This is Zoness?!

Artemis II

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:53:27 -0500

🌎 🚀 🌖

There are days, lots of days lately, where I think it’s all basically over for global humanity’s progress. I mean just look around you at the state of the world right now. Our mad king wants to demolish an entire country if a deal is not reached in the war he started. Gas prices and global economic supply shocks continue to hit hard, to say nothing of the human toll of yet another warfront opening in the world. Despite all the shit we are going through on the ground, NASA with a cadre of global partners from around the world, have sent four humans back to the moon.

No Kings 3

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:56:43 -0500

🚫 👑 ✊

Saturday, March 28th is the next No Kings protest which I will be attending, deftly squeezed in between family events with those who would not look favorably on such an event. Since I last blogged Trump has started a war with Iran, with no obvious end goal, sending gas prices to record highs. This man continues to cause as much damage to our country as he possibly can, looting us so that him and his cronies can get rich and side off into the sunset. The good news, Democrats continue to pick up wins and they continue to pivot towards candidates who want to fight for us like Julianna Stratton in Illinois. Even funnier, Democrats won in specials in Florida including in Trump’s own district where he voted by mail, a thing he wants to ban.

New Year New Desktop

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:20:44 -0600

🖥️ 🐧 ⌨️

Around Christmas I decided that it was time to install a Linux distro again as my daily driver. I opted for Fedora 43 KDE. I am so totally fed up with Windows 11, whose quality has declined so much in the “AI era” that edges that it beat Linux on have basically disappeared. Furthermore, the quality of Linux desktops, especially for gaming experiences (thanks to Steam and its Proton layer) have improved so massively that basically all the games I play work. The few games that don’t mostly fail to work because of Windows kernel-level anticheat. I either avoid those games or I play them on my Playstation.

Winter Ahead

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 21:00:13 -0600

❄️ ☃️ 🌨️

There’s too many ideas to cram into one post in the last eight months. First, my bad for struggling to keep this updated. Life has a way of distracting you when you have two young kiddos. Secondly, a lot of things have weighed very heavily on me this year. Based on previous posts you can probably gather that the state of the American, and frankly western, political world isn’t exactly thriving.

Earth Day Notes 2025

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:34:11 -0500

🌎 ♻️ 🌳

Continuing on his psychotic warpath of breaking the government and society….wait, didn’t I already write this? Yes it turns out that things have not gotten better politically. We managed to eke out some little wins: the liberal victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court on its 10 point margin was enough to critically embarass right wing oligarch Elon Musk who is now whining that he wants out of politics since he did not get his way, and people are being too mean to him. Nevermind the real reason he was likely slapped down was interfering with Peter Navarro, Trump sycophant and policy advisor on tarrifs. Musk has decided to cross Navarro and therefore Trmp offending perhaps the only actual belief Trump holds about anything: that tariffs are good for America.

Reorientation and Compliance

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 11:05:00 -0600

😠 😡 🤬

Continuing on his psychotic warpath of breaking the government and society, I want to draw your attention to a somewhat silly but relevant story. The story I am talking about is Trump forcing a rename of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. Additionally this story includes a renaming of Denali to Mt. McKinley, undoing over 50 years of established tradition deferential to local Alaskan tribes. Presumably because it owns the libs sufficiently with the added bonus of sticking it to the groups of people the American government has repressed throughout history.

Aftermath

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 14:26:32 -0600

🖥️ 🔍 📱

Unless you have been living under a rock, you probably know that Donald Trump has won reelection. Rather than prognosticate at length about where the campaign failed I am going to focus on a short list of changes that I am making in my own life from a technology perspective.

Firstly, and this began before now, I have been closing more accounts than ever. It’s long and very tedious but it is made much easier if you use a reliable password manager. At the time of writing I recommend Bitwarden. This process is useful because over time you can accumulate all of your accounts and see how large your footprint on the internet really is. Closures of accounts can be nightmarish processes but thanks to European regulation like GDPR, more sites let you delete and export data than ever before.

Travel Lookback: Shinto

Thu, 09 May 2024 08:53:45 -0500

⛩️ 🗾 🗻

It’s been nearly two months since I left for Japan. In that time I’ve had a lot of opportunities to wrangle my thoughts into something more coherent. My trip lasted ten days and had me covering Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nara. I stayed in one neighborhood of Kyoto and two in Tokyo to cover this territory. I travelled with two other lifelong friends with a loosely coupled schedule so that we could be free to re-arrange at a whim.

Japan Tomorrow

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 12:54:18 -0600

At long last, my trip five years in the making, whose planning began in 2019 and was sadly cut short due to COVID-19 in March 2020 is finally coming to fruition. Myself and two of my best friends are finally making our way to Japan for ten days, tomorrow. Not only that, I began a new job role this week at my employer which will prove to boost my skills towards modernization in the software development.

