Mixed Musings

A friendly, local queer computer witch/zard and eir musings

Let's start with the obvious...

Nostalgia is a bitch-ass endemic that affects us all.

I start this musing up in this fashion due to the fact that drop-slamming Miss Rowling's name these days has as much impact as saying shit on television. So, let me say it again.

Nostalgia. It's a bitch.

Listen – you've heard it all before. Supporting J.K. Rowling, whether as a fan or as a paying customer, according to her, only fuels her goals. I know that you may not personally support her toxic trans-exclusionary views. Buying new media with her “Wizarding World” brand stamped on it does hurt though. I know that many of you can't feel this pain. And to me, I understand. It literally is a privileged thing.

Many of my friends are playing Hogwarts Legacy, a game with so much controversy behind it, I don't know where to begin. But I do know I can loop back around to my previous statements on Nostalgia. It's a bitch. Especially in recent light now that we all know the type of person Miss Rowling is. (Yes, even though I think she's a bitter old hag, I shall be decent and use an honorific. If you wish to do the same to me, it's Mys. Corvera. Not Mx. Corvera.) You're always going to be brought in by the things you love and adore and wish to return to as adults. And I understand that too. The call of the past is always going to be stronger.

My friends, if you are reading this. I can't stop you from playing. I'll sit here and turn the other cheek. However, in addition to this, I shall strive to play games that I know respect you as my friends as well. If you ever encounter me enjoying media that discomforts you, let me know. Show me how it hurts and I will cease. Because, fuck nostalgia.

Even if HL wasn't a Harry Potter Game...

I still wouldn't play it. In 1985, the world was given a gift in the form of Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, an open world RPG created by Origin Systems, development led by Richard “Lord British” Garriott. The game was novel – a go anywhere, do everything however you want, with the goal of ascending the binds that make you mortal and being an avatar of all that is good in the world. From there, the Ultima series introduced nuance. In Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, Lord British brought in the concept of Legalism, a noted heretical view in which one ABSOLUTELY MUST follow a set of religious doctrine as if it were law. It was here that the Avatar became more of a nuanced good and continued to grow as such through Ultima VI: The False Prophet.

“Now Jaida,” You begin to ask. “Why are you bringing up your favorite era of Ultima games? I mean, sure, we know you're a member of the UDIC,” (Airship Dragon, btw) “but what does this have to do with Hogwarts Legacy?”

Well... everything. Over time, Karma Systems have gotten so deep, it got to the point that franchises such as Fable and Mass Effect began not just rewarding the player for evil or Renegade actions, but also having consequences for such.

However, in HL, there is no coded wrong or right. Which means that there is, by default, a lack of nuance. If you can go around casting Avada Kedavra at your fellow classmates in front of a Professor, they don't give a shit. And if I recall my lore correctly, this would be absolutely taboo, especially since the Unforgivable Curses act was passed not more than two centuries before the game takes place. By allowing your character to do anything and everything, the charm of the world comes crumbling down around.

Then, there's the tale. The goblins in the universe are equated to being akin to Communists and those of the Jewish faith all in one package. And with the player actively trying to stop the rebellion, this does make the story a bit controversial with it's depiction of such people in real life.

Listen, Portkey Games, you tried. Your game may be a breathtaking spectacle, but I have my reasons I can't play it. You lack nuance and you make your staff look reality-divorced, which, seeing as the story was probably approved by Miss Rowling, means you probably are.

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

1. Kickass theme song

I don't need to say much more. Pegasus Fantasy is a banger. It rocks hard.

2. Great fight scenes

Before Goku was using ki blasts for every single fight, Saint Seiya was tapping into Cosmo for the most powerful punches.

3. Greek Mythology based anime

It's centered around Goddess of Wisdom and Strategy, Athena Parthenos

4. Nonbinary representation via Feminine Rank-and-File.

Originally set up to create a red herring regarding one of the characters, all women who aren't selected to become Athena's Saintia are to renounce their gender and wear a mask to hide their feminine countenance.

5. Saintia Sho

The change from the above mask law – the Saintia is a side story inspired by the modern magical girl about Athena's Saintia, or her absolute inner circle of Bronze Saints, pure as can be.

6. The Lost Canvas

A prelude to Saint Seiya that has the lead up to the first time Hades (who, in original Olympian Canon, is a cool dude) tried to screw over Athena.

7. Possible Trans representation

Pisces Aphrodite in the anime.

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

On the 15th of December, Epic Games announced that they were killing legacy support for GameSpy and earlier master servers to solely focus on Epic Online Services (henceforth EOS) as the multiplayer connectivity tool. Much like Galaxy, EOS claims to put friends from all places into one spot. To continue showing their support for their premier Arena series, EOS will be incorporated into UT3, which will be re-released as UT3X.

