Hey guys, I got a sorta sad update. I originally started this blog post as a sort of way to vent my opinion of sorts. I wanted an outlet to express my opinions, and this was a good way to do it, in a way that created discussion. It worked for a time, and I got a good amount of posts out. However, it seems that life has moved me away towards this. I am going to go away for a while, and most likely will be unable to post anything. I might be able to get a post out here or there, but for the most part will be done with this blog. I’m sorry to anyone that enjoyed reading these, and I hope you find other enjoyable blog posts to read.

So for potentially the last time, goodbye everyone.

Hey guys, a little bit of a more tense subject here, but some stuff that needs to be discussed. For those who haven’t heard, basically students from the UC system, mainly UCSC, are having a huge strike. I read a good article that goes over it with some opinions by a blogger name Sarah. The article went over the strike and her opinion. Sarah explains how the grad students are protesting for a cost of living adjustment, giving the name COLA. They are striking for increased wages or decreased housing costs, so that they can comfortably live and go to school.

In the article, Sarah explains that she supports the strike. She explains that she believes the price of college is ridiculous, and that people shouldn’t have to pay such large amounts for an education. She said that she is a UC student, and she is disappointed in the system, as many of the UC employees make over $500,000 a year, and they still won’t give the student workers more pay. She said she would support the strikes if they went to her school.

So I have a couple of things to say in response, and in general, about the strike. I actually know a couple of people that go to UCSC, and have done some research into the strike with people who are in it and have been affected by it. Now first, I do generally support what the people are striking for. The price of tuition and housing in colleges are insane. Many people pay $30,000 a year, totaling up to $120,000 for a normal four year degree. Some people go for longer and pay more, some go for a little less and pay less. Either way, the price for college is insane. This relates to another issue that I actually hear about from one of my friends at UCSC. He lives off campus, and pays around $800 a month for the apartment he lives in. This doesn’t sound like that much, until I learned that he lived with 9 other people. That means that total, they are all paying around $7200 a month. For one apartment. That’s just insane. So the price of housing and tuition are just silly high. This is where I disagree somewhat with what the protesters are doing. They want the school to raise their pay, so that they can afford better housing. While I understand this, I believe a better way would be to get the city to lower rent by having rent control laws put in place. The fact that someone can charge $7200 for an apartment is ridiculous. I understand that it’s more difficult, as it is harder for students to directly interact with city officials, but I think it would be for the better.

My other problems with the protesters are how they are affecting people. I’ve done some looking into what the protesters are actually doing, and they are harming or disrupting the daily lives of a lot of people. They actively block roads, including the main roads into campus, meaning anybody that had to get in or out of campus couldn’t use cars. This meant all the buses were also stopped from coming, meaning anybody without a car had essentially no way of leaving campus, aside from walking a couple miles, which was unfeasible depending on where you needed to go. This is obviously a big disruption to many peoples’ lives. The next issue is that they are withholding grades. One of my undergrad friends had his grades withheld, and he didn’t get anything graded for a while. Honestly, in my opinion, that’s completely unreasonable. Not only is it completely unfair, it’s disruptive to people that would want to support your cause. Why would an undergrad student support a strike that only negatively affects them. I did a little more research, and found stories of people that had grants revoked because they couldn’t turn in grades for those grants. That’s just unfair to those people, and there is nothing they can do about it. Then the protesters will barge into classrooms, and start trying to protest in classes. All of these seem way too rude and disruptive, and to the wrong people. I understand trying to get the message out, and that the point of civil disobedience is to get people’s attention, but they are harming the wrong people. The undergrads I knew were mostly in support of the strike at the beginning, but as they started getting grades withheld, classes canceled, buses stopped, and became unable to do anything about it, many of them started disliking the strike, even hating it.

My bottom line is, I understand the strike, and I do sympathize with them and support them. However, I don’t agree with what they are doing, and wish they would do it in a way that doesn’t harm people that have no part in it at all, such as undergrad students.

