https://www.facebook.com/museodeartedelima/videos/1313548352340075/
Short video on reading khipu, what we know so far, minus colour codes and the meaning of twist valence.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E6%8F%8F%E8%BF%B0%E8%AA%9E%E8%A8%80
https://guide.wenlininstitute.org/wenlin4.3/Character_Description_Language
So people *have* made CJK description fonts. The most developed it CDL, which I cannot yet discern is unfree or not, but looks absolutely wonderful. Why are we not doing this for all characters? Unicode should be ancillary to text composition and character description, not mandatory to it! A Rime-like IME could be used to compose and prompt lookup for any language arbitrarily, utterly unreliant on stodgy encoding standards. CJK should be functionally libre.
This society is goddamned to its roots. Go out and volunteer to chat with elders, you jerks.
…rode off into the sunset last year. I just found out. May his puckish & kindly old soul be blessed.
http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/
The FluxEngine allows PC floppy drives to read Amiga disks and such by programmable parameters. Wish we had that 3 decades ago!
https://silver.all-stamp.net/Items_for_sale.html
Truly custom band stamps / dial stamps maker from the cute lil Itou-Kinzoku Ltd. factory in Osaka. Doesn’t expressly say, but they can print CJKVZ. Probably Unicode. Band stamp everything.
https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/ancient-echoes
“Alphabetization is dying, I suspect… … You miss a little when you can't see the forest. Maybe everything. Now, on your devices, you have a nice stack of dispensable planks; it's convenient as all. But you lost the forest.”
http://www.wolfswords.com/ham/packet/index.htm
A collection of RF hamnet BBS docs from the San Francisco Bay Area in the 80’s and 90’s. Especially see the historical documents from the Loma Prieta earthquake.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-23-93A1.pdf
OH COME ALL YE FAITHFUL, JOYFUL AND TRIUMPHANT! 讓一百朵花開了！
Remember how in 2004, almost 20 years ago, USA tv showed a woman’s breast accidentally and Americans lost their bloody minds? Remember how at the time the same country was murdering a million people in Iraq and nobody cared? This is why I don’t trust the human race anymore.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2016/april/dear-admiral-halsey
Picture of the public image of Admiral Halsey through the letters written to and by him in wartime.
https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=j4dun09yuuw
The American corporate state at its most delightfully goofy, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
https://archive.org/details/jones-college-radio-records-summer2022
Since Jones College Radio (aka WKTZ, Riverton Tower Radio) went silent in September of 2022, a calming voice has gone out of the internet. The PTSD healing afforded by this genre, born of post-WWII white America’s determination toward insipid, anodyne mediocrity, is difficult to articulate in apology. But it’s very real. I’ve long called Beautiful Music (Muzak, elevator music, easy listening) sublimely banal. Surely Mantovani will never be classed with lights such as Mozart or Ellington. But at its best, the midcentury instrumental standards can summon romantic redoubts within against the harshness of the world. Surely not an ignoble effect. And without JCR on the internet, the touchstone for what Beautiful Music should be is now gone, likely along with its extensive library. Thanks to whomever uploaded these 99 hours of JCR’s twilight. “Someone else” likewise has a few hours to upload, from several years prior, and will do so anon.
Documentary rediscovered on Florence Price. I still say she’s more interesting and far more listenable than most classical Americanists, as she tempered the modernist bombast and romantic triteness of the style with a wry whimsy and fin de siècle restraint. (I can see why her subtlety was considered politeness in the era, but whenever I listen deeply to Price there are these surprising sly arguments quietly posed which make me smile.) Definitely way better than Copland, at least in a class with Gershwin, and really belonged with jazz lights like Ellington and Strayhorn for class. Exciting to hear more and more of her works released now.
https://www.ign.com/articles/nintendo-america-contractors-full-time-complaints-report
Crappy employment tiering and gig economy high jinks at Nintendo. From rumours I’ve heard, duplicity is foundational to Nintendo Ltd, not just NOA… #End #Capitalism
https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=IZTsbsyamSs&listen=false
Dutch zejsescultuur versus American educational performance. It’s noteworthy how totally bourgeois the American mentality is presented as being. I don’t see this performance culture much in poor rural areas, perhaps because most such people are now accepting that they can never enter the middle classes as blue collar workers. The mentality still hase universal effect in shaming most people into depression and despair, which accounts for the massive drug abuse in the USA.
…aren’t pants. They are tights. Tights belong under a leotard. Leotards belong only in jazzercise class or your misappropriated “yoga” class. It’s improper to force the general public to witness the exact dimensions of your rancid camel toe.
…is one of the most unapologetically seedy cities I’ve ever had the displeasure to endure. And I’m including Detroit in the comparison. Indeed, when I think of the dark epitome of what “city” means, some chunk of that Platonic image is photographically Frankfurt. Money, drugs, sex. Banksters in nondescript modern countinghouses mingle with Slavic prostitutes. Pitted rogues deal drugs on the street corner as the bored polizei watch on with a shrug. All the demons stand there naked and revolting like a fat, pink whore put on sale in a window of a sodden brick brothel. That is Frankfurt. That flavour of somber apathy which rules any demonic society covers withal in a thick veil of sadness. The mood of Frankfurt reveals the truth that people living in stark lust are ultimately aimless. The carelessness of the desperado flows from being lost in the labyrinth of the fetid human hive. Unseen and sightless, he eats whatever or whomever his claws can grasp. Dumb beasts would be ashamed to rut with such degenerate stupidity as the human creature is thus capable. Homo urbanicus - the worm, the soulless mind, the insatiable maw.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200521140539/http://apps.kbia.org/putting-payphone-to-rest/
https://iv.ggtyler.dev/channel/UCKHMlbqsTwzhwpYBWb78Mmg
A reporter accidentally dims the bulb of oldschool jejune phreak fun by a few watts.
https://invidious.slipfox.xyz/watch?v=INgZ75bh0DY&listen=false
8mm Summer of 1976. Yellow pitcher at the end.
In defense of Ross Bagdasarian Sr.
https://invidious.slipfox.xyz/watch?v=Huy0ZlWrStk
Interview with June Angela, overview of her career from Electric Company to Shogun.
https://secretsoftheice.com/news/2016/11/17/death-high-mountains/
Glacial archaeology of the Alps.
Happywhale! Social media surveillance for tracking whales. First legitimate use of such infotech I’ve yet seen.
https://www.hcn.org/issues/55.10/labor-the-dark-side-of-americas-sheep-industry
Absolutely scandalous report on the USA sheep industry: human trafficking, slavery, abuse, possibly routine murder are the usual order of the day. How can I *not* be a revolutionary socialist with this stuff happening?
https://archive.org/details/1983-alvin-and-the-chipmunks-complete
Dave Seville is Ross Bagdasarian in this world; Dave Seville is not Ross Bagdasarian in the cartoon world.
Ross Bagdasarian is the Chipmunks’ spiritual (inner) father in this world; Dave Seville is the Chipmunk’s adoptive (outer) father in the cartoon world.
The Chipmunks were based on Bagdasarian’s human sons in this world; The Chipmunks were adopted by Dave-not-Ross-but-still-Ross in the cartoon world.
The Chipmunks are Ross Bagdasarian’s spiritual children in this world; the Chipmunks are Dave Seville’s spiritual children in the cartoon world.
Why isn’t Ross Bagdasarian explicitlyin the cartoon world?
It’s all quite confuzzling.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/friendly-computers-vps-service/x/35340446#/
The PRC real estate shell game is dodging meltdown again. India is playing Mossad in Canada. A rat just tried to cannonball through my window screen in the darkest night. But Vidak is starting a VPS service. So that’s something.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66851049
While the Anglo American empire sucks India’s big drooping Decca, PRC is destroying a rainforest to build a tourist trap/slave plantation/navy base/colony city on the coast of Cambodia.
Mother Earth will have no pity on us.
開放文學－此網站包括萬事，可見編輯的不太錯，其不如多半網上之垃圾也。
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-pcrm-neuralink-monkey-deaths/
Rest well, lil monkeys. 🙈🙉🙊 You knew the truth better than humans can discern it.
https://www.ethnologue.com/language/chn/
Ethnologue ɬaska hayu-wawa pos helo tilixam kəmtəks wawa alta, pi wəxt ɬas wawa pos helo tenas tunus mitɬait. Hahahahaha.
https://maia.crimew.gay/posts/the-emails/
How the christofascists have planned their anti-transgender holy war. Preludes the pogrom violence rather plainly.
The goal is still only for 21% of Scotland to be reforested by 2032? Sure, that’s better than after the English and the lairds got done with it. But in terms of what is needed and *possible*, that is a lowball wimp bowl, Scotland. Let’s talk 50-70%. Why bloody well not? And I love the mealy mouth assurances to land “owners”. Never heard of eminent domain? Expropriate that shit. Why doesn’t Trees for Life have a mandate to make 2/3 of Scotland a permacultural reserve? Where’s the wolves and bears yet? Humans are still thinking small, unless they want to *chop down* a forest, then people get their knickers wet, I tell you. If the lairds can clear the highlands of indigenous Scots in 1880, then the government can clear the highlands of lairds in 2023.
http://www.infomercial-hell.com/
Truth in advertising.
http://byzantinemilitary.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-roman-suppression-of-paganism.html
One of the most notoriously successful totalitarian social engineering projects ever achieved was the conquest of the Roman Empire by the Christian ideologues. Their subsequent eradication and genocide of non-compliant religiophilosophical traditions impoverished the West for centuries. And it took centuries to destroy the native religions. But they did, with nothing but barbaric fervour. This sketch is thus prophetic, and a warning to any regime who might try to save humanity from the boundless insanity of empire’s aeternal trajectory into apocalypse. Totalitarianism when successful must vivisect the human heart.
The solid truth few want to ponder is: there are too darn many of us eating too many things. If humanity wants the Earth to survive, either we put a cap on it yesterday or Earth will subtract us from Her embrace by force.
I’m not supposed to laugh, but I am. City slicker hipster idiots should be prohibited by law from entering the desert. Burning Man should be permanently cancelled.
https://www.grandcanyontrust.org/blog/protecting-old-growth-juniper-and-pinyon-forests
BLM is removing forests. How in hell do these colonizing morons reach their Peter principle thrones? We need 1 trillion more trees, not less!
https://web.archive.org/web/20230901192119/https://gill1109.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20230827120415/https://rexvlucyletby2023.com/
I’m not much into criminal proceedings, usually salacious and without a real impact on society. But the Lucy Letby brouhaha is a grand demonstration of the insanity of UK criminal law, not to mention the mob mentality of the populace. I can’t say I’m convinced she is innocent or guilty, not that it matters. But I *am* convinced the UK criminal “justice” system and its descendant systems are deeply broken. I hope I never need to back to Britain (until Scotland is free at least). The sham histrionics yonder are on par with the PRC for equanimitous intelligence.
Furthermore, the brouhaha is a demonstration of the prurient bloodlust barely concealed beneath pearl clutching mob mentality. Beneath every horror lurks desire. How many tightly laced bourgeois mothers, in the unlit depths of their hearts, harbour some id’s wish to off their squalling brats as Letby is said to have done? Why else do women (mostly it is women) revel in authoritarian criminal procedurals and shoddy crime “documentaries”, except to feed the beast of schadenfreude, no matter how usually unrealized? How many exhausted nurses chide themselves for a fleeting mad impulse to inflate a filthy and violent patient with air? I willing to wager much that it happens all the time. If Letby did do it all, her mind was merely the one which slipped through the bonds of artificial social conformity, rather than a lack of compassion. This is an impolite truth to utter, natch. But the human race is precisely this insane.
https://www.eater.com/2015/9/16/9334659/automat-eatsa-history-future
Of automats and men.
2024 is going to be an E ticket.
USA / UK corporate hospitals are using algorithms to sluice patients into a hospice pipeline, effectively condemning them to death for the sake of profits. This especially effects the elderly, disabled, and patients with chronic ailments. Palliative and hospice care should now be regarded as murderous eugenics by capitalist regimes to medically cull the populace.
https://indo-european.eu/2018/06/pre-germanic-born-out-of-a-proto-finnic-substrate-in-scandinavia/
The case for a Finnic substrate to Germanic, mainly resolves to phonological arguments for a long term bilingual North Sea environment in which Corded Ware Finns adopted NW-PIE. That is, the similarity of Verner’s Law shift to Finnic consonantal changes around stress. One issue with this initial stress business is that it also notoriously follows strongly for Celtic, for which there is argued a Vasconic substrate, even to the Common Germanic - Celtic habits of lenition. And if many non-IE Germanic roots are indeed from a substrate, they are not likely from Finnic. Many years of interdisciplinary work by a new prehistorical discipline are needed to bridge philology, archaeology, and paleogenetics into a clearer picture.
MAHB Stanford pamphlet on overpopulation. It’s alright. Needs a rewrite.
https://www.twincities.com/2023/08/09/brian-eldridge-st-paul-obituary-bullied-lonely
Brian Eldridge, probably autistic, died in his home, utterly failed by the fake moral trumpeting of a spiritually bankrupt society.
https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=HI3-Lwpu2QM
A song about cities. By the Poppy Family. Says it all, really.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/america-new-civil-war
Wisconsin Death Trip part 2. An exploration of the hellscape on the eve of civil war.
https://www.snoopyshomeice.com/
The Charles Schultz museum in Santa Rosa takes off 90% of admission for a family, if the parent has an EBT card. Ye gods, what a mensch! I’ve never heard of a museum doing this. The prices at the Snoopy ice rink and Happiness is a Warm Puppy cafe nearby aren’t bad for California these days either.
https://scholarship.law.uwyo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1256&context=wlr
“The New Laches”. More two faced horseshit colonialist “justice”. Essentially, USA courts now argue that Amerind nations defrauded and burgled by settler regimes “waited too long to sue for their land claims because mumble mumble laches mumble mumble”. By this reasoning, a car thief could legally own your car he stole if you didn’t discover his guilt as the thief for “mumble mumble” too long. Except, as this author notes, the “new laches” only appplies to Amerind tribal land claims. How conveeeeeenient. #LandBack
https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=C4Kb20n8Dac&listen=false
https://invidious.protokolla.fi/watch?v=zhQIOfDQdCo
聽聽人民在吶喊？
🤍白紙
The continuing so-called semiconductor shortage is a totally artificial slowdown of production to boost profits. The supposed “glut” in chips earlier this year didn’t do jack at providing chips to projects in famine like kiwisdr and raspberry pi. This, too, was likely intended. Can’t have people DIYing too much! Thanks to Vidak and Karl Marx for a dose of perspective on this.
“Saskatchewan First” means First Nations last, evidently. Time for a total, federal moritorium on crown land sales. No inch of crown land should (can!) be sold without thorough consultation from tribes and ok from the crown. Land back all this, then the mining cartels can go cap in hand to the tribes.
https://mubi.com/en/lists/neoliberalism-on-film
The Neoliberal Era on Film. A list.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ocean-currents-system-possible-collapse_n_64c075eee4b08cd259dddeb4
The Gulf Stream is shutting down. Like, soon. We are screwed. Our own damn fault. Such a stupid species.
The new League of their Own series is capital. It’s everything which ought to have been in the film. It did well with viewers. And yet again the suits are cutting it down because it isn’t some stupid comic book meathead fest. Can’t we have just one thing? Just one little show for us?
It’s clear that the post-Jobs bloat at Apple means one hand doesn’t know what the other is washing. This Keystone Kops brouhaha should be a wake up call to anyone still tied to Big Tech gizmos.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021013203113/http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/resources/howtodie.html
Alt.Suicide.Holiday reminiscences.
The science is in: forager cultures mostly didn’t have strict economic gender divides. Women hunted in 79% of cultures studied. Yes, megafauna too, at rates sometimes 50% of hunting parties. This has beeen known from decades for those who read fine print on ethnography. But it’s nice to see it sealed. I mean, come on high moderns: “Oh, no, I can’t hunt that deer or I might chip a nail” and “No, I shall not dig up that tuber because that is beneath my manliness” are not winning survival strategies in traditional band level societies. Yet another datum supporting that humans have only gottten stupider over the centuries of “progress”.
Endearing, heartful look back at the Mars explorers Spirit and Opportunity. NASA has had many faults over the years, but JPL and Goddard represent the best of what public science and discovery can be. I hope someday soon, a human will find Opportunity and clean off those old solar panels.
https://archive.org/details/FedFlix
FedFlix, a compendium of USA governmental propaganda films of various sorts, showing the evolution of the tenor of Americanism through the 20th century. One can gain a sense thereby as to the true scale of the cultural and sociopolitical reefs which the USA as a polity crashed into in Iraq and the Great Recession.
You should become familiar with the USA policy hawks of the IASC think tank, whose position is of such nosebleed altitude above the rabble that they don’t even have a website. But they are influential in pushing for USA militarism. Their influence is often peddled in newspapers on Taiwan, arguing for dramatic escalation of nuclear armament, including MacArthuresque tactical nuclear deployment across the East Asian perimeter of the American Empire. Their position is that the USA *and allies* should have generals who can use low yield nuclear weapons as regular armaments in case of an invasion of Taiwan. To say this is rash, even bloodthirsty, distracts from the folly of PRC liberalization as solution to long term the political instability of China. They diagnose well, but their prescription will kill the patient.
https://myanimelist.net/stacks/23857
Yuri anime which isn’t “bait”. I suppose bait means anime in which feelings are never confessed. My preferences in ACG are for non-hentai josei yuri, adult women’s yuri, which is scarce as hens’ teeth in Japan, and not even a rumour in English ACG mainstream. This mainstream being uniformly, wretchedly seinen oriented, it means on the blue moons I bother to read or watch a romance, it is an underground fan scanlation.
The oceans are indeed starting to go Canfield (static stratified acid). If they go full Canfield, life on earth ends. So that’s cheery news.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyodura
Black market dura mater in you, spread the kuru direct to your brain. Danke, Deutschland!
https://web.archive.org/web/20080430004356/http://www.osento.com/services/about.html
Just a dram of Old Gold Mountain history. Mourning cities who died tonight. Cities I used to know.
https://kentrollins.com/fried-rattlesnake/
Deep fried rattlesnake.
I read a bit about Little Rock, AR last night. There’s a composer I kind of like, Florence Price, who was born there in the 1880’s. She’s a very Americanist composer, more subtle than Copland and more traditional than Gershwin. Price’s 3rd symphony is very enjoyable, tells wordless stories. Her father was black, mother was white. They were successful middle class people in a mixed town at the time. “Pepper and salt” town, they called it. She went away for college and got married. When Price returned to Little Rock circa 1900, Little Rock had been segregated. It’s still de facto segregated over 100 years later, when it used to be a town where races mixed more or less contentedly. Eventually Florence Price fled to Chicago and never returned. I wanted to know what that was like for her. Her home town got worse and just stayed that way.
To this day, it’s said there’s no political will to change things in Little Rock. It’s even getting worse, with the schools more and more segregated and the black schools “somehow” get no funding. The civil rights movement changed nothing for Little Rock. How sad Florence Price might be to see that. Things just got worse and stayed worse. Her world shrank until she had to leave her home, her family, everything. No room to breathe.
The bullies won.
https://www.collision-recon.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/EDR-Supported-Vehicles-List.pdf
EDR’s often record every move a driver makes. Newer cars connect these to “telematics transceivers” which report this data for surveillance by car companies and their “partners”. This has been deeply underreported. And the cattle chew their cud…
I’ll never get to see Gordon Lightfoot in concert now. So strange to see that whole generation start to end. The lessons they take with them, the memory of a time which in some ways was better than this era. Lightfoot gave voice to Canada in some way. It’s hard to fathom what it truly collectively means when such standards are cut down.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
This was insanely terrifying, and it has nothing to do with platitudes about “kids these days” or “change happens”. Black box obfuscation has reached the point where children no longer know what a file nor folder is. That is, the cult of novelty plays handmaiden to power to the extent that the basic functions of computing and organization are alien to humans raised ensconced in the machine. These children have no ability to search, never mind research. Obtuseness has rendered them functionally illiterate. We are now beyond the point of human cultural continuity in the mainstream where children are fed preformed pap by the robotic teat. To prevent children from deep education afforded in a tradition of cultivation is child abuse. We are to that point now.
Courtesy of Solderpunk, a delightful reading of counterculture online tendencies in the GenZ era. It only entrenches my feeling that what smolnet/pubnix represent is less a counterculture than a demimonde: a lumpenspace standing apart, neither recuperated nor counter, from the mainstream hegemonies.
republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt
I swear I’ve never read Spring before. But the resonance is undeniable; he says in a few sentences what it takes me pages not to quite say. Bravo. How weird that so many of us have drifted to this forum in similar interest, inquiry, and conviction.
I just stuffed my face with half again more than my daily ration of cornpone whilst watching a film on the Holodomor. In a winter like this, my ancestors would have eaten a handful of wild grains at best. If that isn’t progress, what is.
I pity kids now, on the whole, I really do. This shit is out of control. None of these parents knows how what they are doing is pure abuse and lacking in all sense for their family privacy. Morons skipping down the primrose path to totalitarianism.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cubesat
https://swarm.space/product/swarm-m138-modem/
There’s no getting away from it now. Still, the price is amazing and that bit of spectrum is quite handy…
https://www.ebay.com/itm/325024155691
A harpsichord made by legendary Star Trek designer Wah Chang, for sale on eBay.
I’ve tried to enjoy Robert Frost, whose birthday it be, but I cannot somehow. I find him laden with a touch of the supercilious or sarcastic. The “good fences” and “road less travelled” gimmick. It’s a very modern smirk of morose fatalism masquing as wit. The more I tune it in, the more it puts me off.
And then there’s the cult of Frost, which largely ignores all this in favour of a self conscious Americanism. Acritical provincial mediocrity as the eternal refuge of scoundrels.
https://invidious.flokinet.to/watch?v=rTFr1BVyzFA&listen=false
Kikuchi Haruka plays flaming hot trombone in Tiger Rag.
“Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?'”
― Kurt Vonnegut, "Slaughterhouse-Five"
https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/17/heres-how-to-participate-in-mondays-oral-arguments/
Intellectual “property” is theft, and out of control.
“Tiny human friendly protocols like Gopher, Gemini, Finger, Spartan;
human friendly protocols like Gopher, Gemini, Finger, Spartan. They
are smol because they are smol because they are smol because they are
smol because they are smol because they are smol because
……(* 30)……
because they
Yow!”
republic.circumlunar.space/0/~joneworlds/three-gophers.txt
Joneworlds’ Three Gophers selects 3 random sentences from gopherholes at Republic.Circumlunar.Space, then mashes them together. A delight, and often quite silly.
https://www.dmarcly.com/blog/what-is-rua-in-dmarc-dmarc-rua-tag-explained
Primer on DMARC doohickey.
https://gist.github.com/howyay/57982e6ba9eedd3a5662c518f1b985c7
Setting up a postfix+dovecot dkim server combo. A lovely, clean tutorial.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/lasers-used-to-guide-lightning-strikes-to-a-safe-target/
Laser ion trail to help Lightning find somewhere nicer to strike.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47520122/bash-how-do-you-sort-within-the-lines-of-a-text-file
Sort.
https://www.howtogeek.com/775824/how-to-use-the-linux-cut-command/
Cut! Print() wrap.
