. True ownership, I am finding, means physical/analog ownership.