Author: David K.

Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

“Absolutely, 100 percent that the DMs could have been compromised,” Jackie Singh, founder of Spyglass Security, told Newsweek. “I mean it looks like they had ‘god mode’ with seemingly few limitations and we don’t know how long they had it for.”

Source: Twitter DMs of Obama, Musk and Biden Could Have Been Stolen in Hack, Experts Warn

So Twitter has an internal backdoor system, which has been exploited by “the bad guys,” including access to people’s private messages. Since politicians are all over the platform, there are now national security concerns in play. Apple should bring this story up the next time the FBI/CIA/NSA demands that they implement a backdoor system that only “they” can use, in the name of the “war on terror.”

My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

The black market for Amazon reviews makes some sense if you consider how valuable positive reviews can be to sellers on the platform. With more than 2.5 million sellers on the platform, getting seen by customers who might make a purchase is no easy feat. As one friend who has been selling on Amazon Marketplace since 2016 explained to me, on Amazon, “the more reviews you have on an item, the more likely for the item to come up in an algorithmic search. The more customers like the item, with reviews, the more Amazon likes it.”

Source: My Bizarre Stint As an Amazon Reviewer for Hire

For many years, I’ve been complaining that you cannot trust ANY system of review on the internet. Always to deaf ears, of course.

U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation – Reuters

McGirt, 71, has served more than two decades in prison after being convicted in 1997 in Wagoner County in eastern Oklahoma of rape, lewd molestation and forcible sodomy of a 4-year-old girl. McGirt, who did not contest his guilt in the case before the justices, had appealed a 2019 ruling by a state appeals court in favor of Oklahoma.

Source: U.S. Supreme Court deems half of Oklahoma a Native American reservation – Reuters

Who continues to argue a 20-year-old case, at 71 years old, with a 1,000-year sentence, for raping a toddler, when you plead guilty to the charge?! A puppet, that’s who. People behind the scenes are using this case to wrest control of a large chunk of land away from the state of Oklahoma, and the power that will come with it. That is the real story. Who are the protagonists here? What’s their agenda? What have they been doing for the past 20 years?

PhRMA sues to stop state’s new insulin affordability program – StarTribune.com

“A state cannot simply commandeer private property to achieve its public policy goals,” said PhRMA’s complaint, filed Tuesday in district court. “The Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits states from attempting to solve societal problems in this draconian manner.”

Source: PhRMA sues to stop state’s new insulin affordability program – StarTribune.com

If their “alternatives” were working, people wouldn’t be dying from rationing insulin. The only thing “draconian” about this situation is the feudalistic caste system we seem to have recreated in modern America.

This country was started so that we wouldn’t have to live under the regime of a bunch of wealthy landowners who controlled the lives of those who worked their land. The large corporations — who don’t just control the means of production — but use the courts to prevent competition — get to unilaterally dictate their will to us serfs. This move is a complete abrogation of the implied social contract of a corporation. We wouldn’t even be in this position if they hadn’t been so greedy, and extracted so much from society for the past 5 decades.

Go ahead, I dare you to read up on how much money pharmaceutical companies have taken from the US government to develop all those medicines they advertise constantly on television, how much it costs to make them, and then how much they charge for them. The insurance companies have allowed this situation to develop, and get so bad that society cannot bear the weight of it any longer.

When the US finally adopts socialized medicine, the capitalism-lovers who wring their hands and call it communism will have nothing to blame except the corporatocracy that made it inevitable, and no one to blame except themselves for continuing to support a system that is leaving more and more people to fall through the cracks, and fend for themselves when they are the most vulnerable, until they become the majority, and vote with their pocketbooks to rebalance the equation.

Don’t tell me horror stories about health care systems in Canada or England. I hear horror stories from our own stupid system every single week, from rich and poor alike, and you do too, even if you ignore them.

