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</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesd ...
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><title>p1k3::feed</title><subtitle>writing by brennen</subtitle><link href="https://p1k3.com/"/><link href="https://p1k3.com/feed" rel="self"/><icon>https://p1k3.com/favicon.png</icon><author><name>brennen</name></author><id>https://p1k3.com/</id><generator>App::WRT.pm / XML::Atom::SimpleFeed</generator><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated><entry><title>Thursday, January 11, 2024 - a concise theory of notes about notes</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2024/1/11"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2024/1/11</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Thursday, January 11, 2024</h1>
<h2>a concise theory of notes about notes</h2>
<p>Previously:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://p1k3.com/notes-on-notes/">notes on notes</a></li>
<li>2020: <a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/20/">meta meta</a></li>
<li>2020: <a href="/2020/7/27">the zettelkasten / the zeitgeist</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I came across an argument about what exactly makes something a zettelkasten,
and then thought: &ldquo;Zettelkasten&rdquo; is a pretty great example of how one of
the best ways to fuck up a neat idea is to have a bunch of people get really
excited about it.</p>
<p>Taking notes is one of those things in the unfortunate position of being:</p>
<ol>
<li> Surprisingly deep as a subject</li>
<li> Capable of being focused back on itself</li>
</ol>
<p>I guess nearly any practice can disappear up its own asshole under the right
conditions, but some are extraordinarily susceptible.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s my working model of what happens. If you can say a lot about something,
and you can use the something to say it, well, watch yourself. You might just
be teetering on the edge of the pit. People should get a warning about the
risks of this drilled into them right around the age they&rsquo;re ready for
something like <em>The Neverending Story</em> or <em>The Princess Bride</em>.</p>
<p>This post is mostly just the short version of <a href="/2020/5/20">meta meta</a>.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes">notes</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes-on-notes">notes-on-notes</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/writing">writing</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/zettelkasten">zettelkasten</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2024/" title="2024">2024</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2024/1/" title="1">1</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2024/1/11/" title="11">11</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>thursday, december 14, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/12/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/12/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>thursday, december 14, 2023</h1>
<p>it's december<br />
and that old hollow feeling<br />
biding something holy<br />
or forgotten, reappearing</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/12/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-01-12T19:22:02Z</updated></entry><entry><title type="html">Wednesday, November 15, 2023 - reading: more patrick o'brian</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/11/15"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/11/15</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, November 15, 2023</h1>
<h2>reading: more patrick o'brian</h2>
<p><em>Previously: <a href="/2018/1/18">reading: master and commander</a></em></p>
<p>After thinking for a while that I should pick up more of this series
(apparently for <em>five years</em>), I bought copies of the following:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>Post Captain</em></li>
<li><em>H.M.S. Surprise</em></li>
<li><em>The Mauritius Command</em></li>
</ul>
<p>I&rsquo;m through the first two and about halfway into <em>The Mauritius Command</em>.</p>
<p>These remain really strange and wonderful books. They cycle through subtle
and complicated human relationships, absurdly specific sailing nerdery, comedy,
tragedy, violence, the machinery of empire.</p>
<p>Every bit worth the time, so far.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/11/15/" title="15">15</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, November 14, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/11/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/11/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, November 14, 2023</h1>
<p>A windy day. The leaves clattering down out of trees surprisingly late. The
sun down behind the hills by 4pm. The cat dissatisfied.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/11/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-11-28T04:52:21Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, August 13, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/8/13"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/8/13</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, August 13, 2023</h1>
<p>I revisit this thought:</p>
<blockquote><p>the ironies of a bunch of hyperliterates using a giant text machine to
bootstrap text into a thing that exceeds the bounds of comprehension and then
totally overwhelms all the tools of literacy itself</p></blockquote>
<p>I&rsquo;ve spent most of my life enmeshed in language, with words as my main power,
and also a lot of time dwelling on the insufficiency of language to what life
is really like. These days the latter sometimes feels like the <em>main thing</em>
about words. Or at least the main thing about the dominant culture of words,
the technology and system of them.</p>
<p>The tools of literacy &mdash; I don&rsquo;t exactly mean to run them down. We just live
in a time when, for whole classes of human, a kind of hypertrophied literacy
has enmeshed and eclipsed the experience of reality. This isn&rsquo;t so much <em>new</em>
as it&rsquo;s just newly vast, encompassing, interconnected. The language machine is
so big, so ramified, that the sheer <em>mathematical accumulation</em> of its products
now feeds deafening oceans of noise back into the workings. Whether by this I
mean the outputs of machine learning or the behavior of a few billion minds
over-saturated with internet bullshit: I&rsquo;m not sure it even matters.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve all had our part in building this, and you can get endlessly meta about
the endless meta of it, which is part of how it exceeds the bounds of
comprehension. All of that is&hellip; Not really how I want to spend my time. I don&rsquo;t
have any grand thesis here, or at least I don&rsquo;t have any grand <em>prescription</em>.</p>
<p>There was a time when I was a big word fish in a small word pond, I guess.
Somewhere along the way the contemporary internet happened and also I got a job
where being a big word fish was a basic prerequisite. Circa now: Sweet Christ
am I ever weary of paragraphs. There&rsquo;s something useful in knowing that, if I
don&rsquo;t chase my own tail about it too much.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/8/" title="8">8</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/8/13/" title="13">13</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-10-10T01:41:11Z</updated></entry><entry><title>tuesday, august 1, 2023 - one for jack</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/8/1"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/8/1</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>tuesday, august 1, 2023</h1>
<h2>one for jack</h2>
<p>here we are in one of those times of dying<br />
and i'm fucked if i know what to do<br />
i've never known, i likely never will</p>
<p>it was so dark at 5 o'clock that the streetlight came on<br />
in the alley out back, and i started flicking switches<br />
on the lamps</p>
<p>water poured through the kitchen window when it rained<br />
and i got one of those fancy new reverse 911 calls<br />
about the flash flood warning<br />
and now in the aftermath<br />
the mice in the walls are more agitated than usual<br />
i suppose they may have gotten wet</p>
<p>now the storm has shuffled off east, and<br />
there's a thin mist rising off the streets<br />
and i'm on the couch, drinking iced whiskey and orange soda<br />
out of an aluminum camp mug</p>
<p>i should kill the mice in the walls<br />
(god damn them, i don't want to kill anything at all)<br />
i should fix the windows<br />
i should muck the rainwater out of the crawlspace<br />
i should be stone sober, waiting for what comes next</p>
<p>but it's true enough:<br />
the times you should be most in your right mind<br />
are often the times you least want to be in that<br />
mind at all.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/8/" title="8">8</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/8/1/" title="1">1</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-08-02T02:50:20Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, July 10, 2023 - recent fiction intake, first half of 2023 edition</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/7/10"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/7/10</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, July 10, 2023</h1>
<h2>recent fiction intake, first half of 2023 edition</h2>
<p><em>Gilligan&rsquo;s Island</em>, the first (mumble) episodes or so on DVD while killing
time in a ski town (I don&rsquo;t ski). I had only ever caught smatterings of this
back in the era of teevee re-runs. It&rsquo;s often kind of charming and also
periodically extremely racist, which I guess maybe sums up a lot of
mid-20th-century American television.</p>
<p><em>Reservation Dogs</em>, season 2. I think this show might be about as good as TV
has ever gotten.</p>
<p><em>A Prayer for the Crown Shy</em>, Becky Chambers. A <em>Monk &amp; Robot</em> book. I like
these, they&rsquo;re enjoyable, but if I&rsquo;m honest they feel pretty slight compared to
the <em>Wayfarers</em> books. Intentional I&rsquo;m sure. A fine way to spend an evening
without dwelling on the numbing horror of the actual world, but they don&rsquo;t
stick in my head all that much.</p>
<p><em>Wednesday</em>, Netflix. This could have been good. There&rsquo;s a lot of talent
involved, it&rsquo;s (mostly) well cast, it&rsquo;s often very pretty, the costuming is a
delight, and the writing is&hellip; Ok, first of all, why are they doing a <em>Harry
Potter</em>? Second, why does Wednesday need to learn about the power of
friendship? Why does she just kind of suck as a character, despite Jenna
Ortega&rsquo;s completely dialed-in inhabiting of the part? Why does the overall
mode of this thing undermine all the appealing aspects of the Addams Family
material it&rsquo;s drawing on?</p>
<p><em>Letterkenny</em>. We&rsquo;re kind of always watching this.</p>
<p><em>Avatar: The Way of Water</em>. You know what, I smoked a bowl in the parking lot
before the movie, and I had a blast. It&rsquo;s gorgeous. It&rsquo;s the first time I&rsquo;ve
felt anything more than polite indifference about a 3D glasses kind of
experience. Also, at this late date, and thinking back on <em>Titanic</em> (a movie
which came out so long ago that I saw it on a youth group trip to a mall
theater) I kind of enjoy the meta of &ldquo;<em>this</em> very expensive James Cameron movie
is totally gonna bomb so hard you guys, just wait&rdquo;. Many criticisms of the
basic ideas and form of these movies are valid, and also I am still waiting to
hear that Cameron has cut Alan Dean Foster a very, very large check.</p>
<p><em>The Lincoln Lawyer</em>, Netflix. My girlfriend was out of town. I was looking
for something to watch with the cat while I sat on the couch and wrote shitty
code on my laptop. It was Fine. They draw it out a bit too much. The whole
plot with the tech mogul&hellip; Ehhhh. The main guy is implausibly good and
decent. It&rsquo;s sort of pleasantly low-key. It delivers a couple of really good
lines. This is airport novel material but sometimes you just want airport
novel material.</p>
<p><em>Point Break</em>. It had been so long since I saw this. It&rsquo;s way more over the
top than I remembered. &ldquo;Quit being in the FBI and go surfing but maybe don&rsquo;t
rob banks in a murdery way&rdquo; is a reasonable stance. If this movie has a
stance.</p>
<p><em>Supernatural</em>. A procedural ghost murder thing with stupid but surprisingly
consistent rules? <em>The X-Files</em> by way of <em>Buffy the Vampire Slayer</em>? I
dunno. We&rsquo;re a couple seasons in. This show is completely absurd, and
intermittently flat-out appalling, but if I&rsquo;m honest it&rsquo;s grown on me.
Better-crafted than it has to be, and whoever does the visual effects knows
what they&rsquo;re about. More overt about its religious preoccupations than I
usually expect. Weirdly obsessed with quirky vintage motel room interiors.
Too much of the thing where the main characters yell at each other about the
same stuff over and over again. Like many of its genre cousins, I suspect this
works best as an anthology series with a frame of loose continuity and some
recurring secondary characters, and kind of hope it won&rsquo;t get eaten by the Big
Plot stuff as it goes along. But then also, holy shit, there are somehow <em>15
seasons</em> of this?</p>
<p><em>Ronin</em>. I had never actually seen this. The car chases <em>are</em> legit.</p>
<p><em>The Witcher: Sword of Destiny</em>. We watched the Netflix show. I liked it
despite not being that into all the violence and only knowing what was going on
maybe half of the time. I&rsquo;ve been reading some of the story / book stuff. I
expected it to be easier to follow the overall plot of the books than the show,
and I was wrong. On the whole, this is derivative schlock in a very uneven set
of translations, and it&rsquo;s frequently pretty sexist, but it&rsquo;s also&hellip; Kind of
appealing and humane in an unexpected way?</p>
<p><em>Lucifer</em>, Netflix. I was home alone again. I wanted pulpy and ignorable.
&ldquo;The literal devil runs a nightclub&rdquo; is one thing as a setup, &ldquo;Lucifer uses his
oddly-limited and very specific powers to help the LAPD solve crimes and it&rsquo;s
kind of basically <em>Castle</em>&rdquo; is another. It has its moments, but I&rsquo;m not sure
I&rsquo;m overly motivated here. It&rsquo;s a little too standard network murder
procedural with hot cops. The cat was indifferent.</p>
<p><em>The Name of the Wind</em>, Patrick Rothfuss. A couple of trusted friends have
recommended this as something special, and they were right. That rare big slab
of fantasy that felt like something new despite a lot of familiar genre
furniture (with hyper-competent protagonist in a school setting). I am
somewhat wishing my trusted friends had mentioned that there&rsquo;s a second book
but not yet (or maybe ever) a third. I&rsquo;ll probably read the second one anyway.</p>
<p><em>Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves</em>. This was great. A well-resourced
action fantasy where the action and the fantasy are both good and the story is
constrained enough to make for an entertaining, self-contained film with
relatable stakes. Actually funny. Visually appealing in a way that&rsquo;s
meaningfully distinct from the standard visual language of fantasy movies circa
now, which is kind of amazing for a product of a media empire that I&rsquo;ve always
thought of as deriving entirely from a slurry of standard fantasy components.
There&rsquo;s a straightforward lesson here that I very much doubt the movie
machinery on the whole is prepared to learn, which is <em>go smaller</em>. (Even when
you&rsquo;re going big.) Also: Jarnathan. More bird guys, please.</p>
<p><em>Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse</em>. This was also great. I&rsquo;m full up on
superhero material in the general case, but this really stands out.
The maximalist, meta-textual multiverse thing is probably getting worn out
fast, but here it works and has things to say. If you&rsquo;ve seen it or aren&rsquo;t
worried about spoilers, I recommend Eric&rsquo;s
<a href="https://ericsipple.com/superheroes-miles-morales-and-the-fallacy-of-hard-choices/">Superheroes, Miles Morales, and the Fallacy of Hard Choices</a>.</p>
<p><em>Priscilla Queen of the Desert</em>. Flawed, I think, but kind of an amazing movie
in ways I wasn&rsquo;t expecting.</p>
<p><em>What We Do in the Shadows</em> (tv show version). I guess we&rsquo;re a couple of
seasons behind? Somewhere along the way this kind of devolved into a mishmash
of its constituent parts and characters doing stuff in a way that suggests it
probably should have wrapped things up a while ago, but at the same time it&rsquo;s
still a pleasant enough diversion with individually funny bits.</p>
<p><em>The Bear</em>, season 1. I was iffy on this at the start, because I&rsquo;m weary of
&ldquo;people yell fruitlessly at each other&rdquo; as a driving mechanic and stories about
the aftermath of suicide are hard even (or maybe especially) when they&rsquo;re done
well (see also <em>Reservation Dogs</em>). On the other hand, I&rsquo;m a sucker for
workplace stuff. Anyway, it&rsquo;s good. The second-to-last episode of the season
is a basically perfect chunk of shit-hitting-the-fan chaos.</p>
<p>(Did I read a sentence like that last one somewhere else about this show?
<em>Probably</em>. I&rsquo;m not sure I&rsquo;m even capable of original thoughts or phrases at
this stage of the game.)</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/watching">watching</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/7/10/" title="10">10</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, July 7, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/7/7"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/7/7</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, July 7, 2023</h1>
<p>A thought I posted elsewhere not so long ago:</p>
<blockquote><p>the ironies of a bunch of hyperliterates using a giant text machine to
bootstrap text into a thing that exceeds the bounds of comprehension and then
totally overwhelms all the tools of literacy itself</p></blockquote>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/7/7/" title="7">7</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-08-09T04:48:16Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Thursday, June 29, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/29"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/6/29</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Thursday, June 29, 2023</h1>
<p>It&rsquo;s Thursday afternoon. I&rsquo;m sitting outside, on an otherwise-deserted stone
patio, under an umbrella, drinking my second lager of the afternoon. Motorized
tourist traffic pulses through the 25mph zone at a steady 30 or 40mph, with an
occasional outlier in a Tesla or a lifted truck or a very clean late model Jeep
pushing it closer to 50 just to drive home the impression that its occupants
feel very important and would not really mind killing a pedestrian all that
much.</p>
<p>Some guy just went past hauling a no-shit speedboat all decked out in giant
chrome exhaust pipes, which confuses me on a couple of levels. Where are you
going? What are you possibly going to do with that thing when you get there?
