The Week That Was — January 7th
It’s been a busy week, and so I haven’t been able to get to the blog here to write much of anything but I was thinking that it might be nice to start up a weekly post of sorts sharing some of the interesting things that I’ve seen around the internet and what’s going on.
So we’ll break this down into a few interesting stories, and then a few general discussion type things.
Happy Shaqmas
While I haven’t been writing much at all this week, in my job of news editor at TechRaptor I sometimes get to push stories that make me smile some and that’s what I did with this story. While I’m not necessarily huge on celebrity culture or things like that — I do like that Shaq is focused on giving back to the poor and kids without much.
One thing he did this year was give out 1000 PlayStation 5s, and 1000 Nintendo Switch’s along with other toys and gave them away to a school in Georgia. This is part of a yearly thing he does, and you can read a bit more about it here.
Now, how I feel about his NFTs minted to raise money for charity to give to kids is more … mixed.
Is that Banana? Or Pear?
We all know that artificial flavours don’t quite match the real thing. While flavourists work on making it closer and closer these days, older artificial flavours still are used — especially when they are cheaper for mass production.
This week, watching a video that I then read up some more about, apparently the same artificial flavour is used in North America for artificial bananas… and the UK for artificial pears. This is pretty crazy to me to find out about, but it has to apparently do with they got what was a somewhat generic fruity flavour and marketed it by region based on what was popular there — pears in the UK, and bananas over here. Interestingly, I found it mentioned a good amount that artificial banana flavour is actually closer to the Gros Michel strain of Banana that was popular before Panama disease nearly killed off the plant and the Cavendish was adopted as the banana of choice (note: we may see a future change in banana in the future too! Bananas are all basically clones, and are highly vulnerable to disease, and a new strain is going around hunting cavendish bananas these days.)
Mannequin Craziness
Have you ever wondered what happens to mannequins after they are done posing? I admit, I never did, but a new video by the always interesting Tom Scott brought it to mind this week.
Mostly, it turns out they are tossed away, but one lady in the UK has a collection of them that companies send to her. A lot of them get rebuilt, cleaned up and leased out for shows, but there’s still a giant graveyard of them — some set up on display, others like that. If you are in the midlands, you can actually go there and visit this spot, and even pay for a super market rush type experience — 10 minutes to grab as many body parts as you can and keep them!
It’s an interesting 5 minute video that is well worth your time.
Norton Warning
If you happen to use Norton Anti-Virus, I’ll toss out a quick warning here — the suite now has a cryptocurrency miner on it. While it is opt-in, if you subscribe to Norton it might be worth checking and making sure its turned off unless you REALLY REALLY want your anti-virus to be doing mining when its idle and taking a 15% commission. We covered it briefly at TR if you want to know more or know where to look.
A Dollar Store TV Show? Weird TV
Sometimes, you find out about a thing years after its done and you still can’t quite believe it. Dollar Tree, a US Dollar store not unlike Dollarama for us Canadians, a few years back had its own really bad gameshow. Pat Neely hosted it, and everything about it just screams confusion in how it is themed and made, including a different description about the show than what was actually aired.
Also, if you were thinking this was just a show they put on their website or something, nope. This was aired on the CW for its season, so it was a full go TV Game show and I’m still wondering how the hell it happened. Lady Emily did a video on it that I stumbled across this last week.
Treating Depression with a Game
One of the most fascinating areas of emerging technology for me in the gaming sphere is that we are seeing it in use medically. This isn’t the first time a game has started work in development for medical reasons, but a University of Utah lab developed game has gotten a $7.5m US grant from the US National Mental Health Institute to conduct trials for a game called Neurogrow — a video game designed to treat depression.
In the game, players care for a virtual garden with changing demands and conditions. Apparently, this is supposed to help strengthen circuits in the front of the brain, and in theory this can help recover circuits that the brain uses to overcome depression. The idea runs to working out a part of the brain that can be atrophied by aging, and that can block the effectiveness of anti-depressants when not working properly.
As someone who struggles with Depression (as well as anxiety), the focus on this sort of treatment is encouraging to see. This is a way ideally to help people, tested scientifically, and avoiding increasing the amount of medicine someone is on.
The Salt Lake Tribune has more on all of it.
