Z Space Blog

Spring 2026 Updates

2026-03-01T14:21:00-08:00

Hey Z Space travelers! I wanted to update people who may have been absent from the stream on what's been happening and where Game Z is going in the near future. The TL;DR? I beat a crazy Zelda rando with CrowdControl, and I was challenged to a Pokémon FRLG Nuzlocke run, so that's coming soon. Also expect coding and Dark Souls at some point.

Retro Goodness

Last month, I played through Soul Blazer and Secret of Mana on-stream, and both were pretty great RPGs that didn't overstay their welcome. They definitely show their age in core design, but still important pieces of game history that help show the evolution of the Action RPG.

Random-sanity

For the three year affiliateversary, I completed a pretty nutso Ship of Harkinian randomizer, which included one-hit kills, ocarina notes, no wallet, shuffled entrances, shuffled bosses, grass-sanity, tree-sanity, pot-sanity, and SIXTY NINE TRIFORCE PIECES! I played with CrowdControl, and it was a pretty fun three days! The community's participation contributed to at least a dozen of the 94 deaths it took me to finish the run! Big shout-out to those who were able to show up!

Any future randomizers will omit the entrance shuffling. Getting turned around slowed me down quite a bit and it gets frustrating to go in circles looking for that one specific entrance you found already, but forgot about 20 minutes ago. Still, it was a great run and I am already considering ways to spice up the next one.

FRLG Nuzlocke

While hanging on @torabii's channel, I mentioned I hadn't played through a Nuzlocke run before. So, he quadruple god-dog dared me to do one! Specifically, FireRed or LeafGreen. I'll probably be playing FireRed, since I bought and played through LeafGreen back when it was brand new.

The date's undecided, but I'll try to give people a few days' notice. I'll need time to research the rules and brainstorm a starting strategy before I begin.

Reclaiming Darkness

It's been nearly a year since I've touched Dark Souls II. I still have some DLC to finish before I can move on to another Soulslike. Dark Souls III and Sekiro are in the pipeline next, so if you have a preference, please let me know!

Code Learning

My eye has been on HTMX lately, as have a few other tools. I'd like to devote a few streams exclusively to learning or trying out new tools to see if any interest me enough to dive deeper. This sort of content hasn't been on the stream in a while, but I've been neglecting my tech interests, and it'd be cool to find other people trying out simpler or lighter-weight solutions to their problems.

I was impressed with how easily I put together the screensaver with LÖVE2D last year, so I want to get more serious with learning it. We'll start with primitives and work our way up to something like a cutscene or textbox. Maybe an idea will tickle our fancy and we'll run with it.

More Stream Features Incoming

Lastly, there are some ideas I've cooked up for the stream, but I want to finish them before I'm fully ready to share. Let's just say the interactivity for the stream will be going up! These things take time to make, so Please Understand.

That's it for Spring 2026! See you guys on stream, and stay Game Z!

Discord Server Deprecation

2026-02-12T20:46:00-08:00

Due to Discord's new age verification policy, I am in the process of evaluating alternatives that will not be prone to this sort of enshittification. Communities deserve to have control over the information that their members share. I had known Discord wasn't a great platform going into it, but this surpasses my tolerance for bullshit.

What's the deal?

Discord's current approach is to send all your messages through an LLM to "guess" your age with different tells, or to ask users to consent to having their face scanned and analyzed.

This presents a privacy threat. While Discord has indeed had a problem with grooming and other behavior on its service, there are other ways to combat abuse that don't require every single user to be prone to this authoritative and surveillance-enabling requirement.

Discord has also suffered a data breach, just in the last year. We're supposed to trust a company that can't keep its own records secure? Get serious. I'm not alone in seeing this irony.

What's the problem?

I've told people my age online. It isn't about just age, it's about whether or not you consent to an automated system determining your social access, and being sorted into one hat or another based solely on an unthinking machine acting on metrics. That flies in the face of an open and free Internet, and erodes trust in these platforms. It also introduces a slippery slope. First, the tech will be used for age verification. What next? Anti-pornography? DRM-enforcement on file uploads? Silencing unpopular political viewpoints? Yes, these have all been seen on other platforms. So, what's stopping this rot from proceeding? How will Discord distinguish itself from other rot happening across the social media space? My guess is that they won't. There's an IPO looming in the future, and if Reddit is anything to go by, we can count on Discord getting considerably worse after going public.

With this practice becoming more common, it is safe to assume that any corporate-owned communication medium will eventually submit to surveillance, analytics, and data brokering to make money, at least in today's America. All in the interest of "protecting children", something governments have been failing to do for their entire existence. They have no metrics for "children saved", no proof of threats they've neutralized, no evidence that authoritarian practices actually solve any of these problems or keep anyone in the general public safer.

What's the solution?

For now, contenders look to be:

Matrix
Movim
Mumble
Root (proprietary)
Spacebar
Steam (proprietary)
Stoat

Competition is brewing in this space now, so it's exciting to see who's going to take the first strike against Discord. I would prefer something I could self-host, but I don't mind a hosted alternative that I can migrate away from later.

The Discord server will remain around until I either can't run it without breaching my privacy, or we find a new thing to migrate to. Until then, people should rely on the Twitch channel, Ko-Fi page, or this blog for further news.

A Stop-Gap Option

If you don't already know, I operate a Mumble server that exists precisely for these times where other platforms suck and people need encrypted comms.

Server: zlg.space
Port: 64738

I'll see y'all there! You'll need to create what's called a "client certificate" to connect. (The wizard will guide you through it) That's also your encryption token, so you can move it around all of your devices and have access to the same account.

12-in-12, 2026 Edition

2026-01-29T00:54:00-08:00

It's already the SIXTH year of 12-in-12 for Z Space? Dang.

What is 12-in-12? It's the initiative to beat 12 games in 12 months. If this concept is new to you, check out my maiden post on the subject. Also check out last year's 12-in-12.

With that said, let's list the games I completed this year:

Secret of Mana [SNES]
Soul Blazer [SNES]
Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky [NDS]
PEAK [Steam]
Soul Calibur VI [PS4]
Celeste [Switch]
Street Fighter Alpha [ARC]
Ballionaire [Steam]
Dark Souls III [Steam]

As usual, this list will update as time passes.

January

Late in the month, I took out Secret of Mana, the second game in the Mana series, and in Collection of Mana [Switch], the system I played on.

I will save the in-depth thoughts for a full review, but in short, it's a game that suffers from poor ally behavior, lots of time spent waiting for cooldowns, and too strong a focus on chaining magic spells to overwhelm bosses in a few passes. The art, music, and story are fantastic, however, and make the journey worthwhile!

February

A Soul's Chance

One day, I was prepping a stream for upgrading my Gentoo machine and other nerd stuff, combined with retro games. When I was done with the tech stuff, I decided to give Soul Blazer [SNES] another shot.

In two days, a passing interest became a realized experience. It was really cool to see what Enix was doing with the early Action RPG genre, right around the time Zelda: A Link to the Past came out. It has some rough edges, but it was a really satisfying experience without too many ways to screw up.

There are also shared themes between this, Illusion of Gaia, and Terranigma, the latter of which will be in the list at some point.

Explorer's Delight

I had already started Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky [NDS] early in the year, but the end of the story came sooner than I expected. I played it on the WiiU via the Virtual Console. It was a solid experience, and the changes from Explorer of Time/Darkness are very welcome! I consider it the best PMD game in the series, thus far.

March

A Free-Flyer Turned Climber

I was originally going to finish up Retrovirus on Steam, but the launcher seemed buggy, the game never supported Cloud Saves, I couldn't find the old saves, and when I checked on the community and game page, I found the studio shut down and the game was de-listed. Dejected, I scratched it off as a game I cannot play. It was a stream day, so I was out of immediate ideas.

So, against my general ideas and taste, I gave PEAK [Steam] a shot. My girlfriend already had a copy to play with our Twitch friends. I borrowed this copy to play with them as well, and one of them bought a copy for me so the whole group could play.

I'll be honest, the game is a little better than I was expecting, but the performance issues, weird level generation, poor controls, and generally boring world leave much to be desired as an actual game. I enjoy the game's positional audio, and sometimes the vibes are great when you're climbing. I can't help but feel this game could be better without the obscene environmental difficulty, and more focus on the gadgets and multiplayer interactions. Knocking each other out with thrown items is a huge shenanigans increasing feature!

Ultimately, this is a game that's only as good as the crew you bring to it. I honestly kind of dislike this style of game because it feels unfinished, or like I'm supposed to imagine the fun in my head. Like a chatroom with a few interactibles. Mods are almost required for quality of life benefits, and the game still doesn't have single-press to run.

That said, I did peak with a group, and solo, to make sure I got the full experience.

I'd like to see crazy modes like Unbreakable Rescue Claws and No Fall Damage, to compete for time. The engine itself has potential. The way its used is lacking.

Transcending History and the World, Again

The next game I knocked out is a bit less involved, but Soul Calibur VI's [PS4] story mode was way better than I was expecting. I've only completed the main thread for now, but there are over a dozen other storylines to go down before I can consider the single player portion complete.

I'm not sure if it's me or adjusted movesets, but character moves feel a bit smoother, and I'm still learning how the showdown-style attacks work. Overall, this installment seems at least halfway decent, but we'll see if it stacks up against Soul Calibur II as I explore it more.

Climbing the Mountain

Next up in the list is Celeste [Switch], a technical platformer that got its start as a PICO-8 game! It's one of the indie darlings these days, and the expanded, full version of it lives up to the hype. Its story touched me in a way that most games don't. I've only made it to the summit with the standard ending, so I know there's more to experience, but I'm satisfied with the game for now.

June

I picked up Street Fighter Alpha [ARC] one night, chose Rose, and played through the standard arcade mode. Despite barely learning her moves, Alpha feels like a reboot or something. I'll try to be more deliberate in choosing a character and learning some moves in Alpha 2, but I've heard the most good things about 3rd Strike. Still, I wouldn't mind giving these 'prequel' games more of a shot.

July

I was gifted Ballionaire [Steam], which is an interesting mix of pachinko and rogue-ish mechanics combined into a dopamine dispenser. It's an interesting game that's good for playing when you largely want to turn off your brain and watch the pretty colors. Not a bad thing to have on your off days, you know? There's some legitimate strategy behind it, too, and plenty to unlock.

September

After finishing Dark Souls II, I was kind of itching to push forward in the Souls series, and do Dark Souls III! I spent about 90 hours or so grinding out the main game. I think a lot of the bosses in DS3 are a bit over-powered, relying on moves that "track" the player's position and turn the model toward you, and techniques that close the distance and force a roll or block. It made some of the bosses feel more like reaction-fests than calculated combat.

Beyond that, I absolutely loved the architecture, locales, world design, story, pacing... just about everything was rock solid in this Souls iteration! I played through as a Gerudo warrioress, wielding primarily falchions, axes, and a lucerne. In New Game+, I want to lean into more lightning miracles and proper tanking, to be an Iron Knuckle!

There's still the DLC to go through, including the Dreg Heap, Ringed City, and Ariendel. Thus far, I see why people love 3 so much. Playing a Souls game at 60fps feels great, too. A must-play for anyone who appreciates medieval games with challenge!

That's it for now. More as the year progresses!

12-in-12, 2025 Edition

2025-03-18T18:12:00-07:00

Welcome to yet ANOTHER year of 12-in-12 fun. What is 12-in-12? It's the initiative to beat 12 games in 12 months. If this concept is new to you, check out my maiden post on the subject. Also check out last year's 12-in-12.

With that said, let's list the games I completed this year:

Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA X [Vita]
Crash Team Racing [PS1]
Dead Cells [Switch]
Dark Souls II [PS3]
Banjo-Tooie [N64]
Crashmo [3DS]
Hypnogogia [PC]
Torchlight [PC]
Peglin [Steam]
Marble it Up! Ultra [Switch]

Totaling 10/12 games. Not too shabby, since I did art and other stuff this year!

February

At the end of the month, I picked up my Vita for a couple songs of Miku, only to finish up the last challenges of Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA X [Vita]. The finale consisted of choosing one major song of each "vibe" and killing it with a great score. Considering I bought this so long ago, it's about time I get around to enjoying the main game!

March

At the end of the month, I was streaming some Crash Team Racing [PS1] for funsies via the PS1 classics on PS3, and ended up finishing the Adventure Mode! I played through as Crash, though I generally prefer Pura. It was fairly tough just to get through, and the extra challenges leave you with plenty of game to explore and savor. It reminded me of Diddy Kong Racing in its design.

April

In this month, I took apart my copy of Dragon Warrior 3 for GameBoy Color after it nuked my save AGAIN, only to notice that, uh.. the board didn't have "Nintendo" anywhere on it. And the cartridge was black, instead of the GBC-only clear cartridges. In other words, I had a bootleg cartridge! This takes it out of the backlog, despite it not being beaten. I'm going to count it as a backlog reduction if nothing else; the same as if it was destroyed or stolen. Some day I would like to play through this, but not on a cartridge that lost its saves 3 separate times since buying it.

To avoid confusion, we're NOT going to take any credit for this at the top of the post. I just wanted to share this story!

May

This month, I tackled Dead Cells [Switch]! It was nice to finish a game that's been in the backlog since 2018.

Dead Cells itself is a fantastic Metroidvania and roguelite fusion that gets better the more you play it. Permanent upgrades are unlocked via Cells, and dying resets the game and you lose your things. Each thing you put cells into makes the game that much better, that much easier, and attainable. You have to go through it multiple times in order to unlock all of the traversal abilities, so it's not a game for people with a short temper or lacking patience.

June

The tough games keep coming, with Dark Souls II [PS3] getting beaten early in the month! It was a great, if frustrating and odd sequel to the beloved Dark Souls. There's still DLC for me to get through, but I'm chomping at the bit to get through again.

This playthrough, I was a "battle mage", aiming for DEX-based weapons and high INT and ATN. Though, I must say speccing it out doesn't start to materialize until around level 100. I'm not sure how I would refine it, but I'm looking forward to exploring hexes in my next playthrough. After that, I should be ready to explore the top-level stuff like heavy armor + heavy gear builds.

Suffice to say, I actually kinda like the linearity, but it's somewhat open during a significant chunk of the game.

At the end of the month, my friend Elomeno_ and I played through Banjo-Tooie [N64]. It was a trip, full of collectibles. A ton of the game is locked behind the abilities; I'd love to play a version that has the abilities unlocked from the start.

September

This month, I finished up Crashmo [3DS]. It's a cute puzzle game where you grab various 3D shapes and can move them in the four cardinal directions. I beat the initial 100 levels, but the difficulty of them was becoming so grueling, that I didn't feel up to finishing the bonus content.

Still, you unlock a music player when you beat the game, and I believe it has a level editor, too. What else could you really ask for from a puzzle game? I might mix it up and have different play area themes instead of the same one for the whole game, but there's a story reason for that which I won't reveal.

October

My girlfriend and I played a bunch of games we found on Itch.io and other places. One that captivated me long enough to finish is Hypnogogia [PC], named after the state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep. It's a game jam game that was developed in a single month. Pretty cool for what it attempts to do, it was a solid evening exploring the game.

November

A long-standing game in the backlog was finished early in the month. Runic Games' Torchlight [PC] came at a time when there were precious few Western ARPGs to choose from. It was okay for what it was, but playing it really made me want to go back to Diablo II: Resurrected or even just Diablo: The Hell. It's clear from the music direction and general design that it comes from the same minds that developed Diablo, but it's aimed at too casual of an audience for me to find much satisfaction in the game. I played through as a Vanquisher and focused on critical hits for much of the game. My build seemed decent for the most part. Still, it wasn't the worst 20-30 hours I've spent on a game. I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of the original developers concerning this game, considering it was developed in only 11 months!

December

I spent most of this month working on creative stuff and playing games that were gifted to me. I beat two of them, on the same day!

Peglin [Steam] is a fun pachinko + roguelike combination that is accessible, but deep enough to warrant careful decision-making. I pulled off my first win after about 6-8 attempts and 10 hours of playing. However, there's a bunch more to unlock and see after that first win! This is a game that I see myself coming back to when I'm feeling something casual and don't want to think too hard.

Next, I finished up Marble it Up! Ultra [Switch], a modern marble obstacle game. It has multiplayer modes and a bunch of unlockables for all of your hard work finding hidden items and getting fast times! It'd be nice try out the online with people some time.

That's it for the 12-in-12 this year! We did 10 out of 12. Not my worst!

The Coolest Game About Teenage Rebellion

2024-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

Persona 5 released to the world in April of 2017. It was released to an uproar of praise, from critics and players alike. This is despite other heavy-hitters like Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Horizon: Zero Dawn releasing around the same time. Additionally, the shonen anime style is in no short supply these days. However, Atlus is not known for being a slip-shod or lazy developer. Persona 5 marks the second major Persona game to be a hit in the West, but P5 in particular reached a broader audience than past entries, pulling in fans from places like South America! Joker's later appearance in Super Smash Bros Ultimate via DLC practically confirms Persona 5's place in gaming history as one of The Greats.

