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This is scrawlspace. I scrawl in this space. Do not expect coherence or permanence here.
I wanted to update my CV a bit.
From my laptop.
Itās stored on my desktop.
Obviously, something I should be SSHing in for.
Whatād I call that fzf alias? The one I use for changing directories?
Why are all these subdirectories of .git directories showing up in the list?
Finally here.
I already use vim.
I should use something fancier.
Kakoune is a thing.
The text is past the right side because tabs are eight columns in this thing.
Hmm. Argh.
This config file format is inscrutable even with the completion popping up.
I canāt figure out how to set the tab width.
Good thing I use Prettier on this thing anyway.
OK, this seems to help. I couldāve used it fifteen minutes ago:
āThe first two hours of Kakoune in two minutesā
OK, this isnāt awful. Maybe.
Letās try Helix.
Oh right, its themes pretty much all require 24-bit color, so I need to switch to iTerm2.
ā¦Iām already in iTerm2. But over SSH.
OK, ayu isnāt bad.
Right, this thing doesnāt support soft wrapping.
I canāt get it to automatically load the file after I run Prettier in the whole directory.
Whatever, I made the change I was going to make. `git commit -m`, baby.
Which post-Vim editor was the one that showed me lines that were changed in my working copy, again?
(This post was authored in Visual Studio Code.)
Prior reading:
Solderpunk, āDo you even compute, bro?ā
Probably everyone in Geminispace has heard Sturgeonās Law and most can probably recall most of it just from seeing the phrase āSturgeonās Lawā. While ā90% of everything is crapā is the part that everyone knows, whatās lesser known is that heās claimed, rightfully in my view, that the remaining 10% makes science fiction a genre worth the time and attention that it gets.
I think the same is true of computers and bicycle-for-the-mind computing. Most of the time, computers arenāt used for augmenting humans and instead are used for communication tasks of varying levels of importance. However, the times when I pull out the actual mind bicycle ā oftentimes Excel, but not infrequently Ulysses (many people swear by Obsidian instead) ā Iām struck by how these sorts of tasks would break my brain with their difficulty if I were thrown back into the technology level of the early 80s before spreadsheets and āF became common technologies.
So when I read the following in the above-linked article, I could only marvel by how utterly false it was:
But we have to realise and accept that when considering the destructive ecological footprint of the modern computing landscape, *that* kind of personal computing is a tiny fraction of a percent of the whole. To a first order approximation, nobody on Earth does that kind of computing.
Is most computing a distraction from more worthwhile hobbies? Almost certainly. On the other hand, I posit that all independent adults use their computers as bicycles for the mind at least some of the time, and that many independent adults (and more than a few dependents of varying ages) use their computers as bicycles for the mind for most of their workdays and a not-insignificant part of their non-work days where theyāre busy managing their households with tools that are way better than a desk calculator from 1985 and a paper double-entry ledger.
References:
Somehow, I got three issues of CondĆ© Nast Traveler. The first issue is for December 2022, the second is for January/February 2023, and the third is āAn Insiderās Guide to Qatar 2023ā. Not all at once, mind; they dribbled in over the course of months.
The two normal issues turn out to be roughly half ads, by page count. The Qatar issue is either all ad with extra ads, or mostly not-ads, depending on your point of view.
The Editorās Letter for the December 2022 issue was nicely touching. Hereās how it ended:
Wherever you choose to be, I hope you can find a party to your likingāand if thereās none to be had, I encourage you to make your own.
All the normal articles manage to present travel as a flowing, effortless, dreamlike state. Even, to a limited degree, the one about skiing on liftless mountains in Norway (hike up, ski down).
80 pages in, I am struck by the second occurrence of a phrase ā āwhere to see and be seenā. āWhere to go to be seenā is not something I think about much, if at all.
86 pages in, the circulation numbers are listed. Thereās a column for the average number of copies of each issue during the preceding 12 months. In that column, it says there are 702,781 copies in total. 538,105 are paid, while 130,718 were given out free, like this one. On row (i) it says that 80% were paid for.
The January/February 2023 issue has āadvertisementā on the front cover. Iām quite sure how this differs from all the other issues, but I suppose weāll see.
Oh. This front cover is actually fake. Itās attached to the real cover with rubber cement. This underlying cover does not have āadvertisementā on it, so I suppose the whole thing contains the normal amount of advertising in it.
I had thought that advertisements with lots of body copy were a dead art form, but advertorials still survive in magazines like this.
Page 46 describes a spa that specializes in fasting. The authoress is put on a diet consisting of vegetable broth only, with a rice cake to keep on her person at all times to keep her from passing out if she gets dizzy. In sharp contrast to my own experiences fasting, she spends three days, mostly sleeping, after which she is better than normal and goes on bike rides. Maybe I should consider using Epsom salts as a pre-fast laxative and back-engineer an alkaline powder to get the results that she did. Usually, a whole day of not eating wrecks my sleep and I wake up after a maximum of five hours even though my body needs at least 7Ā½ to function properly.
On page 94, another alien phrase waves to get my attention:
Sants-MontjuĆÆc, [ā¦] which still feels like a genuine, un-Instagrammed community going about its daily business.
I can only wonder what a thoroughly Instagrammed community is like. Maybe itās one where all the shops sell too-fancy-by-half milkshakes with half of a candy store mounted on top, or similar culinary visual spectacles.
Finally, the Qatar issue. I hear they had a bunch of soccer games there recently. This entire issue is sponsored by Visit Qatar.
They mention putting saffron and cardamom in your coffee. I suppose itās worth trying once. The saffron probably doesnāt work all that well with the instant cold-brew crystals I keep in the pantry, though. At any rate, I only keep the cold-brew crystals around for when both microwaved tea and Starbucks drive-through are both too slow.
Eighty-eight pages later, they have managed to convince me that I would not be totally crazy to vacation in Qatar. Iām not sure if that counts as mission accomplished, but itās not nothing.
I told you people to not expect permanence. Hereās where I moved older scrawls to:
If you want to stay abreast of updates, have a look at this capsuleās colophon. It has JSON Feed and Atom feeds on it.
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