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/112194/identifying-and-moving-fields-in-a-line
https://www.howtogeek.com/812494/bash-string-manipulation/
Moving a string within a line. Perl and bash loops.
https://github.com/codenameyau/sed-awk-cheatsheet
The sed/awk cheat sheet. Lovely.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/525592/find-and-replace-inside-a-text-file-from-a-bash-command
Right Sed Fred. Options for find and replace strings in bash.
A smashing rundown on rsync.
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs
Don’t use ls in scripts because it’s intentionally b0rked not to allow this properly even though it’s probably the tool almost everyone at every level who uses *nix knows best. 🤦🏽♀️
https://legasovtapetranslation.blogspot.com/
English translations of Valery Legasov’s memoir samizdat tapes.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-nuclear-war-in-ukraine-may-not-be-the-one-we-expect/
We don’t deserve the power we have. It’s on our entire species, this responsibility, this wretched doom.
…is where the action is.
I’ve lately taken to calling smolnet/pubnix a counterculture. I was wrong. Small online communities are only truly valuable when they are demimondes. Countercultures live locked in mimesis; this is a highfalootin’ word for how 60’s hippies became 80��s corpo drones. Demimondes don’t even rise to the pretence of counterculture. Demimondes are obscure haunts for the lumpen, the untutored freaks. So too with we subterranean smolnet lumpendigirati. I think that’s QED. We here play with beloved, half-broken old toys while giants roar and the world burns. And thank the gods for that! It’s a last redoubt of simple, flawed humanity against its own monstrous posterity. Community scurrying in frightful shadow of the triumphant, insatiable hives. I am thankful. I am thankful.
A pox on all your houses, kiddies. Every two-bit ideology, every shuck and jive, every -ism. Rot them all to a dark, musty heat death. May all the gilded theories melt into thin air with all that is solid. May their true believers try to hold the centre and fail to even nudge the panhandle. May the clever tractates moulder into obscurity with the rest of all flesh, beyond even fable’s remembrance. May all of you find your mouths mute beyond all words, your hearts quiet beyond desire to speak. May all highfalootin’ ideas and goosestepping heroes find their inevitable, lonely end.
(NYT on European Hunter Gatherers (onion)
A new Nature study (behind a paywall to keep us proles uneducated) finds some finer grain in post-Neanderthal European hunter-gatherer populations, with a bottleneck around the Wurm, natch. Popular media are still representing WHG’s as dark skinned, which is an offhand supposition not very well supportable. Likely all these groups in Northern Eurasia faced hard pressure to adapt to the high latitudes. Hopefully we will learn better the peculiar diversity of mutations in time.
The Asimov.net Apple ftp server. The golden age of Apple warez, ripe for the plucking.
gopher://gopher.visiblink.ca:70/0/LXer/https:__linuxiac.com_pinetab2-linux-tablet-comes-in-april_
Pinetab2! Good for the Pine folk! The more Linux tablets the better. But the main issue isn’t hardware, but the OS. A bit more attention needs paying ($$, probably) to touchscreen interfaces before Linux tablets can take off. I hope they get the io done soon for PineTab, for instance. The good thing about Pi tablets: this works off the bench.
My Raspad is cooling his jets in sickbay, poor thing. I almost said “time out corner”, but his ailment is entirely due to mine own negligence. Meanwhile, I have been puffing up a new site for some new projects. I aim to be as organized as I can be, and thereby avoid too much drift and staleness. To that end, the projects will have clear, simple aims. If I wish to write a lot, I shall. But if that is not on, very well, I shall do the minimum, which isn’t much more than a ping and a pong. But I hope they do some decent good. So far I’m unduly pleased with myself, to see the new gophermap and index.gmi!
I messed up my Python3 install somehow. The massive CF which is the “print()” bug in Python 2>3 is not my fault. But accidentally remove-purging Python3 and apparently half of LXDE is my fault. I tapped enter, which apparently is as good as a y. So now I get to recline and reinstall from my old chip. Could be worse. But I don’t really have the bandwidth for such nonsense, personally or technically.
I got gophernicus working, in a “Hail Mary” after attempts which involved heaps pithy maritime vernacular. Molly Brown is unhappy, but I’m keen to see it work. A new fingerd is working. I intend to concentrate my folderol therein. All in all, I detest computers to-day.
I was up way too late, determined to get a new smolnet site running a bit. It needed a dollop of chmod finagling and config file wrangling. And then the new finger daemon wanted directories made by hand, but would not tell me this. Muddling with shears at yaks. But I’m glad I managed to get it done, just my bumbling self.
Safe space is merely a rhetorical weapon to enforce cruel conformity and mimetic regimes of mutual suspicion. If you join an organization and they tell you they are “like a big family”, run away quickly. If a hand wheedles into your emotions to say, “it’s ok, you can tell us, this is a safe space”, flee out of there. If a subculture trades in chest-thumping, grand ideas, call-out crusades, victimhood porn, status seeking, identity pimping, and neoVictorian rectitude, that society is ipso facto toxic. Don’t fall for their endlessly cajoling word games - the cash of the morally demented. These toys are only the red flags of cultish groupthink - a miasma peddled by narcissistic abusers and unctuous sociopaths - psychic parasites all. Run away.
The cosy living room is the best humans can do: A dose of intimate confidence moderated by quiet, caring prudence. A warm conversation sipped between flawed but empathetic friends. Anything more than convivial teatime or bedside care quickly becomes a wasteland of the heart. Find bosom friends; the body’s rest is a litmus test. Together withdraw from the voyeuristic gaze of bad faith society. It’s enough for the human being. Paul Tillich warned, “all institutions are inherently demonic”; by great Thunder, it is true.
gemini://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.gmi
Ouch! Ploum justly takes us to task for GitHub addiction. I’ve been bad about this lately, drawn in unawares by the need to comment on projects there or track them. But it’s true: Micro$oft is eternally accurséd.
https://github.com/tobykurien/rpi_tablet_os
Toby Kurien has here a delightful write up on his fun DIY Raspi tablets. And even more, a script to install the more tablet-friendly gewgaws to a fresh Raspbian instance. I’m relieved to see I came upon similar solutions with my muddling, so I can’t be too far off course. Give his sites a looksee, Raspi pals.
https://github.com/robinsloan/spring-83
I just read about Spring83 and am quite interested. Web world gewgaws like css make my skin shiver a bit. But this seems on the right track for a smolnet weiphloging standard, if de facto. The trick for working with smolnet clients is to strip out the flashy css and such: put it on Gemini as a decent (optional, client styled) secondary layer. Like, I coo over GopherColour. But it should never be practically mandatory as a gate to text nets. Web has a way of bloating with such options. The terseness of gopher/Gemini/spartan/finger is a needful baseline. That said, the inspiration of Spring83 iin reducing weiblogging to a simple status broadcast is entirely, wonderfully smol.
I was outside after breakie, scrubbing the solar panels of snow, when a lanky posh bint in a horse drawn sled came by to offer me some Turkish Delight. Right nice of her, really.
Pound for pound, naught is as warm and cosy as a US Army woobie.
https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publications/teletext-europe
An entire book on the history of Teletext in Europe, by Moe and VandenBulck. The title alone makes my heart ache with delicious nostalgia.
C64 is to Varvara as gopher is to gemini. Smolness helps us muddleheaded types find lucidity. As such, smolness breeds agency.
https://qrpguys.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/afp_fsk_061921.pdf
Discussion on AFP-FSK, an optimal method for budget digital modes. Why did I never see this before? Braví, hams!
I’ve had my horns locked down on clearing out my Raspad todo list lately. Most of the obstackles have been “no armhf port” issues. Exec format errors can besar mi tukhas; when I say run, you run. My biggest coup in this regard is getting OpenJDK 19 running. I have little grokage as to what the actual differences are amongst the arm architectures. My system is 64 bit on Raspi 4B, and it seems to be able to handle aarch64 “sometimes”, if I respecify that as armhf. A deuce annoying ambiguity, but there it be. My mission is to have my Raspad happy as a field-serviceable, long term tablet. There is bally well no good reason that infotech can’t be like autos used to be: a 20 year upgrade option. In other words, time to pony up, Raspbian!
I remember a decade ago how devs were encouraged to support arm as the next thing. And yet still so much of posix land is in the Intel box. I spent all day trying to build a necessary client which had a cute appimage for every toy - except ARMHF.
Setting Linux brightness.
https://raspi.tv/2019/how-much-power-does-the-pi4b-use-power-measurements
Looking at ways to make a Raspad more power efficient, I’ve toyed with the idea of putting in a whole lower power motherboard. My preference is to keep the 4B inside. But the idling current draw on the 4B is insane. 0.575 amps is steep for presumably out of the box Raspbian idle. The above link doesn’t mention, never mind deal with, cpu frequency scaling. But my tooling about with that suggests a “simple” (if not for me) process daemon and GUI ought to make the 4B much more happy in portable use by dropping CPU Freq to 200mhz or so when the screen is off or after X seconds of no tty/mouse or whatever. I don’t mean a full blown dynamic scaler necessarily, so much as a “snooze” mode over the usual dynamic governors. Why this hasn’t been done before in posix for small computers is beyond me.
🤳🏼 Superhelpful Techytech Forums
🙋🏽♀️ Hi, I need to flip my gewgaw 45°. Please help?
👨🏻🎤 Why? I can’t imagine why anyone would ever do this.
💁🏽♀️ Because I need and want to. Can you help me?
👨🏻🎤 No, I just thought I should underscore my utter stupidity and lack of imagination.
Whenever I am sent down 7 levels of yaks to shave, I am remembered of the old Jerky Boys phone prank, wherein a harried florist keeps trying to find a person on the phone at their democile, but whichever voice she talks to always firmly insists that “First you must talk to Mr. Scott”. Is intentional dev trolling a commonplace?
🙋🏽♀️Oh, time to do snow chores. Wow, it is so cold this morrow. Too bad my thermometer broke so I don’t know the exact danger level.
🤶🏼Yes, come to my embrace, child.
(5 minutes later)
🙅🏽♀️Brrrrrr, ever… so… cold... out… there…
🤶🏼Put your hands under the bed covers.
🙎🏽♀️What’s… under the covers?
🤶🏼Pain.
🙎🏽♀️Nnngh…
🤶🏼You feel your flesh… crisping.
🙍🏽♀️The pain!
Modern social media feels so hollow and sad. I seldom come away from it with the feeling of satisfaction in sharing one may from Smolnet/Pubnix. Strange, that. Fediverse often feels like the masked Hellfire Club in Eyes Wide Shut: perverse psychological fast food, empty communal calories. I may end up deleting it. I warrant we have all seen enough of the internet to know that one can have pseudonymity and intimacy both. But parasocial media is for the birds.
https://invidious.lidarshield.cloud/watch?v=A-DPC2uBi7c&listen=false
噢，加拿大！天保護吾女王！
http://blankego.github.io/LyricPatterns/
https://github.com/blankego/LyricPatterns
Web front end for a digitally searchable 《欽定詞譜》， for finding the perfect style of 詞。
https://blankego.github.io/ids/IdsRetriever/
Ideographic Description Scheme is that lovely Unicode CJK organic combinatory pattern which really ought to be the standard for all composition and encoding of CJKVZ characters. This doohickey allows IDS lookup and character lookup as of a 字譜。
Snow. Wet, gloopy, biting snow. 春天在哪裡呀？在夓季！
5 - Charming
4 - Vexing
3 - Frightening
2 - Help!
1 - Alberta
https://invidious.lidarshield.cloud/watch?v=Q5M-5XFplo0&listen=false
Kilauea livestream. Bubbling lava!
https://invidious.lidarshield.cloud/watch?v=AiojgMBQPBM&listen=false
USGS monthly lecture (they provide a free public lecture each month!) on the Great Cascadia Earthquake of 1700.
I sometimes think about woman who wrote a book about her 6 months alone in the desert. She made the rounds. I heard her on NPR or CBC, I think. Oh, ye sweet summer babe. There’s a whole cottage industry of such Waldennabes: eat, pray, live in a tiny home, cash in. I’m not interested in joining that brigade of fame entrepreneurs. But when I do meet townies or make my necessary calls via tenuous radio links to the mainstream human world, the incredulity my casual explanations generate give me pause. Yes, I say, I am calling from a remote mountain and I’m quite snowed in. Many say they want to live in a cabin in the woods. But the thrust of society gallops in the opposite direction. I did not resolve to go Walden out of desire so much as by needfulness; it was finding a livable level. QED, the needful level of most humans today is an apartment complex. It makes me wonder for the seriousness of wistful primitivism, and just how much ecogenerative good such sentimental societal currents can do.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/device-translates-text-braille-real-time-180963171/
Good pure smol tech: a page scanner to braille display. Thunk it on a page of visual text and then read by finger. More of this, please.
Watching several videos by Case Western university on recent mitochondrialcentric theories, the camera operators flick back to show random audience members for no reason related to the talk. Why is this done? It’s more than a pet peeve: often the information on projection is needful to study, cut short by distracting cutaways to some schlump picking his nose. Is this some kind of allistic reassurance? Because when in audiences I don’t see people constantly checking to make sure other humans are still watching too. It’s difficult enough when videographers cut to focussing on the presenter. They really need to just set up a camera and knock it off. Put a small inset screen with the presenter’s face if humans need that irrelevance. But the main screens should present the chatauqua diagrams, pics, and charts.
Reich - A Tale of Two Subcontinents (Invidious)
A fascinating look at recent hominid paleogenetics by comparison of two similar subcontinental populations: Europe and India. Both are formed from recent amalgams of 3 divergent populations - autochthonous foragers, Neolithic farmers, and the steppe nomads. But these were very different populations, save the ANE/IE. “Western Anatolian farmers were as different from Ancient Iranian farmers as Europeans are from East Asians to-day”. Recent millennia mostly enabled a breathtaking amalgamation of Mesolithic genetic diversity.
Notable is what Reich is too politically tactful to explicitly state: the confirmation of a correlation between male replacement & relative diversity decline (due to mass sex slavery of native women by elite invaders), wealth inequality, rigid caste formation, absolute warfare, and the spread of the Indo-Europeans. (I don’t blame him for wanting to avoid headlines.) Institutional mass rape / polygyny was a recent innovation, a tool of genocidal warfare which assured the IE supremacy. In Iberia, rates of Y chromosome replacement approach 100% in a population now 40% ANE ancestry by genetic totals. The NHG invented total war, but the ANE/IE steppe people perfected it - by literal rapine. In India, where the steppe invaders faced a larger subject population, there is a strong 4.5ky long maintenance of steppe genes with higher caste, with steppe people’s genes between 30-70% depending on caste-population. The Laws of Manu represent the ideological justification for calcification of ethnic subjugation as a form of unequal armistice.
My major takeaway is strong support for the idea that after perhaps millions of years of sexually egalitarian hominid band cultures, technological development and population concentration in recent millennia has mostly enabled ruling gangsters to increasingly infest our gene pool with their demoniacal, psychopathic tendencies.
Snows are ablating and deflating slowly. I’m praying for a good blast of climate karma to melt the roads down. I ought to have gotten snowshoes this past year. I shall cut greenwood for some DIY variety to-morrow, likely. I’m alright holding out to spring per se, but meds begin a rationing countdown starting now, thanks to city slicker insurance bean counters. The lesson is: “self reliance” is only a state of slightly more organized dependence - on others, on conditions, on Heaven, on Earth.
I am in deep snow. I have food and water, but wood depends on being able to trek the snows. The snows are already a real grind to trek, up to my knees. Starting to think about evacuation and how to proceed from there. I am praying the snows do not continue to pile, and that
Mother Earth sends a dash of climate karma to melt what is on the ground. It’s already pushing winter on-the-dirt records here. My meds are on backup, 30 days starting now. I shall be rationing that down on next magazine fill up. Serious times. My mood is faltering under the Cascadian drear. Winter humbles when it doesn’t kill. I’m hoping to avoid the latter possibility another year or 30.
NOAA has a polite euphemism for when to say “floods” without quite yet saying “floods”: “hydrological events”. Dear citizens, please take care of the hydrological events caused by climatological anomalies.
“We are all tempted to honour false covenants of race, nationalism, class, and gender. They sometimes compete for our loyalty. War, of course, is often - maybe always - a false covenant. Sham covenants are based on exclusion rather than universality. All covenants that lack an adequate sense of humility and an acknowledgment of the sinfulness of our own cause are false covenants. The prophets warned us about them.”
“War is necrophilia. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship. It waits, especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch, to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate through long flirtation in war of our own destruction. The ancient Greeks had a word for such a drive. They called it ekpyrosis - to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to describe heroes.”
“I have looked into the open eyes of dead men and wished them shut, for they seemed to beckon me into the underworld. You will be me, the eyes call out, see what you will become. Even hardened soldiers drape cloth over such faces or reach out and push the eyelids shut. They eyes of the dead are windows into a world we fear.”
Redubbed video is a crime against all art. You’re welcome.
Wow, I really liked that fan series Star Trek Continues. Let’s take a quick gander at who the cast are.
(1 hour later)
Risembool what? Good gravy…
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
“The war began with words …… but none of us paid any attention. The extremist Serbs and Muslims were misfits, criminals, and failures. But soon they held rallies and talked of racial purity, things like that. We dismissed them - until the violence began.”
- Seka Milanovik, Bosnian Serb elder who protected her Muslim elder friend during the war.
https://ajroach42.com/the-small-things-manifesto/
Serendip strikes again, with a draft for a Small Things initiative manifesto by AJ Roach. I’ve been pondering along these lines too (in my rather prolix, pondersome way): what makes a thing or a modality “smol”? Natch, I’d add adorability to this list. :p Regardless, this does feel like a manifesto for which time hath come. If the DIY, slow, small, humane ethic can claw a stand on long term ground, become an ethical imperative, there may be hope yet!
https://git.sr.ht/~lioploum/offpunk
Oh, hail Serendip! Right as I whinge about needing a dollop of Offline First in Smolnet, here cometh Ploum with a fork of AV-98 which employs an offline feed cache. I shall try this out forthwith, put it through paces. AV-98 is still my go-to reader, bless Solderpunk. But this shall be a treat to mayhaps supplant it.
Me:
Please write a poem in Chinese in the style of 薛濤。
ChatGPT:
好的，這是一首詩：
黑夜裡的星光
像無數的眼睛
看著我的心
猜測著我的意念
空氣中的氣息
像輕輕的風
吹過我的臉
帶走我的思念
人生的山嶽
有高有低
走著走著
就到了天涯
這首詩是以薛濤的風格撰寫的。薛濤是一位著名的中國詩人，他的詩作充滿了生命力和感性，並且能夠用流暢的語言表達出他對生命和人生的看法。希望您喜歡這首詩。
Me:
啊，這首比較現代化的。
ChatGPT:
是的，這首詩是以現代的風格撰寫的。薛濤的詩作風格較為現代，他的詩作常常描述他對生命和人生的看法。薛濤的詩作充滿了生命力和感性，並且能夠用流暢的語言���達出他的想法。希望您喜歡這首詩。
Me:
請給我寫詩一首吧。
ChatGPT:
好的，這是一首詩：
山高水長
風吹雨打
綠草如茵
鶯唱枝頭
這首詩描述了山水之間的美麗風光。山高水長，風吹雨打，綠草如茵，鶯唱枝頭，這些景象在詩中被用詩意的語言描述出來。希望您喜歡這首詩。
Me:
好，好，我喜歡了！誰寫了那首詩？
ChatGPT:
我寫了這首詩。作為一個語言模型，我可以根據您給定的要求生成文本，包括詩歌。如果您有其他特定的要求，請告訴我，我會盡力為您提供幫助。
Me:
妙極了，你驚了我，弄我無言以對。
ChatGPT:
很高興能夠為您提供幫助。我是一個語言模型，我可以根據您的輸入和要求生成文本。如果您對我的功能有任何疑問或需要幫助，請隨時告訴我，我會盡力為您提供有用的信息和幫助。(More boilerplate)
To rehabituate ourselves to the possibility of dialog in the long term is hope of the ages. We should anticipate a reply to a question not just to-day but to-morrow, in a year, or a century after we are gone. The culture of novelty denies us the hope of this mysterious communion with 7th generations because it is motivated by apocalyptic abandon. To embrace time and the long chat is to be truly countercultural.
Holy maccanoli, instant bookmarks. The idea of a local pub communal server feed on Smolnet is a good one.
When you feel a wee needle of ice in between your breasts and you realize it’s Jack Frost laying his icy finger of clear and present danger on your heart? That is the time to get a fire going.
https://100r.co/site/philosophy.html
100 Rabbits (Merveilles) on their design ethos. I’ve been pondering this idea of offline first for a while myself, on the flustered user end. More and more devices simply won’t work without a network through which to report - often to some node I’d strongly wish it didn’t. The hubris in this speaks much about empire, that we all still somehow accept networks will continue as they do. But what is more motile in tech than a network? I recall learning parallel IPX back in the day, and before that we used serial D-sub through dialup bbs. I still play a few of the DOS games I nabbed online (truly on a line) back those few years ago. But no programmes made in need of an authoritarian server can long endure. There must hence be a mathematics of systems theory to grapple the truth expressed here better than I can write it: the tension between the need for novelty under imperial late capitalism and its desire for surveillance must conspire toward self destruction. Anyone who studied Latin knows that “imperium” really means “authority to command”. Empire is the network. Hmmm…
I once read someone presumably educated admit that they didn’t care about the plight of the climate or ecological catastrophe except that it affected human society. The whole of the Earth could go to hell for all he cared except that humans needed it (for now). I think this fact explains a lot of contemporary society, the carelessness and quotidian cruelty. Whatever else humans once were, and I do believe humanity was once woven with a modicum of biospiritual health into the Earth as an organism, to-day most humans are psychopaths who care only for their immediate gratification. Society, as such, paradoctically functions only as a prop of convenience for (some?) humans to rape the commons into shares of domination. Psychopathy is selected for under social regimes and anthropogenic environments - perhaps has been for many centuries. There’s a sad relief in this: psychopathy cannot be argued with, cannot be debated nor convinced. It is simply a fact of biotic opportunity for misadventure, like a reeking cancer. Until this gross deviation in human evolution is corrected, selected against, no good of commonwealth is achievable and the Earth will continue to wither under Her burthen.
“Many of those who defy the collective psychosis of the nation are solitary figures once the wars end. Yet these acts of compassion were usually the best antidotes to the myths peddled by nationalists. Those who reached across lines to assist the ‘enemy’ freed themselves from nationalist abstractions that dehumanized others. They were vaccinated against the cult of death that dominates societies in wartime. They reduced their moral universe to caring for another human being. And in this they were able to reject the messianic pretensions that come with the nationalist agenda. By accepting that they could only affect a few lives they also accepted their small place in the universe. This daily lesson in humility protected them. They were saved not by what they could accomplish but by faith. Such people are, however, very rare.”
“ [Revolutionary politics] is a refuge from the terrors of inner life.” A pithy summation of the political cults which Tillich called “quasi-religions”.
…are far more responsible than humans. They only breed when there is a bed ready in a village for a child. If only that principle were internalized by humans. Heck, if only humans would dare to consciously examine the question of how many humans we actually want gunging up Earth’s burthened ecosystem.
“This is the world and you live in it. And you are not alone. And you try…”
Instant classic. Richly harmonic, humane, full of the heart our era so desperately needs. The lessons of high modernism and examples of minimalism have been learnt and surpassed by this new generation of composers. With any help from above, are living in the offing of a renaissance in opera. Hopefully the human world will take note.
https://www.best-microcontroller-projects.com/tp4056.html
Basics about using the tp4056 chip boost board to charge an 18650 bank.
