Okay, admittedly, they are virtual chickens within a video game called Palia, that my sister and I have grown very fond of over the past year or so. The chickens (referred to in the game’s world as “pekis”) were added to the game this week in an update that also includes an entire animal husbandry and ranching system, as well as modular player housing, and a variety of other fun additions that player’s have practically been begging for since the game’s debut. It all comes on the heels of the game’s Elderwood Expansion, which opened up an entire “adventure zone” and brought Palia, which was available to PC and Nintendo Switch players, to Xbox and PlayStation consoles also.
An adult and baby peki in Palia.
Launched in late 2023, Palia is essentially a fantasy adventure life simulator. Players dive into a realm as one of the first ancient humans to re-emerge in a high-fantasy world. They will build a home and relationships with the villagers, develop skills in a multitude of different crafts and disciplines, and explore and shape the world and story around them. The game is also an online multiplayer service, which means you’ll see other players running around inside of it, and can even team up with them to reap greater rewards. The game even encourages it, providing bonuses for players who tackle their to-do list together!
Did I mention that the game is completely free to download and play?
Video games without a price tag attached don’t usually attract much attention. They often contain microtransactions or a “premium store” designed to earn their revenue in ways that can sometimes be a little scummy. If you find yourself in a free game, you usually wind up needing additional lives, turns, perks, add-ons, and other items to keep playing, and those are going to cost you some of your hard-earned dollars, and thus get dubbed “pay-to-win” games in the sense that they aren’t truly a free experience across the board. That’s why many popular titles wind up charging upwards of $60-$90 to purchase the game upfront and/or require a recurring subscription to play. Some titles like Palia, however, have turned that sales model on its head.
Rather than charging for the game or exploiting pay-to-win mechanics, Palia has subscribed to what I like to refer to as the “Fortnite model.” Much like that massively popular battle royale game, Palia also has a premium store, but nearly everything in it is for cosmetic purposes only. You can buy a virtual peki to run alongside you in the game, a fancy outfit, or even an entire landscape on which to plant your own farm and cottage. But the big difference is that it has a negligible impact on actual gameplay. You don’t have to spend a single penny in Palia to have the same experience as the people who spend a fortune on it. The wealthier player has no gameplay advantage over the poorer of the two. In my opinion, that’s actually kinda beautiful and makes games like it far more accessible for the average gamer.
In my game, I’ve started the new ranching skill and adopted two pekis. Initially, I named the two “Tigger” and “Rufus” after my oldest two cats, but as I played further, it turns out that you need to breed the two together in order to birth baby pekis. Though the game is genderless in most circumstances, it still felt awkward for me to have two of my boys mate to create offspring. So once I devised a new naming convention and acquired a few “Rename Cookies” once I was able, I set out on figuring out some fun new names for my feathered friends. Now I have four pekis — the original two and two babies — named Chick Jagger, Henifer Aniston, Angelina Jopeep, and Loretta Hen. No, they’re not completely original, but I did find them clever enough after racking my brain forever and eventually consulting Google for assistance (this page in particular was very handy). Just wait until I get Feather Flocklear and Chick Norris!
Anyway, in case anyone has been wondering where I’ve been for the last several days, I’ve been letting myself get absorbed back into my weird and wonderful little world of Palia. It feels a lot better than doomscrolling and letting myself be completely consumed by the constant darkness in our real world right now. Feel free to stop by my Twitch channel sometime to hang out while we wander through the game together live, or you can even find some clips from those streams on TikTok and YouTube Shorts! One of my favorites especially is when the hot pot table blows my hair off!
I’m trying to learn how to focus better, and I’m starting to scale down.