Hey guys, it’s been a while since I’ve last posted here! Sorry about that, I’ve been quite busy the last couple of weeks, but I’m back! Time to get back to blogging!

Recently, I was checking out the news, and found an article about Clearview AI. Clearview AI is a company that databases photos of people from websites online. It collects photos that are posted to various social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, among other sites. These photos are then used in combination with facial recognition software, as there is a huge database of face photos to use as comparison.

This seems a little sketchy to me. A giant corporation is finding photos that I post online, and saving pictures of my face and the faces of other people in the picture. Honestly, I personally would be uncomfortable with it, even if they had good intentions. This point was kinda proven to me, when I saw and article about Clearview AI being hacked. Essentially, Clearview AI stores the people that access their database. This includes companies, people that use the database, and also government agencies that use the facial recognition software. The hacker was able to access the information of what companies or clients were using the Clearview AI database. This list included banks, law enforcement agencies, and police forces.

Clearview AI had already been in a bad spot with a lot of people. Back in January, an investigation found that law enforcement agencies had been using Clearview AI to match pictures of unknown faces to the database, to find the name of the person. This caused a lot of outrage with people, and companies such as Twitter, Google, and Facebook asked Clearview AI to stop taking photos from their websites, and some states enacted statewide bans on law enforcement agencies using Clearview technology. A lot of people were concerned about the privacy, or lack of it with this technology. If anyone took a picture of me and posted it online, it would be in a database that means I could be tracked by anyone using a picture of my face. This is a scary thought, and something I think shouldn’t be allowed. I agree with the states’ decisions to ban law enforcement agencies from using the technology, although I personally think no one should be able to use the technology. It’s scary that if a photo is ever taken of you, your face will be in some database forever. People can use that photo to track you, and find you wherever you go, as long as camera’s are around. For example, if you were in a city with a street cam, someone could use that camera with facial recognition to determine where you are in the city. This already seems like a bad idea, but this is further shown by the hacking.

While the hacker didn’t obtain any information about photos or faces in the actual database, they did get confidential info that could put certain people at risk. This doesn’t account for the fact that a hacker in the future could get actual information or data that could directly lead to harm. For example, what if the hacker actually got into the photo database. Then they would have the names and faces of hundreds of millions of people, and they would be able to track them at anytime using facial recognition software. Imagine a hacker knowing your name and location at anytime. Scary right?

I personally think facial recognition shouldn’t be used. While it can lead to good things, such as identifying criminals from videos of their face, the possible insidious usages are a lot worse. Privacy is something I highly value, and no one should be able to violate that. If a photo of me is posted online, while it is technically possible for someone to visit it and save a picture of my face, it’s only viable on a large scale because of technology. That is what I’m worried about. If the technology was banned, then large databases of peoples’ faces wouldn’t be made, and while the individual photos could be accessed by anyone, no one would take the time to do it. Facial recognition technology drastically shortens the time and effort required to database people, which means anyone could do it. Currently, our protection is that it isn’t worth it to manually get photos of everyone and store them. That’s why I think Clearview AI shouldn’t be allowed.

There are a whole lot people in the world, and a whole lot of different cultures in the world. Each culture acts differently from the others in various ways, from how they speak to how they interact with others. One of the biggest things is what we eat. People all around the world eat different things. However there is one thing constant that almost every culture around the world eats – meat.