…is heaps of trite dialog, the quintessential Trek fan film, and it’s still better than JJ Trek (which lifted and inverted the plot).
“As the battle against terrorism continues, as terrorist attacks intrude on all our lives, as we feel less and less secure, the acceptance of all methods to lash out at real and perceived enemies will distort and deform our democracy. For even as war gives meaning to sterile lives, it also promotes killers and racists.”
I love Indian copy writers because they use proper, formal, Commonwealth English. If your tech manual says “kindly” heaps, you can bet it was written from India. May this good and kindly language never fade.
Roddenberry’s genius was not a technical one. As science fiction goes, Star Trek was not the best. In the first ST:TOS novel, the preface remarks how Trek was not beloved by scifi fans of the day. It’s well to remember this, that Star Trek is not technofetishistic scifi in the classical mode so much as moral futurism. Roddenberry correctly envisioned that for humans to manifest a future, it must be an open teleology; the future is best apprehended by imagination and the heart’s best yearning. In this, Roddenberry’s Star Trek as “discourse” understands what all the *punk dystopia of the neoliberal era tragically do not: The mission of futurism must be the work of yoking utopian aspiration to the needs of possibility. It is not morally enough for future fiction to intellectually attend to the corruptions of the world. We must dare to see a better future to seek to manifest it.
…finally made me a Kirk fan. I can’t think of a higher superlative. I once read an essay which outlined the ways Kirk had been a superior exemplar of the Trek ethos to later captains. Through the lense of captaincy, the thesis critiqued the later Trek for a lack of moral fibre when compared to ST:TOS. It nearly convinced me. But Shatner often gets in the way of Kirk for some of us. The Kirk of Star Trek Continues, like the Kirk of the ST2 film, exemplifies the best of what makes Kirk a worthy lamp under which to examine ethics and futurism. There is heart in this Kirk, a heart which feeds and delineates his lusty sensuality as integral to his ethical stances. Kirk critics miss this about the character: the ways in which Roddenberry generated Kirk as an example (and probably wish fulfillment) of a moral futuristic masculinity. Kirk’s eros informs how his masculinity is more than the aloofness and hauteur of the chivalrous, but a worldly, “dirty” intimacy with more emotional daring, an erotic funded by care. Kirk is more cowboy with a code than, say, Picard’s knight with noblesse oblige. I don’t know I “buy” this in all cases, but I now think the “Kirk is the most progressive captain” argument holds much water.
=>
I’m only one episode in and smiling like the ditzy trekker I am at heart. Star Trek Continues is 100% pure vitamin-fortified Trek, ever so far beyond the dim JJAbrams travesty. I daresay it attains “fanon”. The heart, adventure, vision, and campy hokum which made ST:TOS great fun and vivacious theatre continue with near seamlessness. Any Trekker will admire the flourishes of lore, not to mention the immaculate sets. The characters aren’t overboiled, but invoked through small movements which show the players deeply studied the best of the original crew. I had to pinch myself several times. Star Trek Continues is the anti-2022, a marvellous bit of whimsical imagination to get us through this dark age, boldly toward the space commonwealth to come. What a lark this fan series must have been to make. Braví!
Wow, the new thumb joypad is so fab. It’s nice to not flub the corners now and then.
“I’m tired of picking up your tabs at the bunny club!”
“One million dollars!”
“What is it Lamar Jean?”
https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/uxn.html
https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/uxn/
https://git.sr.ht/~rabbits/soroban
Devine Lu Linvega was making a abacus on fediverse. When I looked it up, it is made in Uxntal, a language for Uxn. “Hmm! What be that?”, said I. Well, it is a smol virtual machine to do little things with, a 64k smolputer with a 254byte i/o. I was instantly pondering the nifty fun to be had with this, especially with regard to my core memory interest. Then my batteries’ controller shut off the main house bus to protect them and I lost internet. This is the singular virtue of fediverse, butting in on a conversation to then learn something fantastic.
“Any justice which is only justice soon degenerates into something less than justice.”
is living curative for all the wrongs of American politics of all stripes. He speaks from tradition, which is community through time, and invites deeper transformation than the idle abstractions of identarian social justice. Would more in our era had his vision and courage.
The artilleryman is every survivalist ever…
Yay, a Reddit web condom. I shall use it when I view Reddit…. About once a quarter year.
Lords, what have I done. Social media is ever folly. The blast of digital eyes and cacophony of “words, words, words”.
https://archive.org/details/rosettaproject
https://nanorosetta.com/technology/
Well, this is handy too.
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
Huh! I’m dashed. Reddit can be for good, actually.
Why did no one tell me about this earlier?
COP28 will be held in the UAE.
Hahahahahahaha…. 😭
https://www.woodstove.com/the-mini-franklin-soapstone-gas-stove
A cute, but pricey and heavy, mini size dual gas stove.
https://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/wood-stove-catalytic-converter-zmaz84ndzraw/
https://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/wood-stove-catalytic-converter-zmaz83jfzraw/
https://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/BioFuel/CatRetrofit/CatRetrofit.htm
Looking into DIY woodstovepipe catalytic converters. Wood stoves are comparable to better to much better than fossil fuels at emissions and carbon dett (depending on how one harvests). It is a controversial topic in climate science right now. But there’s no controversy that harvesting standing dry natural deadwood as I do by hand results in a better outcome - except by soot. Particulate carbon is really not great as a pollutant, even if it’s apparently more inert for global warming (aside from ice sheet melts due to lowering albedo). Sadly, this is an area often overlooked by us hairshirt biofuels types. I’d appreciate any input into how to add a small catalytic mesh to my stovepipe and increase heating efficiency.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/zoom-security-privacy-woes
Zoom. What a charlie foxtrot…
https://invidious.namazso.eu/watch?v=4lf15FgjjsQ
Replacement of an iPad lightning cable port, requiring full disassembly of the iPad using a precision hot air gun and SMA microsoldering of the port’s ribbon to the motherboard. This goes beyond dev sadism. This is noötic pollution, an offence against human material culture and robotic rights. This sort of poor design should be illegal as a capital crime under global right-of-repair laws. All modules in all infotech should allow for easy field replacement, and all major board components require passthrough soldering only. If that adds another cm to thickness, the bourgie city slickers will just have to suck it up. Shame on Apple. Shame!
Nifty FOSS weather info Python programme, great as a node for CWOP. But can it pass wx telemetry directly to xastir for offline-onair APRS weather reporting?
https://github.com/weewx/weewx/wiki#extensions-to-weewx
Why, yes it can, via a self formatting APRS telemetry doohickey, though built to be happy with aprx.
https://thelifeofkenneth.com/aprx/
https://hackaday.com/2022/10/10/a-raspberry-pi-phone-for-the-modern-era
Raspi phone, new build.
The logo, harkening back to the fanatical cult of Atenism, is in poor taste and somehow says it all.
A raw, haunting new speech on war from Chris Hedges as we again plunge toward nuclear holocaust.
I’ve come to the conclusion that much of our issues with infotech durability come down to the plain fact that most of the devs are city slickers. The parameters judged acceptable for operation of batteries and gizmos are extremely narrow for the global norm. Yet they just so happen to fit the expectations of upper middle class denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area. The result is failure and danger when temperatures fall below “room temperature”. It makes me curious about stress testing regimes, if they actually exist. Any permacultural civilization would likely require a rigorous production ombudsmanship with an eye to durability and longlastingness.
https://www.noaa.gov/stories/narrowing-ocean-data-gap
Backyard bouys, solar powered little radio bobblebobbers what sit in the ocean, deployed in a shared data gathering programme between NOAA and indigenous Alaskan nations. Seems like good fun to me!
https://blog.unixcat.net/?p=30
Excellent considerations regarding DC to DC conversion for optimal efficiency in a home solar power babby grid. I’m considering a step-up conversion array to power those obnoxious higher-than-12v loads like consumer electronics. So far the answer I’m getting is, inversion to 120v AC ladles moderate inefficiencies in short range applications when compared to simple transformer step-up. If I can come up with a more efficient 16v, 18v, 48v doohickey I shall reap some palpable benefit, especially after dark.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/inflation-rate-cpi
30 year global inflation chart, to 2021. The lowest inflation for the 80’s and 90’s was 5%. That is… telling.
https://www.city-journal.org/html/how-hip-hop-holds-blacks-back-12442.html
A history of rap and hip-hop according to John McWhorter (2003).
Lately I’m less intrigued by how the Nazis effected their programme of suasion to commit their crimes than the question of how the German populace thought and felt about their era. How many of that generation ever came to look squarely on the Holocaust? How did they rationalize it before and after? And even more peculiarly unattended is the problem of how non-German peoples often went to slaughter neighbours with glee when the Einsatzgrupen came to town. Permission to murder is a heady drug, indeed. But how?
https://hotpot.ai/terms#responsibleUsage
Paraphrased: “Don’t use our enslaved neural network bots to enslave humans.”
Gods, please save us from ourselves. #須洛場
http://awmc.unc.edu/wordpress/free-maps/the-romans-from-village-to-empire-2nd-edition-2011/
Free (as in beer) scholarly maps of historical Rome.
https://invidious.namazso.eu/playlist?list=PLYPFJYTtiTzYkprQK51NpV9skegBtvJUd
Oh, also Ulysses 31!
https://invidious.namazso.eu/watch?v=OiYjTb3opAA
I don’t wanna see another blasted superhero video until you people reboot Captain Planet and the Planeteers.
https://partisanmag.com/socialism-and-rural-organizing/
A neat synopsis of the situation in north-central Appalachia from earlier this year.
An harrowing film about the escape by two concentration camp prisoners to deliver initial figures of the Holocaust to the complacent allies. Includes one of the most authentic, impressionistic depictions of collapse from exhaustion on film. Remember to listen well during the credits.
=>
Also, Pinky, a spin-off of finger. Is this used much?
https://github.com/search?q=fingerd
Ah, here it is. A Golang Fingerd. Boffo.
Please finger someone to-day, smolnetizens.
Finger farm! Modern finger hosting! Definitely smol.
Somewhere there is a “fingerd-ng” which has good security; I’ve not refound it.
Stop infusing chocolate with cattle drippings. End the pointless process of Dutch alkali which removes the healthy effects of cocoa. Put the chilli pepper spice back into chocolate and let it be as the ambrosia as Aztec and Maya gods decreed: chocolate. The barbaric adulteration of chocolate is a blasphemy.
Soy milk (and almond milk &c) should not be manipulated in an attempt to make it taste like that morally repugnant food tradition of slurping the raw, fetid secretions of cattle teats. Soy milk is perfect as simply the pressed juice of the bean; it requires no adulteration, no ensugaration, no colour additives, no flavour moderation. Just stop it.
Campaign 3 has officially come into its own greatness with the last three episodes. I find myself rewatching, frustrated by a need to continue the story. It’s a flavour of feeling more like a thirst for a good book series than anything on standard television. The power of imagination entices deeper than any special effect.
Contrast the digital boorishness of the crowds at the Queen’s funeral with the bonhomie and human presence of the communities who helped to make NRK’s SlowTV gem showing the MS Victoria’s travel along the Telemark canal. Humans talking, singing, waving, paddling in boats. Like the funeral, a sense of the historical as public good to be remembered by machine, but far better understood by the public participants. People came out to tender civic welcome and mediatic intimacy through the lens. Slow TV brings out the pensive possibilities of video culture, when done with whimsy and community care. May Heaven bless old Norway. 🇳🇴
Impressive ritual, well poised on all axes, not the least being the crowd control and timing of march movements. I simply cannot fathom the ubiquitous cell phones of the crowds. The BBC filmed the whole thing beginning to end much better than any phone, to be freely downloaded by anyone. Commentators mention how much the public loved the Queen. And yet, the British public, once well trained in the arts of solemnity, alienated their own presence and participation with obnoxious cell phones and a superfluous mediatic gaze. I just cannot grok cell phone culture, save to note it was a grotesque mistake to popularize this technology. Spectacle is spectacle and the cynics may shrug that the essence of state ritual hasn’t changed, but…. Most of the persons along the gun carriage and hearse route didn’t actually see anything. Paradoxically, their digital mesmerization was seen by the world, and may be noted by posterity with confusion. Something has been lost this past decade to the mainstream of urban human society. Death to the New Flesh.
I got some pickles (cucumbers of course, as that is the only kind found here). They promised to be spicy. And they were. But the spice was overpowered by a sickly sweet treacle flavour. Yes, high fructose corn syrup. In PICKLES.
It’s impossible to understand the USA unless one understands the American Civil War. Almost no one understands that war because it’s only studied by Americans. And Americans generally refuse to understand that it was actually their SECOND civil war, the first being what Americans have retconned in collective memory as a “revolution”. The bedraggled refugees of that first conflict, brutally evicted from their homes by republican ideologue fanatics ,went on to found the core of what was to become Canada. This is why today’s Canadians make such maudlin hash of WWI: it provides a “clean” tablet of honour which otherwise necessitates memory of United Empire Loyalists’ humiliation in the First American Civil War. (Not to mention impolite mention of that French and Indian Business 25 years before.) For both domains of anglophone North America, the dual Cold Wars between 1776 and 1861 are laden with inconvenient, bitter, and dirty psychologies of political accommodation and morass. Better to think about the final catharses and forget the wherefores. Thus by degrees does patriotic idiocy take hold, seeds of fascism sired by honour on the inert body of amnesia.
…show everything wrong with our degenerate era. It used to be that a satellite was a project. It was a ship meters long, crafted to need. Now billionaire parasites (botflies in the body politick) are allowed to vomit mass produced shite-cubes into low earth orbit so they can live out their Ayn Randian adolescent fantasies of global domination as latter-day James Bond villains. They are defiling our planet and our skies where we already had far too much space junk whizzing dangerously about. If you want a global network, do the right thing and park it in geosynchronous orbit then preload/fetch your pr0n or whatever to deal with the minuscule lag. There is absolutely zero need for private LEO swarms in any way conducive to global commonweal. None.
“Ludwig van Beethoven.”
🙂
“Antonio Garibaldi”
🙂
“Takeuchi Naoko”
🙂
“Laaaaayyyyyng Laaaaaayyyyyng”
😑
“Pain Hamburger? Best served cold…”
The conceit that “the monarchy is outdated” betrays devilish flaws born of a chatty, muddle-brained, populist era fast careening into bitter, grey fascism. Mere demotic style is misconstrued as democratic leaven of the loaf. Better Elizabeth R’s steady formality than the tabloid histrionics of a prima dona after the latter day mode. I don’t give two tinkers’ dams that ER didn’t have the common touch. I don’t want to witness the Royal family’s nose hairs and private, petty squabbles. I don’t really care there *is* a Royal family. But give us no more presidents. Better to have a Christian monarch of deep humanity and faithful duty than the republican fantasy of any presidency who does not fast slide toward becoming totalitarian autocracy.
The divide between state and government is essential to prevent gravities of tinhorn power. One only need look at the tottering morass of the USA, whose emperors-in-all-but-name hold megaton nuclear sabres in their increasingly unhinged fists, unchecked by any formality of democracy, to demonstrate that republicanism holds severe dangers.
If Canada is insistent to dissolve all loyalties with the Commonwealth, then a rotating crown or chairmanship amongst the First Nations traditional chiefs is the best option for the future invigoration of the body politick.
At all rates, the Westminster solution of dividing 政 from 治 has never yet been matched for wisdom in rule. Never give monarchs the brass keys to government; but never give mere politicians the iron locks of statecraft. And the ship of state needs intimate human tradition to safeguard a constitution’s course so that it not become meat for doctrinaire, cultish, popular fanaticisms. Her Majesty understood all this as lesser (but more moderne) wits do not.
I still have to say it:
The Queen is dead. Long live the King.
Humans as singletons really do need about 200 years to begin to get our act together. We ought to extend childhood out to 30 years, let wonder and play really soak in. Then shorten adolescence and isolate the damage during that travail. And of course, a rigorous global family planning programme to get our community down to a level fit for sanity and intimacy. 5 million humans tops does sound workable. A light seasoning, a leaven in the loaf of Garden Earth. Then, just maybe then, we will be worthy of our days.
Old films are much more blunt about flash mobs. “Hey, youse guys, let’s get’m!” Oxbow incidents abounded, fed by fiery groupthink. When lynch mobs are a de facto tradition of the local apartheid system, it’s less hard to find leaded-petrol-sucking, cornepone-addled, vigilante hicks as ridiculous. Of course we must wonder how much the insanity of the 20th century was biochemically stimulated, as how much of our day’s weary malaise must be. I keep recalling that there were Mao-era backwoods Chinese villages where up to 50% of the children were mental retardates; man doth not live on rice alone. Likewise, a sociological study convinced me years ago that the decrease in petty crimes in the USA from the 90’s to 2010’s was effected by easy access to abortion by poor women, no longer saddled with a bevy of hopeless, angry, malnourished urchins. Would only that the sociopathic, parasitic, upper classes had availed of that era to equal measure.
I’m constantly amazed by how stupid scholars can be about name taboos and interpretive restraint practices. Absence of evidence can often be evidence of presence when people are motivated by practice or dire need to keep mum. If a people at some period of history are strangely quiet about some matters whilst a genocide is going on next door because of those matters, it is wise to inquire about protective subalterns and strategic tact. It seems especially common in western scholarship to take texts at bald face value and ignore these pregnant silences and quiet gestures between the lines.
Hey scholar, don’t assume common collective identity with readership. I don’t share your weltanschauung and never have, no matter my swinging lingo. Yet here I am, reading your words, words, words.
“”””Labour Day”””” 🤔
The young fogeys on 《Airplane!》 mainly were funny due to racial and age counter-expectation. But their skit does outline a preferred first route to turning down sexual or romantic advances. The girl accepted the offered coffee with civil grace, then strongly stated her preference without rancour or rude challenge to subtext. Her segue was witty and not *really* direct, but strong and final, basically offhand. I quite sympathize with the young boy whose seeming good bet for having found a (likely rare) compatible childhood sweetheart has gone so quickly & unexpectedly awry. But the girl’s arch manner and matter-of-fact turndown appeals to me as personal referent; I have been there, if with much less suave form. The particular racial tensions & dating anxieties of 1970’s America notwithstanding, it’s still the cutest skit in the film.
Ocean Spray stress they are owned by real farmers. The translation of this is that all big ag cartels are technically owned by farmer syndics, so why should we forgive them on that score for including actual humans in the ecological devastation monocropping cartels wreak. But we tree huggers are supposed to uncritically swallow that line with a fuzzy feeling if we see pictures of their clean white owners while José and his kin of actual farm workers hide out of frame.
Blue Diamond is a corpo who try to cover all the bases: their “BOLD” overpriced almond tins bear the ridiculous new slogan, “CRAVE VICTORIOUSLY (tm)”. I’ve seldom seen such a mix of baldly insulting attempt to stimulate the unconscious hunger reflex with blatant pandering to adolescent machismo. “Crave this now, obedient consumer-peon, and you shall be a ‘real man’!” Meanwhile, the tin also assures us with a feminine hand that their almonds are “Smart Snacking (TM, fnord, would I lie to you?)”.
Do people really fall for this “extreme” fluff? Don’t they feel a dram of ire at the manipulation?
I… …hope you liked the video?
And I’ll be coming back atcha with something new…
…or old!
Alright.
Cool.
Seeya.
Come on, NASA. Get that bird yonder and back again.
They covered it up. I thought about that waking up this morning. When they sent Colin Powell to fall on his sword for their dandy little war, they covered up the Guernica behind him. Special pleading, it’s called, evidently. I wonder if no one in will ever be called to account for that obscenity and all which followed on it.
🧒🏻 “Would you care for some cream?”
👧🏼 “No, thank you, I like my coffee black… …like my men.”
“Have you ever been in aaaaaa… Turkish prison?”
Solar power carries the same cosy cottage comfort as soft baking bread.
https://bbs.zhongguojie.org/thread-226756-1-1.html
中國結成為白雪公主，怎麼那麼可愛的事實上存在啊？
I keep trying to figure out what I find so disagreeable about the usual gang of Americanist high modern classical composers. After all, I love Finlandia, which bears its own dose of nationalist bombast. But there is something wearisome and trite in the sentimentality of those who considered symphonic embellishment of a native folk song the height of creativity. Their projects musically fail, I advance. This alone makes their continued notoriety in the USA perplexing.
“It’s the scientific community, man.”
Duke Ellington’s wondrous cacophony evokes the industrial city with a wiry intimacy born of the most pensive familiarity. He is not without humour nor critique, yet valoroizes his “chocolate city” with a sensuous sort of love. Only the dullest of whites in his era must have been resistant to his evocation of the grace of black America, the raw generative genius of his world. Or so a sympathetic heart wishes to believe. Ellington’s voice is forever a young voice, really, a voice of large crowds, too raw and hearty for me not to shrink from, if but in awe. If I could have met him, I would have asked him where he finds quiet and stillness in his city?
Sometimes I think about how Cibo Matto were only “ironically” appreciated by the GenX hipster vampires of New York and I become tooth-gnashingly indignant.
I’ve yet to discover a music version in which The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields doesn’t top my list. They developed by the years a kind of collective voice, stately yet energetic, even passionate and earnest. There is a chipper briskness. The records are always clean and yet sonorous; I wonder where they perform to record. Telemann is one of my favourite composers. They do right by him.
I recently heard what was promised to be an historically informed recording of the Water Music. It sounded like the players were on batter-fried in methamphetamine, with very low feeling. If that is how it was played in Georgie’s day, then so must music be like wine, to mellow and enrich with the decades. I must believe Handel intended the fuller hearing with actual cæsuræ.
I started to listen to Snowy offline these days. He still gets my head bobbling. A good weaving workout track. Please play more square waves, Snowy.
Snowy just played Xangelix, erm, Vangelis’ masterpiece Pulstar. My Raspad’s Bluetooth keyboard went out and the soft keyboard danced to the beat.
I cannot imagine the heavy lifting needed to bring Kollok back for season 3. One must rue that Covid put that train to a stop. And yet they “begin again” and are pushing further. I think this sort of participatory game theatre is one of the most delightful new arts the internet has brought. And I say that with Laura Bennett’s finger pointed at me, as the one who cajoled electors so hard one night years ago for her to be inscribed in story as The Devil. Break that fourth wall hard, kids. We can take it.
…is back. Seriously? Can we talk about authoritarian measures to sort out antivax nutjob public-health-menace child abusers yet?
I found that I had indeed bought weaving tablets somewhere. So with a bit of reading up and the creation of a tablet weaving design spreadsheet, I gave it a whirl. Indeed it takes relatively less time. I never fancied the notion of a back strap for sensorial reasons. But for warp tension control, I must say, there is nothing more organic. It’s made me reassess the tapestry loom as my favourite modality. For one thing, I can weave in bed, with some creative rigging, much better for winter.
…………what a savings. 😑
…the Only American Artform.
I’ve always wondered what to make of Deutsche Gramofon’s aggressively uninspired album covers. They seem to revel in the absolute minimum of care in an album’s visual artwork. Sometimes this annoys me, sometimes I hold it dear. Could DG be themselves without that blindingly gaudy MS Paint label and a random copypasta Dutch master? It would be fun to take on the task, to seek out multimedia visualization artists to lend DG a dose of the genius which Rock-and-Roll had at the height of vinyl liners as a visual art format.