The past few weeks or so, I’ve been keeping myself busy ramping up production on my little home-based server. You might recall that I was doing something similar in the spring, only I was attempting to self-host everything on a paid VPS (virtual private server) and didn’t know much about any of it. I was learning things on the fly. I didn’t really have the funds to spend on web hosting as a hobby, and nobody was really interested or impressed in anything that I was trying to build, so I eventually shut it all down and fully moved just this website over to Ghost’s services proper. But I never really gave up the idea of building my own private “walled garden,” if you will, on the internet. The thought of a box physically set up here in my own home that’s harnessing and controlling my data instead of the corporate “broligarchy” dudes sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?
My nephew has also taken it upon himself, over the last few years, to slowly and painstakingly digitize our fairly massive film collection on DVD. Why? Because the DVD industry is rapidly dying due to the rise of streaming platforms and digital giants like Netflix and Disney+. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since they were physically mailing me DVD rentals (did I just date myself??)… Nobody loves the ability to do things without leaving my home more than me. But these big digital corporations are also the first to tell us that we own nothing. Did you know that when you digitally purchase a movie, TV show, album, video game, etc., you are actually purchasing the license to use it recreationally? You do NOT own that piece of media, and the license can be revoked at any time. And the streamers? They’re sometimes just playing an eternal game of roulette with one another as to which copyrights they’re holding each month, which results in movies and shows being here one minute and then either on a different service or completely gone the next.
And what’s up with that, my dudes? I just wanna watch my little short-lived, sardonically creative and comical Wonderfalls in peace, but do you know where you can find it streaming? That’s right: NOWHERE!
Sign up for Jiggy’s Journal
All this and more, for FREE… In your inbox!
No spam. No selling your data. Unsubscribe anytime.
There’s also this point: Ever since this last presidential election, my father and I have been slowly turning into doomsday preppers. Which, admittedly, sounds bonkers. I also used to think people who spent a lot of time in their handmade bomb shelters were a little on edge, too, but the world has completely lost the plot. Can you blame me these days? Digitizing our collection so that the only requirement to enjoy them is electricity makes his portable hard drive worth its weight in gold during the apocalypse. It fits in nicely with our bug-out bags, solar panels, weather radios, and raised garden beds we’ve been making efforts to acquire.
With his growing collection in mind, I knew that there were a few pretty popular pieces of free and open-source self-hosted software on the internet, the most interesting of which was Jellyfin. After it’s installed on your system, you can effectively create your own streaming platform similar to Netflix, but you also pretty much have to supply your own media to load into it. Thankfully, we just so happened to have someone who did have that piece of the puzzle. But Jellyfin didn’t work out on my VPS because, well… It’s sorta difficult to plug a physical hard drive into a virtual machine, right? But when I started getting the idea to turn my old PC into a physical server here at home, that wouldn’t be a problem! So off to work I went on my new side project for my whole “famn damily.” And this time, I was more cautious and had a slightly better grasp on how things needed to function.
Now we’re getting to the techno mumbo-jumbo that I know many of you aren’t going to be super interested in. Feel free to skip ahead if you’d like. I’m not the boss of you!
No, Toad, wrong kind of techno!
I knew that I was going to need to wipe the entire hard drive of my old PC to get this project going. In fact, I was going to need a whole different operating system. We don’t want to mess with Windows. I knew that I wanted to use a containerized system, and since I was really only mildly familiar with Docker, that’s the one I decided to go with. Some cursory research indicated that there are two options for an OS that would execute Docker pretty easily: Proxmox or Ubuntu Server. Well, that “cursory research” wound up pretty much failing me, because neither of those operating systems wanted to boot on the old machine. In both cases, I flashed a USB stick with the image of the OS, managed to get GRUB to start booting, and then wound up on a completely black screen that did zilch. Nothing.
