I'm making note of this, or, rather, beginning a blog entry this evening so I can gunny it out on the morrow morn. Most likely, I'll have finished the book, as I am close to the close and shall begin reading forthwith. Many fascinating ideas lie within, though I'll most likely just touch on this one.
So who is this Alice, anyway? In Lethem's *As She Climbed Across the Table*, the idea of absence is explored in depth. More specifically, the idea of replacing substance with absence is explored. The characters repeatedly substitute an intense yearning for something they cannot possibly have for something substantial that they already have as if the ineffable is always the more attractive choice. Philip, the protagonist, pines for Alice with whom he had a serious and seemingly satisfying relationship. Why does he pine for Alice? Well, Alice chose another over Philip, and as you may have guessed, this *other* is something Alice cannot possibly have. In fact, what Alice wants is the epitome of the ineffable, a tangible embodiment of *nothingness*. In the book, its name is, appropriately, *Lack*. Don't be fooled by my superficial description of events. This no ordinary *unrequited love story*. "Lack" is a portal into the void. He is the result of a scientific experiment gone "awry" (actually not really awry, but that's a close enough description for the moment).
Now... the good news and the bad news. Plus, some observations.
I was denied SSDI, so now MUST bring in an income. Then, my sister decides, since this has happened? That she is going to move out, leaving me and her father alone here in this house. She got me a phone so that we have a form of contact, and I suppose also that I can use it to get employed. Fucking great.
You know how we say "I was conceived"?
Not "my body was conceived". But "*I* was conceived".
Does that not explicitly state that "I" is a thought?
Do ponder.
Re(i.e. againness of)presentation seems quite the little re-ality machine.
Something similar happens relative to religion: one moron hurts themselves on the likes by way of misapplication or taking literal what was intended to be metaphoric, murmuring ensues, and next thing you know anyone attempting to apply the same intelligently (read: humbly) is considered - usually rather condescendingly (if not belligerently) - a fool by fools anxiously proud of their foolishness.
During my walks by the Tanana River, I'm growing accustomed now to seeing an abundance of a dozen or so familiar wild flowers. However, I came across one small patch which I wasn't familiar with Siberian Aster (photo)
At first I thought it might be some kind of "fleabane", but my sister helped identify it as Siberian Aster.
On fedi, I was having a conversation with @glenthefossa@yiff.life about open tables and said that it’s important to be aware of likely trade-offs when running open tables with high player fluctuation: on the plus side, there are a lot more players so fewer sessions cancelled and a large variety of characters and humans. But the negatives need to be taken into account: no long term character development plot, no long term overarching big bosses, no big reveals, no world changing events – unless you enjoy that just for your own sake. Then again, you already saw that coming.
The players can only do short term things: discover how a trap works, a trick in a location, conversation with an NPC, or fights. It’s a game that needs prep just for this: rooms, monsters, treasures, traps, that works well.
There are a few one to three person companies out there that never grow any bigger, but all in all it looks to me like the vast majority of companies just want to grow and keep growing. New markets, more employees, bigger or more products, higher revenue, higher profits.
How come they never say "look, we're about 20 people now. Any bigger than this and we'll have to hire someone for the administrative overhead. We make enough for everyone to have a pretty good salary, and we can increase prices at the rate of inflation to keep it that way. What do you say we just settle for this?"
I was listening to Outside by Ada Hoffmann. At first the neurodiversity topic was a bit thick but it all meshed quite well into a story that made Cthulhu-style madness and AI-gods and cyber-angels interesting.
Sadly, there is a torture scene towards the end.
Ugh.
WTF a is wrong with people putting torture scenes in fiction books.
A bit later, I listening to the next book, eating some self made bread after going for a short run, having a good time. I'm listening to Ascendant Wars: Hellfire and there’s another fucking torture scene coming up. What the hell. I start skipping. I'm angry. I don't care what they're saying. Next chapter! Oh, he's waking up and the maltreatment goes on? Fuck this shit.
I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of this formatting is a crutch for good writing, and only really exists in an ad hoc sense due to the digital publishing revolution.
For me, the greatest tragedy of the vitality-sucking security morass associated with online spaces is its triggering fear of sharing things that might reveal too much.
For example, I had a bit of a song-spoof writing/recording career back in my software days that I'd like to share in the Antenna realm, but have to worry about some psychopath who found a sentence of mine insufficiently polite tracking me/mine down to do real harm.
For the past 3 months I've been running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my laptop.
[...]
There were a few major instability issues that were really starting to get to me, it turns out my Thinkpad T14sG3(AMD) had some major issues on Linux. Of course I kinda jumped to the conclusion that this was a Void issue which fanned the flames of wanting to distro-hop. Only to have the same exact crashing issue, albeit at a (perceived) lower rate, before being fixed after a few kernel updates.
It took a while to get OpenSUSE feeling comfortable, being a little tricky to get codecs and stuff like that, but after a week or so I had squashed every bug and got it to be usable.
The 2023 "Old Computer Challenge" happened recently over at solene's. I didn't take part, but wanted to write about the notion.
If my office space was organized differently, I would always have at least two of my old computers nearby, but as it stands, I only have one. My 8088 sits on its own desk, behind my main workstation, as I have most likely mentioned before. I'm writing this post from that system.
Little bothers me more than having to manage passwords, certificates, and wasting time/effort dicking with two-factor authentication schemes - especially the latter because I usually have my phone's radio off because I dislike being interrupted by text messages and/or calls.
There's been some discussion recently of building compliance tests for gemini servers and clients, as a point of unification. The web had the ACID tests which were a rallying point; the idea is to do something similar for Gemini.
I'm tentatively referring to this project as "Base Tests", because that's the opposite of an ACID test :) And also the literal interpretation.
ACID tests specifically tested web clients for compatibility with JavaScript and HTML standards. The exact format of the ACID tests cannot be translated to Gemini. JavaScript provides a method to programatically control web clients from within the client itself in a cross-client compatible way. There is no cross-client compatible way to programatically control gemini clients -- by design! So gemini's Base Tests will need to get more creative.
I'm thinking about blocking all bots from my website. But where to start? How about this: Check the access.log file (I use Apache as my web server). If the User Agent Field contains the word "bot" that sounds like a candidate? Let's see!
Oddmuse started out as a CGI script written in Perl. This is great for very small and dynamic sites: Most of the time, nobody is visiting and the process isn't running. As activity increases (and search engines and bots activity increases!) a CGI script is an increasingly bad idea. Every time, you load the Perl binary, it loads the script, parses the script, runs the script, loads the libraries, parses the libraries, and so on.
These days, I run a Mojolicious server which keeps the script in memory and reruns it for every request. The webserver acts as a proxy server for all of this. And it's somewhat tricky: Every now and then there are processes that won't die, accumulating, see 2023-06-28 Reduced Site Functionality.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.