State of the blog 2023.

Holy crap. It's 2023.

This is the year where we should be running around in man-bikinis in the UK worshipping a God that vomits guns Zardoz style! Okay Zardoz, the penis may be evil. You MAY have a point. But we're keeping it regardless of how many H&K fully automatics you try to give us.

Okay, we know Zardoz is set in 2293 because the movie tells you and thus the meme is wrong. Guess the internet is impatient and can't wait another 270 years. The consolation prize is that anything that gets people to watch this hot mess of sci-fi is bonus points in our book!

Looking beyond that. We at S-Config wish you guys a happy new year. A look back on 2022. Perhaps what we hope to accomplish in 2023. Read on if you want to know more.

Happy new year 2023!

Throughout the years, I've spent New Year in all sorts of different places. Clubs, Warehouses with DJ's, at a friend's first business, traveling to other states to watch furries get drunk, at NYC times square, with parents forever alone standing on an empty lakefront when it's -8 C outside. Time to change it up again. This time at the Garcade. Which is an all-ages classic arcade place on the north side of Milwaukee in the Menomoniee Fall region. Now, there is such a beast as a "Barcade" where they serve alcohol to go with your classic gaming experience. But this location is alcohol-free which is rather refreshing compared to what everyone else was doing on new years eve. and our experience is as follows:

• Every "Stranger Things" (3rd favorite) pinball machine we've played throughout the US (Texas, Utah, Tampa, and Milwaukee) always had a failing solenoid flipper issue where the back charge that's supposed to snap the flipper back to park position simply fails. Leaving the flipper halfway up. Never seen it happen so much on such a new machine. What is up with that?!?
• The lobby where you can eat and drink had a TV going off every 70's 80's and 90's cartoon intro going back to back. I remember almost 95 percent of them. Thanks! Now I feel old as fuck!;)
• I got to watch a Stern pinball machine soft crash. Woot technology!
• "Total Nuclear Annihilation" (2nd favorite)is still my favorite pinball machine. It doesn't rely on Nostalgia and has its own IP. The playfield is savagely hard. Apparently, the people that make also send software updates and bug fixes for the thing which is amazing. I'd love one but don't have $9,000 so instead, I'll just play it in any state I'm in.

What's my favorite pinball machine of all time? Grade didn't have it. But it was "Police Force". You can never forget your first pinball machine and to top it off. I'm Furry trash, so it works.

Around 11 pm I was starting to get a little bored. But that's my own damn fault! But it's good to see pinballs and classic arcades making a comeback when it felt like the industry dodged death so many times throughout its existence.

Is S a pinball wizard?

Hardly! I just flail on the flipper buttons and hope for the best to be honest. But I could never tilt one of these. These machines in their own right are works of art and to tilt or shove them is just evil.

Overall, pretty good time!

The things of 2022.

We would say that we certainly accomplished some things here. But also a few things in RL as well.

Different place, different time! HAHAHAHAH!

First thing first, we moved from one location in Milwaukee, WI. To another location in Milwaukee, WI. A lot of accumulated events brought us to this decision. It could be the fact that we've stayed in one place too long and instead of doing the "smart" thing of going into horrible debt buying a house we pissed away our money in rental properties.  But also waking up at 2 am to fight outside of the bar across the street. Getting your windows blown out on your car for $20 sunglasses. Or dealing with neighbors that smoke so many cigars indoors that it was actually seeping through the walls and throwing away a lot of expensive things. Those elements help too!

It's oh so quiet.

The reason why I'm bringing up the move is the new place is interesting in the respect that we're not sharing a street where everyone drag-races their cars or revs their Harleys until the engine explodes. So it's actually quiet to do audio work in the future.

The reason why we're bringing this up is not only to have more additions in our Audio Testing section. But to perhaps start a new project. We've gotten e-mails from people wanting to use the samples in that section for their own applications and audio testing work.

Interesting.

This verges on Voice Actor type of activity. We never really considered that path as something people may want. But perhaps in 2023 we'll expand on that some more. Not just do a demo tape or something lame but actually give out something which could be usable with a 'do whatever the fuck you want' kind of license.

The Fediverse.

My instance at core.s-config.com is actually doing remarkably well! The blog article about my 2nd return to Mastodon/Fediverse is here and added to the social blades. Does this mean we're totally going to abandon centralization?  No. Because the instance is on my box. It may communicate to other boxes via ActivityPub. But if we pull the plug on the server it's gone!

Who benefits from this type of technology? The host or the users? The answer to this one is Neither!

It benefits YOUR community. My instance has 2 other users on it but if you self-host your own instance all of your own then you are the community. If you are a user you need to find an instance that you could call YOUR community. I'm fairly sure I'll be feid-blocked by one instance during my time if not by default for using Pleroma (Because of Fediverse drama we guess?!?).  But it's okay because I've told my instance to only listen to a handful of art servers.

The Fediverse to us like many technologies we've tried is a tool. It allows us to broadcast what we're doing here and to those interested in what we're writing (and to those reading this, holy shit, you're awesome! Thank you!) We are fully aware that, unlike Twitter, you can't just log in and expect some algorithm to decide who you follow. Fuck social algorithms and do the hard work of following who you want.

New anonymous protocols added.