I was already pretty defeated, and I was only at the first step of this whole thing. I think the old PC just sat, set up on a desk, and wasn’t touched for weeks because I got so frustrated thinking that Rufus (the flashing software, not my cat!) was somehow flashing corrupted images onto the USB stick, or maybe I was doing something wrong. I was reading horror stories on Google and Reddit, and saw some users suggest that some USB ports are better than others, and maybe you need to change the BIOS settings on your machine to read what’s on the stick before it boots what’s already on your hard drive, and so on and so on. Eventually, I stumbled across some information that suggested that I instead install something even simpler: Debian. “That makes sense,” I realized, pretty much as I was flashing my USB stick with it. After all, Proxmox is based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian. When in doubt, go to the source, I guess, because BAM!!! Debian 13 installed with zero issues. I also managed to get Docker installed and got Cockpit, Portainer, and Nginx Proxy Manager up and running so I could control everything remotely from my main computer! I finally started to feel a little tingle of technological prowess and, hey… Maybe even usefulness!
I still wound up having to retool things a little bit, and eventually settled for using a little bit of a cheat code called YunoHost. Mostly because I kept getting frustrated at Docker, and I also quite simply felt challenged and maybe a little inspired by their name originating from the simple internet question of, “y u no host?” But everything started falling into place. I was going to build my family the best damn closed-circuit network they’d ever seen! It wasn’t just going to have an instance of Jellyfin! It’s going to have private communication apps, a wiki platform, collaboration and whiteboard solutions, and even a few games! Not to mention email at our own chosen domain! Have you ever known the thrill of having an email address that is just your name before the @ symbol?! Getting your own name in an email address carries the weight of being busy and important, okay? My family was going to be so glad they had someone as cool and smart as me in the gang! Simply just ignore the fact that I think I look a little like this meme to them:
Not gonna lie, I can kinda see it.
That was my thought process until I built it and gave them their credentials to access and log into it. A week later, and the server has seen exactly two of them log into it and then promptly forget about it. And though my dad and sister (who are incidentally also the only two family members that subscribe to this publication, hi dad and sisterface!) would maybe disagree to spare my feelings, none of them really care. And I’m making peace with the fact that that is okay.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s painful and frustrating to continually get these wild ideas to build spaces and communities, hoping that others will want to join in, only to be met with constant silence. I’ve been doing it for a long time. From my very first web pages all the way up to this website, along with my Twitch channel, content creation as a whole, social media, the AMA page on here, all of it… I’ve just been begging and hoping that maybe one day people will want to join me and think that all this “stuff” is as cool as I do. But I also need to understand that it isn’t personal.
Meredith gets it.
It honestly isn’t. To other people, all of this “stuff” is unnecessary. My 72-year-old father and my 33-year-old nephew alike don’t care about their super cool new email addresses. Neither one of them likely even cares about email overall. So the addresses that they’re already forced to use for everything else work just fine. My siblings are a-okay with relaying group communication through Discord, so why do they need yet another login to manage? It’s a little overkill for just the six of us. And that Jellyfin server? Eh, we’ll get that movie collection loaded into it some other day. These kinds of things, while cool to me to get to check out and get hands-on experience with, isn’t scratching the same kind of itch for them. And that’s fine. I should stop expecting it to. Even if it’s cool and technically better, people prefer to default to what’s familiar, what’s easier, and what they already know.
And listen, I love my family. I think I’ve established that fact in multiple other posts. But why fix what isn’t broken for them, ya know? And if something does break, or if I can somehow offer a solution one day? They’ll know where to find me. In the meantime, I don’t need to keep subjecting them to never-ending digital journeys or whatever.
So I’m scaling it back down a bit. I’m going to keep Jellyfin and the emails available, but the wiki, the message board, and the browser games are being jettisoned. They’re already stale and probably won’t be missed. I’m instead going to refocus the server space on things that are productive, fun, and convenient for me personally. Maybe build some projects of my own on it, who knows? And hey, sometimes things happen when you stop trying to force it. I want to believe that there are like-minded people out there who do care about what I’m building, what I’m streaming, what I’m making, and what my brain can accomplish.
I never thought I would be one to recommend anything from Apple, but here we are!