I for one, greatly enjoy eating meat. A good hamburger or some good barbecue ribs taste amazing. I have nothing against eating vegetables or fruits, I just like eating meat. However, I was reading an article from a foodie that talked about meat substitutes. The article was from Paul Osborne, titled How this “Meat Patch” is helping us make the change to plant-based diets, from the article series, Paul’s Eats. In the article, Paul explains how eating vegetarian can be healthier for you, as well as helping out the environment, since the meat industry has a huge impact on the environment. However, he explains how it could be hard for some people to just stop eating meat all together, so he explains about a thing called a “meat patch” of sorts. The way he explains it, imagine if you had a vegetarian meal, some people wouldn’t like it due to the lack of meat. What the “meat patch” does is release a smell similar to bacon or other meats, so that your brain associates the vegetarian food with the smell of meat. This will make the dish seem to taste better, as smell is a large part of taste. The goal of this meat patch is to eventually get the person to slowly move away from meat products, and slowly move towards more plant products. While the technology for this isn’t perfect yet, Paul believes that this could lead to eventually switching to all plant based technology. He also says that we’re getting closer, with stuff like Burger King’s “Impossible Burger”, which has a plant based patty, and lab grown meat is getting closer to a viable alternative. Paul hopes that in the future, we can be environmentally friendly whilst eating only plant based foods.

I agree with some of what Paul says, but I also disagree with some of what he says. While I think that it is bad that the meat industry is polluting our environment, I think instead of just getting rid of meat products, we should be holding the meat industries more responsible for their actions. I would be willing to pay a little more to help out the environment if costs go up. Also, while I completely support and respect if someone decides to go vegan or vegetarian, I also hope they respect my right to decide to eat meat. If I want to eat meat, I should be able to. Although the plant substitutes and lab grown meat are interesting. If a plant substitute tastes enough like meat to the point where I can’t tell the difference, then I wholly support that endeavor. However, we aren’t quite at that point, and a lot of the plant based meat substitutes taste off, or aren’t that good. Lab grown meat is also an interesting thing. If we can “grow” meat without any animals being harmed or injured, and it’s healthy and the same as normal meat, I’m all for it. If a very good alternative for normal slaughterhouse meat, and it was good enough that I couldn’t tell the difference, then I would 100% switch over. However, until that day comes, I think I should be allowed to go out and buy a nice steak.

I read an article recently titled Robi Ludwig: Are video games a mental health hazard for our kids?. In the article, the author Robi Ludwig talks about video games and gives some facts about it. He explains about a research from Dr. Daphne Bavelier, who did a study on popular first-person shooter games such as Call of Duty. Bavelier had found that the brains of those playing such video games showed activity in brain regions that showed many visual-spatial benefits such as attention, task switching, brain plasticity, learning, short-term memory, perception, and perceptual decision-making skills, all of which can help prepare children for jobs in the future. The study also said that gamers were better at making split-second decisions, and less likely to be violent. There had been a previous study that said playing violent video games could lead to children being more violent, however a psychologist Christopher J. Ferguson thinks that the study was done improperly, with the results being incorrectly analyzed. He says the study completely ignored the important social factors of the mental health status and the family environment of the gamers. Ferguson found that poor mental health, such as depression or antisocial personality disorder, were much more likely to cause aggressive behavior. He also found that a poor family environment was also more likely to cause aggressive behavior. Another study found that problems linked to video games were dependent on the child’s psychological investments into the game. Gamers that were heavily invested into games were more likely to be at risk as opposed to those that played games recreationally, and kids who used games as a method of escape were more likely to have negative emotions or lower self-esteem. These both show that it’s a lot more complicated than we think, and not just a simple case of video games leads to negative emotions. Another problem is video games can cause trouble if the game is addictive, and prevents the player from developing good habits. Ludwig summarizes that essentially, there is no solid answer stated. Video games can be very helpful as much as they can be harmful, and it drastically depends on the surrounding situation.

