Enter a landscape with a solitary farm, run by a lone woman, connected to civilization by a sunken array of dilapidated telephone poles and a lone merchant who delivers mail. The Stillness of the Wind is an independent game that takes place in a world that feels simultaneously rich and empty. More than a simple story telling simulator, there are tasks to do and a farm to build up. It’s like Stardew Valley, with a slower pace, and shorter days. It leaves the player with a deep connection to the stories of another world, with a past wrapped inside of it.
Before you’re allowed to enter a bar, the doorman asks you if you’re on antidepressants. After all, there is an increased risk of committing mass shootings for people who are on SSRIs. Would this be acceptable? Of course not. In many countries, a person’s medical history, including whatever medications he or she might be prescribed, is considered private health information. In the United States, health privacy is one of the many things covered under legislation know as HIPPA. However, all the rules seem to have changed in the reaction to COVID-19. Now, people are not only proclaiming their medical information to everyone, but venues and employers are requiring disclosures of experimental medication in order to enter their premises. Whether you believe this is a justified request or not is irrelevant. It’s the end of medical privacy as we know it, and opens up an entirely new class of discrimination based on an individual’s choice to take a medication.
Lithium City takes place in an amazing isometric world, filled with low polygon count enemies, lightning fast game mechanics, a heart thumping soundtrack, and relentless challenging stage after stage of cyberpunk fighting. The color scheme is hypnotizing and fits perfectly with the music. Although the focus of the gameplay is on fighting, there is a considerable variety of levels that include sword fighting, dodging helicopter mounted cannons and a fun shufflepuck court. There is no dialogue. The story is complete, while also leaving itself open to a wide amount of interpretation. It’s a fun game that’s about the right length for an independent tile. However, parts of it can be quite grueling and difficult, making it inaccessible to those who don’t have the dexterity for fast paced, unforgiving, fighting games.
Deep in the heart of a mythical nation known as Kyrat, you play Ajay Ghale; a man returning home to spread his mother’s ashes. But things are rarely so simple. Far Cry 4 places you in the midst of a civil war which leads through a tangled family past. Thrown in are CIA operatives, criminal regimes, drug induced passages to magical worlds, wing suits, gliders, the unsafest aircraft ever and an insane amount of weapons. It’s a decently sized, open world first person shooter that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The story is fun and hilarious, the game play mechanics varied and the game moves at a decent pace without ever grinding.
Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist and podcast who recently interviewed Robert Malone and Steve Krisch about the current COVID vaccines. Dr. Malone, the researcher who invented mRNA technology, expressed concerns about continuing to push these new vaccines, when it was clear that the medication Ivermectin could be used effectively as a prophylaxis and treatment for COVID-19. Dr. Malone pushing for the use of Ivermectin, and challenging the safety and efficacy of the current vaccines being promoted by Pfizer and Moderna, lead to the podcast with Weinstein being removed from YouTube.
I remember hearing about SuperHot at a party; a first person shooter where time only advances when you move. I played a three level demo while the game was still in the early stages of development. Conceptually, the game is unique and creative. Although the setting and low polygon graphics may seem basic, the mechanics are creative, challenging and addictive. The story is fairly simplistic, but it does play a little into a meta-narrative on gaming. Overall this is a fun independent title that merges puzzles and first person shooters in a unique design.
The mask mandates for Chicago began on May 1st, 2020. The exact order only mandated masks in stores that were not large enough for social distancing. However, in practice, every store was refusing to let people in without a face covering. I already had concerns over the reaction to the pandemic, and I decided to draw my line in the sand very early. For the next few weeks, I drove to Indiana in order to shop for groceries to avoid the mandate. Usage grew even past the state line, and one store stopped allowing entry to those who were unmasked. Eventually I settled into a routine of purchasing groceries and supplies on-line for drive-up/pick-up. Eventually I left Chicago for an undisclosed location on the east coast, in the deep south, far away from cities and the growing hysteria. Even in the middle of nowhere, major chain still have signs requiring masks. There are some people who wear them, but the rules are never enforced. Although seeing people with masks in stores does disturb me, I’m glad I now live in a place where I have the option to not participate in a mandate defined by pseudoscience. It’s not “Just a mask.” The consequences of shame around a new article of clothing are not minor, and I think we will see the effects for decades to come.
A few months ago, I got a notice stating Google Hangouts would stop handling SMS/Voice. In 2012 I transfered my primary phone number to Google Voice before leaving the country, so I could still send texts and keep my American number. At the time, it cost $20 to transfer a number to Google Voice. Eventually Voice was deprecated and Google moved their customers’ phone numbers into Hangouts. Now they’re moving everything back to Voice apparently, in their never ending confusingly labeled and hopelessly broken suite of communication tools. Rather than wait for Google to finally put their telephony products out of their misery, I decided to port the two phone numbers I had on Google over to another service. After some experimenting and trials with various providers, I decided to go with jmp.chat which allows for both Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for voice calls and XMPP for texts/MMS.
As people have been banned from one major platform after another, one common response has been, “build your own platform”. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Platforms need infrastructure to run on, and if every hosting provider decided to not offer someone service, corporate censorship can kill a website. Parler made the mistake of tightly coupling their website to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The weaponization of the courts essentially made their contract with AWS entirely worthless. Parler’s response makes me question a lot of their core business decisions, and their future.
People may have flocked to the new network because Parler promoted themselves as an alternative to the current social media landscape. Yet Parler has made critical mistakes with their infrastructure stack, and arbitrary decisions about what content to allow. Parler also suffers the same failure points as any centralized social media platform. To paraphrase Obi-Wan Kenobi, “This is not the free platform you are looking for”.
I’ve grown increasing concerned over the way big social media networks have been manipulating large swaths of the population. Many of them compete with, and are actively aggressive to, smaller independent platforms. I rarely ventured onto the large platforms except to promote my own material. Yet, the growing audacity of these networks and their blatant manipulations of human thought and perception, has led me to the point where I feel I can no longer ethically use them. I decided that even using them passively for promotion was no longer morally acceptable. In February of 2021, I deleted my Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. I’ve potentially cut myself off from a large number of acquaintances I’ve know throughout my life, yet I’ve always had my own presence on the web which I control and promote. The people who truly matter, will always be able to find me.
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