Despite my affinity for tech, I’ve never really been an Apple fanboy. I loved my old-school classic iPod back in the day with the satisfying clickwheel navigation, but for as much as the iPhone revolutionized basically carrying a whole ass NASA computer around in your pocket, I’ve never been on the iPhone bandwagon. I actually ventured into the world of smartphones with webOS and the Palm Prē, a largely defunct operating system and obsolete hardware manufactured by a company that no longer even exists (HP bought them out in 2010). It was a magnificent little device for its time, though, and eventually led to me joining the Android family of smartphones and tablets. I like Android’s openness to third-party developers as opposed to Apple’s so-called “walled garden,” and so I’ve never really even considered switching to an iPhone. And any time I’ve had to use a Mac for work or school in the past, I was thoroughly lost and confused, so swapping from a PC has never been an option either.
Apple TV+, the over-the-top streaming service that Apple launched back in 2019, eventually showed up on my radar within the last couple of years after I started seeing some articles and headlines about some of their marquee shows like Ted Lasso and The Morning Show, and as interesting and compelling as both of those shows look, they weren’t enough to convince me to subscribe. Then, early this year, I started seeing rumblings about a show called Severance on my social media feeds. I couldn’t recall having heard much about it, so I looked up the plot details and immediately wanted to check out the show. Thankfully, a member of the family is an iPhone user and already had a subscription to Apple TV+, and allowed me access. What I found upon logging in was unexpected…
Apple TV+ is hiding a goldmine of sci-fi television greatness.
Sign up for Jiggy’s Journal
All this and more… In your inbox!
No spam. No selling your data. Unsubscribe anytime.
How this came to be the case is puzzling. Apple reportedly spends north of $20 billion to produce original content for the streaming service. Yes, that is $20 billion, with a ‘B.’ It attracts big-name stars like Jennifer Aniston, who was just announced to be headlining a second series for the service. And that money has earned them numerous Emmy Awards, including the 72 nominations they snagged just last year. So all of that begs the question: Why does Apple spend so little on marketing for the service or its popular shows? All kinds of arguments exist to explain: Apple is more focused on promoting its brand rather than its individual offerings, the billions spent on the content mean that the marketing budget is much smaller, or perhaps Apple is just more interested in curating quality content rather than acquiring a large quantity of it.
Whatever the case may actually be, Apple has managed to create something of a hidden treasure trove of shows, especially in the sci-fi genre, which we all know is where I tend to gravitate. This becomes obvious by the fact that it was Severance, and not Ted Lasso, that managed to draw me in.
Severance stars Adam Scott, Patricia Arquette, Britt Lower, and several others as employees of the strange and mysterious Lumon Industries. Many of these employees have willingly opted to undergo a neurological procedure where their personal life is “severed” from their work life. While outside of work, the employee does not know what goes on inside of Lumon, and while at work, the employee knows nothing about their personal life. While this might seem like an ideal situation for some, the show explores the morality and deeper meaning behind personal identity and the exploitation of it. This was the general premise that got me hooked, but it was the impressive storytelling that got me to stay. I don’t think I’ve found myself so attached to a series as early as the pilot episode since 2013’s similarly bonkers Orphan Black. And if you need a professional opinion to jump into one of Lumon’s cubicles, the Los Angeles Timescalls it “an exquisite, masterful work of television.”
My reaction exactly, Tatiana.
Upon completing my binge of Severance, and during a discussion about how good the show was, my older brother recommended that I follow it up with the post-apocalyptic Silo, which is another sci-fi offering on Apple TV+. Taking the sci-fi a little further into what seems to be a ruined and toxic future Earth, Silo tells the story of a community of thousands of people who live in a giant underground silo. After the silo’s own sheriff breaks one of their most important rules and dies, this community, led by engineer Juliette (played by star Rebecca Ferguson), start to unravel the truth of their confinement, the world outside, and their restrictive laws that forbid learning more about the past or possessing historic “relics.” Tim Robbins, rapper Common, Rashida Jones, and Steve Zahn also appear at various points in the show’s run. While Severance at times seemed very well lit and almost squeaky clean, Silo makes up for it by being exceptionally dark and gritty since almost all scenes take place underground. The show is based on a series of stories collected in a 2011 book titled Wool by Hugh Howey, which I feel I’m going to have to eventually read to satiate my appetite for more until the show’s third season arrives.