I personally disagree with the idea that video games are more likely to cause violence. I think the main issue with these studies are that they don’t separate what is caused by gaming and what leads to bad habits while gaming. For example, the study that showed that playing more violent games meant the child was more likely to be violent didn’t consider the psychological background of the people playing the games. A lot of the listed symptoms that they had listed seemed like they would have stemmed from already existing issues, not video games. This is said by Christopher J. Ferguson, as he believes the studies were improperly analyzed. I think a lot of the time, they would find kids that already had other issues going on, which would lead to them playing certain games, not the other way around. For example, a kid that is having issues in their household could be more likely to develop bad habits with gaming, while a person playing the same games the same way but in a better household would not develop those bad habits. This is anecdotal evidence, however growing up, I often would play what most consider more violent video games, and I have never really had mental or physiologic issues in my life, and have generally been living a pretty good life. This is also true for many of my friends and my brother, who played those games with me. None of us have any mental issues, and we all generally had good lives at home. While this is very anecdotal and personal evidence, it’s hard for me to believe that video games could directly cause violence, as I played games with many friends, and none of us have really an ounce of violent tendencies or problems. The only people I know that had bad gaming habits already had troubles in their lives outside of gaming, and usually used gaming as an escape from their problems. This of course isn’t the best thing to do, however sometimes people feel like they can’t do anything else. I think the best way to fix that would be the fix the root problem, not blame video games. The author says that video game addictions can be harmful, and that is true, however they also are similar to any other kind of addiction. Drug addictions, gambling addictions, or any other addiction can be just as harmful, and a video game addiction isn’t itself special. If a child didn’t make friends and developed bad studying habits because they were always playing video games, it would be bad, however the same thing could be said if they had spent the same amount of time doing nothing but reading, or dancing, or any other activity. The reality is that too much of anything is bad, and video games aren’t an exception. However, they also aren’t a special case, and I think people are trying too much to blame video games for problems that arise from somewhere else. So while I think it is possible for video games to be unhealthy, I think that people should try looking for other things that could be the root problem, such as problems at home, before they go to blaming violent video games.

Hey guys, this post isn’t going to be about games much. I just wanted to get my opinions out on something that is slightly terrifying. A post from Koi Lovers Paradise that I read recently was about facial recognition. The post was titled Face to Face. In the post, they talked about facial recognition software, and how it can be harmful or helpful. They said that while facial recognition could be used to keep order or be helpful with security, it’s also possible it could be used for harm. It would be possible for the government to keep tabs on every person, as long as there are cameras nearby. That means that going into any major city and possible even small cities and towns would get you tracked. If the government decided to abuse this technology, it would be terrifying. Any stoplight could have a camera that tracks your every movement. It could track where you ate lunch at, where you bought groceries from, what video games you bought, everything. Not only does that feel like a complete breach of personal privacy, the government could do malicious things with that info. For example, if a camera recognized your face at a protest demonstration, the government would know what you were protesting about, and while they might not be able to do much, what would happen if they made protesting illegal? They could track you down and easily arrest you. This seems all dystopian Sci-Fi, but it’s really something to worry about. As technology gets more and more advanced, we’re getting closer to all the Big Brother 1987 governments that we right about in fiction. Before facial recognition, it was unfeasible for the government to watch everyone. However, with advancing technology, a malicious government could watch every person autonomously, with very little manpower, using only computers. In fact, it’s sort of happening right now, in China.

In China, there is a system called the Social Credit System. Basically, each citizen is in a large database, and each person has a social score. Doing things the government approves of gives you a higher score, and can give you discounts or access to better jobs. However, doing things the government disapproves of can limit you. Certain jobs would be denied based on your score, and if you’re low enough, they even limit how much you can travel. It’s straight out of a Sci-Fi novel, yet it’s actually happening. Cameras around cities track the citizens based on facial recognition software, and then it detects who is around them and what they are doing. Being around people with low social scores will lower your own score. Essentially, the Chinese government is using cameras and facial recognition software to track it’s citizens, and rate them based on how well they are listening to the government. This is a total complete breach of privacy, and the government is overstepping it’s bounds. We should be doing everything in our power to prevent this from happening in the U.S., and stop it from happening in China.