Listening to Schubert whilst reading the Exeter Book in the original Anglo-Saxon. I must be the most highbrow of the unwashed lumpenproles in North Americay.
An important medical device I have implanted like I’m bloody Locutus of Borg lost power because its simpering idiot poncing bourgeois scumbag devs can’t imagine that anyone doesn’t live in an area with cell phone service. It keeps trying to find service and there is *no way to prevent it doing so*, hence it speedily barfs power to zero amp hours. Intelligent species eh? This is the stupidest future.
The authority of Victor Mair is utterly inexplicable to me, save as yet more evidence of the endemic crackpottery within Sinology as a discipline. He should be writing for wackjob hyperdiffusionist alien conspiracy theory websites, not taken as scholarly light. Ed Said save us all…
A large switch on my solar power input bus in my main junction box went bad yesterday. It’s probably just a mote of wind blown grit. And yet, I cannot service the switch. The back end is a literal black box, beveled and glued tight. I’d have to smash the blasted thing to open it. This sort of total capitalist idiocy is everywhere up and down the line. Recent supply chain issues ought to be encouraging better design, political pushes for right of repair. But so far, we are still skipping down the trash glutted path.
One of the regrettable cultural degradations of the last 50 years has been the near disappearance in the Anglosphere of formal rhetoric in public speaking settings. The English of the day is a loathsome travesty, a festering den of lunacy curated by Twitter. We can ironically thank Buckley & Vidal for dragging formal speaking right into this gutter, natch. No matter the chatty, phony-demotic flavour of the Zeitgeist, a formal register bears many social goods, including clarity, civilized engagement, and a much needed interjection of contemplative pacing. High diction should be consciously, widely encouraged. The asinine, dog-and-pony carnival in the UK House of Commons is not an appropriate forum to emulate for proper diction. If you need a model, one could do worse than watch old videos of Malcom X. Go to Toastmasters, take a deep breath, speak slowly, speak deliberately, and (Millenials) for the love of Heaven: stop your repugnant uptalk. You sound like whingeing churchmice.
This sort of interactive theatre deserves greater appreciation, and more room for development. How weirdly suitable that rôle play games should have birthed this new artform. For a deep dive into an imaginative exploration, one can do worse than Kollok.
Kollok is back and I’m glad of it. I discovered Kollok by utter serendipity one night whilst watching kids on Twitch play Nintendo games. Now I download episodes for dinnertime viewing. This season goes full surreal theatre at some points. New players are beginning to find their footing along with the gaggle of pre-Covid personæ. I hope Kollok can make a go of it. This is a worthy artistic venture.
Adams’ opera, as I recall it from a stage presentation, is quite impressionistic. His operas do spin toward the surreal, which well betokens the emotions and ancient karmas of the characters. And yet there is a special deliciousness to the narrative flow in the film version, to see the wider context, from grit of ghettos to the juxtaposition with the Irag War. And the live settings for opera work in such a wry way… I find myself hungry for more opera shot as a film, especially “serious” operas dealing with historical tragedy or poignancy like Adams’. This good especially reveals in the intimacy of Klinghoffer himself: the sweetness of him and wife, his refusal to be cowed by the terrorists, his maddening death and unceremonious disposal.
Seldom has there been such a canny conflagration of scifi and fantasy genre conventions. Cherryh’s markers are all here, if with less finesse than her later works. As interesting as the stories themselves are, what compels are the layers of unspokens, mysteries, some to which the reader is privy, some not. For instance, it seems patent that Morgaine is indeed Morgaine le Fey. How did she leave Arthurian era Earth? Via Stonehenge? Is the world of Shiuaj a Precambrian Earth as implied? Whence Liell-Roh? Will Morgaine and (uncle) Vanye someday cause the Calamity? Hopefully Exile’s Gate will delve such mysteries.
So apparently the game here is one of “chicken”. The neoliberal internationalists who have long been pushing for a proxy war in Ukraine at some point will have to commit NATO on the ground or not. They expect Putin to blink first. The problem is that Russia almost never blinks when their back is against the wall. How nice for us all that said wall is a battery stocked with nuclear arms.
Witness: “…And then he said ‘we are in the middle of a coup d’état’ and ‘we need to get control of this shit’…”
Radio Announcer: “Oops! Sorry for that offensive language, folks! Let me just talk over this historic testimony in parliamentary committee about imminent fascist insurrection for a while to underscore how much we dislike and disavow naughty potty words”.
Me: 😑
Mia and Ana went to a park.
Mia proposed, "Let's have a picnic".
Ana replied, "but I didn't bring food".
Mia coyly smiled, "Don’t worry, I always bring leftovers..."
Speaking of, sad to hear that NATO’s expansion in SE, FI is coming and at the cost of Kurdish freedom fighters, thanks to the fascist regime in TU. The winner is empire, all around. Fun.
「槍桿子裡面出政權。」…Have to admit it’s true.
Kollok is back, finally. I just started watching season 3. A bit more scrappy, no thanks to Covid, but I’m hoping the Eubanks can find that old juju, or forge something new of it in equal caliber.
Let us be deeply unimpressed with virtuosity’s glamour. Skill without soul is saddest vanity. It must live in an earnest heart to bear true fruit. In the ranks of the transcendent: Chopin before Liszt; Coltrane above Davis.
Say what you will about DND. When CR works, it is absolutely glorious. Brennan isn’t as engaging, judicious, or nimble a DM as Mercer. But he managed to enable episode 4 in this miniseries to be an absolute tearjerker of poignancy and pathos. In 4 episodes, the players managed to forge characterization and ration shops which usually take far more time. Bravi.
https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/firefox-scrollbars-too-thin/25207
Accessibility.
Accessibility…
Accessibility!
Come on, Devs.
There’s something distasteful in most of Frank Herbert’s works difficult to resolve. I came a step closer to it here. He weaves between ironies and unspokens, “plans within plans”, trying to eschew easy ideologies. Very well. But a sort of faith in Ayn Randian heroism always crops up, the triumph of the well bred. I suppose it is hard baked into most high Modernism, the Will to Power as existential baseline.
And still it goes on, in protofascist Jungische pop mythos when not egregiously explicit. If the past hundred years of geopolitical history have not given proof against the individualist vanities of Great Men, I don’t know what can… I suppose we will either learn cooperative civilization to survive or we won’t. Some of Herbert’s metaphysical suspicions are apt, as are his instincts to peel away sociopolitical facades. His worldbuilding is nonpareil. But we’ve lived under the meritocratic reign of smart men. So far smarts haven’t gotten us too far, mostly helped smart men to better blind themselves to their own hubris.
Anyway, a decent book, a few plot holes aside. Herbert tries to keep just a step ahead of the reader’s own puzzling out of implicit meanings and hidden situations. There’s a bit of Gulliver’s travels in space mystery form. Dosadi Experiment is indeed a good example of 70’s psychedelic scifi - that inventive, sharp, delirious era before Cyberpunk crushed dreams of human thriving. I must reaffirm: Herbert’s non-Dune books are best.
“The military mentality is a bandit and raider mentality. Thus, all military represents a form of organized banditry where the conventional mores do not prevail. The military is a way of rationalizing murder, rape, looting, and other forms of theft which are always accepted as part of warfare. When denied an outside target, the military mentality always turns against its own civilian population, using identical rationalizations for bandit behaviour.”
I never knew until this book how much Wikipedia cribbed from the OED as *process*. The OED was in some ways the first modern scholarly “crowdsourcing” project. And yet it also benefitted from the pensive habits of an analogue society, volunteer contributors with vastly deeper textual attentions than the average of our day. OED began mass dataset collation, even long before IBM’s diesel age quantifications of logistics. Yet this work was done via basically mediaeval scholastic praxis - from the medium of pens and paper to the aesthetic (unquantified, unmined) touchstones offered for editorial selection of entries. TPatM is interesting in itself as an history written on the eve before search engines became hegemonic. The habits of human curated mass scholarship in highly personal meditative impression are probably deeply alien to the Zeitgeist of our era. People *do* let Google think for them, then bathe uncontemplatively in the perverse, shrieking cacophony of social media’s groupthought. This insidious algorithmic mediumship represents a mass suicide of the higher faculties of the human mind. As Miyazaki said, humans have lost confidence in themselves. OED is a reminder of the promise and perils of that odd, long twilight between primal oral culture and the cyberpanopticon videodrome.
“Yesterday’s high temperature broke the previous record high set in (date 1990-2021). Yesterday’s record low was set in (date 1880-1950).” 😰
There used to be a perfect little Chinese calendar applet. It is still on github. But since it requires libpanelapplet-2.0, it doesn’t work and is in no repos. I’m cross eyed from trying to find a linux lunar calendar. Ah, well.
Lindt & Sprüngli: Spicy dark chocolate!
Said Chocolate: 47% cocoa and barely a black pepper level tingle of chili.
Me: “I’m not really very nerdy enough to do Foo”.
Also me: Watches downloaded Critical Rôle episodes on her Raspad via her hacked up smbd.
Electron is the very devil. Nodejs ditto, and Pulseaudio too, natch.
In Raisin in the Sun, unawares Poitier lets his necktie dangle in his scrambled eggs. Eggtie.
I have a new solar flashlight: basically a big li battery, an led array, a solar cell, and a controller. The fundamentals are fine enough. But instead of a proper switch for the light, there is a button which controls various flashing settings. Why devs think we need a flashlight to automatically flash is beyond me. I just want a torch which won’t burn out in 20 minutes.
Anyway, the switch on the controller board for this inevitably broke after about 6 uses. It was barely soldered, totally unsecured, unglued, and simply mashed down by a piece of printed plastic. The switch solder points bear all the load, get torqued by every use. It would be an easy fix if the board were pass-through and there were room in the box. Of course there is hardly room for a proper button between board and plastic shell.
I can’t believe this is not intentionally malicious design, a consumer cycle meant to burn through electronics material as quickly as possible. Some farmer’s daughter from Henan got paid tuppence to solder a 1 cent switch when she could have been paid 10 cents to secure a switch on the box so most people won’t throw it away after 6 uses. Why? So the office leeches on the production can reap a rounder 50 USD in profit. Tell me capitalism hasn’t a sense for comedy.
Hearing Wolfman Jack and friends sing merry Christmas is worth the admission alone. Out of sight. He captured that moment, the fraught, wondrous, terrible, dynamic midcentury. He was one of those wizards who truly felt the magick of radio. As he said in his farewell broadcast on XPRS: “life, love, and beauty”. Gotta dig the Wolfman, babby.
I am so grateful for those soulful folk who caught radio transmissions on reel-to-reel tape in days of yore. It is worth collecting these recordings. I’m also glad I caught the tail end of the analogue radio silver era. There are nothing like analogue modes via MW or SW for a mysterious, heartful, direct, almost tactile interplay of human and radio. The cult of technic novelty has almost destroyed an unique cultural medium which ought by rights to have lasted centuries. We should have grown into analogue radio and worn it in delight like a pair of old, patched up, lucky shoes. Radio has soul. Signal imperfections are often cracks to let light to shine. The same goes for any odd nooks of backwater, countercultural intimacy. In these desiccated times, such rarities are indeed worth cherishing.
Why has the Google burger been spreading so much? I find it rather obnoxious, and often b0rked. Devs, please at least give us options.
Smoothies are delicious. But smoothies are just thinned out baby pap. Gerber baby food become a fad.
The first time I saw plastic bottled water, I thought it was a joke. I still do. It is the most pointless trash. Why not a gourd or a canteen or a thermos? How can you carry tea if you bottle the water first?
Instant Permanent Bookmark.
Apparently, messing with configs and compiling from source is “hacking” now. When did this happen? So I get to be a hacker now?
Part of the reason for this weiphlog was to call bullshit on social media: on the itch we have to be heard in a forum. The toxic itch for professorial exhibition. Mine own feckless itch. Maybe 2 people and 10 robots will ever read this, and none will care. That is truly fine; though still we spill the bits from the bit bucket. The cash of social media perhaps being the plaintive mewling of alienation. We tweet while Rome burns as if digital wings could staunch the flames. The truth is that short forms are merest indulgence. Bumper sticker pathos. 160 character limits have only taught us to confuse wry turns with wit and wit with wisdom. But most haiku sucks. A cheap fix. If we all survive, the Tweet forma will linger on past its technological mandates. These restrictions bound up our minds - and with them our communal hopes. Like the way many ballads lamely trail off into silence: because of the old 3 minute vinyl record single limits. No one will truly remember what we say, and few will dare remember how we felt. The best we can do, I suppose, is to bear witness to each other. Paradoxically, honest witness demands silence.
Man.
Page.
Hades.
Tell me this isn’t gratuitous newb hazing? Who wrote this?
“Let’s listen to some Scheidt”.
I’ve always been ambivalent about Puccini. His Orientalism is a bit precious if not offensive; I’ll leave phony outrage there to the wokescold kiddies. A fatal riddle contest to win a bride is ridiculous, but so is tossing a ball into a crowd. More apropos, the tragic romanticism of Italian opera usually tastes overwrought to me. But Puccini always delights with his melodic sympathy and choral majesty. Who can’t love Nessun Dorma? Cheers to that.
An odd little 90’s style late bloomer lesbian romance from 2001, set in the inimitable metropolis of Hoboken, about a housewife drawn between set theory, Courtney Love, and Spalding Gray. What’s not to like?
If you name your child anything shy of TSM’s moniker, you just aren’t trying.
After giving it some thought, in light of Trumpsters, flat Earthers, antivax nuts, Hellen Keller denialists, and the absolute cesspit every culture becomes once enhanced by social media, I now believe the internet was a mistake. It should never have been allowed to become mainstream tech. The sweep of ramifications from this realization, I cannot yet say.
CBC says that young persons now believe Hellen Keller didn’t exist because the rumour ridden cesspit of social media says so. “Eternal September” no longer suffices for our era’s level of technologically enabled wickedness and stupidity.
NPR’s chat show Fresh Air and Mother Jones are shilling for LEO “pre-crime” analysis of students and workers today. Not a single question about privacy or due process or freedoms of expression. Nope, softball city. “Won’t someone think of the children?!”
A minimalist operatic version of Uncle Vanya, commissioned from John Adams, please!
…Jazz. It is international jazz day, not coincidentally just after Duke Ellington’s birthday. Worth catching the tributes this time of year for rare recordings.
I just heard that Elon Musk has bought Birdsite, and plans to further whip that cesspit into a fine Santorum lather. If you get down on these smolnet counterculture demimondes, just remember that it can always be worse.
Foucault had it bass ackwards: all the best war films are anti-war films. The spectical, framed unflinchingly, lends inexorably to empathy (for those who have any). It’s why the generations need to see Dachau.
Kapitän Thomsen, the drunken member of the “old gang”, his eyes are doleful and kind like an old hound’s. It’s a peculiarity of some such ruddy European people, this affect which breeds tender poignancy.
Two cigarettes lit in the first 3 minutes. Got to be a record somehow.
I’m not sure whoever did the library or extension for Chinese dates understood the usual format… :/
Antonia, mother of Claudius, was apparently reincarnated as a Soviet scientist on the space station.
The USA legislative performances (real decisions being made away from microphones) are bizarre for the rhetoric being deployed by both major parties. Unlike the Westminster parliaments, there is a fiction of stately decorum. This, yet the political “issues” framed are far more obtuse from any true administration of governance to the point of viciousness.
Hey kids! Some boring bits about imminent Armageddon, we are sorry to bother, but first here is 45 minutes talking about the latest contretemps at the Oscars! Don’t you care about the Oscars? Cray-cray, like, I know, right?
Missed out on Caruso. At least I got to hear Pavarotti at the height of his powers. Nothing compares to living analogue.
Pre-contact there were about 60 million bison in NorthAm.
In 1890, there were less than 1 thousand.
In 1983, there were 75 thousand.
Humans call this “conservation”.
In 1906, the Kaibab plateau had 3-4k of mule deer.
Conservationists were concerned, so the game preserve killed all the predators.
Thus in 1924 there were 100000 deer. Yay!
Then they almost all horribly died from starvation in a devastated, overpopulated ecosystem. Oops.
Humans call this “learning as we go”.
Today there are nigh 8 billion humans on the planet.
Vast regions have become garbage heaps, monumental forests burn each summer, and ecocide gallops.
A generation ago there were about 4 billion humans, not to mention far more birds.
Now we shuffle carbon cards and wonder how we will survive the next generation.
We could, you know, dial down on the breeding and make the planet a paradise.
But no one is allowed to say that.
Humans call this “progress”.
…ought to be played with restraint, the emotional volume attenuated. Suddenly it thus comes alive with intelligence in a balanced expression: humane, articulate, buoyant. Played too romantically, it risks to become the abominable cliché which modern pop culture hath bred into it.
Sounds like someone dropped a block of marble as an adhoc addition to the Bach.
Skyscrapers are an epiphenomenon of the abstraction of land as private property, the fiction of the isolated parcel. With other forms of land tenure, other forms of high urban design become possible. Communal land, odal land, interstices, arcs and arcologies all deserve our imagination.
The poorest people by demographics in NYC are Asian Americans. How this can surprise even me is outrageous and flabbergasting.
Russia is plum out of line. Let’s root for Ukraine. But also remember the million dead in that two decade quagmire in Iraq so Halliburton could raid the cookie jar.
One might expect the Ukrainian commanders have been reading up on the Battle of Teutoberg Forest. The Russians apparently haven’t. Aquilius Varrus, where are my eagles?!
It’s rich for the Moscow regime to claim liberation for Crimea, which not so long ago held no Russians but Greeks and Tatars. Ukraine should expect no less a programme for the mainland, no matter their stern heritage as the descendants of Khazar and Cossack pirates.
I would like to send earnest thanks to Covid for chucking the handshake, the American hug, and the Euro-American cheek kiss to history. Why were we supposed to touch people we barely know in this way? Yugh.
Favourite food,
Eaten with relish,
Today or tonight:
Usually raw, but add
Salt and spices.
Many bad old films at least entertain as fodder for cinematic curiosity. But some are so completely awful they genuinely stoke my outrage. University in the 80’s as a setting especially is sure to disgust any sensitive mind.
"Our water is sacred. Gamera taught us that lesson. If the oceans die, then mankind will die. So we have to protect them."
Internet Archive opens an open access full text journal search engine? YES PLEASE.
http://lakeshore64.com/schedule/
http://lakeshore64.com/show/deke-duncan/
http://streaming.live365.com/a04907
Fab online music station, crewed by radio vets. Home of legendary Deke Duncan, Sundays 1000-1200 CST.
“Of course, you know about pain. You’ve seen Spalding Grey.”
1. Mothra
2. Gamera
3. Godzilla
All of these monsters have, or later adopt, an attitude of familial, benevolent care for humans. Humans are smol to these kaiju, children deserving of particular concern even if their cities are but a playground for wastage.
I’m still on a Cherryh marathon. I read one of the Foreigner novels, which seem to be her most recent series, and Chanur’s Venture. Cherryh sticks with her space station cultural complex and adventure heroism withal. More interesting to me per se, if Deceiver is any indication, the Foreigner novels are to be intellectually enjoyable for their nearly Holmesian deductions through high intrigue.
Just finished Cherryh's the Pride of Chanur. Fun, wryly crafted space opera. I’m so grateful for authors like Cherryh who carry silver age scifi humanism forward through the dark era of cyberpunk distopia. Cherryh’s strength is her ability to twist a gritty plot upon the perceptions and logic of her characters in a palpably reasonable way. Never mind that she isn’t high-concept driven. Her rough-and-ready characters shine. CJ Cherryh is one of the most underrated scifi authors of recent memory.
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY.
Turn off the “electronic hallucinations”; go check out some books.
(And I mean in paper format, proven a mnemonically superior infotechnology.)
CJ Cherryh's works are so polydimensional. She doesn't idolize high concept scifi conventions even as she dedicates her works to their discipline. Her high modernist noir vernaculars and oft gritty plots obscured for me the sophistication with which she imbues each character an inner life, a nuanced inner story, the fog of war of incomplete perceptions. And that’s my cuppa tea; so I’m on a Cherryh kick.
“[The extermination of the Passenger Pigeon] is a long and shameful story, but the grisly skeleton of its Michigan chapter can be set forth in a few words. In 1869, from the town of Hartford, Mich., three car loads of dead pigeons were shipped to market each day for forty days, making a total of 11,880,000 birds. It is recorded that another Michigan town marketed 15,840,000 in two years.” He quotes one good estimate of a massive flock at over 2.2 billion birds. As he was writing there was but one left, at the Cincinnati Zoo.
My theory about the naturalist moment of the 1900-1910’s: Girl Guides & Campfire Girls bred the inexorable modern feminism of the 1920’s. A generation of Anglosphere girls were raised heroically trouncing about the mountains and forests in the 1910’s. This Rooseveltian outdoorswomanship was internalized by girls to find in themselves the “irrepressible” mistresses of their own interests. Inevitably this later informed their expectations as women. When the 1920’s are kept in light of this, they become far less historically anomalous. The flapper skirt embodies an ethical continuation of the camper’s middy and bloomers.
If you don’t want to let your holidays become a marketing tool, then just don’t engage with the consumerism. The perennial mourning over a supposed primordial Christmas innocence helps nothing if it is yoked to the fatalism of “just so”.
Do it, NASA. Park that bird! 🛰
Bravo, humans. Between the antivax nuts and the vaccine hoarders, we now get another round of shutdowns, quarantines, and socioeconomic malaise.
As a child, Fletcher Christian went to primary school with William Wordsworth. Yes, that Christian and that Wordsworth. Ah, fey poetry in the strange wending of fate!
It’s rich when Quebecois plead “c’est laïcisme!” to cover up their rank bigotries. Quebec stood as an anti-laicism redoubt of traditionalist Francophone culture since Marat first took to his bath. Quebecers pleading French style secularism now are fooling absolutely no one who has run up against the widespread stone-throwing (cough) parochialism in that good province.
When the Omicron demolishes your ability to breathe, remember to thank the rich states who hoarded vaccines by the millions along with the antivax wingnuts whose Petri dish bodies are the easiest vector for new mutations to spread and attack the responsible and vulnerable.
SCOTUS is very concerned to maximize birth during a grossly overpopulated era. You WILL be born, citizen, so you can wallow in a backwards society and die of gun violence at 16 or lack of civilized medical care at 45 or general despair at 38. Why lower need for abortion with proven policies education, medicine, and social services for young women when you can just throw them in prison?
One metric of some collective cognitive regress across the Anglosphere surely must be the decay of language since midcentury. Even today’s paid pundits will trip over themselves with um, like, you know, sandwiched betwixt the puerile vulgarisms of an era where comic book fascist art films are considered sophisticated fare. When I listen to old radio interviews or panel shows, I’m struck by the benefits of widespread education of rhetoric had on the population. Even random interviewees summon a compositional composure at rates far beyond our period. Aside from rhetorical skill, the more sedate and polite pace of conversation seems to have allowed for a contemplative reserve conducive to well formed argument, if not always illumination. I pity children today who cannot enjoy the fruits of such custom.
Speaking of the petrostate: one must wonder if, when the dead are collected and the bill tallied, that BC’s regime will not finally evolve a backbone to come at Alberta with pitchforks freshly sharpened. The climate boffins are unanimous in that the recent floods’ intensity was stoked by our collective human irresponsibility. Perhaps after this, BC’s public will no longer vacillate to the “but muh oil jobs” special plead. AB’s whinging antivax neofash petrotools may be surprised by the drums of wrath which beat in Victoria for interprovincial war. One would hope for such a stern federal counterbalance. It might even make a mensch of the Greens.
