Added unfinished blogs, dubuque page

Makefile

@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ BLOGSHTMLTMP=$(addprefix $(SITE_ROOT)/,$(BLOGS))
 BLOGSHTML=$(subst .md4tj,.html,$(BLOGSHTMLTMP))
 #$(error $(BLOGSHTML))
 
-all: $(SITE_ROOT_RESULT) index about links archives takes restaurants css blog contact
+all: $(SITE_ROOT_RESULT) index about links archives takes restaurants css blog contact dubuque
 
 index: $(SITE_ROOT)/index.html
 
@@ -29,6 +29,8 @@ archives: $(SITE_ROOT)/archives.html
 
 restaurants: $(SITE_ROOT)/restaurants.html
 
+dubuque: $(SITE_ROOT)/dubuque.html
+
 blog: $(SITE_ROOT)/blog.html $(BLOGSHTML)
 
 contact: $(SITE_ROOT)/contact.html

blog/deusex.md4tj.bak

@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+@@META charset UTF-8
+@@META name viewport content width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0
+@@TITLE Vidya Review - Deus Ex (2000)
+@@CSS ../css/main.css
+# The Jerks
+## Blog
+[Back to blogs](https://www.thejerks.club/blog.html)
+
+### Vidya Review - Deus Ex (2000)
+@@BLOGPOSTTITLE Vidya Review - Deus Ex (2000)
+@@BLOGPOSTDATE 1722098380
+
+#### Introduction
+Prior to this game, I never thought of "Immersive sim" as a separate genre, I just always called them "first person RPGs". The only other immersive sim I played prior to this game was [Dishonored](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonored) years ago; I enjoyed it, but to me it was basically just like Fallout with supernatural elements and different skins. This game has changed that for me. For context, I was born too late for the real "PC-Console" wars. Sure, there was brief period in the 2010s where the intensity of the wars rose quite a bit, but these were over superficial technical issues - at the end of the day, with the exception of Halo PC and Console gamers were playing the exact same games. In the PS2 era, PC and Console gaming where quite disparate. This game was competing with the likes of Half Life and System Shock 2, with the faithful PC disciples claiming that these games were only playable on PC. At the end of the day, unlike its competitors this game truly can only be run in a mouse/keyboard control scheme. It is so complex, so chock full of content, so detailed that the attempt to port this game to the PS2, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy, was a complete and utter failure. This game is truly a shining star in the field of PC gaming and shows that a true immersive sim is too complex to be played with a game controller. Unfortunately, immersive sims don't pay the bills anymore - the gaming industry has moved on, but we are left with some masterpieces. 
+
+I made various attempts to play Deus Ex over the course of the last couple of years, always resigning out of boredom after the first or second mission. This is because I'm a victim of the classic "male fantasy" - I just want to cause destruction and mayhem all over the place. Deus Ex is an AWFUL game for this. I decided to give this game one more try, mostly because my brother who has completed it about 3 times at this point shilled it pretty well. The conclusion I've come to is this: if you treat Deus Ex as a classic action game, bhopping and spraying bullets everywhere you will not have fun. I can not emphasize this enough - Deus Ex is a horrible action game due to its complex control scheme, slow movement, and easy deaths. It's best enjoyed as a slow burn, taking time to stealth areas, discover secrets, and get immersed in the world.
+
+Full disclosure - I DID NOT PLAY THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS GAME. I played with [Kentie's launcher](https://kentie.net/article/dxguide) which added an OpenGL renderer and [GMDX (Give Me Deus Ex)](https://genericname112.wixsite.com/gmdx/home), a massive overhaul mod that makes some extremely opinionated changes to the gameplay, including changing up enemies, changing enemy AI, adding in mantling, and several graphical and visual improvements. Life's too short to play the "way the developers intended", I want the best experience available whenever I play a game. Keep in mind that this entire review is based on Deus Ex + Kentie's Launcher + GMDX.
+
+Also, I realized that one thing that would spice up my vidya reviews was screenshots. I tried to use the in-game screenshotter (bound to numpad asterisk) but when I beat the game, I couldn't find the screenshots anywhere. Let that be a cautionary tale - don't trust Deus Ex to save your screenshots, use your own screen capture software. 
+
+#### Summary
+Deus Ex is an immersive sim set against the backdrop of the near future, 2052, where the UN in response to growing terrorism threats instituted a supranational diplomatically immune police force, UNATCO (United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition), FEMA is now the secret fist of the US government, the world is suffering from a pandemic of the "Gray Death", and every conspiracy theory ever has some tinge of truth to it. You play JC Denton, a successful genetic experiment that UNATCO is using to shut down insurgent groups. JC Denton is equipped with nano-augmentation technology, which allows you to put augmentation canisters into parts of your body to have it enhance your abilities in some way.
+
+The UNATCO characters you can interact with are
+- Joseph Manderley - head of UNATCO, fired after you betray UNATCO
+- Anna Navarre - mechanically augmented (more primitive than JC) UNATCO agent, favors violence and will berate you if you aren't violent enough
+- Gunther Hermann - mechanically augmented UNATCO agent, favors violence but is pretty dumb, afraid of obsolence due to being only mechanically augmented
