The Art Of Not Asking Why

Looking forward to Cities: Skylines 2 🎮 coming this October

Cities: Skyline is a dangerous game if you’re into city building. You can design your cities down to the level of the pavement of the sidewalk, apartment buildings from around the world, and your local coffee shops, all thanks to a thriving modding community.

They’re coming up with a sequel, and they are intimidating us with an even more realistic model. How dare they threaten us with a good time.

Another grey rainy day with some 75% humidity until the afternoon… At times like these I think I was made for deserts.

Back in 1984, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, a book that gave birth to the Cyberpunk genre along with Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D, or DnD) was already in the geek scene for ten years at the time. I’m a little surprised that it took Shadowrun, ten more to show up, and still somehow miss the point.

I’ve spent the last week or so reading up Shadowrun rules. I want to bring up the DnD gang back together to explore a new world, one that I’ve been cooking in my head for months. It takes place in the far future. Human cloning failed unexpectedly and spectacularly, giving birth to a certain form of “magic” in the process. I wanted a roleplaying game that brings into play huge corporations, cybernetics, and computer systems, and Shadowrun was an obvious spot to revisit. But I dropped it pretty quickly.

First, we already know and understand DnD 5e. Learning a new system of rules, especially a confusing and complex one like Shadowrun’s, is not appealing. That, and the fact that I don’t think the human hand is meant to roll 12 dice at once (a bad Shadowrun joke).

Second, I don’t like the lore of Shadowrun. Magic is fantastical, Dragons are real, and dwarves and elves show up because of some sort of disease… eck. I already have my own story, as I mentioned above. I wanted the system to adopt my world, not the other way around.

Third, making your own rules is fun. I am not an experienced DnD DM and I will never memorize all those rules. I count on my players not just as guests to my creation, but also equal in its making. We will shape and adjust rules as needed. Taking out the Big Book of Rules and searching if something can be done and how or is not as fun.

So nowadays I’m expanding on my rules and lore where it makes sense: my wiki. It’s mostly DnD rules that will remain unchanged with a couple of twists influenced by Shadowrun and my own inventions. My goal is to get to a “beta” point where we can test it, perhaps during a session 0 of sorts.

My niece graduated from kindergarten, and I wanted to send a reply in a short video. I don’t usually use my iPhone on a whim for personal messaging, but my sister is deep in Apple’s world. Here’s the process:

1. I Recorded a short video using the iPhone’s camera app
2. Realizing I wanted to cut two parts out, I sent it over to the Mac with Airdrop
3. On the Mac, I opened it in Snagit and edited it to my liking
4. I dropped the MP4 into Messages and sent it to my sister

I haven’t done this before, but the process was so intuitive and seamless that it blew my mind. As a person who uses Linux on a daily basis, I forget how nice it is that technology is so seamless these days. 10 years ago, this was all science fiction.

When I read the pro and con arguments about Facebook federating, I feel the same way. Maybe Facebook’s integration with ActivityPub means I could reach my friends from college who never left Facebook and will always stay there. Maybe they’ll see my posts on their feed, and I could communicate with them without ever logging into Facebook Messenger. To me, that’s a win.

Does this mean Facebook’s motives are anything but profit and closed walls? No. This is the same way I think about Apple and Messages. But I like having options.

It’s easy for me to say, “Join Mastodon! Chat with me on Signal! It’s easy!” But to my sister and my college friends, it’s not. And yelling louder would only make me more obnoxious and these alternatives even less appealing.

I now have an official email with my domain…! Hooray. It’s my name here at the domain, also added to the About page.

I’ve been busy with a couple of updates, mostly on the wiki. More on that soon. Time to eat some Indian food, one of my favorite cuisines.

From Wired:

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens wired.com

Read: www.wired.com

Wired doesn’t do much besides pointing fingers and raising the alarm, but it did lead me to this PDF from the DNI (Director of National Intelligence):

www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Declassified-Report-on-CAI-January2022.pdf dni.gov

Read: www.dni.gov

Data brokers “maintain large, sophisticated databases with consumer information that can include credit histories, insurance claims, criminal records, employment histories, incomes, ethnicities, purchase histories, and interests,” among other things. They are so effective that even the government prefers to go to them to get whatever their after.

In turn, these data brokers have special rates for local and federal governments to encourage these entities to buy this information.