I&rsquo;m sure there&rsquo;s a place for it somewhere around here, albeit one that hinges
on a great deal of engineering and the expressed whims of a wealthy population
who should never have moved so far from naturally occurring bodies of navigable
water. It&rsquo;s just a striking discongruity in this arid expanse of grass, small
cactus, prairie dogs, tiny rivers, looming mountains.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s been warm for a week now, but there are storms in the forecast and the
hills are still an unlikely green. <em>Elsewhere</em> in the States, a
record-shattering heat wave is going into weeks of duration, at least.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/29/" title="29">29</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-07-07T14:40:27Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, June 27, 2023 - a thing, falling apart</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/27"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/6/27</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, June 27, 2023</h1>
<h2>a thing, falling apart</h2>
<p>(Context: American west, Great Plains, midwest.)</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s something I notice: Buying a fast food hamburger is borderline
impossible a lot of places.</p>
<p>You walk into let&rsquo;s say a McDonalds situated at an interstate exit. There are
giant touch-screen kiosks you&rsquo;re supposed to order from, but even if they&rsquo;re
turned on they don&rsquo;t really work. No one is at the counter, although if you
wait long enough a teenager who doesn&rsquo;t know how to work the register may
appear. Don&rsquo;t try to spend cash; it will snarl the transaction. (Unless the
card reader is down, in which case you will have no choice, but the transaction
will still be snarled.) Wait longer and you may get food, if not exactly the
food you ordered. Odds are it will be grimly inedible: Appalling even by the
standards of early 21st century American franchise burger joints and quite
possibly unsafe to eat.</p>
<p>I hold no brief for the American chain fast food restaurant, but
there&rsquo;s something unsettling about this experience. Like a kind of implicit
contract has come unraveled.</p>
<p>You expected that these institutions were, at root, evil. You knew that they
abused animal life, the environment, the labor pool, and the economy as a whole
to deliver a product which was harmful to its consumers. On the other hand,
you had a feeling that they were <em>functional</em>. Whatever the externalities,
they <em>worked</em> in a sense that would be recognized both by a person in a minivan
at a drive-thru window and a stockholder in an evil megacorporation.</p>
<p>You would be somewhere that might well be a food desert and you would need
calories. A local outcropping of an efficient corporate machine organized &mdash;
ruthlessly and immorally &mdash; by competent people would take some of your money
and give you a paper bag full of food-shaped objects in exchange.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m a pragmatist about roadtrip utility, and I have spent a substantial part of
my life on highways, subsisting on trash from chains and truck stops. Still, I
didn&rsquo;t quite realize how fundamental this system seemed until I found it in
tatters with a carload of sobbing toddlers and exhausted, sleep-deprived
30-somethings in tow.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/food">food</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/systems">systems</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/travel">travel</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/27/" title="27">27</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, June 14, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/6/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, June 14, 2023</h1>
<p>It&rsquo;s midway through a rainy, stormy, cool and clouded June. The river&rsquo;s up,
frothing in a usually-sedate channel. I just pulled a load of laundry off the
line outside, wetter than when I hung it up three days ago, and scattered it
over surfaces inside the house before it could get rained on again.</p>
<p>My garden is yellowing in the moisture and filtered light, battered by hail.
We left town for a few days and the grass tripled in height. Our negligence in
mowing has tiny bees zipping around wildflowers we didn&rsquo;t know were growing.
Green-white flower spiders hide atop the chives. Two days in a row: A double
handful of strawberries, vivid standouts in a bed half consumed by grass,
bindweed, and runaway oregano.</p>
<p>There were grim levels of smoke, for a while, and then it drifted east. A
round of those &ldquo;[city] has among worst air quality in the world&rdquo; headlines. I
expect there to be smoke again before long. Canada is still burning, after
all, and it&rsquo;s only June. There&rsquo;s allergy-generating pollen now. Not as bad as
some years, worse than others. I can breathe, a lot of the time. My eyes itch
but they aren&rsquo;t streaming yet, or burning so much that I just have to close
them and lay down.</p>
<p>I feel like I&rsquo;m suspended for a moment between things that will force me to
hide indoors, only half-able to think, my whole self just rendered useless by
one irritant or another. Part of this I&rsquo;m sure is just the faltering strength
of being 40-something rather than 30-something. The shift in my relative
position with respect to infirmity, the limits of the self and the system it
inhabits, mortality. But then part of it feels like something that&rsquo;s changed
about the world. I suppose because it is.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/6/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-06-27T06:02:26Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, April 14, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/4/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/4/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, April 14, 2023</h1>
<p>The end of this month will make 26 (twenty six) years of this. I posted here
13 times last year. A low number. It included this one about <a href="/2022/2/21">not blogging
much</a>, so I won&rsquo;t bother to repeat it so soon. The state of things
is just, you know, all of that but more. Enough more that I go around
muttering to myself about how quantity is a type of quality.</p>
<p>Sometimes I feel a sense of vertigo, a sense of the world tilting. Sometimes
it&rsquo;s just one thing that does it. Something big that changes on the horizon,
or something small throws it all into relief. But sometimes it&rsquo;s just:
Everything.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/4/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-06-15T04:25:58Z</updated></entry><entry><title>thursday, march 2, 2023</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2023/3/2"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2023/3/2</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>thursday, march 2, 2023</h1>
<p>the way that midmorning<br />
on a tuesday<br />
can be the worst time<br />
to think of weekends<br />
and the distance<br />
from the last one<br />
to the next</p>
<p>the way february's a<br />
bad month to think<br />
back on christmas<br />
and contemplate<br />
september</p>
<p>3:13 in the morning<br />
is a grim interval<br />
in which to see<br />
the bedside numerals,<br />
segments floating red<br />
in the dark over<br />
her shoulder</p>
<p>and remembering the<br />
day past, wonder if<br />
you'll sleep before the<br />
daylight on its way</p>
<p>the threads of this life<br />
weave in and out of<br />
some pattern i cannot see<br />
or they fray at the<br />
edge of a spreading tear</p>
<p>i waver without saying<br />
much, between joy and ---<br />
well, what i cannot say.<br />
a sense of loss or<br />
one of foreboding?</p>
<p>my yesterdays all read<br />
like missed exits<br />
and letters left cruelly<br />
unanswered for years on end<br />
this time of night</p>
<p>i get up to write this<br />
but all the lamps are<br />
too bright for a sleeping<br />
house</p>
<p>so i light a dusty candle<br />
out of the clutter on<br />
my grandma's kitchen table<br />
and half the lines have left me<br />
before i get them to the page</p>
<p>you might imagine better ones<br />
the way i imagine all the<br />
tomorrows i might have made<br />
had i been better then.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/" title="2023">2023</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2023/3/2/" title="2">2</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2023-03-06T20:33:25Z</updated></entry><entry><title>sunday, december 18, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/12/18"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/12/18</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>sunday, december 18, 2022</h1>
<p>driving out east of denver<br />
in the early hours after sunrise<br />
onto the winter plains</p>
<p>frost and haze,<br />
black cattle moving slow<br />
in the muted light</p>
<p>the grass all gold and brown,<br />
the sky all gray and<br />
white, pale blue and</p>
<p>industry bellowing steam<br />
into the layer of smog<br />
just above the horizon</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/12/18/" title="18">18</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, December 7, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/12/7"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/12/7</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, December 7, 2022</h1>
<p>Submitted:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>If you haven&rsquo;t adopted a somewhat science fictional frame of mind in the
last decade or so, you probably don&rsquo;t understand things as well as you
could.</p></li>
<li><p>If you&rsquo;re operating entirely on that basis, you&rsquo;re still probably pretty out
of the loop.</p></li>
</ol>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/12/7/" title="7">7</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>wednesday, november 30, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/11/30"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/11/30</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>wednesday, november 30, 2022</h1>
<p>the blazing light at the edges of the ice on the sidewalk<br />
wakes up something in my mind, some sense of the real<br />
and i tell myself it doesn't mean anything at all<br />
except for snow and sun and everything that entails<br />
but then i guess that's a lot, maybe that's most of it</p>
<p>it's hard to find the world beautiful when it's dying<br />
it's hard to love what you're going to lose<br />
but then if you can't find beauty in what's dying<br />
what else would you find it in at all?</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/11/30/" title="30">30</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>tuesday, november 1, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/11/1"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/11/1</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry">
<h1>tuesday, november 1, 2022</h1>
<p>some days i think<br />
you're only ever<br />
talking to yourself</p>
<p>other days it seems like<br />
we dwell in the<br />
warmth of some<br />
shared understanding</p>
<p>(like there's a <i>we</i>,<br />
all told, lit with the light<br />
of other souls)</p>
<p>it's always fleeting,<br />
too brief, an unstable<br />
configuration</p>
<p>except when it seems<br />
bigger than the whole world</p>
<p>the way a mountain<br />
in the distance<br />
is part of the landscape<br />
while one underfoot<br />
is the whole of it</p>
<p>we're left i guess<br />
unable to agree<br />
what it all meant or<br />
should mean</p>
<p>but i still find myself<br />
reaching for the idea<br />
that it meant<br />
that it means<br />
something</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/11/1/" title="1">1</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>monday, october 17, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/10/17"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/10/17</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>monday, october 17, 2022</h1>
<p>there was one i was trying to write<br />
i had the pieces in my mind<br />
and then the most of them<br />
rattled out to nothing in the<br />
juttering motion of the year</p>
<p>the bit i can remember, it's been<br />
a theme of late, this little mysticism<br />
i'm carrying in my pocket and taking<br />
out now and then to turn over in the light:</p>
<p>an idea of the past<br />
looping back into my life<br />
20 years since i first left home<br />
half a life-so-far ago<br />
cycles and rhymes in the shape of the days<br />
distant lights through the trees</p>
<p>i'm a natural sucker for these minor pareidolias<br />
born to a people who still read the hand of god<br />
in passing birds and the placement of telephone poles</p>
<p>or maybe i just have eyes, once in a while, for<br />
drifts and currents in the way of things<br />
even if i can't say what rocks and channels<br />
give them a shape</p>
<p>either/or i guess</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/10/17/" title="17">17</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, September 21, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/9/21"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/9/21</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, September 21, 2022</h1>
<p>It&rsquo;s late September, and we&rsquo;re back from the big burn, back from bluegrass in
Kansas. Outside the open window of my mud-room office, a light rain is falling
and the temperature drifts towards the 50s. Camping gear and festival stuff is
everywhere. My desk and the adjacent workbench are covered in the detritus of
a month&rsquo;s traveling and unpacking.</p>
<p>(My immediate field of view just below the monitors: 2 Altoids tins (1x actual
mints; 1x weed), a vintage Leatherman tool, a chapstick, 2 lighters, a pile of
dusty stickers, six pens &amp; 2 pencils, $1.42 in change, some ink cartridges,
matchbox, coffee mug, 2 festival wristbands, plastic Snoopy pencil sharpener
dated 1958, microfiber glasses cloth, 2 pill bottles, some washers, 3 packing
checklists, button that says &ldquo;God Bless John Prine&rdquo;, necklace with a tiny
pewter guitar that says &ldquo;THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS&rdquo;, index card that just
says &ldquo;Shit.&rdquo; in large underlined letters, T25 driver bit, some screws, empty
nitrous cartridge, beercan pop tabs, RockyGrass stage schedule.)</p>
<p>I can&rsquo;t find anything. Every time I locate something like a pair of glasses, a
wallet or a keychain goes missing. My phone&rsquo;s been absent since Sunday at the
latest. I think it&rsquo;s probably in a pocket, a plastic tub, the corner of a
rolled-up tent. Odds are decent I&rsquo;ll see it again but I don&rsquo;t know when. I
admitted defeat a few minutes ago and ordered a new one.</p>
<p>Out in the yard, a good-sized buck is sitting under the neighbor&rsquo;s tree. We
made eye contact for a while after I stepped out the back door to watch the
rain. He didn&rsquo;t seem inclined to leave. Later, he&rsquo;ll probably eat more of my
garden.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/9/" title="9">9</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/9/21/" title="21">21</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2022-10-10T19:06:28Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, August 5, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/8/5"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/8/5</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, August 5, 2022</h1>
<p>It&rsquo;s pushing midnight. It&rsquo;s hot and the air is thick. I&rsquo;m sitting on the bed
in my childhood bedroom, eating cold roast beef with Miracle Whip on a
hamburger bun, drinking a Bud Light.</p>
<p>This room has changed since I lived here. The worn-out carpet and the twin
mattress and the computer desk that used to house my Gateway 2000 are long
gone. The shelves are still full of science fiction novels and comic strip
anthologies though, and they&rsquo;ve never painted over all the places I drew on the
walls. The paint is peeling now, water damage from a leak a dozen years ago.</p>
<p>The house here has, in defiance of strict necessity or practicality, grown
substantially since my siblings and I lived here. A series of DIY additions
and renovations have added a window seat here, a family room there, expanded
roof lines, an entire <em>covered walkway</em>. It&rsquo;s excessive, but it&rsquo;s hard to say
it&rsquo;s unjustified. I think the effort keeps them going. It&rsquo;s something like an
art project at this point. Decades of salvage materials and a lifetime of
know-how going back into <em>something</em>, even if it&rsquo;s not strictly the most
necessary thing. You have to keep it moving. You can&rsquo;t just accumulate 2×6s
and daydream, you&rsquo;ve got to build.</p>
<p>A place like this, like anywhere people live, isn&rsquo;t a static fact. It&rsquo;s
<a href="/2014/12/1">something people keep doing</a>.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/8/" title="8">8</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/8/5/" title="5">5</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2022-10-04T04:55:58Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, July 15, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/7/15"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/7/15</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, July 15, 2022</h1>
<p><a href="/2019/12/18">One from 2019</a>.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/7/15/" title="15">15</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2022-07-15T07:14:10Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, June 27, 2022 - aphoristic noodling</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/6/27"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/6/27</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, June 27, 2022</h1>
<h2>aphoristic noodling</h2>
<p>I read <a href="https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/100-things-every-web-developer-should-know/"
title="136 facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to landscape painting or nude modelling">this
post by Baldur Bjarnason</a>, listing "Everything I’ve learned about web development in the almost twenty-five years
I’ve been practising", and <a href="https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2021/the-curious-case-of-the-crashing-conic-gradient/">this
followup</a>, which says:
<blockquote>
<p>Some of the aphorisms ended up not-so-pithy, but it was overall a fun little
experiment that I recommend: note down everything relevant about the craft that
you can think of over the space of a week.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I thought about this, and then I thought: Ok, what exactly is my craft? I
do computer shit. So I started a list about that, challenging myself to be
<i>descriptive</i> about things and not veer too far into pure advice.</p>
<p>A year or so passed, and I noticed this post was still sitting in my "work
in progress" directory. I tried picking it back up and noticed how much
overlap it would have with other posts like these:</p>
<ul>
<li>2013: <a href="/2013/12/4/">on software</a></li>
<li>2014: <a href="/2014/9/6/">language things</a></li>
<li>2015: <a href="/2015/5/5/">YOUR CODE IS TOO COMPLICATED</a>
<li>2019: <a href="/2019/10/5" title="sfe">this entry on the experience of working at SparkFun</a></li>
<li>2021: <a href="/2021/7/21/">rules</a></li>
</ul>
<p>This style of writing is basically catnip to people like me, whether it's of
much use to anyone else or not. This post ultimately felt like a dead end,
because instead of a blog post, it really wants to be some long document where
I collect all sorts of aphorisms, pithy quotes, eponymous laws, and so forth
about technical work and maybe just work generally. Maybe I'll start that
document one of these days.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✯ </p>
<p>Anyway, that very partial and uneven list:</p>
<ol>
<li>Caching is hard to think about and breaks often.
<li>Cleverness in code is generally a sign of danger.
<li>Business ruins everything.
<li>Some forms of interoperability are a trap.
<li>Bad ideas aren't limited to bad people.
<li>Good people aren't limited to good ideas.
<li>An aesthetic is not an ethic.
<li>The customer is usually wrong.
<li>If it's written in:
<ul>
<li>C: It'll work, but I should remember there's a buffer overflow or something.
<li>PHP: It'll probably work, but there's an SQL injection vulnerability somewhere and the cool kids will be shitty about it being PHP.
<li>Python: 50/50 whether it'll just barf stack traces into my terminal for non-obvious reasons.
<li>Ruby: Decent chance I'll wind up reading the source code and cursing at clever Ruby programmers.
<li>Haskell: It works, but I'm not smart enough to understand it.
<li>Rust: Probably works, if they finished writing it. I'm not smart enough to understand the code.
<li>Go: Total crapshoot, but either way I bet the CLI has a bunch of infuriatingly nested subcommands.
<li>JavaScript: Life is too short to deal with whatever package management and runtime I'm supposed to use for this now.
<li>Java: If I have to <i>find out</i> it's Java, I'm probably in trouble.
</ul>
</li>
<li>Lightweight markup languages are fundamentally in tension with the range
of structures that their users will inevitably want to express.
<li>Design, marketing, and management are all real undertakings, but they are
also aggressively self-reproducing ideological systems and political
projects.
<li>Environments within which small tools can be combined to operate on
simple abstractions are powerful. An environment might be what you think of
as an operating system, a programming language, a database, or an
application. All else being equal, the ones that can bridge to other
environments are more powerful.
<li>There are few abstractions in computing more stable than filesystems,
standard IO, text files, and the shell. Boring relational databases aren't
too far behind, but the barriers to entry and data transfer are higher.