That said, I am writing this review in 2024, after P5 Royal, P5 Strikers, Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, P5 Tactica, and P5 Dancing in Starlight have all come out. Some are side-stories, but some are soft prequels or sequels, so if JRPGs aren't your thing, Persona 5 has a few other genres that it shows up in. This review will focus exclusively on the base Persona 5, for Playstation 3. This means I won't be addressing the new content in Royal, which is a remix or director's cut of sorts.

Initial Impressions

From the beginning of the game, Persona 5 hits you in its intro with sick urban shots and acrobatic dancing to bass-heavy jazz music. This ain't your typical JRPG with wizards and slimes! Although yes, they are sort of there in the game. :)

The plot begins with the main character encountering a man harassing a woman, stopping him, and later being sued for assault in his defense of the woman. During the altercation, the harassing man makes it clear he is socially powerful and will not let the woman tell the truth. This results in your character's arrest. As punishment, your character is to go to a different school under the care of a man named Sojiro until your probation is over.

So, you did the right thing and defended someone, but an adult misusing their power damaged your life for stopping their abuse. This sets the stage for the vast majority of the game. As you make new friends throughout the story, you also encounter numerous situations and problems that people are dealing with. The core theme is innocent people being taken advantage of by those with power over others in some capacity or another, be it emotional, financial, or political power.

Soon after settling into school, your character wakes up in a dream to a jail cell and a man named Igor tells him he must carry out tasks for his "rehabilitation", if he can muster the power to carry it out. The power of the Fool Arcana unlocks soon after, and you awaken as Joker, the Phantom Thief.

What do the Phantom Thieves do? Why, they steal the hearts of evil adults who misuse their influence of the world to harm others, of course! Seriously, using a mysterious smartphone app, a group of teenagers gains access to a "Metaverse" where they can steal the Treasure from a distorted mind's Palace, and reform evil-doers by compelling them to confess their crimes. Stealing the treasure of their distorted heart removes the distortion, and returns them to a reasonable person, but there have been rumors of mental shutdowns in Tokyo...

Given how much I've blabbed about the premise above, I don't want to spoil. There is a lot to read, see, and experience in this game. This game has an edgy anime style to its art, but the subject matter includes everything from financially abusing the elderly, to sexual harassment and extortion, art fraud, overbearing vicarious parents, exploitative CEOs, and corrupt politicians trying to steal an election. Between you and your rag-tag group of misfit teenagers, the group will witness or undergo many trials that will keep you playing "just another (in-game) day" for that new Persona or next story beat.

Visuals

The artistry on display in this game is absolutely top-of-class. Menus are the most dynamic and interesting I've seen them since Meteos on the Nintendo DS. Each and every menu of the game is a different layout and feel, with different arrangements of the signature red, black, and white motif for the game. Palettes and shapes change between various menus, such as Takemi's white, black, and blue palette, Iwai's white, green, and sometimes orange palette, and so on.

Each element of style in this game is clearly inspired from other things, but by combining it in the fashion that Atlus has, it takes on a flavor of its own. The edginess of ransom-note text and graffiti-style cursor boxes is great. The readability definitely takes a hit to pull this off, but after a while, you learn to adjust and not get too hung up on it.

Music and Sound Design

It goes beyond just the art, too. The music and its track names are references. Iwai's gun shop theme is "Layer Cake", which not only refers to the progression of the piece going through phases, but also how Iwai himself is a character with a rough layer on the outside and softer layers inside, like a cake. The game and its OST are filled with these little nods to their own designs. I can't talk enough about this game's music. I love everything from the infiltration music to battles, daytime in Tokyo, there is SO much music in this game to enjoy. There have been times I've just left the game sit so I could listen to the music, especially inside Futaba's Palace.

Sound design is often overlooked by a lot of reviewers, so I'd like to include that. Many of the confirmation sounds in the game sound like some sort of weaponry or gear you're preparing. It's a satisfying motif that I never got tired of, even after beating the game. Sound effects all sounded believable and were mixed really well. Nothing ever stood out as "that's way too loud" or "I can't hear that effect". Top notch sound, as I would expect from Atlus.

Design Inspired by Real Mythology

The references don't stop there. This game is FULL of references, to all sorts of occult and legendary stuff. Personas come in many different flavors, from things like Yamato-no-Orochi and Kushinada to Thor, Dionysus, Hanuman, Quetzalcoatl, and tons more. Most of the world's religions or pantheons are represented somewhere in Persona, with their own crazy Atlus flair.

The most present references are the two main themes: picaresque fiction where plucky, noble thieves overturn unjust societies, and tarot houses, known as Arcana in the Persona series. Each of the main characters gets a Persona representing a noble thief from some mythology or another. Think of characters from folklore like Robin Hood, Zorro, or Goemon. Each Persona and confidant also has an affinity with an Arcana, which influences various aspects of gameplay.

Personas in general tend to be references to existing cultural relics or legends from history, so each one you meet and add to your ranks is also a little archaeology lesson with the flavor text telling you what they were inspired by for the monster design. Really fun stuff for cultural nerds.

Gameplay

So, what about the game itself? Persona is a series typically about high school students fighting through some sort of supernatural event and saving the world. Part of the game is also a constant dichotomy between RPG mechanics and Social Simulator mechanics, which build on each other as you progress. Certain breakpoints come up throughout the game's calendar where you need to meet certain social criteria, or you cannot continue down a particular social pathway. Sometimes it's only a temporary block, but there are multiple hard blocks too, where you either have the Knowledge, Guts, Profiency, Kindness, or Charm to Do The Thing, or you don't.

That's why they give you a million save slots. You will save-scum a lot if you don't like missing things. Personally, I played through mostly naturally, and used YouTube videos to catch any cutscenes or moments I may have missed. Considering that it took me nearly 200 hours to play through it the first time, I think that's a better use of one's limited life.

Speaking of limited life, that's the name of the social game. Every day, your character gets one (and later two) actions to choose to do with their in-game calendar day. Since you're a high schooler, you have a school schedule to keep that you have no say in. The leftover time is when you choose to hang out with people, go out to Shibuya or other places to do business, get a job, and so on. There's always something to do in Persona 5, as long as Morgana isn't telling you to go to bed...

When you make your way back to the Metaverse, you can take as long as you want for that one visit. This is where the role-playing and dungeon-crawling of the game is. It's my favorite part of the game because it's also the most interactive and dynamic. In the story dungeons there is a ton to explore and uncover, with fun puzzles to break up the stealthy monotony. Some of the puzzles got a little obtuse, and one of the later ones really overstayed its welcome, but overall I would say each major puzzle mechanic is interesting and compelling long enough for it to be a fun distraction between grinding.

While you're out hunting Shadows, sometimes you'll corner them after smackin' a weakness or two, and they'll beg for forgiveness. When you corner enemies, you have the options to take their money, an item, or recruit them to your team, if your level is at least as high as theirs. This is how you "capture" Personas, and where the game starts to feel like a grown-up Pokémon. During negotiations, you have to appeal to the personality of the Persona you're trying to convince to join you, so it throws a little social sim action at you in the middle of the JRPG action. Atlus really knows how to throw gameplay elements together!

Old-school JRPG fans might already be thinking of Dragon Quest Monsters, which has a similar mechanic, including fusing monsters together! Persona 5 has its Fusion system where you lose both original Personas and get a more powerful one out of it, with bonus EXP based on your relationship level with that Arcana. Setups like this are how the social stats you build in your "normal" life will affect your performance in the "real" game, where your relationships alter the gameplay options available to you. However, you can also summon any prior Persona you've had, for some Yen, and re-use them to fuse other Personas, or just bring one back that you liked! (Hello, Rangda and Trumpeter!)

I could spend another entire post covering the mechanics, match-up dynamics, status inflictions, and gear setups you could use across this game. Rest assured, the turn-based gameplay of Persona 5 is some of the best you'll find in what amounts to a fancy "monster battler". You can get a preview of who's acting next turn, relationships unlock various perks like auto-recovering from status effects with a team-mate's help, to active buffs and healing from Navigators, completely new mechanics like the shoot-up you can unlock when a battle starts, taking would-be-fatal hits for other team mates, and so on. If you're looking for impactful decision-making in a monster battler, it's here for you to bask in.

Characterization

The last major thing I want to cover is mostly for the skeptics. Don't let Persona 5's anime exterior keep you from enjoying a heartfelt and hopeful story full of excitement, despair, righteous fury, sadness, relief, joy, and every other human emotion. Many of the cast come across as somewhat trope-y when they're first introduced. Like a person, you can't judge how they come across and run with it. I found myself pushing away characters at first, who actually turned out to be deep characters during the story, and invaluable allies in combat.

Part of the trouble I had is my inexperience with Persona (5 is my first), but also, I was sticking to the goal of staying on the down-low, so I assumed I needed to hold off on relationships for a while. Don't do that.

And, that leads me to the reason for the review to begin with... An RPG hasn't touched me on such a relatable and human level in a long time. Even when I'm done playing, I reflect on how characters reacted to events in their lives, or how I would feel in one of the characters' positions. I don't remember the last time an RPG's characters got me thinking of them off the screen.

In one of the major goals of the game, you're trying to save a teenage girl from her self-isolation and hallucinations induced from losing her mother. The pain and distress is well-conveyed in this section, having gone through my own fair share of witness to things I was too young to process. Futaba's Palace holds a special place in my heart; Midway through my playthrough, I sat down to listen to the music for a while, and eventually nodded, "I get it."

Persona 5 isn't about teenagers, Personas, or Big Bads. It's about Life, the decisions you make with the limited time you have each day. It's about viewing relationships and self-improvement as keys to progress in life. It's about planning for the times where life is going to kick your ass, or accepting that some decisions are forever locked behind prior mistakes. But most of all... Persona 5 is about seeing requests for help as opportunities to reverse injustice in the world, one stolen heart at a time.

Final Verdict

If you like JRPGs and are looking for a monster battler to take up 200 hours of your life, piss you off, make you laugh and cry, rage and despair... then hell yeah, do it! I cannot recommend this experience enough for anyone who enjoys a good story and RPG mechanics. This game is one of the greats, wholly deserving of the accolades it's received over the years.

That said, it's a long game, and you will miss things. Some decisions open doors and close others. You cannot 100% this game in a single run, since there is New Game+ content. If you are a completionist, do not like missing things, or are getting exhausted from longer games, then I wouldn't blame you for skipping it, but at least watch a Let's Play or something if you don't. The characters and plot are worth it!

If this review stole your heart, please consider contributing to my Ko-Fi to encourage more content like this. Thanks!

A Worker's Treatise on Industrial Abuse and Political Abandonment

2024-09-01T07:52:00-07:00

This post is written in solidarity with workers worldwide who face oppressive capitalist enterprises, locking hands with the government charged with protecting them and being an ally. In truth, government and business work together to harm the citizenry. It's an affront to everything decent to rob a man of his usefulness and then discard him like trash. Moreso to be in a position of power and let it happen, against your own professed allegiance. This is another story of labor abuse to add to the pile.

In this post, I am specifically naming Mountain Shadow Nursery as the party who harmed me in the course of labor, and the State of Washington as the governing party abdicating its responsibility to help me, a tax-paying and L&I-contributing resident of Washington since 2014, get back to proper working health.

In September of 2022, I started working as a lab technician at Mountain Shadow Nursery, a plant tissue culture facility in Littlerock, WA, off of Exit 95 in Washington's I-5 highway. It's a small compound with two primary buildings in an open field, owned by Bryan and Joanna McCulloch of Littlerock, WA. There are two driveways -- one gravel, for the workers, and one that is paved, for the business owners. They go parallel down the length of their property, so one is rather curious about why these two roads coexist so closely together. Their home is at the back of the vast field, with a forest of decent thickness on its rear and right flanks. The shortest of commutes, for sure, since the business itself is less than a football field away from the front door of their house.

The work at this place is essentially chopping up plants and putting them into vials of various fertilization media, for the purpose of cloning plants. To do it, you need to wield long pairs of tweezers and scalpels under a plastic "hood" part, which you will be hunching over for 8 hours a day. Then, you'll need to put together dozens of these containers per day. The typical standard is 96 containers of the 30-piece variety. So that's 96 containers of 30 pieces, ergo thousands of times daily that you're squeezing and releasing tweezers. And you can't just toss'em into the vessel, they need precise placement to grow correctly.

The less experienced people had to spend multiple days a week in the dish room, where they shake out the dead plant matter and extra media in the vessels, then wash them. The tooling for getting the media out of these containers is rudimentary, demanding that the worker shake the vessels repeatedly to get the medium out. I think their idea was to mix it up, but both jobs are actually quite hard on the wrists, but in slightly different places.

In November of 2022, I had issues with my shoulder caused by the small stations that I had to cram my 6'2" frame into. It caused me to miss a few days due to the posture required for me to fit into the station. Mtn Shadow worked with me to try to find a suitable chair, but the stations themselves were still just too small.

I was adapting to the job, or so I thought, when I began having wrist issues. I took it easy at first, until I was waking up with numbness in my hands. I eventually brought this up after determining that it was indeed the working conditions causing my problem. This was in February of 2023. By March, I was unable to make it through an entire day's worth of work without significant pain and discomfort in my hands and wrists.

During this process, Joanna took multiple pictures of the way I worked, but not others. This felt like I was being singled out or setup for something, but I assumed she was just being responsible. I was wrong. The same happened when a comment box was introduced at the facility shortly after I began working there. Did I mention I was one of only two male employees? Did I mention that when I used the box for its intended purpose, my message was ignored for two weeks? The box did not exist in the business before I was hired, and it was introduced VERY shortly after.

Logically, this means someone had a problem with me but did not communicate it, and wanted to use the message box to add plausible deniability. I understand that a workplace is not a court of law, but the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution was written for good reason: you cannot defend yourself against an attacker you cannot face, or accusations you're not allowed to read. Due to the secret nature of this message box and its timing, I have no reason to believe that my presence wasn't related to its installation. It's too perfect for it not to be.

It is at this point, in mid March 2023, that Joanna took me aside and suggested that I call and apply for L&I. I did so, at her suggestion. During the process of filing for L&I, I was fired by Mountain Shadow Nursery because of a job I worked but did not disclose on my resume, due to using one that was out of date. Nothing about the resume was a lie, and I was wrongly accused of lying by Mountain Shadow Nursery. So that means the advice given to me by Joanna was given in bad faith. Washington State then referred Mtn Shadow Nursery to a Corporate Liability firm to help them fuck me over.

L&I dragged their feet on things at first, and I waded through the extreme amount of paperwork. One thing that Washington L&I does that I think is quite manipulative and misleading is the focus on encouraging you to stay working. I managed to get a 10 hr/wk job a couple of months after Mountain Shadow fired me, but it was for less pay and I was left with less earning ability, because I could not work the initial 25 hour weeks. I am still unable to work full time as of September 2024. I did this because I thought staying in some sort of work might actually help my hands, and help me get assistance by showing some initiative.

I did not tell the new employer that I needed any special light duty but I did mention that I was on L&I and trying to recover from an injury. There was also no indication from L&I that I might need to travel extensively, to the tune of 100+ miles to get to a facility that is approved. And they'll only tell you this after the cutoff for getting mileage has passed.

Due to waiting list issues getting into medical facilities and physical therapy, my case was marked "chronic" and reassigned. This new person must have a goal to cut off any sort of progress I was making, because I was denied my last few physical therapy sessions, and the full extent of medical massage. Every step of the way, Washington L&I tried to shortchange me on getting better.

They suggested that I get steroid injections, which they also noted a possible error rate. Due to the already damaged trust in both the state and the medical side, the risks of the procedure, and having to travel over 200 miles round trip to have a needle stuck in my wrist, I turned down the injection. They'd already damaged my trust. What was wrong with the cheaper and more effective therapy I was receiving? Under physical therapy, I made actual progress and felt like I had a chance of recovery. The medical massages helped ease my shoulder and wrists a bit, but I was left mid-recovery. How do they expect me to get better? I'll answer that: They don't WANT me to get better, and they don't care that they injured me.

Today, I can't lift a 40 lb bag of feed or dog food without lasting pain in my wrists. I can't sweep and mop a floor without intermittent pain and tingling. You can forget wiping down surfaces or cleaning anything with manual effort, because the pain begins and starts to build the more I do it. Is this what acceptable recovery looks like to you!?

I was raised to take responsibility for hurting others if I brought harm to them. Last time I checked, it was simply The Right Thing To Do. And in my own life, I have been charged with taking responsibility for any property I destroyed, or people that I harmed. So then, why should it be any different for a business to restore the health of the people it exploits to make its money? Did your father teach you to leave your workers hanging, Bryan? Is that how he made his money and passed the business to you? I'd like to think that man had a little integrity, but who knows. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I challenge the State of Washington and Mountain Shadow Nursery to defend their careless and cruel disregard for harming me, and explain why I should not seek damages for lost wages and emotional distress. I worked this job for only six months, and I have been incapacitated from the injury for over 12 months. In what world is this acceptable?

My hands are important to me, and Mountain Shadow Nursery injured them and doesn't want to help me get back to 100%. I am not even at 50%! They and Washington State think barely getting by on 10 hours a week of work is acceptable recovery for tendinitis. This economic impact also affects my ability to provide for my children, so in effect these parties have damaged both me and my family.