Crafting in Elder Scrolls Online

Naturally, crafting in ESO is a very MMO-grindy type of thing. Since the start, I had been intending that my main character would be able to craft all the gear that I’d want to use on him. The best set of craftable gear for a light-gear magicka user seems to be the New Moon Acolyte equipment. It requires knowing all 9 traits to craft, and the 9th trait — nirnhoned — is a rabbit hole in and of itself, which I won’t even bother going into here.

Even after solving the nirnhoned rabbit hole problem, there’s the simple issue of time. Researching the 9th trait on any single piece of light gear takes 64 days. Sixty-four in-real-life days, though you can do 3 pieces at a time.

Now, you only need 5 pieces to make a set, so the natural thing to do is to create shoes, pants, chest, belt, and gloves, and finish your armor with a head-and-shoulders monster set. So, at a minimum, there’s something like 8 months required to research enough traits to break into this end-game build-out.

So, for grins, I just searched around on Tamriel Trade Center, and found New Moon Acolyte gear in a guild store. Turns out some master crafter had the same idea. I found all 5 pieces, with the divines trait, and magicka enchantment, just like I intend to create. It costs, like, $6K per item. So it only cost me like 30,000 gold to just buy the stuff, and anyone can afford that.

I guess I’m going to be playing the game, and time will be passing, so I can keep researching, and eventually be able to do this myself, but this experience has really slowed my roll on bothering with the whole thing. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of upside to solving the nirnhoned puzzle to get to the point of being able to create 9-trait gear.

Shoutout to Chiptunes

Chipzel on Bandcamp

I just wanted to post about how much I love chiptunes, and the whole scene. Especially Chipzel, who is my favorite in the genre. I bought Dicey Dungeons and The Crypt of the Necrodancer, based in large part on the music. Turns out, she was the force of nature behind both. Per my previous post on video gaming as I’ve gotten older, I’m terrible at Necrodancer, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to master Dicey. But the music for both is just terrific.

I also like this chiptune station: http://hyperadio.ru:8000/live, but I can’t seem to find where I found it to begin with. I think it was an Apple Music radio station, from it’s internal listings, that I put in a playlist, but Apple took the listings out of the application. You can still add manual entries, and I guess I can see where they’re coming from, but I sure hope they don’t remove the ability to stream an internet station entirely!

Twitter? In my Imgur? It’s More Likely Than You Think

I was just trying to get away from the political trash fire that consumes every. single. post. on Twitter now, and this is the front page of Imgur’s user sub. Come on, internet. Is there nowhere you cannot give it a rest? #SocialMediaIsDestroyingSociety #TimeToReadABookAnyBook

Why Don’t I “Consult?”

I get asked this question fairly often, and I usually just mumble something to move the conversation to something else, but I was thinking about my experience with it this morning, and wanted to write about it.

About… 25 years ago, I was working very heavily with Linux at my home, my church, and work. A good friend told me that his company wanted to get an email sever, and a file-sharing server. Aha! I was an expert at doing those things! I would indeed love to help!

In those days, there was a prominent local business-to-business consulting company which was charging $100/hr for their services. I quoted my friend’s boss at $50/hr. He balked initially, but eventually agreed. I bought them a server, installed Linux, configured postfix with spam rejection, and set up their computers with Outlook using IMAP. I bought a domain, setup a web site, and created a shared directory for internal file sharing. Except for the occasional new user I had to provision (which I could do remotely), everything ran fine for many months. I didn’t even charge them for less than 15 minutes of maintenance work like that.

Then the owner started making noises about paying too much for changes. I wasn’t doing much, so I agreed to cut my rate to $25/hr. Then he started making noises about how that was still too much, and my buddy told me that he was planing on bringing in a kid who was making local-business IT consulting his main gig. This guy was saying he could set them up with a wiz-bang Windows server for only $10/hr! I told him I wasn’t going to cut my rate any further, and they were welcome to replace me and my server.

Through my buddy, I heard how the kid bought the new computer, but couldn’t get mail to it. For days, he struggled, blaming my computer, which was turned off and sitting on the floor. Then he started blaming me, personally. So I wrote a nice, long letter, explaining that he needed to change the MX records in DNS, sent them the password to GoDaddy, told them what to do, and said that if they needed any more help, I would be glad to, without charge. None of this kept my name from being dragged through the mud by the owner.