<li>Technology is at least as fashion-oriented as the sartorial choices of
highschoolers, actors, and musicians. Changes are driven as much by a desire
for difference from the perceived status quo as anything else.
<li>Technical politics are also organizational, labor, and identity politics.
The currents of power they involve are illegible without taking those factors
into account.
<li>There's no guarantee that your technical preferences will match up with
the ideas, people, or power structures you find agreeable in other domains.
(Or vice versa.)
</ol>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/work">work</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/6/27/" title="27">27</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, May 29, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/5/29"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/5/29</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, May 29, 2022</h1>
<p>One earlier this month from Tyler <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2022/04/30/ive-used-all-the-notebooks/">on notebooks and paper
notes</a>.</p>
<p>This was a reminder that I&rsquo;d been meaning to update <a href="/notes-on-notes">notes on
notes</a> with the current shape of my system. My habits haven&rsquo;t
changed drastically in three years, but I&rsquo;ve made some extensions worth
describing. (In particular, I now make heavy use of the <a href="/2021/1/4/">tagged log
format</a> I wrote about last year. In turn, that&rsquo;s shown me some things
that could be better.)</p>
<p>On a meta level, that document is still mostly boring technical specifics. I&rsquo;d
like it to include more of the <em>why</em> of things, the stuff I&rsquo;ve come to realize
after years of overthinking.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/notebooks">notebooks</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes">notes</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/5/29/" title="29">29</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>wednesday, march 16, 2022</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/3/16"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/3/16</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>wednesday, march 16, 2022</h1>
<p>what's the distance<br />
between a nervous habit<br />
and a ritual tradition?</p>
<p>maybe just time and the collection plate<br />
or how much group dynamics and trappings of<br />
the numinous you can gin up</p>
<p>but i notice how<br />
a lot of us have lost all touch with the latter<br />
while accumulating a distinct excess<br />
of the former</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/3/16/" title="16">16</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2022-03-25T05:48:37Z</updated></entry><entry><title type="html">Monday, February 21, 2022 - why i don't blog much, any more</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/2/21"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/2/21</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, February 21, 2022</h1>
<h2>why i don't blog much, any more</h2>
<p>I read Tyler&rsquo;s <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2022/02/21/why-i-blog/">Why I Blog</a> earlier today, and it reminded me of a
draft I started here back in early January. I thought: These are compelling
reasons to write in public, or at least I used to think so. Then I remembered
I&rsquo;d been been writing about not doing that any more.</p>
<p>I used to. Lately&hellip; Well, prior to a <a href="/2022/2/7">bit about writing on paper</a>
from the 7th, I last posted anything of length here in July. In <a href="/2021">all of
2021</a>, I wrote 19 entries. This is the fewest in any year that I&rsquo;ve had
a blog, including the ones where it lived on GeoCities or still had a tilde in
the URL. Reading back over the year, there&rsquo;s not much weight to any of it. A
few incomplete thoughts. Some rabbitholing on mundane topics. Mostly: Going
through motions and repeating myself.</p>
<p>I could overthink this, but it isn&rsquo;t warranted. The reasons not to write here
are all just themes I&rsquo;ve been repeating at (numbing) length for years:
Self-expression in the open seems like an attack surface. A public record is,
as much as anything, a liability. Kinds of text that once felt liberating now
feel like an embarrassment at best. The internet in general is owned by bad
people and has gone septic as a culture, even as it determines culture as a
whole.</p>
<p>Besides all of that, writing on the internet in 2022 is a lot like photos in
2022: There&rsquo;s just <em>so much</em> of the stuff. It&rsquo;s not just that anything I write
here might be used to train a language model a la <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3">GPT-3</a>, it&rsquo;s that
increasingly it feels like it could be the <em>product</em> of one.</p>
<p>And so it naturally works out that instead of writing more p1k3 entries, I chat
with my friends, post to a handful of people on Mastodon, and take notes in
local files.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✦ </p>
<p>I still feel some kind of an attachment to this. It&rsquo;s my longest-running
project, more or less, and writing here has been a lot of how I sorted out the
world for myself. <a href="/2017/10/16">Back in 2017</a>, I wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the other hand. Writing is one of the only real powers I've ever had,
and the surface of this terrible website is still mine to write on. The web is
dead to me, as a hope or a cause, and the world it's made &mdash; the world
that so many thousands of us helped to make &mdash; is in bad shape and getting
worse. But why should I give up my only real canvas, the only place where I
have any voice at all?</p>
<p>Possibly (almost certainly) having a voice is itself an illusion, irrelevant
to the course of things now. But I guess it's something.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Over time, though, it feels less and less like something. On matters public,
there are infinite voices. The repetition and variation, the algorithmic
swell, is vast. If I have anything to say, someone else is probably saying it
better. At least if it <em>can</em> be said in any useful way. The usefulness of
<em>saying things</em> itself is frequently washed out in the deluge. The
impossibility of communication feels like a defining feature of the age.</p>
<p>The only thing that&rsquo;s left is whatever&rsquo;s particular to my perspective, and it
rarely feels like the networked ebb and flow has a healthy use for that.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✾ </p>
<p>Anyway, I&rsquo;m repeating myself again.</p>
<p>For a while I&rsquo;ve been thinking about changing the structure of this whole site
into something less reverse-chronological, writing something besides the
personal narrative that a blog lends itself to, or just publishing somewhere
away from the public web. Maybe somewhere away from screens altogether. Who
needs Substack when you&rsquo;ve got a laser printer and a roll of stamps?</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not sure what I&rsquo;ll do any different, if anything. It&rsquo;s just hard to let go
of something you&rsquo;ve made at considerable length, even if it isn&rsquo;t worth much,
even if it&rsquo;s just a habit of talking mostly to yourself. Maybe I&rsquo;ll let it lie
fallow for years until I get hit by a bus, or find some better use for the
hosting costs and let it drop off the web without fanfare. Maybe I&rsquo;ll change
my mind about all of this in six months or a decade.</p>
<p>(Of course this is more <a href="/2020/5/20/">meta-whatever</a>.)</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/writing">writing</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/2/21/" title="21">21</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, February 7, 2022 - paper again</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2022/2/7"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2022/2/7</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, February 7, 2022</h1>
<h2>paper again</h2>
<p>What is it that paper has that the computer lacks?</p>
<p>The answer might be humility.</p>
<p>Paper doesn&rsquo;t seek to consume and mediate all things &mdash; or at least the age in
which it did so long ago fell to digital computers, databases, and networks
between them.</p>
<p>Paper forms a part of the world computer, but in so many ways an almost
forgotten part. Uncontested, or nearly so.</p>
<p>If it seemingly offers few features and little apparent leverage compared to
software, then it also makes very few demands. It extracts little from the
user&rsquo;s autonomy and privacy, while remaining transferable, repurposable, cheap,
generic, accessible. It&rsquo;s not subject to platform degradation, malicious
updates, DRM, new rents at vendor whim, or remote code execution
vulnerabilities. There will probably never be a CVE issued for my favorite
brand of paper, and I do not need to assume that three-letter agencies are
automatically indexing its contents with the cooperation of its manufacturer.</p>
<p>What can be expressed on paper is vastly more constrained in many respects, but
limited as it may be, it&rsquo;s also <em>open</em>: To whatever can be expressed through
ink, graphite, scissors, glue, binding, tape, staples, stitches, and filing.
Paper can&rsquo;t embed full motion video or execute complex instructions on my
behalf, but neither are its possibilities bound by the hyper-elaborated
techno-social systems that govern the display of media formats or the
implementation of language runtimes.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ⭒ </p>
<p>There&rsquo;s a line of thinking here that risks the kind of reductive rabbitholing
on a tool fetish you so regularly get from people fixated on a process idea:
People convinced that only plain text will serve as a format for any purpose.
Zettelkasten devotees who will stringently insist that connecting notes remain
grindingly manual. Angry holdouts lecturing mailing lists about the evils of
HTML e-mail while the world conducts its business on Facebook and Slack. That
sort of thing.</p>
<p>All the same, I think there&rsquo;s something to it, just like there&rsquo;s something
vital that motivates a lot of hopeless impulses to digital minimalism and
performative exercises in retrocomputing.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s an age when the computer is the network and the network is a threat &mdash;
simultaneously the only tool for thought and the thing that makes thought
nearly impossible. It&rsquo;s exhausting, enervating, periodically shattering. Its
healthy effects are constantly overshadowed by its pathology. It&rsquo;s owned by
bad people and operated by a fundamentally compromised class of technocrats
whose occasional glimmers of self-awareness can never overwhelm the home truth
of who and what writes their paychecks.</p>
<p>Against this backdrop, other channels of thought can feel like an escape hatch,
respite, a balm, a view of other paths that maybe aren&rsquo;t entirely closed just
yet. Opening a notebook, like going for a walk down by the river or messing
around in a garden or sitting with friends around a campfire somewhere away
from cell reception, can feel like sanity.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✮ </p>
<p>Of course paper is a technology, embedded in an industrial economy: And this,
as usual, is to say that it is an ecological catastrophe. It consumes trees,
soil, and landscapes. It poisons water and air, clogs transport networks and
waste streams, facilitates consumption, and often assists in extending the
control of computerized systems deep into the physical realm.</p>
<p>All the same, in the torrent of junk mail, grocery store fliers, BPA-coated
thermal printer labels &amp; receipts, redundant bills, bank notices, invoices,
address change forms, fast food packages, and all the rest of it &mdash; well, the
handful of notebooks and letters I spend in any given year feel comparatively
benign.</p>
<p>(Drafted on paper.)</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/notebooks">notebooks</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/paper">paper</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/systems">systems</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/writing">writing</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/" title="2022">2022</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2022/2/7/" title="7">7</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Thursday, December 23, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/12/23"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/12/23</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Thursday, December 23, 2021</h1>
<p>It&rsquo;s 2021, and I&rsquo;m sequestered in the guest house at my parents' place, waiting
the results of a COVID-19 test.</p>
<p>When we moved to this property, late in the 1980s, you could still tell it had
once been a prosperous working farmstead on the model of the early 20th
century. Along with wooden barns, corn cribs, machine sheds, and all the rest,
most of it decaying rapidly as pigs rooted around the foundations, there was
this little house. At the time it consisted of two rooms and a partially
enclosed porch. Much of the structure was full of raccoon shit and corn cobs.</p>
<p>Most of the original outbuildings have been gone for 25 years or better. The
little house has been fixed up for guests, deteriorated again, moved a hundred
feet or so, and fixed up a second time. We built a new outhouse once, but it&rsquo;s
plumbed now. Hooked up to the electric, insulated, with new windows and a new
woodstove in one corner. The woodstove burns too hot for a building this size
and my dad&rsquo;s got plans to put in a wall-mounted propane heater.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve always figured, and maybe my parents were once told, that this was the
hired man&rsquo;s house. It would make sense for the patterns around here. I know
the name of a couple families that owned the farm at one time, but I couldn&rsquo;t
guess at who lived in the little house. A lot of the elders around here who
might have had stories are gone now, along with most of the farms that they
inhabited and worked.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/12/23/" title="23">23</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2022-04-09T06:34:43Z</updated></entry><entry><title>thursday, december 2, 2021 - spectra</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/12/2"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/12/2</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>thursday, december 2, 2021</h1>
<h2>spectra</h2>
<p>the richness of the colors<br />
that come early in a deep drought:</p>
<p>sometimes we have a false idea<br />
of the variation within some range<br />
we see as narrow</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/drought">drought</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/12/2/" title="2">2</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>monday, september 20, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/9/20"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/9/20</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>monday, september 20, 2021</h1>
<p>it's always the last day of the festival<br />
you're always packing to go home</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/9/" title="9">9</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/9/20/" title="20">20</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>friday, july 23, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/23"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/7/23</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>friday, july 23, 2021</h1>
<p>one thing i notice<br />
the hotter it gets<br />
the harder it is<br />
to give a shit<br />
about industry &amp; thrift</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/23/" title="23">23</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, July 21, 2021 - rules</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/21"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/7/21</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, July 21, 2021</h1>
<h2>rules</h2>
<p>I was doing the laundry a while ago (I first started writing this in May of
2019), and I got to some stuff where I wasn&rsquo;t sure whether it was <em>actually
dirty</em> and needed a wash, or if I&rsquo;d just tossed it on top of the pile on the
way to the shower one night thinking I&rsquo;d sort it later. Should I trust my past
self to have made a definitive decision that everything in the pile was dirty?
Or did my past self act on the belief that my future self would make informed
decisions about the pile&rsquo;s contents?</p>
<p>In thinking about this, I came to something like a general rule: <em>Minimize the
trust that you need to place in past and future versions of yourself.</em></p>
<p>That is, past-Brennen would have done best to make the decisions about whether
something was dirty instead of deferring them to future-Brennen. And indeed I
washed pretty much everything in the laundry pile because it&rsquo;s easier to assume
past-Brennen was sending a clear signal than to re-evaluate the whole pile, but
I think in more serious situations it&rsquo;s important to always keep in mind that
past-Brennen is at least as likely to have screwed up as now-Brennen.</p>
<p>Ideally, you shouldn&rsquo;t have to make leaps of faith about your past selves'
correctness, and you should operate with an awareness that your future selves
will have a lousy memory and shortages of time/energy to deal with your
unfinished work. Consequently, you should label things, document interfaces,
write tests for your software, put your keys and wallet in the same place every
time they aren&rsquo;t on your person, etc.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❦ </p>
<p>I have to think about that rule and its phrasing for before I add it to my
overall List of Rules, but it has promise. I&rsquo;ve been thinking about rules of
this sort&mdash;aphorisms, rules of thumb, personal commandments, proverbs,
epigrams, whatever&mdash;for a long time. Now and then some phrase or
injunction-to-self will prove itself useful for a while, and the idea of a
personal canon of them seems attractive.</p>
<p>Two that I&rsquo;ve thought about lately: The Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, and my
colleague <a href="https://liw.fi/rules/">Lars&rsquo;s list</a>, quoted here in full:</p>
<blockquote>
<ol>
<li>Always copy and paste a URL.</li>
<li>A will-do attitude trumps skills.</li>
<li>Always ask the simple troubleshooting questions first.</li>
<li>Externalize your memory: write things down, always carry a notebook.</li>
<li>Measure, don't guess.</li>
<li>Write flames, but don't send them.</li>
<li>Always write unit tests for error handling.</li>
<li>Aim for 100% test coverage. You'll never get there, but bugs mostly happen
in the parts without tests.</li>
<li>Don't be late in telling you're late.</li>
<li>If you cannot automate it, make a checklist out of it.</li>
<li>Be careful what you reward, because you will get more of it.</li>
<li>Be careful what you measure, because you will optimize for that.</li>
<li>Don't debate with analogies.</li>
<li>Always indicate time zone explicitly.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>Those are pretty good.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❀ </p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s a crack at the list that&rsquo;s been floating around in my head:</p>
<ul>
<li>Do the dishes.</li>
<li>Only break one law at a time.</li>
<li>Ask the stupid questions early.</li>
<li>Don&rsquo;t deploy on a Friday.</li>
<li>Don&rsquo;t let your gas tank drop below half.</li>
<li>Remember that avoiding temptation is easier than resisting it.</li>
<li>Never mistake an aesthetic for an ethic.</li>
<li>Don&rsquo;t mistake a shared experience for a shared understanding.</li>
<li>Don&rsquo;t trust systems that rely on the benevolence of a few powerful actors.</li>
<li>If you figure it out: Write it down.</li>
<li>If you have to figure it out three times: Automate it.</li>
<li>&ldquo;Read the manual&rdquo; is good advice; &ldquo;write the manual&rdquo; is a moral imperative.</li>
<li>If a server is broken, first make sure that something in <code>/var/log</code> hasn&rsquo;t
filled up the disk.</li>
</ul>
<p>It seems like there should be more of these and they should be pithier, or
something.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/idealogging">idealogging</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/rules">rules</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/21/" title="21">21</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, July 13, 2021 - an appeal to people who sell stuff on the internet</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/13"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/7/13</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, July 13, 2021</h1>
<h2>an appeal to people who sell stuff on the internet</h2>
<p>This is a suggestion that people in business should be better at it. It&rsquo;s a
departure for me, inasmuch as I kind of hate business. All the same, if you
work for or own a company that does e-commerce, build a web site that sells
stuff, etc., this is one is addressed directly to you. (Unless the company /
site we&rsquo;re talking about, is for example, Amazon, in which case my only message
to you is &ldquo;stop that&rdquo;.)</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ☼ </p>
<p>My job doesn&rsquo;t involve selling physical goods on the internet now, but it&rsquo;s
something I spent around a decade on. Since I moved on to other things, it&rsquo;s
been unpleasant to watch so many of the people still doing it become so <em>bad</em>
at it.</p>
<p>Let&rsquo;s start with this: Your job is hard to do well. It was never exactly a
cakewalk, but the whole environment has changed, and mostly not in a way that
favors your chances. Web retail used to be an area where you could stumble
into a growing revenue stream just by having something people wanted and
posting half-decent pictures of it on a barebones shopping cart site.</p>
<p>Now you have to contend with:</p>
<ul>
<li>Amazon&rsquo;s all-devouring maw</li>
<li>Google&rsquo;s adtech protection racket</li>
<li>More and faster competition from a global supply chain</li>
<li>Ubiquitous phones</li>
<li>Facebook, Twitter, Instagram</li>
<li>How you&rsquo;ve probably hired marketing professionals</li>
<li>The grotesque absurdity of contemporary web development tech</li>
<li>&hellip;just all of it, really.</li>
</ul>
<p>I mostly wrote code for a living, but that meant I got to see the moving parts
of a web retail business: Product design, purchasing, manufacturing, inventory
control and catalog management, content marketing, customer service and
technical support, picking/packing/shipping, fraud prevention, taxes,
regulatory compliance, etc. I know there&rsquo;s a <em>lot</em> that might live behind any
given shopping cart icon.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✺ </p>
<p>Still, here I am. I buy things on the web: Electronics, computers, audio gear,
notebooks, pens, tools, books, music, concert tickets. I feel bad when I give
money to Amazon. I don&rsquo;t operate under an illusion that your business is
ethical, because mostly businesses are unethical, but all the same I would
rather pay smaller organizations. Maybe your employees seem better treated,
maybe I want to support manufacturing where you&rsquo;re located, maybe I just like
your product.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s 2021, and I am a person with money who might like to give you some of it.
