Today is the last day of Golden Week vacation here in Japan, and perhaps it's fitting that it's raining heavily.
The other day I jumped on the Shinkansen* and visited a city from my past that I am intimately familar with. Even at 06:30 Tokyo station was packed with travellers and I almost got lost in the labrinth. There was no need for a map when I got to my desintation however, as I navigated the city under the hot summer sun. Knowing the streets and train lines backwards and forwards I was able to bypass the crowds and tourist traps and I visited quiet places where I used to go - places where no tourists (and very few foreigners) ever go. More than once I had a spot to myself, or an entire street to myself, which is just what I wanted.
Last night was stupid.
Hold on, let me restate: last night I was stupid.
Why? Because I hung out with the non-online versions of Eternal September-ites.
See, so-called "Eternal September" was, in essence, nothing new to/for me. Those who rushed to demonstrate their stupidity *that* time were merely the descendants of the knuckleheads I started becoming aware of back in early grade school. They're the vast majority ilk that always self-centrically rush in. That all important separate, individual self has to be early to be seen in/on the scene, to be able to tell others they've been there and done that. Life's been a touch screen for them long before it was invented.
Not growth is a negative, though there are traditions where what you have lost is important. However! Negatives may not be the best marketing strategy, especially in a culture that values positivism. The above link links to a PDF wherein a matrix is presented to help guide degrowth, or at least things to think about when deciding to do one thing or another, with nuance beyond the single-minded pursuit of increasing shareholder value.
A notable rub is between the techno-optimist and techno-pessimist positions in the degrowth movement (or wider society); the optimists believe that technology will save the day, while the pessimists point out that piling more technology onto a technology problem may not work out so well--Jevon's paradox, and etc.
Families are strange... or rather those I have got to know, so far. Even more strangely, I haven't met a single family that could be called "healthy", and even those appearing to portray a stereotypical "healthy family", it's usually those that spiral into complete disaster upon the death of another family member, such as the family in this tiny anecdote I picked up a while ago.
[...]
A few years later, likely in 2016 or 2017, one of the deceased man's kids became an adult. His former affair organized a family party to celebrate the fresh adult's new milestone. While most family members engaged with each other in some way, the brother, his wife and his kids shut themselves off from everyone, neither talking to anyone else, nor playing together with the others. Taking the bowling alley the farthest away from the only child of his sister and the fresh adult's younger brother, they stood next to each to each other like a bunch of scared chicken. It seemed like they were jealous of the kid and the only child having fun with each other, glaring at the young ones in envy, when they thought no one was looking.
[...]
One might feel pity for the only child, as they experienced two losses within four years. First, their uncle – the deceased man, who properly introduced them to computers – passed away, and in 2015, they lost their father.
[...]
I wonder, however, what causes people to lose their minds over such things to the point of showing clear signs of mental issues. No one can convince me that this is just a side effect of the passing of another family member. Of course, the only child is the ideal scapegoat, as far I got told about them, but this is more of an excuse, rather than an explanation of the root cause.
Found this in my LJ archives. 21 years ago:
"Also terrible was my realization that I'm a twenty-something now."
Oh my sweet boy
It's something about adding quote functionality to Mastodon. I was going through [GitHub discussion] and I came across interesting term /Matrix of Convivial Technology/. It was quoted from [The Matrix of Convivial Technology – Assessing technologies for degrowth by Andrea Vetter M.A.]. I thought that I should cite it on the small net because there is a place many new solutions has been creating.
I have been practicing dvorak for 2 weeks or so now. I am capable of touchtyping at 20wpm or something like that, while my qwerty top-speed (i cannot touch type in qwerty) is 90-100 wpm in spanish and 80-90wpm in english. Typing speed is not my priority, anyway; i wanna learn dvorak mainly because of 2 reasons: learning to touchtype, and ergonomics.
[...]
Dvorak, at least for spanish and english, is designed to be better than qwerty in terms of the amount of hand movement, hand alternation, inbound rolling, bigrams, trigrams etc. It does feel better to touchtype in dvorak than in qwerty, because you do not need to leave the home row as much, and typing with the same hand is greatly reduced. There are some diptongs in spanish, but it does not increase same-hand-writing to a level near similar to qwerty.
Lately I've been very stressed, and find myself spending a lot of time watching YouTube. I know, I shouldn't for a variety of reasons, but it helps silence the noise in my head... Occasionally I learn something useful.
[...]
Occasionally, my app goes to a black screen during rapid back-and-forth action; I just back out and try again.
> When other thoughts arise, one should not pursue them, > but should inquire: 'To whom do they arise?' It does not > matter how many thoughts arise. As each thought arises, > one should inquire with diligence, "To whom has this > thought arisen?". The answer that would emerge would be > "To me". Thereupon if one inquires "Who am I?", the mind > will go back to its source; and the thought that arose will > become quiescent. With repeated practice in this manner, > the mind will develop the skill to stay in its source.
Changed the post "Using 'xfce4' without a Mouse" according to an entry in wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_keys#Enabling).
I have reverted my story "An Abusive Interviewr" to the text format so you can read it if you find it using Veronica-2.
- Work: - Complete the move from the cloud to self-hosted. - Establish salary transparency. - Begin the first steps of transferring the company into employee ownership.
I wanted to mess with gmisub, but that seemingly required BearSSL, which seemingly required gmni, and I finally re-figured out how to have headers and libraries in non-default places be seeing by the compilation/linkage toolage, but ultimately hit the likes of...
Kind of hard to avoid the latest Discord news. At least on cohost, one of my ex-Twitter haunts and one that skews young and queer and seems to have a lot of feelings about the news that Discord is changing how it handles usernames (changing from UserName#WXYZ to @username).
"I hacked up a quick thing" overlapping with "The web sucks" - there's a Venn diagram of the perfect Gemini post!
Lots of web sites have photo galleries. I'm interested in photography, so I see a lot of them. They suck. They give you animated transitions and fancy navigation and social media widgets and fancy borders and I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT THE PICTURES. Sometimes you can tell the browser (say, by right-clicking a thumbnail link) to open an image in another tab and so just get the image and no flim-flam. So I thought "I could make a browser extension to do that: open all the images in a gallery, one per tab."
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
