Stand With Ukraine

Zoness
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

Zoness
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.

Facebook Outage Day World Stopped

Zoness
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

Zoness
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.

IPhone 12 Two Months On

Zoness
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.

Cloud Conundrums

Zoness
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

Zoness
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.

Pop Culture Metaphysics

Zoness
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.

Extinguished by the Platform

Zoness
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.