Help me to help you.</p>
<p>What I want:</p>
<ul>
<li>To give you money in return for a thing</li>
<li>To know up front what the thing costs</li>
<li>To see clear pictures and a description of the thing I&rsquo;m buying, including
relevant technical specs</li>
<li>To have the thing shipped to me</li>
<li>To know where to ask for help if something goes wrong with getting the thing</li>
</ul>
<p>Things I won&rsquo;t mind along the way if you manage not to louse it up:</p>
<ul>
<li>Reading some reviews of the thing from your other customers</li>
<li>Showing me the similar things you have for sale</li>
<li>Getting an e-mail when I place the order and one when it ships (but seriously like 2
e-mails, no I don&rsquo;t want your newsletter)</li>
</ul>
<p>What I do not want:</p>
<ul>
<li>To load dozens of actively hostile 3rd-party spyware services</li>
<li>To figure out which half dozen actively hostile 3rd-party spyware services I need to
tell my adblocker to ignore for your site to work</li>
<li>To discover much later that my order has been silently canceled without notification</li>
<li>To drive an hour to retrieve my order at a distribution center because you shipped it
to an undeliverable address</li>
<li>To be remarketed at, anywhere, ever</li>
<li>To install an actively hostile mobile app in order to access and/or transfer
ownership of the thing I purchased</li>
<li>To give up and buy the thing on Amazon because your website doesn&rsquo;t work</li>
<li>To like and subscribe</li>
<li>To fill out a survey</li>
<li>To know I&rsquo;m being A/B tested</li>
<li>To engage with your brand</li>
<li>Just about anything the marketing professionals you hired probably want</li>
</ul>
<p>To a first approximation and as best I can figure it out, <a href="/2019/10/5">the
business</a> I know the most about took off because some people in
college stumbled into a growing revenue stream by way of posting decent
pictures of stuff or whatever. As it grew, it was built and operated by a
bunch of mostly-20-something stoners and freaks, most with scant experience.</p>
<p>I know it&rsquo;s grim out there, but it keeps surprising me in 2021 just how
thoroughly almost everyone seems to have thrown up their hands in defeat. A
decade ago, us misfit toys were halfway competent at this. Now what happens is
the laptop fans spin furiously in order to show me a giant popover about the 16
ways you want to abuse my privacy while a couple layers of video try to play in
the background and the infinitely scrolling gallery of product photos fails to
load correctly for some reason, the little counters on the adblocker widgets
ticking ever upward. Later, you cancel my order but neglect to mention it to
me. The second time I place an order, you send it to an address I told you not
to use and I have to figure out which giant FedEx building a county over has
ahold of it. When I finally open the box, a cable is missing. Soon afterwards
I realize I&rsquo;ve been subscribed to your newsletter.</p>
<p>As the cast of <em>Letterkenny</em> would say: Figure it out.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/business">business</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/7/13/" title="13">13</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>wednesday, june 2, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/6/2"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/6/2</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>wednesday, june 2, 2021</h1>
<p>sure the self dissipates and hollows<br />
and all dignity is temporary at best<br />
while memory itself will betray you<br />
at every turn</p>
<p>but all the same, if you're lucky,<br />
you'll look back sometimes<br />
across the sweep of time<br />
and discover there was some extraordinary freedom<br />
even in places you once read as trapped and lonely</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/6/2/" title="2">2</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2021-07-14T05:45:07Z</updated></entry><entry><title>tuesday, april 27, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/27"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/4/27</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>tuesday, april 27, 2021</h1>
<p>there was a flood once,<br />
and then it was years before<br />
the sound of rain on a roof<br />
for more than a few minutes<br />
stopped being a reminder i didn't want</p>
<p>you'd see it in the people who<br />
were there &mdash; one of those rare wet<br />
days would set in and they'd<br />
get a little nervous around the eyes</p>
<p>last summer we patched together the<br />
failing gutters on this old house<br />
and added a section or two</p>
<p>it was shoddy work and the lesson i<br />
learned about gutters is next time<br />
i'll hire it done, but they carry water<br />
down to the ground better than before</p>
<p>now, nearing midnight, it's been raining<br />
steady since before sundown<br />
i can hear it streaming through those<br />
aluminum troughs, probably pooling in<br />
the low spots i can't figure out how<br />
to build up, trickling down into the<br />
crawlspace we'll have to fix for real<br />
one of these seasons</p>
<p>and what i feel is just the old midwestern<br />
calm of a roof overhead in weather<br />
the quiet pleasure of being alive in a world<br />
that's happening at some greater scale than mine</p>
<p>the grass all lifting up to meet it<br />
the birds waiting to make riot at dawn<br />
the rabbits huddled under the scrubby<br />
trees in the fenceline</p>
<p>just rain on the roof.<br />
i'll take it.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/27/" title="27">27</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, April 12, 2021 - software as government</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/12"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/4/12</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, April 12, 2021</h1>
<h2>software as government</h2>
<p>I&rsquo;m sketching an incomplete thought here. For context:</p>
<ul>
<li>GitHub eating open source, Microsoft eating GitHub. Google eating
e-mail, the web, corporate communications. Apple with its infinite dollars
and stranglehold on a class of users with deep, identity-defining emotional
attachments to its stuff. All the usual monopoly-and-aspiring-monopoly stuff.</li>
<li>The totality of cloud computing&rsquo;s ideological and conceptual triumph in
the space of a decade, to the point where people tend to view a business
that owns servers and runs stuff on them instead of renting them from an
approved megacorporation as aberrant and maybe kind of offensive.</li>
<li><a href="/2021/3/23/">RMS and the Free Software Foundation&rsquo;s apparent ongoing collapse</a></li>
<li>A few years' experience working for a technical nonprofit embedded in a
large community.</li>
<li>The way most of the general-purpose computers are phones now, and how much
less general purpose they&rsquo;re looking these days.</li>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❃ </p>
<p>So, the recurring thought: <strong>A lot of the things that people gravitate towards
or become dependent on in software are effectively governments.</strong></p>
<p>That is, partly, things which:</p>
<ul>
<li>Build and maintain infrastructure</li>
<li>Create / enforce standards</li>
<li>Police at least some kinds of bad actor</li>
<li>Extract rents / taxes</li>
<li>Provide employment to a class of technocrats</li>
<li>Provide frameworks for cultural affiliation</li>
<li>Express or enact aspects of the civic religion</li>
</ul>
<p>While often what a lot of us in FOSS / digital rights / free knowledge circles
are striving for is some combination, depending on priors and priorities, of:</p>
<ul>
<li>Software anarchism - things that don&rsquo;t require government, operate outside of
it, or actively defy it</li>
<li>Mutual aid</li>
<li>Certain kinds of resource sharing and cooperation between entities that
are effectively (and sometimes literally) competing governments</li>
<li>Better governance</li>
</ul>
<p>There are thus contradictions that arise:</p>
<ol>
<li> Within those aims</li>
<li> Between those aims and the dominant forms of power</li>
<li> Between those aims and the needs / wants / habits of users</li>
</ol>
<p>#2 is sort of a given, though we could do with a lot more self-awareness about
just how much our work is the foundation of now-dominant powers. #1 and #3
bear more thinking about.</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s nothing new here, and I suppose it rhymes with stuff I&rsquo;ve been saying
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2013/12/4/" title="on software">for</a> a
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/14/" title="the world computer: a marginally coherent bathtub rant">while</a>.
The frame, though, feels like recognizing something I&rsquo;ve been bad at looking
at directly.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/free-software">free-software</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/idealogging">idealogging</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/politics">politics</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/12/" title="12">12</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title type="html">Sunday, April 11, 2021 - observations on gear nerdery & utility fetishism, 2021 edition</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/11"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/4/11</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, April 11, 2021</h1>
<h2>observations on gear nerdery &amp; utility fetishism, 2021 edition</h2>
<ol>
<li><p>In most settings, a big van covers about 70% of the utility afforded by a
pickup truck, plus you can sleep in it and the stuff inside won&rsquo;t get rained
on.</p></li>
<li><p>Before you buy or gift a synthesizer, remember that owning a synthesizer is
like having a little robot voice whispering in your ear about how cool it
would be to own <em>more and better</em> synthesizers and synthesizer accessories.
(The voice isn&rsquo;t necessarily wrong, but it will never be satisfied.)</p></li>
<li><p>However many audio cables you think you&rsquo;re going to need, double it and add
one for good measure.</p></li>
<li><p>Whatever comes after USB-C, I&rsquo;m already mad about it.</p></li>
<li><p>In 2021, the primary determinant of what power tool you&rsquo;re going to buy is
usually whatever brand of lithium batteries you already own a bunch of.</p>
<p>It took concerted effort by some very smart people to create a situation
this thoroughly stupid. I&rsquo;d boycott the whole market if I didn&rsquo;t already
own a bunch of tools encased in yellow plastic and dislike messing with
extension cords.</p></li>
<li><p>My Casio G-Shock still works great.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Previously:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="2011/8/30/">recent observations on gear nerdery &amp; utility fetishism</a> (2011)</li>
<li><a href="/2012/4/12/">more observations on gear nerdery &amp; utility fetishism</a> (2012)</li>
</ul>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/synthesizers">synthesizers</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/usb">usb</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/4/11/" title="11">11</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, March 24, 2021 - the weather</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/24"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/3/24</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, March 24, 2021</h1>
<h2>the weather</h2>
<p><em>Written back in March, posted 2021-07-14. Discusses a mass shooting.</em></p>
<p>I moved out of Boulder almost a decade ago. Writing this now, I don&rsquo;t remember
if I thought I was making a decision about <em>leaving Boulder</em>. I think I
figured I&rsquo;d be back sooner or later. I was just getting worn out on living in
basements, my landlords upstairs were about to have a baby, and it seemed like
time to make a change. When I went to look, it turned out I could rent a
massive old 3 bedroom house in one of the L-towns for what a decent
above-ground apartment was running in Boulder.</p>
<p>When I left, the exodus of most people I knew in town was just getting
underway. The stuff that made it permanent seems pretty concrete and
inescapable now, but it accumulated gradually. One formulaic conversation
about real estate and the money moving in at a time; the same story as every
other place in America that people from somewhere else want to live.</p>
<p>Looking back on it now, those two years in a basement in South Boulder were the
best that town ever treated me. Martian Acres, with Martin Park for a back
yard. The bike path all the way out to Gunbarrel for work, or jamming onto the
crowded bus up Broadway. Beers at the Southern Sun, breakfast at the Walnut
Cafe to go with the hangovers.</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s nothing much <em>extraordinary</em> about that part of town. As far as I
know, it&rsquo;s just 1950s and 60s development that grew into something lived in.
Cheap little ranch houses on irrationally curving streets. It felt a little
more real than the places the money had completely eaten by then, and by virtue
of that reality also maybe a little weirder in the way things around here are
<em>supposed</em> to be weird. They get fewer by the year, but Boulder as I knew it
was a place of little pocket-universe neighborhoods. You&rsquo;d find yourself in
some hidden corner and think: This is how it used to be. This is why people
keep coming back.</p>
<p>People in that part of town were good to me. It&rsquo;s the part I always feel like
I can still imagine living in.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✢ </p>
<p>There are things you remember about a neighborhood. Mundane but also defining.
I wind up with strong opinions about grocery stores. The Table Mesa one was my
favorite King Soopers around here. Nice produce selection, friendly people at
the checkout.</p>
<p>A couple of days ago, a guy walked in the door there and shot ten people to
death with, most probably, an AR-15 knockoff. Nobody I know died, though I was
as worried about that as I&rsquo;ve ever been during one of these.</p>
<p>Some unbelievable asshole was streaming from the parking lot on YouTube during
all of this. I watched more of it than I feel good about, with a more acute
version of that same sick dread you feel when a tornado is bearing down on
somewhere you know.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✾ </p>
<p>This is the weather in America. If you live in a place where the violence is
usually at a distance, you put it in the mental background. You figure today
probably isn&rsquo;t the day a mass murder hits while you&rsquo;re picking up groceries or
going to work. Most days aren&rsquo;t. You&rsquo;d take sensible precautions but there
aren&rsquo;t any to take. It&rsquo;s like living in tornado alley, but you can&rsquo;t look for
a house with a basement.</p>
<p>I hate my country.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/boulder">boulder</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/colorado">colorado</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/violence">violence</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/24/" title="24">24</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, March 23, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/23"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/3/23</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, March 23, 2021</h1>
<p>The RMS thing has come up again. I wrote at some length about this back <a href="/2019/10/20/">in
October of 2019</a>. I felt messed up about it then, and I still
do. If anybody wants or needs my opinions, they haven&rsquo;t changed much since I
wrote that piece.</p>
<p>Anyway, I signed <a href="https://github.com/rms-open-letter/rms-open-letter.github.io/blob/main/index.md">the open letter</a>. I could quibble with aspects of
the demands there, but I guess this feels like a necessary push right now. A
lot of friends and colleagues are on that list, and it seems like for the right
reasons.</p>
<p>I don&rsquo;t want to see the Free Software Foundation destroyed. I would very much
like to see it saved from some of the worst impulses in this scene. If that
can&rsquo;t happen, then we as a community probably need to stop treating the FSF as
a useful proxy for the radical libre software position and put that effort,
time, and money into less damaged undertakings.</p>
<p>At any rate: I won&rsquo;t personally renew my membership with the FSF until, and
unless, meaningful changes are made.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/free-software">free-software</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/richard-stallman">richard-stallman</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/23/" title="23">23</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, March 14, 2021 - reading: a desolation called peace</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/3/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, March 14, 2021</h1>
<h2>reading: a desolation called peace</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.arkadymartine.net/a-desolation-called-peace-press-publicity"><em>A Desolation Called Peace</em></a>, Arkady Martine, Tor Books, March 2021.</p>
<p>The followup to <em>A Memory Called Empire</em>, which I <a href="/2020/11/13/">read in November of last
year</a>. More overtly Space Opera in its plot mechanics and fantasy
physics, but digs deeper into the first novel&rsquo;s most interesting ideas, and
pays off all over the place. Doubled themes of memory, language,
theory-of-mind, small cultures surviving at great cost in the face of larger
ones, cultures and polities transformed by what they attempt to subsume.</p>
<p>I have marginal notes like &ldquo;this is so fucking good&rdquo; in a couple of places. If
this is a <em>kind</em> of thing you enjoy, you will very likely enjoy this instance
of it.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/arkady-martine">arkady-martine</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/books">books</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, March 3, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/3"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/3/3</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, March 3, 2021</h1>
<p>We loved computers: That&rsquo;s a simplification, almost a category error. What
happened is we found computers, we got on the network, and before long we lived
as much inside the possibility space of computing as we did anywhere else.</p>
<p>Maybe what we got wrong is this: From the beginning, computers appeared to us
as a kind of liberation. Because we were young and our horizons were close, we
mistook the ways they opened the world to us for their most important quality.
