Minecraft

If you're looking for some deep entry today, well, too bad---no deep insight of any sort today.

I built a 2.7k+ block railway bridge from my base in Minecraft westwards towards the Deep Ocean biome with the intention of building a mob farm, and doing some other exploration. I've been playing Minecraft single player on and off for a long time, but this was the first time that I had built something that used rail mechanics. I play on a local server, spending most of my time in survival, but with some creative liberties just to improve my quality of life and have fun instead of tedium, like not having my inventory dropped on death, or low-key aesthetic choices like block-lighting sources (Jack o'Lantern) for safety, and sand for smelting into glass for use to seal off the lava in the underground to form lava ceilings/floors as I dig out a 3-block high layer out. Other than that, everything else are from regular mining/smelting/farming activities.

I had recently migrated my Mojang account for Minecraft off to the Microsoft one, and it was... annoying, to say the least. I really don't like having so many things that are getting tied to specific [e-mail] accounts of one company---it concentrates risk into one place, and considering just how nonchalant many of these companies are in the way they handle false positives of whatever their fraud-detection algorithms go, I feel justifiably worried.

I mean, why should my single-player game behaviour be tied to some other multi-player game, or more drastically, why should a false report from fraud in a multi-player game penalise me through removing access to all of my single-player games, or to even up the ant&eactue; even more, removing access to software tools that are not game related that were mercilessly tied to the same account? It's definitely a worse form of justice than whatever we get from the regular governmental kind because such private and proprietary systems are a law unto themselves that have, so far, resisted attempts to be controlled by the lawful government.

I'm not saying that I want to be have all kinds of rules crammed down my throat. I'm saying that between facing enforcement from an entity that is unaccountable by virtue of being a private platform versus one that at least has a social contract agreed to by the electoral population, I would rather take the second over the first.

It's scary because more than ever almost everything that is of value that we use these days are no longer hours---that rental mentality has gotten itself much more deeply embedded within our consciousness over time. No longer do we ``own'' our things---almost everything is a rental. It's easy to see this for digital goods like e-books, videos, music, and games, but it is also catching up with the durable goods as well; the more ``smart'' that durable good is, the more likely that it will operate under a rental model.

Like why does my refrigerator need access to the 'net for? ``Internet of Things'' for my refrigerator to auto-stock up on things via delivery as a possible use case? ``Firmware updates'' for my refrigerator?? Why would my refrigerator, the product of more than seventy years of innovative life time, suddenly need the control mechanism of its being, i.e. the ``firmware'', to be updated? It is as though when we shove the ``smart'' moniker on a durable good, it suddenly loses all its operational stability from the days before it got ``smart'', and requires even more kid's gloves to handle.

That isn't progress. That is regress.

That's part of why I want out of the Infocomm Technology industry. We are peddling all manners of snake oil to everyone. There aren't many things that are done that actually improve life-styles---if anything, every new ``innovation'' increases the number of shackles we are slapping on ourselves to be further tied to the corporations. I love computer science, but I hate how the power of automated reasoning (and automated actuation from the mechatronics counterparts) gets abused to enslave humanity once more.

It's like that apocryphal story of the capitalist who was talking to the fisherman who was returning from his fishing with a bucket of fish, whistling a tune while looking at the sunset. The capitalist was talking about how the fisherman was wasting his potential, and how the latter should fish beyond what he needed so that he could buy more boats to fish, then form a company to run a fleet of fishing boats to make more money, so that in the end, he could just relax. To the gradiose statement made by the capitalist, the fisherman merely replied ``Isn't that what I am doing now?''

Some might think me nuts to suddenly decide to follow in the path of Jesus as a believer. But Jesus never tried to sell me snake oil, telling me to enslave myself to make a lot of money so that I can retire in comfort. Hell, even God in the Old Testament made it clear that even when He was providing [manna], each should get only what they need and no more, even actively punishing those who disobeyed. Work still needs to be done to earn one's keep---it is just good for society in general. But to be overworked, and have a lifestyle whose upkeep requires ever increasing amounts of resources to maintain... that's just Not Right.

That's enough out of this windbag for now. Maybe I'll play another couple of maps from Serious Sam 3: Before the First Encounter after my shower, or maybe more digging in Minecraft while watching some Hololive videos on YouTube in the background---I haven't decided which yet. Till the next update.