New iPhone

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 13:16:01 -0600

Welp I went ahead and did it AGAIN; I switched to the warm embrace of Apple and purchased an iPhone 14. My current Google Pixel 5a is a nice phone in working order, but its over two years old and so I was feeling the itch to upgrade. I managed to catch a Black Friday promotion for some money off of a new phone and figured, why not?

See there’s some backstory here: my growing frustration with Google as a money. It’s clear to me that they’ve lost their way from their days as a plucky startup, onto a large but loveable tech giant moving the internet forward. Now they’ve atrophied into a directionless company that, addicted to the heroin drip of ad money, is not sure what they want.

Init: Hugo Edition

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 16:39:26 -0500

Yo I am trying out Hugo as a replacement for Wordpress! Content will be restored as I figure out ways to port it.

Enshittification Blues

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 09:57:46 -0500

The internet sucks lately. Well, not lately. There has been a rot that has been setting in for years, now more accelerated by rising interest rates making “free money” technology ventures very unpopular and risky. What we’re seeing today is what Cory Doctorow famously coins as Enshittification. Quoting him directly from that link:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Transitions and Closures

Mon, 22 May 2023 10:22:00 -0500

Today bums me out. Why? Because the Peoria, IL Round 1 location is closing tonight at 10pm for good. For those who aren’t familiar, Round 1 is an arcade chain in Japan and the United States which offers a mix of food, bowling, karaoke, classic arcade games but most importantly to me, Japanese rhythm games. Back in its pre-COVID heyday, it was opened until 2am and allowed adults only after 10pm which made it an excellent spot to have a beer and play some games with friends or sing our hearts out.

Imgur Great Content Purge

Sat, 22 Apr 2023 12:18:21 -0500

Starting straight from the Gizmodo headline: Imgur bans NSFW Content, Begins Purge. Doesn’t get much simpler than that.

Back in the early heyday of reddit, imgur was created by a sole developer attempting to offer an image hosting solution to a budding reddit in the wake of Digg’s utter collapse. This site has grown massively in the intervening 15 years due to the ease of posting images anonymously, without an account. It was also a major hosting haven for reddit’s burgeoning NSFW subreddits and relevant communities.

Grounding Oneself

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 12:21:54 -0500

The blog has been quiet lately because I’ve been mired in a well over a month long major work effort at my job. As a software developer responsible for a platform used by thousands, I’ve had a lot of work to deliver lately. On top of the late work nights, on call times, desperate panicked calls and more; my son is fourth months old and hitting a famous growth spurt. With that growth spurt comes a major sleep regression. We haven’t slept through the night in weeks and weeks as we were doing in July.

Surveillance Capitalism in Post Roe America

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 12:25:28 -0500

Unless you live outside of the United States, it would be impossible to ignore the news of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. Republicans, Christian nationalists and reactionary conservatives have been pining for it since decades before I was born. Rather than lament the disastrous path that women’s rights in this country is headed down, because rant I can, I am going to focus in on a specific harrowing problem.

Summer Solstice Soundbites

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 12:26:30 -0500

Summer Solstice, also known as Litha, is less than twenty four hours upon us as of my writing. You wouldn’t know it based on the record heatwave many of us have been facing in the center of the country! Climate change continues its ravages across the world, heavily distorting the seasons in many parts of the globe but that discussion could take up many blog posts, I will set it aside for now.

Old Places Liminal Spaces

Tue, 07 Jun 2022 11:25:36 -0500

Last week, the day before I flew out to Denver for a long time good friend’s wedding, I made a brief detour in my hometown and adjacent town. I visited the adjacent town because other long time friends have made a major decision to relocate to northern Wisconsin for a fresh start and new work opportunities. I visited the town for a suit fitting for my mother’s remarriage to someone who has basically been in my family for the majority of my life and is already my stepdad effectively.

Stand With Ukraine

Sun, 27 Feb 2022 20:43:06 -0500

I’ve got a couple more writings coming down the pipeline but I want to take this opportunity to announce that I stand with the people and the nation of Ukraine. We in the west should band together to support a country being bullied by the imperialist actions of a violent, expansionist power that is Russia.

From my blog to the people of Ukraine we stand with you. слава україні!

My Hero Academia and Humanism

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 20:37:01 -0500

This season has had me busy at work but grinding a lot of anime over my lunch hour. Specifically, I decided to rewatch My Hero Academia in order to get current. As of writing, I am a few episodes shy of the end of Season 5 and have watched the first two movies.

think that as far as Shounen anime goes, My Hero Academia is probably my favorite one. It’s not my preferred genre but I’ve really come to like the story and general feel of the show. The superhero subject matter, bright colors and interesting character designs are compelling and entertaining. They also offer a nice break from bleak media of all other kinds. In that way it really takes me back to being a highschooler.