What we couldn&rsquo;t see then was that they were born as instruments of the
oppressor, and would help us become the same.</p>
<p>Even when we grasped that the scaffolding of computation came from power, when
we were running free around those systems we felt like we understood their real
purpose in a way that the institutions that built and purchased them couldn&rsquo;t.
Nevermind that they couldn&rsquo;t exist without an industrial economy, ranked tiers
of exploited workers, and a relentlessly degraded environment.</p>
<p>Computation was a power that we could see how to take for ourselves. It
unfolded in front of us in a way that the authorities in our lives could, for
the most part, barely even perceive. Sometimes they&rsquo;d glimpse it and lash out
in fear or contempt. We mistook their fear for a sign we were on the right
track.</p>
<p>And maybe some of us were, for a while. But we didn&rsquo;t understand that what
power serves is usually power itself.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/3/3/" title="3">3</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2021-03-04T05:31:45Z</updated></entry><entry><title>sunday, february 28, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/2/28"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/2/28</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>sunday, february 28, 2021</h1>
<p>in the transient world<br />
nothing is incorruptible<br />
except perhaps corruption itself</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/2/28/" title="28">28</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>sunday, february 14, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/2/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/2/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>sunday, february 14, 2021</h1>
<p>days and days into weeks and weeks and months<br />
and months go by with all the variation of<br />
fenceposts outside a car window<br />
on a road through western kansas</p>
<p>and then it's the late winter again<br />
in february, we finally get a stretch<br />
of cold weather</p>
<p>i leave my desk and go out for a walk one day<br />
and see a coyote hunting prairie dogs in the<br />
grass, a bald eagle looking down over the<br />
half-frozen saint vrain</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/2/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, January 26, 2021 - reading: the steerswoman (series)</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/26"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/1/26</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, January 26, 2021</h1>
<h2>reading: the steerswoman (series)</h2>
<p>These are by Rosemary Kirstein, and available as e-books <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/byseries/13953">on
Smashwords</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>The Steerswoman</em></li>
<li><em>The Outskirter&rsquo;s Secret</em></li>
<li><em>The Lost Steersman</em></li>
<li><em>The Language of Power</em></li>
</ul>
<p>I came across these by way of <a href="https://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2019/03/20/0">a blog post by Sumana Harihareswara</a>, I
think with my ambient sense that I should read them enhanced by <a href="https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-345-46105-3a.html">a review by
Russ Allbery</a> and a blurb from Jo Walton.</p>
<p>On first inspection, <em>The Steerswoman</em> is a particular and familiar sort of
fantasy with one or two mildly interesting conceits. It quickly becomes
something deeper than that, and after working through all four in the space of
a couple of weeks, I&rsquo;d rank them with the classics of their genre.</p>
<p>This is an unfinished series, the first of which was published in 1989, with a
whole lot of unresolved questions. I normally try not to encourage people to
take up this kind of thing; most readers of speculative fiction have been
burned by <em>some</em> long-running series or another by now. I&rsquo;ll make an exception
for this one: I eagerly await the concluding volumes, but even if they&rsquo;re
never published, the first four are all worth the time.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/books">books</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/rosemary-kirstein">rosemary-kirstein</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/the-steerswoman">the-steerswoman</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/" title="1">1</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/26/" title="26">26</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>wednesday, january 20, 2021</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/20"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/1/20</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>wednesday, january 20, 2021</h1>
<p>somewhere a little after 10pm<br />
a mandolin, amplified loud enough for<br />
most of town to hear it<br />
plays a triumphant instrumental.<br />
and then a single firework</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/" title="1">1</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/20/" title="20">20</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2021-01-21T05:36:56Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, January 4, 2021 - keeping a log: 9 months / ~1k entries in</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/4"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/1/4</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, January 4, 2021</h1>
<h2>keeping a log: 9 months / ~1k entries in</h2>
<p>Previously: <a href="/2017/1/22">org mode, vimwiki, timeslice</a>.</p>
<p>Mechanisms inspired directly by: A <a href="http://demo-journal.liw.fi/">demo</a> &amp; talk
from Lars Wirzenius on his <a href="https://ikiwiki.info/">ikiwiki</a>-based external
brain and journal; fediverse discussion of the <a href="https://orgmode.org/">Org mode</a>
agenda; and possibly too much <a href="/2020/7/27/">reading about the Zettelkasten</a>.</p>
<p>Back in March, in the throes of a bunch of <a href="/zettelkasten">rabbitholing about
note-taking</a>, I roughed out a system for keeping short,
granular log entries in my VimWiki. I agonized for quite a while about how to
do this before deciding to start with the stupidest thing that could possibly
work.</p>
<p>The short version is that I have a hotkey to create datestamped files in
a <code>log/</code> directory, like these:</p>
<pre><code>./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-2033-33.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-1719-51.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-1516-18.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-0914-03.wiki
./vimwiki/log/2021-01-04-0142-59.wiki
</code></pre>
<p>A new entry opens with a template like the following:</p>
<pre><code>%date 2021-01-04 21:46:40.056011313-07:00
%title
</code></pre>
<p>I then give the entry a human-readable title, links to relevant topics, and as
much text description as seems useful. A typical entry looks something like:</p>
<pre><code>%date 2020-12-11 16:49:51.356943342-07:00
%title Configuring digiKam again
[[/configuration]] [[/photos]] [[/digikam]]
Digging around in the guts of an old `digikam4.db`. Changed the album root to
point to the new path in `~/workspace/photos`.
</code></pre>
<p>Then, when I&rsquo;m viewing a topic page like <code>digikam</code> or <code>photos</code>, I can press
another hotkey to pull up a window with any linked log entries. When I&rsquo;m
viewing the diary page for a given day, a bit of shell boilerplate shows me
all the log entries for that date.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❉ </p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve elaborated on this all a bit since March, but the underpinnings are still
just a few hundred lines of hacky scripting and Vim configuration. Before I put any
work into cleaning it up, I thought I&rsquo;d try to outline some stuff I&rsquo;ve learned.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ll use the time-honored form of &ldquo;answers to questions no one has actually
asked me&rdquo;:</p>
<p><strong>Why a log?</strong> Because in taking notes, I&rsquo;m worried about two dimensions:
Subject matter and time. A single flat wiki namespace can be workable for
navigating the <em>who/what/where</em>, but it&rsquo;s lousy for navigating the <em>when</em>.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve also spent a lot of my life keeping logbooks, looking at logfiles on
computers, writing a journal, and publishing a datestamped blog. At Wikimedia,
I&rsquo;ve been particularly impressed by how useful the <a href="https://sal.toolforge.org/production">server admin logs</a>
are, and I pretty much live and die by command-line history and bookmarks.
It&rsquo;s a notion with an overwhelming amount of precedent in my life.</p>
<p><strong>What distinguishes a log entry from any other wiki page?</strong> Its placement in
the <code>log/</code> namespace and a handful of formatting conventions.</p>
<p><strong>Was this actually a good way to approach the problem?</strong> Yeah, I think so,
with caveats.</p>
<p><strong>Is the implementation sound?</strong> Not by miles, but it holds up better than I
expected. Eventually the flat directory structure will get cumbersome in the
shell, and grepping through files like I&rsquo;m doing some places might get less
practical.</p>
<p><strong>How are the ergonomics?</strong> Not <em>that</em> bad, but there should be as few
keystrokes as possible involved in writing a new entry, and this doesn&rsquo;t quite
cut it.</p>
<p><strong>What&rsquo;s a good fit for this kind of log entry?</strong> Finding a new piece of
software, writing a letter, taking notes on a meeting, setting up or
decommissioning a piece of gear, finishing a book, garden/yard work, house and
vehicle maintenance, phone calls, general life events, sysadmin work, etc.</p>
<p><strong>What&rsquo;s not?</strong> The single thing I&rsquo;ve done the most of that probably makes the
least sense in this format is logging individual expenses and financial
transactions. This has been useful enough to convince me that tracking what
I&rsquo;m doing with money is a good idea, but clunky enough that I&rsquo;ve learned stuff
like &ldquo;paid the mortgage&rdquo; and &ldquo;bought groceries&rdquo; should be structured,
query-able data. The most that I have to bash out with a keyboard in that
context should be an annotation on a specific record or group of records.
That&rsquo;s not to say I&rsquo;m thrilled at the prospect of keeping a rigorous
double-entry ledger that balances out for every transaction in my life, but I
can see the appeal in a way I couldn&rsquo;t really before.</p>
<p>This generalizes I guess: A lot of the history I care about lives in
structured, formal-ish systems like version control, banking, various databases
&mdash; and other parts of it <em>should</em>. Like sometimes I log specific weather
events, but usually when I want to know about weather in the past, what I&rsquo;d
really like is a way to quickly aggregate a bunch of data points.</p>
<p>That points at two categories of &ldquo;log entry&rdquo;: The loosely-typed human-readable
kind that make sense as wiki pages, and the granular, highly-structured and
repetitive kind that make more sense in something like a database table. Then
there&rsquo;s a third that doesn&rsquo;t quite fit in either box. Sometimes I paste a
lengthy shell transcript into a log entry, for example, and while that&rsquo;s more
or less fine, it points at a gap in the tools I use. It would be way nicer
just to push a button when I&rsquo;m doing something in the terminal that it&rsquo;s
important to remember exactly, and then it can record until I tell it to stop
and let me add some tags and a summary to the session.</p>
<p><strong>So what next?</strong> Well, I&rsquo;ve arrived at something I&rsquo;m going to keep using.
I&rsquo;d miss it if I quit, and it&rsquo;s easy to accumulate a useful record this way. I
might clean up the mess a bit and package its components as a VimWiki addon.
After that, I&rsquo;m going to spackle more stupidest-things-that-could-possibly-work
on top to augment it, and think about more ways to surface and integrate other
parts of the meta-log that are scattered all over the systems I use.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/data">data</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/logging">logging</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes">notes</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/vimwiki">vimwiki</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/" title="1">1</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/4/" title="4">4</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-26T00:08:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Saturday, January 2, 2021 - reading in 2020 (books edition)</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/2"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/1/2</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Saturday, January 2, 2021</h1>
<h2>reading in 2020 (books edition)</h2>
<p>As I <a href="/2021/1/1">look over the set of books I&rsquo;ve piled up in my house</a>, the
other thing that strikes me is that, in the years these books have been
accumulating, both the relationship of books to the culture and the nature of
reading itself have been rearranged. Like I <a href="/2018/1/1/">wrote three years
ago</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Because really what I read in 2017, in most of the last several years, was
the internet. Not even, in any real sense that registers, individual
documents hosted on the network, or the work of authors I can clearly
identify. Just the endless scroll.</p></blockquote>
<p>&hellip;it&rsquo;s like that but more so, now.</p>
<p>The last book I read in 2020 was Kim Stanley Robinson&rsquo;s <em>The Ministry for the
Future</em>, which has this bit (chapter 30):</p>
<blockquote><p>So how you feel about your time is partly or even largely a result of that
time’s structure of feeling. When time passes and that structure changes, how
you feel will also change— both in your body and in how you understand it as a
meaning. Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet
massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious
contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time
quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way
to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too
will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is
itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally
recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the
reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely
always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all.</p></blockquote>
<p>The moment&rsquo;s structure of feeling has changed, and you can tell it in just
about every text you encounter. It&rsquo;s also pretty hard to stop encountering
texts even if you want to. The stuff is inescapable and much of it has a
quality of self-replicating churn that makes me feel kind of queasy about the
entire enterprise of human thought.</p>
<p>I wonder if it felt something like this when literacy really took off as a
technology in the first place.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✢ </p>
<p>Anyhow, what booklike objects did I read this past year?</p>
<p><strong>February</strong>: I ordered a copy of Sönke Ahrens' <em>How to Take Smart Notes</em>.
Note-taking was on my mind a lot over the course of the year, and I spent too
much time reading other people&rsquo;s ideas about it. By July I managed to post
some <a href="zk">notes on the idea of the Zettelkasten</a> that serves as a partial
review / summary of <em>Smart Notes</em> and related things.</p>
<p><strong><a href="/2020/5/14">May</a></strong>: I binged my way through Martha Wells' <a href="https://www.marthawells.com/murderbot.htm"><em>Murderbot
Diaries</em></a>. Popcorn SF, socially anxious heart-of-gold protagonist.
I started <em>The Elephant in the Cornfield: The Politics of Agriculture and
Climate Change</em>, by Chris Clayton, which I should probably revisit.</p>
<p><strong><a href="/2020/10">October</a></strong>: <a href="/2020/10/9">Meghan O'Gieblyn&rsquo;s <em>Interior
States</em></a> (essays), <a href="/2020/10/11">Vanessa Veselka&rsquo;s <em>The Great Offshore
Grounds</em></a> (a novel), <a href="/2020/10/12">Ron Chernow&rsquo;s <em>Grant</em></a>
(biography). The first two were quite good and I still haven&rsquo;t finished the
Grant biography.</p>
<p><strong>November</strong>: <a href="/2020/11/13">Arkady Martine&rsquo;s <em>A Memory Called Empire</em></a>, first of a
trilogy. The first two of a trilogy by <a href="eden-robinson">Eden Robinson</a>: <em>Son of
a Trickster</em> and <em>Trickster Drift</em>. All recommended.</p>
<p><strong>December</strong>: <em>Trail of Lightning</em>, Rebecca Roanhorse. I liked some characters
and scenes and ideas in this, and didn&rsquo;t exactly love it as a novel. Mileage
might vary.</p>
<p>And then <em>The Ministry for the Future</em>. Near future SF, barely a novel at all
for a lot of its length. A book that seems more deliberately pitched to be
read <em>right now</em> than a lot of short-shelf-life fiction is just by accident.
Among other things, it&rsquo;s partly an argument that the end of ecocidal capitalism
is achievable, partly a claim that eco-terrorist violence is likely (and quite
possibly necessary) as the climate struggle intensifies, and partly a fantasy
that cryptocurrency might have some kind of pro-social role to play in
engineering a survivable economy. I will be thinking about this one for a
while.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/books">books</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/climate">climate</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/murderbot">murderbot</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/" title="1">1</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/2/" title="2">2</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, January 1, 2021 - shelves</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/1"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2021/1/1</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, January 1, 2021</h1>
<h2>shelves</h2>
<p>I rearranged my office back in mid-December. This is always tricky because we
have more stuff (hand-me-down furniture, old computers, bins full of
electronics) than we really have house to put it in. As per usual one thing
led to another and I wound up moving all of my books.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve finally got just enough room to shelve most of them again, thanks to
secondhand bookshelves and a partner who went on a building spree for her own
collection over the summer. It&rsquo;s been a couple of houses since they were
anything like organized, though. Half of them have been trapped behind a cat
tree and an armchair for years.</p>
<p>I went for alpha-by-author ordering, with a handful of category exceptions:
Poetry, reference works, religious texts, computer stuff, a bottom shelf for
the oversized volumes. It&rsquo;s a mess because I&rsquo;m doubling up to fit everything
and the books are wildly different sizes. I can see one of the flimsier sets
of shelves coming apart under the load as I type this, and the U&ndash;Z stacks
are still sitting on the bedroom floor because I ran out of space.</p>
<p>So it&rsquo;s imperfect, but it&rsquo;s also really the first comprehensive view I&rsquo;ve had
of this set of books since I was 6 or 7 years younger and it was a much smaller
set. It&rsquo;s kind of a strange experience.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✥ </p>
<p>From the time I started reading on my own until pretty far into college, I
lived in books. As a kid I read and re-read my dad&rsquo;s pile of genre paperbacks,
thrived on trips to the library, spent hours arranging things on shelves, was
always in the process of reading <em>something</em>. Once my friends and I could
drive, it meant I could go to B. Dalton and Waldenbooks before we saw whatever
the movie was that week. Eventually the internet started to tell me about
writers and my personal canon expanded slowly outward, one novel-length trip at
a time. It felt so weird to leave a book unfinished that until at least my
early 20s I could remember everything I&rsquo;d ever bailed on (a <em>Hardy Boys</em>
mystery with a scene containing a skeleton that wigged me out, the copy of
<em>Cujo</em> that my mom got banned from the school library after I accidentally left
it where she could find it, &hellip;).</p>
<p>The books I have physically to hand in middle adulthood are a different kind of
animal. There are, sure, beloved volumes from childhood, things that have
changed how I think, the kinds of books I go to for solace and perspective.