+- Shannon - office administrator at UNATCO headquarters who will get pissed off if you go into the women's restroom
+- Sam Carter - 
+
+
+#### Gameplay and Strategy
+The game takes place in a first-person perspective. The metrics to track are health - split into your head, torso, arms, and legs, energy - the power source for your augmentations, and your O2 - used when you run and swim. You take damage based on where enemies hit you, if both legs get to 0% you will no longer be able to run. I never got to 0% on the arms, but I assume your accuracy degrades for ranged weapons and your damage degrades for low-tech (i.e. melee) weapons. Your torso getting to 0% means death; I never reached 0% for the head but I assume that's another death condition. Energy getting to 0% means you can't use your augmentations, and O2 getting to 0% means that you start taking torso damage if in water, otherwise you slow to a walk. From what I read, this seems to be an addition with GMDX - if I understand correctly in the base game you were allowed to keep running.
+
+The nano-augmentation system is composed of slots in your bodies into which you can insert augmentation canisters which can then be upgraded with augmentation upgrade canisters. To be honest, most of the augmentations were worthless. I stuck to only a few - the light (bound to f12), enhanced vision (bound to f8), and invisibility (bound to f4). I had augmentation canisters installed in every other part of the body except the legs (I somehow never stumbled across an augmentation canister for the legs even though I took an exploration-heavy approach) but these were the only ones I used. There was a passive augmentation that reduced the energy consumption of every active augmentation; this is the single most useful augmentation upgrade you can get in my opinion. The light can be upgraded once which gives a larger lighting radius and less energy consumption, but I barely noticed a difference. The enhanced vision starts out as night vision, but fully upgraded you can see enemies through walls. The invisibility came in useful for when the developers just left you no choice but to run across an open area in full view of enemies. Its upgrades consist of lowering energy consumption, which is needed for this augmentation to be practical. In the beginning when it wasn't upgraded and I didn't have the energy consumption reduction augmentation, I would go through an entire energy bar in like 15 seconds. I eventually got it and the energy consumption reduction aug fully upgraded, and I was able to comfortably use it without draining all my energy. Unfortunately, cameras can still track you if you're invisible, along with (Wo)Men in Black, a mid-late game enemy. 
+
+There is also a skills system, where you can upgrade your various facilities. Starting out I decided to max out stealth as a skill, which was a good move but didn't leave any skill points for upgrading anything else. Still, maxing out stealth made the game super fun in the early game. 
+
+#### Story and Gameplay
+You play as JC Denton, one of the first successful test subjects of nano-augmentation research, an agent of UNATCO sent to supress the NSF (National Secessionist Forces), an American insurgent group who have captured [Liberty Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Island). After dismantling the occupation, you find that the NSF took over the island because they believe the US government is withholding Ambrosia, the cure for Gray Death, from the American people. I chose to stealth this mission, which was the right call because this changes how people perceive you - everyone back at headquarters will love you. In fact, I managed to get through this entire mission with even knocking anyone out or getting discovered. I chose to fulfill the optional side quest of rescuing Gunther Hermann who was captured after he was previously sent in to fix the situation. I also chose to fulfill the second optional side quest of talking to an informant who will give you the key to the Statue of Liberty, although I didn't need it - there was a way to mantle over some crates and sneak in that I chose to take. After capturing the NSF commander (who drops some serious truth bombs when I talked to him), I ran back to the headquarters, looted it for everything it was worth, walked into the women's bathroom (pissing of Shannon), and got chewed out by Manderley who then gives the next mission of recovering some stolen ambrosia. 
+You are sent to track down this stolen ambrosia, this time in [Battery Park (renamed to The Battery in 2015)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battery_(Manhattan)). 
+#### Difficulty
+There are 5 available difficulty options - easy, normal, hard, realistic, and hardcore. I chose normal out of these, which I believe was the right choice for me. I went for a nonlethal stealth approach, meaning that I was killed pretty quickly when I was caught but this game makes save-scumming so easy that this never really was a big deal.
+
+#### Technical
+- Game source - GOG (6.99 USD)
+- GPU - AMD RX580 8GB
+- CPU - AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
+- OS - Linux (ran with Wine on Lutris)
+- Control - Mouse/Keyboard
+
+#### Conclusion
+I have played many video games throughout my life, which is why I have the confidence to say this is one of the greatest games ever created. I wish I could sensationalize it by saying it's the best, but unfortunately there are a couple games closer to my heart. It's complex without being unapproachable, 

