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.
Former Vice President Biden announced plans to forgive at least $10,000 in student debt for individuals earning less than $125,000 per year, and $250,000 for families. The majority of Americas are concerned that this will drive up inflation. With less than 15% of Americans currently holding student loans, this will be nothing more than a massive wealth transfers from laborers to those in the upper middle class.
At the beginning of this year, a truck filled with nearly one-hundred monkeys, in Pennsylvania, crashed while on its way to a lab. Several of the monkeys escaped. A Danville woman who came in close contact with the animals, soon developed a cough, appeared to have an eye infection and was treated preventatively for rabies. The previous year in November, vials labeled smallpox were found at a research facility in Pennsylvania. Now, the news is filled with stories of monkeypox, and officials are using smallpox vaccines as an untested prophylaxis to prevent infection. These stories might have nothing to do with one another, but with everything that’s happened over the past two years, they are certainly suspicious coincidences.
I grew up during an era where the Bush administration was openly defending its use of torture. Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib became synonymous with the total deprivation of justice and law under the banner of the United States. It was the violation of everything America stood for. There was never a reckoning for this era. Bush and Rumsfeld were never tried for their war crimes, and Cheney, an evil and vile Vice President, now has a daughter who is openly persecuting American political prisoners in her role as the Vice Chair of the January 6th committee. Everything has come full circle, and the gross carriages of misjustice that took place overseas have now come back to our shores. We are in a new era of torture, this time domestically, against citizens who stand against lawmakers desperate to hang onto their power and authority.
I was living in Wellington, New Zealand when Margaret Thatcher died. Some people I knew threw a party at Hotel Bristol, a pub on Cuba Street. I knew nothing about Thatcher, but I assumed she must have been pretty bad if friends of mine were singing “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” in her wake. Today, activist still literally piss on her grave.
Years later in Seattle, I worked with a British woman who grew up under Thatcher. She was horrified when people celebrated the death of someone who was an inspiration to many young women all over the United Kingdom. In the past few years, I’ve become increasingly more aware at how conservatives will simply state the facts, or praise what they appreciate, when an ideological adversary dies. In contrast, progressives and our legacy media will often write horrific hit pieces when someone on the opposite end of the spectrum passes away. It’s truly disgusting, and shows the relative levels of maturity of people on the far sides of the political spectrum.
I’ve been on Cricket Wireless since I returned to the United States. Cricket is owned by AT&T and uses its cellular network. Until this year, Cricket worked perfectly and without issue. A few months ago, my phone randomly stopped being able to accept or make calls. Data and texting still worked, but calls were impossible. Cricket support had me change my settings, so my phone defaulted to 4G instead of LTE. They claimed this wouldn’t reduce my speed (which I don’t think is correct), but I was able to make outbound calls. The fix only worked for a few months. AT&T seems to be upgrading their phone networks. In either pure incompetence or an intentional push to force customers to buy new phones, they have made several old devices unusable on all their partner providers. Thankfully, my device still works on the T-Mobile network at full LTE speeds, so I said goodbye to Cricket/AT&T and trashed my old SIM card.
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