The writing's on the wall, Washington. If you so flagrantly turn away someone who has contributed to your economy for the past decade or more, including funds for L&I, do you really think you deserve defense when the time comes to defend this land? Allies and respect are earned, not entitled or owed. And you are losing both in me if you allow a business to injure a worker and not get him back in working order. Why do I deserve to be abandoned by my country? I pay taxes like any other damned citizen. I had to sign my life over to your pathetic organization to even get the right to vote. If anyone owes shit here, it's you.

How committed is Washington to her people? I dare say she's not invested at all. Put up or shut up. I am seeking workplace injury counsel to hold these fools accountable. This is not justice, nor is it acceptable to do this to any worker.

You break it, you buy it.

Holiday 2023 Outage Post-Mortem

2024-02-02T00:00:00-08:00

In the days leading up to the end of 2023, zlg.space's primary hard drive began having errors and locking up the entire server. It began with simple unresponsiveness, and ended in a replacement drive, new OS, and a bumpy road of /opt self-compiled madness to bring the backup to the modern ages of PHP. The server is now on bigger, faster storage and an OS that won't get in the way if/when it breaks again, but it didn't come without an arduous test of patience.

December 28th, 2023

The problem happens for the third time since before Christmas. By the end of the year, I discovered via smartctl that the drive had experienced many hundreds of error events concerning the reallocation of damaged sectors. It would detect bad sectors, but either would not or could not tag them as bad and reallocate the data elsewhere. The hard drive was in a laptop-sized enclosure and had not been thrown, dropped, stepped on, or otherwise physically disturbed since October. At this point I determined it was some sort of unrecoverable hard drive damage. Before using SMART, I had tried to use fsck to repair filesystem errors, in case the problem was at that level. It didn't seem to help.

January 1st, 2024

I decided to order a new storage device in the same form factor; the enclosure's controller could correctly read and interact with other drives that I inserted, so I know it wasn't the enclosure which errored. This new drive is an SSD, so even if I put it into the same environment, it will be less prone to vibrations.

January 9th, 2024

The drive arrives and I start considering my options for moving forward. The primary candidates were Gentoo, KISS, or PiLFS.

January 11th, 2024

I tried one last time to get the drive to work, so I could attempt to get data off of it. I had performed a backup of the website's data a month or two prior, so not much data, if any, was lost. I guess there are perks to being the only active user of your own site, haha.

The server was formerly using Ubuntu Server, which uses systemd and cloud-init to provision your server as if it were part of a fleet. This is entirely overkill for a singular Raspberry Pi server, and includes many more layers of complexity than I need. I spent more time trying to figure out the Ubuntu way than I did just using tools I already know. "Modern" Linux with its container app formats and cloud-init shit and XDG portals and incomplete Wayland specs are just annoying. Like it or not, those technologies are not the way forward for Linux.

After reconfiguring the Pi's firmware to boot directly from USB, I chose to go back to Gentoo Linux for my server. I was leaning toward KISS Linux, but their Pi ecosystem isn't quite ready for what I need. Gentoo gets out of the way, has the tooling to pick and choose, and ebuilds are hackable for anyone who knows shell scripting. I really wish distros could get the experience right for developers, server owners, power-users, etc.

January 12th, 2024

Configuration and installation of Gentoo continued, and tweaks were put in place to reduce the number of writes that will be made to the SSD, to extend its life a little. Using a source-based distro is already going to be a mild problem when it comes to writes, but it can be mitigated.

January 13th, 2024

I fought against a chicken-and-egg problem created by the proprietary nature of the Raspberry Pi's Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so I had to fetch distfiles for a few packages to bootstrap wifi. I could have just finished prepping ssh instead, but I want this machine to be adaptable to networking conditions. Also, who doesn't like watching the first boot?

The data from the backup was only from /srv, the Nextcloud installation, and the Postgres database cluster. System configs were not backed up before the old drive failed, but a backup from 2021 should make most of the restoration a smooth process. Now that this is all on one device, making backups should be trivial in the future.

Networking eventually was put into place, and after adding a few extras to get started, I now have a user accessible via SSH and the correct security needed for the admin account. We can begin the actual rebuilding!

January 14th, 2024

The real Gentoo Linux starts here. It feels wonderful to have a system ready to be hacked on! The process begins to put together a firewall, webserver, smarter log rotation, and install the software I was running before!

fail2ban and logrotate are the first goals, which went off without any major problems. Mostly just small configuration and boot-persistence kind of stuff. The next major goals are lighttpd and certbot, which will open up most of this server's available software. I sure miss my Nextcloud...

January 15th, 2024

I had to work and handle some errands and chores today, so not as much time to do big things. I installed ddclient and got started on Gopher. Fun little story there. I went to install my Gopher server of choice, sgopherd, and learned that its only available version in Portage was out of date. "Hmm, weird. I guess I'll go ahead and update it," I thought. So I did what one does when you need to bump an ebuild, double-checked on current dev tools/standards, made sure things were good, and...

I'm aware it's in maintainer-needed status, but if I'm the only person who cares about it in five years, I'm not bothering to interface with the community. I don't mind maintaining my own ebuilds, having prior active experience with the distribution. I have no plans to publish a repository/overlay, however. My prior experiences weren't a net-positive, so I will not be sharing my work. People don't think it be like it is, but it do.

January 18th, 2024

It didn't take overnight; instead it got hung up on dev-lang/rust-bin due to insufficient space in /var/tmp/portage. No worries, I updated the package.env file to use the SSD instead of RAM, cleared $TMPDIR, and moved on. It wasn't going to take all night anyway.

Eventually, I orchestrated the dance of lighttpd, lexicon, my registrar's DNS servers, and certbot to get a new certificate through Let's Encrypt. Now I can hook it up to cron again and wash my hands of it. I'm glad that having a partial certificate chain, and enough time between issuances was enough to get me back on track and not need any extra configuration or tweaking.

Later in the evening, php-fpm was brought up and, with it, the wiki is now online! Next in line are cgit/gitolite and mumble. Then we'll only have one service left to bring up...

January 23rd, 2024

I did some admin configuration behind the scenes to formalize system structure. It was smaller than I thought it was, which is a sign that I'm doing things correctly.

Due to the way Gentoo packages webapps -- and my complete lack of need for virtual hosts and other crap their tooling does, like needing versioned directories -- I compiled cgit myself and just threw it in a folder somewhere.

To be fair, Gentoo generally packages things in a decent manner, so when I have the time and patience I may revisit webapp-config. For now, I just set the vhost provider to lighttpd so it stopped yelling at me about apache2.

January 25th, 2024

Cgit was installed and hooked up to Gitolite. I verified that I could push commits, and Cgit was displaying the 'About' page correct, after telling it to use my own cm2html which calls mistletoe instead of markdown.

January 26th, 2024

It felt good to make some progress with relatively little effort, so I restored the Postgres cluster from a .sql backup and verified the data was present and ready to be interacted with.

January 27th, 2024

The database restore made MantisBT work almost immediately, so that was encouraging!

The final task, Nextcloud, took a number of days before I succeeded. Nextcloud 23 supports PHP 7.3, 7.4, and 8.0. The Gentoo install was on 8.1, and none of the 7.x series was available. So, I needed a way to run Nextcloud juuuuust long enough to get to a Nextcloud version that supports PHP 8.1. So, I tried with a third party overlay to install PHP in an older SLOT, because Gentoo is cool and can do that. Sadly, that did not work.

I'm not shy on the command line, so the journey began to build OpenSSL, PHP, and APCu outside of the Portage tree (generally not recommended). I installed things to /opt, customized a few things, and... partial success? occ didn't quite work yet but a phpinfo(); page worked mostly fine. We're getting there!

Across the 28th through the 30th, I wrestled with dependencies and other things that were needed, until eventually the occ command worked and I was able to upgrade to Nextcloud 24, which supports PHP 8.1!

January 31st, 2024

The circus continues as I tried to mitigate each new tiny problem that came up. The funniest took me some digging. Across the 6 or 7 rebuilds of PHP (each taking at least two hours), I learned that Nextcloud stores passwords with different crypto functions, and missing any of those functions makes login break! Why this isn't covered by its dependencies, I'll never know. BUT, be sure to enable argon2 in PHP if your Nextcloud logins don't work! I ended up locking myself out and having to disable bruteforce detection for my local IP for a bit before I found and fixed the password issue.

In the end, all data was okay and the server is in better shape now than it was before the event. But, because Nextcloud itself took nearly a week to get working, that is the first piece of software I'm targeting for removal should I have to do this dance again. There's no excuse for something like a webapp to be that difficult to put together and maintain as an admin.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I could not determine the root cause of the SMART errors. The drive had operated for around 30,000 hours across 3.5 years. I'm not sure if that's a good run or not, for a dinky little laptop drive. Vibrations from loud speakers could create the physical damage needed to eventually render the drive useless, but without greater access to tooling and a means to test, I cannot form a confident conclusion.

A few days after I discovered the problem, the drive failed to spin up. I don't know what any next steps would be for data recovery, but I'm confident that if anyone lost files, it was me, and only files or changes since December 1st, 2023. I'll hold onto it until I get the gumption to take a hammer to it. If anyone has ideas on further inspection before I destroy it, hit me up.

We'll just go forward with what we have. I apologize for such a lengthy outage. I would have fixed it sooner if real life hadn't been so adamant at getting in the way of things that are important to me. Keeping Nextcloud upgraded will prevent me needing to manually compile things in the future. The website is here, and that's all that matters.

I'm available for hire if anyone needs an administrator or someone who isn't afraid to get their hands dirty in the command line.

12-in-12, 2024 Edition

2024-01-06T00:00:00-08:00

What's up guys? It's time for my FOURTH 12-in-12, the initiative to beat twelve games in twelve months and take out the backlog! Newbies to this concept can check out my maiden post on the subject; then you'll get what's up here. Also check out last year's 12-in-12.

As always, here's the successful hit list for 2024:

TMNT III: Radical Rescue [GB]
Sonic CD [Sega CD]
Factorio [Steam]
Final Fantasy Adventure [GB]
MagiCat [Switch]
Yoku's Island Express [Switch]
Hades [Switch]
The Misadventures of Tron Bonne [PS1]
Persona 5 [PS3]
Resident Evil 2 Remake [Steam]
Narita Boy [Switch]

That makes for eleven games this year! Not quite hitting the mark, but we're still on track to clear this backlog! There are some stats at the end of the post, if you're into that sorta thing.

January

A Radical Finale

I started the year off with a bang, finishing Donkey Kong Country 3's 103% with a friend. I've already beaten that game, however, so it wasn't quite the accomplishment it could have been. That said, a day or two later I started and finished TMNT III: Radical Rescue [GB]! This marks the final game that I needed to beat as part of the Cowabunga Collection that I got last year.

It's a neat Metroidvania for the original GameBoy which somehow lends a special ability to each turtle, has a world that makes use of those abilities, and even a few collectibles to motivate you to explore.

The extensive use of one-way doors and unfair enemy positioning makes the game begin to get tedious toward the end, and the hitboxes for boss attacks are laughably aggressive in their disproportional power. You hit them for a single bar of damage, while they hit for 2 or 3! The gameplay boils down to locating keycards to open doors, which lead to bosses. Defeat bosses to get keys which will free each of the missing characters. Very basic design.

There are also only four collectibles that you can miss, so this may be the longest, but also shortest game I've 100%ed. Considering it took me about 3 hours to 100%, but there only being 4 collectibles, it's in a weird place of "you didn't do much extra compared to a basic playthrough" but also "it turns out this game isn't actually lengthy".

For what it is and the time period, it's impressive. I would love to see a studio do a modern take on a Turtles Metroidvania. There's a lot of potential.

Gotta Go Fast

I picked up Sonic Origins [Switch] in January, just to relive the classic Sonic games with some upgrades. It turns out the "Plus" part in the physical release is just a code for the DLC! Talk about misleading...

Anyways, I've beaten the main 4 games in the series, but didn't remember if I beat Sonic CD or not. Well, with Origins now I have! So we'll count that as beating Sonic CD, rather than Origins entirely, since it's a collection.

February

I spent a lot of the month playing classics, but also chipping away at the goals in Factorio! It's a mind-absorbing automation sim where you try to escape a planet you crash on by... building another rocket from scratch, of course!

To say that this game has infected my mind would be an understatement. I've learned about various real world engineering things simply because the way Factorio has you do them is really similar to how it's done in the real world. I can build train networks, automated warehouses, wagons with fricken artillery on them...

Honestly, if you bounced off of Minecraft or Terraria, Age of Empires or Starcraft, give this one a shot. It has many different play options, many different technology trees to go down, and a steadily increasing difficulty that doesn't feel too harsh on its default setting.

The developers of this game stood out because they don't offer it on sale. Ever. I scoffed at this idea, but after experiencing how many different interlocking gameplay and resource systems there were... I'm amazed at how well everything runs, considering the level of complexity happening. It deserves every penny of the $35 USD I paid for it.

For better or worse it's still getting new content, but it seems to be QoL or advanced interaction stuff, which is still important but feels like the refinement stage. I approve of this sort of stuff.

If I could change things about Factorio, I would lean into the Landfill and get into Terraforming. It's nice that we can lay stone down, and concrete, but we can't dig trenches (to put water in) or build cliffs. Being able to do those things would greatly add to the base planning capabilities of the game and give the player a lot of defensive control.

The team at WuBe has more locales in the making, so that's exciting! Imagine playing on a planet where there's lava, or more biomes for the standard planet!

Anyways, it's a great game and you should get it if you appreciate design and automation in any capacity. It's multiplayer, too!

March

The Beginning of Mana

I had played this a long time ago when I borrowed my brother's copy, but I recently finished Final Fantasy Adventure [GB], which is also known as Adventures of Mana or Sword of Mana, if you're playing the GBA version. I played through on Collection of Mana, for the Switch, which uses the original GB version.

Considering that it came out in 1991, FFA is a fantastic Action/RPG that captures the feeling of a fantasy game quite well. Its story is simplistic, but considering the time of its release, it avoided a lot of pitfalls that other classic RPGs missed.

One of the things that stands out to me is, you can 100% the game through a pure intuitive exploration of the world. I ventured out when it was time to find the final sword of the game, and ended up learning two spells and fighting two bosses that the story was going to send me on later anyway. It felt nice to not need to go back and do anything; the game keeps its dungeons self-contained and doesn't rely on backtracking until the very end of the game.

The title screen music is part of what makes this game stick with me. It tells such a simple little fantasy story, but holds within a deep (for its time) and fun action game!

There are really only two or three things I would fix in this game to make it top-tier for its age: faster text option, better enemy placements (just don't spawn on top of me or block the entrance, please?), and let the Bone Key double as a skeleton key for the entire game. By that point, the player's earned it. Just give it to them. It would make the post-waterfall portion much better and not force the player to farm skellies for keys in the final area. That was the only thing that slowed me down to a degree strong enough to be annoying.

Anyways, if you like action RPGs, you owe it to yourself to at least play for a few hours. Part of why this game is a big deal is because it came out before Nintendo's Zelda: A Link to the Past and Zelda: Link's Awakening, so they were paving new ground in terms of equippable weapons and magic, and in puzzles more complex than pushing a block.

July

Magical Cats?

After some considerable determination, I finished up MagiCat, on Switch. I think this was originally a mobile game. It shows due to its increasing punishments for death, rather high skill floor, and mechanics that overall feel like it was meant to be padding. There are some great gameplay ideas here, but they're all missing that extra polish that makes them feel comfortable.

One mechanic that stands out is the spirit cat ability. MagiCat stands on a button, and can direct a spirit around, which can attack ethereal enemies while his corporeal form cannot. Why do both the spirit and the physical body have hurtboxes while this power is activated?

Another: There's a mechanic where you stand on a button, and a series of blocks that you can steer come out from somewhere. Why can you move around while these blocks are reading your input, and why is the time limit for their disappearing so short? This isn't a "git gud" complaint; some of the level design for these mechanics is overly punishing and it feels like not much testing went into making these levels more feasible to No Damage or even No Dash.

If MagiCat was my game, I would tone down a few of the frame traps and near-pixel-perfect jumps needed to get red jewels, and provide a way for players to backtrack in the level, where applicable. Games that only allow you to move forward were common in the 1980s. Platformers can do better now!

Bosses are another source of frustration. Every level has a boss that's a twist on an existing enemy. While the extra effort of bosses is appreciated, it became stale quickly. I preferred the end-of-world bosses, but the difficulty for them was also tuned for a mobile game and frustrate you so you'll play more and get some paw prints in prior levels.

With just a little tuning, this game can redeem itself while still retaining 99% of its current content. The level design and enemy design need work. The end-of-level bosses shouldn't be there and it can have a mini-game or other simple reward instead. The cost for death should also be more reasonable. Doubling every death until you take 32 paw prints is kind of overkill. (so is 16 with the item)

I'm relieved to finish this game, which is disappointing because I went into it thinking it was cute and fun. I still like some of the mechanics and abilitiess, like dashing upward! I discovered by accident you can heal by pressing down and X, so that's nice too.