We added I2P in 2022 because Tor has been going through a lot of attacks on their network and thus we receive e-mails stating the service going offline periodically. It's not really user-friendly like Tor has become where you could launch a browser and go to town. And it certainly can't play videos across a network that has dial-up speed. But this could very well be the fact that there aren't enough gateways to keep I2P running nicely.

Webring status update.

Another thing that we did in 2022 is we added webrings to our Cellar Door.

Originally what we had in there was Blogroll which is slightly different with respect to those sites that are run by our friends or people that we seriously look up to and it doesn't matter if they link back to us because they're just that fucking awesome.

A webring is a little different in the respect that we are a part of a community of others that self-host their own content. Although we may or may not agree with each other's opinions and worldviews we at least give each other the respect of sharing links to each other's sites

Lately, because the webring we're involved in has no javascript, and it's based on the word of an anonymous image forum. We had to impose some rules that you well. Actually have to have a webring of sites. Doesn't matter if there are three from the Webring or all of them. Just something! It's just bad etiquette to ask for linkage but not offer in return.

There are other webrings we would be interested in joining. But the need to link to JavaScript from a third-party source is what drives us away from pursuing those options..

Although they are now offline, we'd like to take a special moment to thank the admins of Slushbin for getting us motivated and involved in some of the webrings we are currently in. We've contacted them and they're doing okay. So if they start a new site. Or ride off into the sunset. Or if we leave the webring ourselves for reasons! Thank you for reaching out to us and talking.

Quick update 01/13/2023

They're back! https://www.slushbin.org/ if you want to check it. They just needed to sort some things out!

Background tasking.

There are things that go on on this website that we're not entirely sure people notice. But we do post updates on our past blogs. Especially if there's a product we recommend that either went out of stock or changed the way things are done. Such as my RedDragon article where they don't sell the Acrylic A-105 keycaps anymore and instead sell the A101's which means you're perpetually rubbing off keys. Great.

This is common administration work for a blogger. Also, when someone comments on one of my technical articles we do revise it. We don't claim to be the smartest people in the world. So if the correction is reasonable and not filled with some Reddit-level bottom feeder going nuclear then yeah, we'll take care of it.

Upgrades!

Along with the new apartment, there were also new sleeper PC builds that we did which allows us to not only play games like Cyberpunk at 60fps instead of the 10fps coming out of our Geforce 1050ti. but also with the updated patches for better or worse Cyberpunk has fewer bugs. Don't get us wrong, there are still bugs. But like we said back in 2020. Is it really a bug or an unexpected feature as Cyberpunk tends to revolve around the aesthetics are glitching technology?

If there is one game that I kept coming back to for almost 2 years now. It's Noita. Because even if you turn on the cheats it does not guarantee you will live! It's almost the opposite of Cyberpunk 2077 in the respect that Cyberpunk is a game that you play and you prey it never breaks. Whereas Noita is the kind of game that encourages you to break it! Go ahead, make a nuclear wand. See where that takes you.

Personally, I found that flooding out levels with water and having electrical immunity/generation pretty much gets you through the game. Proving that you CAN drown out just about all of your problems!

CryptoCrash!

With crypto dropping like a rock in 2023, FTX embezzling millions. And scammers on the dank web cloning websites to try to steal crypto. There is some good coming out of crypto plummeting like a rock.

For starters, Video card prices are becoming sane again. This means we could finally upgrade are GTX 1660 to something a little better! This is mostly due to a lot of butthurt miners not being able to make crypto mining worth it but also the chip shortage isn't making things suck (waiting for the world governments to come by and fuck that up again.)

In the haze of crypto/web 3.0 scamming Odysee is still online despite losing its lawsuit to the FTC. For how long? Giant question mark there!

But apparently, our profile where we dump-test videos that have no relation to our site seems to be doing out there. Just look at that hella-swol ass follower count! Hitting the big time folks!

In all seriousness, we kind of forgot about Odysee. It wasn't fun to watch because it kept pixelating out. There's no Android TV client. And we sorta got other interests like looking at other people's websites.

Metaverse and SecondLife.

We were even feeling nostalgic enough to make a metaverse entry this 2022 by looking back at SecondLife and checking out how active it is with so many years behind us! Will we be joining Neos or VR-Chat? From a technological standpoint, it's a little more complicated due to the nature of the blender.

Tower Unite?!

To whom it may concern. Yes, we did try out Tower Unite which we're rocking a model of a Bestboi avatar modded to look like a Dutch angel dragon. Perhaps we'll do a full article about it. There are a few good things about this Metaverse engine. But a lot of bad things too. In essence, I feel like this is digital purgatory. You can build a 'condo' but it doesn't really mean anything as the main lanes are static and unchanged. And the majority of the audience is in the casino trying to get that sweet digital currency that technically has no value.

Final thoughts: The future.

Moving forward with this blog we certainly hope we can blog a little more now that life isn't taking a total crap on everything. The site has been operational for more than 8 years. Financially speaking we're just fine. So, it really comes down to time to make content and time to blog. To those who have checked out my site throughout the years. Thanks, man! Even if it's one dude reading it's more than enough really. Because the site helps me as well as it (hopefully) gives you the reader some level of entertainment.

That's what server said.

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