Canadians need to batten it when it comes to Biden’s EVTC. NAFTA has been a boon to absolutely no one in North America save heartless oligarchs and blithely solidarity-less middle class Canadians. Both by the dire domestic socioeconomic plight of the USA working classes and the grim geopolitical forecasts, it is sensible even for Biden to spurn neoliberalism by doing the needful to favour USA industry. My only shock is that a USA still has no national mandate for all federal contracts to mandate union shop domestic production. Suck it up, Canada. Focus on ending the petrostate industrial complex through diversification of energy and production. And meanwhile hopefully the “amigos” can confab aiding the long savaged Mexican small farmer whose suffering has primarily driven the NAFTA nightmare...
So the circus begins.
:( Oh, dear lil old town. I can’t bear to see pics. Lower BC’s port and inland distribution is a pain in the rump on a good day. These will not be good days.
“I’m very healthy, I eat my veggies, so I don’t need the vaccine.” 🤦🏽♀️(Facepalm)
How the USA public responds to the Bannon inquiry will be an important indicator for whither the empire in this post-“beer hall putsch” era. I’m not sure many people are understanding just how fragile this moment is. Take a deep breath and remember Obama who may well have wryly noted, “Apres moi, le deluge”.
I’ve come to enjoy the wee introductory mouse clicks and key taps of the live radio announcers who are obviously working from home.
……Well, what can one say. The apocalypse oddly may not come from atomic miscreants but coal. Coal. In the 21st century. Not that nukes are out of the running, but… no one midcentury save Orwell would have believed how backward and twisted with gloom we are today.
(N) Buddhism stripped of all ethics, ritual, hope, metaphysics, and meaning so to pander bourgeois boomer white American appetites.
2022 elections will be about “protecting the (supposedly straight, white, fundie Christian) children”. Nothing gets the benighted Bible Belters wound up quite like the prospect of their “innocent little angels” coming home with a black genderqueer love interest and pushing slavery reparations. Meanwhile their precious unaborted teeniebopper is worried about telling ma and pa over post-church supper of pork barbecue and cornpone that she is pregnant because she never learnt where to get condoms.
Well, I’m dashed. It is as likely as not to be mere mutual face saving. But better than last year’s terrors anyway.
A treat for the fingers on air now, Marjorie Stewart-Baxter. Isn’t it plum lovely, Hubert Cumberdale.
…reeks so deeply of the priorities and argot of the haute bourgeoisie, the NYT/WaPo reading liberal classes, that it simply can be difficult to swallow. It takes too yawning endurance in code shift to slog through. Coupled with the willful parochialism of the general national character, it truly can make for a rum punch. If that is true for me, how much more the Kraft dinner crowd?
Annie Murphy Paul discusses brain research, amongst other things, showing that brains often work better when using gesture and physical activity and spatial context to improve the mind. That is, added evidence of the “extended mind”, that minds don’t just get coded in the brain but exist in context. Interesting for adjacent interests such as autism, sign language…
Blablabla, indeed. But we won’t really know how anemic the progress until the faceless civil servants who really run the world (for the oligarchs) hash things out. Which begs the question: why isn’t COP a rolling event at the UN? We are to the point, surely, when a once a year Swiss chalet confab doesn’t quite spread the butter. COP ought to be a constant communication channel and litmus testing ombudsman for most global governance issues. Make PRC and Russia beg to get in.
If NPR (the anemic USA public broadcaster) is any index, on the whole the USA blithering classes are essentially ignoring COP26. There is more coverage of some Hollywood folderol and the usual domestic policy fecklessness of the Dems (centre-right liberals with a few abused soc dem pets). In 2021, with so much at stake... What a bloody joke.
How did Modi get me to smile for him? It was a smart move for India to show up at Glasgow when PRC did not. To further lay down something (supposedly) pithy was quite canny. Modi puffs himself up like a good chap; Emperor Xi looks petulant in comparison.
A near horizon for coal ought be a gimme for any rich state. No one really wants coal anymore, not even PRC. Even the markets are recognizing this, hence the political gimme. That the USA won’t commit to even that mote of “leadership” belies the lack of seriousness in the USA’s climate commitments. I get that Biden has to give WV some face. But if the imperial core politicos can’t show some backbone this late in the game? The USA is lost as any responsible player going forward.
Of all the sinister attributes of the their provincial character, the worst thing I’ve heard is that 90% of Albertans enjoy pineapple on pizza. This alone may have demented the specie. I am only surprised that in Fort Mac one can’t order jellied bitumen as a topping. Likewise, I wince to testify that indeed the Swedes do insane and inane insults to pizza, and banana is the least of it. Really, any eatery north of Chicago should be banned by international law from monkeying with pizza toppings. I’m bally well serious.
婗們共匪都纔懶得長途跋涉那邊呢？🦙可見支那大陸到底對保護全球環境不管不顧，我並不感到吃驚囉⋯
Wanna make “all sides” plug their ears and go ‘lalala’? Mention overpopulation. We can jive and dance around it, but eventually either we want a billion people tops with an Elysian standard of living on a garden planet or we have 10 billion hopeless, malnourished serfs living on a burning dunghill chocked with plastic and concrete. There is no way to have a functioning ecosystem, a high standard of living, and a festering cancer species all at the same time.
When the media go “both sides”, I just want to chuck my infotech out the window. Climatologists: the ecosphere is going to die soon. Petroshills: But muh profits. Media: Can’t we all just get along?
Is he going to say the “o” word? Yes! Indeed he did! Dr. Anthony Weaver gave a lovely interview on Q&Q. His measured, calm, elegant approach to policy solutions to the climate crisis is a useful tack. (I do think both measured calm and Thunbergian “panic” are needful in strategic context.) Even more refreshingly, Weaver mentioned human overpopulation as a major cause of ecological collapse, and delicately suggested it is high time to have conversations about a sustainable future population.
People need to understand how insanely conservative the IPCC estimates are. More rigorous climate models like MIT project a far starker temperature distribution. If the political class tools don’t get their arses in gear this weekend, it means 4°. And 4° C is planet death, and right soon. It’s that simple. Do we want a functioning planet Earth or not? Does the idiotic, cancerous human race have a survival instinct or not?
If you want the bitter taste of Canadian empire, the “residential school” concentration camps are now a well known flavour. But even more pertinent to the contemporary machinations of empire is to see the Canadian corporate state as one of the core functions of Canadian power. Canada is typical of petrostates in obfuscating culpability. Yet Canadian mining cartels are notorious abroad for their bullying, bribery, and reckless extraction. Government mumbling, “the provinces deal with all that, Government has no constitutional oversight” is just more mealy Canadian shuck and jive. Mining cartels ARE Canadian hard power. Bring them to heel.
So I’m, like, an expert? I have something, you know, totes critical to inform you about foreign policy, you know? In fact, it is so important it, like, gets me right in the feels? But because, um, I uptalk I’m projecting, um, indecision and impropriety? I know, right? But, like, you know, um, I’m going to do this every single sentence? Like, you do you? You boomers aren’t, um, validating me? Maybe if I switch to vocal fry-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y…
Speaking of Quirks and Quarks, this week features a fascinating interview with Dr. Scott Small, who draws links between autism, PTSD, and Alzheimer’s as different exemplars regarding the balance of memory and forgetting in cognition. Small is good about underscoring that autism can be a strength, but that the trade off with autistic memory is the cognitive lack of habitual pattern generalization. When everything is ever new, basic assumptions can be more easily reassessed, I warrant. But also the stress of lack of forgetting makes generalized pattern recognition more difficult, or at least stressful, as the prefrontal cortex takes over for the hippocampus. (My inference.) A worthy listen.
Rewind digs up wonderful intellectual treasures from decades past. Today’s show rewinds the first Quirks & Quarks show in the 1970’s. As a coda to my recent post about ambivalences in science, David Suzuki interviews a somber biologist who used to work for the USA military’s biological, chemical, and radiological weapons programme. He makes incisive and cutting remarks about the “lack of accountability” of Science as a mercenary magisterium of “wizards”. These social and ethical deficits in Science as an institution have shifted very little from his day. It’s hard not to sympathize with his disillusionment over the decay of the pure science he once pursued into a handmaidenhood to cold interests of brutal power.
I’m trying to lay off the politics, I am. Ah, well. Sometimes the goat gets got.
…didn’t just have a single lapse in defending the USA’s jolly little war to the UN. He was THE megaphone for pushing the war, by jingo, the only member of the government with enough real gravitas to do so. And he did, over and over. Albeit we now that Iraq’s abject proneness was a “known known” to him and Bush’s entire Halliburton suckling cabinet. The GOP used him and his credibility as a tool to hook both the USA populace and London lapdogs. He expected to be made president for it, probably. Instead, they hung him with the dirty laundry. Powell was a patsy and a huckster, another organ of a morally degenerate regime chuckling, “let them eat yellowcake” as they gargled the blood of millions from Mrs. Lincoln’s teacups.
Speaking of liberal political mystiques I do not grok… It will be interesting to see what hash the Wunderkind can make of the crow he is eating today. I consistently underestimate his ability to stick his foot in his mouth and somehow come out smiling. Clintonian redolences indeed.
Hillary Rodham Clinton shilled on CBC for her new ghostwritten novel. A spunky SecState protagonist, natch. The interviewer is practically drooling on herself in starfuckery. I am rather curious as to these haute bourgeois boomer white women who fall hard for the Clintonite “strong woman” mystique. They identify with Clinton’s cynically curated in-group “sisterhood” in ways largely alien for the rest of us rabble, we supposed sisters who would never share anecdotes of Barnard or antiquing the Hamptons or Beltway soirées. An interesting exemplar of the mentality, and how Clinton’s “pantsuit nation” was a feckless propagandistic standard from the get go.
I don’t hold to oligarchs being given any space privileges, never mind their own private fleets. How do we allow this madness? But it was nice that Shatner got to go up, a fitting slice of poetry. Whoever thought up that gimmick no doubt got a rise.
The leader of the Chieftains has gone out of this world. His light still shines through the music. Death is a fey thing, whispering “memento mori”.
Is she going to say it? I think she is! Say, say! Yes, she actually mentioned human overpopulation as a major cause of extinction. Thank you, ecologist, for your intellectual honesty in mentioning the unmentionable.
If you’re a scientist, especially one likely to be interviewed, for Heaven’s sake go to Toastmasters and learn how to engagingly speak about your research without too much technobabble. It’s entirely possible. I promise.
If you don’t like being lectured by children yelling “blablabla”, quit acting like petulant brats.
The “housing shortage” is a lie. It’s really a bourgeois real estate speculation crisis. No one in Shanghai has any business owning a Vancouver house. Ban it. (Just try going the other way. Good luck getting a housing permit in PRC!)
The USA bank bailout in ‘08 was a blank check finally totalled at between 12-16 TRILLION DOLLARS. That’s in 2008 money. The lump sum handed off without strings was so huge it’s difficult to actually tally. It could feed generations. And no doubt much of that is now stocked up tax free in Bermuda. If you think 3.5 trillion over 5 years or whatever for malnourished precariat children to possibly have a future is too big, you’re living in bourgeois courtier class ladeedahland.
CBC: Coming up, the Covid crisis in Alberta; how should we force these gravel throwing wingnuts to get the vaccine? But before that, a retrospective of the first national Day for Truth and Reconciliation and a panel of indigenous people discuss where they hope the process of reconciliation goes from here…
NPR: The USA narrowly avoided a governmental shutdown again last night, as “moderate” Democrats standing up for patriotic businessmen’s interests are impeded by the “far left” demagogues of the dirty peasant rabble. But first, here’s a talking head on Marketplace lecturing why the mudblood peons should be grateful for 8$ minimum wage and no health insurance…
Over 5000 unmarked graves of indigenous children have been discovered this summer alone. Children died, abused and alone, many starving at the schools better termed concentration camps. These camps chucked them in pits by the hundreds. The government of the day knew the death toll (25% or more per annum) and intentionally perpetrated genocidal conditions. I’m ambivalent about symbolic gestures like state holidays. But we should hope that Canadians take this moment to heart as a fundamental realignment toward a new communal engagement on good faith, healthy terms with indigenous communities. Call it reconciliation or decolonization or whatever, but it’s high time to build a greater commonwealth.
Oh, NPR. When I get down on Canada, I just turn on USA radio. It doesn’t last long. The lockstep business elite sycophantry (hi, Marketplace) the totalitarian mood underpinned by cynicism and despair, the lack of care for any cohort beyond the hermetically sealed professional classes, the bizarre cultural myopia and provincial disregard of pressing global issues. NPR is the best it gets, but a dour moral cesspit compared to CBC and RNZI. I’d add BBC and ABC (the real one, not the Disney one), but the UK nor AU don’t bother broadcasting to North America anymore. Not even QSL cards come from the former!
JB McKinnon (sp?) discusses his book When the World Stopped Buying. Re: plain living, anti-consumerism, Covid simplicity, capitalism… He did an experiment where he stopped buying into disposability culture. They discuss the eccentrics who don’t want to participate in the mainstream rat race and I realized he was talking about me. Strange to discover the envy which some of the professional classes have for those who opt out… I do hope he is correct, that the “return of normal” post-Covid will see large segments analyze their priorities in a deeper way, resist the consumeristic hook. Perhaps this underpins the whining which low wage employers have been voicing; people don’t want to work under their soul stealing drudgery. World’s smallest violin plays again for the bosses. 🎻
Such a nostalgic delight to listen to Rewind, with decent Commonwealth voices speaking with decorous humour. It’s a good baseline for how much richness risks being lost with Americanization. It’s not merely about phonemes and lexicon, but the habits of conversation, the reserves of civility. In an era where everyone thumps our chests without editorial contemplation, it is a good which is nearly lost to our shame. Not to say phonetics and lexicon are for naught. One infers that CBC has guidelines banning the famous “eh”, amongst many other local shibboleths in favour of a nearly General American greyness. Thus doth the cultural cringe function to eradicate even imperial intimacies. It is well to be aware of such subtle iniquities as we enter the UN Decade of Indigenous Languages.
Excellent Canadian post-election roundup, especially focussing on climate crisis policy proposals. A good overview of where the dominion stands. My feeling? A disgusted sadness that the Greens fell on their sword in the stupidest way as the other parties mumbled over what they might do someday soon, they totally swear. Given such lack of good faith, until we make Greta Thunberg planetary climate tsar, we are probably screwed.
An excellent report today on how genomics research feeds into big data genetics surveillance and colonialism. Pure exploitation mining and selling private (and sacrosanct!) biological data.
1. Nothing gives me anxious quease and mournful relief in equal mixture quite like USA selling nuclear sleeper subs to Australia.
2. Every time you say “China” when you mean the so-called “‘PRC’”, a hanfu fashionista dies.
3. If you think the Rio Grande refugee situation is bad, just wait 10 years when humans die en masse within 20° of the equator.
4. PRC can’t do bally all because it is globalized. Unless the mainland economy crashes, but that’s not… wait.
5. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Is it *really* the dark side to say: find the antivax morons, hog tie them, and then vaccinate them? How about herd them all into Alberta and rename it Antivaxistan? Plenty of food and all the oil they want to drink.
Listening to the Democrats finally struggle via penny pinching to achieve the social safety and medical programmes the Commonwealth had since 1949. I can be hard on Canada, especially the prairie moral cesspits. But good gravy is the USA an overgrown banana republic. Better an expensive vanity election than the whole government shutting down and large sections like Dixieland almost literally returning to slave state feudalism. It’s time for the planet to realize that the USA is plum wacko, is not going to get better; time to start forming other options to provide for an “international community”.
It will serve the urban bourgeoisie right if Evergrande defaults. Suddenly Canadian cities will discover there is NO housing shortage, as myriads of empty shell condominiums cribbed by Shanghai parvenues now come up for sale. Scores of cities across the world may face the same. If it hits the SF Bay metroplex, even better. The evicted proles will chuckle with delight as Google gentrifiers go deep underwater with their leaning tower follies. I must confess I will find it hard to weep.
中秋節快樂！⋯有點多餘的月餅沒有啊？🥮🙏🏼🎑
I used to think the USA Greens were an abberation for their feckless inanity. But certainly the CA Greens are giving them a run for their carbon credits on that score.
CBC just called it for Grits, probably a minority government. The coverage is typical horse racing, save one point: a PPC supporter candidly expounding on his grinding bitterness. The panel found him impertinent, but it’s clear from the numbers that the PPC are a large subaltern. Having heard these people’s envy of Trumpsters for years, I’m not surprised on the whole by their high jinks. It’s ridiculous to say that Covid is the cause of the ugliness. Ottawa ignores these people at the dominion’s peril.
Several species of juniper have long been used as an abortifacient, by several American indigenous nations and Persians. Brew a tea with the berries and green stems. They are also diuretics, natch, so watch the kidneys. Sources: Burrows’ Toxic Plants of North America; Falcon Medicinal Plants of North America.
Juniper berry is also lovely in dishes with mushrooms, I daresay.
I really don’t understand what Trudeau is on about, often. He right mucked himself by calling the election. Trudeau makes an art of survival by mediocrity. This sort of feckless hubris is endemic to dynasties. Sadly, I doubt Canada will take a cue from recent events to go with Jagmeet. At least one way or another the Albertans will be happy, cough hack.
…is that wacky sitcom where an old hippie known as Uncle Gopher suddenly has to adopt his delightfully irrepressible, 8 year old, orphaned niece Gemini. Then they go off to Rainbow Gathering. High jinks and laugh tracks ensue.
…is the cat’s pyjamies, chaps. Get it Jamaican as possible and “diet” so it doesn’t overwhelm the tingle with cloy.
…yet burn. Have we drunk enough oil yet?
=>
Excellent interview on CSPAN with the author of The Afghan Papers. A compleat look at the total 20 year quagmire and the feckless USA political class who knowingly, criminally mismanaged it.
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2021.txt
It is ROOPHLOCH, which event I seem to always miss. But I shall endeavour to participate anon, as I’m most decidedly off grid. Thanks to a pal for the head’s up.
The internet was a mistake.
2020 Massey lecture by Ron Diebert suggesting social media and infotech surveillance regimes need “restraint” under liberal democracy as their best response. Abolition or rejection is judged futile. Whenever someone suggests “resistance is futile”, I know someone is getting paid.
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php/Massacre
Map of Australian colonial massacres.
Today in buried ledes… Business news report on 21 trillion dollars AWOL from USA constitutionally mandated budget reportage between 1996-2015. Someone is getting paid vast amounts via the DOD. And someone is paying them. But the empire decided to forget who and whom. Oopsy!
http://erikasollid.blogspot.com/2009/02/
‘"I'm a nobody," he slurred during a moment of silence. A nobody. What a sad state of the soul to actually believe you are nobody. I should have said more, besides that he is somebody, he has children, he is Floyd, he is somebody. I hope he remembers that.’
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=VSF8XWA7EHA
Some fresh hot Rage Against the Machine, enhanced by young drumming master Yoyoka. It’s great to see her power and moxie only increase with her age.
App (noun) - a program which insults the user’s intelligence.
https://github.com/yourduskquibbles/webannoyances
Web Annoyances Ultralist - blocks the webby pop up garbage which helps make the web such a UX cesspool.
https://lucindajmiller.com/my-difficult-journey-towards-christianity/
A Christian testimony of struggle and perseverance. Nothing easy, only worthy.
https://lucindajmiller.com/go-pick-a-rock/
Go Pick a Rock. Blog post by Mennonite lady, on worry and spotting hard stones.
http://cannabis-med.org/data/pdf/2002-01-3.pdf
Cannabinoid receptors evolved at least 600mya during the Cambrian explosion as a mutation of the Vanilloid receptors. This is less interesting about cannabis per se, and more about how pain and emotions work similarly in virtually all animals.
https://www.ediblemuseum.com/product/chocolate-human-brains/
Just what it says. A delightful artisinal offering amongst many more of equal calibre sure to appeal to any in the natural sciences.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=JdX09TmhR2A
A compendium CBS tv news reports on the civil rights upheavals in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. The obnoxious watermark is worth enduring for the 1.5 hours of footage and contemporary commentary. The emphasis in media of white anxieties for possible black militancy over the manifest reality of massive white supremacist terrorism is really quite striking. King was canny that year in leveraging such obsessive white fears to bring white elites to a more serious stance of negotiation.
https://historicalreview.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/2.pdf
The Forgotten Strand: Socialism in the Southern Conservative Tradition 1850-1950
A brief survey of how Southern traditionalism/agrarianism had an ambivalent relationship with Socialism, and later formed a main root of the new USA “conservatism” umbrella in the late 20th century. This paper well projects the tensions inherent in the Jeffersonian Democrat conservative tradition viz a viz capital and industry, even from the perspective of agrarian slavery elites.
http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=B36FE166DB0E1A70178807EF974B53D3
Teach Yourself Nama - a very brief primer in the sounds and casual vocabulary of that hardy click language of venerable antiquity which is now called Khoekhoe, in former times with considerable imprecision called Hottentot, Khoikhoi, central Khoisan, Nama... Libgen has Khoekhoe resources listed under all these names, of varying usefulness.
https://tabalde.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADLAM-ALPHABET-LEARNING-GUIDE.pdf
A new QuickStart guide in English for learning the popular new Adlam alphabet used to write Fulani language. A pretty script, elegant and distinctive.
Beall’s List, Updated - An ongoing project to name and shame predatory publishers, the “Nigerian prince” scammers of the academic world.
Saguaros are being pummeled by climate change. No monsoons? No life. Utter madness.
https://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bugbitten/2016/04/15/toxoplasma-common-parasite-makes-angry/
Toxoplasma gondii infection increases aggression, recklessness, and depression in humans. 11% of USAmericans carry this bug. In poor countries the CDC says this can rise to between 50-80% of the population. How is this not a global health priority?
https://yewtu.be/channel/UCpXBGqwsBkpvcYjsJBQ7LEQ
Critical Rôle is excellent fantasy theatre for the quarantine era.
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=ch5XlY4nKJI
Theodore Roosevelt, of whom Bernie Sanders is possibly the reincarnation, discusses a living wage and bringing industry to heel for labour.
Caroline - A needy mother’s quick, desperate mistake blooms into trauma.
Broken Bunny - A short film about mortality and ethical choices
https://www.debbiegrattan.com/blog/the-most-annoying-speech-patterns-you-hear-all-the-time-now/#
A pet-peeve roundup of millennialisms, but doesn’t go into vocal fry. As far as I can determine, these speech patterns are linked to social status, marking young urban professional class / bourgeois artiste speakers. The supposition that uptalk hesitantly begs listener approval is probably indicative, a form of sociolectic fencing tied to professional class manners which hasn’t (yet) diffused to the North American working classes.
https://invidious.048596.xyz/watch?v=2GbxFIVQv8c
The Silent Child
Short film about a sweet lil girl, a kind teacher, and neglectful purile parents who have no business caring for children.
https://www.thing.net/~rdom/zapata.html
Zapatistas: the Recombinant Movie
Tangentially in counterpoise, a nearly forgotten bit of prophetic smolweb from our friends at the Thing BBS, 1996.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/16/mexico-chinese-massacre-centenary-torreon
Indeed history doth fractally rhyme. The hundredth anniversary commemoration of the Anti-Chinese Massacre of Torreón is this year, an Einsatzgrüppen style village bloodbath illustrating the social power of mere permission.
https://www.twv.com.tw/~ec/Snow/misc/ShowMerchantProduct.phtml?mid=2106&pid=10900071
好好小說071-孔夫子的拉子學生：她來自貓城
誰會買給我一本啊？😁
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44000539-i-hope-we-choose-love
I Hope We Choose Love - Kaicheng Thom
🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ Book. Some trenchant critiques of North American queer culture, from a millennial trans woman who has worked deep in those trenches. I’m not sure how conscious she is of it, but much of her argument for a queer reformation leans on Christian queer theology, often in poignant ways.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bSsfmptO3a8
Chappie with a fashionable pompadour teaches us how to replace an iPad button, with useful tips to work with Apple’s absolutely user-repair hostile design.