What I’m Playing
This past week I’ve gotten into playing the Lingo-esq word game Wordle. Developed over the pandemic by Josh Wardle, Wordle gives you a single word puzzle each day and you have 6 tries to figure out a 5letter word, being told when you get a letter in the right spot, or if its in the word but in a different spot.
It’s easy, and surprisingly addictive and easy to share. I’ve started sharing my squares with co-workers and family. It also is completely free, and there’s no advertising, and there’s a heartwarming story behind its creation, as Wardle made Wordle for his significant other.
You can play Wordle at https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle/
I’ve also been playing Suzerain, an interesting interactive fiction/strategy/rpg type game. In it you play as the elected leader of the fictional nation of Sordland and have to navigate it through a post-world war 2 like situation. While there are a lot of parallels to other nations, stuff doesn’t line up quite 100% and the developers take this liberty to create a compelling narrative with a lot of choices. My first playthrough I went as a no-holds barred reformist social democrat and ended up getting myself replaced by a Military Junta. For that President Rayne, my only hope is that his reforms for better education, health-care and equality with minorities and women managed to create lasting change somewhere in his single term.
It’s an interesting game that asks you to consider priorities, focus, and look at all the problems there can be in reforming a country, as well as the factions that can emerge. Why isn’t a politician doing all that they promised? Sometimes, they might just be pushing to do all that they can while balancing a ton of other priorities.
It’s a fun game, and worth checking out. You can buy it on Steam or Nintendo Switch for $17.50 Canadian.
What I’m Reading
Canada Reads is coming up next week — but for now I’ve just finished re-reading the first two books of the Age of Madness by John Abercombie, as well as the third book released late last year. Its a continuation of the First Law world, taking place a few decades later, and continues the highly cynical fantasy series. I won’t say much about it because even some of the premises of Age of Madness’ draw on having read the previous series, but the fantasy world has entered the industrial age, and all the evils of capitalism of the early industrial age are on view in the gritty low-fantasy world. It’s not necessarily for everyone, but if you are a firm believer in Power Corrupts, then check out Abercombie’s books.
I’ve also started a new series by the late Tim Severin. This is a bit outside my normal science fiction/fantasy area, and instead in the realms of historical fiction. Vikings Odinn’s Child, and Sworn Brother are two parts of a trilogy that gives a fictional literary take on some of the old ballads, and connects them through the character of Thorgils Leifson. While he’s an actual person, he doesn’t seem to be much focused on so the author has latitude to explore them, and through two books we’ve been to Vinland, Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, Orkney, Britain and travelling some more. It’s an interesting exploration and a nice read — and you can choose for yourself if there is or is not any magic here though Thorgil would definitely say there is (I mean he is Norse, and a believe in their religion).
What I’m Watching
My mom and I recently finished rewatching Star Trek Deep Space 9, and the rewatch reminded me of why DS9 is my favourite of the treks. There is a certain humanity that pervades the series that can sometimes lack on some of the other shows — The Next Generation can sometimes get a bit too full of itself and preachy, The Original Series got a bit too cheesy at times (I mean serious the American constitution?), and Voyager rarely stopped to question what they were doing.
Deep Space Nine doesn’t present the federation as perfect, but as an aspiration and working to be better while dealing with a complicated universe. Commander, and then Captain Sisko is flawed — his temper can be a problem and he might on occasion be tempted to expediency- but he is always working to make the galaxy a better place, and when he makes those mistakes they are reflected on generally. Or, acknowledged as what he decides was the price he was willing to pay for it. The series gets off to a bit of a slow start (what Trek doesn’t), but finds its footing by Season 2.
One of the more admirable things about Deep Space Nine from a storytelling perspective is that when presented with a choice of whether to play things safe, or to take a chance, they almost always took the leap. It didn’t always work, but more often then not it did, while Voyager failed to take those chances and would struggle due to it often. DS9 was at its best when it did its own thing with the world of Star Trek, and in it you can see a move to the more serialized storytelling on TV that we see today.
And that went a bit longer then expected, I guess in the future I might limit the neat things to three and maybe only 1 or 2 of the what I was doing during the week. Tell me what you thought, and what interested you here, but it was nice to write about some of the interesting things I’ve seen and share them with you all.
Until next week,
Don