A Bug-driven Postal Service

The next target was Yoku's Island Express, on Switch. It took a little patience, but it was worth it. It's a fun, light-hearted pinball and Metroidvania fusion. I really enjoyed the different ways to manipulate the pinball, on top of the movement of Yoku himself. The customizable ball sprinkles were cool, and some of the sidequests weren't half bad. I finished the game at 97% even though I collected basically everything, so there's probably some small quests leftover or something. Still, it was a solid game and I'm glad I played through it. If you like both pinball and Metroidvanias, give it a whirl.

A Dark and Treacherous Ascent

Lucky me, I managed to clear Hades for Switch. It's an interesting roguelike that innovates in the storytelling department. It rewards continued play, but at a rate that is less than ideaal for my liking. Even after clearing the game once, I will need to clear it multiiple times in order to get a "true" ending. While it was a great romp, and new gameplay options are opened up, I'm rather weary of the mechanics I had to endure to get where I am now. I assume the more readily available diamonds and Titan Bloods will make subsequent runs a bit easier, but for now I'm walking away from the game due to tedium. I feel that this game, like Blasphemous, is one whose sequels I will likely be skipping out on.

August

It had been percolating for a little while, but I finally finished The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, for PS1.

It's a fun and cute game where you're essentially paying off a debt to get your family members back who've been taken hostage, but you do various missions with your Servbots to earn the money and get the upgrades you need to confront Mr. Loath. In-between, there are fetch-quests, mini-games and scouting to improve your Servbots, and conversing with all of your minions.

I finished the game in about 15 and half hours. Not too shabby, and there's more that I haven't done, like the Casino level.

I will say that the mini-games for building Servbot stats are too strict. The Attack-building one isn't all that terrible, but it still depends on getting at least one pie and bazooka for the last level. I could barely manage the second series of levels in the food serving mini-game.

Overall, I'm glad I played it despite the jank. The world of Mega Man Legends has so much potential, I'm still sad about MML3...

October

Becoming a Phantom Thief

The push for Playstation games continues! I picked up Persona 5 for the PS3 back in 2018, played it to level 7, and never got around to picking it back up until this year. My girlfriend wanted to experience it with me, so most of our time this year was spent watching movies, or playing this game.

It was a wonderful JRPG, telling a story that I think most people can relate to; of fighting injustice and fighting for those who can't fight for themselves. It's a game of self-discovery, reflection, and tenacity. It shocked, angered, surprised, intimidated, elated, and even tore at my heart.

Across the game, you and your plucky gang of misfits face up to a sexual predator, con artist, blackmailer, gang leader, and even a malevolent god. Each stage of progression makes you feel closer to each of your teammates, not as sit-in avatars for mooks on a battlefield, but as somewhat believable and relatable characters. I feel like everyone who plays Persona 5 will find someone in its cast that they most closely resemble, be it in attitude, life circumstances, or personal challenges.

It's not for the faint of heart, though. This game will trigger people who have been through trauma, if they aren't prepared to think about fictional characters going through things. Personally, I found it reasonable and found it to be a great opportunity to reflect on the feelings characters made me feel.

Futaba in particular struck my heart to its core. To say that I relate to her life experience is an understatement. Without any spoilers, I think anyone with a troubled childhood will have trouble making it through her story arc with dry eyes.

Not ashamed to admit I cried a few times. Only the truly great games will make me do that anyway. Persona 5 has left an unforgettable mark on me. When I get the time to percolate more thoughts, you can look forward to a review. A story that's over 100 hours long deserves more than a mention on a timely listicle.

Becoming a Real Cop

Not even a full day later, I wrapped up the end of Resident Evil 2 Remake on Steam. Apparently, when I paused playing in 2019, I was only two bosses away from the end! It feels great to wrap up a long-standing game right after a really long game. It was a satisfying and atmospheric game that I'll come back to some day to play through as Claire.

December

Becoming a Narita Boy

The next game I finished up was Narita Boy for the Switch. It's a decent action-platformer with basic puzzles, but a wonderful story and great art direction. It tells the heartfelt story of a man's life and how he turned tragedy into a legacy for his son. Except, you're in a digital world on the verge of total ruin and you're tasked with saving it, with no context.

I really enjoyed the storytelling in this one, and the graphics. Unfortunately, the gameplay isn't as tight as I'd prefer, enemies and mechanics are a little too simple, and you can't go back to get any of the four missable collectibles in the game. Your choices are "watch the missing memory on Youtube" or replay the game entirely for a single paragraph of text. I'm glad I didn't do a second playthrough for such a small reward, but the story itself was cool. It was a worthwhile game that has left an impression on me, which is the best kind of game purchase if you ask me.

Sadly, I wasn't able to beat twelve games in 2024. However, we finished the gargantuan Persona 5, which was one of the big JRPGs on the list. I also took the liberty to tally up my progress since blogging about 12-in-12:

2021, 16 games;
2022, 4 games;
2023, 18 hames;
2024, 11 games.

This puts my total at 49 games over four years. At one game per month, that puts me one month ahead of my projected progress at this point! There are still many more games to beat. I can't stop now!

Vim Author Bram Moolenaar Has Died

2023-08-05T12:38:00-07:00

I woke up to a huge gut punch this morning: Bram Moolenaar, legendary author of the Vim text editor, has passed away. Given the occasion, I want to express some thoughts regarding both Bram and his software. Without his work, I'm not sure I would be the same person.

How I found Vim

On a wintry Wisconsin night in 2004, I was looking for better, more customizable software. I was a teenager, learning about alternative OSes and losing patience with Windows every passing day. I had started getting more serious about learning web development, and began trying different text editors, to see what was to my taste. As we all know, Notepad on Windows is NOT sufficient for programming.

On this path of discovering text editors, I stumbled across all sorts of things, from UltraEdit to metapad, Notepad++, gedit, AceHTML, Emacs, and eventually I found this free software called "vim", but it came with some newbie-friendly settings, called Cream. (I was surprised to see it's still around!) One thing that stood out to me about Vim, at the time, was the fact I didn't have to enter some weird licensing scheme. I didn't have to pay to unlock features, and the big thing was -- if I wanted to help, I could donate to a charity that actually helped people! That stuck with me, morally. "Huh, all these companies are making software for profit, but this guy from Europe just wants me to help some less fortunate people. That's awesome."

I would not realize it until years later, but discovering Vim was a key step in my journey to libre software and GNU/Linux. Had I not been looking for a free, customizable text editor to do what I wanted, it may have delayed or slowed my introduction to that world.

How I Use Vim Today

These days, I keep a small group of plugins (mostly things like fugitive, tabular, sparkup, and some syntax stuff), a hefty vimrc with keyboard layout switching capabilities, and there's almost always a Vim process open on my machines. It earned a place as my favorite piece of software when I learned how easy it is to extend its behavior. No other piece of software evolves with me and my skill level like Vim does.

I love Vim's documentation system the most, I think. If there's anything I don't know about Vim, I can consult :help and get answers immediately. For anything else, there is a broad community of fellow text-heads out there, who might even have saved a fricken macro for the task you're trying to achieve.

Each time I learn something new about Vim, I feel like I've unlocked a new ability, or added a new text wrangling tool to my belt. This, in turn, improves my ability to manipulate text and makes the editing experience that much better.

The Future of Vim

It seems that Bram had tapped a successor, in some way, before he died, but the state of things with the Vim project seem to indicate his death was not expected, per se, though he had been ill for a few months prior to his death. It is sad to see another one of the "original breed" of FOSS hackers pass on. It stands as a reminder of how little time we really have on this rock, and the importance of choosing goals that one can look back on with pride. I hope that the new primary author and maintainer, Christian Brabandt, leads the project with the same core values that Bram did. Christian expresses his thoughts in the Google Groups thread.

Vim is the reason I discovered the Free Software movement. It's the software that I use most in my day-to-day computing. How strange, that a journey for a good text editor led to me discovering an entire social movement of hackers that I still hover around to this day, nearly 20 years later. Thank you, Bram, for bringing joy to my computing and rewarding every new morsel of knowledge I gain about this beautiful tool.

I have nothing but condolences for the Moolenaar family in their time of grieving. I hope their hearts are made lighter by the worldwide celebration of Bram's wonderful work, and the many testimonies people are publishing today which show how influential he was. We are all privileged to have received his work.

Please consider donating to ICCF Holland if you wish to leave a token of appreciation for Bram. It's what he would ask for.

12-in-12, 2023 Edition

2023-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

What's up guys? It's time for yet another 12-in-12, the initiative to beat twelve games in twelve months and take out the backlog! Newbies to this concept can check out my maiden post on the subject; then you'll get what's up here. Also check out last year's 12-in-12.

As always, here's the successful hit list for 2023:

Dark Souls [PS3]
Marble it Up [Switch]
FAST rmx [Switch]
Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom [Switch]
Terraria [Steam]
TMNT: Shredder's Revenge [Switch]
BIT.TRIP RUNNER [Steam/PC]
Cogs [Steam/PC]
Furi [Switch]
Geometry Wars 3 [PS3]
Symphony [Steam]
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night [Switch]
Super Mario Bros. Wonder [Switch]
Castlevania: Dracula X [SNES]
TMNT: Tournament Fighters [NES]
TMNT: Tournament Fighters [SNES]
TMNT: Tournament Fighters [Genesis]
TMNT 2: Back From the Sewers [GB]

(yep, those TMNT games are each different!)

That's a total of eighteen games beaten this year! Huzzah!

April

I spent the first few months of the year dabbling in classics, but Dark Souls [PS3] had hung out in my backlog -- with an unfinished save -- since 2016! I decided to push through it, while streaming, and it turned out to be a great experience. I may come back to it some day, but I'm beginning to see flaws in the structure of the Soulslike genre. I think a little more work could be put into discoverability, but the art direction and world building is stellar. It has absolutely earned its place as a classic and I'll never forget my first time through.

I also picked up Marble it Up [Switch] in March and finished it in April, so despite the drought in game progress since Box Pusher in 2022, it feels good to knock out a long-running, 100+ hour RPG. Those are the true phantoms of a backlog, right?

Toward the end of the month, I knocked out the last of the cups I needed to finish in FAST rmx on the Switch. It's a great racing game if you're looking for edge-of-your-seat, white-knuckle driving! I got it years ago, but lacked the grit to finish out the races (placing at least 3rd) until recently. I'll come back to it from time to time, like I do most racing games that I hold onto.

June

After picking it up on release day in May, I finished Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom [Switch], a game I'd been anticipating for six years! There is a whirlwind of thoughts in my head for this game, and it's definitely changed how I view video games, and the Zelda series as a whole. I correctly predicted that we're getting a third game: the plot lends itself to a continuation for this pair of protagonists. I give it a year max before Nintendo announces work on a third game. Overall, TotK was a wonderful romp, but a kind reminder that I'm getting too old for certain genres that require huge blocks of time to get anywhere in. There are still some sidequests and collections to complete, but I've done all the shrines and exposed all the map, and most of the equipment is found too. I hope the next Zelda leans less on device-building and open world mechanics.

July

At the beginning of the month, my partner and I finished up Terraria [Steam]! We ended up cheesing through some parts using the Builder's Workshop, but everything we skipped was essentially farming and repeating stuff we had already done. We still beat bosses and crafted ingredients legitimately.

Having beaten both Terraria and Minecraft, I'm solidly convinced that sandboxes and crafting/survival games are not my cup of tea. They're two of the most famous and popular games in the genre, and I'm walking away from them rather disappointed in all the time I spent doing what amounts to busy work.

In Terraria, the primary way you discover the game is through the Guide NPC, and later other NPCs, depending on the quest. Almost none of the game is clearly conveyed to you, and it reeks of a game that has organically grown in scope creep for ten years, just like Minecraft. You really can't make appreciable progress in games like this without a wiki. Discoverability is a huge part of games, especially for games with interacting systems or concurrent mechanics.

Additionally, it's not enough to have one or two primary crafting stations. In Terraria, there are dozens of them! If I were to redesign the game, it would be in its progression. I'm totally cool with bosses being the gates for world progress, but the crafting stations and whatnot would be a single crafting station, and a single chest that has tabs/pages you can unlock or purchase. The visual mess that you end up with by the endgame is overwhelming, even though you know what everything's supposed to do.

If I ever come back to Terraria, it will be to build random creations, just like Minecraft. Sad to say, the genre has an extreme amount of work to do in the accessibility and discoverability departments. I shouldn't need an online resource to grok your game.

August

I had picked it up a few weeks prior, but once I got into TMNT: Shredder's Revenge [Switch], I couldn't put it down for a good few days! It's the spiritual successor to Turtles in Time, right down to a lot of the bosses! It feels more complete, featuring bosses and enemies from both new and old TMNT, though the focus is mostly on the old style. I like that you can finally play as Master Splinter and April O'Neill; a first since Tournament Fighters, on the SNES!

There is at least one unlockable character that I won't spoil, which is nice, but it seems all additional content will be coming in DLC form. That's disappointing, because I bought the game in physical form with the expectation that a classic-styled sequel would have 100% of its content from launch day. The release of the DLC gives me some trepidation about buying new Turtles games, despite the quality gaming experience. I expected better from Dotemu, considering that Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap launched earlier in the Switch's life and had 100% of its content on day one. What happened, guys?

September

This month, I targeted some older games in the backlog, starting with BIT.TRIP RUNNER, the first in the BIT.TRIP series.

It was essentially a precursor to games like Harmoknight on the 3DS, but unlike Harmoknight, RUNNER will bump you back to the beginning of the level if you hit ANY obstacles! The variability in playing the game is mostly "how many of the gold bars did you get?" You unlock bonus levels by completing the normal levels while getting all of the gold bars.

Also, despite being a rhythm game, I didn't feel much like I was interacting with a beat or any particularly well-placed musical sounds. Mid-level checkpoints would go a long way to improving the game's accessibility.

Machinations

Later in the month, I tackled Cogs, a fun gear-based puzzle game that's also a sliding tile and PipeDream clone, all in one! I had got it as part of a Humble Bundle back in 2011 or so, and had barely played it. I was surprised at how well I adapted to coming back to this. It's still worth booting up just to study the puzzles a little. Glad to have come back to check it out. That said, I'm definitely more of a Move guy than a Time guy. I enjoy how the Challenge modes allow you to pick between time and moves as a way to challenge yourself and get easier stars. After 300 stars, you can unlock the credits, which is a level! It's one of the most complicated in the game, and it certainly tested my skill in sliding tile puzzles. Much like Box Pusher from last year, I think Cogs has burned me out on this style of game. It was a solid playthrough, but I'm kind of over it.

Escaping a cosmic jail

Toward the end of the month, I finished out Furi [Switch]. I had left off on the third boss, then over the course of the past week, butted my head against the wall of challenges that are this game's bosses.

Overall, I believe the game is an interesting blend of bullet hell and edge-of-your-seat reflex-oriented combat. Though every boss is meant to be an immense challenge, only one of them felt unrealistically unfair and tedious: a female sniper named The Burst.

She begins the boss fight by hiding, and can shoot you from across the arena, which is 3-4 screens wide and tall. This shot can take one of your three life stocks in a single hit. Living up to her name of Burst, this makes sense for a super or something; as a primary attack, it's bonkers! Her game of keep-away is what is most annoying, because the actual combat against her was fairly well done. The hide and seek phases and one-shot kills are what make this boss fight ridiculous. By contrast, the very next fight after her is more intense and imposing, and yet he does less damage than her auto-lock one-shotter.

As the credits rolled, I was blown away by the landscape in this peaceful realm. Discovering the true identity of The Stranger was crazy, and defeating the mothership was a satisfying end to the saga for me. I do wonder what would have happened if I chose the other option, but that's what Youtube is for.

This game sat around in my backlog for a solid five years. It's a relief to bring it to rest. I might some day play through just so I can fight the rest of the bosses. We'll see. The Burst is such a bitch that I really don't want to fight her again.

October

Angular Ownage

I'm on a roll at the end of the year now, aren't I? This month is off with a bang with Geometry Wars 3 [PS3]! I bought this game very shortly after getting a Playstation 3, back in 2015. I had played the OG at a friend's house on Xbox back in 2009 or so, and had Geometry Wars: Galaxies on both my DS and Wii at some point, so the third entry in the series was a must-own, naturally. Its gameplay is wonderful and the same it's always been, with the bonus of drone behaviors you can upgrade that isn't as grueling as Galaxies, but just as rewarding. I have to admit that I don't like the weird and warpy levels, because they're zoomed in too much. The biggest issue I have with this game is the frequency that enemies will end up spawning on top of you. The pillar of light that appears before a spawn is super helpful, but perhaps not quite enough warning. Overall, I'm still satisfied with this game even if it kicks my ass from time to time.

Liberating My Music

The next target was Symphony [Steam]! It's a Galaga-style shmup that is similar to Beat Hazard in that it analyzes your music and generates levels (in this case, enemy patterns) to play to. There's a story involved, but it's really just an excuse to play more levels.

Overall I felt it was okay, but it's much easier to earn Kudos than it is to acquire Inspiration, so I reached a point toward the end of the game's progression where I would have to farm songs on lower difficulties to get more dependable rates of inspiration. There are also rare items that I still haven't unlocked yet, despite seeing many multiples of other items that, if bought, cannot be converted into a resource, nor can kudos be exchanged for inspiration. As a result, I ended up with millions of kudos, but lacking the inspiration (by around 80%) to purchase all of the equipment upgrades that I wanted to.