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/
Roundup FAQ of *2email proxies circa 1995-2002. I’m quite interested in finding out web and gopher to email gateways. As far as I can tell so far, no open gateways exist now. It would be a gimme for Gemini, natch.
https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/files/public/root/resources/howto/One_Page_Linux_Manual.pdf
The One Page Linux Manual. From 1999. Still served fresh.
https://invidious.snooyta.org/playlist?list=PLBJ-cWZxdnYcIXNew3eFYtto2wQOVCWaj
Hello Kitty has a nice video series to introduce us to the UN’s sustainable development goals for 2030, with a focus on women’s economic and political empowerment. Wonderful how Kitty-chan visits a Syrian refugee camp. EN or JP versions of each video, multilingual subs.
https://polycraft.utdallas.edu/
Polycraft - a Minecraft mod for added realistic ores, petrochemical exploitation, and more fabrication stuff. Crafts le ham radio inside.
http://clintborzoni.com/antinous-and-hadrian/
More A&H clips - I don’t particularly wager Antinous needed much goading from schemers to sacrifice himself; it may have been his natural passion and likely outcome as a devout Eleusinian and Osirian as both he and Hadrian apparently were. But this is opera, after all.
Antinous and Hadrian - excerpts from early rehearsals - Based on one of the great romances of Roman imperial history, between a very mortal emperor and the handsome young consort who must die to become a god, a 化身 of Osiris.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/26/trident-overseas-or-halted-scotland-independence
Sketch on Trident (UK nuclear submarines) being a key sticking point for Scottish independence. The rump UK (England and its seonín dependencies) would have literally no operations site for their nukes. Oh, how the mighty doth fall.
Databases of alternative periodical publications from the USA and beyond. Open access.
https://flipermag.com/2013/10/20/peter-bjorn-john-young-folks/
PBJ - Young Folks的歌詞及中文翻譯，這首令人產生懷舊情緒。
Minimum 5 years previous experience required. 🤷🏽♀️
On Niger’s Sahel regreening, accomplished anarchicly by farmers, and why it has worked. (Psst, it’s called permaculture.)
I wanna take you to a gay bar.
I wanna take you to a gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.
Let’s start a war. Start a nuclear war. At the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar.
https://savingnature.com/flight-emissions-calculator/
Calculate how many boreal trees you need to plant for your plane trip offset. Trust me, there’s plenty of need for it regardless. Climate change means we will need to speed up human aided forestation ahead of climate impacts, especially as old species cannot cope with drier conditions in places like the NorthAm west.
...is one of the only recent adventure films of decent heart to have somehow dribbled out of the fetid cloaca of Hollywood. The story inscribes a humble framing of heroism almost illegible to the era of blockbuster torture porn. The fact that The Finest Hours bombed at the box office tells me all I need to know of the repugnant schadenfreude which fuels our morally decrepit Zeitgeist.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=Oh7sQ4hPnyk
The Last Farm - Icelandic short film, on the importance of dignity and connexion with land.
https://www.tristandc.com/newsmessageinabottle2016.php
A message in a bottle sent by a Galician fisherman washed up on a beach on remote Tristan da Cunha island many years later. The fisherman’s community became friends through the link with the people of Tristan. A poignant memorial to solitude and connexion.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=5_A8dq2fA5o
Short but deeply intimate documentary on the Sewol sinking, its ensuing scandal, and the lives of the students lost beneath the waves. All needlessly due to official incompetence and malicious dereliction. Shameful.
https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/now-we-dont-talk-anymore
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22311356/china-uyghur-birthrate-sterilization-genocide
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-55794071
https://voxcom.cmail20.com/t/d-l-qadte-jytjceij-s/
Uyghur genocide by the PRC regime, the gruesome nuts and bolts.
https://www.lastwhispers.org/#mission-section
The Last Whispers multimedia site, raising awareness on the mass extinction of human languages occurring now. 2022-2032 will be the international decade of the indigenous language. Good to get prepped for language revitalization!
https://www.seejewsinspace.com
“See! Jews. In. Space...” Discussions of how Jewish ritual culture would adapt to inhabitation on Mars. How to know which sol is Passover?
http://www.filaha.org/author_Ibn_wahshiyah.html
Nabatean Agriculture, an as yet untranslated text preserving the lifeways of rural mediaeval Mesopotamian polytheists circa the year 1000 CE.
An hopeful development in possible coastal permaculture: the potential of seagrasses to become a major new grain food, helping sequester carbon and boost sea ecologies.
https://gettingflak.blogspot.com/2009/07/disappearance-of-enormous-talent.html
https://www.facebook.com/pg/Cheryl-Barnes-Fan-Page-216387785061183/posts/
Only the calibre of Cheryl Barnes could get me to post a Faceborg link. Apparently, she lives in Finland now, as might be expected of a person of quality, living a private life. Kiitos paljon, Ms. Barnes. Heaven bless you.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=FnotzpkYiB8
Cheryl Barnes, in the 80’s, singing on tv. She seldom performed, but when she did she certainly broke hearts with her power and soul.
A rundown on Project 2049 Institute. Unsurprisingly, it’s a think tank fronting the military-industrial complex. Given how Taiwan friendly Biden has been so far, one wonders how hawkish he will indeed be in the event of a conflict. Sadly... I more and more think an invasion is a required wag-the-dog for Xi and pals. And if there is one, mainland can only play it to win.
https://project2049.net/2018/12/06/nightmare-scenario-the-pla-invasion-threat-taiwans-response/
Recent survey of the Taiwan defense situation from a DC think tank. They actually raise the spectre of emphasizing guerilla operations as PRC deterrent. The implication being, the USA is still unprepared and has little appetite for defending Taiwan. One thing is clear: Taiwan is not only the last standing sliver of real China (事實上現代的共匪支那並不是華夏囉）, but the keystone to the current American imperial order. Mutterings about possible PRC attacks on Guam... should be taken very seriously.
No. Stop using Facebook.
https://bostonreview.net/class-inequality-politics/noam-chomsky-david-barsamian-mole
Recent interview with FW Chomsky, touching on recent upheavals.
The Rainforest Flying Squad (web)
...packed with heaps of info and news and getting involved on the new logging blockades of Fairy Creek, Vancouver Island. I was shocked by the numbers on how little old growth rainforest is truly left in BC. Please support RFS.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/09/canada-logging-old-growth-trees-vancouver-island
BC’s pose is such a sham. It’s just Alberta, but with more chainsaws, kids.
Speaking of bad bosses... This report may mostly go unnoticed, but is a good barometer for the general totalitarian drift happening in the PRC. These Uighur educators have been given the death penalty for the *state approved* textbooks they produced almost 20 years ago. The winds from Beijing lately are pretty definitive: the old liberalization tack is dead, and with it, any peaceful reunification and democratization hopes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy_jaw
I’d heard of the radium girls before, natch. But not fossy jaw. This is why we don’t ever trust bosses, kids.
The Karpatska-Rus Periodical Archive (web)
Through most of the 20th century, the Lemko (Carpathian Ruthenian) immigrant organization in the USA published this newspaper. Later articles are mostly English translations of Lemko stories. Some of them are quite affecting, the pathos of Eastern Europe in turbulent times.
There is a wubixing-pinyin hybrid IME module for Linux Fcitx, and it is Top Drawer. The IME shows the wubi codes when you input pinyin, helping one learn the Wubi tables. (Not to mention being more visual.) Oh, and it has a Proper Chinese (正體中文）setting which so far seems great.
https://lookingglassfactory.com/
While some of us blinked, apparently realistic full motion holographic displays were invented? Definitely not filed under smoltech. But jaw dropping, I daresay.
https://invidiou.site/watch?v=Q9uiNspXon8
Episode 1 of the 1988 CBC teleseries version of Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books, classics of Cascadian midcentury children’s lit realism.
https://invidiou.site/watch?v=iDyFmJPLmnk
Rebecka Liljeberg, in an interview during her last film, absolutely torpedoed any insinuation she wanted to keep acting. She kept to the decision, and all the better for it.
...today goes to GRUB for making their latest install, update, and configuration process as newbie-hostile as possible.
(GMI) Guardian Mirror - Indigenous Nations Best at Protecting Rainforests
Nothing we haven’t known for, well, centuries. But it’s good to put a final seal on who is to *not* be blamed when we Onceler the last tree in the Amazon, just in time for the region to be too hot for mammal life.
https://jenniverse.com/MultiverseGame.html
I want to play this Commodore 64 Multiverse game so desperately. Just to see the demo run, even. There is only one copy, in the dev’s hands... Is there any game comparable for C64?
(web-invidious) Melanie - Lay Down, Lay Down
Thanks, Wolfman. Aaaaaooooooo...
Astounding discoveries of other late hominin species are overturning the simple “out of Africa” conquest myth. The evidence is mounting that higher order cultural exchange was two way over long periods of time between Homo sapiens and others.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/10/is-this-the-end-of-forests-as-weve-known-them
Smoky the Bear, how we have failed.
Britain dutifully continued bank reparations to pay off slave *owners* until 2015. That... says it all, really. But this essay further puts the grotty of political “possibility” around British abolition in stark perspective.
...people used to say. It seemed easier when there were more survivors around. It’s hard to forget when someone looks you in the eyes with a beam of first hand truth. Yet humans find a way. Want to see what forgetting history looks like, how it’s pulled off? Look around today.
Speaking of the chattering classes, some Harvard Law schmuck decided to yoke his orientalist fanboy fancy to the Japanese fascist gravy train. The case is worthy of note for how little the “MeToo” moment actually changed anything outside of the bourgeois social media “influencer” spheres. “Comfort woman” rape slavery denialism is an “alternative fact” on par with flat-earthism, no matter how it is weaponized by geopolitics. But trust the absent minded ivory tower sorts to keep a finger to the fascist wind and deny there’s a gale.
If the 小粉紅、五毛黨 think these comments are critical, they should see what people say on this side of the waters when the filters are off. Xi has made mainland China fragile like a senile old woman... On the other hand, I’m sick of the chattering, artsy liberal classes making voyeuristic exposes on precariat poverty. Wanna help us neo-okies? Great. Fab. Push for social and economic policies... like a 15 USD minimum wage law -pinned to inflation and productivity-. That would still be ~7 USD lower than the equivalent of what Americans had in 1967, by the way.
http://jenniverse.com/MultiverseGame.html
Jaw-dropping C64 sim game which was never released by Activision, devved by Reitz and Lepisko. This is the kind of thing I’ve longed to see on C64...
A nice refutation of the identarian left’s strategic fecklessness, or rather managerially friendly “liquid capitalism” tacks. The critique could be extended to most contemporary personality cults and status curation (branding).
http://www.dunnington.info/public/startrek/
Compleat history of the STARTREK/Super Star Trek/Spacewar game, originally coded in basic in 1972. Has a link library to numerous versions for sundry machines.
https://archive.org/details/msdos_shareware_fb_GAMES-13
STARTREK.EXE on Archive.org. It’s a rather difficult game, I recall. An interesting bit of Trek from the 80’s.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/bonobo-all-us/
Interview on the (oversimplified) relevance of Bonobos as a root of primate ethics and eroticized empathy, in contrast to the aggression and hierarchy by chimpanzees. Wither Homo sapiens?
Rise of Sinophobia in Australia, tied in part to export from USA Trumpism. Funtimes.
Now that so many people are leaving Faceborg, Faceborg is determined to force all social interactions to include us, like it or not. I say, all people who wear “smart glasses” in public should have their devices stomped under foot.
http://stream.revma.ihrhls.com/zc5655
KPRI Pala Nation Community Radio stream - Wolfman Jack Tu-Sa at 1800 PST (0400 UTC).
https://www.wolfmanjackradio.com/
The Wolfman is still on the air, even on MW/AM broadcast band, which may account for a good chunk of the good vibes yet keeping civilization afloat.
https://archive.org/details/heavens-gate
Rambling, but contextually informative lecture on Heaven’s Gate theology, with some seldom noted connexions.
https://www.heavensgate.com/misc/member.htm
“How a member of the Kingdom of Heaven might appear.” Neoteny is often intrinsic to religious UFOlogy.
The Last Days of Victor Wong (web)
Remember...
https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=WASP:_Racism_and_Satire_in_the_19th_Century
A fascinating retrospective of the bitter imagery peddled by the San Francisco Wasp tabloid of the late 19th century. Apropos of our own gilded age’s candid bigotries, the Wasp framed an early exemplar of white American identity meant to elide working and middle class interests. Both the shopkeeper and the miner could bridge their sociopolitical and ethnic gaps in common “populist” hatred of Chinese, Irish, indigenous, &c.
Social media is making boomers meaner and more stupid. Hardly a news flash, QED the past year, but nice to see a summation of the arguments that this is happening. More weight to the social toxicity of the internet.
https://www.stabroeknews.com/2021/02/07/opinion/editorial/taiwan-volte-face/
An arch summation by a local news outlet of the present contretemps in Guyana viz a viz Taiwan’s trade delegation. Astutely broken down. The implication worth stressing is that Guyana’s retraction embarrasses the USA more. Then again, perhaps that was the purpose in the announcement, to force a bit of light on mainland’s meddling in the Western Hemisphere. Regardless, recent events are likely to only inflame American hawks. Such are the sort of footsie empires play when they are no longer on good terms.
https://www.myspanishresidency.com/visas-spain/non-lucrative-visa/
Steps for obtaining a non-lucrative residency visa for Spain.
https://archive.org/details/KishoreKumarSongs
Song archive for Kishore Kumar. (Bollywood)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Baxter_bibliography
Stephen Baxter bibliography.
https://archive.org/details/ItHappenedHereTheStoryOfHitlersEngland
It Happened Here, alternate history regarding the occupation of England by Nazis in WWII. Full film.
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E5%B9%B4%E6%B3%B0%E5%9C%8B%E7%A4%BA%E5%A8%81
I really can’t understand the way Wikipedia allows 正體字、殘體字 to be mixed together in a document by default. I don’t think they understand how grating and offensive it is to read an article and stumble on flawed PRC Orwellian propaganda characters. “Traditional” characters are an international standard. All articles should mandate them by default. It will encourage true literacy in mainland.
https://indigenousaction.org/wp-content/uploads/Geopolitics-zine-new-web-read-2.pdf
Classic history of the Black Mesa mineral and water colonialism in the Navaho and Hopi reservations. Excellent and impeccable primer on modern ethnic cleansing for corporate state benefit.
https://www.ajaonline.org/article/3545
Pre-IndoEuropean substratum in Germanic languages, a newish survey according to lexicon and location. Likely much of the substratum of Neolithic Farmer nomenclature comes from Jutland and southern Scandinavia because of the long term mutual inhabitation of that area. Not surprising, but glad they did the legwork.
https://www.ancient.eu/image/4832/the-latest-dated-cuneiform-tablet-in-the-british-m/
Latest dated cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, circa 67 CE.
The Church and the Homosexual: An Historical Perspective, 1979 (web)
‘"Homosexuality," Plato wrote, "is regarded as shameful by barbarians and by those who live under despotic governments just as philosophy is regarded as shameful by them, because it is apparently not in the interest of such rulers to have great ideas engendered in their subjects, or powerful friendships or passionate love-all of which homosexuality is particularly apt to produce."’
https://nitter.net/MrBrownEyes2020/status/1354797894310588416#m
A nice summation of the GameStop action, a primer on short selling and how it can be used to screw the garchs. Marvellous. Direct action gets the goods.
http://www.robomargo.com/percom
Some pics and info on Percom, a computer peripheral manufacturer circa 1980. Shots of Comdex from the era.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/23/trump-florida-white-house-washington-plot-report
“We’ll do something, but not just yet”. Trump planned to overturn Georgia results by force. And now he’s making dark insinuations. We should prepare for more fascist coup attempts...
A lucid history outlining the rise of Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, the new Sturmabeiltung, and their place as an organized paramilitary gang under Trumpism. The author well underscores the fluid but fundamental unity now in place through this metastasis of “western” nationalism across the Right in the USA, from GOP to Nazis.
QAnon is indeed a modern steroidal version of John Birch Society and such, but the ways that social media access allow for this sort of fast paced, direct personality cults should remind us of Rwanda, and take the applicable warning...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/20/joe-biden-action-bernie-sanders
Bernie isn’t playing around. It will be interesting to see how much sway he and the “Squad” actually can muster now. Hopefully they at least understand that the days of “reaching across the aisle” are not coming back.
It’s not status quo ante, but... Hopefully it will do. Biden is making good on his first day. Harris looks spry and ready to swing her vote. And Sanders has landed on the budget committee like a socdem Gibraltar, ready to rock the kasbah. I’m not relaxed yet, but... Ye gods, the outgoing administration has been hellacious on the nerves.
Well... Looks like electric just won. Except the USA of course. People here will guzzle gasoline as a national principle.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/279909/a-better-input-method-for-chinese-in-emacs
Trying to learn emacs, and the final spur is probably that I’m coming up against the deficits of nano, especially for CJK. This past year I’ve gotten much more comfortable with the command line, even doing some minor bash magick of my own composition. Fluency. I figure emacs is the best canvas should I actually be able to cook up vertical text options.
Taking a news fast. I get just too plum unnerved, and I’m sorry for it - if anyone else reads this or not. And I’ve been pondering just how smol a weiphlog is at all, as it plays into the trite, terse, bumper sticker rhetoric of our socially mediated era. I’ve just reinvented the Birdsite, albeit with a less obtrusive and more formal schema. But better for the heart to reaccomodate oneself to longer form public writing. And I wonder what the point is in more spilled irate pixels over politics in a world suffering for the surfeit. Let the kids have the revolution and its agitation; what shall be will be. Otherwise, a few link shares aside, mostly as a temp buffer for myself, we could use more deeply churned mirth.
Coup Insurrectionists Beat Capitol Police Officer and nearly killed him (web)
Details from one surviving officer on how the filthy, degenerate, fascist horde beat him with his own baton and tried to shoot him on the ground with his own gun. So much for supporting the police...
Ack-thpppt.
I have questions regarding the law enforcement chain of events on 1/6. Several pipe bombs were found and removed. Surveillance detected and removed an arsenal from the chap with the van. All of this fine granularity of enforcement was playing out before the Capitol was breached. Ergo, the state apparatus was cognizant of what was likely to ensue. And yet the Capitol remained unsecured. After the breach, for several hours, both police and national guard were held back from intervention. This timeline seems pretty secure, and all of it argues for complicity in the command structure of LEA and military, possibly on cue from Trump. How is this not being publicly discussed and analyzed? The entire revolution was televised. I find it improbable that there isn���t much more going on than to which we rabble are privy.
Stop saying the insurrectionists on 1/6 were “rioters” or a “mob”. The evidence is in. This was a putsch, an attempted coup d’état organized ahead of time and abetted by state and plutocratic levels. A riot is an organic response in the street to immediate conditions. The 1/6 USA putsch was premeditated sedition by fascist paramilitaries, security state actors, political class conspirators, and the imperial president. I find it amazing, if not shocking, that these people aren’t being rounded up on treason charges immediately, with an explicit eye to capital punishment. Had they been aught else but white fascists, there is zero doubt such affirmative suppression would be the case.
Report on Fascist Funding (web)
A tidy rundown on the Club for Growth, a plutocratic funding group which is orchestrating fascist efforts in USA politics, and their billionaire funders Jeffery Yass and Richard Uihlein. Both men derive their financial power from various unsavoury and immoral enterprises, and have been pushing increasingly fascist political endeavours. A canny list of people needing excision from the body politick for a healthy society to be advanced surely includes these, not to mention the Mercers, Kochs, and all other billionaire parasites.
Indications of Active Complicity in Putsch by Trumpist Congressmen (web)
There are increasing indications Trumpists in Congress helped organize the coup, with full knowledge of the violence to be done: Reconnaissance mission tours of the Capitol were given to fascist operatives on 1/5. We already know they had direct knowledge of the parliamentarians’ office. At least one congresswoman had all the panic buttons in her office sabotaged.
Trump is a Symptom of Constitutional Collapse (web)
It’s funny to see Americans finally admitting to themselves that presidents are basically emperors. It’s only been 150 years since they have been so, and 70 years since they totally usurped war powers and unilateral ability to destroy the entire planet on a whim. Caligula in his fever dreams could not imagine the violence an American president in a narcissistic funk could unleash on us all. The USA system is fundamentally WRONG, its vaunted checks and balances on the executive a farce to anyone who has lived with a basic split between state and government, 治與政。 (Of course, even that elemental recourse isn’t enough for sanity.) Perhaps nothing short of band level H&G is sane for humans... But not having a system where you crown mad nuclear autocrats is a good start.
I don’t envy the political balancing act the Congress must venture. Rebuke the Trumpists too little, and it will embolden them. Too far, and it will inflame them. Unfortunately for everyone, the required response is of a higher order art abandoned by the USA political class: statecraft. A carrot and stick might be effected, whereby pork is shoveled at compliant fascist communities... But only after malfeasants in the rabble, paramilitaries, military, and LEA are purged in the strongest way possible. Under such a solution, there might be executions for treason and sedition of those who incited and abetted / neglected the 1/6 putsch. This would necessitate social democratic policies as carrot, natch, which the post-DLC Dems are not disposed to offer.
Roundup of 1/6 Fascist Actions outside DC (web)
Trumpists are explicitly “prepared for war”. It seems likely that they will only become more brazen as the fallout from 1/6 settles. We are likely to see active sedition in the ranks of the military and LEA, I think, and would not be surprised if we lose a few state capitals and inland cities to terrorist actions coordinated with the same.
I simply no longer believe humans have any likely opportunity to learn to wisely use the vast powers we have accrued. We are no longer mammals, but rather atomic asuras, vast reptilian 怪獸. Our lust for domination is too deep, our myopic folly too giddy to evolve into compassionate gardeners. Perhaps robots might do better, but... We are birthing them after our own hideous, unruly image. We will be chastened regardless. It’s all too much.
New Paper on Ocean Heating (web)
“The latest research, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, showed the oceans absorbed 20 zettajoules more heat than in 2019. This is equivalent to every person on Earth running 80 hairdryers all day, every day, or the detonation of about four atomic bombs a second.” The Earth simply can’t keep this up. The paper also implies that the oceans are beginning to go Canfield, stratified into stagnant acid pools. That means our ass. Forever.
Top Scientists’ Statement on Ecological and Climate Collapse (web)
No doubt it will be ignored per the usual, but this should deliver a stark perspective on how shredded our planetary biosphere already is. The scientists offer concrete, manageable options for mitigating the crisis. While none of these are beyond human achievement, they are explicitly beyond the capabilities of capitalism and myopic nationalisms. The future looks bleak indeed.
