It was an ordinary Tuesday evening. The package had arrived by courier that morning, but I'd only opened it after dinner, with that silent ceremony I perform every time new hardware arrives – as if opening a box quickly were a form of disrespect toward the object. Inside was a MINISFORUM UM690L. Small, almost ridiculously small. A Ryzen 9 6900HX in a form factor that fit in the palm of a hand. I put it on the desk and looked at it. Looked at it again. And then something uncomfortable occurred to me. I had ordered it from a Chinese retailer, with a credit card, through a completely traceable payment infrastructure, from one of the most centralised and surveilled commercial ecosystems in existence. To build a homelab that would let me escape centralised, surveilled ecosystems.

From time to time, to completely disconnect from everything and everyone, I turn back into a kid and immerse myself in video games. I'm slow, I admit it: a game that would normally take 4-5 hours, I finish in at least quadruple the time. But every now and then, among the depths of Steam, I encounter genuine gems. And last night I finally completed Planet of Lana, a 2023 indie game that had been sitting in my library for months. The plot is straightforward but effective: Lana and Elo, presumably brother and sister, live in a peaceful fishing village built on stilts, where life flows serenely in harmony with nature. But this peace is shattered when a group of robots assault the village, kidnapping some inhabitants including Elo himself. From here begins Lana's odyssey: a journey to the edges of the known world to find and save her brother.