It was okay but I think I'm done with music games. Between Guitar Hero, Hatsune Miku, Taiko Drum Master, Beat Hazard, and now Symphony, I've played so much of the genre that I don't think there's much left to explore.

Déjà Vu of the Night

Later in the month, I struggled my way through Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night [Switch]. To be honest with you, as a backer of the game at the $100 tier, I am somewhat disappointed in the game. Not because it's bad, per se, but because it has so many technical problems. I intend to write a more thorough review when I've had some time to refine and reflect on my thoughts.

I think this is one I'll be 100%ing, despite the difficulties that come with the Switch version. The nostalgia is strong for me, and the smooth framerates and responsiveness of Symphony of the Night all through Order of Ecclesia were all fantastic! That's what lets me down the most about Bloodstained; Igarashi's past games were all great in the technical department. His staff at Konami must've had more experience or something.

I may eventually pick Bloodstained up on Steam at a steep sale so I can experience the "proper" version, but thus far I will probably not be getting aboard another Igarashi project without some proof he has a capable and dedicated team that can churn out a minimum of a solid 30 frames per second, and no input problems. This is not an unreasonable standard, even back in the mid 2010s when it was being developed. Perhaps Inti Creates should've been contracted for the main game instead of just the two Curse of the Moon games.

There are all sorts of other weird things that happen to me on Switch too, like Great Swords auto-attacking a second time if you attack in the air with any buff that increases attack speed. If you strike an enemy with the air attack, it cannot hit with the attack that starts as soon as you land. This seems like a design error; either the sword shouldn't auto-attack when you land, or it should be able to hit both times.

This marks the twelfth game beaten this year! Hell yeah!

November

A Wond(er)ous Adventure

I received a copy of Super Mario Bros. Wonder [Switch] for my birthday, and once I started playing it, I couldn't put it down. It was a blast the whole way. I ended up 100%ing it in around 15 hours. Like many other games, I want to give it the attention it deserves in its own review. It's a great game, though, so if you have a Switch, you owe it to yourself to try Modern Mario. It's great!

Following that, Bloodstained's 100% completion wasn't too far away, so I finished that up just after 100%ing Mario! I've not felt like I was making progress like this in quite a while.

X Does NOT Mark the Spot

The next target in my continued onslaught is Castlevania: Dracula X, part of the Advance Collection on Switch. After having played through it now, it's definitely not as good as Rondo of Blood, and is straight confusing if you go from Dracula X to Symphony of the Night, due to the differences in story and, in some cases, total lack of certain characters or stages from Rondo.

The chief problem I have is the relationship between the clunky movement and the invulnerability from being hit. Too often in Dracula X, you get hit out of the air, only to get knocked into another hit that you have no control of, and can sometimes be juggled, with little recourse available to you. This is because your only special move is a backflip, and the landing lag prevents you from doing any evasive maneuvers. Richer lacks his attacking dash, his slide (and its dash), he can't run or spin his whip, he can't angle the direction of his whip... Honestly one of the weaker entries in the series.

That said, the music and graphics are both great. A mod of this game with a double-tap dash and some better movement options would turn it around completely. You can still have clunky movement without super-short invulnerability times and overly aggressive AI. It feels like it was meant to be an arcade game with its janky mechanics.

Not Quite Turtley Enough

I wanted to beat the Tournament Fighters games from the TMNT collection. I was quite let down by the lack of techniques available for each character, and the utterly unfair CPU opponents that I was up against. There's not much room for juggling, parrying, reversing or blocking a grab, etc. I appreciate how different each of the NES, SNES, and Genesis versions are, but because they're so different, I feel each one is missing some depth that it would have if perhaps there was a more unified vision for the final product.

They're okay for what they were, but definitely not a reason to buy the collection. All that's left for me on the collection now are the 2nd and 3rd GameBoy games, the latter of which I'm saving for last since it's a Metroidvania!

I knocked out TMNT 2: Back From the Sewers [GB] just in time for the end of the year!

That's it for 2023! I'll see you again in 2024!

Mountain Shadow Nursery Review

2023-04-18T00:00:00-07:00

It occurred to me recently that I operate my own website, which is a distinct advantage when platforms like Indeed try to silence legitimate and truthful communication from users. Owning your publishing medium gives you a freedom that most others on the Internet don't have. Someone in such a position can communicate freely, without interference from those who would be embarrassed by their communication. There are no voting, reporting, or comment systems that can make their pages disappear.

I already review video games and books on this blog, in addition to my other content; why shouldn't I review employers and businesses I've interacted with? Reputation is a key ingredient to a successful business, and every person has a voice. It's time to use mine. Businesses are not so special that they are immune to the mechanics of sociology.

Mountain Shadow Nursery is a plant tissue culture facility in Littlerock, WA, specializing in propagation/cloning and research.

Here's the review, copy-pasted verbatim as I posted to Indeed. But first, the verdict:

I do not recommend working for this firm, or doing business with them if you are in the agriculture industry.

The work is basically cutting plants in a particular way and moving them to another vessel, in another particular way. The processes require multiple documentation steps along the way, most of which are manual. So when you're not actively processing plant material, you'll be fumbling around with stickers you write on by hand, and an inventory system that belongs in a kindergarten. The firm is behind on the benefits of automation for their core business, and processes change too often for workers to gain true mastery of each new way to do things. This results in an almost ad-hoc way of running the business. That approach works for some. To me it appeared as if people were playing things by ear and didn't actually have a clue.

One could look past this most of the time, but the ergonomics are not suited for people with large frames. The stations you sit at are designed for people with smaller frames. Taller women and just about any man will have issues fitting into the tight stations.

In addition, the majority of the staff (90%+) are female. I saw one other man working among the women in transferring, and didn't see another man even coming through for an interview during my time there. I suspect I and the other man were token hires to avoid scrutiny.

This job has the potential to be rewarding, streamlined, and efficient for all parties. It also has potential to be a positive place for workers, if diversity were appreciated in practice rather than in word.

One good thing I will indicate is that they will try to work with you on some things; particularly anything that keeps you producing. But realistically, don't apply unless you're okay with squeezing tweezers or cutting with scissors 4000+ times a day. If you get hurt on the job, they'll push you out the door and look for the next person's hands to wear out. Typical for agricultural outfits, I guess. There are better places to work.

Just a gentle reminder to employers who think they can control the narrative on their business: People will spread the word about their experiences at your firm. Some of them operate their own websites and are not subject to your influence online. It's not wise to assume you can walk on someone without consequence, or assume their skill level in navigating communication networks.

Indeed.com can do better by communicating which aspects of the review they disagree with. The rejection included no language on what was wrong with it, but encouraged me to re-submit, which is lazy and flippant design meant to waste the reviewer's time. Stifling the voice of workers is despicable for a company who purports to court both workers and employers. Do better.

Why I learned C "Category-0" Style

2023-03-16T20:02:00-07:00

I've been asked a few times over the years why I chose to learn C with the colloquially-known "K&R C Bible", and specifically the Category-0 style, coined on USENET back in the day.

For those unfamiliar, I'm talking about The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed., by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the creators of the language. In it are a series of exercises that the reader can work on to build their knowledge of C through actually building something with it. On comp.lang.c, people would share their solutions to exercises in this book. After a while, they coined different categories of solutions, to refer to their robustness and complexity.

Category-0 is solving each exercise using only the knowledge the book gives you, up to that point. In other words, it's to approach it as a complete newbie and see what you can put together using only the stuff you've learned in the book.

I had considerable difficulty learning C at first, due mostly to its similarities to C++, the challenge of finding good advice and practice, etc. I settled on the K&R because it was written by the original language authors. By choosing my reference on that criteria, I was certain to find a book that was more accurate than most, at minimum.

After buying my copy and eventually discovering the clc-wiki, I started grinding out my own K&R solutions. As you can see via the commit log on the repository, it was a very slow advancement due to real life interfering. But I did eventually complete it, so that's cool, right?

Similarly, I have a copy of Programming in Lua, by Roberto Ierusalimschy, one of the language's authors, and it's also a wonderful resource in teaching me Lua. I've heard Stroustrup's C++ books are great for learning. I would buy a similar reference for Python by Guido van Rossum, but Python is a large beast that evolves quickly via PEPs and its online docs are superb, so I'm not sure what the value of it would be.

If you're into C, feel free to give it a look. Patches and constructive feedback are both welcome. There are plans to make a "modern C standard" version of the solutions as well, to illustrate the difference between "good code for learning" and "the way you should actually build this".

A Look Back on 2022

2022-12-17T23:45:00-08:00

I've spent the past few weeks reflecting on the sort of content that tends to get posted this time of year: retrospectives. Opportunities to review the events of the year, look at what went well, what didn't, what we'll do in the future to be better. Even though companies and other bullshit are joining in the spirit, it's still important to give yourself moments to look back and self-assess your life. A new year is a new opportunity to improve. You don't need a new year to justify it, but it feels right for some people. I kicked a nicotine habit cold-turkey with a New Year's resolution, back in 2005. It can be done.

So, what was 2022 like? Let's try to exclude the grim politics and general state of the world. Life is rough right now. Some countries are at war. Some are dealing with radical extremists. Some are starving or struggling to stabilize their currencies. Others are fighting for basic rights of expression with clothing, or to keep their culture alive in the face of re-education camps. Let's try to find the good stuff.

How was it for others?

Let's start with what happened in general, that stands out to me. That generally means new developments in GNU/Linux or the video gaming world.

Libre Software

Sadly, I can't think of much that happened this year in libre software that was notable. Maybe I'll come back and edit this before the end of the year.

Video Games

Elden Ring was released. I thought I'd be much more hyped about it. I ended up not getting it at all. I still have Dark Souls 1 through 3, and Sekiro, to finish. I'm not thirsting for Soulslike content at all, lol.

Pokémon Legends: Arceus also came out this year, I believe? It almost had what it takes to get me to buy. Scarlet and Violet have technical issues and design flaws that prevent me from enjoying 9th gen as much as I'd like to, so I have avoided buying them as well.

The only games I bought this year were either games that I already owned (Quake for Switch), replacements for the Switch that was stolen from me, or Narita Boy. I haven't played enough to give any solid opinions, but I love the motif of the game so far.

Anime

In the latest season finale of Pokémon, Ash Ketchum becomes the World Coronation Monarch; the most accomplished and dominant trainer in the world! With his dream achieved, The Pokémon Company is bringing Ash's story to a close with 11 episodes set to air in Japan in mid January 2023. The new season has already been teased, featuring two new protagonists. One of them has a hairpin with a design resembling Ash's original hat design. There may be more to what's going on.

As someone who's not been watching the anime, I came back to it when I heard the rumor that Ash might become world champion. To see the twerp I used to make fun of for being a nublet in the 2nd season end up facing off against, and defeating the most accomplished trainer ever in Pokémon is quite impressive. Finally giving Ash a proper send-off is almost like a milestone for the first generation of Pokémon fans. All I could think at the end of the season was, "The kid actually pulled it off!" I am filled with a sort of bittersweet happiness. For the first time in a while, I'm looking forward to anime content!

The Dragon Prince got its next series, which I haven't started yet. Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners has been pretty intense and quite interesting, despite my total lack of knowledge of the series. I hope it's true to the source material.

That about wraps up what hit my radar, outside of whatever real life events were happening.

My Life

Things were challenging for me. Near the end of 2021, I left a profitable job that was sapping my energy and motivation. I ended up going into a part time job for a while until getting back to full time work this year. This job isn't really my cup of tea either, so I'm looking for more computer-oriented work.

My partner was diagnosed as Celiac. The change has been very difficult for her due to her appreciation for baked goods, but also foods from different cultures. She has such a broad palate, and to see her health restrict her food choices has been challenging. She's been strong and diligent at checking ingredients, and I do what I can to help find or make safe food for her.

A good friend of mine had to leave the state due to economic reasons. It sucked to see him leave, but we were lucky enough to be able to spend some quality time together before he had to go. I'll always remember our trip to Ocean Shores.

Projects

As always, it's been difficult to get enough free time to put something together that I can give a shit about. One such thing is an anxiety meter in PICO-8! It took a decent amount of planning and experimentation, but it's a complete feature that looks and acts really well. With any luck, my work on core gameplay elements will come to a pause soon, and I can start churning out assets and get some level design going!

If you're reading this, then the blog was relaunched, after being dormant for three years. Some content was still produced in the time the blog was absent, but not anywhere it would get attention.

Gaming

The 12-in-12 for this year doesn't look too hot, unless I can pull a game or two out of my ass in the next two weeks, haha. I did, however, knock out Box Pusher, another long-standing entry in the backlog. It took nearly 6 months, so it took up a lot of time I could've spent on other games. For one reason or another, my year's been spent playing games I've already beaten. Risk of Rain 2 is almost 100%ed; the gameplay challenges are all finished and all that's left is farming monster logs.

The Future

The future holds many things, depending on what you're looking at. For me, it's primarily the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom in May. The new Pokémon episodes are coming in January for subbed, and the Mario movie is coming next year. I'm still on the fence on whether I'll watch it. Hollywood just doesn't do anything my style any more.

Work has begun on VGStash-Tk, and I am experimenting with date-oriented fields for games in one's collection, to cut down on needless note taking within vgstash. As the software's only user (that I know of), I am solely guiding development, haha. Check out VGStash on PyPI if you haven't already. It's cross-platform and should work on a potato.

That wraps up the major thoughts for me on this year. Overall, it was kinda shitty. Would not want to relive, haha. Here's hoping to a better and brighter 2023.

-z

Box Pusher » Level Data for Solvers

2022-09-12T22:17:00-07:00

Back in 2012, I bought this cute little game called Box Pusher [DSi]. It features gameplay from a 1982 game called Sokoban. In Sokoban, you are a warehouse worker and push boxes around an enclosed area onto target squares. This is the entirety of its gameplay. Think of ye olden Zelda block puzzle, on crack, and you get Sokoban. Box Pusher contains 250 levels worth of this craziness, and features a level editor, in case that's not enough box pushing for you. It was certainly enough for me. But, you don't have to do the work needed to get some Box Pusher solutions; I did it for you!

Box Pusher » Level Data for Solvers

Hook it up to a solver, and you're good to go! Putting this together was a journey.

About halfway through the puzzles, I realized "I'm an adult and have other shit I want to do. It'd be cool to beat this game, though." So I decided to make it a little fun, and use Sokoban solvers. I used a combination of JSoko, takaken's Sokoban Solver, and YASC Solver to get solutions. I then used JSoko's optimizer to shorten those solutions. Between these tools and a few strays that I was able to solve on my own, it only took raw determination to see it through.

Building the Levels

The first part of this task was transcription. I started this project in March of 2022. Due to the game's design of only allowing you to play 5 levels at a time, I had to rely on the small level previews (and my phone camera's zoom) to get level layouts ahead of where I was, or solve puzzles as I transcribed. It was an arduous process, but Vim's virtualedit setting was a huge time saver. It allows you to move the cursor anywhere in the buffer, which is key to making text-based diagram creation approachable.

To make matters worse, my TypeMatrix Dvorak keyboard got a sticky key and I was unsuccessful in reassembling it after I cleaned it, damaging the keyboard. I tried everything I knew to do to keep the silicone/rubber membrane to stay in place; even glue, but in the end, the key is permanently mushy. Unusable to me, so I kept it around for parts. Being stuck back on a staggered, QWERTY keyboard sucks, but I'm glad that the muscle memory is still there.

Getting back to the game, I enjoyed the variety of skins and music, and the camera options are cool, too. Ultimately, I feel like the game has way too much content, and some puzzles are really similar. A better curated set of 100 puzzles would be more palatable, and a more realistic goal for someone to meet. Perhaps that wasn't the goal in developing Box Pusher, though. If you are a hardcore Sokoban player, Box Pusher has it in spades! As it turns out, I'm not super into Sokoban.

Sharing the File and Looking Back

I appear to be the only person out there who's finished this game. I wasn't able to find any guides, FAQs, solution lists, blog posts, nothing to indicate anyone else had played or beaten it. To remedy that, I'm sharing a text file containing level layouts for Box Pusher, in machine-readable form, ready for use by all the major Sokoban solvers.

Comments at the top of the file contain advice for usage, and certain levels are commented where I had issue with the solvers. Level 225 and 232 are particularly rough for solvers. None of the solvers that I ran against those levels produced a result, even after 2 hours of running. I ended up following the solution shown in-game by using a solution credit, recording it with my phone, and playing it back at 0.25x speed so I could follow it. Publishing solutions would require me to do 250 puzzles again, and that's just not happening. I've seen enough variations of UDLR to make my head spin.

Despite the slog of completing the puzzles, I did appreciate the different strategies required to solve the levels, and I got to learn about an entire hobby group that uses automation not only just to solve levels, but to gain knowledge of AI techniques and get programming practice. Some levels were solved lightning fast in one solver, but timeout in another. It appears that Sokoban is a game that requires an adaptable AI that relies on numerous algorithms to make its choices, to get best results. Single algorithms can work, too, but it was the variety in algorithms that helped me clear Box Pusher's levels.

