Random thoughts - Ghost Deletion Mech

This post could go anywhere today.

Ooo ! Shinies !

I'll start by saying that I've watched Ghost In The Shell tonight, the original anime version. There are similarities between this and the live action movie even going as far as nigh on replicating certain scenes. And then they're both looking into the distinction between physical biological intelligence and electric artificial machine intelligence. If a machine becomes self aware, does that validate artificial intelligence ?

I have to admit that I preferred the live action version. There was a bit more to its story and I was taken in by the investigation of the backstory of the main character. I must watch it again soon. And I didn't think that the main character absolutely positively had to be of Japanese type origin, as some fans of the anime would demand. That said, Rinko Kikuchi (Mako in Pacific Rim and that's an IMDB link for you) isn't in enough movies and she's a little marvel. I think she would have made a great Major Motoko.

Talking of Pacific Rim and its Jaeger Mechs ... The new Battletech game unlocks tomorrow and I may have pre-ordered it. I've been enjoying the Enter Elysium playthrough (youtube playlist link) and he's been doing his traditional thing of naming his Mechs after people who subscribe to his Patreon. Naming things like that definitely adds something in games. It certainly gave me an attachment to my soldiers in the XCom games and a grin when finding a particularly good name in Elite.

What were the Elite ships again ? I finished in this ship :

The black Python known as Shipka 3.14159-Thon. My other ships in the game were (quick peek at the Inara page !) : Humility, Dignity, Algebraic the Adder, Ranger, Pathfinder, Dorothy Drake. Then there were the space trucks called Lisa Kelly, Art Burke, Alex Dewey. The ones named after the Youtube and streamer community people : Elizabeth Sparrow, Chrissa's Potato, Katherine Of Space, Nik's Hammer, Space Viking, Owner Jms Vas QwibQwib. And those named after people close like Queen Skye, Shaname's Sword, Skye Searcher and there would have been a few more of those if I'd stayed with the game.

I think I'm done with Elite now. There isn't enough variation or story in there to hold my attention. There is a feeling of having done everything in the game already and I've never been one to grind out the time in a game. There are better games to play that don't involve grinding. So if you were looking for your name above, there were names like Queen Karen and Queen Jenny coming later.

But those are spaceships. One thing about Pacific Rim was the names given to the Mechs. They sounded probably epic and had a certain weight about them. Names like Gypsy Danger and Gypsy Avenger. Striker Eureka and Striker Omega. I think my Battlemech mechs need similar names. Let's see :

Iceangel Alpha, Kitten Cyber, Yankee Tango (that may be tea related). Gorilla Demon (guess what album I'm listening to at the moment !). Keela Shadow. Space Viking could come out again. I know a streamer/youtube community that would love that. Iron Elysium. Curmal Ghost. Hopefully more names will come later. Crazy Queen is a good one too. Or Toller Bob for ... reasons :-). Marine Dragon.

I'm quite looking forward to the Battlemech game. It looks like a cracker. I was hyped for Frostpunk as well, which comes out soon too. However with that one, as I watch more gameplay I get the feeling it's another game I'd bounce off without playing much. I was doing that yesterday with short sessions in Satellite Reign and Rebel Galaxy before getting irritated and coming away from the games. Knights of the Old Republic 2 (Star Wars) held my attention a bit longer.

Enough about games. Deletion ?

There's a lot being said about Facebook and the general slurping of data it has been doing since ... day 1. The response seems to be to walk away from Facebook and delete everything they hold. I don't think this will be particularly useful as they appear to have been cleaning up their act lately and complying to the various Data Protection things that are out there. And besides, most of your data will have been hoovered up long ago, plus you won't have realised quite how much of your data is exposed to them.

Yes Facebook. If you pop up an advert on my laptop that is suspiciously related to something I looked at or searched for on my desktop, then you're being very creepy. Make no mistake about it, there is an information war going on where the hackers, the Twit/books, the Googles are all looking to harvest our data for their own means.

So what can we do ?

The big thing is to be very careful about the picture we present to the internet. I don't give my actual date of birth any more when Steam asks me, I give the year. If you take pictures with your camera or your phone, be very wary about location services. The place where you took the picture could be getting saved as metadata in the picture and that geotag data can be extracted later. I think I'm safe from this but I should really check seeing as I take pictures outside the front door. Of my house. This is why I never take pictures at work.

Geotagging is a real threat. My phone has popped up train times occasionally when the bus takes me past the train station. It's not data that I asked for but in being Helpful, the phone tells me that it has been programmed to continuously monitor my location and use my data bandwidth to look up possibly relevant data. That's part of what they call a digital footprint.

Be paranoid. We are being tracked and data on us is being collected without our express consent.

The thing to do is to not make it too easy for the people collecting the data. Think about what you share on Twit/book. If it isn't something that you're happy for a Crazy Random Internet Person to know, don't post it.

A lot of the people who are saying "OMG DELETE FACEBOOK!" have done that a little too late. Their data from oversharing will have been harvested by the various apps that they and friends have allowed to have permissions.

That's another thing - beware of the permissions that an app is asking for and if you're the least bit suspicious, don't allow them. I've backed away a few times from those Fun Post sites because I didn't like the permissions they were asking for.

I'm not going to be deleting my Facebook. There are a few people with whom I value their communication immensely and my primary means of communicating with them is via Facebook. I'm not going to lose that due to the hysteria that says Delete Facebook. But I have considered it, mainly due to their policies on the News Feed. There are very odd algorithms at work there, posts you would expect to see are filtered out and random posts from advertisers are sifted in.

Twit/book has far too much advertising and not all of it is gotten rid of by web browser ad-blocking software.

I don't pay as much attention to the news feed any more. There's only so much that your attention can actively monitor. Trying to keep an eye on too much will lead to stress and madness. I realised a while ago that while I follow groups and people that I'm interested in, a lot of it is garbage and not worth my time. One of the Twitter accounts posts and reposts the same stories - scroll past. The Elite group on Facebook has been overtaken by idiots - scroll past but not before blocking the instigator of the troll post.

Haha, I thought this would be lots of random things about many random topics but it's been :

Ghost in the Shell - enjoyed both. Understood and preferred the live action version. Yes I am a heretic and will burn in digital hell when they upload me.
Mechs and epic names for them - Ivanova Fury, Zen Liberator, Prospero Nimoy, Viper Apollo, Robinson Danger, Solako Grave. How many of those do you recognise ? :-D
And a bit about the dangers of Twit/book.

Don't make it easy for people to find out about you ! Unless you want them to of course :-).