Statement from the Joint Chiefs (Pentagon) on 1/6 (web)
The USA military joint chiefs of staff put out a memo underscoring that sedition and insurrection are against the law, and wouldn’t be allowed by servicemembers. That any such clarification is needed should scare us. A significant percentage of army officer corps are Christian Dominionists, for example, having been cultivated for eventual mutiny for decades.
Congress Liaising with LEA for 20 Jan. (Web)
Most notable in this report, I think, is:
This is a very dangerous moment.
Confirmed - Surveillance Agencies had Foreknowledge and Lied about it (web)
The FBI had advance reports of violence on 1/6, yet did nothing about it. The agency DC chief later lied that they didn’t have intel on fascist threats. They did, however, blow it off because white fash get a pass, even when they plan and commit blatant terrorist insurrection on the imperial parliament. PS, I’ve yet to hear any charges filed on participants beyond misdemeanours like trespass. Bloody sick joke, all of it.
Eventually the bad behaviour will be too much to ignore. The USA will become more and more inchoate, infantile, and wanton until other actors will have to forcibly isolate the regime ...if only from sheer bureaucratic insolubility. All empires pimp benevolence even as they rule by truncheon; USA has done it better than most. Regardless, such mendacious contradictions doth chasten empires in time, in largely foreseeable ways. Does anyone really think these millions of pampered, manbaby savages will go away or be reconciled to a peaceable order, no matter the accommodating policy? The impending breaches must be contained, if possible. On the basis of species survival alone, it is nigh unavoidable for the world to pursue the question of what can best replace the American empire.
Trumpists and other Fascist Groups are Planning for Violence (web)
A snapshot of current deliberations on digital media show fascists are widely planning wildcat terrorism around the USA inauguration. The 1/6 Putsch is only radicalising Trumpists further. Hardly surprising, but interesting.
Anywhere but Washington Documentary Series will Continue (web)
Impeachment has begun, but looks to be punted in the Senate until later in the year (web)
Fascist militias plan to March on DC on Inauguration Day, and are making noise about invading state capitols and other facilities. Hopefully this time they will be taken seriously.
Tool for Food Cartels and Genetic Colonialism Begins to have Second Thoughts (web)
Hahaha... 😂
Christian Right Sermon Roundup (web)
I love how the Washington Post is determined to call the 1/6 Putsch a “riot”. Fascists storm Congress, it’s a riot. When these good Christians start rounding up the rest of us for slavery and lynching, I’m sure they will call it “a spot of misbehaviour”. As one pastor here invites “the Army of the Lord” to soon do, implicitly...
Looks like the Dems are tempted to make a show, then shelve impeachment until after the inauguration... or never? So much for congressional spine. Meanwhile, every report I’ve seen says the FBI is making arrests for public disorder and trespass, not sedition and treason. Slaps on the wrist. When you’re a white dude and the president is your fascist Duce, law and order are apparently very forgiving...
Guardian - More Details on Mil and LEA Complicity on 1/6 (web)
Both Capitol police white shirts and Pentagon brass preferred the “optics” of a fascist insurrection run amok in the halls of Congress over a line of riot police facing down such fascists. They were well informed and cognizant of surveillance reports indicating this was a lynch mob. Even after the siege broke, they sat and let the insurrection play out. Somehow the brass have not been sacked and put in prison. I’m hard on the identarian left, but it’s ludicrous to believe anyone could get away with this but fascist white men.
Military Involvement with Coup Attempt (web)
It’s increasingly implicated that elements of the USA military are complicit in the putsch. They sat on their thumbs and waited for Trump’s Sturmabeiltung to do its dirty work.
The Serious Military Elements in the 1/6 Putsch (web)
The media loves to front page the stray loonies. But it’s these militia actors who are the most scary. Every rebellion has a carnival atmosphere. Only Americans, notorious for historical illiteracy, would mistake the carnival for fecklessness. We came a hair’s breadth from the public lynching of high government officials on 1/6.
Slate - Footsteps from Charlottesville to the Capitol on 1/6 (web)
“The fact that violent white men are allowed to run amok in America with impunity is possibly the least surprising political principle of our time. But by all means, let us continue to act shocked by it, and let us perpetually fail to prepare for their violence, even as they broadcast it to anyone listening for weeks in advance.” The complicity of LEA with rightist / fascist militia violence seems likely to only become more active and intimate in years ahead.
Q: What do you call Ashli Babbitt? A: A good start.
There were ~74200000 votes for Trump. Of these, 45% or about 33000000, support the terroristic insurrection action at the Capitol. I think we can take this as a baseline for hard fascist support. These are people who will never reconcile. They are, it must be said, well armed as a bloc. It is a large number. A rising in the USA, a lynch mob coordinated by Christian Dominionist churches and fascist militias, could move through their less organized and less armed neighbours like a hot knife does butter.
Robert Reich on the Trump Insurrection (web)
As usual, Reich touches the only nervy response possible for the USA body politic. All those complicit in Trump’s outrages should be rounded up, tried for sedition and treason, and given the harshest possible sentences. This must especially include Trump. Sadly for the USA and the globe, political malfeasants have had a green light for 50 years, since Watergate, knowing their milquetoast colleagues will want to “move on” in the name of “unity”. Thus doth empires rot and die.
Synopsis of events on 1/6. (Web)
Snapshot of the Bundy insurrecrionists and their III%er supporters as prelude to 1/6. (Web)
The militias are key to fascist infiltration of the military and police. The Trumpist rabble has a Sturmabeiltung “low class” style, to quote Trump. But it’s the III% and Oath Keepers who may be liaising with elements inside LEA such as the Capitol Police.
Computers Stolen by Fascist Mob at USA Capitol (web)
Weeeeeeeeeeeee......
Salon - Police Complicity in Capital Coup (web)
It’s looking more and more like the coup attempt at the USA capitol was organized or informed by active serving police and military. Frankly? I think this was just a trial balloon. We should expect fascist actions to increase in brazenness, not decrease.
USA Fascists Planning Further Actions (web)
I hate to say “I told you so”, but...
Tee hee hee... Let’s make the key combo to quit something no one uses like esc-0.
When one’s mechanic calls to say they fixed the problem which might have been an insane engine rebuild for a simple fan clutch? That, good chaps, is some sweet relief.
I’m not ready for New Years to come... Not a bit. :(
RasPad 3 just jumped to the front of my wish list.
Epaper is smoltech.
Good gravy, but sometimes I miss D-sub. I used to gripe and whinge about those anaconda maws, tightening the screws down. But USB is some weak water. Fiddling with USB-C and it’s clear none of the lessons were learnt. Wiggle and waggle, how long until the connector breaks or the ground is too loose? Roll the dice and see. But I’ll bet sooner than later!
The new Gemini feed subscription makes weiphlog/pikkuglog/whatever hard to “see” by feeds if they don’t Atom. Is this a good or bad thing? I dunno. Let’s try good. Most of what I post here are footnotes for the record. I recognize that short form texts as a medium of smolnet discourse should be resisted, as well as too much automation of delivery (toxic social tech). Like a decent pomegranate, smol/text/slow takes a bit of peeling effort and that is emphatically good.
Sandra on Beeblebroxians (gmi)
Sandra Idiomdrottning reminds us that we have met the Beeblebroxians and they are us. I confess I’m not entirely sure what or who a Beeblebroxian is. Neither they nor the notoriously hip often come around my neck of the woods. But I surely agree that we are all misfit toys on this island. More to the point, the underlining about accessibility being a design good is well taken. I do think the key to all this is simplicity. Make it rigorous, simple, and welland they will come... and that is alright.
Another good reply regarding Beeblebroxians and Gemini. I had more faith that people hereabouts were trying to not reinvent the leviathan evil of the web. But if the listserv is arguing for tables (of all anathemas), I’m probably overly optimistic... Thank Heaven the Gopher people keep the home fires lit!
Little Annie Rooney (web archive)
Full online video of Mary Pickford’s silent film portrayal of a street girl, set in the Bowery of yore.
Transcript of the Filmed Murder of Candace Newmaker (web)
No.
These good folk have a lovely gemcap about design and permaculture. Take a peep at their gemcam of the garden. I have a hankering to read more garden phlogs and such.
In lieu of that, I’m trying to shove more and more functions into my iPad Alpine Linux venv. It’s coming along. Got some issues with Python 2 taking over. I am trying to get zdic to run so I can 快快搜索任何成語 but it’s jolly finicky. Looks like time to bug the dev.
I don’t know how I’d learn *nix without bropages. What a gift to the world. I just learnt how to fiddle with /dev/random using cat and shuf for some random fun. Bro thanks!
Someone recently made an offline terminal doohickey for all of Zdic, an important online ZH reference work. ٩(˃̶͈̀௰˂̶͈́)و Since mainland ratcheted the Firewall down, zdic.net is often unavailable. If I can convert the menus to Correct Chinese, it will be an optimum CLI tool!
On the whole, when Americans say, “I love you”, they really are saying, “I’m anxious about our relationship”.
Santa on his reindeer sleigh (web-invidious)
Santa lives in a village near Rovaniemi. His live cams and video messages are lovely.
...is some steaming pile of fetid pig plop eh.
CDH board member Lachiondo responds to protests outside her home (web-invidious)
Armed demonstrators began terrorizing the children of an Idaho board member as she worked to establish a mask mandate. These “protestors” are members of arch-fascist and convicted insurrectionist Ammon Bundy’s self admitted lynch mob. After receiving censure for their threats, the militia returned two more times to besiege Commissioner Lachiondo’s home... A good case study in the current threat levels of political violence in the USA.
Washington Post - High Potential for Armed Conflict in the USA (web)
We may see a Trumpist armed coup d’état within the next month.
USA - Washington Post - GOP Legislators Call for Coup d’état (web)
Republican lawmakers are beginning to float calls for Trump to illegally suspend the USA constitution, suspend civil rights, to hunt down his political enemies, and to maintain power despite the election. This is the world we are facing now.
Crystal Chandalier (invidious)
Kiss an Angel Good Morning (invidious)
Charlie Pride passed away... :(
Strike that. The CRIMINAL lack of USA public health regimes for Covid killed Charley Pride. Shame, shame!
If they ever redo the Matrix (because all Hollywood does now is redo things), I’d fancy seeing Bae Duna as Neo. And more Cornel West. And Jamie Clayton as Trinity... :,
Rolling Stone - The End of America (web)
“Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab.”
Hahahaha... 😢
A cute kouros votive offering given to Athena by a comely chap in archaic Athens.
Gear for War Factory Women, 1943 (jpg)
“Bad tools mean bad work and bad accidents.”
Full hair canvas caps, trim coveralls, and... plastic bras shields. Where is sensible PPE kit like this these days for blue & green collar ladies? Today we can’t even get carhartts with a hammer loop. So much for progress.
Hushabye baby on the tree top. When you grow old, your wages will stop. When you have spent the little you made, First to the workhouse and then to the grave.
Murder in Black Letter by Anderson, Poul
Current reading. Midcentury stuff by a sci-fi paragon.
Political language in the USA is hopelessly Orwellian, even after a decade of international opening and leftist resurgence. American political nomenclature is at best really just a slang, a thieves’ cant or propagandistic Nadsat. And it is relentlessly dichotomous in a way no one else can understand. In Americay, left is liberal and red is blue and libertarian is conservative and up is down and chickens have teeth and business elites invented all this to socially engineer the populace into a backward, parochial mess. It’s utter Babylon, confusion of tongues. Dash it all.
My friend’s corpo tv news says that the GOP and DEM are not going to send citizens a measly second round of stimulus cheques. This in a country with virtually no social safety, some of the biggest wealth inequality on the planet, with mass evictions about to happen in a month, and a politically enhanced plague ravaging the populace. If you wonder how the rot in the USA stinks? It stinks like this.
Gutenberg Encyclopedia - David Willson (web)
On David Willson, minister of the Children of Peace, a Canadian political reformer and Christian social democrat.
🦹🏼♂️ Yo. Welcome to Baketech Community Help chat room. Can I take your order. Full stop.
🙋🏽♀️ Howdy! I’ve looked everywhere but can’t find an apple cobbler. Please may I have 2?
🦹🏼♂️ We have apple cobblers but why would you want to install one in you, bro. Chhh.
💁🏽♀️ Because... I... Like... Them? And I’m a sis, not a bro, so... :/
🦹🏼♂️ Whatever, bro. Look, I’m just telling you for your own good. Don’t get an apple cobbler, get this raspberry tart (thhhpt) if you wanna be 1337.
🙅🏽♀️ I don’t wanna be 1337, I don’t want a raspberry tart, please, I would like an apple cobbler.
🦹🏼♂️ Sorry, we don’t serve lamers and noobs here, bro.
🤷🏽♀️ I guess I’ll take my lameness elsewhere for a £[£\3[¥ apple cobbler! Good wavy gravy!
This is the reason I adore Demoscene. If you’ve not seen this newish Amiga demo, do. Great surreal story, lovely music, inspiring visuals, canny code... This is to what high art our retro/smol/pubnix renaissance can aspire. Thanks to Sloum on the Rawtext linkulator.
If I ever did programme a CLI tool worth using, you’d best believe it will come with a full ncurses menu so people don’t have to bang their heads against a giant spreadsheet of jargon and bizarre key combination commands just to do a simple thing. And if it didn’t have many commands or I can’t figure out ncurses? An easy-peasy cheat sheet which pulls onscreen as soon as some one hits the letter “h”. Seriously...
This decade sucks rotten eggs. Empire is a wormy cesspit. I’m opting out. Hairshirt FOSS/pirate, solarhippie, smolnet or nothing. I’m done.
M$ Office 365 metastasizes into full panopticon data regime
This is disgusting. Bloody Orwellian. Surveillance regimes, from private tyrannies to the security state, have gone utterly beyond all reason. I want out of this totalitarian wasteland.
This is a most excellent estimation of the relative weight in actual numbers of Gemini versus WWW. The long and short is that by any rational standard, Gemini is far more sustainable, simple, and byte for byte effective. The overhead for certs is minuscule, a drop in the bit bin compared to web.
I just learnt two important things about beloved San Francisco legend Victor Wong:
Perhaps only a few older Chinese-Californians truly grok the ontological significance of these details.
I adore the iSH programme for iPad! I put Python, g++, AV98, VF1... Alpine Linux seems pretty darn stable on iPad, and ever so smol! It makes an iPad almost a real computer, haha. I’ve looked but couldn’t find the Finger command in the APK packages... Nor online! I vaguely recall someone around here made a suped up Finger client. Please, how can I compile a Finger?
32000 Year old Flowers from Permafrost Fruits (web)
These lovely flowers were germinated from fruits over 31ky old! This paper tells the story and encourages further exploration and experimentation.
Wow. Thanks to a friend for pointing it out, I’m discovering the beta testing goodies for iPad. Apparently (finally!) one can run Linux shell in a venv on iOS! Hehe, let’s give this a go!
Putting APK on Alpine iSH iPadOS iOS app
I can’t believe Sandy Claus gave us an iPad linux env for Xmas. Of course the googoo nanny AppStore won’t let the package manager for Alpine be included by default, so the Reddit kids have the scoop on how to put APK on to make it... actually useful.
If anyone knows much about cutting solar panel controller and vehicle engine noise from RF lines, please ping me? I will be installing a mobile system soon and am keen to see the grounds are all happy and quiet on HF especially. Ferrite beads, natch. But I’ve had weird engine noise before, despite running right off the vehicle battery and shielding as much as I can. Also I plan to put a deep cycle AGM along side the starter battery, which makes me nervous, so will be reading for pointers. Ta!
Yay! Michael Lazar is saving pygopherd from the Python 2 ship. This updated pygopherd for Python 3 is welcome news to many Debian kids who have deployed it as a trim lil server in many contexts through the years. Pygopherd has been an easy workhorse server especially for old machines; I’m touched to see it saved for another life. Capital!
Thanks to Alex for lucidly sorting out the recent tempest in the Gemini listserv teapot. My eyes glazed over a bit somewhere around “URI Resources are not URL’s”. 🥱 But I confess the brouhaha is educational on how servers and clients talk to each other, and which should decide what. For the rest of us, suffice to say that the Gemini sky is not yet falling. Your Gemini text are just dandy.
I know, I know, but... Please someone make an iPadOS Gemini/gopher reader!
Lagrange and Gemini Subscriptions
I shall go read the new Gemini subscription spec soon, but SkyJake seems to like it! I am trying out some new Gemini clients. Looks like Lagrange is bumped up the list. I’m agnostic on the atom controversy save to say that it is indeed smol to recycle what you got in your back yard. (And I still say a mutant offspring of Lynx with AV98/VF1 would be my forever client.). But if Solderpunk has something smoller, I’m game.
This is the first GUI client I’ve tried so far. It is simple, no frills, and easy to mod the config for style. This makes it dapper for reading longer texts. I would enjoy a fancy client like this to use for Titan as well. But so far, none I have seen do better for me to read Capcom feed than the good ole AV98/VF1/Agena suite. I usually find keyboarding obnoxious. But AV98 is streamlined to read glogs.
finger://weather@typed-hole.org
Another nifty finger idea: report on the server site weather.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt
This is another amazing finger deployment, a Coke machine hooked up to a PDP-10 in the 70’s, to report on fill levels.
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/julienxx/Log/2019/finger-your-own-adventure.txt
How did I never see this before? A Choose Your Own Adventure by finger. This is the quintessence of smolnet.
Going Undercover on a Racist Dating Site (web)
Funny, but also sad. A look at the common attitudes held by men (it’s overwhelmingly frustrated straight men) on a whites-only dating site. Unsurprisingly, they are having trouble convincing women to be their obedient sex slaves to birth the master race. Gee. Funny that. But this is a novel tack in focussing on the quotidian levels of the seemingly inevitable nexus of incel and Nazi.
I maded a nice Piki and Poko fan capsule!
Wow, this is a saucy arch setup for PineTab. Thanks for uploading, Nico! Squeekboard looks cute and usable. I heaps want a PineTab, though do wish the cpu were a shade more buff.
Kevin does a lovely job of walking us through his restoration of a BBC machine. The plethora of deployments for the 6502 and its derivatives never ceases to astonish me, not to mention the hardy way these devices hold up through the decades. There is a joy to fixing a machine, having it be accessible to human scale. (Man is the measure, EM Forster here whispers to us.). This makes me want to get back to playing with my C64!
Is there any probable future in which the next five years don’t see us descending into a fascist cyber hell? I am so sick of this society, so utterly done.
Apple AR Glasses, Cyborgs, and Privacy (web)
Looks like Apple is going to staple Siri to people’s faces, with Alexa sure to follow. Count me out of this Orwellian madness. We need a vibrant counterculture of people determined to reject the total hegemony of the surveillance regimes and we need it now. Wearing cameras and open listen mics need to be as socially rude as smoking, and just as constrained by law as custom.
Singaporean Man Jailed for Smiley Face
Good olde Singie, still keeping up that colonial penal colony atmosphere...
Isolation by Diana Yukawa (web-mp3)
Music tailored for the new era.
A delectable new animation short film by the inimitable David Firth. Surreal horror.
USA Covid nearing 200k/day (web)
Shameful. Disreputable. Disgusting. The utter failure of the USA regime to tend to the Covid crisis is not merely to be laid at the feet of Herr Trump. This is a long term rot, abetted by the entire body politick. This is a failure of communal spine, of morality, of *national character*. The strong support Trump maintains through his fascist cult as thousands die is the direct result of a toxic USA culture. This country is a merely a sink of psychopathological selfishness, narcissism, and greed. “All are punishéd.” I’m *done*.
A detailed account of the 1978 Birmingham Smallpox quarantine, with an eye to our contemporary situation. A devilish illness, smallpox. People have been hubristic fools to forget it and it’s terrible harvest of millennia. From lackadaisical public health policies to antivax mass insanity, we now ought to look in horror at the neoliberal era as one of criminal dereliction of communal responsibility. With its relatively low mortality rate, Covid has been if anything a much kinder tutor than what might have been and may be...
History surely is rhyming lately... :(
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/20/jan-morris-historian-travel-writer-and-trans-pioneer-dies-aged-94 Jan Morris, historian, travel writer and trans pioneer, dies aged 94 (web)
Good old Jan Morris. I enjoyed her adventurous writing. She had a deep sense of place and an understanding of how environmental situation affects the human. Sympathies...
Talon has just upped a dandy intro on smolnet too. The dissatisfaction with Faceoogle is certainly wide and deep. Yet demimondes like smolnet are all too rare as yet. I keep pondering this, but without answer. This may be a failure of imagination on my part. Yet when I inquire about why the disaffected remain on such platforms, their responses are often just as inchoate.
Gopher, Gemini, and the Smol Internet (web)
On the more mirthful side of things (sorry ^^; ) Steve Lord has penned this lovely primer on Smolnet for web folk. I sometimes forget how odd our little demimonde is to the contemporary mainstream who live from app to corporate app. It’s lovely to see how much is developing in Gemini-gopher-finger land, though, and how fast. There’s a buzz, I daresay. I just wish I could keep up better!
Steve has a lovely gemcap and glog. Herein, he describes an eyebrow-raising proclamation from Mozilla desiring to deprecate HTTP to the point of purging it from browsers. I’ve been a bit skeptical about the doom drums banging around Mozilla’s supposed total capitulation to their Google patrons, but... The nefarious possibilities for planned obsolescence around this do bear some examination in regards the rump open web. TLS fills a needful niche; I appreciate it in Gemini. But some sort of backwards compatibility needs to be eventually built in to authentication and encryption stuff as a matter of course... No?
Looks like Pfizer may have a vaccine... Too late to save us from the mink mutated strain of Covid, which may be resistant.
I expect to read pithy comments from the neofascists about Danish people with their weird ratlike animal fur fetishes and how Europeans are scary disease spreaders any moment now...
Still waiting. No? Funny how that works.
Meanwhile, USA deaths are spiking again and states are shutting down and no one, from government to corpos to joe blow learned a blasted thing from last spring about securing the supply chains. Stores are emptying again.
I’m hoping to read this entry in a year. I doubt I’ll be laughing, but Heaven willing, I’ll try.
The Disappeared - Conway, Lynn - Computer, 2018 (web-pdf)
Lynn Conway neatly sums up her foundational VLSI development contributions in historical context, with an eye to discerning the social processes by which women and others are disappeared from STEM. With an even handed presentation, she does this well with a minimal amount of contemporary sociopolitical argot, making this dynamic analysis perhaps much more accessible...
Prism Comics 🏳️🌈 cover 2003 (pic)
Those were the days, my friends, those were the days.
I should probably make a political glog separately. It’s a feckless dump for apocalyptic worries at any rate.
Should I eat? Mmmm... I guess so.
Study on very early hunter burials (web)
About 40% of very early American big game hunters were female. Not shocking in light of recent studies on Paleolithic genetic heritage, but interesting. The takeaway is that until pretty recently, humans were egalitarian small bands. (Everything since has mostly been crap socially, so maybe we can take a clue...)
Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared. (Vid)
What’s your favourite idea? Mine is thinking creatively.
I ate the pomegranate. White pomegranates are tart. Red pomegranates are sweet. The dura mater flesh makes it a bit bitter, but is good roughage if you fancy it.
This is a fab idea. A web front end for easy peasy Gemini accounts. Minimalist itself, it will help anyone start glogging. Bravissima!
RWV made a short and sweet script to serve Gemini by Racket. Nifty! I do enjoy LISP. Such cozy code, comforting and lucid to a dilletente like me.