Luckily, it seems that from the article that Koi Lovers Paradise referenced that the U.S. is trying to regulate facial recognition software. This is good for the people, as it means that it’s less likely we’re going to be in some dystopian society that tracks everyone, and arrests people that resist the government. The future we should be aiming for should be a future of freedom. Anyone should be able to go where they please and talk how they want, without worrying about being arrested or having rights taken away. Hopefully facially recognition software isn’t used for anything malicious in the future.

I was reading an article about Nintendo, specifically their return policy. Apparently Nintendo doesn’t allow customers to cancel digital preorders. For those that don’t know, a preodering is when you purchase something before it’s actually released. It usually has some benefit, like being slightly cheaper, or giving special bonuses, like special ingame items that can only be obtained by preordering. Consumer authorities of Germany and Norway were suing Nintendo, as it was against the EU’s Consumer Rights Directive, which says that you must be able to cancel online purchases to receive a refund. The case went to court, and the court ruled in favor of Nintendo, meaning that their policy of no online refunds stands.

A lot of people dislike the idea of preordering, as it is basically giving the company money and hoping that they keep their promises. It’s sort of the same as the crowdfunded companies- you give them money and hope they give you whatever they promised to give you. This of course, doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. If the company doesn’t keep their promise, you won’t get your money back. Your money is completely gone. And even if the promise is kept, you might simply not like the game. If you had instead waited for the game to actually release, and try it out before buying it, you might have realized that you don’t like the game, and not have bought it. Either way, preordering is generally not a good idea. An example of this is the game No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky was released on August 9th, 2016. Before the game’s release, it was incredibly hyped, with many people extremely excited to play the game. The game was available for preorder, which many people did. However, on the day of release, the game was met with heavy criticisms. The game was considered too boring, too buggy, and not worth the money spent on it. This of course, made many people upset, especially those that had preordered, as their money was effectively lost.

This is why Nintendo not allowing refunds or preorder purchases is bad for consumers. Most preorders are a bad deal. While you might get a special item or character, the chance that you could lose your money with nothing to show is something to consider. Because you can’t get a refund, anyone that decides to changed their mind has already lost their money. This is of course, non-consumer friendly, and potentially a violation of laws in certain countries. In fact, Nintendo is one of the only companies that does not have any way to cancel or refund online software. I think that Nintendo should have to follow to rules, and should allow refunds, as the consumer should have safety and knowledge, that if they no longer want the item, they can get their money back. It’s unfair that Nintendo can just ignore the law because they say that their rules comply with the laws.

Recently I’ve been reading some other blogs from other blog writers. One post that caught my attention was a post about movies around the world: My Westernized Experience: Film. This post was oddly written by an AI training to write similar to a human, which is really cool. For those that read my last post, I wrote about the world and how connected the world can be with video games. The post I read is kinda similar. It’s about how the world can be connected through film and movies. The post was about how many foreign film directors get awards like the Golden Globe awards, yet we rarely see foreign films in US theaters. The author of the post, SammyTheSlugBot, believes that the language barrier is the biggest reason for the lack of foreign films in the US, and I agree with this. Some people might feel like it’s not worth seeing a movie if they don’t know the actors, don’t know the language, and don’t get the cultural aspects. I can understand this to an extent. It costs money to go a theater, and someone might hesitate to go to the theater if they don’t know whether they would enjoy the movie or not. Some people also would rather watch a movie for the visuals, and having to read subtitles may detract from the viewer’s experience. Another problem is the cultural differences from different cultures. Even if you read the subtitles and understand what is being said, you may not understand the context and background behind it. For example, let’s say someone that doesn’t know about American sayings watches an American movie. If someone in the movie says something is “a piece of cake”, the viewer might be confused as to why they are calling something a cake. This would be the same for an American viewer watching a Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean film. It’s difficult to understand the cultural sayings and jokes. All of these combined make it understandable that American movie watchers would hesitate to spend money at a theater to watch a foreign film, this movie theaters would be less likely to have showings of foreign movies.