Key art for Apple TV+ series Foundation.
The latest show that I managed to stumble into on Apple TV+ was the excellent Foundation, based on the stories of the same name by legendary science fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov. And whew, if you thought Severance or Silo sounded really out there, just wait until you step into the extremely far-flung future of this series! In said future, the galaxy is ruled by a Galactic Empire managed by its original Emperor Cleon’s trio of revolving clones: Brother Dawn (played by Cassian Bilton), the youngest Cleon of the three, who is training to one day take the reins; Brother Day (Lee Pace), the adult Cleon currently in command; and Brother Dusk (Terrence Mann), an aging Cleon who is preparing for retirement. This “genetic dynasty” is overseen by majordomo Lady Demerzel (Laura Birn), who also happens to be the last ageless robot to survive an event called the Robot Wars. The main story is put into place when the Cleons are threatened by a famed mathematician named Hari Seldon (Jared Harris) after he predicts the fall and ruin of their Empire with a method of science called “psychohistory.” Hari’s young and talented protégé, Gaal (Lou Llobell), is forced into the eye of the brewing storm when Hari calls on her to verify his findings and to help him set up a Foundation in order to try and soften the blow of the imminent disasters. With a story that spans centuries and galaxies, Foundation has been heralded as Apple TV+’s Game of Thrones, and critics are stating its upcoming third season is a “Masterpiece of Television.” If that doesn’t convince you to check it out, I don’t know what will.
And though I haven’t yet had the opportunity to view them, there’s plenty more science fiction where these came from. Apple’s original content on the service also includes alternate-history series For All Mankind, the alien thriller Invasion, reality-shifting drama Dark Matter, and robot comedy Murderbot. If the quality of these shows is as good as the aforementioned, then they will certainly be worth your time, too.
If you’re a sci-fi fan like me, the only piece of advice that I can impart to you now is that you don’t sleep on Apple TV+ and its incredible selection of stories. Don’t be turned off by what Apple might stand for with all its shiny iPhones and iPads, and instead, be comforted by the knowledge that I can almost guarantee you’ll find something to love here in Apple’s secret place. 🤫
If the apocalypse comes… uh, message me on Signal???
My time these days has mostly been engulfed with doing techie things with my computer and gaming, but did you know that I’m also something of a TV show connoisseur? I think I can pinpoint exactly why it is that I prefer television over film, and it all boils down to a conversation that I had with my sister recently. While working on a bit of writing herself, she had asked me if I ever get sad when a really good story ends. And I do! That’s why I love serialized storytelling like you see on TV—episode after episode usually expands upon the last. And don’t get me wrong: I also love and greatly appreciate standalone movies and stories in other media with firm beginnings, middles, and ends. But at the end of the day, isn’t it a little more exciting knowing that there’s more story yet to come?
There are plenty of shows that could probably make it into my personal Top 10 Favorite list, but I think Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had a pretty high-ranking position on that list for 20+ years now. People who have never watched the show often dismiss it as silly and frivolous based on the title alone, but honestly, the only thing you should judge the show on is its use of uh… Questionable special effects, especially in its early seasons. The show is built around the central character of Buffy Summers (played by the remarkably underrated Sarah Michelle Gellar), who is the latest young girl chosen by fate to fight against vampires, demons, and other nasty monsters that lurk in the darkness. Joining her in the show’s cast is her mentor, Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), and an evolving cast of friends, family, allies, and enemies alike, played by Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Charisma Carpenter, David Boreanaz, Seth Green, James Marsters, Eliza Dushku, Emma Caulfield, Marc Blucas, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Amber Benson.