But looking at the whole spread, I&rsquo;m honestly not sure I&rsquo;ve even read more than
half of this stuff.</p>
<p>Some of it I read but hated, or liked fine but never actually finished. There
must be 30 lbs of assigned reading I&rsquo;ve been lugging around since college. A
dozen literary relics of relationships (romantic or otherwise) that have been
defunct for many multiples of the brief time they existed. Detritus like the
copy of Jordan Peterson&rsquo;s <em>12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos</em> that I
bought used and hate-read for reasons that now escape me but must surely
reflect poorly on my character. Books about math that I own because I liked
the idea of being a person who would read them. Poets who just leave me with a
sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. Things that looked mildly interesting
on the book swap shelf at a coffeeshop I frequented in 2003, but which are in
fact bad. I have a copy of <em>Battlefield Earth</em> for some reason. (It was
probably on the free table at SparkFun.)</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s at least as much dross in this collection as there is gold waiting to
be found, and then it&rsquo;s funny how much of it belongs to some now-distant idea
of who I was &mdash; or wanted to be &mdash; as a reader or a thinker or a
person in general.</p>
<p>I suppose all of that&rsquo;s pretty normal for a stack of books sitting around going
into one&rsquo;s 5th decade. If you hold still for very long in this culture, stuff
accumulates around you, and plenty of it outlasts the parts of your life that
it attached to in the first place. A library is a kind of memory and an index
to memory, but what it remembers can often be strangely fractured and unevenly
focused across time. Not unlike the way things actually go in a given life I
guess.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✣ </p>
<p>Still and all: I haven&rsquo;t let go of the idea of a personal library, and I doubt
I will.</p>
<p>Putting this stuff on shelves makes me think of what it was like at 10 or 12
years of age, crouching on the floor halfway through reordering a stack of
paperbacks, accidentally caught up in reading <em>The Green Hills of Earth</em> or
<em>The Call of the Wild</em> over again. It also reminds me of what it was like at
21, wandering deep in the stacks of a big university research library: All
those weird pathways and strange wonders. Outcroppings of the sublime or the
sturdily useful in the most unexpected places, amidst treacherous pools of
boredom and fossilized nonsense. All the times I intersected with some
decades-old choice in curation and bounced off of it as a slightly different
person.</p>
<p>I think a library should be a refuge, but it should also be something with the
capacity to surprise and unsettle you. Maybe a personal one should serve as a
reservoir of things you used to think and things you still might.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/books">books</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/libraries">libraries</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/" title="2021">2021</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/" title="1">1</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2021/1/1/" title="1">1</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, December 28, 2020 - the yak queue: end of year 2020 - linux audio: pacmd, pavucontrol, and pasystray - limiting wacom tablet pen input to a single screen under X.Org - google pagespeed metrics for p1k3.com - displaying moon phase emojis for current phase of moon</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/12/28"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/12/28</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, December 28, 2020</h1>
<h2>the yak queue: end of year 2020</h2>
<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving">Yak shaving</a>:
<blockquote>
<p>Noun: yak shaving (uncountable)</p>
<ol>
<li>
Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome
intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.
<dl><dd><i>I was doing a bit of <b>yak shaving</b> this morning, and it
looks like it might have paid off.</i></dd></dl>
</li>
<li>
A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to
procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.
<dl><dd><i>I looked at a reference manual for my car just to answer one
question, but I spent the whole afternoon with my nose buried in it, just
<b>yak shaving</b>, and got no work done on the car itself.</i></dd></dl>
</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>As Lars <a href="https://yakking.branchable.com/posts/debugging/">is fond of saying</a>,
&ldquo;queue your yaks, don&rsquo;t stack them&rdquo;.</p>
<p>That&rsquo;s good advice which I&rsquo;m bad at following, but early in 2019 I started a
list of yaks where I can stash problems as they come up. Sometimes, at least,
I manage to put something on that list and then go back to whatever I was
nominally working on. I think I would recommend this practice as a way to
eliminate some brain clutter.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s the tail end of the year now, cold and snowy outside, and I have some days
off of work, so it seemed like a good time to go through the yak-shaving list
and try some things. Here then is brief documentation of some problems solved
(or further complicated) along the way.</p>
<h3>linux audio: pacmd, pavucontrol, and pasystray</h3>
<p>I have a Behringer UMC404HD audio interface for recording synthesizer output
and other audio. You plug it into USB and it gives you some new interfaces.
Works out of the box with Audacity and Ardour, no driver fiddling required.
You can plug headphones into it and monitor what it&rsquo;s recording, or use it as
an output from the computer.</p>
<p>This all works pretty well, but at least on my Debian Buster system, it made
juggling the builtin sound card, a set of external speakers, and the headphones
plugged into the UMC404HD kind of clunky.</p>
<p>I searched and found out that you can use <code>pacmd</code> at the command line to switch
which audio streams are going to which &ldquo;sink&rdquo;:</p>
<pre><code># Get a list of sinks - i.e. output devices, I guess:
pacmd list-sinks
# List sink inputs, i.e. apps sending audio somewhere:
pacmd list-sink-inputs
# Move an input to a different sink, for example from external
# sound card to builtin:
pacmd move-sink-input 79 0
</code></pre>
<p>Unfortunately, <code>pacmd</code> has verbose output and is tedious to work with. I was
afraid I was going to wind up writing some kind of hacky wrapper script, but
then people on Mastodon told me about <code>pasystray</code> and <code>pavucontrol</code>, which
expose GUIs with a view of what&rsquo;s playing and let you select what hardware it
goes to. <code>pasystray</code> in particular gives you a little tray icon, which is
pretty much what I wanted. There&rsquo;s also <code>pamix</code>, which seems to expose some of
the same info in a terminal interface.</p>
<p>These are in Debian, so:</p>
<pre><code>sudo apt install pavucontrol pasystray
</code></pre>
<p>Not perfect, but much improved. I <a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/bpb-kit/commit/ccb5db7f94db8c2e79dae219e2c65c8a8cfcfa18">added pasystray</a> to my
xmonad startup script.</p>
<h3>limiting wacom tablet pen input to a single screen under X.Org</h3>
<p>I have a Wacom Intuos pen &amp; touch drawing tablet. I don&rsquo;t think this version
has been made for a while, but it&rsquo;s probably similar to current models. It
acts as both a pen input device and a trackpad. I&rsquo;ve always had the problem,
when using two displays, where the pen input is mapped across both screens so
that (typically) whatever image I&rsquo;m working on I can only use half the tablet
for.</p>
<p>I haven&rsquo;t done much drawing on the computer since I got a second monitor
anyway, so I never dug into it all that deeply. This time when I looked I
found <a href="https://feldspaten.org/2017/05/06/ubuntu-linux-map-wacom-to-one-screen-when-using-multiple-screens/">a blog post from 2017 on feldspaten.org</a> with pretty clear
instructions.</p>
<p>I wound up running (sample output in comments):</p>
<pre><code># I didn't have this installed:
sudo apt install xinput
xrandr | grep primary
# DisplayPort-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 598mm x 336mm
xinput | grep -i Wacom
# ⎜ ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Pad pad id=16 [slave pointer (2)]
# ⎜ ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Pen stylus id=17 [slave pointer (2)]
# ⎜ ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Pen eraser id=18 [slave pointer (2)]
# ⎜ ↳ Wacom Intuos PT M Finger touch id=19 [slave pointer (2)]
xinput map-to-output 16 DisplayPort-0
xinput map-to-output 17 DisplayPort-0
xinput map-to-output 18 DisplayPort-0
</code></pre>
<p>I left the &ldquo;Finger touch&rdquo; input alone, and sure enough the pen input winds up
locked to my primary display while the tablet can still be used as a trackpad
across both displays.</p>
<p>Not totally perfect and I&rsquo;m not sure what the appropriate way to make this
permanent is, but at any rate it removes a frustration and makes
<a href="http://mypaint.org/">MyPaint</a> fun to use again.</p>
<h3>google pagespeed metrics for p1k3.com</h3>
<p>I don&rsquo;t generally worry about Google&rsquo;s opinion of this website, but it seemed
vaguely useful to be aware of the things they&rsquo;re tracking here. Profiling
usually reveals something you&rsquo;ve missed. So I read through the <a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fp1k3.com%2F">PageSpeed
Insights for p1k3.com</a>. A few things:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>They suggest inlining CSS and JavaScript files. This would be easy enough, I
guess, but I&rsquo;m probably not going to do it. It&rsquo;d bulk up each page with a bunch of
boilerplate and anyway it kind of grosses me out.</p></li>
<li><p>Enable text compression: Ok, easy enough. I uncommented the line
<code>gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript
text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;</code> in
<code>/etc/nginx/nginx.conf</code>, which upped the score from 90 to 98, so I guess it
just wasn&rsquo;t enabled for&hellip; Some type. See also: <a href="https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/web-server/compression/">nginx docs on compression</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>They suggest minifying JavaScript. There&rsquo;s a copy of jQuery on here - used for
almost nothing, but handy every now and then. I swapped it out for the minified
version of the latest version from the <a href="https://jquery.com/download/">official download page</a>.
That got the score to 100.</p></li>
<li><p>It looks like I could tweak cache lifetimes on some files, but I think I
won&rsquo;t bother.</p></li>
</ul>
<h3>displaying moon phase emojis for current phase of moon</h3>
<p>A while back I learned about the moon phase emojis:</p>
<p>🌑 🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘 🌑</p>
<p>I immediately wanted a way to display these in the terminal for (approximately)
the current phase, but I didn&rsquo;t initially have much luck finding a utility that
would just spit out the phase of the moon without calling a web API or
anything.</p>
<p>I realized while digging into this that <code>gcal</code> will display moon phases,
although the documentation is impenetrable and trying to construct the right
format string gave me a headache, so on to other approaches&hellip;</p>
<p>Paul Carleton <a href="https://pcarleton.com/2018/06/18/cli-for-the-moon/">wrote up a solution</a> in Rust which uses a US Navy
Observatory API, but I&rsquo;d rather network access not be a requirement.</p>
<p>I did find a handful of libraries:</p>
<ul>
<li>Perl: <a href="https://metacpan.org/pod/Astro::MoonPhase">Astro::MoonPhase</a></li>
<li>Python: <a href="https://astral.readthedocs.io/en/latest/package.html">astral</a>, <a href="https://github.com/sffjunkie/astral">GitHub</a></li>
<li>PHP: <a href="https://github.com/solarissmoke/php-moon-phase">solarissmoke/php-moon-phase</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Of these, Samir Shah&rsquo;s PHP code was the least hassle to work with. It doesn&rsquo;t
really satisfy my goal of &ldquo;a shell script I can toss in <code>~/bin</code> and use for
whatever&rdquo;, but it lets me stop thinking about the problem, so here&rsquo;s a few
lines of PHP called <a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/phasemoji">phasemoji</a> (also <a href="https://packagist.org/packages/brennen/phasemoji">on packagist</a>,
though that distribution isn&rsquo;t set up in any kind of useful way).</p>
<p>Also, because I&rsquo;m a dumbass, I bought a novelty domain and set up a web service.
Behold: <a href="https://phase.city">phase.city</a>.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/audio">audio</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/emoji">emoji</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/google">google</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/linux">linux</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/moon">moon</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/phase-city">phase-city</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/phasemoji">phasemoji</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/php">php</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/yak-shaving">yak-shaving</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/12/28/" title="28">28</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Saturday, December 5, 2020 - the garden cart - the short version - the long version - directions for further research</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/12/5"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/12/5</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Saturday, December 5, 2020</h1>
<h2>the garden cart</h2>
<h3>the short version</h3>
<p>I&rsquo;ve been lugging a lot of heavy stuff around the place lately, which has had
me wanting a utility item that was a staple of the gardening and building
projects of my childhood: A garden cart.</p>
<p>My parents own several of these by now, but there&rsquo;s a specific version I think
of as The Cart. It&rsquo;s probably been around for 30 years, give or take. I
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2009/1/3/">wrote about it back in 2009</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>It consists of two wheels, four pieces of plywood, and some metal tubing +
trim. Its construction is far less complex than that of most bicycles. It&rsquo;s
easy to load, capacious, and surprisingly sturdy. The wheels are positioned
so that the cart seems almost to lift itself when you tug upwards on the
handle. It moves easily over broken ground. It stands square on one end for
dumping or storage.</p></blockquote>
<p>Theirs turns out to be a Garden Way cart; unfortunately a company that went
bankrupt a while back. Looking for the closest approximation I could find,
these are what I came up with:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.gardeners.com/">Gardener&rsquo;s Supply Company</a> - <a href="https://www.gardeners.com/buy/large-garden-cart/8609662.html">Large Gardener&rsquo;s Supply Cart</a> - USD 349.00</li>
<li><a href="https://cartsvermont.com/">Carts Vermont</a> - <a href="https://cartsvermont.com/shop/garden-carts/large-garden-cart/">Large Garden Cart</a> - USD 399.95</li>
</ul>
<p>I&rsquo;ll probably order one of those (although reading reviews of both has me
nervous about materials &amp; build quality). I&rsquo;d also be remiss not to mention
the Whizbang Garden Cart, a wooden do-it-yourself design (by a guy also notable
for his homebrew chicken plucker):</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://gardencartblog.blogspot.com/">The Whizbang Garden Cart Blog</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.planetwhizbang.com/">Planet Whizbang - Down-To-Earth Books, Tools &amp; Inspiration</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.planetwhizbang.com/gardening">Plans on offer here</a> - find-in-page for &ldquo;Garden Cart&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<h3>the long version</h3>
<p>I&rsquo;ve wanted one of these for years, but I spent a lot of this summer &amp; fall
dragging tools, dirt, and building materials around our yard, and when I saw a
recent Mastodon post with a cart in the background I decided to do something
about it. I spent an evening grubbing through search results, and <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:brennen/t:garden-carts/">bookmarked
a bunch of stuff along the way</a>.</p>
<p>Garden Way seems to have been out of business since 2001, at least under that
brand name, which it appears was once the parent company of Troy-Bilt. From
the depths of Troy-Bilt&rsquo;s support site, an article about <a href="https://support.troybilt.com/s/article/449-1">parts for Garden Way
carts</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Problem</strong> Where can I order parts for Troy-Bilt &amp; Garden Way Garden Carts?</p>
<p><strong>Solution</strong> These garden carts are products that we have licensed another
company to build and support. Service, parts and/or warranty inquiries
should be directed to the phone numbers and address below: …</p>
<p><strong>Older Models:</strong> Prior to the 2001 closure of Garden Way Inc., similar
garden carts were sold as &ldquo;Garden Way Garden Carts&rdquo;.</p></blockquote>
<p>And one <a href="https://support.troybilt.com/s/article/218-1?language=en_US">about Garden Way&rsquo;s bankruptcy</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Problem</strong> What happened to the OLD Troy-Bilt manufacturing company?</p>
<p><strong>Solution</strong> The product brand names Troy-Bilt® and Bolens® were formerly
manufactured under the parent company Garden Way Inc. of Troy, NY.</p>
<p>In 2001 Garden Way Inc., filed for bankruptcy and is no longer in business.</p>
<p>On September 1, 2001 MTD Products Inc. out of Cleveland, Ohio purchased most of
the remaining assets under the Troy-Bilt® and Bolens® names from the bankruptcy
court.</p>
<p>MTD Products Inc. then transferred the Troy-Bilt® brand to the Troy-Bilt LLC
Corporation. Troy-Bilt LLC Inc. is now manufacturing Troy-Bilt® brand outdoor
power equipment.</p></blockquote>
<p>There&rsquo;s a <em>New York Times</em> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/01/nyregion/lyman-p-wood-86-founderx-of-garden-products-company.html">obituary for Lyman P. Wood</a>, the founder of Garden Way:</p>
<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Lyman was an incredible mix of entrepreneur, futurist and marketer,&rdquo; said
David Schaefer, a Burlington public relations man who was once host to a
syndicated gardening television program about Mr. Wood&rsquo;s company. &ldquo;Our last
conversation was about how are the political systems and resources of Earth
going to stand up to increased population growth.&rdquo; …</p>
<p>Mr. Wood is known for his book, &ldquo;The Have More Plan,&rdquo; a 1944 volume offering
a thrifty wartime population a way to live off the land.</p>
<p>In the 1960&rsquo;s he founded the privately held Garden Way Manufacturing Company,
expanding New York&rsquo;s Troy-Bilt rototiller company into publishing, retail
stores and other ventures.</p></blockquote>
<p>Which brings us to the carts themselves, in their current incarnations:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.gardeners.com/">Gardener&rsquo;s Supply Company</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.gardeners.com/buy/large-garden-cart/8609662.html">Large Gardener&rsquo;s Supply Cart</a> - USD 349.00</li>
<li>66″ long, 42.25″ wide, 30″ high</li>
<li>&ldquo;For over 25 years, our garden carts have been a beloved tool of gardeners everywhere.&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://cartsvermont.com/">Carts Vermont</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cartsvermont.com/shop/garden-carts/large-garden-cart/">Large Garden Cart</a> - USD 399.95</li>
