The second link discusses how some cultures are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic).
An interesting test is how you complete the question "I am ______".
WEIRD people speak of their "attributes, aspirations, accomplishments"; not-WEIRD people instead talk about relationships, how they map with their family or society. This could be seen as talking about yourself as a node on a graph (what attributes do I got?) or as a link (who am I connected to?). Kind of like how the individual can vanish from Confucian thought, or is paramount in some Western traditions.
Like a lot of people, I started playing Wordle shortly after it blew up on social media. It was a fun, daily thing when it felt like there wasn't a lot of fun going on in the days. I don't play daily, but I do, mostly. I think my best streak is 147 days. My current streak is 23.
The last week or two, after hitting the URL in the morning, I'm no longer launched into the game. Instead, I hit a splash screen. Wordle, it informs me, is edited by Tracy Bennett. How To Play? Login? Play?
Indeed, a collection of self-centric people. And I think collections of people working self-centrically to manufacture reality to/for others are particularly heinous.
There used to be a flower stand close to where I live. As you approached it, a sign on the road read "flowers around bend", and you would find the stand after the next curve.
The farm that owned the stand closed and moved to Bend, Oregon. The sign is still there:
"Flowers around bend".
Spent twelve hours Doing Things today: getting bedding plants, walking the dogs, mowing the lawn, goddaughter's dance recital, buying new shoes (wedding next week), fish and chips for dinner, out to a different nursery afterward to pick up forsythias, applying mink oil to a couple of older pairs of shoes, laundry, viola practice. A few coffees here and there to keep the energy up.
Tomorrow will be similarly partitioned. All those plants need to go in pots. I need to dig out the dead forsythias and put the new ones in. Zoom call with the in-laws. The evening should be free. (I hope)
In the dream, a scroll stretched between the two cottages. It was a stereotypically antiquated scroll - one you'd perhaps expect to see in a film about warlocks or fifteenth century reformists in the Kingdom of Bohemia. I specify *fifteenth century reformists in the Kingdom of Bohemia* because I spent one of my so-called former lives as a paramecium in the Kingdom of Bohemia and I clearly remember the Hussites using this sort of scroll as a symbol of additional "rebellion" against the Roman Empire's obsession with bound books. The parchment itself was veined with creases in various shades of brown and grey and one could have thought the whole would simply come apart at these veins were one to take the scroll from one side and from the other and gently pull. At my end of the scroll, in my cottage, a portion, even a great portion, was still rolled. I slowly fed the parchment into the roll at the same time that Lucía unrolled her portion.
Money for Nothing is heavily overplayed, but here with the full intro, it still works. Likewise Brothers in Arms is a classic (if overly 80s) Dire Straits track. But all of the good points are drowned in synth or sharp 80s production that does it no favours. Looking back to The Sultans of Swing, Tunnel of Love, Telegraph Road, they work because they feel tight - a talented band supporting an incredible guitarist. Brothers in Arms feels like a stab at something different, a real pop album, with... SAX and hey why don't we try slapping a zydeco-esque synth on top of this otherwise mediocre track?
I was wondering about converting my kitchen into a swimming pool. But it's not big enough to swim even one stroke. I'd have to extend the pool down the hallway.
Finally. The butterfly species my friend always manages to spot decided to show itself to me today. After the dry year that was 2022, it is refreshing to see nature recovering so fast.
Heh, how curious. Biology used to be my most-hated subject back in school. I can't tell whether or not my hatred was a result of my biology teacher, who judged every kid based on their looks and popularity among others, and, after six years of teaching our class, began to make his growing disinterest in his job quite obvious. Judging by my old notes, I guess I was mentally absent during his lessons, as one note is nothing but praise for genetically-modified organisms – a stark contrast to a class test I took a year prior in geography class, in which I wrote that humans are predatory animals that base their existences on the radical exploitation of resources (and got punished for it without ever receiving an explanation, just a vague question mark and a death stare). Decades later, I make a new friend and his passion for biology almost instantly infected me to the point I'm taking part in a citizen science project and send him all of my observations.
A happy Itanium Day, to all who celebrate. Twenty-two years ago today, after significant delays, the first Itanium - Merced - was released. The hardware was mediocre; the software situation was dismal. The overwhelming majority of shipped systems of this generation were rebadged Intel SDVs, but a few larger vendor systems escaped - notably the proto-Superdome HP rx9610.
The other day I installed OpenBSD on a Raspberry Pi 3B. I found a few websites that went over the installation process, and this is what worked for me:
1. "Burning" install73.img to a micro SD card 2. Using a second micro SD card in a USB adapter as the root disk 3. At installation, at the boot> menu typing set tty fb0 (otherwise you get a blank screen.) 4. After installation booting off that second micro SD card.
After spending days archicturing and building my own decentralized public key infrastructure. I find myself consistantly thinking about how attackers can DoS my system or how the trust model is flawed. Then I come up with a solution and realize GNUnet already has something like it built in. Typed DHT records.
One thing I didn't understand when I started using GNUnet was why the hell are there so many different types of records? I get that you might want to prioritize storing some records over others. But there's already a priority system. Furthermore, every record is validated before sending it to the DHT. It's so annoyning that I've to always specify the TEST record type when I'm testing my library.
finally received a key for midnight.pub!
Thoughts come and go.
Or do they?
Don't they actually just come, newer comers replacing old? Overlaying old?
What is it?
Does it even matter what it is, or that I/you/we can say what it is?
Because isn't saying merely re-presenting, and said presentation isn't Thing Itself?
Thought pursuing thought gets crazy quickly.
The most recent excitement in Geminispace is about the domain `geminispace.org`.
Is it appropriate that it be used for Bubble?
Might it confuse newcomers into thinking it is somehow an “official” representative of Geminispace?
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