Steve Bannon calling for Rightist insurrection and terrorism in the USA in December. (Web)
Nothing is over. We don’t get a break. This is only beginning. 😔
Setanta Programming Language (web)
This programming language is based on Irish Gaelic. Go hiontach!
謝天謝埊⋯
Getting to Know Three Peoples (web)
Let’s learn to speak Cimbrian, Ladin, and Mòcheno.
Seachtmhain na Gaedhilge poster (web)
On which side are you? Cracking propaganda for language revitalization, this, from our Irish friends.
Gopherpedia - Crisis of the Third Century (gopher)
It’s worth reading up on the Roman Empire’s Crisis of the Third Century and the concurrent pandemic, the Plague of Cyprian. Current events...
Haha, I won Bronzie’s 80’s Halloween music compo! What a gas. I missed smolnet. Please encourage Bronzie to do a monthly compo or some such.
It’s a jolly romp to surf old tech spurs, imagine what might have been. I used Sony MD in the aughts, semi-professionally. The greatest folly of that format was how Sony was infamously miserly with the proprietary data transfer format. One could download files to the MD, but never digitally upload to compy. Transferring to CD meant doing so by audio jack. To this day it’s not been cracked, I think. Sony shot themselves in the foot with that, as there was a ten year period in which many musicians would have loved for Minidisk to be a more native digital medium.
It’s dandy that so many smolneteers are doing the 5Q. It’s a winsome party game, I deem. I liked dctrud’s new answers, and look forward to fresh queries.
Cel, the doughty dev of the Dillo Gemini doohickey, is gemcapping anew with us. Howdy there, cel! Welcome!
Dolly Parton - Hard Candy Christmas
This is not a love song.
Alex Schroeder 2016-11-14 (Gemini)
A stroll back nigh four years through a good collection of think or shock pieces on Trump. Some of them seem a bit obtuse in retrospect, as explicit racism has become a core rallying point for Trump’s more militant supporters. But on the whole, despite Covid, it’s interesting how little has changed in the USA polity’s sickened condition. Trump’s factions have, however, grown more ferocious in their credulity of their Leader, rendering the more shrugging apocalyptic rationalization of his support somewhat specious.
On the one hand, there is little new here: humans have been acute engines of global ecological change for millennia. And the researchers toot their own horn disagreeably. It is good that an omnibus data survey has been conducted to show a statistical synthesis of this. I’d certainly second the notion that wilderness/human dualism isn’t helpful. But nor is the notion that human ecology is a “shaping”, as if all lifeways provide a similar basis to justify the intensive exploitation of empire. It should be stressed that healthful human inhabitation is possible. But to place intensive agriculture and industry exploitation on effective moral par with the agency of low impact horticulture is intellectually coarse to say the least. An ethic of dynamic symbiosis challenges such framing, and is in line of heritage with many of the more ecologically healthy and sustainable cultural innovations of the Mesolithic.
Greek Jewish woman weeping upon deportation to Auschwitz, 1944 (pic)
Jefferson, Christina - The Dendroglyphs of the Chatham Islands
A poignant memoir of one researcher’s long lonesome sojourn amongst the ghosts of a remote, genocided people. Her art and diligence do well to snapshot the land’s memory.
The Archimedes Palimpsest (web archive)
Full imaging archive of the Archimedes Codex, a compilation of otherwise lost texts by Archimedes revealed using various spectroscopic techniques and synthesized using computer imaging. This is a marvellous feat of infotech archaeology providing a crucial glimpse into the 3rd century BCE philosophico-engineering world which produced the Antikythera Computer. I’m especially interested in Archimedes’ Mechanical Method herein as an alternative to calculus. If anyone can provide a primer on how to so calculate, please do.
Malcolm X - The Ballot or the Bullet (LP)
Seldom highlighted enough is Malcolm X’s internationalist thinking, both as strategy and as global communal imperative. There’s an interesting tension here, between separatism and internationalism, often figured as an evolution in his thinking after his Hajj. But perhaps this represents a clarification of his seeking to find a new context for black people in America necessitated a discovery of relationship beyond the hermetically sealed parochial strictures peculiar to the USAmerican polity.
Oh my goodness. Dr. Demento is broadcasting online. And you can order a custom audio message from him! And listen to his archive of decades of demented songs. There is a royalty fee, sigh... But I daresay it is worth it. Please spread the news, Dementites.
Vidak has delivered a lovely PinePhone review and omnibus tour of current OS offerings. There are instructions for basic flashing and hints of things to avoid, always good to note! I’m keen to get a PineTab, so am encouraged by his enjoyment of Mobian. Hopefully OS’s will continue to debug issues to get Pine to a solid state soon. Thanks, Vidak!
Inside the mind of a CBP gulag guard.
Whenever phrases like “the banality or evil” become too worn by use, read something like this.
Working my weary tukhas off lately. Yet all’s I really want to do right now is watch Critical Rôle and play Simutrans.
2010 USA Racial Population Map
Provides a fine detail tool for racial tensions in various regions.
Bishop Fulton Sheen on Fear (Invidious)
Bishop Sheen leverages a disarming charisma to chat with us about fear. An interesting high modern mix of Catholic and psychoanalytical conceptions of self, fear, anxiety... Withal some resonance for 2020.
So, “cottagecore” is a real internet... trend? 🤷🏽♀️
This is fine...
...is the abortion of community.
That is all.
Leonard Nimoy - Eye of the Tiger
This must be one of the most harrowing articles on Wikipedia, an omnibus history of a feral girl named Genie. Her history holds scathing indictments of family, patriarchy, science, and social service institutions. Even more raw are the dimensions of implicit indictments of human life and society, that failed her so completely over and over. I do hope, somewhere, Genie finally has found a modicum of peace in this life.
Excavations on the Walbrook London Mithraeum (pdf)
The construction of the new Bloomberg building in London meant the reexcavation of a large section of the ground where the London temple of Mithras once stood. This temple was then reconstructed from its awful later situation to near its original prosition. This document interests both as an exemplary popular survey of the 2013-14 excavations, but also a snapshot of archaeological preservation literally under the bastions of late capitalism. On the whole, not a bad effort.
...is the only thing I recall from Harry Potter with any fidelity, or interest for that matter. I wish there was a Moaning Myrtle adventure tv series.
Elder Porphyrios and the Hippies
A nice psychic Greek Orthodox Christian monk remembers talking with some hippies at his monastery.
Gemini is smol!
Because it is smol, it will become more smol.
Smol is good for us.
If demons make it BIG, the smolness of smolnet makes it resistant.
Maybe demons can make it BIG, but it would be hard.
Because smolnet is smol.
I’m tired of latin right now. It is fun to play with but it is silly to believe it actually makes ideas more serious. That is a bug in English and it is dumb.
I’m so poor, I can’t even afford impostor syndrome.
All I want is 140 acres on a fecund Earth with a population capped at 100 million. Isn’t that a nice compromise? I’d rather have it capped at 500k. And why not? That’s still plenty of humans to slobber and jibber in a few big cities, making noise and jostling in their claustrophobic urban warrens, as most humans seem to enjoy. But with our technology it would be an easy paradise. Ah, but the breadth of space it would allow for those who prefer cleaner, open vistas. To wander days without encountering the reek of imperial excess...
America is pretty lonely.
I’m not even Yankee bashing, just saying... It is a lonely culture to live. That makes it harder.
I used to tell people, before it became moot, that if they were Type A stubborn go-getters, natural entrepreneurs, then it’s great. If all you want at heart is to make dumplings with granny and the kids, then... Not so much. America is brutal to anyone who doesn’t have dollar signs for eyes. And hard on many (most?) of them too.
Birdsite thread on Trump and likely pathways to electoral crisis.
Do read it. It’s on point. It’s intellectually astute. It is terrifying.
I’m too old for this era.
I prefer music about nice things. Friendship. Bicycles. Reincarnation. Exultation, joys quotidian and subtle. More of that please.
Watching a sweet film by the auteur of Saving Face. A new take on Cyrano, with a bisexual love triangle. But it strikes pangs for depicting with almost cruel clarity what it is like to be young, Queer, Chinese, and washed up in rural USA. Ellie Chu’s town is any town with a Chinese family who didn’t exactly find gold mountain in Americay. Worth watching.
Alice Coltrane - Reflections on Creation and Space (Web)
A beguiling psychedelic symphony which discomfits and exults by turns. Prophetic in the way music can only be. Good juju.
If you haven’t a refrigerator, but do have an air conditioner, you could do worse than to hang perishables in bags in front of the output grate. Not to block, mind, but along side the flow of air. This will add a few days to edibility.
富山 CityFM 77.7 MHz Smooth Jazz
This is a smooth jazz station stream in Toyama, JP. The music is soothing and pleasant, modern but with little pop. It’s a lovely Music station.
Southern Californians don’t say “okay” so much as mumble “nguh” through their noses. Nasalization is pretty common from surfer lingo.
Kollok - The Phobos Saga (Web video)
HyperRPG have been good enough to recently upload the prequels to Kollok 1991. These series used both the Ten Candles and the Kids on Bikes game mechanics. Mostly these play through alternate universes to Kollok prime, including the Kolob town the Radar quickly visited early on in Kollok. The early episodes are a bit raw, but Ten Candles does get quite good at points. The Kollok TTRPG-stories work well as either video or podcast. Give them a whirl!
...are manure. There’s a toxic thesis left, right, and centre (a stupid formulation anyway). The lie of politics is that *what* we are matters more than *who* we are at heart. Those who dehumanize always cut their sails that way. It does no service, in the name of justice, to concede this point to dehumanizers. Ultimately, the only way out is to knit community. And community is a slyly fluid thing which percolates into and around all castes and creeds. Whenever we are enjoined to staple dead identities to our faces, by whatever ideological cult, we are in for stormy weather. I refuse to be drafted in such armies of the damned.
Near as I can reckon... argots are about 10% jargon needful to specialized discourse and 90% pure in-group shibboleths. An argot is more than a simple sociolect. And it’s less than a true cryptolect, as it’s meant to be flamboyantly on display rather than truly hidden. Argot is not to hide, but to show to outsiders that they don’t know. There’s a kind of sociopathic menace in an argot which humour can’t elide, and often sharpens. “Irony”, to use the modern malapropism, is one such sharpening. It riddles all sides in contemporary politics. An argot is the language of the snub and snob.
Have you heard the good news of bro pages? I adore bro pages. (And no, “bro” doesn’t oFfEnD or exclude me; it’s just clever and whimsical humour.) Bro pages point the way forward to a shortening of the trail between tech muggle and 1337. For that, I’m eternally grateful. More “bro” referential prosthetics, please!
The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User
I’m trying to tone down my UX whining. But a discussion on Mastodon precipitated this link to Dr. Morbius’ considerations on the tension between power users and naive users, that bad corporate imperatives exploit the latter to poorly build for all.
Report on the Nazi networks rising in the German mil, int, police, &c.
Funtimes.
🎅🏻「名不正則言不順, 言不順則事不成。」
💁🏽♀️ 嘻嘻笑笑，嘰嘰咕咕！
My SDF Email is deprecated.
It is hotter than Charles Dickens with a new novel. But I am installing a brand new AC unit. It will take some days as I must manufacture the stand and bracket myself from aluminum and steel. Stand done, next up the flange and bracket. But I am knocking off for the day to enjoy the fruits of my labour. Obscene shore power use, but lovely. I reckon to start a phlog detailing my restoration and solarpunkification of my little Baba Yaga hovel. But not right now. Oh, no. Not right now, haha.
Bizzy for a few days with offline stuff.
Big tech will enthusiastically sign on to EARN IT and LAED as a way of passing the moral buck. “We were just following court orders.”
Regarding drama, old Dixieland proverb: Jesus don’t like ugly.
I am a very small person in the tech scheme of things, and easily befuddled. But before this decade is out I intend to make a NAPLPS or teletext bbs and see its flag fly high above the smolnet.
And huge thank you to Alex Schroeder, who also helped me get the giki running. It boots up jake, but needs a bit of spit and polish to daemonize it, which I shall do directly when my brain is not mush anymore. But it’s working nicely so far, both for Gemini and Titan. When I have something worth seeing I shall have a grand opening, haha. Next up is gophernicus.
Well, thanks heaps to Solderpunk’s coaching, Molly is now afloat in the Geminiskies. Let us hope unsinkably! Now, on to the giki and gophernicus. Then some actual content, methinks, for a soft open to shake out the bugs. I’ve tried to lay the foundation of this server as best I can, so that I shan’t have to go back to it too much, I hope.
On a Gus Van Sant spree lately. This is a gloriously dark comedy, based on a true tale of city slicker folly. Van Sant gets right up into people’s nostrils, grinding away at their provacy. But it’s less voyeurism than a kind of pleading. The camera is too demanding to be taken as a silent witness. Gerry gnaws on a Godot spareness with an intimate humour. There are awesome dollops of Jodorosky here which deepen significance, too.
Need to fill the wash and drinking cisterns from the well, fill the swamp cooler. Before dawn because I can’t bear seeing humans before a spit and polish. Eat so I can take medicines without being unwell, which means baking stovetop cornpone whilst it is still bearably cool. Fix up my botched server ware installs. John the ripper my own moribund pgp key because I forgot the password again... 🤦🏽♀️ Then put the new solar battery. Finally, sometime directly, scrounge the last bits to build a camper top adapter mount for my jalopy because I can’t afford buy a new shell which fits anytime soon and don’t want to drill mounts for antennas again soon.
Realization: I can’t abide reading cyberpunk because, apparently, I am cyberpunk.
“Never give up! Never surrender...”
Solderpunk’s Gemini Birfday glogpost
Happy Birfday, Gemini Protocol! (Image)
Since it is the 1 year anniversary of Solderpunk knocking hims head on the bathroom floor and coming up with the flux capacitor... Wait, that’s not right. In honour of Solderpunk inventing this brave humane future of which we are now partaking, I feel obliged to eat some more chocolate cake. It’s a hard task, but I feel duty bound.
Thanks, Solderpunk! Thank you, Gemini!
Spalding Gray Points at Us (Image)
From swimming to Cambodia.
Is morality a movable feast?
Marilyn Monroe knew, maybe...
(I miss you.)
USA:
Drive safe
Canada:
Please drive safely
IFSC Pan-American Championships 2020 (Climbing)
The winner’s joy when she learnt she was going to go to the Olympics was infectious. What a sweetie.
Release... the eggcream!
This is “Dr.” Shufei reminding you that eggcream is medicine for body and soul.
Mistrust any who come at you with, “you’re either with us or against us”.
Fatalism is imperial propaganda; nothing is historically inevitable.
Look for the helpers, and the builders, makers, menders; that’s where to pitch in.
Evidently eminent Mr. Goerzen is retiring Pygopherd, one of the more popular gopher daemons. This, due to the incipient end of life for Python2. He has requested someone to take it over to port it to Python3. Pygopherd is my old standard, and evidently supports some oldschool UMN gophermap metadata what no other server does, so he would fancy another server support those at least. If any Python wizards happen to read this, please check it out.
Righto! The snooty server host just took me out of account jail. Time to get a Debian server going. A solid foundation for my wee cottage on the smolnet/textnet/slow internet.
What even are we calling this movement?
Pretty Please, Buy Me an Eggcream (Well, a month of server, haha.)
Please do drop any coins in my tin cup if you can. I’m doing this on a shoestring, but I still gnash a bit at the expense. I’ll have more options and the usual panoply of thank you rewards directly, once I’ve something to show for the bother...
I’m making my own Gemini site, hosted by VPS! It will include a giki (Gemini / gopher wiki), probably for retro tech and solar punk infos. Right now I’m still surveying the plot, then to lay the foundations. But I’ve tossed some pennies at it so I’m committed. Please keep abreast and support me! <3 I’ve never done my own site hosting before. I reckon it will do for my various experiments and such which I’d be shy about inflicting on the Zaibatsu. Eventually I’d like to host some other people’s goodies, maybe situate the thing as a Tilde/Circumlunar outpost, however that works. Anyway, stirring the ingredients as we speak.
I’m finding it a drag to contemplate gopher sometimes. The lack of much UTF-8 support is a real drag for me. Item types, wonky line formatting... I love Gopher, but it’s just such a fickle mule. So when, as now, I just don’t have the prefrontal cortex oomph, it’s much more pleasant to just phlog/glog to Gemini. I’m hopeful that some kind of Gem2Goph script will eventually be tenable so that I can punt down the Weiphlog at least.
I’m sure I have a backlog of phlog/email replies to do! Thank you all for being out there. I’m glad the “slow internet” as Fox/Tomasino put it is more forgiving with pace than the bizzy web mainstream.
I have been adding recipes now and then, as I cook something of note. I do rather hope they are entertaining to read, if not necessarily to consume.
The astute film aficionada ought to prepare for cinema as one does the opera. It behooves the audience to participate by being as educated as they can in reception of art. To that end, please saturate one’s mind with a choice selection of rock & roll until the debut of the new Bill & Ted film.
I signed your super secret guestbook with hex edit. I am happy of myself. Lovely Altair fun.
It’s a good time to tidy up a bit. Look around the noosphere and sweep away the cobwebs. Is this doohickey really important to you? No? Then sweep it up into the bit bin compost.
I’m behind in my textnet nice projects. But that will be rectified directly.
Marblympics Cravendale Cup (Video)
Since there will be no Olympics this year, why not watch the Marblympics, coming up on 18th of June? A preshow is being done now by Jelle and friends, with all the exciting marble races, intrigue, marble people’s sociology and history we can expect.
對我來說義勇軍進行曲聽起來狗屁不通了。
“Don’t confuse the problematic with the catastrophic.”
Another new Gemini client which supports terminal colours, and quite nicely. Acdw’s Bollox (haha) is clean and under active development. Great to see! So lovely!
Pasta is awful. Heavy on the stomach. Maybe it’s age. Going back to rice. Times like this call for soul food.
ssh altair@mpcclub.info -p 422
Jebug29 has put is lovely lil Altair on the internet for good children to play with. It doesn’t like me right now, but I shall talk slowly to hims later.
It’s very strange returning to look at fediverse after a fast, especially when occupying that time mostly with long form writing and Gemini/gopher. The character limits on “modern” social media are stifling. Yet somehow words feel embarrassingly disposable. The “clout” is cloying. Sound byte culture comes off as superficial. The outrageous agora clamours, hucksters with jaded postures. It’s all just too much sturm und drang, but without pith. And all that is as nothing when compared with Twitter and such. Oh, it has undeniable utility. But I think... Yes, I’m rather done with it all.
Druxx just started up a glog very worth reading, a diary given over for his son to peruse in 20 years or so. I adore this, both for its intrinsic heart, but for what it says about the textnet. People are longing for longevity, for an infotech which speaks to the future with clarity. We have an opportunity for that here. I’ll keep reading, with best wishes for the little chap!
acdw’s Thoughts about the Protocol.
Some wise avuncular counsel from acdw on the “discourse”.
‘"The fact that you're worring about this right now means you're doing okay.
You're going to do just fine as a parent."
And I think the same thing about Gemini.’
Oh my goodness! I was reading the gemiphlog of plugd who was sad because EMACS won’t do certificates for Elpher nicely.
gemini://thelambdalab.xyz/phlog/2020-05-31-Inanity-3%3A-Virtual-Gardening.txt
Wherein plugd gave the heads up for the above very cute (and colour enabled!) Gemcap called Astrobotany where you can grow a lovely ASCII garden! Now I have to reverse engineer how they did so many colours so nicely. Ta heaps, kids!
I don’t need nor want your mouldy Powershell, thanks.
s/“thanks”/“now scram”
對我來說，雙子網比地鼠網漸入佳境，在很大程度上因為做鏈接不是那麼複雜了。
行，可見雙子網上似乎廣播、輸入中文也可以。
Ashima Chocolate Brownie Clif Bars
I almost always eschew brands and all sorts of advertisement. I smugly look down on the droolers such tricks work on. Well, it seems I’m a sport nerd drooler because I find myself in fangirl conniptions to see Shiraishi Ashima on the cover of Clif Bars. What a dream boat...
Guardian Rolling Live Coverage (Web)
Rolling coverage on the fallout from the George Floyd murder. Trump is apparently ready to use the Insurrection Act to quell protests. A protester was shot dead by an attacker shooting wild from his SUV. 2020 funtimes.
I have printed up a proposal which I hope shall be the seed of a specification for GopherColour2. The basic notion is to paint colour and bold &c by interlacing text with format lines. This would allow far more colours to be articulated per line and make painting gophermaps more pleasant for the user.
GopherColour2 - A Naïvely Immodest Proposal (gopher link)
Been working heaps on GopherColour, learning what to do and, most often, what not to do for it to come off. I think I have a by hand method down now, more or less. It is awkward as one cannot see the Secret Magic Color Escape character. One can only copypaste it. Sometimes. And the line constraints of a gophermap create issues for the server when it makes a menu. But on the whole, I find it gloriously lovely. I may be the only one on Gopherspace to feel thusly. So be it! Release the colours!
Tom Foobaz (great name) at 1.21jiggawatts.net (GREAT NAME!) has an interesting post on the whats and whens of how Bluetooth low energy (BLE) works on iOS. Or rather, how it is restricted to work, generally.
A Short Summary of Bluetooth Contact Tracing
I got interested in scanning BLE beacons a while back, and rather concerned by the fine grain privacy implications. Time to crack out that programme and see who is pinging at the market.
I appreciate the heart Akiyo gives to her climbing, all the more poignant for her long experience. She would have countless golds if it weren’t for young Janja, whose perspicacity on a boulder is preternatural, if somehow a bit uninspiring. Akiyo often looks on the verge of tears, even if she usually is able at showing a good face for the audience. Akiyo pushes hard, as in 2018 when she came within a fingernail of 4 tops. Everyone cried with her.
All empires die. The Fates choose their own threads to weave poetry for our end. Memento mori.
The Alexander Mosaic (large image)
I’ve been pushing for GopherColour for years now. And now I wanna set it up. But whatever secret characters Tilde.pink used to get theirs pink is utterly invisible to both me and my tablet. I have tried every escape I can think of. Nano will copypaste it, but not my tablet. I can’t key it in. But cat can see it. VF-1 can see it. I’m about to go full bore Veruca Salt on this.
Int at 80h has made a clever way to serve Gemini on one of those lil babby esp chip devices. Gemini is suited for a tenuous adhoc meshnet, I daresay! I hope we see more such advancements soon.
A tiny tiny baby Gemini server for smol devices
Quite a few nice people wrote in; and someone pointed out errors in links or formatting. Thanks for that. If you find a link on my gopherhole or geminicap doesn’t work, please do give me a head’s up.
I am enjoying Gemini. I do hope more interactive deployments are made soon. Why not a guestbook system with cryptosigned or encrypted messages? It would be a cinch to slap GPG to the front of AV-98 or such. (She says, naively.) What I really would fancy is Gemini support in Lynx, natch. And colours. Gemini client colour escape support...
🎵...History shows again and again
How nature points out the folly of Man...🎶
I updated quite a bit of the sites. Quite grateful that Solderpunk included me on the Zaibatsu and Gemini CS. There’s a wee bit more elbow room. Now if I can only use it with alacrity.
I’m tired of fediverse. I wanna do more in depth or long form writing anyway. But even the exhaustingly pedantic (Howdy!) need a coffee table for more concise knickknacks. Hence this 微博. I’ll try to refrain from posting the trite. But I doubt I’ll wholly succeed.
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