The Buffy cast reunited for Entertainment Weekly in 2017. From left to right: Amber Benson, Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, Emma Caulfield, Alexis Denisof, Charisma Carpenter, Seth Green, David Boreanaz, Sarah Michelle Gellar, James Marsters, Michelle Trachtenberg, and Kristine Sutherland. Below: Joss Whedon.
Pre-dating teen girl fantasy vampire dramas like Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, Buffy was ahead of its time and the curve. The show’s writers brilliantly used its supernatural theme as a metaphor for the horrors of high school and adult life in later seasons. For example, in a first-season episode, a fellow student of Buffy’s feels so ignored by her peers that she literally becomes invisible. After going off to college, Buffy’s first roommate is so annoying that she turns out to be—surprise!—a vile demon. The ultimate metaphor that the show employed throughout its seven seasons was a second-season arc in which Buffy’s ensouled vampire boyfriend loses that soul and reverts to his wholly evil and murderous persona after sleeping with Buffy for the first time. Raise your hand if you have ever had an ex turn into a massive jerk at perhaps your most vulnerable moment!
Sign up for Jiggy’s Journal
A vibrant mix of casual humor, thoughtful musings, and the occasional deep dive. From culture, technology, and gaming to personal stories, world commentary, and tales of my feline companions… All in your inbox!
No spam. No selling your data. Unsubscribe anytime.
The show fit into the supernatural and horror genre perfectly, but for these reasons, its storytelling was also surprisingly relatable and compelling, and perfectly encapsulates why it’s still relevant and beloved by its cult following to this day. It should come as no surprise, then, that series star Sarah Michelle Gellar is planning a return to the role in a series revival in development at Hulu. The new series is being spearheaded by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, Poker Face writers Nora and Lilla Zuckerman, and executive directors from the original Buffy include Gail Berman, Fran & Kaz Kuzui, and Dolly Parton—yes, that Dolly Parton!—with her company Sandollar. Thankfully, the show’s original creator, Joss Whedon, is not involved with the revival after facing a boatload of misconduct allegations in 2021 from numerous Buffy cast members and his own ex-wife.
The thought of the big Buffy reboot has me feeling two disparate emotions: over-the-top excited and grimly nervous.
Sarah Michelle Gellar talks about the Buffy reboot on Access Hollywood.
Excitement because… of course I want more of the Buffyverse! Is that even a question? The fictional world that was built in Buffy and its spinoff, Angel, honestly lends itself to infinite expansion. Even as early as 2003, when it was reported that Gellar was leaving the show after its seventh season and that the series was effectively ending, there were reports of additional spinoffs in development that could continue the story of a few other popular characters. Those spinoffs never happened. It is not even the first time a revival of the show has been planned. Back in 2018, before the allegations against him came out, it was reported that Whedon was moving forward on a reboot with TV writer Monica Owusu-Breen, who had worked with him on Marvel Television’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series. That reboot never materialized either. But the hunger for more from this world is real, and the fact that it could happen very soon has me delighted.
There’s a great deal of trepidation on my part as well. It’s common knowledge now that Hollywood has produced a mixed bag of revivals, remakes, reboots, etc. Another one of my favorite series, Gilmore Girls, got a revival with a four-part miniseries on Netflix back in 2016, and feelings on it were middling at best. While it was lovely to step back into the show’s world again, the story left a lot of fans questioning why they bothered. If Buffy receives similar treatment, it would be enormously disappointing. I’m cautious, but optimistically so after Gellar’s recent remarks. Over the years, she has also been understandably wary about returning to the role of Buffy, but Zhao was the one who changed her mind.
“Every pitch I heard was just like, ‘Let’s just do Buffy again.’ Why?” Gellar said to Elite Daily last month. “But the passion that [Zhao] came to me with, what she wanted to do with the show and the character, and why Buffy is needed now — it was the first time where I thought, ‘OK, there’s a reason.’”
And frankly, in Sarah Michelle Gellar, I trust, so I think it’s time to put on our stylish but affordable boots and pick up those stakes again, friends.