The fireworks started here in NYC. Since COVID, I hate those with passion. The sleepless nights for these couple of weeks is not something I want to experience again. Glad to take a vacation for the 4th.

Thursday evening I felt smart and decided to clear some space in my boot partition on my Linux Mint computer with apt autopurge. What this does is to clear the old kernels and clear space along with any libraries apt figures we don’t need.

The issue with this is that apt didn’t know I needed certain libraries that came with Emacs. That’s because I didn’t install Emacs with apt, but built it directly from source - to get a later version. The next day, Emacs didn’t launch and complain some essential library was missing.

The solution was to follow my instructions and install Emacs from source, but here I encountered a catch-22: the instructions were in org-mode inside Emacs, which wouldn’t launch.

Instead of taking out my laptop or switching to the Mac, I decided to deal with it sleep deprived, which is something that happens to me often. This, in turn, led to more frustration as I forgot the steps. Eventually, I gave up and went to sleep (which was the smartest thing I had done up to that point).

The next day I looked for help in Emacs IRC. The folks there helped me enough to fix the issue. Now that I have my notes again, I’m putting those here in my blog (as well as on my wiki), so I always have it handy for myself and for you, if you happen to be that sort of geek.

Here are my original instructions based on xahlee’s blog with some additional notes to help.

One last thing regarding Emacs chat on IRC: When going there using the web interface, use the UI to connect to the Emacs channel. Typing “Emacs” directly will open a new Emacs channel with you as the only person in there.

The Process:

1. Download the gz file from the GNU at savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs.
2. Untar using your file manager or tar -xvf path/to/file
3. In the Mint menu, look for Software Sources, under Optional Sources turn on Source code repositories.
4. Install essential build tools in the terminal: sudo apt-get install build-essential
5. Get the dependencies using alt: sudo apt-get build-dep emacs

You can now build emacs:

1. cd to Emacs download dir, run ./configure
2. run make
3. now run sudo make install
4. launch Emacs from terminal

I thought I’ll make a nice little video about CSS “reverse engineering” on my blog. Started out ok, but quickly went off track as I had to look things up and got tangled in CSS quicksand. An hour later I gave up recording, thinking, there must be an easier way to do this.

The old and the new. NYC.

Out of nowhere, I bought Diablo 4 🎮 yesterday for full price. It came up to about $75 bucks, tax and all. It’s Blizzard, so I know I’m not going to see a sale anytime soon, and I was tired, and it looked pretty… I’m working my way up slowly from regretting it.

The game’s good; it rolls out like a classic horror story of gloom and doom, which I enjoy. The combat is as simple as it can be (point the bad guy, the good guy bonks him on the head, rinse and repeat), though I’m learning there’s more to it slowly. There’s also multiplayer, and I saw some dude kicking ass near me yesterday, so I sent some bad guys that were giving me a hard time up his way, and my silent friend ate them for breakfast.

It’s going to be one of those games that pull me in and do not require much brain power, which is going to be perfect for my training breaks - study a bit, play a bit, and in the end, you end up cramming more knowledge in your head you knew is possible.

Can I play on Linux? Maybe, probably not. Game launchers are the bane of Lutris and the others, and AAA games all (pretty much) have their launchers.

Not specifically an Apple thing, but Apple-emphasized. To put it simply, it’s Money. The way Apple splits people into can-haves and can’t-haves is financially clear and functionally obvious. Much of what Apple sells is.

Google is another example, with the state of their affordable phones/laptops (Chromebooks). They can utilize these better, but since it isn’t profitable to the company, these devices get the backseat. Meanwhile, tech journalists publish the Oohs and the Ahhs because most tech journalists are in the can-haves camp themselves.

I’m probably more agitated because in the past I wasn’t able to afford “luxury tech,” and later I was briefly a teacher to kids in similar situations. It’s also important to mention that Apple and other big tech companies kill independent shops which offer repairs and used devices for affordable prices.

Still, it gets worse. After we buy expensive tech, we keep buying it a bit every day by selling our data. The amount of information our tech spews about us to advertising companies is mind-numbing. I’d bet that if we had a law forcing companies to only sell data from people who opt-in for, say, 5% of the profits, a lot more people would be able to buy luxury tech.

So once again Apple “introduces” technology people can’t afford to do something they don’t need.