💾 Archived View for carcosa.net › journal › commonplace-book › 2021 › 01.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:22:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
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Angela Yvonne Davis is an American political activist, philosopher, academic, and author born on this day in 1944. She is a professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Ideologically a Marxist, Davis was a member of the Communist Party USA until 1991, after which she joined the breakaway Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. She is the author of over ten books on class, feminism, and the U.S. prison system.
I finally got with the program, and started using a long-lived self-signed certificate for my Gemini server, rather than the letsencrypt certificate my other services use. So if you're seeing a warning that the cert has changed, that's to be expected and is not a problem. But it will probably not change for quite some time in the future now.
I'm currently reading "The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: a Contrivance of Horror", by Thomas Ligotti, a book on philosophical pessimism that frequently references Lovecraft. Coincidentally, I read this morning a gopher log by cat, about Lovecraft's racism, and the ability or inability to separate the artist from the art. I have Thoughts on this, but I'm not sure I'm going to have time to write...
Lovecraftian Blindspot (gopher)
Maya at maya.land writes about "the tragedy of Gemini", which is that the quality of Gemini depends on its unpopularity – on avoiding the Eternal September, but that this same quality makes it (and the rest of the smol internet) techno-elitist, blocking out people without technical skills. I agree this is a problem, but I have kind of complex thoughts about the way forward.
In the comments (yes, there are comments), Zachary Dunn writes:
This is pretty inline with my own thinking on #Gemini. It's only going to be populated by technical or more advantaged people. I don't begrudge anyone their hobbies or passions, but I wonder what could be accomplished if everyone building gemini software tried to improve the web instead.
I would like to emphasize that the web *cannot be improved*, because humans don't have agency on the web. But this goes back to the Big Thing that I have been unable to write: The Web is Babylon.
Maya: The Tragedy of Gemini (WWW)
Inauguration passed with no violence but a lot of spectacle. People are feeling relieved. I'm not, because I can see what's coming, but I really need to let people feel this moment of relief. Maybe pretend to feel it myself for a little while. Be thankful Bernie has a powerful position in the Senate now, and go on a news fast for a bit.
Bernie Sanders: Joe Biden must put an end to business as usual. Here's where to start. (www)
I've been serving an atom feed for my gemlog, and will continue to do so. But I've also updated the main index page to be a compliant Gemini feed, so that people who prefer to use that kind of subscription can use it. The Commonplace Book will not appear in gmi feeds, but its updates will still appear in the atom feed.
I had lost track of daily new COVID cases in my state when the health department stopped doing daily mailings. At that time, the daily rate was over 2000, too much for a state with a population of only 5,024,369. Today's latest reported new daily total (from Tuesday) is 4,809, with a positive test percentage of 34.2%. In the most conservative city in the state, positive test rate is up to 40%. Good thing we're taking this seriously.
So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit...it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years...No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures... diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there. — William Gibson, _The Peripheral_
Recently, Shufei's 微phlog has been full of depressing news about the Capitol insurgency, and today about the climate. She says:
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.
And I can't say I disagree. As the other Q (not QAnon) said, "humans are a dangerous, savage, child race". And I don't expect that we'll get to grow up, either. Gibson's right — we're already well into the jackpot. Things are going to keep getting worse from here on out, and no one really has the leverage to stop it, and it's all coordination problems that our social and political systems are incapable, by design, of solving.
I've played at being an ironic Posadist in the past, but it's almost making me an unironic Posadist. The best case scenario I can think of(for humanity, not for America; nothing can save America) involves nuclear war...
My chest has been hurting today, but I don't think it's COVID; I think it's anxiety.