Over the winter and into the spring, I played several turn based and action/platform games. On the Switch, I finished Fire Emblem Engage, the third game I’ve beat in the Fire Emblem franchise. I also completed 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, a story rich kaiju versus robot anime adventure. On the PC, I played Hi-Fi Rush, an interesting mix of beat-em-up combat combined with musical beat matching in a retro futuristic world. I finished up the season with Ratchet and Clank: Rifts Apart, a cute and fun kids game that really shows off the power of the PS5 console.
Over the winter months, I played mostly PC games and a single console title. On the PlayStation 5, I played Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut. It’s a smooth and beautiful sword fighting title. Bringing things down in intensity, I also played and reviewed Airborne Kingdom, a cute casual simulation and resource management game. I finished up NieR:Automata, a role playing robot title I had started a while back, yet put down for a while. Finally, I’m finishing this season’s reviews with A Plague Tale: Requiem, a captivating yet dark saga following the adventures of a young girl protecting her brother.
A few months ago, when looking for fun 3D printing projects, I discovered the Raspberry Pi Server Mark III. The prices for Raspberry Pis has skyrocketed, despite the fact that nearly half a million units are produced every month. Luckily, I had several Pis lying around from my previous research into environmental sensor networks. I decided to print the 18 slot version of the Mark III rack, so I’d have plenty of room to expand. As I was printing all the parts, I dug through my hardware and found 5 Raspberry Pis from various generations. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to add Pis to my home lab and experiment with cluster management and distributed tasks.
Last year Kayne West (also known as Ye) made headlines for several interviews where he directly blames a single ethnic group for issues he’s had with the entertainment industry. Blaming any group of people based on a characteristic they literally have no control over, has been historically been condemned as immoral. Kanye’s views shouldn’t really come as a surprise in a world that is returning to segregation as some type of penance for past wrongs. However, there is a deeper evil to this story that people are dismissing because of Kanye’s absurdity. Kanye’s story is about the dangers of Hollywood, the power of propaganda, and the way people are used for their cult of personality to propel a narrative. But worst of all, his story is being used to fuel the Orwellian idea that words are violence. His story will likely be twisted as a tale of right-wing radicalization that fuels domestic terrorism.
This fall, I powered up my PlayStation 5, after not touching it for a while. I finally finished up Sackboy: A Big Adventure, the second game I’ve played in the Little Big Planet Franchise. Afterwards, I immediately jumped straight into God of War Ragnarök, an absolutely stunning sequel to the 2018 God of War for the PlayStation 4. This month’s reviews are from a seasons of sequels on a current generation console.
A few months ago, I wanted to add in a 10G Ethernet card to my primary development box. Since it’s an ITX build, I only had one PCI-E slot that was occupied with an old AMD RX 550 video card. Even though the Ryzen 2700X processor it held was more than powerful enough for my needs, I switched it out with a Ryzen 5700G so I could free up the PCI-E slot for 10G networking. Unfortunately, X11 started crashing recently with the integrated graphics. Sway/Wayland seems to run stable. I currently use Sway on my personal laptop, so I attempted to take the plunge again and see if I could switch to it on my primary machine. I jumped in with an open mind, and found replacements for many of the i3/X11 tools that do not work with Sway/Wayland. The following is a summary of what worked, what didn’t quite work and what’s still broken. The version of Sway I’m using is 1.7 on Gentoo.
Journey, Far Changing Tides, Stray and Fire Emblem Three Kingdoms
It’s been a couple of months since I’ve published game reviews. I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue writing them, as part of me wanted to just enjoy games rather than detailing my journey through them. Still, I haven’t finished many titles since my last review, and I might as well recommend some titles that I enjoyed over this year. Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the second Fire Emblem game I’ve played, the first being Awakening on the 3DS. It’s the only Switch game I’m reviewing. Far: Changing Tides and Stray are two great short titles, filled with puzzles, amazing artwork and story. Finally, I was inspired to play Journey, one of the early walking simulators, after hearing part of the soundtrack preformed by a local college ensemble.
Larry Sanger, one of the original founders of Wikipedia, has openly stated that Wikipedia is clearly biased. Although the free online encyclopedia is good at general information about broad topics, it’s terribly inaccurate for anything political, contentious or controversial. If it wasn’t for section 230 immunity, many of its articles would be subject to claims of libel, defamation and slander. Recently, several outlets have talked about how the Wikimedia Foundation raises far more money than necessary for its day to day operations, using much of their funding for political actions.
Wikipedia may still have a lot of valuable information, but it takes effort and skill to maintain your privacy and avoid rhetoric while browsing Wikipedia. No one should be donating to the Wikimedia Foundation. Their banners are deceptive, and the money they raise fund overtly political, unscientific and biased organizations.
By now, everyone has heard that PayPal made a change to their acceptable use policy, allowing them to fine people $2,500 for promoting “misinformation” or “hate.” Although they have since rescinded the change, the damage is already done. There has been a mass exodus of people deleting their PayPal accounts. I have minimized my use of PayPal since they started censoring several people and organizations I respect, for the past several years, including conservatives, people who investigated American political prisoners, the Democratic Party of Hong Kong and Wikileaks.
In 2017 Cloudflare, the world’s largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection provider, decided to withdraw all services from a website they didn’t agree with politically. Their company didn’t operate in a vacuum, as every big tech provider collectively censored that website, making it impossible for them to host their content anywhere on the Internet. Recently, Cloudflare decided to do the same thing to Kiwi Farms, days after releasing a statement about their policies and “avoiding an abuse of power.” Cloudflare not only dropped Kiwi Farms as a customer, but put up a custom error page defaming them. Kiwi Farms released a statement saying Cloudflare was lying about the entire affair, but were unable to keep their website up after being forced to switch DDoS providers. Wikispooks, a comprehensive wiki about three-letter-agencies, went down around this same time period as well.
The types of censorship we are seeing right now is not unprecedented. We’ve seen countless amounts of censorship in the past few years, surrounding everything from COVID-19 and doctors to election fortification to corruption involving the son of Former Vice President Biden. This level of censorship should terrify everyone. In the case of Kiwi Farms, the censorship appears to be specifically due to pressure from a trans-activist who openly advocates for giving children prescription hormones without parental consent.
