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.
A lot of shouting has been made from the modern propaganda boxes known as social media, the news and classic TV broadcasts. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have engaged in what can only be described as a silly, and very likely staged, ridiculous slap fight. Epstein narratives are making their way into the news again as Los Angeles moves from forest fire season to riot season. Meanwhile, Congress has become functionally illiterate as they continue to vote for bills that they do not read. Bills that are ushering in an era of magical wrong answer language machines (a.k.a “AI”) permeating their way through state and local governments. There are a lot of distractions out there, so it’s important to understand why it’s all most certainly propaganda and surveillance narrative.
I’ve been using Stack Overflow, and other Stack Exchange sites, for over fourteen years. During that time, I’ve both asked and answered over 80 questions, with some overlap of providing answers to my own queries. Even when I was younger, I limited my questions to things that were truly difficult problems I was stuck on. The site has provided some great insights and has helped me tackle difficult coding issues. Recently, the amount of questions submitted has gone into massive decline. A few weeks ago, I used the site to ask questions about a very difficult problem I was facing, which involved Python and Qt using PyQt bindings. The comments I got were condescending. Even as I provided more information and fully reproducible examples, I was told to further condense my questions before they were eventually closed and deleted. Stack Overflow is no longer the website I once enjoyed using.
Hogwarts Legacy is a game built upon the world of Harry Potter. It takes place long before the events of the famous J.K. Rowling series. You, as the main character, are a new 5th year student at Hogwarts who must catch up to the other students while also working with Professor Fig to deal with a mystery surrounding goblins and poachers. It’s a game that does an amazing job of immersing the player into the world of Harry Potter, but it also reuses many of the familiar mechanics of open world games. The game is a total mixed bag, with some of the artwork and world building fitting beautifully, while other aspects just felt crammed into an existing game engine. The story is mid-tier, and much of the dialog is pretty awful. It’s a game I put down for a few months, but I did eventually finish it.
A few years ago, I built out a home theater system, after not having a TV for nearly a decade. Even after leaving my life of minimalism, I still just watched movies and shows on a regular desktop monitor or laptop. I was surprised at how difficult it was to get HDR support working on Linux, and how limited my options were. For years, I simply used Windows 10 and the VLC media player to play videos with HDR and high quality audio. Although true HDR is now possible on Linux, it’s still not entirely straightforward and took a little bit of work. This guide explains how to setup mpv media player with HDR on KDE Neon Linux, but should be adaptable to other Wayland based setups.
Odin Sphere is a platforming role-playing game originally released on the PS2. I played the Leifthrasir PS4 remake of this adventure with its rich story, beautiful artwork and breathing animation. I’ve played a couple of other Vanillaware games, but Odin Sphere is one of their earliest classics I missed out on back when it was originally released. The artwork is incredible, although the action did get a little bland. At just around 37 hours, the rich and complex story seemed to go well with the casual gameplay.
