Last month, a shooter opened fire in a Catholic church. The immediate backstory of the shooter being transgender fit the current social fears of ideological conservatives. Almost immediately, news media seemed to forget about the current administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Conservatives also seem to be heralding Trump’s commitment to expand military deployments in American cities, something they would have raged against had the previous administration engaged in the same practices. Why was the media covering this particular shooting, with a near orgy of evidence released immediately, while completely glazing over the assassination of a Blackstone executive whose industry has been ravishing the consumer housing market? Now we see another assassination of a prominent conservative speaker, in full view of hundreds of students at a university. Immediately there is polarization and massive coverage of the event from every media outlet. Examining what the major outlets are covering and what they’re downplaying can paint a picture of what may be coming later this year.
I originally started playing Final Fantasy VIII in the 1990s on the PC. I had the original 5-disc set and ran the game on Windows 98. Unfortunately, I lost my save files twice when I forgot to back them up during operating system reinstalls. In one game, I even got to the final dungeon. Twenty years later, I’ve decided to pick up this classic again, and I finally finished the 2019 PS4 edition. This remaster has some amazing improvements, which really make the game a lot less boring. Even though the story is about average, I enjoyed my final playthrough of FF8.
In 2019, I placed a pre-order for a Purism Librem 5. It was touted as a Linux mobile phone, providing an alternative to the two big players in the cellphone operating system space. Two years later I attempted to cancel this pre-order, as the promised device had failed to materialize. Three years after my original order, I got an e-mail indicating the device I no longer wanted would finally ship. It took almost six years from my original order to get a refund. I was met with tons of excuses from support staff and eventually had to file a complaint with my credit card company to finally get the money restored. I’m honestly shocked Purism is even still in business. They’re a horrible company filled with liars. No one should give them any money for what must be garbage products.
Earlier this week, a friend of mine sent me an invitation to a “community resistance gathering.” It came in the form of a text message with a link to a website called Mobilize dot US. My friend was likely unaware of my complex political views, specifically that the two-party system is an illusion made to fragment Americans against one another. I declined her invitation, but examined this organizing website and its backers. What I found was very troublesome, and I also noticed the link she sent me contained tracking information that could potentially violate the privacy of all the people she sent the link to. Many of the large-scale protests over the past year have been backed by questionable organizations with very deep pockets. Gone are the days of truly grassroots organizations, and most people should do considerably more research before buying into protest groups that may just be fronts of Political Action Groups (PACs), big tech tracking and US intelligence agencies.
I’ve been using Sonatype Nexus for the past few months as a repository for build artifacts (Python and RPM packages) for project I’ve been developing. Recently several of my build pipelines broke with RPM checksum errors. Doing some searches, I only found old, unanswered forum questions and absolutely useless AI-generated answers. Upgrading to the latest version of Nexus didn’t solve the issue either. After looking through some documentation, I did discover how to rebuild the package indexes and fix my issue. However, I didn’t realize the Nexus upgrade shifted me from a truly open-source artifact repository to closed proprietary commercial software with no way to downgrade back to the open-source version. This was infuriating. Now, even though my problem was fixed, I had to extract all my artifacts, rebuild an older Nexus installation and then reupload all my package. I’ll also have to create my own build pipeline if I want to continue getting updates for the open source-version of Nexus.
Nearly a decade ago, I was purchasing beer for a friend’s party at a drug store and the cashier wanted to scan my drivers license. I refused and her manager said my ID had to be scanned to make my purchase. The cashier was surprised no one had refused a scan before. Sometimes people have scanned my IDs before I could stop them, so I put a sticker on the back of my drivers license. Increasingly, more businesses and restaurants are demanding this invasive tracing of customers for entry or alcohol purchase. No matter how much a bouncer may claim “we don’t store your information,” they have literally no way of being sure of that. If you value your privacy, do not let venues or stores scan your drivers license.
I wanted to take a break from combat games and play a more relaxing turn-based role-playing title. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been making waves as a new masterpiece in RPGs. The previews looked incredible, and the game seemed to incorporate turn based mechanics with some timing-based attacks. It was difficult to find this game on physical disc, since its popularity has led it to sell out in several markets. I ordered my copy from Japan, and it cost just $10 over the retail price, including shipping. While the game is visually stunning and has an intriguing story, the combat mechanics are anything but relaxing. Expedition 33 manages to combine traditional turn-based combat with the most frustrating elements of precision parry brawlers. It makes for a game that’s very beautiful, creative and well written, yet also much more frustrating than it is challenging.
When Elon Musk originally bought Twitter, a number of people moved over to Mastodon. There were a lot of misunderstandings around how Mastodon works. People are used to mega-websites, now known as platforms. Mastodon is composed of tens of thousands of independently run servers that communicate with each other using a protocol known as ActivityPub (AP). There are other services that can communicate over AP, including Pleroma, PeerTube, Misskey, PixelFed and more. This interconnected network is colloquially known as The Fediverse. People use to the mega-sites and large-scale algorithmic content moderation were completely unprepared for a return to distributed, chronological, non-algorithmic social networking.
Neva is a beautifully animated, left-to-right scrolling adventure game. From the makers of Gris, this game feels like a spiritual successor, although one that’s driven more by combat than its predecessor. You play a female protagonist with a magical companion named Neva. Your faithful animal seems to be a combination of a deer and a wolf, reminiscent of the deerfox from the children’s series Hilda. Together, the two of you walk through a vast, breathtaking word while battling enemies, jumping over platforms, solving puzzles and finding secrets.
It’s been a busy few weeks when it comes to domestic and international politics. Both conflict and propaganda are escalating. People are divided further than they ever have, and it should be obvious that the divide is intentionally being accelerated by social media algorithms and the 24/7 news cycle. Although I’ve previously covered immigration and the LA riots, there’s been a lot more information I’ve discovered regarding the funding of these protests. I also don’t think there was significant coverage of the fall of Syria by major media outlets, an event that has massive significance when viewed through the lens of the current escalations between Israel and Iran.
