Sitting in the living room, the dish washer in the background reminding me of the sound of sea, and missing the real sound of waves and the shore, the rocks and the sand. My wife is on a call and I’m thinking about the end of summer.
Summer is coming to an end. The temperatures are dropping below 30°C. To think that when I was young we expected a few days only of 30°C and more. Summer is coming to an end and my summer break is coming to and end at the end of September. As always, the prospect of going back to work is not very enticing. I’m looking forward to a future were we mostly entertain each other and the basic necessities of life are free.
I don’t need a future with long distance holidays but I don’t want to give up ambulances and hospitals; I don’t need a future with private cars but I like trains. I wonder whether we’ll manage to make the transition without it all breaking down. But enough of climate doom! One of these days I will create a website with fake political posters and stickers for progressive issues as if they were on the table. In a different context, I wrote:
If we’re the resistance, then we need to think in terms of propaganda. What are our posters? Our jokes? What new names do we give the things we like, the things we dislike? – 2020-08-12 Mozilla fires 250 engineers
2020-08-12 Mozilla fires 250 engineers
I’d like a poster of a rich old man handing a thick bundle of paper money to a young man while an innocent bystander is watching. The caption says: “One million is enough! Reintroduce inheritance tax: Yes ✓” – as if this was a campaign poster for an initiative here in Switzerland.
Another poster would show the rich old man offering a thick bundle of paper money to a picket line of small people proudly standing next to each other and a Swiss flag behind them. The caption says: “Together we are strong! Reintroduce inheriance tax: Yes ✓”
The rich old man sitting on a throne, a thick bundle of paper money in their hand. The caption says: “End feudalism of the rich. Inheritance tax: Yes ✓”
Anyway, summer is coming to an end, and I am in the lucky position of only working a 60% job. This usually means that I work 80% when I do work, taking Fridays off, and the remaining days plus regular holidays turn into a nice four month summer break. Every year. It works out financially because programmers are well paid, we don’t have kids and we don’t have cars and we live in a small 3½ room apartment on the outskirts of town.
As I like to say when people ask me what I do with all this free time, and what my holiday plans are, and whether I plan to travel: “I don’t like to travel, and my wife doesn’t have all these holidays, so I stay at home, do the dishes and the cooking, houseman stuff. And no matter what I do, I shall make sure that it isn’t anything productive or efficient!”
This always makes me smile. The idea of doing free time “efficiently” and “productively” is silly. That’s not how leisure works. I need to feel slightly bored. My mind starts swimming and ideas come and go, and I end up being busy doing this and that.
I tried to install Go To Social but failed. 2022-06-08 No GoToSocial.
I wrote a Discord bot which I no longer use. 2022-06-20 Discord Bot.
I played a lot of D&D. Montag in Zürich.
I wrote a GUI program in Common Lisp using SDL and Cairo. 2022-07-20 Gridmapper CL.
I wrote a TUI program in Go using Wish and Bubble Tea. 2022-08-18 A map generator for the terminal
2022-08-18 A map generator for the terminal
I joined a translation and proofreading project to translate OSRIC into German. 2022-08-12 OSRIC ALRIK.
I started drawing again, to illustrate the wiki pages. ALRIK Album.
I produced an episode for my podcast. Halberds and Helmets Podcast.
We did go and spend a few days in Lyon, and we’re hoping to spend another two weeks in Saint-Malo. Both of them reachable by train, thanks to the French TGV. 🚄❤️
#Life