Months went by, and I would occasionally ask my buddy how it was going with the new IT setup. Turned out that it was more down than up. About a year later, my buddy tells me that the owner was open to using my services again, if I would come back, and basically grovel for the work again. The whole process had been pretty dismal, but that’s when I decided, once and for all, that I didn’t have the patience or the temperament for doing consulting work.

The Reports of the End of an Era Were Greatly Exaggerated

I’m still working through the issues of getting respectable DPS numbers in ESO, because — of course — I can’t leave it alone. It’s impossible to dictate a single approach to any build, because there are so many factors involved, and so many ways of going about it, and most of it seems to be interchangeable. Is it better to have higher base damage, for every hit? Or it better to have higher critical damage, which fires by chance? Or is it better to have a higher chance of hitting critically? Or is it better to have higher damage on elemental effects? Or… on and on it goes. Videos like this help, but the numbers are also affected by the way you play the game, and are not always absolute.

I bought a better secondary set of gear through a guild store (which turned out to be much less expensive than I thought). I re-enchanted my main weapon with a different glyph, and changed the trait with transmute gems. I re-spec’d my CP. I obtained the “monster set” that everyone recommends for my build (which is really cool, when it proc’s). I’ve changed my rotation to what I want to do, with the understanding of exactly why I have each item on my action bar, and when to use it.

I’m getting 13K without trying. If I really concentrate, and apply all the buffs I can, I can get into the high teens. I’m hitting groups for over 30K, sometimes 40K. While this isn’t winning any awards, I no longer have to feel like I’m effectively shut out of running trials. Most importantly, the game is just fun now. I don’t have to dread walking around the over world. If I pull aggro from a random encounter, I can kill it in a second. It no longer feels like everything is a slog. I solo’d a public dungeon with 7 bosses in it last night. I only died a couple of times, and that’s because I was talking to people while doing it.

Now the situation changes. Now I’m going to start working with one guild to sell stuff to make the money I need to buy nirncrux and work with another guild to get the nirnhoned-trait gear I need to research so that I can unlock crafting my own set of high-end, end-game gear. Maybe by the time I can create that, I can also max out enchanting and jewelry to make the best glyphs and jewelry, and collect the improvement mats to upgrade everything to legendary, and the transmute gems to correctly trait everything (whatever that means).

I’ve maxed out the fighter and mage guild lines. I continue to work on the psijic guild line. I’m still trying to collect all the sky shards in the game. If you really work at it, I’m thinking there really are enough skill points in the game to max out all the crafting stuff, and still have all the skills you would want for fighting. I’ve managed to collect all the crafting except metalworking, and I have more skills than I know what to do with, and I still have, like, half the sky shards to collect, and that’s not even counting all the questing I haven’t done, or half the group dungeons I’ve not done for the first time.

The point is that there are still several more passives — and about 600 more CP — I can throw on this build, and I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I feel like I can lighten up a bit now, and just get on with collecting while I wait for researching to finish. Something tells me that I’m going to wind up buying research scrolls, if I’m going to really see this through…

Is This the End of an Era?

I don’t have a lot of memories from when I was young. All I have are a few bits and pieces from my early grade-school days. However, one thing I remember pretty vividly was discovering a Space Invaders arcade game in the super market when I was 6. It started a lifetime pursuit of video gaming that has been obsessive at times.

I’ll be honest: I stunk at early coin-op video games. I couldn’t clear 4 boards in Pac-Man. I couldn’t get through 3 levels of Donkey Kong. I fared a little better in Asteroids. It wasn’t until Defender that I found a game I could actually play fairly well. I got to where I could always get to the space stage, and usually back to Earth again. This was around 6th grade for me, and it was probably just a function of getting a little older, and able to understand more of the mechanics.

