On October 11, 2023, Nintendo Life cited to reports that Disney is looking to purchase a video game company. This sounds very ominous so I am crossing my fingers that they do not buy a company that makes good games. Go for one of the companies that makes those terrible free-to-start mobile games!
Kodi Segfault on Fedora 40
I use a low-end Beelink mini-PC as a TV box (this will be a New Leaf Journal article eventually). I run Fedora on the mini PC and switch between GNOME and Kodi sessions depending on what I am doing. Yesterday, I upgraded from Fedora 39 to Fedora 40. The upgrade went smoothly. Everything appeared to be good until I tried to start a Kodi session only to have Kodi crash after its logo appeared. What happened? I think it was a segfault (I love segfaults). How did I fix it? I could have read through the logs and tried to diagnose the issue, but I instead chose the path of less resistance. I uninstalled the Fedora Kodi package and installed the official Kodi Flatpak from Flathub (note not the Kodi Flatpak from Fedora’s Flatpak repo). I then reinstalled my small number of plugins (including MrKarabat’s unofficial Crunchyroll plugin) and was off to the races.
On idiosyncratic blogging interests
From Mr. Heinrik Karlsson’s “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”
Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.
I feel under attack. I will have people know that some articles in my series on interpreting hair color in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels have actually done alright. The better example of people not caring about my idiosyncratic interests is actually my al|together visual novel review project, but I think that endeavor is genuinely worthwhile.
Russia on the rights of “occupiers”
Israel has no right to self-defense against Hamas militants in Gaza as an occupying power in Palestine, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations said Wednesday.
The Russian government is appropriating Soviet humor. (I dare say that this is a better example of Russia’s questionable Iran-coddling commentary than the one I used for an October 14 article at The New Leaf Journal.)
tp-link Wi-Fi Access Point Lights
I return from a brief and unplanned publishing break with an important story (“important” is the operative word here). I use a MikroTik hAP ac3 internet router. However, I disabled its wi-fi functionality and use a low-end tp-link access point for wireless. The access point is right in front of my computer. I turned on my computer a bit before 9:00 AM this morning. I noticed that the lights on my access point were off. Was there a power issue? I was about to check before I remembered that I had just been connected to wi-fi on my phone. Then I remembered that I had set the router to turn its lights off at night (I access my access point’s admin panel less frequently than I access my router through Winbox). I deduced that the lights return at 9:00 AM when I witnessed the green lights return at 9:00 AM. Another mystery solved.
The Meaning of Matter of Salama
The Board said all the way back in 1966 that long and pervasive discrimination can amount to persecution. Matter of Salama, 11 I&N Dec. 536 (BIA 1966) (recognizing discrimination against Jews in Egypt as persecution). Matter of Salama was one of the first BIA decisions construing the phrase “persecution on account of race, religion, or political opinion” in the Immigration and Nationality Act. What today’s decision confirms is that the Board’s analysis in Salama, that “a government campaign of discrimination” may be persecution, remains true.
I wrote a detailed analysis of a 1966 Board of Immigration Appeals decision in Matter of Salama, 11 I&N Dec. 536 (BIA 1966). In that post, I worked through the decision and examined the small number of citations to it in precedent decisions. I opined that although I first came across the decision while researching economic persecution precedents, its analysis is too limited to provide much value in that area of asylum law. The Hoppock Law Firm’s description of Salama as holding that “long and pervasive discrimination can amount to persecution” is over the target. However, as I explained in my piece, the limited analysis makes it difficult to discern an easy-to-apply broader principle in Salama.
Corey Seager Breaks Bonds’ Divisional Series Walks Record
I came across an article noting that Corey Seager of the Texas Rangers was walked three times in a 3-game sweep of the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Divisional Series, breaking Barry Bonds’ 2003 record of 8 for a divisional series. I am not a baseball fan and am not following the playoffs, but I took note of the article since I recently wrote about some of Barry Bonds’ more absurd intentional bases on balls and regular walks records, with a focus on 2001-2007. There is one major difference between Bonds’ 2003 NLDS and Seager’s 2023 ALDS. 6 of Bonds’ 8 walks in the 2003 NLDS were intentional whereas only one of Seager’s 9 walks in 2023 were intentional.
Formatting for The New Leaf Journal ActivityPub profile is a work in progress but everything works perfectly here on Emu Café Social.
Importance of Sourcing
Universities and colleges across the country have become embroiled in a debate over free speech in the aftermath of the…
Jonathan Turley’s blog is part of my RSS feed collection. One reason I enjoy his work is because he is consistent in his views and articulates his position well. However, his recent piece on free speech issues related to the response to pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses in the last week was a bit sloppy. That some high-powered law firms rescinded offers of employment to Harvard law students on account of their views has received a good amount of publicity. After Mr. Turley touched on that issue (granting private law firms have discretion in hiring), he made a claim that I am less familiar with.
