I heard Elizabeth Holmes is going to prison for her fraudulent Silicon Valley co (and yea, I will forever mistakenly call her "Katie Holmes"), so, I figure "hey, let's amuse ourselves with some visual irony, and look up the photo where she is with the "30 under 30" crowd with Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley tech captains of industry".
I search, I scroll, I re-search, scroll more - that photo is fxxxing buried. What I DID see (all over the front page of DDG) was the news news news that she is, in fact, being imprisoned and not remaining free until an appeal, or whatever. Not even a Wikipedia entry on her. Not even an "insider hot take" about what the malicious/malignant culture Silicon Valley portrays and upholds means for "tech" at-large. She isn't the only bad character in the Bay Area, she just got caught.
A little more than a decade ago, after CAPITALISM handed my ass to me (the 2008 crash, and subsequent fallout), and I was left with pretty much nothing, I agreed to be sent to TX to be with my mother and sister.
I love blueberries. I bet you like them too. If you don't, you probably haven't been eating very good ones. Lowbush blueberries are the best - they're small, sweet, and packed with flavor!
Today's been busy. Got tomato plants, carrot and cucumber seeds, bags of compost. Took the dogs to the vet for their shots and heartworm/tick medication, then got down to business. Weeded the vegetable garden, turned the soil with a garden fork, poured out the compost, worked it in. Found a few potatoes from last year I must've missed, and which had started sprouting. Planted those, came inside, had a shower and poured a beer.
Spring is here, beyond all doubt. It can't have been much more at all than one month ago that I remarked to my wife how very happy I was that, without having planned it at all, I had placed my comfy next-to-the-CD-player-and-bookshelf chair in just the right place that in the evenings I could watch the sunset out one of our windows (three stories up). Not the whole glorious thing, just a little slice through a break in the buildings and trees down the end of the street that window faces down. Still enough to be really nice. I was shocked just the other day to notice that this is no longer possible. The reason is that the trees lining that street have now all grown so much green foliage that they collectively block my view of the sky. I am still not, and possibly never will be, used to such rapid and visible seasonal change. Growing up closer to the equator, in a land without many deciduous trees, and then moving to the Nordics is like a mole rat emerging into full midday sun for the first time after years of subterranean living. You never quite get used to it. I am slumming it down at 50-something degrees North these days, alas, but still find the seasonal change striking.
[...]
With spring in full force and all this greenery at our doorstep, we've been taking lots of walks lately, and I've taken to bringing my little Ricoh GR digital compact camera with me. Pushing 20 years, this little fellow is still an absolute delight. At some point I'll write a long-overdue post about my photography taking a bit of a digital turn, but that isn't this post. I have been collecting photographs of the tremendous variety of wild flowers that have been springing up recently, in the park, in the forest, along the river banks. My wife has the PlantNet app on her phone which seems to do a pretty good, but not infallible, job of identifying them. Even as a digital retrogrouch, it's hard for me to deny how cool this is. I have learned the names of dozens of flowers over the past couple of weeks. Some of them are beautiful. Some of the plants are edible! I have read astonishing things on Wikipedia. Shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris) is "proto-carnivorous": its seeds attract and kill (I'm not sure how) nematodes, microscopic worms, so that their decomposed bodies enrich the soil. The Garden Star-of-Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum) is "thermoperiodic": its seeds will not germinate unless their temperature falls below a certain cold temperature threshold and then subsequently rises above reach a certain warm temperature threshold. You won't find them in a spring following a mild winter because the cycle hasn't completed.
[...]
I have started keeping a "Lo-fi nature log" on my Gemini capsule.
There is a vast Wiki that is not Wikipedia; and it describes the greatest achievements of humanity.
The greatest achievements being, of course, contained in works of fiction; where they are not bound by the constraints normally placed upon us.
It’s called TV Tropes, it bills itself as “the all devouring pop-culture wiki”, and I recommend a read if you have too much spare time...
[...]
Or starting from “Anathem” we find that it holds an example of “Recursive Canon”, in which a story mentions its own existence; and that Sherlock Holmes is an example of the same trope, with Watson well known as the writer and publisher of Sherlock stories.
Thought I was at a capsule front page, but saw no "activate a client certificate" option/path.
(That's what I get for generally being in favor of barriers to entry, right? ;-) )
I still like the process of writing a post, uploading it and a new index.gmi, and pointing Antenna to that. Way more than activating a client certificate, for example. :-)
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
