In 1997, the Southern Baptist Church announced a boycott of Disney to protest the company’s challenges to traditional family values. It could be viewed as symbolic, a failure or both. Many Christians did not stop watching those adorable animated tales, at least not until decades later when Carrie Fisher became Marry Poppins, Mark Hamill drank green milk, and Gina Carano was fired for a political post on social media. In 1955, after the arrest of Rosa Parks, E. D. Nixon called for a one-day bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama. That one day boycott continued for 11 months. It was one of the few boycotts that fueled a movement which lasted generations. But were those who participated really voting with their dollars? It wasn’t their choice in purchases that was impactful, but the cultural and legal shift brought about by their collective actions.
On January 7th, the Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments, regarding the mandates for testing or vaccination, that Biden is attempting to impose via OSHA regulation. Many Americans listened closely to the arguments. Many listeners were also horrified at how Supreme Court justices made arguments for facts not in the records, that were blatantly and horrifically false. The Supreme Court is often seen as a sacred institution, empowered with determining what is, and is not, constitutional law. On January 7th, many Americas discovered that the judges on the Supreme Court are fallible individuals, subject to the same prejudices as anyone else. Soon, these nine individuals will make the most important decisions in the history of the United States.
Earlier this month, I posted a link to an article I wrote, titled Burning Witches, on LinkedIn. When I checked to see if there were any comments, the post was gone. I was given no notification, and received no e-mails, indicating that the post had been removed. I’ve previously written about how Facebook is hostile to smaller platforms. It seems like LinkedIn is also participating in the new era of corporate censorship, but what makes their actions more sinister is that they do so without providing their users any notifications of post removal.
I’m going to close out the year with two game reviews from very different titles, which you may want to check out on those new gaming systems you got for Christmas (for those of you who can find and afford them). A Plague Tale: Innocence is a beautiful and well produced title; a puzzler with dark, medieval and supernatural themes. Cloudpunk is on the total opposite end of the spectrum: an independent title, with pixel art animation, that takes place in a dystopian future.
You are in The Crucible. Someone in your town has been accused of witchcraft. Do you defend the witch, or walk away from those screaming for fire and blood? Would you burn the witch? Would you turn on your friend if they were disloyal to the Soviet empire? Would you turn in your neighbor for hiding Jews? Those who conform instead of standing up for deep moral convictions, are the ones who survive. In every authoritarian state, genocide, or episode of mass-hysteria, those who stand to defend others are often the first to be imprisoned, arrested or killed. Figures like Gandhi, Martin Luther (both of them) and others, are the outliers that give us hope. Yet, the tragic reality is that those who either stay silent or embrace atrocities, are often the survivors.
I’m switching to a new format, combining game reviews into monthly posts. I’ve been keeping up with writing reviews, but have fallen behind at posting them. I finished a couple of PC games back in October. Runner 3 was a game I started years ago and finally picked up again to finish. LEGO Builder’s Journey is a recent title I purchased mainly for the RTX graphics. Frost Punk is a game I’ve wanted to play for a while, and finally grabbed while it was on sale.
I’ve been using ZFS for years on my Linux storage server. Recently I upgraded from Alpine 3.12 to 3.14, which included a ZFS 0.8 to ZFS 2.0 update. Not soon after, I started getting random file corruption issues. I didn’t see any SMART errors on the drives, but still assumed that my hard drive could be going bad. My storage had outgrown my previous backup drive anyway, so I purchased an additional drive. When I attempted to sync snapshots to the new device, I started to see I/O errors and kernel panics. I took a long journey through ZFS bug reports, attempted to switch to Btrfs and even migrated my storage to a different computer. In the end, ZFS saved me from what could have been disastrous amounts of data corruption due to faulty hardware.
I’ve been administering e-mail servers since the early 2000s, for both my myself and for various jobs. For a brief period I stopped hosting my own e-mail, but returned to running my own stack due to the revelation of domestic spying in 2013. Even though the larger providers have made e-mail less reliable than it once was, I’m still glad I host my own e-mail. I had been using an OpenBSD 6.3 VM for e-mail, and couldn’t upgrade to OpenSMTPD 6.4+ because of some big configuration file changes. Thanks to many good 6.3 → 6.4+ tutorials, I finally tackled this lingering piece of technical debt, and migrated my e-mail from an OpenBSD VM to my standard Docker infrastructure.
I’ve owned a lot of smart phones. I started off in the PalmOS world and have been solidly in the Android camp for the past several years. Although I’ve used a lot of custom ROMS, I typically still install Google Apps and services. As my concerns over privacy have grown, I’ve started looking at microG, a bare-bones implementation of Google Services that limits personal and location information being continually sent to Google. I purchased a Sony XA2 a few years ago as a backup device, and decided to try out the Lineage for microG project on this device. Although flashing a new operating system on a phone should be a common affair by this point, I ran into issues that left me digging through forum threads for help. Hopefully documenting the errors I encountered, and my solutions, will help others with similar devices.
On the other side of an apocalypse, survivors emerge to build a new world. Their weapons are duct taped and welded together; bizarre amalgamations from a fiery past. Remanence of an old cult can be found along the countryside, as well as new villains who control the highways and like to paint everything bright pink. They game was marketed as a light sequel for Far Cry 5, about half the playtime of a full length title and priced appropriately. It has some beautiful visuals, questionable dialogue choices and all the guns and explosives that are expected from any Far Cry game.
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