Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Some Observations During 2019 Through 2021

 

My name is Walt Jimenez. I am 41 years old born in 1979. I am an Asian man of Filipino-Spanish descent, but I am 100% Canadian and was born and raised on Canadian soil. I practically bleed Maple Syrup. English is my main language. I have not had any illness or colds since April of 2019. That was two whole years ago and well before the current pandemic began. My family and I have always obeyed COVID-19 rules, and policies since the beginning of February 2020 and I can attribute my excellent health to the extreme social distancing methods, face mask wearing, and constant washing of hands and just general good hygiene practices. Before the summer of 2019 I did not really follow those simple rules and our family members regularly took turns getting sick with colds, and flu at least three times a year previously even with regular annual cold & flu vaccinations. It really goes to show what a positive difference it makes to follow rules and not spread sickness.

My spouse Marie and I had also made some changes in our autistic son Xavier's education at the end of the 2019 school year in June when he had finished Kindergarten. We had decided to begin homeschooling him in September 2019 where he would start Grade 1. When we had him kept at home rather than being together with hundreds of other children or away from publicly used spaces, we noticed that none of us would ever get sick. We absolutely did care that he would be missing out on important social contact, but we felt that he needed us with a bigger focus on individualized learning to help him feel comfortable in his own progression. In previous years, where he went to daycare, preschool, and kindergarten, it almost seemed like a never ending cycle of getting sick. One or all three of us would be getting sick every other month it seemed.

I remember the first time I heard about the new Novel Corona Virus way back in the first week of December 2019. I saw it on the news several times and distinctly remember that it began with a reported outbreak of 64 infected people in Wuhan, China, and knew it was extremely serious as soon as they even mentioned "CDC" (The Center for Disease Control) and no cure. Right then and there I took it extremely seriously, and began denying business meetings, turning down friendly meets with friends, and even not visiting family before it was even announced that we had to do so. I regularly checked on updates on the news for this Novel Corona Virus that would become referred to COVID-19. Every time I heard about it, the numbers multiplied...64, 266, 1100, 2800, 4200, 10,000, 14,000 etc. and the days and weeks went by and the numbers kept skyrocketing. More and more countries were reporting outbreaks, and it was getting worse by the day.

For me when social distancing rules were announced in March 2020, not much had really changed for me at all. I had already taken a backseat from big social meets and interactions. I feel like I already naturally started social distancing in the past few years since I was probably around 35-years old back in 2014. Perhaps it was the realization that I needed to be a better dad. I just wasn't interested in abusing my health, partying so hard that my wallet was empty, and having to suffer effects of a hangover for 24 hours anymore. In my mid 30's I pretty much stopped drinking any alcohol for my own personal health. The last time I had an actual hangover was September 2018 and that's because I went to a bachelor party for my cousin. In my 30's I was absolutely not the party animal, that I was in my 20's. In my 20's I also used to smoke like a chimney buying packs of cigarettes from the years 2000 to 2008 but I did manage to quit and quite successfully. 2008 (29-years old) for me was a very rough year battling depression, ulcers, and extreme overworking and anxiety. After that, I made some lifestyle changes and came out stronger than ever. Even now, I don't over indulge in anything except maybe Netflix, and video games.

A positive thing about being locked down and staying indoors, was that it brought me closer to my family via video conferencing. I was and still am talking more often to my siblings and parents via Facetime, Zoom, and WhatsApp more than I have in years or even decades. I love my my family and we were brought even closer together in the fear of losing our parents and elderly to COVID-19.

Then starting in March 2020, I tried out my own social experiment over a number of months to observe people's behavior when I did or didn't wear a mask. I religiously walk my dog twice a day around the neighborhood. Most of the time I would wear a mask to cover my nose and mouth but sometimes I purposely didn't and was making some astute observations. I randomly recorded that on average, 5 out of 10 times, people will berth wide and walk around me when I wear a mask and only 1 out 10 times people would walk further away to avoid me when I didn't wear a mask. To me, this is totally backwards and not right. I can only extrapolate and try to understand the logic here. It could be that some people automatically associate mask wearing, with already being sick which is false. It could also be assumed that these people are associating non-mask wearing individuals as not being a threat, or not being infected with COVID-19 which is also false. Perhaps, it could be simplified that most people just favor unmasked individuals over masked individuals because their identity can be made and therefore seem safer!? That's not a very wise assumption that people should be making either. People need to understand that masks make it safer, period.

While outdoors and social distancing while riding my bike I again made some other observations. A few times while out riding my bike while wearing a mask, I received some dirty frowning looks. Other times I got weird comments like, "Are you feeling okay to be out like that?" or "You aren't social distancing." (commentor walks closely with a group of four other people not even social distancing amongst themselves). I just shake my head and wonder why these people exist. Racism towards me is not new to me whether it be a joking matter or a serious threat to my well-being. Every time I hear about racism, or anti-maskers, or anti-vaxxers, or anti-asian hate and violence, the more and more I think that Thanos actually had the right idea. Oh well, at least it's just cowardly words. If they would actually come at me they'd just be digging their own graves.