By this time, I had a Commodore 64 at home, and was playing a lot of games on it, too. Badly, of course. Hard Hat Mack stood out as a platformer which was particularly difficult, but one which my sister and I spent a lot of time with. There was Archon, which I mastered. And M.U.L.E., which I could win. But getting good at these games came at a cost. I, uh, “went through” several joysticks during this phase.

The landscape truly changed for me in my sophomore year of high school with the release of The Bard’s Tale. As much time as I had been spending with video games, in general, they were self-limiting because of the difficulty. But The Bard’s Tale was different. If you were getting beat by the game, you could retreat, lick your wounds, level up, buy better gear, use a different strategy, and then have another go. This was different. It wasn’t so punishing. I played a lot of Bard’s Tale. My sessions would last so long that I took the cover off the floppy drive, and used a house fan to keep it cool. I’ve never been any good at staying up all night, but I do remember playing the game for 25 hours straight once. Then there was Bard’s Tale 2 and 3. And Centauri Alliance.

During college, some good friends a couple doors down had a Nintendo. I missed out on the first Zelda, because I didn’t have one, but I remember staying up many nights playing Zelda II. I can’t remember for sure if I beat it, but I think I did. I do remember it being super difficult. It was the first time that I broke through the “git gud” in order to play a game. I know what this looks like. I know what it feels like.

After 30-35 years of obsessive video gaming, I’ve noticed that I’m really slowing down. There are times where I don’t really want to play video games, but I’ll play one any way, because there’s nothing else I want to do instead. There’s not much I want to stream, and even though I read voraciously as a kid, I don’t enjoy it very much any more.

My issue with gaming and difficulty has really been coming to a head with the quarantine. I’ve been part of a great group of guys who had been playing Gloomhaven every week for several months leading up to the pandemic. To keep playing, I bought 4 of us the “game” Tabletop Simulator on Steam, which has a free plugin for playing Gloom. We tried it out over the course of a couple sessions, and found that it was fiddly, and prone to irreversible error. So we kept looking for something we could all play online, and finally settled on Elder Scrolls Online. That first week, another friend turned to me at our first streaming-only church service, and asked, “So what MMO are we going to start playing?” I said, “Funny you should ask…”

We’ve been playing it a lot. Like, a LOT. I just checked Steam, and it reports that I’ve spent 247 hours with it in the past 2 months. That’s 6 man-weeks. That represents a solid chunk of time I could have spent doing something else. Something productive. Something self-improving.

Two of the other guys had played a lot of World of Warcraft, but I’ve never played an MMO before. I was prepared for the infamous WoW “grind.” ESO is not like this. You can max a character in probably 20 hours. Then ESO’s system of Champion Points kicks in, and starts a long process to max out. But! Those CP’s are shared amongst your characters. I really like this system. It’s not overly grind-y. If you start a new character, you can get them into the CP fairly quickly, and then they also collect and share CP’s with all of your other characters.

The problem for me has been player-versus-player. I never wanted ANYTHING to do with PvP, because I didn’t want to be humiliated by “bucket” players. However, in my quest for sky shards and their attendant skill points, I ventured into Cyrodiil, and into raw player-vs-player interaction. As predicted, everyone I’ve ever run across has killed me in a couple of hits. If I even bothered to try to fight back, I never even scratched my opponent. Likewise, the battlegrounds are an utter joke for me.

This led me to get serious about looking at my build, and what sort of damage a magicka sorcerer should be able to do. Based on build guides I had read, I thought I had a decent setup for PvE. Then one of my guys joined a PvE guild, and told me that they ran trials and world bosses on a regular schedule, so I joined too.

I joined the guild’s Discord. Before my first run began, I asked what sort of DPS numbers they would expect me to be doing, and the clan leader said “around 20K.” I had just used a target dummy before this, and had gotten 18K DPS, so I thought I was good to go. We ran the trial, and the combat metrics add-on showed me that I had done a mere 3.3% of the total damage in the final fight. I was doing about 3,800 DPS. It was, frankly, embarrassing. Turns out the dummy I had used in the clan-leader’s house was one which represented having all the buffs you could get in a trial, from the whole group.

