Give A Little

So, I’m an avid fan of Reddit. Yes, that site that lots of people don’t like (but people dislike lots of sites!). My belief of Reddit, just like a good majority of things, is that there’s always a good and bad side of things. Well, let’s skip the philosophical side of this and jump to the topic today.

As I was saying, I’m an Avid fan of Reddit and I also love video games. Some coworker friends and I have been playing the latest title from Activision called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (aka “CoD” or “MW”). Sure, there was a slightly similar CoD game back in the early 2007’s but this is the remake/remastered (whatever) version from 2019. Boy was (is) it good. Again, there’s good and bad in everything.

So, where this story comes in today is more with a Quality of Life (QoL) aspect inside of the game. Even if you don’t video game or know anything else about technology, you’ll get this aspect. Inside of MW as you rank up, earn achievements, upgrade weapons/character, there is a little green indicator like the below figure for evvvvverything new that you’ve accumulated.

Think of it like this example: suppose you have a pistol and during a match you rank it up to where you earn a scope or suppressor on it, those will show a green indicator. All you have to do is roll past or click on each value to make the green mark disappear. Well, this sounds simple enough, right? Maybe. Now let’s say you play a LOT and accumulate a ton of these indicators and they can be all across the player profile. That’s a lot of hunting to find and get rid of them.

So, some other users on the subreddit (the specific community) for COD: MW suggested a fix to the developers of the game to make a “clear all” button … and they actually delivered on it. Now, a big part of that was people rallying behind it with a donation to a charity to support this. I, of course, saw this as a win/win and spoke up to make a donation if this got implemented. Well, lo and behold it did. So, this morning I made two contributions to two organizations that I most closely feel passionate too: Samaritan’s Purse and the Wounded Warrior Project.

Technology and gaming is not as bad as some (of you) may thing. There is good out there and this is one of those times where faith in humanity can have a glimmer of restoration.

If you’re interested in more details, click here for the original Reddit post and the follow-up post here. Even if you don’t game, I encourage you to donate to a charity/organization of your choosing at least once. It’s a nice feeling and helps people in ways we’ll likely never see … and that’s ok!


New YouTube project

Some of you may remember a YouTube project I ran from 2017 until just a couple months ago called Peach Cactus. It was a sort-of play on the name Peach for Georgia and Cactus for Arizona representing the states I’m from and moved to and one of their –if not the — key features. Even further back than that, which is merely a memory for me now, was another project called IT Central. Both of these were focused on the IT (Information Technology) field but ran their due course for different reasons.

One thing I always am an OCD (shouldn’t it be CDO???) person about is meticulous details. Even though those names were great they weren’t perfect nor long-term … at least not in the likeness of some of the other great tech users out there (Linus TT, for example).

Well, now I have finally decided on a name that I think can carry its own weight and is worthy of long-term investiture (one day!). I present to you Coody Connection! Sure, it has a better ring with “The” in the title, and I’ll use that, but officially it’s just “Coody Connection”. I will leave the videos from my prior two projects as-is like a freeze-frame and maybe link back to them somewhere, but everything will be fresh and it’ll have its own site, blog, and other properties as it goes on.

Because the name is more generic (in a good way!) I can focus on not only Tech things, but other news, vlog, and tidbits. It’ll take a while to get started, but if you were a fan of Peach Cactus or IT Central, please go ahead now and subscribe to Coody Connection at coody.co.

See you there!

Andrew