Final Thoughts

I think parallel processing would improve the solvers that are the current state of the art. The most I could get for a solver were 2 threads! I have a 6-core, 12-thread CPU. How much faster could I have solved these, if I had a few cores assigned to a few algorithms, so they could all "compete"? Threading is a hard thing to program correctly, so I understand why someone might want to keep things simpler. Perhaps next-gen solvers will integrate parallel computing in some way, to improve performance for modern hardware.

Please enjoy using this file to solve Box Pusher levels! Big thanks to the hackers putting together solvers for the rest of us to use. My file would be useless without them.

A Brief History of Web Versions

2022-04-25T00:00:00-07:00

Ever since Mark Zuckerburg pitched the Metaverse, the "Web 3.0" buzzword blew up, describing a "Web" that is backed by cryptocurrency-like ledgers. Proof of work, proof of stake, etc. NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are also involved in a scene like this.

What in this picture is an evolution of existing Web technology? How does this enhance the state of hypertext? To me, this is Meta's vision for their next Web product. It is not a new version of an existing, open platform. It has nothing to offer me as a programmer, gamer, writer, or server admin. It seems to be the mixture of NFT scamming, VR, and botnet. It looks like an addiction chamber for whales.

By "whales", I'm referring to customers who invest a ton into their entertainment, seemingly impulsively. It has led to moral questions in society over "dark patterns", or methods of design which aim to keep the user engaged and, in this case, paying for more microtransactions. These people will spend literally thousands of dollars on mobile games. Many developers of this sort of dark-patterned tech offer the software for free, with a few hooks like free items to get started with. Then, once you're out of items, you find you can only get them with real money, or spend time to grind it out. Whales are, in a sense, people with poor impulse control unable to get out of the dopamine loop.

Is it moral to allow a company to design their software in a way to take advantage of vulnerable people? That's what I think of when I think of metaverses and NFTs.

Without diving into NFTs and blockchain, what I'm really looking at in the Metaverse is Facebook-branded VRChat that preys on addictive personalities. No thanks. I don't want to contribute to a platform owned by the creepiest social media company on Earth. In what way does the Metaverse, or other so-called "web 3.0" software, compare to today's Web tech? Why should we want VR or even GPU-intense games on the Web?

Metaverse and anything else built on NFTs and cryptocurrencies is just an application of what Web 3 actually is. Not will be. Is.

If we divide the history of the Web into eras, we get three distinct periods of development:

Sharable, linkable documents. Early forums and fansites, early e-commerce, early rich media
Syndication, blogging, early streaming, social sites and big-business e-commerce
Web as a Software Platform; expanding to the desktop and mobile, analytics booms, data brokerage becomes a thing

Buckle up, stay a while and listen.

Web 1: The Beginning

Tim Berners-Lee began development on HTTP, HTML, and CSS (and thus the Web) in 1989, but the W3C wouldn't exist until 1994, and the protocol wasn't finalized until 1996. However, plenty of early Websites (such as WikiWikiWeb, which inspired the creation of Wikipedia) existed in this early time.

In Web 1, the paradigm was the document that can link to other documents with a click. Servers could do things, but computing resources were scarce in the '90s, so they kept it simple like visitor counters or variable replacement. This lasted quite a while as the dominant paradigm, but plenty of effort went into making the server side smarter and the client side prettier. The Web gained things like CGI servers, and support for higher level languages like Perl and PHP through server modules. Server Side Includes, ColdFusion, and ASP were also created in the Web 1 era.

Over time, HTTP gained support for more headers, which could better inform the server how to serve the page. This included things like smart Content-Type handling, serving different markup for different browsers ¹, and other tricks. The cookie was invented during this time, too, so browsers could send certain data for every request, and the server could process (and update) said data as needed. This was used for logging into a site (a novel concept at the time!), remembering site settings, or early e-commerce. Speaking of e-commerce, back then you were required to purchase a security cert from a company if you wanted to process payments online. Let's Encrypt wasn't a thing, and eBay and PayPal wouldn't exist until 1998. SSL was much slower than unprotected Web back then, due to the decryption step and limited hardware support for the algorithms.

In the late Web 1 days, it gained plugin support in most browsers. This allowed support for Java and Macromedia (later Adobe) Flash, right in the browser! This jump in abilities for the Web allowed media-heavy sites to exist, like Joe Cartoon, Homestar Runner, Newgrounds, Yahoo Games, and Neopets.

I would put the end of Web 1 around 2001-2002.

Web 2: The Explosion

The Web 2 days were marked by a few things:

HTTP/2, HTML 4, and CSS 2
rounded borders, gradients, and diagonal stripes on EVERYTHING
link sharing and syndication
early social media, topic-based sites
blogging
Javascript starts getting beefy

The biggest thing to happen in the Web 2 era is the ease of access to a server. Web 1 had Angelfire and Lycos and friends, but Web 2 had cheap shared hosting and project-specific hosting, like Wordpress. Becoming a web developer in this era was easy, and due to how new it was for a lot of small businesses, it was a great time to be a capable web developer. Groups were forming to create better compatibility between frameworks, there was a big push in the industry and community to upgrade skills and clean up the markup. Accessibility for the blind and other impaired people also became an initiative.

In doing a lot of this work, designers began to pay some real attention and effort to website design. Websites like CSS Zen Garden were created, to show what's possible JUST with HTML and CSS. The same rings true today, with even more possible now thanks to CSS 3 transitions and animations.

As part of this trend, a lot of websites began adopting a similar look: usually rounded borders around their main content, with a header containing a vertical gradient. The background would be a muted, low contrast alternating diagonal stripe pattern. Some later Web 2 sites would try to go for a "glass" look, similar to Windows 7's taskbar.

This era also gave rise to topic-dedicated social sites. While the late Web 1 era had LiveJournal and Xanga, Web 2 gained things like Deviantart, Flickr, Imageshack, and numerous file hosting websites, meant solely just to link to others. This could be understood as early cloud storage. Combine this with the prevalence of pre-built Web packages like Wordpress, phpBB, SMF, and others, and we see a Web of interaction and sharing.

A key part of this sharing was syndication. RSS and Atom are two such standards used to facilitate this. All it is is a "feed", or list of items. When the website publishes, the feed updates. So all you have to do is check if your feed updated to see if there's a real update. This avoided you having to visit every day, or F5 periodically. Blogging took off due to the advancement of this tech, and it created thousands of communities worldwide.

A big issue of this era was finding reliable links with fun, interesting, or valuable info. Search engines existed, but they weren't as refined and weren't as good at indexing the relevant data. What if, instead of linking to someone every time a topic came up, you could post your bookmark as the topic itself? Community link-sharing websites came together, like Fark, Digg, and later Reddit. (Yep, it was founded in 2005!) There were some underground ones, too.

Myspace launched in 2003. It was one of the first websites that allowed you to add a "friend". You could also rank your friends, and have custom CSS on your profile. There was a huge attraction to Myspace, partly for this customization, and the built in blogging feature. It was around this time that some began suggesting to use real names online, to find people you knew. This was counter to the prevailing knowledge of "cover your ass and use a pseudonym". As we see today, there are very real risks and problems when you use your real name online. That didn't stop people back then, though.

Facebook was launched in 2004. It wasn't opened up to the general public until around 2007. Soon after, it got games and began expanding into other avenues of social activity, like Marketplace, Business and Group pages, etc.

Others contended around this time, sometimes for different purposes. Friendster was one of the first social media sites, but it never took off. A lot of dating sites and job boards popped up on the Web around this time, too.

HTML 5 and CSS 3 were released in the late Web 2 era. With them came better parsing support due to clearer markup rules, rounded borders without images, images as borders, composite layering inside the background of an element, and many other Quality of Life improvements. HTML 5 and CSS 3 wouldn't gain their crazy features like animations and Web platform integration until Web 3. At the end of Web 2, the canvas element was being played with and some small games were released.

Web 3: The Panopticon

The start of Web 3, I think would be somewhere around the time NodeJS and Electron came onto the scene. WebRTC, WebGL, and EME are also key to this era.

I posit that we are already in Web 3. Web 3 is Web as a Software Platform. In this era, the Web gained support for restricting the freedom of viewers through Encrypted Media Extensions (thanks for selling out, Tim), lots of new headers to better control inter-site behavior, and new tech that only works on the Web, like WebAssembly, WebGL, WebUSB, WebRTC, and so on. This is distinct from Web 2 in that it's continuous effort to turn the Web into a platform that's as equal to a universal OS as it can be. However, this results in a lot of over-engineering and actively prevents new browser makers by raising the technical floor so high that only multi-billion dollar companies like Google can negotiate licensing for EME code and devote the resources to standards adherance.

Some people and companies actively build ONLY for the Web, and containerize a browser on as many different platforms as possible to achieve that effect. It's kind of like using the Web as a virtual machine language like Java.

One of the reasons I think Web 3 is popular, for companies at least, is the evolution of tracking technology that began as a curiosity in the Web 2 era. If you implement your software on the Web, you get most of the groundwork done for free, devs are cheaper, and other companies like Google want your users data, so they'll help you track and optimize your site for revenue, for the price of the data and some fees, of course.

Another facet of Web 3 is using it for things like text editors, IDEs, and other productivity software. This can be done in a serverless way using Electron. Have you noticed a pattern here though? Most of the advancement of Web 3's tech has come from Google, a company that was born on the Web in 1998 as a search engine. Today, it has a vested interest in gathering as much information as possible since it sells ad space and analytics tech to other companies. Making it simple and easy to build an application in Electron and hook it up to Google Analytics makes Web as a Software Platform (Web 3) an easy sell for small business and is hugely profitable for Google.

The big problem I have with Web 3 is the total disregard for privacy and security that the major writers of the Web have for those that visit, and the intent on expanding the Web into an unmaintainable mess of standards. So little of Web 3 technology is meant to enrich the Web for everyone.

It's mostly a monetization platform with flashy things that give you more access to the client's system so you can manipulate or control what's possible on your site or app. The advantages of deploying on the Web are countered by massive RAM use compared to a native program, fitting a square peg into a round hole, and the continuous invasion of privacy that gets hand-waved with as-of-yet-unchallenged Privacy Policies. Perhaps governments are right to want to regulate some aspects of Web development, if corporate participants can't behave themselves.

(Psst, America and the EU are both looking at ways to hold tech companies accountable for how they conduct business online, especially in regards to user data and viewing algorithms, given that the misuse of social media has led to disruption of elections.)

Conclusion

There is way too much history, too many websites, and too many cool side things that evolved in or next to the Web over the years to cover it all in an article about eras of the whole thing. Things like microprotocols via markup, decentralized social media like StatusNet and ActivityPub, Tor, freenet, ssb, the list goes on. So if I missed anything, know that it's not because I don't know about it. I probably do. :P

The main reason I wrote is to counter the idea that Web 3.0 is on the horizon, like some tech companies or uninformed communities want us to believe.

The Web has already reached its third major era. If you use VSCode, Atom, Etcher; if you use codepen, ideone, or Google Docs... you're using Web 3 stuff. We reached Web 3 when we built traditional software with Web tech.

Web 4 will probably be when it goes truly decentralized, or a bare metal OS is implemented in Web tech. (ChromeOS doesn't count; it's Gentoo Linux with an Android emulator) Who knows; right now it's looking like the Web has been taken over by Google, both in terms of market share and in terms of "who guides the standards". However the Web moves ahead, it needs to do so while keeping businesses from snuffing out the rest of the community, or using their greater resources to fill positions and exert undue influence over the technical community.

The modern Web giants do not play nicely with others, and the greatly increased complexity of Web tech has forced a duopoly in mainstream browsers. To my knowledge, Google still pays Mozilla to be the top search engine, so they're paid competition... There are only two others that I know of in development (Pale Moon/Goanna and Serenity) that are anywhere close to Firefox and Chrome in features. Netsurf and Dillo exist, but from what I can tell are stagnating... probably due to lack of people to contribute and the sheer number of standards you need to implement to call yourself a browser.

I think a fork of HTTP is inevitable, due to its complexity. It either needs to branch off and serve app developers, or resist corporate influence and selectively choose the standards they support. Bonus points if they explain why they won't implement certain tech. It sends a clear message of differentiation, reminding me of the fun server shizaru, which allows you to set specific limits on what you're serving..

Where do you think the lines between Web eras are? I'd love to read peoples' ideas on this.

Thanks for reading,

-z

This was really a thing. Netscape and IE both had some big incompatibilities in the early days. Even their Javascript implementations were largely incompatible! ↩

Free Software is Politics

2022-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

It seems that the systemd debate has made its way to Alpine Linux, and naturally that gets people out of the woodwork to bang their drum about it again. The irony's not lost, either. It's really tiring to see people complain about politics, in a software movement that's entirely about the politics of software to begin with. Have you guys forgotten why we're here? Are you more open source instead of free software? That's still a political statement; one of practicality and reduced costs.

For those unfamiliar, Alpine Linux is a Linux distribution (NOT GNU/Linux) powered by busybox, musl libc, and OpenRC. By contrast, systemd is a project aiming to provide a "system layer" between userland and the kernel. It explicitly depends on a recent build system (meson) and generally only supports glibc and the Linux kernel. It explicitly does not support any alternative libc. In short, Alpine and systemd go together like oil and water, on purely a technical basis. The social half even moreso, since this incompatibility resulted in users having access to a simpler system that isn't built on systemd. Choice is great, right? Some disagree, but they're free to make their own projects.

When dealing with the systemd debate, many try to reduce it to the early years of the debate, where people used the false dichotomy of technical and social. Or they derail and assume it's a personal vendetta against Lennart Poettering, without accounting for Lennart's behavior when he was advocating for systemd, and the smug ways that his project has treated contributions, criticisms, and distros like Gentoo. We do personal responsibility, first impressions, and all that civil shit, right? Can we not apply this to our fellow developers? Are we not responsible, to some degree, for how others perceive us and our projects? If so, then I think it's fair to criticize a developer.

Lennart said "Gentoo, this is your wakeup call," concerning the ability to run udev without systemd, when eudev was created. He actively asked GNOME to depend on systemd. Granted, GNOME was probably going to use it anyway due to Red Hat employing both Poettering and many GNOME developers... A number of Arch developers (particularly its sysvinit maintainer) were early contributors to systemd. It's safe to say, influencing other projects is the bread and butter of the systemd project, and I challenge anyone to argue otherwise.

If you're going to participate in the debate, at least understand the history of the project and the actions of the principal authors -- cultural origin matters here because their values are baked into the project. The discussions from the Arch and Debian communities are also worthwhile, to show examples of how NOT to deal with the issue. Arch promised sysvinit would remain as an option, then pulled the rug out from users with their switch. Debian had an ugly debate that resulted in some developers leaving the distribution altogether, and sparked the creation of the systemd-free Devuan distribution.

Arch and Debian both went systemd, while Fedora and SuSE leaned into systemd first. As a witness to both Arch and Debian's decisions as-it-happened, the one thing most distro devs missed was user transparency. Whatever plan you go with, you need a pathway for the users who get left out, or you're going to create a rift in the community or even a fork. So many users who didn't want systemd got stuck with it. Some people who were using systemd on neutral distros found themselves having to make a decision, where there wasn't a need to before. Systemd support was not uniform across the ecosystem (wrt build options), and still isn't.

The decisions affected a ton of users, ironically creating more forks and attempts to maintain control of one's computing -- the dreaded "fragmentation" boogeyman, often coming from those who don't see the value in a diverse software ecosystem. The fatal flaw of consolidation is the assumption that every developer in the problem space can agree on how its problems get solved. Given human nature, that is very flatly a false assumption. Every solution in software has different benefits and pitfalls. Some optimize for CPU speed. Some for memory. Some for I/O. Others for networking! No single project can solve every problem in a space. The solution to this is coexisting via multiple projects, all of which can solve the problem(s) in the style that they choose. The openness of software diversity is why systemd had a chance of adoption at all.

The ways that various distributions handled their decisions were decidedly high temperature, and it's clear from the beginning of the systemd project that it was intent on changing distributions. Denying that is to side with groups trying to manipulate the ecosystem into carrying their software on every default install. It's competitive behavior that has no place in a collaborative environment.

Not every piece of disruptive software causes this much trouble, though. One of Lennart's other projects, PulseAudio, hasn't caused nearly as much trouble even though it, too, has its share of critics. I posit that the limited scope of the project and its less aggressive appeal to the ecosystem allowed it to coexist with ALSA and JACK in a better way than systemd does with other inits. Many environments can treat PulseAudio as "another supported stack" with a little maintenance, without upsetting their software's architecture.

Even the Wayland project, with its own brand of smugness and the specific goal of replacing X11, hasn't done much to create an actual, damaging rift in the communities they are near. Programs can support both Xorg and Wayland; at least for the features that they both share.

It could also just be the nature of init systems. You generally have to make an all-or-nothing decision. Coexisting init or service systems are a somewhat new idea, which is why most distributions choose a single init. Apparently it's possible, though, to mix and match between OpenRC, s6, and runit. Neat.

The technical and social are inescapably intertwined, just like politics is to free software. Two sides of the same coin. The movement itself began as the desire to fix a printer driver and compute their way. Furthermore, the decision of which packages to include in a distribution is also political. It affects the "computing lives", for lack of a better phrase, of the users who trust the distribution's choices on software, or are otherwise aligned with their software philosophy. Anything that has far-reaching consequences on how people interact or conduct themselves could be interpreted as political.

