💾 Archived View for quasivoid.net › gemlog › 2021-04-21-lamentations.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Weather was fine, but a little dreary. I needed a rest day anyways, so I chose this day to not do any riding. I always regret taking rest days, I end up feeling like empty garbage when I haven't done any cardio, but they're necessary to make gainz. I stop regretting having taken one the next time I ride. So, nothing happened. I ate lots of garbage out of the freezer, and spent some time playing with writing some authoring-related software.
I found myself a little annoyed today by the amount of platforms which are legitimately cool and interesting because of their technological basis, but because they're an inherently techy thing, the community that ends up forming around them discusses little other than wow cool tech and Linux. You see a pattern like,
It's depressing how often this happens, where what would be a lovely tool to write and communicate becomes a broken record of same old, same old preaching and creed.
I found myself researching the origin of the phrase "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" (which, by the way, come from a Japanese maxim called the "three wise monkeys") today, and ended up learning about the "blue wall of silence", which refers to a code of silence among cops to never expose other cops errors. In practice, the blue code of silence is enforced by a threat of retaliation from colleagues if it were to be broken, such as ostracism. The precedent was that if you were to have a cop testify about another cop in court, you would never hear anything negative or incriminating.
Then, later in the day I started seeing news headlines with regards to the Derek Chauvin trial, all of which were invoking speculation of the effect the verdict will have upon the blue wall of silence, eroding it. Pretty cosmic coincidence, but it led me to look deeper into the concept, and I found an essay published in 2009 which talks about the blue wall of silence in the context of masculinity with a dash of Freudian psychoanalysis by a Criminal Justice professor and former officer.
(sci-hub) Behind the Blue Wall of Silence
It discusses the systematic manifestation of the blue wall of silence in the police force, from the assault of Michael Cox by other officers and later being ostracized for speaking up about it, to the (again) ostracization of Robert Ian-Schlessinger for not fulfilling strong masculine stereotypes, and how the police academy and social expecations of the police force have this idea of masculine brotherhood deeply ingrained.
I found it particularly interesting first because it was published in 2009, which predates police corruption and brutality being such a well known and discussed issue in my memory, and second because it describes the mechanics of the blue wall of silence in the way only a cop who was complicit in it's existence could, the author having been on the force for twenty seven years before becoming a professor. It's not very long, and definitely worth the read.
One of my friends has sent me pictures of their 90's Allez today. Lugged steel frames are extremely cute and seeing it got me thinking about having a steel bike of my own again. I'm not entirely sure if I'd want to put in the work to find a good condition vintage bike, or if I would want to build up my own with a new frameset and modern components, but the latter scenario is what I've spent the most time contemplating over the last month or so.
My dream bike really is just steel frame with huge tyre clearance and 105 groupset. The Surly Cross-Check somewhat captured my heart, since it's designed to support becoming literally anything you can imagine, which is helpful because that means I would also be able to reuse most of the components on my existing bike.
On the other hand, it'd be really cool to go retro, and I guess the work required to restore an old bike would be comparable to the work required to build up a new bike. You can't really get modern lugged frames without forking out tons of cash, and other characteristically vintage features like quill stems are cute too. That 90's DiNucci Allez my friend has makes my kokoro go all doki-doki.
Either way, I've got plenty of time. The fact that I don't have my heart set one way or the other indicates to me that it's still way too early to be thinking about another bike.