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.
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.
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