So, what's really being called for when we're asked to "stahp being political"? To ignore the social history of a project? To censor jokes we don't find funny? To ignore prior debates, the outcomes of said debates, or the project management of upstream? Software isn't developed in a vacuum, and software with a big picture agenda (anything involving the desire to standardize is automatically political) is not doing itself any favors by accusing others of being problematic, when the politics is the point. It comes off as intellectually dishonest or in bad faith.

Why shouldn't we consider the whole when we make software decisions? If given the choice between two technically identical upstreams, would you rather deal with the upstream who's helpful and receptive to contributions and doesn't mind if people don't use their software, or one that sees itself above you, decides the structure of your system without helpful or constructive feedback for contributions, wants every system you touch to run their software, and has a nasty habit of displacing other software? You sure that last part is really an oopsie? Am I "not allowed" to notice that part?

I know what I'd choose, and it doesn't have to be highly personal. It's a matter of one's own software standards. As a programmer, I find it shameful to push one's project in a way that creates a lot of discord in the community. I don't try to get people to use VGStash over Backloggery or their other favorite game manager, but I might bring it up in a conversation if someone doesn't sound sure of how they want to fix that problem, and it's relevant to the conversation. Even then, I'd rather know that I have users because they like the software, and not because I screamed about it from the digital rooftops or pressured people into using it. That's a false merit, if anything.

Coexisting as a software project is not particularly hard. I could not, in good conscience, act in the ways that Lennart has regarding systemd, even if it was my own project. While some of the responses he's gotten have been over the top (death threats? Crazy), I think it's entirely fair to apply my personal standard to my software choices, and the people who write them.

I think there are many other people in free software who use similar criteria to determine which software they use. This is especially important for software that you think you might contribute to! If you don't like the ideas of the author, or their tech choices, or their philosophy to software, those are valid reasons to avoid their software! It's also valid to tell others that's your reason. They don't have to agree with you.

But, I have to question the motives and values of a person who tells me to stop paying attention to the politics that happen from a project with a decidedly political aim. The technical and social parts of free software cannot be reliably separated, any more than a human being's identity can be separated between heart and mind. Separating the art from the artist only shows half the picture.

Focus on the whole, and make the right decision for your computing. No outside entity knows your needs better than you do.

-z

(Who can read the GNU Manifesto and not gather that it's political?)

12-in-12, 2022 Edition

2022-01-16T00:00:00-08:00

Hello once again, and welcome to another year of 12-in-12, the initiative to beat twelve games in twelve months and take out one's backlog! If you want a history lesson, check out my maiden post on the subject; then you'll get what's up here.

Just as before, here's the successful hit list for 2022:

Dadish [Switch]
A Short Hike [Switch]
ToeJam & Earl [Genesis]
Box Pusher [DSi]

That's it, unfortunately. Here's hoping for a better 2023! Read on for the details, as usual.

January

I was bored one day and decided to fire up Dadish [Switch], a cute platformer about a radish, who's a dad (get it...?) gathering up his children who've run off to play and gotten into trouble. The dialogue is silly and light-hearted, and the art style is fairly clean, if a bit simple. The platforming mechanics and bosses were somewhat disappointing for me, but I wasn't expecting a masterpiece in the first place. I just learned it has a sequel, too, but I think I've had my fill of it. It was still a fun little diversion, and I appreciate that it wasn't 20-30 hours of collecting crap.

February

I played way too much Minecraft. Nothing of importance accomplished.

March

I couldn't resist picking up A Short Hike [Switch] when it went on sale. I love the art style, the humorous writing, and the general chill tone that the game conveys. It lives up to its name, with roughly 4-5 hours of content to cover. You can even speedrun it! Goodness. I beat it in like two days, but those two days were quite lovely.

July

This month, my girlfriend and I finished our co-op playthrough of ToeJam & Earl [Genesis] on the Genesis Classics Collection on Switch. We ended up using the savestates between levels, and sometimes rewound to better handle obstacles.

I really dislike how many of the enemies just plain move faster than you. Dodging is not really a thing. Splitting up creates an animation, while re-uniting doesn't. Item mechanics while both characters are on-screen versus off-screen are somewhat interesting. It allows for better teamwork I guess. Overall, I feel like it's a game with better art than gameplay. Definitely a relic of the 1990s.

September

I finished a months-long project in tackling Box Pusher [DSi]. It was a big enough deal to write about it separately. Suffice to say, I will not miss Sokoban, but I enjoyed the adventure in automated solvers.

Conclusion

Sadly, progress in my backlog basically stopped after September. Box Pusher took so much out of me, I ended up playing classics the rest of the year. Here's hoping I can get more done in 2023!

GNOME as a Platform

2021-10-28T00:00:00-07:00

I came home today and strolled my usual Web haunts before diving into the Underground, and stumbled across a piece by GNOME developer jwestman, titled Platforms, Compatibility, and the Future of the Free Desktop. In it, he advocates for GNOME (and by extension XDG) to become the platform that "everyone can work on together". Isn't it funny that the kind of people that suggest this are always talking about the platforms, software, or APIs that they have control over? Does this person not understand why people choose other software, or choose to create something different? Do they not understand the risks present when the vast majority of your userbase is on one or two platforms and a 0-day is found?

Something jwestman doesn't comprehend about the libre software world, I think, is that its diversity is both a help and a hindrance. To get the best software from the community, it needs to be able to grow, change, and adapt at the individual level. Those adaptations will create the behavior of the ecosystem. This is observable in wildlife, as well.

Congregating the majority of an ecosystem so that they all use the same platform is not helpful to anyone except the builder of the platform and those that depend on them. It's commercial behavior, not social. These projects can exist just fine on their own without trying to get everyone to use them.

The overarching goal of organizations like GNOME are to have control over the future of the software ecosystem. If you provide the platform, you control the platform, you control the users. If you define the standards, you control the platform.

Where's the incentive?

What do I gain from XDG and GNOME as a software developer? It's yet another piece of software or interface I don't control, forcing me to update my software if I want to remain functional ON your platform. It's based on bureaucratic consensus, where decisions are gatekept by the top two funded and top two largest implementations (GNOME and KDE). If I disagree with a decision or propose an addition to the standards, or the interfaces, what hope does my voice have of being heard and given honest consideration? That's the problem I have with these organizations that are companies pretending to be communities, so they can gain resources from the community.

GNOME has not demonstrated themselves to be a good player when it comes to collaboration. A lot of concerns have been cast aside, and their chief funding company, Red Hat, employs these developers.

Do tell me why I would want to work with such an organization. I challenge GNOME to show the choices they allow within their platform, especially in light of the recent dwindling in options across GTK, GNOME, and GNOME core apps like the file chooser and Nautilus. Interestingly, jwestman does a rhetorical trick where they characterize the choices GNOME offers as "real" while other choices are less "real". If someone switches away from GNOME, there is still a cost!

GNOME is and has been obsessed with image, UX, branding, and community outreach the past 5-8 years. To increase broader appeal, you dumb things down. Novice users overwhelmed by options? Remove some, or hide them in dconf/gsettings! Marketing alone isn't going to make a good platform, and neither is suggesting people use your platform because of some fake appeal to collaboration that doesn't hold to scrutiny if you look at your bug tracker.

The direct result of coalescing on any standard is to give power to those who wrote the standard. I do not trust the groups in charge of FreeDesktop or GNOME, so I have no reason to learn how to write a GNOME app.

Some Thoughts on the GNOME Experience

For the record, ~~I'm a daily user of GNOME right now~~ (nope, lol ¹), since my laptop shipped with it as the default environment and I chose to try my best to set it up, so I could zero in on what I dislike about it.

It's a struggle to use this environment. It's a struggle to navigate the bullshit XDG docs for defining a desktop file, so I could make a launcher for PICO-8. The one GUI program I found to manipulate the menu and launchers didn't have a clear interface as to which fields meant what, and the launchers it did produce didn't work. I ended up returning to the spec, and fucking around until something finally worked. Then I needed a systemd unit to get some semblance of "run this bash script once on boot" so I could set a sysfs value while waiting for an EC firmware fix. GNOME also can't switch audio output when I plug in headphones, and there isn't a GUI to fetch programs that have tray icons, like Nextcloud and Steam. I have to use the Task Manager clone that GNOME has and make sure it's not in the process list. (ps aux | grep is loads better btw) I often leave Steam, Nextcloud, and Mumble all in their own workspaces, to avoid losing the windows. How on Earth is that better than a system tray!? The worst part about this is a naive GNOME user would assume these programs are broken, when they are not: GNOME simply doesn't implement tray icons! Load them on any other DE, and I can access the tray icons with no problem.

Add to that the uselessness of the icon spec. For defining something visual, you might want to provide a complete set of blank or example icons. Nobody wants to navigate through the ridiculous amount of XDG-defined icon names and try to figure out the correct one to use. Can't we use sane names, and document them better? Half the problem are the atrocious docs. They're not written for app developers or even independent, self-taught folks. They're written for other standards writers.

Honestly it just feels like GNOME and XDG, if we were to consider them "a platform", are designed to be difficult to integrate with, and you're stuck with whatever Trolltech/KDE and Red Hat/GNOME decide on for their systems because there's no evidence that any outside opinion would be given consideration or be able to get any ideas merged into the standard(s).

Every step of the way of my using this "platform" is a disaster. It's like it actively doesn't want me to use it, or enjoy myself at the computer.

My first Linux experience was on Ubuntu, back in 2005. It used GNOME 2 and had tons of options and supported a great amount of shit. I got bored and frustrated trying to customize it, so I moved onto Fluxbox and Openbox, then got into tiling WMs: dwm, awesomewm, ratpoison, finally settling on i3-gaps.

So, GNOME used to be good, and I come from an angle of control and customizability. GNOME 3 is not good, and as a libre software developer I do not see GNOME as a stable platform to build software on. Between version 2 and 3 there was a huge upheaval, both technical and social. GTK3 to GTK4 is already pissing off developers and some users. What do you really have to offer other than an API that doubles as a treadmill?

Choice is Empowering

The diversity of the software ecosystem is precisely why initiatives like XDG could even form. Were this not possible, the platform we'd be using would in fact be called GNU, or we'd be stuck on XFree86 or some other big project nobody wanted to fork from at first. It's odd to me that those peddling new technologies -- pipewire, wayland, GNOME3/4, systemd, they all lament that there are choices in the environment and seek to actively replace other choices instead of trying to just be a good choice. This competitive approach does not convey an air of collaboration at all.

Why should people all use one platform? "So they can gain the benefits of standardization." Yeah I get the boilerplate answer, but think about long term risks of using someone else's platform to build your program. If FreeDesktop changes something, now you have to change with them. "Bitrot happens," one might riposte. Bitrot is an artificial phenomenon caused by other people intentionally changing things so that other software does not work. It's not a magic force of nature.

A Fractal of Projects

I think the last part of jwestman's post was the most accurate. I would take it a step further: computing itself is fragmented. We use computers for different reasons; already, we cannot reasonably expect every interface or API to be suitable for everyone. Standardization helps for interoperability, yes, but to make the most of that, you need a stable spec from a level-headed, experienced group of API writers and implementers, developers who are aware of computer users who don't use MacBook Airs or desktops with kilowatt power supplies, and people who are good at simplifying.

The best standards are the ones easiest to understand and easiest to implement. But another truth is, some have seen the downsides of standardization and fully understand what you're giving up when you "just use XDG" or "just use this framework", etc. You're inviting an entirely new set of bugs into your code, and problems to your project. And they don't come up at first. At first, integration's great! You just read the spec and tested it a bunch. It's when change happens upstream, long after you've committed resources to this platform, that it bites you in the ass. And by that point, you're dealing with the Sunken Cost fallacy. Congrats, your pet project is now dependent on Daddy Platform. Do you beg and plead with upstream to address your problem, refactor to suit Daddy Platform's preferences (i.e. making development decisions FOR you), or fork/restart on another toolkit? If you choose the latter, now you're stuck for a minimum of a few months, if your tool is non-trivial.

If you build from scratch, there are only a few things that can change and upset your project. First is any libraries you happen to use, then the standard library of your language. Lastly, the kernel.

That may result in a less integrated app, but I'm not concerned with my software looking like it belongs in GNOME or KDE. We are never going to have One True Interface that everybody likes. We won't have One True Audio Stack, or One True Networking Stack. This pursuit in finding The (only) One seems... almost religious.

Personally, I like the vast software diversity available to me in the libre software world. If XDG was the only game in town, it'd be really dull. Same for Apache, or even just GNU. What we need is for platforms to try being platforms on their own merits instead of parroting advocacy.

Choice is Inspiring

One of the most exciting things I experienced in libre software was realizing "I'm not stuck with Paint or Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop!" I learned about The GIMP, and Krita, MyPaint, mtpaint, libresprite, and so on. If we take the ideology of "consolidate and collaborate" to its conclusion, there would only be one image editor available for Linux, and it would have such a slew of features it would be an unmaintainable mess. I feel the same way about platforms. Whether it's elementaryOS, Tizen, enlightenment, GNOME, or KDE, each one has a different flavor of GUI, with conflicting or oddly accenting views on how a GUI should behave. As I mentioned before, humans use computers differently. That should reflect in their interfaces, and yes, even their choice of software.

As for The Free Desktop, it's been around for a long time, and it's practically a meme at this point. What people are shooting for with the Linux desktop now is mainstream appeal. That is not going to result in improved software, any more than adding more people to the Internet will improve its discourse. What we're more likely to see is less helpful bug reports, burned out or frustrated triage devs, lots of stupid community positions to fill, arbitrating all this labor coordination now needed from the influx of users... it sounds a lot like the way a business grows...

Conclusion

So yeah, I dunno who jwestman thinks they're fooling. A platform isn't what GNU/Linux needs. It needs APIs that can be left alone for a year or two and not need babysitting because upstream took Adderall and is gazing at glowsticks while they design the next iteration. If things are designed well, they don't need to be changed as much. Platforms need to be stable, predictable, reproducible, portable, and perhaps MOST importantly, slow moving!

Ideally, we shouldn't be asking anyone to waste lines of code on a standard that's not ready to be finalized in print. It's disrespectful to ask developers to rely and build on something you can't make any stability or mutability promises on. It's like building a Jenga tower on a table someone lent to you, but they shake the table every so often, ruining your progress up to that point. Would you want to build on that surface anymore? I wouldn't.

Stay independent, fellow devs.

-z

I no longer run GNOME on my laptop, mostly due to the lack of a proper tray without using an extension, and issues capturing windows in OBS. There doesn't appear to be a way to run or build OBS so that it sees both Wayland and X11 windows. Since most of my software was X11, I switched to XFCE until I get the gumption to put together an awesome-wm or i3 config for my laptop. While it still uses XDG standards, it at least doesn't limit me in how I arrange my UI or spin up my GPU for fancy effects. It's quite adaptable and gets out of the way. It also hasn't crashed yet. ↩

Twelve Years of The After Years

2021-10-23T00:00:00-07:00

The year is 2009. Square Enix releases a digital sequel to the long-loved Final Fantasy 4, titled "The After Years". It concerns the story of Ceodore -- the son of FF4's protagonist, Cecil -- and his journey in saving the world from a mysterious moon that appears. The After Years pulls in all of the characters from the prior game, extends character development and story for a lot of characters, and introduces more; most of them simply the progeny of some main character from the prior game. Fan bait!

I had recently 100%ed Final Fantasy 4 Advance, back around 2008, so naturally I bought its sequel! However, it was not quite what I expected. While the new characters were welcome, a lot of the changes to gameplay negatively impacted my experience for the entire game, despite my initial interest in them. This article isn't a review, per se, but I will briefly discuss what I didn't like about the game, to add context.

The Moon Phase system turns the game's various damage types into its own form of Pokémon. Each phase makes one of the four types of damage stronger, and another weaker. This idea sounds cool on its surface, but changing the moon phase is done only by resting via Tent or Cottage, sleeping in a bed, or waiting long enough gameplay time for it to automatically advance. These mechanics turn the system into something tedious and unnecessarily annoying, forcing you to pad your inventory with Tents to have any sort of control over the phases.

Co-operative moves, called Bands, are another mechanic that seems interesting at first. The moves themselves are cool: they allow multiple characters to band together and pull off things like a team-wide heal or buff, a unique magic attack that neither character has on their own, etc. The catch is both characters get their turns tied up to perform the move (reasonable!) and the move itself takes about 3 times as long to cast as anything else. That translates to a good 7-10 seconds you have two characters sitting like ducks. You also don't know about what bands are available until you attempt to Band, and choose the correct menu option on the second character. As a result, there were a number of Bands I simply never acquired.

Next, the encounter rate was frustratingly inconsistent. The After Years was originally a mobile game, and sadly it shows. Most areas contain a higher leveled enemy ready to swoop and murder a member or two of your party, almost as if to add an arbitrary punishment to exploring. On a related note, the enemies you run into tend to be MUCH faster than you. I experienced this throughout the entire game, even after grinding at the end of the game.

Lastly, there are a bunch of items across the 8 or so episodes that are completely missable, and missing them blocks you from getting some of the best equipment in the game later. Yes, optional content is optional, but permanently missable things in an RPG leads to pointless replays.