Wednesday, April 7, 2021

My Top Ten Games Enhanced By PS5

 

These games have gotten a visual boost with Playstation 5. They all feature increased resolution, increased frame rate to 60 frames per second, and smoother responsive controls than on the original Playstation 4 hardware. 

  1.  God Of War

  2.  Monster HunterWorld: Iceborne

  3.  Ghost Of Tsushima

  4.  Spider-Man Remastered

  5.  Days Gone

  6.  Titanfall 2

  7.  Spider-ManMiles Morales

  8.  Ratchet & Clank

  9.  Killzone: Shadowfall

  10.  Knack

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Next-Gen Hardware Spring Update


As it stands right now in April of 2021, all next-generation gaming and graphical hardware is still pretty much impossible to acquire unless you are a scalper using AI purchasing bot tools. It is unachievable for any normal consumer to buy a new Playstation 5, or an XBOX Series X/S, or a GeForce RTX 3000 series GPU, or an AMD Radeon RX 6000 series GPU. These types of units have been unattainable since October, November, December of 2020 etc or when they all had their respective debuts recently. 

What's new is that Crypto-currency miners are now involved. Crypto-currency companies are now using bots to buy up all of the new next-generation GeForce RTX, and AMD Radeon RX GPU's (Graphics Processing Units otherwise known as Video Cards) in order to use them in crypto-coin hashing calculations and crypto-mining operations. This creates another huge problem and effectively keeps these useful GPU's out of the hands of gamers, and content creators and video editors alike.

The bots + scalpers are the biggest most obvious issue but are only part of the problem.
There is the abysmal quandary of not having enough units to meet the demand in the first place.
There is also the dilemma in which the manufacturers, and distributors are not setting rules for how the products are distributed by retailers. The manufacturers and distributors probably don't even give a damn since they are just able to just offload their full stock, and are already meeting their quota and getting paid.
An additional frustration is that retailers themselves are doing little or not enough to fight, let alone stop AI purchasing bots via the online avenue.
Similar in fashion to the manufacturers and distributors, the retailers probably just don't care about the actual consumers because they are able to just offload their entire stock to bots & scalpers and are still able to get paid. They don't really care if the product actually reaches the hands of real people, and real buyers, and real individual users.

COVID-19 is an obvious culprit, forcing the manufacturers to have lower than desired output of actual hardware. The current pandemic plays a big hand but, the supply & demand & hype trends have existed for much, much longer and continue the same patterns they've had for decades.

As long as retailers only trickle out a few hundred units at a time or relatively small quantities, there is no hope for us normal consumers. Bots will continue to snap up all of that limited stock every single time. If retailers are even able to push out thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of units, there would be a much better result for regular consumers. With plentiful stock, there would be absolutely no chance for bots to be able to buy up everything as they are doing now. The deceptive profiteers behind the maddening AI bots are just not rich enough to buy up all of the units if the inventory was ranging in the high thousands.

My opinion in the last three paragraphs in my winter blog entry still remains very similar:

If I could reach out to my fellow people and shoppers out there I would say this, "Please don't spend your hard earned money on next-generation hardware from Scalpers. Every time one of us buys from a scalper, we just enable them to keep doing it. Wait patiently and in a few months we will all have one from a retailer at a fairer price".

Because of how the supply and demand system works, there will still likely be a shortage of Next-Generation hardware well into 2021 and maybe even into 2022.

Retail online websites absolutely need to protect us consumers and change their websites and online sales systems. They need to implement a form of 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) in order to stop these auto-buying AI bots from ruining everyone else's experience. One good example of 2FA would be introducing a Captcha form somewhere during the sequence of an online transaction. Captcha images usually rely on human user input to select either an image sequence, or selecting a word from analogue cursive writing style that is not using a regular text font. Another one is MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication in which a one-time alphanumerical code is sent to the human purchaser's point of contact, whether that be a mobile phone call, mobile phone text, or an e-mail address and then that code has to be sent back to verify that they are a real valid human being that is shopping.

One interesting tactic I had heard rumors about was that one retailer was very concerned with protecting it's human buyers. So this rumored retailer implemented a massive price hike of the PS5 to add something like $2000 over the retail price, but then only offered a specifically handed out coupon to real human buyers that discounted the $2000.  The positive result here would then cause these bot-using scalper type scammers to lose money if they attempted to buy up PS5 units.

Any of these can help deter AI bots and can significantly reduce the amount of non-human buyers.