<li>67.25″ long, 41.50″ wide, 30.25″ high</li>
<li>&ldquo;Home of the original “made in Vermont” garden cart and multi-purpose
hauler. Carts Vermont has the tried and true garden, firewood, and
utility carts for over 30 years!&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Based on photos and slightly differing measurements, I don&rsquo;t <em>think</em> those are
exactly the same cart off of the same assembly line, but they&rsquo;re close enough
they must have originated from the same plans somewhere along the way.</p>
<p>I got closer to an origin story with <a href="nancy-wood">this piece by Nancy Wood</a> -
Lyman Wood&rsquo;s daughter:</p>
<blockquote><p>But first, here’s a bit of clarification about the origin of Country Home
Products. The article says it was founded by Lyman Wood (my father) in the
1960s and that it “became known as Garden Way.” In fact, they were two
completely separate companies. Lyman and others founded Garden Way in the
1960s with the rebirth of the original Rototiller, which became the Troy-Bilt
rear-end tiller manufactured in Troy, New York. That successful mail-order
business provided the funding for the growth of several Garden Way divisions
in Vermont, including Garden Way Publishing (books for country living),
Garden Way Research (manufacturer of the Garden Way carts) in Charlotte, plus
the Garden Way Living Center retail store and the nonprofit Gardens For All
in Burlington.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as it grew larger, not everyone ascribed to that mission. A
group of dissidents in Troy who were more concerned about profits
masterminded an internal takeover on January 28, 1982, ousting Lyman and
other key employees in Vermont on that day. Within two years, all of the
Vermont operations had been sold or closed and over 200 employees relieved of
their jobs. The nonprofit, Gardens for All, was the one exception, and it
continues today as the National Gardening Association.</p>
<p>Many of those Vermont employees started new businesses (such as Vermont Teddy
Bear, Gardeners Supply and Williamson Publishing), and Lyman was no
exception. Even though he was forced out of Garden Way, he was still subject
to a non-compete agreement. Garden-related products were out, so he
investigated other possibilities. With his friends John Gibbons (former owner
of Harrington’s) and Dick Raymond (former gardening guru and author at Garden
Way) he came up with the name Country Home Products.</p></blockquote>
<p>Drama, intrigue, garden industry strife!</p>
<p>Anyway, based on this, it seems like the Gardener&rsquo;s Supply cart is a clear
lineal descendant of the original. I&rsquo;m pretty much assuming the same is true
of the Carts Vermont one &mdash; though I haven&rsquo;t seen anything to indicate
what, if any, relationship they&rsquo;ve got to the original company / factory.</p>
<h3>directions for further research</h3>
<p>I wound up ordering a copy of <em>What a Way to Live and Make a Living: The Lyman
P. Wood Story</em>, by Roger Griffin.</p>
<p>Mostly I just want to buy a cart, but there&rsquo;re hints of a cultural history
lurking in this kind of thing. Back-to-the-land ideas that were circulating in
the 1960s&ndash;70s, mail-order retail, the ubiquitous rototiller infomercials
of the 1990s, whatever it is that leads people to do things like burn wood for
heat and can their own green beans. It&rsquo;s probably roughly one step from the
Garden Way garden cart to, say, the <em>Whole Earth Catalog</em>.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not sure how much I&rsquo;m really going to pull on any of those threads, but
it&rsquo;s a good reminder that most things run deeper than it seems at first.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/garden">garden</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/garden-carts">garden-carts</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/lawn-and-garden">lawn-and-garden</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/tools">tools</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/12/5/" title="5">5</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, November 29, 2020 - notes from a time (4)</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/11/29"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/11/29</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, November 29, 2020</h1>
<h2>notes from a time (4)</h2>
<p>COVID-19 numbers for late November 2020:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="who-dashboard">WHO</a> global numbers:
<ul>
<li>Current: ~61.87 million confirmed cases and ~1.45 million deaths</li>
<li>November 18th: 53.7 million cases / 1.3 million deaths</li>
<li>Early June: 6,535,354 cases / 387,155 deaths</li>
<li>Late April: 2,804,796 cases / 193,710 deaths</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/blob/master/us.csv#L314">NY Times</a> US numbers:
<ul>
<li>Current: 13,311,031 cases / 265,940 deaths in the US</li>
<li>November 18th: 11,439,304 cases / 248,462 deaths</li>
<li>Early June: 1,883,033 cases / 108,194 deaths</li>
<li>Late April: 938,590 cases / 48,310 deaths</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://covid19.colorado.gov/covid-19-data">colorado.gov</a>:
<ul>
<li>Current: 228,772 cases and 2,521 deaths; 1,749 currently hospitalized</li>
<li>November 18th: 176,694 cases and 2,324 deaths</li>
<li>Early June: 27,615 cases and either 1,524 or 1,274 deaths</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Earlier this year, I started a series of posts under the heading of &ldquo;fragmentary
notes from a bad time getting worse&rdquo; (<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/21/">April 21</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/26/">April 26</a>,
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/6/5/">June 5</a>). And then I thought well, that could pretty well just be this
blog&rsquo;s subtitle, so I guess I might as well ease up on the whole conceit.</p>
<p>I spent a lot of time reading the internet about the virus in those early
months. For a while I <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:brennen/t:covid19/">bookmarked a lot of it</a>. I was curious how
much, so I checked:</p>
<!-- exec -->
<pre><code>$ cut -c 1-7 ./bookmarks-by-date.tsv | sort | uniq -c
92 2020-03
102 2020-04
10 2020-05
15 2020-06
7 2020-07
1 2020-08
7 2020-09
4 2020-10
10 2020-11
</code></pre>
<!-- end -->
<p>I didn&rsquo;t stop reading, but at some point it started to blur together and
tracking my idea of what was going on and when started to feel hopeless: too
unfocused and reflexive to carry any real signal. Around the time the
bookmarking fell off at the end of April, I jotted a note about a call with my
sister: It just says &ldquo;the sense that we burned out on being terrified and have
moved on to some form of resignation&rdquo;.</p>
<p>In August I came down with something weird for a couple of days - the symptoms
seemed right but a test by the time they&rsquo;d mostly abated came back negative.
No one I&rsquo;d been in contact with ever got sick. My partner got an antibody
test when giving blood a while later and it, too, was negative. I wrote that
one off to &ldquo;probably something random&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Early on I had a lot of thoughts like: Shit, what do we do about feeding the
cat if we both wind up in a hospital? Now I think that&rsquo;s not very likely, and
anyway I have a plan in place. Mostly what I&rsquo;ve worried about is family and
friends. My family is full of old people in rural middle America with the
genes and lifestyle factors that get you heart disease, diabetes, and bad
lungs. My friends run heavily to chain-smoking alcoholics with no health
insurance.</p>
<p>So where are we now? I&rsquo;m not sure I know. Cases are, as predicted, surging as
we go into the winter. By mid-October I think I could have told you two people
I knew personally who&rsquo;d had it. A few days later I heard some extended family
in the midwest had tested positive and now I&rsquo;m sitting at maybe 17 plus some
near misses.</p>
<p>I feel overwhelmed trying to write about the dimensions of the pandemic,
nevermind the moment as a whole. I don&rsquo;t think I have anything to offer a
general reader on the subject. There&rsquo;s been such an ocean of text about this.
I&rsquo;m not privy to any special perspective. I just now and then feel like there
should be some index to memory of it amidst the other trivial crap I write
here.</p>
<p>If I were trying to tell someone a few decades on a whole story about the
strange dimensions of life on earth just now, I wouldn&rsquo;t know where to start.
I wonder what I risk forgetting.</p>
<p>Maybe how quickly and radically things can change. Not just at the scale of an
individual life, that one I knew already, but at the scale of <em>things
generally</em>.</p>
<p>How much relationships will bend and dissolve and reconfigure across the
conceptual and epistemic fault lines that some system-level event reveals.</p>
<p>The strange paralysis that can seep through things when a polity and a culture
are really riding the edge of decoherence and murderous collapse.</p>
<p>The way I start to see some of how my grandparents got the way they were.</p>
<p>How much of a self is contained and expressed in and through the places you go
and the people around you. What happens when you stop going places.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/america">america</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/covid19">covid19</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/politics">politics</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/11/29/" title="29">29</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, November 13, 2020 - reading: a memory called empire</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/11/13"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/11/13</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, November 13, 2020</h1>
<h2>reading: a memory called empire</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.arkadymartine.net/teixcalaan-memory"><em>A Memory Called Empire</em></a>,
Arkady Martine, Tor Books, March 2019.</p>
<p>This evidently won the 2020 Hugo for Best Novel, which is not surprising. I
thought as I was reading it &ldquo;this is going to win some major awards&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Space opera / vast empire / political intrigue in imperial capital city,
elements of romance, some fairly well-handled mind/memory/identity stuff.
Starts out kind of dry, works its way towards an emotional register that feels
a little like Guy Kay.</p>
<p>First in a trilogy. I&rsquo;ll be reading the followup.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/arkady-martine">arkady-martine</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/books">books</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/11/13/" title="13">13</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, October 13, 2020</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/13"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/10/13</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, October 13, 2020</h1>
<p>I went for an aimless drive on Saturday. It was accidental. I set out to haul
the recycling and buy a can of Coke at the gas station, which they didn&rsquo;t have
so I settled for a 20oz plastic bottle. I left the gas station and got stuck
in the turn lane where I&rsquo;d usually make a u-turn back towards home and thought
whatever, why not just go for a couple of miles. It felt good to be out. It
was pretty weather, apart from the wildfire smoke, and the fall colors were in
full effect. A couple of miles turned into 20 or 30.</p>
<p>I was feeling relaxed when I got back to town, turning over ideas about stuff I
wanted to write and stuff I needed to do in the yard. Then I came around a
curve and there were a bunch of flags waving, which resolved as I got closer
into a little Trump rally: MAGA hats, banners, oversized pickups, jeering
shitheads. I flipped them off as I went past and caught a full wave of rage
noises, although the only specific phrases that stuck in my memory were a
chorus of &ldquo;fuck you!"s and a single "God bless America!&rdquo;</p>
<p>I went back to the house all keyed up on stupid animal loathing and made a
&ldquo;YOUR GUY SUCKS&rdquo; sign on a cardboard box, but by the time I headed out the door
to stand across the street and get screamed at they&rsquo;d dispersed for the day.
It was down to three teenagers looking a little confused about where to stand
while trading insults with drivers. A few big coal-rolling pickups with flags
in the back trickled through town over the next hour or two and that was it,
more or less.</p>
<p>&ldquo;YOUR GUY SUCKS&rdquo; isn&rsquo;t much of a message. I couldn&rsquo;t think of anything more
high-minded that was also true. I just didn&rsquo;t want them there, being the way
they are, and I wanted them to know it.</p>
<p>They feel, I&rsquo;m sure, the same way about me.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/politics">politics</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/13/" title="13">13</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, October 12, 2020 - reading: grant</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/12"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/10/12</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, October 12, 2020</h1>
<h2>reading: grant</h2>
<p>There are two kinds of annoying biography:</p>
<ol>
<li>The kind where the author hates the subject.</li>
<li>The kind where the author loves the subject.</li>
</ol>
<p>This one, a biography of Ulysses S. Grant by Ron Chernow, is so far the second.
I&rsquo;m a hundred pages in, out of 960-odd. It&rsquo;s a slightly disjointed read, in
that bouncing-from-source-to-source and speculating-about-motives kind of way.
It tells us how great its subject is with a regularity that quickly becomes
grating. Still, it&rsquo;s full of detail and deeply researched. I&rsquo;m learning stuff
and I&rsquo;ll likely persist.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/books">books</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/history">history</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/war">war</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/12/" title="12">12</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, October 11, 2020 - reading: the great offshore grounds</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/11"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/10/11</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, October 11, 2020</h1>
<h2>reading: the great offshore grounds</h2>
<p>A novel by the author of <em>Zazen</em>, a book I first read <a href="/2012/11/14/">back in
2012</a>. At the time, you could <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160310205938/http://redlemona.de/vanessa-veselka/zazen">read the whole thing on the
web</a>, which I did, clicking through until the end. I then bought the
paperback and read it again.</p>
<p>I got to <em>Zazen</em> by way of <a href="https://www.metafilter.com/121345/Invisible-People">a MetaFilter thread</a> on <a href="https://www.gq.com/story/truck-stop-killer-gq-november-2012?verso=true">&ldquo;The
Truck Stop Killer&rdquo;</a>, a long piece she wrote for GQ drawing on
her experiences hitchiking as a teenager and a bunch of research into serial
killers. It&rsquo;s probably one of the most disturbing things I&rsquo;ve ever read.</p>
<p><em>The Great Offshore Grounds</em> is a book you can tell didn&rsquo;t come easy to write,
and although it&rsquo;s not a slow read, it&rsquo;s also not exactly an easy one. Scenes
in here will stick with me for a long time. Recommended.</p>
<p>(Veselka, Vanessa. <a href="https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525658078"><em>The Great Offshore
Grounds</em></a>. New York: Borzoi
Books / Alfred A. Knopf, 2020.)</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/books">books</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/vanessa-veselka">vanessa-veselka</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/11/" title="11">11</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, October 9, 2020 - reading: interior states</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/9"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/10/9</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, October 9, 2020</h1>
<h2>reading: interior states</h2>
<p><em>Interior States: Essays</em>, Anchor Books, 2018.</p>
<p>An essay collection by <a href="http://www.meghanogieblyn.com/">Meghan O'Gieblyn</a>,
picked up after a friend linked me to one of the included essays,
<a href="https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/ogieblyn_su16.html">&ldquo;Dispatch from Flyover Country&rdquo;</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at
work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area
and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to
Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us
on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they
work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to.
Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and
brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital,
conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being
lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves,
will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?”
we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell
them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and
bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires,
liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We
are, after all, Midwesterners.</p></blockquote>
<p>O'Gieblyn comes from somewhere I half know — a life unlike mine but also not
that many degrees off of it: The definite Midwest rather than the ambiguous
Plains states of its western edge; evangelical Christianity rather than
conservative Lutheranism and rural Methodism; homeschooling like I watched
shape friends; an academic/literary path I didn&rsquo;t go down.</p>
<p>As I went through the book, I realized I&rsquo;d read a few of the included pieces
before, somewhere on the internet, usually with a sense of recognition for
their subject matter. These are good essays. It occurs to me that reading
them from a place of immediate recognition (I, too, saw <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carman_(singer)">Carman</a> in
front of a packed house on a mid-90s tour) probably isn&rsquo;t quite like reading
them in the <em>New Yorker</em> as someone who grew up on a coast and feels a vague
anthropological interest in the in-between places. I suppose that kind of
reader is closer to who these are written for, but it&rsquo;s to the author&rsquo;s credit
that they still work if you&rsquo;ve spent time inside the frames they discuss.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/essays">essays</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/michigan">michigan</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/religion">religion</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/10/9/" title="9">9</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Thursday, July 30, 2020</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/7/30"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/7/30</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Thursday, July 30, 2020</h1>
<p>Earlier today I found myself in one of those moments of tractionless inaction
that people at the attention deficit end of the scale come to know well. I was
in the midst of staring at logs and rolling back a broken deployment of
MediaWiki while outside a torrential downpour was overwhelming the failing
gutters and flooding the crawlspace under the house.</p>
<p>I was thinking that maybe we&rsquo;d lose power again, or something crucial in the
local infrastructure would get struck by lightning, and that maybe I should
have somebody&rsquo;s phone number in case they had to pick up where I left off.