So, with the character of the game established, I played it off and on for the first few years of having the game. Made it pretty far, about halfway through. However, the mechanics were really agitating me, and I was frustrated. Final Fantasy 4 was a great game; was I just not appreciating the design of its sequel? The characters weren't as well written as the prior game, either, but the story was still compelling enough to make me want to see the next scene.

It sat there, unplayed, for a good 5-6 years. Whenever I thought about playing it, I'd think about another classic JRPG I'd rather play, or a different game on my backlog that felt more rewarding. When I came back to it, I played through every episode until the last one, where it sat again for 1-2 years. I started the end of the game some time last year, in 2020, and finished it yesterday, 2021-10-12.

The After Years was a sort of "dark horse" game for my backlog. It's the game that I had the most trouble coming back to and advancing. Don't get me wrong, I've played through some bad games in the past, but none stayed in the backlog for twelve years. It's a ridiculous amount of time for a game to sit around unbeaten. Your mileage may vary, but there's my take on it.

Back in 2016, I started the vgstash project to manage my backlog; by that point I had more money than I did time, so the collection of unfinished games began to get bigger. The After Years was one of the first games to stick around long enough to consider tracking. I made the software to practice programming, and to optimizing my gaming time so I could catch up on my backlog.

In a weird sense, The After Years will be a special game for me going forward. Not because it was particularly well designed. It's not. (sorry, Matrix Software. This one was just a miss.) It's special because it was one of the stubborn games in my backlog. It motivated me to write code to solve my own problem. It helped me see why I was having a backlog problem, and how to solve it. Now that it's beaten, I can also say it gave me more patience. Not only for beating a game, but the greater lesson of waiting to buy a game until you have the space in your life for it.

Great deals happen all the time, even as much as 80%, and it happens on a yearly cycle. Since mainstream gaming is going digital (much to my dismay), the need to have a game right when it comes out is moot. Most games are published in unfinished form these days, and even if they are complete and just get DLC, there's always a "Definitive Edition" a few years later.

This lines up very closely to the "Patient Gamers" ideology of waiting to buy games so you don't get burned by preordering or other FOMO tactics. The idea is, if the game is good then people will talk about it, and eventually it will go on sale or even become good if it was released unfinished. It's a wise way to purchase in the chaotic world of games publishing.

In the twelve years since starting The After Years, I went through some of my own character growth and struggles, just as Cecil and the gang did. I started and ended a relationship, injured my back, reconnected with my dad, met and moved in with my current SO, became more active in libre software, lost my dad and cat, moved in with the SO's parents, endured the loss of her father with her family, and now today... one step closer to a clear backlog, and relieved to be done with such a long, flawed game that I wanted to like but ultimately didn't.

The lesson to learn from all of this is twofold: (a) don't buy games you aren't sure you'll like, especially if they're digital, and (b) it's okay to remove a game from your collection if you don't enjoy playing it. I chose to stick it out through The After Years because I really wanted to know the story and finish the game legitimately, but pride isn't exactly a good reason. :) At some point, you have to be conservative with your use of time or you'll feel like the time you do spend gaming is wasted. Games are entertainment, and you're supposed to have fun.

What games have taken you forever to beat? I'd love to hear about other games people have had trouble finishing. Hit me up at zlg+backlog@zlg.space.

-z

Purism Librem 14v1 Review

2021-10-01T00:00:00-07:00

Purism is a small company in the hardware space aiming to provide software freedom (via their Debian-based PureOS and coreboot-based Pureboot) while also protecting your privacy and security. One of the key selling points to their hardware are killswitches, which allow you to physically disconnect internal hardware to prevent abuse. The Librem 14 has two such switches: one controlling the webcam and microphone, and the other controlling the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios.

Due to COVID, supply shortages, and other difficulties of the business, Purism has had some trouble meeting their shipping obligations; this delay has caused a number of people to seek refunds or issue chargebacks. Backers for the Librem 5 in particular seem to have rough luck getting their hardware. I was a backer for the OpenPandora back in 2010, and never received a unit, so I understand their frustration when it comes to not getting what you pay for. ¹ I must note, however, that my experience with Purism was better than I anticipated.

I ordered my Librem 14v1 in March 2021, when the website said "Shipping in May". May came and went, and I sent out an e-mail asking them what happened to my order. I gave it some time, assuming I wasn't the only one with shipping delays, and reached out again in August. Eventually, a Purism employee reached out to me via their personal e-mail address to deduce the issue.

It turns out that shipping confirmation was sent to me in early July. When I read the e-mail from the employee, I checked my e-mail client configuration. Lo and behold, it wasn't syncing my Spam folder at all! It had also been more than 30 days since the e-mail was sent, so Spam was empty. I updated the configuration, confirmed proper receipt of e-mail from Purism, and my order was marked Priority to ensure it got out sooner. I received the laptop on 2021-09-15. While I would've preferred it in May or June, as advertised, I'm just glad to have actually gotten the product. I was worried that I'd funded another OpenPandora... it was just PEBCAK! How apropos. :)

So, with that saga over, let's take a look at the thing and see how it holds up!

Specifications

Note: Purism offers a number of different choices for storage, RAM, and OS. I opted for the model with 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD, and PureOS with Librem Key and PureBoot.

Dimensions:  322mm x 17mm x 220mm
Weight:      1.4kg
Screen:      14" matte, 1920x1080 @ 60Hz
CPU:         Intel Core i7 10710U (Comet Lake)
             4.70GHz, 6 cores, 12 threads
RAM:         16GB DDR4 (up to 64GB)
Graphics:    Intel UHD Graphics 620, 9th gen (Coffee Lake), device 9BCA
Wi-Fi:       Atheros AR9462, 802.11n
Audio:       Intel Comet Lake PCH-LP cAVS
Ethernet:    Realtek RTL8111 series Gigabit Ethernet
Bluetooth:   Atheros AR3012 (NON-FREE BINARY DRIVER ath3k REQUIRED)
Storage:     Samsung NVMe SSD SM981/PM981/PM983
Ports:       1x HDMI 2.0
             2x USB 3.1 Type-A
             1x USB 3.1 Type-C, data only (left side)
             1x USB 3.1 Type-C, with PD (right side)
             1x DC-IN jack, barrel style connector
             Genesys Logic SD Card Reader
             3.5mm audio (mic-in and headphone-out combined)
Keyboard:    Full size chiclet, QWERTY, no numpad, backlit with 5 light levels
Chassis:     Aluminum, black matte finish; flat, good for stickers
             Five grommets on the bottom to improve airflow and add stability

Hardware Experience

Out of the box, the laptop feels heavy enough to know you're carrying it, but light enough to where it's not a big deal to carry it. The aluminum chassis feels nice, but due to it being matte black, smudges and fingerprints are an inevitability. The backlight on the keyboard is clearly uneven in places -- mostly around Caps Lock, backslash, and the Logo key.

Typing on the keyboard isn't quite as satisfying as my TypeMatrix, but I recognize my choice of input isn't exactly popular. For what it is, the Librem's chiclet keyboard gets the job done and isn't particularly weird, aside from the right side Shift key. It lacks a Menu key, so those of us who like Compose keys get stuck losing right Alt.

The webcam supports up to 1280x720 pictures and video, but frame rate decreases with resolution:

1280×720: 10fps
960×720: 15fps
640×480: 30fps

You're not using this for OnlyFans or pro streaming. :) Video calls with family or coworkers will do.

The grommets on the bottom aren't bad, but the one in the back center feels like one good snag will take it off. It's made out of a harder rubber than the other four, however, so maybe it's sturdier than it appears. I'd rather be careful than find out. :)

Software Experience

The default PureOS uses GNOME 3 Wayland on top of systemd. It has a decent amount of packages pre-installed, like LibreOffice, the GNOME suite, Thunderbird, Polari, Boxes, TeXinfo, and some other extras.

This is the first time I've 'committed' to learning a GNOME 3 interface, and while some of its features are handy, the window management workflow seems like it's on rails. I could maximize-half horizontally, but not vertically (to have two wide but short windows stacked together). Resizing uses Meta+Middle Click instead of Meta+Right Click. There's no equivalent to the taskbar, so you lose the minimize paradigm; the workflow seems to encourage putting each program in its own workspace and having the user depend on Meta+Tab to swap between programs. I haven't found a more sane way to navigate with it.

Hitting Meta to get the overview is kinda neat since it doubles as a launcher and window switcher. If I wanted to improve GNOME, I would add a drop-down style terminal for drive-by commands, and an info widget like conky. Keyboard toggle mapping targets for Bluetooth and WiFi would be nice, too.

What I Like

Requiring the use of the Librem Key in order to boot is pretty awesome. It adds risk to losing the key, but I've done pretty good at not losing my car keys. However, I don't feel comfortable attaching it to my physical keyring. I'll need to come up with another strategy in the future, but things are working okay for now.

Most of the system does indeed work out of the box. I had some issues with Cheese wrt the camera killswitch, but rebooting seemed to fix it and I haven't had it happen since. Bluetooth also didn't work out of the box due to needing a non-free binary blob. Everything else I've thrown at this Debian derivative has worked as I expect it to, including non-free stuff like Minecraft, Discord, PICO-8, and Steam.

The backlit keyboard is a game changer when you're trying to relax in bed and be creative. It's a full sized keyboard, too, so despite a few key placements being weird, it's not terrible for a staggered QWERTY board.

What I Don't Like

I had to correct an issue with the power IC initializing to weird values of charging thresholds in /sys/class/power_supply. On one hand, I learned how to make a run-on-boot script work with systemd. On the other, why was such a feature not already baked into the OS? Both the autorun script (like rc.local) and the battery issue; the latter is said to be getting fixed in an upcoming EC firmware update. Maybe a better question is: Why doesn't GNOME have adequate battery charging threshold settings? If I was a 'normie', I'd be stuck with a laptop at 2% battery until the EC update ships.

There's not an easy way to toggle function of the touchpad from the keyboard. Prior Librem models seem to have this feature via the Fn key (according to pictures), but I see no such method on the Librem 14. Sometimes I want to go keyboard-only, like when writing this review.

The 'A' key feels mushier than the other keys. I've hit it with canned air a few times and it's somewhat loosened, but maybe it's just a side effect of chiclet keyboards. My TypeMatrix Dvorak fits across the laptop really well, so if it gets unbearable, I can always bust it out.

Some programs that I consider essential weren't installed out of the box. Some were understandable, but you'd expect a free software platform running GNOME to offer The GIMP for an image editor at the very least. PureOS doesn't appear to ship with an image editor so this seems like an odd choice, or perhaps an oversight.

For the record, the other programs are scdaemon, vim, htop, and tmux. I can understand their exclusion since the default install is desktop-oriented, but lacking scdaemon when they support the Librem Key is another odd decision. Not every Librem owner was interested in such a device, but it makes sense to put it in the default installation.

The Bluetooth controller requires a non-free binary driver. One of the chief reasons to buy Purism is software freedom. While the FSF makes exceptions for microcode, it's inconsistent to claim support for freedom while sporting hardware that's literally unusable with free software drivers, at present.

While we're at it, let's discuss the Management Engine. It is not fully disabled, due to the way Intel's architecture is designed. In the interest of fairness, Purism wrote about their efforts of reverse engineering the ME, and why certain parts needed to remain. It's just a shame that it's this difficult to provide libre x86_64 hardware due to these enterprise-focused features that enable abuse in the wrong hands.

Due to choosing GNOME 3 on Wayland, livestreaming is a nightmare, especially if, like me, you ended up using a mix of xorg and Wayland programs. I gave it nearly 5 months... GNOME (and Wayland) are still unable to meet the same use cases that xorg has fulfilled for years. As such, I moved to XFCE for now, until I get back to Fluxbox or i3. For all the fancy features, if it doesn't work with core use-case software, it's useless.

What I Hope For

Above all else, I want to see continued improvement on Purism's behalf. On messaging, and pushing for their next devices to be even more libre. I can appreciate purism itself as an ideal rather than an absolute goal, but completely free hardware can be achieved. Perhaps we'll be using RISC-V some time in the future.

I hope Purism moves their focus away from GNOME, with the upcoming changes for GTK 4 essentially pushing non-GNOME development out of the circle. Solus and others have expressed interest in moving to the Enlightenment stack. That will be an interesting development if done. It's unfortunate, because Purism has contributed to both GTK and GNOME, but the tide is against them in crafting their own experience on the GNOME stack. I'd rather see their efforts go where they'll be appreciated and move the desktop forward.

Lastly, I hope this machine helps me in becoming more creative. I'm trying to take a hands-off approach so I can focus on programming. I gave GNOME 3 an honest try, and as I suspected it still isn't up to par.

GNOME Dislikes

(Yep, special enough for its own section)

Some things like Alt+Tab have unintuitive function compared to its use in other environments. Super+Tab is what you really want most of the time. Oh, and selecting sub-windows or tabs of a program is a separate keystroke. I see why it was done, but the usability on a freeform "every window, period" flow is ruined.

You also can't launch a program twice from the overview to get a second window, like gnome-terminal; you have to focus the terminal and bring up a new window instead. Wat?!

Can we talk about how hard it is to get a custom program to show up under Show Applications? You have to write an INI-style .desktop file, move it to just the right place, and wait for GNOME to figure it out and display it. The GUI to make a launcher is not very good, and quite confusing. I had better luck reading the desktop file spec; it too was bad in its own verbose and abstract way, like most other FDO documents.

Why oh why is subpixel antialiasing enabled for font rendering? It's ugly and makes screenshots non-portable between displays. I don't want to see bits of color on the edge of my text. You need higher display dpi to get the full 'benefit' of it anyway. You can change this via Tweaks, which tells me GNOME ships with this on by default.

Sometimes, windows like the Nextcloud client or PICO-8 won't show window decorations, so exiting or manipulating them isn't as easy as it is in a regular window manager. Part of this may be due to GNOME running in Wayland instead of Xorg.

OBS Studio cannot seem to record the entire screen, or PICO-8; the window does not show up in the list of windows to capture. This is due to Wayland being unable (or rather, unwilling) to share the entire composited screen with a program, and the micro-protocol approach that Wayland uses in its design-by-consensus ensures it'll be a few more years before something like PipeWire and Wayland can deliver a quality broadcasting stack. OBS inside an xorg server session can see all windows. For being so 'modern' and a 'mature' project at over 10 years old, Wayland still somehow isn't capable of such a workload, while the 'old, busted' xorg still chugs along. Maybe in another 10 years, Wayland will support this use case.

GNOME lacks a system tray equivalent, so programs like Steam can be closed, but in the 'background', which GNOME then produces a notification for. So it knows it's there, but won't give me a way to interact with it to bring it back to the foreground? Mumble is the same way, to use a libre example. Come on, guys... What was wrong with having a tray for arbitrary icons that you don't necessarily want an open window for all the time but are still useful?

Please drag GNOME Files out back and shoot it. SpaceFM gets the job done and hands control to me.

A quick look under Tweaks gave me a few of the features I was missing before, like resizing with Right Click, but those are in the form of extensions that might or might not be there, or might not work on the next GNOME version. Some of these settings I consider basic and expected in a cutting edge desktop, so it's difficult to commit too much to the DE. I'm glad that most of my computer use can be distilled to a browser and terminal window.

I switched away after 5 months of trying to get a workable and pleasant environment. The single best feature was the overview access via tapping Super, which I can emulate in any other environment. XFCE will be a good xorg-based substitute for now, while I build toward my eventual LFS or similar OS with i3 on top.

Conclusion

For what you get, you're paying a premium for the hardware killswitches and security-focused design. I knew these things going into it, and I got what I purchased, more or less. It's Debian under the hood, so I can use a totally different OS if I want, as long as the EC firmware is applied and PureBoot is still in use, it's still the same machine. I want to do some research and testing to be sure I can do so before messing with the installation, just so I have another OS to go to if PureOS goes defunct. Virtual machines may be a better idea for now.

One thing I wasn't 100% on was the RAM. I will probably upgrade both the RAM and SSD in this machine, since the iGPU uses shared memory. Had I known that, I would've gone to 32GB. But for now, I'll see how hard I can push it before needing those things. The SSD alone makes things feel so much snappier, coming from HDDs.

Consider me satisfied, but I will wait before buying another Purism device. To be fair in this conclusion, I have avoided essentially everyone else for a laptop, for various reasons. Every brand I've come across has made some concessions; a single binary blob for Bluetooth is something I can live with until they source a BT radio with a libre driver. Otherwise, the machine has been what I expected it to be and it gives me the control and assurance that I'm looking for in a modern laptop. I can't ask for much better than that.

Before I go, a photo with my TypeMatrix, bluetooth mouse, and external HDD hooked up to the Librem 14. I am taking sticker suggestions for its lid!

Thanks for reading.

-z

OpenPandora and Purism are not related at all. They're just two companies trying to provide open hardware. I was a backer through the UK Ltd, which was not solvent and left some 1100 customers (like me) holding a bag. The German GmbH (now DragonBox) was solvent and offered to get us our units for the difference in cost to produce, but by that point we had all spent over $500 and he needed another $200 to make it cost effective for him. VAT made this worse, and I didn't have cash at the time, so I effectively threw away money. From what I understand, DragonBox is today offering the Pyra and units are reaching people. ↩