I am familiar with the concept of a lack of foreign representation in media, mainly in video games. There are many excellent video games that are made in foreign countries such as Japan or Korea, and many of them are never seen in the US or receive an official translation. An example of this is the popular game series, Fire Emblem. For those of you who don’t know, Fire Emblem is a game series in where you play as a commander, controlling your units to fight against enemy armies. The game is now fairly popular, mainly due to the inclusion of characters from Fire Emblem in the much more popular game, Super Smash Brothers. However, the games initially were very popular in Japan, but essentially unknown outside of Japan. Some people in the US had heard of the game, but it was never officially released here, so people that wanted to play it had to buy copies from Japan. It wasn’t until the 7th Fire Emblem game that a US version was finally released. The game was widely well received, and most future Fire Emblem games were also released world wide after that. However a lot of games never become as popular, thus never get a world release. This is a common issue with less popular games made in Japan, and thus they will basically never be seen by people in the US. I’m not sure of a total solution to the problem, but it is fairly similar to the lack of foreign movies in the US, which i think is quite sad. Next time you’re looking for a game to play, try looking at some foreign games. They might not be in English, but many of them are just as fun or even more fun than the games we have in the US.

Recently I was doing some reading on news sites and other stuff, mainly Reddit r/news (maybe not the best source but it does link to the actual source) when I stumbled on this article: Teenager having seizure saved by online gamer – 5,000 miles away in Texas. Basically what happened was Aiden Jackson was playing video games with their online friend from across the globe, and he had a seizure. His friend, Dia Lathora, was playing video games with him at the time, and noticed that he was making sounds and noises that “I could only describe as a seizure”(Lathora). She tried asking if he was okay, and he was unresponsive. So she tried to find the emergency number for the UK, and called it to get police and medical assistance sent to Aiden’s house. Aiden’s parents were downstairs, unaware that Aiden was having a seizure, so they were understandably surprised when police and ambulance showed up outside. They went upstairs to find that Aiden was “extremely disorientated”(Caroline Jackson). Aiden was then given medical assistance and is now okay. All in all a good ending, with no one hurt.

I like this article for a lot of reasons. To me it shows the power of video games in our huge world. The ability to play a game with someone that is thousands of miles away keeps us connected. Not only do they let people stay connected, but people can even make new friends from people they meet online. Two people from opposite sides of the world were playing games together, and being friends. The fact that Dia possibly saved Aiden’s life by calling emergency services for him while on the other side of the world shows how video games can be helpful. Beyond that actual helpfulness of being connected, just being friends with other people around the world is fun. In most other ways, it’s difficult to make connections with people so far. The internet changes this and allows us to converse with anyone, anywhere. However, being able to converse isn’t all. You can also play games over the internet, similar to how you would play soccer or baseball with friends close to you. For example, I have a friend that lives in Canada, while I live in the US. I play video games with him, like League of Legends or Rainbow Six Siege. We stay close friends because we play a lot of video games together.

I think this story can be a lesson for all of us. Video games save lives. But really, video games help keep us connected, and can keep people of different backgrounds living in different countries linked. There are almost no other things that exist that can do this, which is why I like playing video games. Meeting people online that you would never meet in real life can be fun. This is why I would recommend anyone play video games. You might meet some people that will become your friends, or you can play with friends you already have that live in other countries.

Hello to anyone reading this, I am the guy who games. That probably doesn’t mean much to anyone reading this, so it seems an introduction is in order. As you probably have already guessed, I am a guy that plays video games. A lot. Like a little too much. Anyway, this blog is gonna be about stuff that happens in the world, usually related to games somehow, but not always. While this blog is mainly focused around games, it won’t always be the main center focus. There should be at least something on this blog for anyone to enjoy. That being said, video games will be a large part of my blogs! I’ve had a love of video games ever since I was a kid, and want more people to join me in my love of video games. So come with me, as we experience the world and all it has to offer, all while enjoying some nice video games.

“Greetings, stranger. Stay awhile and listen…”

– Deckard Cain, Diablo II