I've been WFH-ing it pretty hard the last few days, which means my desktop computer is feeling like "the Bad Screen". I want to spend some time at "the Good Screen" in the evenings, which should be my laptop. Unfortunately, while my youngest was using my laptop for a remote class today, the WiFi adapter seems to have basically died. Even cold booting after a cooldown period doesn't let Linux see it. So no Good Screen for a while. The idea of writing offline and transferring files by removable drive is actually sort of appealing, but i need to be able to refer to my Wallabag for links.
Not sure what I should do. I guess the laptop has a PC Card slot? Don't know if that or USB is wisest. This postlet brought to you by phone.
This is what it looks like for me editing my gemlog on my phone.
Productive day at $DAYJOB today. It's only pretty routine search and CRUD code, but the truth is I don't even get to code every day (a lot of recent work has been helping junior developers and shepherding completed projects through the release process), so any time spent in Emacs is good.
Gender Acceleration: a Blackpaper
Apparently, the trick is to install from git, re-enter your config file's data, edit the upgrade script so that it lets you upgrade to master and not only the highest existing tag, run the upgrade script, and debug the 'template not found' errors you get when you log in afterward. I seem to have lost the thumbnail images associated with my bookmarks, but everything else seems okay now.
My Wallabag install has been broken since I updated to Fedora 32, which includes PHP 7.4. Apparently, I can install from git to get it working, but I'm not sure how to migrate my existing settings; there's not like a single configuration file that I can find, and the install process is dramatically hairy.
Didn't get to write up any of the stuff I was thinking about; busy with family and socially-distanced $DAYJOB. Went down a rabbit hole of reading Adolph Reed Jr. and his son, Touré Reed, both history professors who look at US racial issues through the lens of political economy. Both iconoclasts. I'm not endorsing everything either of them has ever said, but I do think they're worth reading.
Been busy in the garden and with my family a lot lately, which has kept me off of the computer. There's a lot of stuff I want to write about, maybe even a new STN, but I can't get the free time to do it.
So much of the public discourse about the quarantine is about how great it is for introverts. But what about introverts who have families? Families some of whom are extroverts? Families you love dearly but never get a moment away from?
The summer 2020 Konpeito mixtape is out! They're absolutely one of the best things in Geminispace, so go grab it!
Was expecting a very comfy day at home yesterday. Had well-defined things to do at $DAYJOB, some ideas of things to write, a little gardening to do, but not too much, and the kids were in virtual summer camp. Should have had the chance to listen to some synthwave and do some writing and Lisp hacking, but this was not to be.
Was caught up on work, decided to run the long-put-off upgrade of my desktop/server to Fedora 32. The upgrade ran fine, but afterward, lots of stuff was broken, mainly relating to PostgreSQL and PHP. Postgres upgrade from 11 to 12 didn't work the first time; had to restore from backups, discover that the backup hadn't been cleanly shut down, install postgres-11 from upstream to clean it, uninstall it so the upgrade script will run, restore my configuration. Then the version of Nextcloud I was running wouldn't work with the new PHP release in Fedora 32, so it had to be manually upgraded, disabling version checks in the first few upgrades...
My wallabag install is still only partially working; it looks like php-7.4 is hugely disruptive.
At the same time I was struggling with this, youngest child needed help with the craft project at camp and was getting frustrated, so I had intensive parenting to do. And I belatedly realized that I had a video meeting for $DAYJOB just half an hour after summer camp broke for lunch... so rush to make lunch for my kids in time to scarf some down myself before my meeting...
I was pretty much done with the day by 2 PM.
Was offline all weekend because of gardening. Am now catching up on emails and so on and so on.
Since yesterday I've been fatigued and having some chest congestion. Yesterday, I was too tired to write anything; today I'm trying to get this out before I have to take a nap. No fever, by normal standards, though my normal body temperature is a degree or two lower than most people's, and I was up to human-standard yesterday. Only a little cough. Don't know if it's COVID-19 or just a cold, to be honest.
Anyway, if I go without updating for more than two weeks, either I'm dead, or the government has seized all of my computing hardware for writing seditious things on the internet.
Context: the protagonist, a private eye, is talking to a serial killer on a plane to Las Vegas. This is not part of the investigation; it's just the kind of thing that happens to him.
“And what about…all the rest of it?”
“I think I’ve seen a lot of it on the Internet.”
“I can’t use the Internet. My ex sends me things. Photos.”
“Perhaps I should send you some photos sometime. Consider this, though. If I’ve seen it on the Internet, is it still underground? ‘Underground’ always connoted something hidden, something difficult to see and find. Something underneath the surface of things, yes? But if it’s on the Internet—and I do praise the Lord that I lived long enough to see such a wondrous thing—it cannot possibly be underground.”
“People show pictures of their asses on the inner-web.” “Yes. And it’s a wonderfully useful tool for stalking people. What’s more, my personal fetish—and it is a fetish, I fully appreciate and understand that—requires trophies of a sort, and I find that storing them as images on private Web space does very nicely. I don’t have to carry them with me, you see? Wherever there is an Internet connection, I can reach my collection. I mean, that’s just marvelous. My point, however, is that the Internet is more than a system for holding pictures, whether it be of people’s backsides or my hands all slick and yellow with human subcutaneous fat. It is the greatest mass-communication tool ever invented, and utterly democratic beyond the entry-level requirement of having a computer.”
“Now holllld on. A seventy-year-old serial killer is gonna lecture me on the intynets.”
“Seventy-one. And I think it’s important you learn this, for the future of your enterprise. We agree that if something is available on television and in bookstores and the papers and all, it’s mainstream, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Well, then, how can something on the world’s electronic mass-communication net not also be mainstream? It’s easily found. You told me your friend there saw acquaintances of the gentlemen from Ohio on the Web.”
“Did I? Okay. I’m a little drunk.”
“There you are, you see? It’s not that strange a world, when you can see images of men with testes full of saline just as easily as you can visit the wonderful world of Disney online. That’s not underground. It’s mainstream. Just like me.”
If something is on Gemini, is it mainstream?
This book was published in 2007, when the Internet was only just starting to Go Bad, so take that as you will.
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
-Mark Twain in *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court*
“Foresight strategy, pal. Nonprofit economic think tank in Eindhoven. Fucking field economist, I am.”
“How does that work?”
“I go to big conferences and get important people so drunk that they can’t shit straight, and then ask them evil questions and write down the answers.”
“That,” Adam offered, “doesn’t sound so bad, really.”
“It’s bloody great,” Clough agreed. “Except that when you get these bastards shitfaced they tell the truth. And it’s fucking horrible."
Why Do Narcissists Care So Much About Intelligence? - Marcin Zajenkowski, Michael Dufner, 2020
The Man In Black sings the old Stephen Foster song, Hard Times Come Again No more.