In the meantime, UT games will be delisted in the near future. If you don't have an Unreal game and were looking to get into the series, hit up GOG and get the games before Epic delists them from that storefront.

EDIT: Epic has delisted UT99 and UT2k4 from storefronts. Search the shady key resellers.

It's January 24, 2023...

Hi current or future readers. If the date in your PC reads “01/24/2021”, then today's the big delist day. The master servers are probably offline.

Here's how to get them back.

Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament GOTY (henceforth UT99)

Install the latest “OldUnreal” patch for your game.

Unreal Tournament 2004 (ECE) (henceforth UT2k4)

The community has already started to move UT2k4 over to the open source GameSpy replacement “OpenSpy”. Visit ut2004serverlist.com to learn how to migrate your game. Additionally, instructions can be found to updte your server to use OpenSpy here.

In Closing

The big delist isn't the end of an era of gaming. The only thing affected by this is game availability. I ask that you circulate the link(s) so that others are aware of the alternatives and make the update before the Epic Masters shutdown.

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

Elon Musk and Twitter -

Elon Musk is a Tech Tyrant. Let me just get this out of the way. The recent poll posted by Mr. Musk and then the decision to make Policy Voting only open to Twitter Blue members puts the policy decisions of community platform in the hands of the elite. This was possibly done so that he can get his way and retain control of his little toy. The fact that he supports the one of recent history's biggest tyrants is just proof alone that he doesn't care other than money and power.

I believe that he shouldn't restrict voting to just his paying sycophants. Sure, RuneScape's polls are for members only, but at least, with RuneScape, you're getting a ton of fun out of a Membership. Two games, a lot of quests and new skills to try, and new regions to explore. With Twitter Blue, it's just the check mark and priority listing in the timeline.

He should also follow the whims of the userbase as well and step down. He has too much going on. How else is his other scams going to flow now that all of his time is sunk into the blue bird site that is even more on fire since he purchased it.

“Free Speech” -

I may be misinterpreting this, but I don't believe “Free Speech” allows us to say as we want. Now, I grew up in a Christian home and still hold fast to values. I can point out that in James 3, James himself warns us how dangerous the tongue can be.

James 3:7–10

[7] For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, [8] but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. [9] With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. [10] From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. (ESV)

As such, I believe “Free Speech” is the right to criticize the government openly, along with “Free Press” (libel and slander laws do exist, after all). Looking back through American History, we can clearly see that these rights were not rights guaranteed by the Crown. As such, when the anti-feds wanted to ensure rights were secured by the document that laid down the foundation of our government, they wanted to make sure that people can openly criticize the government AND petition for redress for the reasons they were criticizing. One of the greatest presidents of all time (if not the GOAT), George Washington, is said to have taken criticism like a champ. Why? Because it was a right he not only fought for against the troops of King George III, but also agreed to have enshrined in the document he helped bring together in the 1780s.

Regardless if you are a believer or not, if you hear a professing Christian talk about how their right of free speech is being violated, point them in the direction of James 3: 1-12.

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

So, recently, I found that winget has an online library called Winstall. This does help people use the tool better. One of my online acquaintances had to factory reset her laptop. Feeling inspired by her plight, I made a few batch scripts to help bootstrap the install process.

For those not in the know, winget is Microsoft's own package manager-like program for command line installing programs from the MS Store or a database managed by Microsoft containing community submitted manifests. It's a core part of Windows 11 and was available in testing with Windows 10's Beta AppX Installer.

  • Quick Spinup: Writers Edition- Contains TeXstudio, MiKTeX, Pandoc, and PanWriter – batch file

  • Quick Spinup: Gamer's Edition – Comes packed with all the installers, Nyrna, Borderless Gaming, and a few open source games – batch file

  • Quick Spinup: Jaida's Ninite – Comes with my favorite programs and languages I feel are important for me to set up. You'll need to use winget's import command to run the install. – JSON. This was the first file I created, so it doesn't have a fancy “edition” name.

All you need to do is to save the file of your choice and then read and run it. I hope that this helps you and brings you joy, as much as I've had fun compiling such.

#programming #winget #windows11 #newinstall

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

Once again, I'm updating the site from Hugo Static to WriteFreely. Not only does this allow me to federate my blog across the fediverse, but the import functionality was rather nice. If you have jumped ship with everything that's going on, you can actually get my posts on your Pleroma or Mastodon timeline by following @jcorvera@jdcain.me.

