Tidbits and notions. Stuff and blither. News and snooze. This little gmiphloglet be short and more mirth than matter.
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.
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