Video games wear all the hats.

They’re an escape. An outlet. A distraction. A muse. We play them to remember or to forget, to focus in or to zone out. It’s a daily activity for most people, even if many of them don’t even realize it. 

SEE ALSO: Netflix’s ‘Hilda’ is the cozy winter binge you’ve been looking for

Rami Ismail’s Meditations focuses our innate fascination with play in a constructive direction. It’s a lightweight application for Windows or Mac that updates every day with a simple, new game for you to play.

No one explains the purpose better than Ismail, an outspoken indie developer who forms one half of Vlambeer, the studio behind Nuclear Throne, Ridiculous Fishing, and (a personal favorite) Luftrausers. Ismail unveiled his project, which is really more of a group effort, on New Year’s Eve.

(You can download it right here. More details here.)

An FAQ on the Meditations website offers a bit more detail on what kinds of games you might expect and how they were made/the intent with which they were made:

Meditations are free games made in approximately six hours. They’re often small, experimental, and minimalistic – and can frequently be personal. Many of these games have been inspired by the day that they’re available on, and will relate in some way to the creators’ life or interests. In general, they will feature no text, and should take you approximately five minutes to complete.

That’s been my admittedly limited experience so far, two days into the new year. I unfortunately missed the Jan. 1 Meditation — the app’s internal clock switches to new ones on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), and I got home too late on New Year’s Day to check it out — but that’s part of what’s appealing here.

There’s no commitment! The mainstream gaming world is ruled these days by a desire on the publishing side to keep players hooked, and spending money. Meditations unmoors itself from that mindset. 

Seeing every single Meditation will take some commitment, of course. But the motivation to keep up needs to come from inside you. There’s nothing in the app that tracks your progress or measures your performance at a macro level. Each daily Meditation is just that — a contemplative act of play that’s replaced by a new one within 24 hours.

Consider the Jan. 2 Meditation, from Adriel Wallick. (Every day brings a different creator.) Before you even begin the game, you’re greeted by a bit of text that sets the scene. The words read more like a daily affirmation than an instruction manual. 

It’s just something to ponder in the brief moment before you hit the button to begin your Meditation. The way it’s written suggests that Wallick is sharing a bit of herself and what inspired her addition to this project. 

As a naturally outgoing person, I long to fill up my happiness by being near friends, but I often quickly hit a wall after a small amount of time. It’s hard to find the balance between making myself happy without draining all of my extra energy. This is always [exacerbated] by the holiday season, as I tend to spend a lot of time around those I love over the New Year’s holiday.

It’s also a hint. Wallick’s Jan. 2 Meditation is effectively an interactive representation of this hard-to-find balance she’s talking about in her preamble.

Clicking the “Begin” button opens up a new, roughly square window with a small, pulsating greenish-blue circle situated in the middle of a larger, lighter blue-green circle, tinged with shades of yellow. Clicking anywhere inside the window, or even just pressing and holding a button on your keyboard, causes the central circle to slowly grow in size, and change to more of a reddish color. Let go, and it’ll slowly shrink back to its original size and color. 

Hold the button for too long, though, and you’ll get an audio cue, at which point you’re barred from inflating the circle for around five seconds. During that time, the circle shrinks and reverts to its original color as it normally would when you let goal.

The goal of the Meditation is to make that central circle large enough to fill the whole playing area. To do that, you’ve got to get into the groove of holding down your button just long enough for the circle to inflate without it going full red. Then you release for a few seconds while the color reverts, and repeat the whole process again.

It’s a simple activity that most people would figure out on their own after a few minutes of experimental clicking. But then, once you realize what you’re supposed to be doing, it requires total focus. The color change is subtle and slow, which can complicate that moment when you decide how much red qualifies as “too red.”

Remember: this is just one Meditation out of 365. And if you’re reading these words on any day other than Jan. 2, you’re going to find something very different waiting for you when you boot up the app. But even if you missed this one, I think Wallick’s contribution offers a good example of what to expect  in general from Meditations.

A few things to note from my own experience of downloading and setting up Meditations: Windows 10 might freak out on you (depending on your security settings), telling you the app is suspicious and shouldn’t be trusted. I won’t tell you how to handle your own PC security, but I can say I’ve downloaded and installed it without issue. Just follow the link in Ismail’s tweet if you’re worried — he’s a trustworthy creator.

(I don’t own a Mac, so I can’t speak to how this setup process would work in Mac OS.)

There’s also nothing in the app that makes it open up automatically every day, and nothing that nudges you to do so. If you want to check out each day’s new Meditation, you’ll have to manage your schedule accordingly and make time for it on your own. Though the same could be said of more traditional approaches to meditation!

The overall execution may be impossible to judge at this point, but I love Meditations as a concept. I love that idea that every day, I can sit down at my desk and take five minutes before work to puzzle through something new and fresh and original. It feels like a much-needed daily reset button for your brain.