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

Sorry that I kept you all waiting. It's been a hectic year. A few highlights of the year:

  • July: I received notification back from the WA DOH Vital Records office regarding an ammendment to my birth certificate. I'm now legally nonbinary!
  • August: I got a new brother-in-law. The wedding was rather fun and I'm glad I was asked to be an usher.
  • October: My boyfriend and I hit our anniversary again and it was a wonderful night.

Which leads me up to this past week. I've received some sad news with my family. Few days after hearing it, I'm still... struggling to process it all. I won't exactly explain what's going on. Family's wishes right now, plus it's not really wise to go about blabbing this sort of information to complete strangers.

Anime 2022 Watchlist

I got distracted this year with life and three series – “Spy X Family”, “Ya Boy! Kongming”, and “RWBY: Ice Queendom”. I did get Gundam G done... so I didn't exactly push everything under the rug. I know I won't be able to rush new series in the two months I've left. I'll roll over whatever I have left on the 7th.

Site Update

Due to a few interests dropping and current hardware restrictions, I've removed some links in the top bar. When will they be back? Dunno.

#importedfromold

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

I've got a lot of anime I'm in the middle of and I never really get back to it all. I've decided to make an Anime New Years Resolution list. The list is as follows.

  • Mobile Fighter G Gundam
  • Gundam Build Fighters
  • Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha Strikers
  • Mahoutsukai! PreCure
  • Sakura Taisen
  • Macross Delta
  • Cardfight! Vanguard -overDress-
  • Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle

My goal is to have these series finished by the 7th of January 2023, one week after the New Year 2023.

#importedfromold

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

Nothing much has happened so far. Being spring, the NWS has started siren testing, which will occur every first saturday until Octoberish. Annoying. I've moved back over to Linux, currently running Artix on my desktop. So far, it's not terrible. Runit does make sense to me. Recently, distrotube released a video on how his main production will be directly on Gemini, stating that 90% of the web is dominated by corporations. He has forgotten that 90% of the internet is deepweb. Only 10% is clearweb and on that 10% most advertise. Granted, many pages in the deepweb may belong to a corporation (such as your profile's edit page, my own service listings in Vultr or at work, and others like it), but those aren't advertised on, unless the company running the site is stupid and begins with Game- or is related to CBS in someway. As much as I like the concept behind Gemini (trust me, I've a few capsules myself), the web is here to stay and it will be dominant. Unfortunately, the dream of building a network of linked documents is dead, as the web is now the entertainment vehicle it has become. I am probably digressing and confusing some things. Who cares anymore.

#importedfromold

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here

Introduction

I'm wanting to share my own writing workflow with you all, just something I think that many of you might find interesting.

I'm a fan of Open Source Software. As such, a good portion of my programs are such – even the applications I enjoy on Windows.

The programs I primarily use for writing is Neovim, which is a super version of the vi text editor. It does work well on Windows, especially in Windows Terminal. I do have a few plugins – primarily a few distraction free plugins and org.vim, which I will be touching on below.

Organization

Like many starting points, it's always good to be organized. As such, I use org-mode, an organization format made with use for the Emacs editor, but can be used with almost any editor. In fact, Visual Studio Code has it's own org-mode plugin. As for me, I use org.vim, which provides the organizational layout of org-mode to write down the outline of my stories or even journal posts, like this one.

Prototyping

Once I have everything organized, I then go to use Markdown to get basic markup taken care of. Markdown itself is a “What You See Is What You Mean” layout for HTML, but can be easily parsed into any other sort of document format, especially with a converter like Pandoc. Passing the markdown into pandoc with a proper output file gives me a file I can then further refactor.

Refactoring

I take the output from Pandoc, which is a .tex file, and put into TeXworks. A .tex file is a special text preprocessor file with macros to properly typeset text. The TeX format was written by mathematician Donald Knuth back in the 70s and is still maintained today by both him and people who have made their own versions, like XeLaTeX, which is the version I use, due to the fancy fontspec package, which allows me to define my own fonts for use using TrueType formats. (I love using Garamond as my serifed font. Thank Apple for that.)

In any case, I take this .tex file and put it into TeXworks, which allows me to preview the document and make changes to make it look right.

Publish

Once I'm happy with the way it looks, I take the compiled preview and make it my final version. If I'm wanting an epub version of the document, I run one off with Pandoc, as it has native epub compilation.

End

It is a lot of work, I'll give you that, but in this case, the end really does justify the means. I'm left with a beautiful PDF document and a file I can use on an e-reader of my choice.

#importedfromold

Jaida Corvera Follow this blog (@jcorvera@jdcain.me) with any activitypub based fediverse account. Follow me here