blog/disney3.md4tj.bak

@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+@@META charset UTF-8
+@@META name viewport content width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0
+@@TITLE Third Visit to Disney World
+@@CSS ../css/main.css
+# The Jerks
+## Blog
+[Back to blogs](https://www.thejerks.club/blog.html)
+
+### Third Visit to Disney World
+@@BLOGPOSTTITLE Third Visit to Disney World
+@@BLOGPOSTDATE 1710971214

blog/tapvpn.md4tj.unfinished

@@ -0,0 +1,22 @@
+@@META charset UTF-8
+@@META name viewport content width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0
+@@TITLE TAP VPN for Remote LAN Gaming
+@@CSS ../css/main.css
+# The Jerks
+## Blog
+[Back to blogs](https://www.thejerks.club/blog.html)
+
+### TAP VPN for Remote LAN Gaming
+@@BLOGPOSTTITLE TAP VPN for Remote LAN Gaming
+@@BLOGPOSTDATE 1706943051
+
+#### Introduction
+I started hosting LAN parties long ago, when I was in high school. Our favorite games to play were from the 2000s. Back in those days, I guess the average gamer was considered enough of an idiot that they wouldn't know what an "IP address" was, so having direct-connect capabilities for games back then was hit and miss. Either this, or somehow they reasoned that direct-connect capabilities increased piracy. In any case, some games were excellent for LAN multiplayer, like all the early Call of Duties (anything before MW2) which exposed a console that allowed direct connection. Others were awful, like Star Wars Battlefront II which depended upon server discovery. These games that depended on server discovery had the additional egregious sin of only scanning the highest priority network interface instead of all the network interfaces for games, meaning that if you somehow were left littered with network interfaces when you were e.g. messing around with virtual machines, one of these unused interfaces might have been the one that was scanned. The scanning itself happened via the now *deprecated* broadcast address - sending packets to 255.255.255.255, letting the router forward these packets to all of its clients, and answering any replies.
+At some point we all grew up, but we still wanted to play these games even though we were scattered across the country. Gamespy's 2014 shutdown killed online multiplayer for many of the games we played, and publishers not wanting to pay for the servers killed the rest. If a game was beloved enough, people would reimplement master servers for these games (e.g. [swbfspy](https://info.swbfgamers.com) for Battlefront I and II). However, for various reasons including my zealousness for where my internet traffic goes - why go through a master server and a public server when all I want to do is play with my friends? - I wanted to get LAN multiplayer over a VPN working for these games.
+
+#### The Problem
+I already use a VPN to keep in touch with my friends and play video games that allow *direct connection* to hosts, but this is an OpenVPN TUN configuration. As mentioned before, these older games use the broadcast address 255.255.255.255 to scan for games. OpenVPN allows you to create a TUN (create essentially an isolated virtual network with the VPN server acting as a router) or a TAP (essentially graft clients into the one of the networks to which the host is connected by bridging the virtual TAP interface with an interface) VPN. TUN is much easier to set up and recommended