However, some have gone further to discuss these views as unprotected free speech and suggested that law students holding such views should be prevented from joining the bar.
I have not seen examples of people arguing that law students who support Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups, or more charitably justify their atrocities, should be prevented from sitting for the bar. At a minimum, these arguments are far less common than the broader debate about the views being expressed on college campuses. I agree with Mr. Turley’s position that abhorrent views should not prevent one from becoming a lawyer, but he provides no source for examples of people making this argument. While this is not the sort of disingenuous claim I examined in my critique of experts say headlines, it does read like trying to squeeze a side argument where it does not fit. The omission of a source is notable because he provides many sources for other issues raised in the article. For whatever it is worth, I think what we are seeing raises questions about U.S. immigration policy and the efforts to subsidize college tuition through federally backed loans, not admittance to the bar.
Potatoes and Darkrooms
Hackaday published an article titled Spuds Lend A Hand In The Darkroom. I have no experiences with darkrooms, much less potatoes in darkrooms. Thus, I cannot comment on the utility of the potato-darkroom recipes referenced in the article. However, if your potato has reached the stage where it is growing hands, it is much more amenable to darkroom usage than to kitchen usage.
Live Action Takagi-san
The staff for the live-action adaptation of Sōichirō Yamamoto's Teasing Master Takagi-san (Karakai Jōzu no Takagi-san) manga unveiled its main cast, production team, and March 2024 premiere on Netflix globally (before its Japanese television premiere) on Wednesday.
I am on the record as being a fan of the Teasing Master Takagi-san anime. I selected the first season as one of my honorable mention recommended series for general audiences from the 2011-2020 decade. Last year, I picked the third season of Takagi-san as my 2022 anime series of the year and described it as the best anime comedy since 2012’s Humanity Has Declined. But with that being said, I never understood the appeal of live action adaptations of manga and anime? I suppose by manga/anime standards, Takagi is a plausible live action candidate and the actress and actor playing Takagi and Nishikata do not look too old for their 8th/9th roles (they are 16 and 15 respectively). While I am not interested, I hope the live action Takagi-san does the series justice.
NAF’s 12 Big Impression Video Games
I published the list of the 12 video games that left the biggest impression on me in close to 30 years of gaming over at The New Leaf Journal (see article). My New Leaf Journal article contains my reasoning for each selection. Here, I will re-post the list without the essay.
- Pokémon Red
- Harvest Moon: Back to Nature
- Pokémon Gold
- Animal Crossing
- SMT Persona 3 FES
- SMT Persona 4/Persona 4 Golden
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2
- Paper Mario
- Super Mario 64
- Pokémon Ruby
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
- Pokémon Trading Card Game
There is no strict criteria for the list. I interpreted my prompt subjectively and considered which games made the biggest impression on me for one reason or another. The list is not a ranking of the best games I have played or necessarily my absolute favorites (I do, however, very much like all of the games on the list). For example, I prefer most of the classic Mario 2D platform games to Sonic 2 today, but Sonic 2 was the reason why my first console was a Sega Genesis.
If you have your own list, feel free to write your own article linking to this one (or to my New Leaf Journal essay) and using the form below the post (unless your site automatically sends Webmentions). You can also respond to the Fediverse version of this post.
I am moving toward finishing my al|together visual novel review project. I just finished reading A Dream of Summer (which had been pending for a while) and one of two translations of Narcissu (I did not realize that the al|together Narcissu was two translations in one package). This leaves just three novels to read. With Narcissu completed, I am almost entirely sure of what the top of my ranking, which will be published in three parts in November, will look like. I leave no comment at this time on where precisely Narcissu will rank, I only note that it was the last remaining novel that, based on my pre-reading knowledge, could threaten the top spot.
Sharing is Pearing
I was walking in Brooklyn Heights (I think it was Brooklyn Heights, but it could have been Cobble Hill) when I saw a pear on the sidewalk. This was unusual. You do not see too many pears on sidewalks in New York City. I looked up and found the source of the pear.
But what is important here is not the pear. It is the pun.
(I am assuming that this is a pear tree. It would be neat if it was quince tree given my prior writings on the subject of quinces in New York City.)
Tom Cantor Changed Sighting
I saw a copy of Tom Cantor’s Changed, a self-published religion conversion story that makes the rounds through an unsolicited direct mail campaign, sitting on a step in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Why might I care? Over at The New Leaf Journal, I published what I hope was a humorous article on the cover design of the book after receiving a short-lived copy in July 2022. To my surprise, the article performed very strongly in terms of page visits in December 2022 and January 2023, which I inferred was a result of the direct mail campaign, before becoming a proverbial non-entity shortly thereafter. While I know that many people were weirded out about receiving Mr. Cantor’s strange book, The New Leaf Journal would benefit from his resuming his strange pastime with abandon.