A big update is coming for Roku’s free content network, Roku Channel.

The set-top box company announced on Wednesday that it will soon launch premium subscriptions on its movies, TV, and live events platform called The Roku Channel. 

Users will be able to subscribe to their favorite paid cable networks like Showtime, Starz, and Epix. Other paid subscription services coming to Roku Channel include CollegeHumor’s Dropout, Smithsonian Channel Plus, Noggin, and Tastemade. 

Roku touts that premium subscriptions can be setup with a single click. Those who subscribe to premium content via Roku Channel can manage their subscriptions through a single interface and be able to pay for each services’ fee on a single bill. Pricing for each service is the same as if your subscribed outside of Roku Channel, so the aggregated bill and management interface is really the main selling point from Roku. Premium subscription content can be viewed on any device that supports Roku Channel. 

Amazon offers something very similar to what Roku is rolling out through its Amazon Prime Video service with add-on channels. However, there are pros and cons to each service.

SEE ALSO: YouTube now offers free, ad-supported streaming Hollywood movies

A major difference between the two services right now is that Roku does not currently have an option to sign up for HBO. While it’s very possible a deal is currently in the works to bring HBO to Roku Channel, this is certainly a glaring absence at launch, especially with Game of Thrones’ final season coming up in April of this year.

Another negative, as The Verge points out, is that your subscriptions will only allow users to watch the services from within the Roku Channel. For example, if a user signs up for Showtime within Roku’s platform, they won’t be able to download Showtime’s standalone apps and use their subscription to watch the content there.

However, one major plus that puts Roku’s service ahead of Amazon is that there is no initial subscription necessary on Roku’s end to use the service. To subscribe to any premium network on Amazon, a user must be an Amazon Prime member at a cost of $119 per year or subscribe to Prime Video at $8.99 per month.

Roku Channel is a completely free, ad-supported streaming service provided by Roku. Just this past summer, Roku further expanded accessibility to Roku Channel when it launched a website allowing users to view content from any web browser. Previously, viewers needed one of Roku’s set-top streaming player to watch it’s free content channel.

An update will also be coming to Roku’s iOS and Android apps at the end of this month, bringing Roku Channel to tablets and mobile devices. The company will first begin rolling out premium subscriptions to Roku devices by the end of January as well.

The toilets at Joshua Tree National Park — a world of palm oases, lizard-dominated wilderness, and desert tortoises — are overflowing.

Due to the ongoing government shutdown that started Dec. 22, there is zero funding for most Park Service employees. Hence, Joshua Tree announced that it is now forced to close its popular campgrounds, beginning on Jan. 2.  

“The park is being forced to take this action for health and safety concerns as vault toilets reach capacity,” the park wrote on its website. 

In a dozen past government shutdowns, like that in 2013, national parks closed completely — which gave some inherent protection to the nation’s hundreds of parks, memorials, and historic sites. But beginning in January 2018, the Trump administration instructed parks to stay open during a shutdown, however long. Now, with an extended shutdown, the parks are finding themselves littered, ill-managed, or not managed at all.

“It would be analogous to leaving The Smithsonian open, but having no staff there,” Jon Jarvis, who spent eight years as the director of the National Park Service, said in an interview.

“The parks are somewhat analogous to a small city,” added Jarvis, noting that parks run trash collection, wastewater, and emergency services like police and fire response. 

“You eliminate all that, but the visitor population is still there,” said Jarvis. 

That leaves toilets overflowing in Joshua Tree, piles of trash in Yosemite, and the hallowed ground of Civil War battlefields unwatched. 

“It’s an unacceptable and very worrisome situation,” John Garder, the Senior Director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association, said in an interview. “We’re deeply concerned that the administration has taken an irresponsible approach in urging parks to remain partially open when there are clearly threats to resources.”

SEE ALSO: Crumbling national parks mired in $11 billion backlog, but experts scoff at jacking up fees

The decision to keep the parks open makes little sense from the lens of preservation and conservation. Rather, it’s a political move by an administration that is insistent on a budget that secures billions of dollars to extend walls along the nation’s southern border.

“The reason the administration left it [the parks] open is nothing more than pure politics,” said Jarvis. “They didn’t want to face the public’s outcry that the parks are closed.”

The consequences of the shutdown expand well beyond wretched bathrooms. 

In Yosemite, for example, the Park Service has spent decades carefully keeping trash away from a large population of wild black bears. The reason is simple: Bears that seek out trash inevitably learn to seek out human food and become comfortable around, or habituated to, people. 

“In Yosemite we have worked for decades to wean black bears from human food,” said Jarvis. “Now the trashcans are overflowing.” 

“The bears aren’t on furlough — you’re going to wind up with habituated bears,” said Jarvis.

