Important Life Update

I learned on my trip that the left joystick on my Switch Lite was broken again and instead of just replacing it again I realized I had the rare opportunity to buy a fancy new thing and save a bunch of money in the process.

My ~7 year old windows machine has been increasingly struggling with running Spelunky 2 (a game that runs perfectly fine on my Switch) and I have been dreading the thought of having to buy a new machine with Windows 11 just to play a 4-year-old indie platformer. Literally the only other thing I use the computer for is streaming the crossword with friends on the weekend and I can easily do that from my laptop instead.

The ~2020 Mac Mini I bought to be a server (it's running this site) and to watch movies on in my living room works just fine and is more than powerful enough for the simple task of processing H.264 video so instead of buying a new Windows machine I could just buy a Switch that supports video out and a cheap USB capture card and solve all my problems at once.

Anyway, the big life change is that next time I submit a Spelunky run I'll have to select platform switch instead of pc. It turns out the Switch Pro controller has a d-pad that's unusable for speedrunning Spelunky but I can fix that either with some electrical tape or by buying an adaptor so I can use my X-Box controller instead