by pretty much everyone on the internet for what we were doing, which is why we went with this. However, TUN also works at a higher layer of the OSI model that is incapable of handling broadcast addresses so when my game sends out requests to 255.255.255.255 these packets are essentially just ignored. TAP does not have this issue though. In this post, I will be bridging the virtual TAP interface with the server's interface to the internal network, which is almost universally discouraged online for security reasons (at least without firewall rules for isolating traffic). For this reason, we only put this TAP VPN up on an ad hoc basis, bringing it up when we want to game and tearing it down when we are done. Eventually, we will switch to using an unused interface on the server. In addition to this problem, we also need to make sure that 255.255.255.255 is routed through the TAP interface. 
+Note: networking is one of my weakest points in computing, so this explanation of TAP/TUN might not be 100% correct. For the purposes of this post it should suffice.
+
+#### The Setup
+We assume that the internal network for the server is on the 192.168.1.x subnet which is pretty standard. When grafting in disparate clients to this network, we can reserve a chunk of this subnet to these clients. In this case, we will set 192.168.1.240 through 192.168.1.254 as the IPs assigned to clients connecting to the VPN. It is 

dubuque.md4tj

@@ -0,0 +1,19 @@
+@@META charset UTF-8
+@@META name viewport content width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0
+@@TITLE The Jerks - Dubuque
+@@CSS css/main.css
+# The Jerks
+## Dubuque
+
+@@INCLUDE nav.md4tj
+
+A collection of times [Dubuque, Iowa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubuque,_Iowa) has shown up in pop culture. This list is by no means complete; I intend to add to it as I run into more Dubuque references. 
+
+- [George R. R. Martin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin) briefly taught English and Journalism at [Clarke College](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke_University) from 1976 to 1978
+- [Kate Mulgrew](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Mulgrew) (Star Trek Voyager, Orange is the New Black) attended high school at [Wahlert Catholic High School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahlert_Catholic_High_School)
+- [Mississippi Grind (2015)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_Grind) briefly took place in Dubuque at the start of the movie. IIRC, it featured an establishing shot of Mulgrew's which is a bar across the river in East Dubuque, Illinois, but points for effort I guess.
+- Law and Order: Special Victims Unit Season 17 Episode 20, Fashionable Crimes, features a victim who started out working at the Coldstone Creamery in Dubuque and moved to New York for a modeling job.
+- In [You Were Never Duckier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Were_Never_Duckier), Daffy Duck says he came from Dubuque when he arrived at the National Poultry Show.
+- [Field of Dreams](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_Dreams) had scene filmed in Dubuque
+
+@@LASTUPDATED

nav.md4tj

@@ -8,4 +8,5 @@
 - [Blog](https://www.thejerks.club/blog.html)
 - [Git](https://git.thejerks.club)
 - [Contact](https://www.thejerks.club/contact.html)
+- [Dubuque](https://www.thejerks.club/dubuque.html)
 @@ENDDIV