The crux of the problem is that most Park Service employees are deemed “non-essential” by the federal government, so they’re furloughed during a shutdown (unlike, say, air traffic controllers and Army soldiers). A small percentage of Park Service employees are considered essential — mostly law enforcement rangers — and are able to still work. Though, these rangers often have huge swaths of land to watch, but are few in number. 

“I would argue that Park Service employees are all essential,” said Jarvis. “We have these priceless resources that are under the stewardship of the National Park Service.”

It’s unknown when President Trump, who boldly declared responsibility for a shutdown in December, will sign a budget. But when Park Service employees return, they’ll almost certainly have to survey the land, clean up, and repair some of the nation’s most prized resources.

“They’re going to have to fix it,” said Jarvis.

We’re barely 24 hours into 2019 and some of the tech industry is already re-trodding or doubling down on the the blunders, bad looks, and irresponsible policy of 2018. Sadly, we did not leave milquetoast PR statements and broken promises in the past where they belong.

But guys, it’s never too late to change! Let 2019 ring in the New You (even if that idea, for us flawed humans, is mostly BS).

SEE ALSO: 10 New Year’s resolutions that will make your online life a little better

As tech employees, their bosses, and the pundits (like me) shuffle back into work today, here are a few resolutions we hope the tech brass really, really considers. We make these suggestions not just to criticize, but in the hopes that tech actually can be a force for good — as long as the industry holds itself accountable to its own (not even that) lofty standards.

Happy new year!

1. Stop complying with fascist governments

On January 1, the Financial Times reported that Netflix had pulled an episode of comedian Hasan Minhaj’s show ‘Patriot Act,’ in Saudi Arabia. The first day of 2019 showed that, like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many more, tech plower player Netflix chose to meet the censorship demands of an authoritarian regime, rather than uphold its own self-ascribed value of artistic freedom.

In the episode, Minhaj skewers the Saudi government — and the United States’ hum drum response to its crimes — including the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the war in Yemen. Minhaj also called out Saudi Arabia’s massive financial interests in Silicon Valley, including in Uber, Slack, and more.

Netflix reportedly pulled the episode following complaints by the Saudi government. Under a Saudi law that basically justifies censorship of anything whatsoever, Netflix said it was just complying with local law; for anyone keeping track, that’s the tech industry equivalent of “I was just following orders.”

“We strongly support artistic freedom and removed this episode only in Saudi Arabia after we had received a valid legal request — and to comply with local law,” Netflix told NPR.

Netflix’s move followed a year of fascist-assisting backslides in tech. In 2018, the Intercept reported that Google was working on a search engine for China that would comply with local censorship laws — reversing its 2010 decision to pull out of China because of censorship. But Google was not the only company to aid what a 2018 report from the organization and think-tank Freedom House has called “The rise of digital authoritarianism.” By removing apps, access to information, and even walling off individuals from the censored internet in China, Uganda, Tanzania, Vietnam, and other countries, Silicon Valley has helped authoritarian governments gain tighter control of their citizens by restricting the flow of information.

Tech companies need to do business in companies with far from perfect human rights records to make money. But tech also holds itself to a higher standard, often claiming to be companies with values that attempt to do good in the world. So for 2019, more of the tech industry should ~resolve~  to stop citing “following the law” over the values they themselves claim to espouse. 

2. Get a handle on the content moderation shitshow

A lovely January 2 report (from TechCrunch) showed how hackers exploit a Twitter vulnerability to spread Islamic state propaganda. That followed the December 27 New York Times article on Facebook’s disorganized global content moderation efforts.

2018 saw many tech industry policy changes and stated commitments to detox the web from hate and propaganda through proactive screening and AI. However, both of these recent reports show that much of tech companies’ efforts to remove harmful content still amount to reactive measures. In 2019, strive to own and learn from these mistakes, close the loopholes, and do better. The stakes are too high to allow propaganda to languish online.

3. Follow through on your own rules

Call it a meta-resolution. If tech companies abided by the rules they themselves had set up, the internet might be a much better place.

In 2018, many tech companies followed through on rules they had set on hate speech and other content violations, kicking many prominent figures off of social media. 

However, a little reported story from December shows they have a far way to go. 

In mid-December, YouTube banned Proud Boys leader Gavin McInnes. Many lauded this move, since YouTube is a particularly harmful avenue for spreading propaganda and radicalizing the impressionable. But what many of the initial reports missed was that McInnes was able to come back online just two days later. 

YouTube did not ban McInnes for his and his group’s well documented use of hate speech and incitements to violence, which break YouTube’s own rules. Instead, he was booted because of copyright violations. Once McInnes fixed the violations, YouTube gave him the green light for misogyny once more.

Experts recently told me that this is characteristic of the tech industry’s approach to clamping down on rule breakers. Its application of its own rules are diffuse, and often only followed through on after public outrage. 

Tech companies are incredibly powerful arbiters of speech and change. Like any diet or vow to exercise for the new year, if these companies enforced their own rules in 2019, the internet might have a chance of getting in shape.