So I’ve looked at various other build guides. I’ve watched videos. I’ve respec-ed. Crafted and bought better gear. Spent more CP. Last night, after staying up too late, I tried a target dummy with more changes, and I got 5,500. 5,500? 5,500! All of the guides I read agree that 20-25K should be no problem. Like, no effort at all. Lots of people say that they can get upwards of 40K, but many agree this takes real talent at “weaving.” I see people who demonstrate 60-70, and I’ve even seen one at 95! I’m getting all of 5.

I saw a post on the ESO forums from a guy who was stuck at 15K, and people were telling him “simple” changes to get into the 20’s. Meanwhile, I can’t even get on paper. And the worst part is that I have literally no idea how I could be doing any better. OK, sure, I could grind to CP810, and then grind trials, group delves, and world bosses to get top-tier gear, and then spend the resources to improve them, re-enchant them, and re-trait them, but the way the math works in the game, these kinds of changes look like they might add up to 20-30% better stats. I’m behind the curve by at least 400-500%; maybe even 1000-2000%. More CP and better gear will not fix my problem, and I don’t know how I could be executing people’s supposed 40K-rotations any better.

And even if I could master some 40-60K build/rotation on a target dummy, I literally have no idea how this would translate to actually running around the game, where you have to keep moving to avoid enemy attacks and AoE’s.

In all my years of gaming, I’ve never been stuck like this. And I’ve played Battlefield! I know how to work on fundamentals and learn the mechanics, and get to a competitive place in difficult games. I may not win, but I’m almost always a threat. I literally have nothing this time around. I realize that this is the game. The weaving and the rotations, working in tandem with your gear, is the main mechanic. I get it. But, as of this writing, I have no clue as to what to work on or change.

I’ve been noticing a trend with me and video games. I think it started with Rogue Legacy. This is a great game with terrific mechanics, wonderful graphics, good music, a great premise… and I absolutely suck at it. I can get to a certain point, and then I just can’t go any further. I’m not good enough to get far enough into a run to earn enough gold to pay for any of the available upgrades, and the restart “tax” effectively stops any further progression. Which is too bad, because otherwise, I love it!

Other games that come to mind are Crystal Catacombs (which I helped fund), Wasteland 2 (which I also helped fund), The Binding of Isaac, FTL, Dicey Dungeons, and Children of Morta. All of these are games I like, but which get to a level of difficulty I just can’t be hassled to overcome. These are mostly short-run, “rogue-like” games, but there are triple-A’s in there too, like Dishonored, which made me give up early on because every approach I tried to be stealthy on one level wound up failing. I just don’t have the requisite patience. Then there are games like Spider-Man PS4 and Borderlands 3, which are such utter slog-fests, that they just wear me out and take the fun out of it. And, finally — and especially — DOOM Eternal. I’m trying to play it on the easiest level, and it’s still such a chore to clear the levels that I consider the $90 super-deluxe pre-order (because I loved the first one so much) to be akin to throwing my money in the toilet, because it’s just not… you know… fun! The first one was amazing. This one? Ug.

It would be one thing for me to complain that I’m an old man now, and don’t have the patience to “git gud” at the “hard” games any more, but most of these are more-casual games, so I’m kind of stuck with modern gaming, in general. It’s kind of depressing to effectively be told that my favorite pastime is forcing me out because I suck at it. I guess the industry is telling me to go suck my thumb and play Minecraft or Terraria or something, but those kind of games never appealed to me.

What’s been surprising to me is that I can easily solo the content I’m supposed to be able to in ESO, so I’m clearly not doing something fundamentally wrong. But I’m also clearly not doing enough right to succeed at the end-game content, and there are no hints or clues from going through the game missions to point me towards what I should be doing any differently. I don’t know if I’m going to continue trying to fool with this or not. I don’t know what comes next, but I felt the need to save at this checkpoint, and get my thinking out of my head.

And maybe it’s time that I don’t figure it out this time.