Facebook Outage Day World Stopped

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 20:28:42 -0500

Mondays are hard, they’re especially hard if your a Facebook engineer frantically, desperately trying to get your network connectivity back. Little did they know, or maybe they did know: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus are down globally.

Now I spent the day memeing this to death on Discord. Because frankly, there is no love lost for me. Where do we even begin on Facebook’s very numerous, protracted conflicts that are so long I can’t even summarize them entirely but here goes:

Digimon Metaphysics

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 12:57:15 -0500

In case anyone thought I was normal, allow me to disabuse you of that notion today.

Recently I’ve been watching all of the Digimon series in chronological order, mostly as a time killer while I continue to work from home. This turns out to probably be the right choice as it looks increasingly likely that we are going to go back into lockdown, but I digress.

Today I finished Digimon Adventure 02. This is the second season of the original Digimon Adventure, which made its breakout debut in August 1999 on American TV, almost to the anniversary of this post. If you’re only nominally acquainted with the show, the basic premise is: Young children (the “digi-destined”) get sucked up into a fantastical and mysterious world known as the Digital World wherein they meet, befriend and work with fantastic creatures called Digimon. These creatures are fragments and outputs of the data in this digital world but seem to have consciousness. They can be manipulated to do evil or sometimes they are innately evil. Digimon may also evolve, but not in the linear way of Pokemon, but with a series of branching outcomes catalyzed by their specific circumstances.

IPhone 12 Two Months On

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 12:44:46 -0500

After I announced my move to the dark side I promised that I’d come back and offer up some thoughts. I’ve had my phone since April 22 and have some opportunities to put it through its paces. Below, I’ll summarize some good and bad points I’ve found in my personal use case.

GOOD: Device runs very smooth on long uptime. After 30 days without a reboot, the phone runs as it did on day one. I brought a reboot to update to the next version of iOS and updates as well are very smooth.

Cloud Conundrums

Mon, 17 May 2021 12:41:31 -0500

It’s always an outstanding question to me about what cloud provider to use if any. If you’ve read my previous post, you know that I’ve recently migrated to an Apple device. Thus the temptation exists to move all of my files to iCloud. The prices are cheap, I don’t have to own the servers, what’s not to like? Still, that’s no guarantee of anything. Apple, like anyone else, has to answer to legal inquiries and they still have the decryption keys.

Moving to the Dark Side

Sat, 01 May 2021 12:39:47 -0500

Well folks, after eleven years of Android usage which began auspiciously with the much hyped Motorola DROID line of phones, I finally did it; I switched to iOS. My Android user friends and Windows/Linux/Android fellow devs (colloquially called ‘Windroid’) gasp in horror as I pay the famed Apple tax for access to their much lauded (or maligned) walled garden.

Why did I make this change? In short, its nothing sinister nor is it a given to be permanent. For starters, Apple’s recent move to crack down on spying applications over Google’s supreme disinterest in reigning in even the worst offenders was a major motivator. The comparatively closed ecosystem allows Apple to say “my way or the highway’ and it frustrates Zuck so much that he took out full page ads in the New York Times to come and complain about it.

Pop Culture Metaphysics

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 12:36:13 -0500

Over the years it seems that once in awhile we get something a little unique in our somewhat secular culture: the accusation that pop culture has secret, underlying metaphysical principles that exist to drive god fearing people away from Christianity. The Satanic Panic is archetypal of this fear but its remained extant into the modern day.

In future blog posts I am going take a look at a few of the sporadic claims attacking mostly things I personally like such as Pokemon, Dungeons and Dragons and video games writ large but I am curious to see if there are metaphysical threads that emerge between all of them. I find this question interesting because as society secularizes, we aren’t necessarily hard atheists but rather a sort of vague irreligious but spiritual category. One that is defined by capitalism, globalism, democratized access to information and content creation. I’ve been reading a few books on the subject and I have become profoundly interested in it.

Extinguished by the Platform

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 12:34:08 -0500

What happens if a service you lean on for a key, everyday piece of your life suddenly is wiped away? You don’t need to wonder, that happened to the Terraria developer. Quoting the linked Ars Technica article:

Three weeks ago, the official Terraria Twitter account publicly pleaded with YouTube for some kind of resolution to a recent Google account ban. The Terraria account explained, “We have not added anything new to our only YT channel (RelogicGames) in several months. However, we randomly received an email saying there was a TOS violation but that it was likely accidental and as such, the account would receive no strikes.” The Terraria Twitter account continued, “Three days later, the entire Google account (YT, Gmail, all Google apps, even every purchase made over 15 years on Google Play Store) was disabled with no warning or recourse. This account links into many business functions and as such the impact to us is quite substantial.”