Then would I even have cell service in that situation? Not if it was anything
like last time. I wished again for a landline. The kind that, more often than
not, still works when the electric is out. (Albeit also the kind that gets
struck by lightning, sometimes, and then your phone rings violently and bursts
into flame, or at least that&rsquo;s what happened in my aunt&rsquo;s narrative about
this.)</p>
<p>The cat, unsatisfied with the size of his afternoon meal, was yowling piteously
at the back of my head. The rollback finished, the error logs stopped
exploding, I copied an error message to file a task, I opened the issue
tracking software in the wrong browser and copied the wrong 2-factor auth code
trying to log in and found myself locked out.</p>
<p>Wait 57 seconds, it said. I knew instinctively that I had just hit a cognitive
limit and was destined to lose track of all the pieces I was holding in my
mind and that would be it for the day, more or less. At least I&rsquo;d held it
together past 4pm on a day I touched production systems.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s often like this inside my head. Not always, maybe not even most of the
time, but not seldom either. Everything happens at once, and because of that
nothing can happen at all.</p>
<p>Stimulants of one description or another would probably help, for a while at
least, but I&rsquo;m scared of a dependency on legal speed and I just can&rsquo;t handle
caffeine the way I used to. Weed used to help me dial in on things; these
recent years it typically leaves me with the working memory of a goldfish (&ldquo;the
little plastic castle is a surprise every time&rdquo;) and sprays my attention all
over the landscape like my nervous system is some kind of malfunctioning
glitter cannon.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/7/30/" title="30">30</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2021-03-14T21:08:01Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, July 27, 2020 - the zettelkasten / the zeitgeist - background - - further research or whatever</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/7/27"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/7/27</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, July 27, 2020</h1>
<h2>the zettelkasten / the zeitgeist</h2>
<p>Discussed: The idea of a Zettelkasten, note-taking, index cards, wikis,
<a href="https://takesmartnotes.com/"><em>How to Take Smart Notes</em></a> by Sönke Ahrens.</p>
<p>This post roughly continues a thread that goes something like:</p>
<ul>
<li>2006: <a href="https://p1k3.com/2006/4/19/">this one about notes on index cards</a></li>
<li>2014: <a href="https://p1k3.com/2014/8/23/">a notes.txt / TODO file format</a></li>
<li>2019: <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes-on-notes/">notes on notes</a></li>
<li>2020: <a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/20/">meta meta</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>background</h3>
<p>For the unfamiliar: &ldquo;Zettelkasten&rdquo; is German for &ldquo;slip box&rdquo;. It refers to a
note-taking method where ideas and bibliographic references are stored on index
cards or slips of paper.</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s a decent chance my first exposure to the word was on a blog by Manfred
Kuehn called <a href="https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/">Taking note</a>, which started publishing in 2007 <a href="https://takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/luhmanns-zettelkasten.html">with an entry
about Niklas Luhmann&rsquo;s Zettelkasten</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>One of the more interesting systems for keeping such index cards was
developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). […] Luhmann
claimed that his file was something of a collaborator in his work, a largely
independent partner in his research and writing. It might have started out as
a mere apprentice when Luhmann was still studying himself (in 1951), but
after thirty years of having been fed information by the human collaborator
it had acquired the ability of surprising him again an again. Since the
ability of genuinely surprising one another is an essential characteristic of
genuine communication, he argued that there was actually communication going
on between himself and his partner in theory.</p></blockquote>
<p>By the time I read that, I&rsquo;d already spent time thinking about index cards as a
way to organize knowledge, and experimented with a card box that might have
become a full-fledged paper Zettelkasten if I&rsquo;d kept at it. I think these
ideas were on my mind because of <a href="http://wiki.c2.com/?IndexCard">C2&rsquo;s stuff about index cards</a>
in software development, the notion of the <a href="http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-pda">Hipster PDA</a>, and my
friend Brent&rsquo;s fixation on David Allen&rsquo;s <a href="https://gettingthingsdone.com/">Getting Things Done</a>.</p>
<p>Hypertext had been a preoccupation of mine for quite a while by the time I
heard of Niklas Luhmann: HyperCard in the early 90s, the web, the wiki (with
its roots in a HyperCard stack), Ted Nelson&rsquo;s <em>Computer Lib/Dream Machines</em>.
Apart from introducing me to Ward&rsquo;s Wiki, Extreme Programming, Agile, and GTD,
Brent Newhall wrote a <a href="http://walawiki.org/">simple filesystem-backed wiki in Perl</a> with
some unique features. I wound up maintaining that code for years, and used it
to keep a personal wiki on this site for at least a decade. (Any readers I
retain from back then might remember that it functioned as a comment /
&ldquo;marginal notes&rdquo; / linkblogging system here for much of that time.)</p>
<p><a href="https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/">Luhmann&rsquo;s Zettelkasten</a> was a kind of paper hypertext. He numbered individual
cards/slips in such a way that related things could be found in physical
proximity, and made links between cards by referencing those identifiers.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✦ </p>
<p>So now it&rsquo;s 2020 and the Zettelkasten is having a moment. Sort of a nested
moment, inside of a larger one about note-taking and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_knowledge_base">personal knowledge
systems</a>. I haven&rsquo;t really traced out the web of influence
here, but there&rsquo;s been an escalating flurry of pieces like these:</p>
<ul>
<li>Magnus Eriksson - <a href="https://omxi.se/2015-06-21-living-with-a-zettelkasten.html">Living with a Zettelkasten</a> - 2015-06-21</li>
<li>Roberto Zoia - <a href="https://zoia.org/2018/11/13/zettelkasten/">Zettelkasten, a method for note-taking</a> - 2018-11-13</li>
<li>abramdemski on LessWrong - <a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettelkasten-method-1">The Zettelkasten Method</a> - 2019-09-20</li>
<li>Clerestory - <a href="https://clerestory.netlify.app/zk/">Zettelkästen?</a> - 2019-10-09</li>
<li>Clerestory - <a href="https://clerestory.netlify.app/zk1/">Zettelkasten!</a> - 2019-11-09</li>
<li>Nat Eliason: <a href="https://www.nateliason.com/blog/smart-notes">How to Take Smart Notes: A Step-by-Step Guide</a> - 2020-02-07</li>
<li>Jethro Kuan: <a href="https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/how_to_take_smart_notes_org/">How To Take Smart Notes With Org-mode</a> - 2020-02-14</li>
<li><a href="https://jonathanlorimer.dev/posts/smart-notes-review.html">Book Review: How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens</a> - 2020-03-19</li>
</ul>
<p>There seems to be a thread of interest in the rationalist / LessWrong scene.
Apart from that, I&rsquo;d guess much of this is due to the work of Christian Tietze
and Sascha Fast, who maintain a long-running blog and forum at
<a href="https://zettelkasten.de/">zettelkasten.de</a>, sell note-taking software for the Mac, and have
recently begun promoting an online video course on the method. (I believe
there&rsquo;s also a book in the mix somewhere, albeit one not yet translated to
English.)</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, the community at <a href="https://forum.zettelkasten.de/">forum.zettelkasten.de</a> is the most
direct place to watch an entire ideological complex, complete with in-group
vocabulary and evangelical fervor, crystallize around the core idea. That
said, it feels like it&rsquo;s spreading and mutating in the wild by now, and would
probably continue to do so independent of any particular guru figure or
canonical text.</p>
<h3><i>how to take smart notes</i></h3>
<p>If there <em>were</em> a canonical text in English, at the moment it would probably be
<em>How to Take Smart Notes</em>, by Sönke Ahrens. That&rsquo;s the book that gets
mentioned over and over again. I bought a copy back in February, after
skimming the first chapter and reading a bunch of blog material like the stuff
linked above.</p>
<p>I decided to write up my notes here after I recommended reading it to a friend
who turned out to thoroughly hate it, and seeing similar reactions elsewhere.
Although it fails to make as strong a case for its ideas as it intends, I&rsquo;ve
personally found it helpful for thinking about my habits.</p>
<p>This is a short book - 170 pages with bibliography and a very brief index in
this edition. It&rsquo;s also substantially longer than it needs to be, which isn&rsquo;t
unusual for this sort of self-help nonfiction. To its credit, it&rsquo;s fairly
dense, but it veers into evangelism and salesmanship often enough to be
frustrating, and makes claims that some readers will find questionable, if not
off-putting. It also comes with a dose of pop-psych material.</p>
<p>Construed strictly, Ahrens' idea that &ldquo;nothing else counts than writing&rdquo; is too
narrow a conception of work for most people. It&rsquo;s simply not true for
programmers, engineers, designers, customer service reps, or project managers —
let alone general contractors, farmers, or electricians. Most people who could
benefit from note-taking habits aren&rsquo;t chiefly concerned with writing documents
even when documents are integral to their work. Where the exhortation that
writing is the only thing <em>does</em> ring true is when your goal is to produce
written artifacts, e.g. to turn your reading into research output.</p>
<p><em>Smart Notes</em> as a whole tends that way: It&rsquo;s explicitly aimed at students,
professional academics, and nonfiction writers. While I occasionally qualify
as that last, none of those roles map to the scope of my note-taking.
Accordingly, this is a book I read selectively and with a critical eye,
gleaning what I could and generalizing where useful. I&rsquo;d suggest other readers
approach it the same, particularly if, like me:</p>
<ul>
<li>You don&rsquo;t work in an academic field.</li>
<li>You aren&rsquo;t much concerned with writing papers.</li>
<li>You rely on your notes to archive collections of specific facts and
remember sequences of events as much as to connect and synthesize ideas.</li>
</ul>
<p>I do think it&rsquo;s a useful read if you&rsquo;re interested in the mechanics of a
Zettelkasten and haven&rsquo;t found what you&rsquo;re looking for in other writeups, or if
you&rsquo;re just looking to yak-shave a personal knowledge system.</p>
<p>I don&rsquo;t, strictly speaking, keep a Zettelkasten. I have, however, been
borrowing ideas from people who do. After finishing <em>How to Take Smart Notes</em>,
here&rsquo;s some of what I think I&rsquo;ve taken away from it and related sources:</p>
<ul>
<li>Your notes can be:
<ul>
<li>An extension of your long-term memory.</li>
<li>A living system.</li>
<li>Capable of surprising you with new connections, forgotten ideas,
and emergent patterns.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Writing is a means of thinking.</li>
<li>Read (or work) with a notebook to hand. Jot stuff down as you go.
<ul>
<li>Using the same notebook for everything will save you thinking about
which one to write in.</li>
<li>The notebook can function like an inbox. Process things from there into
permanent note storage, be that in electronic form or on index cards.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Track citations / bookmarks / bibliographical references.
<ul>
<li>Luhmann&rsquo;s paper Zettelkasten seems to have used a dedicated card file for
this. Ahrens recommends tooling like <a href="https://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a>.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Work in small units.</li>
<li>Summarize/restate ideas instead of just quoting or excerpting things.
Link them to other ideas already in your notes.
<ul>
<li>Just reading a text isn&rsquo;t the same as understanding it. Restating
an author&rsquo;s ideas and integrating them with your existing knowledge is a
kind of self-test, and facilitates learning.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>Add stuff to your notes if:
<ul>
<li>It connects to something already in the notes.</li>
<li>It&rsquo;s open to future connections.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>You might understand something if you can effectively teach it.</li>
<li>Hierarchy is likely to get in your way. Draw connections within the whole
space of ideas, without being limited to the current level/tier/box/rank.</li>
<li>&ldquo;To get a good paper written, you only have to rewrite a
good draft;&rdquo; for a draft, a series of notes, for a series of notes,
rearranging what&rsquo;s already in the slipbox, which you&rsquo;ve written as you go.
&ldquo;All you <em>really</em> have to do is have a pen in your hand when you read.&rdquo;</li>
</ul>
<p>That last one cuts pretty close to the heart of the method the book espouses.
It&rsquo;s focused on writing an academic paper, but if you fuzz it out a little I
think it gestures at something more generally useful.</p>
<p>Most of the work of understanding things is incremental and piecemeal: Refining
and tending a fragmentary web of memories, perspectives, practices, states, and
relationships. Notes are a technology for <em>accumulating</em> that work and
extending its durability outside of our skulls. Used well, they&rsquo;re a
foundation for making new things and a solid place to stand when faced with
recurring problems.</p>
<h3>further research or whatever</h3>
<p>Anyhow, while I find the Zettelkasten thing interesting as a cultural
happening, I&rsquo;m not concerned with replicating it.</p>
<p>In the broad outlines, the notes I keep in VimWiki look a lot like an
electronic slipbox. There&rsquo;s a bunch of stuff in the Luhmann / Kuehn / Ahrens /
zettelkasten.de trains of thought that seems useful to borrow, and lines up
well with things I&rsquo;ve already learned working with wikis, version control
systems, bookmarks, and a couple decades of paper notebooks. On the other
hand, there&rsquo;s a lot in how I model the world and how I think in writing that
doesn&rsquo;t fit.</p>
<p>I often need to think in terms of when very specific things happened: State
changes to complicated systems, what happened when I ran some technical
procedure, when I planted a bed of onions. While restating ideas and
situations in my own words is a good way to get a handle on various things, I
also find it useful to archive verbatim fragments of conversation, specific
texts, chunks of code, and long transcripts of program output. Some of my
&ldquo;notes&rdquo; are really executable scripts, and a lot of my external memory lives in
source code repositories, wikis, README files, command-line histories, and
issue tracking systems.</p>
<p>All of that&rsquo;s led me to thinking in terms of logs and journals, and roughing
out some tools for a 2-axis time vs. topic approach that I&rsquo;ll elaborate on one
of these days. I&rsquo;d also like to make more room in my system for integrating
drawings, photos, and structured data, though I&rsquo;m not entirely sure how to go
about it.</p>
<p>In the meanwhile, I&rsquo;ve been thinking a lot about various collections of public
notes (some more Zettelkasten-adjacent than others), stuff like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Found by way of <a href="https://forum.zettelkasten.de/discussion/1128/compilation-of-public-zettelkastens-external-brains">a Zettelkasten Forum thread</a>:
<ul>
<li><a href="https://notes.andymatuschak.org/">Andy Matuschak&rsquo;s working notes</a> are
full of interesting thoughts and presented in a format I fully intend to
steal from.</li>
<li><a href="http://bactra.org/notebooks/">Cosma Shalizi&rsquo;s Notebooks</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="http://dannyreviews.com/">Danny Yee&rsquo;s Book Reviews</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/notebooks">notebooks</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes">notes</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/zettelkasten">zettelkasten</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/7/27/" title="27">27</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>thursday, june 18, 2020</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/6/18"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/6/18</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>thursday, june 18, 2020</h1>
<p>the sky turns heavy all afternoon<br />
the cheap hardware store thermometer on the front porch<br />
drops 20 degrees in a few hours</p>
<p>in the evening, it rains for a long time<br />
we're out walking when it starts, halfway through<br />
a habitual loop down to the river, past the labyrinth<br />
and the parking lot full of deputies and the post office</p>
<p>it rains while i chop vegetables,<br />
while we sit on the couch eating stir fry,<br />
while we stand in the kitchen washing dishes,<br />
and while i sit again at my desk, scratching notes<br />
in ink and thinking that i ought to be thinking<br />
something that weighs something</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/6/18/" title="18">18</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, June 5, 2020 - fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (3)</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/6/5"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/6/5</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, June 5, 2020</h1>
<h2>fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (3)</h2>
<p>Back on the 25th of May, four police officers in Minneapolis murdered a black
man named George Floyd on camera.</p>
<p>In 2018, on a <a href="/2018/3/27">list of guesses</a> to check after 5 and 10 years, I
wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>No meaningful reforms of policing in America will have gained any traction.
When I go to look at this list again, I will be able to recall one or more
killings of an unarmed black civilian by law enforcement within the previous
2-3 months.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&rsquo;s only been two years, but the pattern has held and in a basic way I expect
that it will continue to hold for years and decades to come: Because American
law enforcement is a violently racist system. A system that both reflects the
racism of the society it operates within and actively works to entrench that
racism.</p>
<p>George Floyd isn&rsquo;t the first black person I&rsquo;m aware of being murdered by
on-duty cops or cop-affiliated parties this year. He wasn&rsquo;t even the first one
that I learned about in <em>May</em>.<sup class=footnote>1</sup></p>
<p>I&rsquo;m a work-from-home white desk-job professional living in one of the whiter
places on the planet, surrounded by entrenched wealth. In my small-town
neighborhood, the cops speed-trap tourists on their way to a national park and
are otherwise largely ignorable. How many cop murders would I have known about
this year if I lived in that enormous swath of America where the police
function day-to-day as a hostile occupying force?</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❃ </p>
<p>What if the pattern didn&rsquo;t hold?</p>
<p>This time feels different than the last <em>n</em> iterations of this grim cycle.
There&rsquo;s been, as best I can tell, an explosion of police violence in response
to a wave of protest that seems vast and not yet remotely contained. As I
write this, people in my family are are marching. Cities like Lincoln, NE have
seen actual unrest.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s long seemed to me that, for the most part, America knows how to neutralize
street protest as a political force. The machinery contains, suppresses,
deflects, and misinforms. Structures within government, law enforcement,
news media, and activism itself all function to render it a kind of theater that
mostly plays out for its own participants.</p>
<p>Whenever it feels like that machinery is breaking down, something is up.</p>
<p>Maybe it feels that way in part because the vicious, bullying, riot-inciting
brutality of the cops is on such unguarded display right now. A display that
might satisfy the longing to inflict pain and fear that fuels so much of our
politics, but also throws the hypocrisy and complicity of authority into sharp
relief and must put an incredible strain on the quiet consensus that usually
keeps these things so <em>manageable</em>.</p>
<p>Don&rsquo;t mistake this for hope. I&rsquo;m not hopeful. All the same, it&rsquo;s possible to
imagine this as the moment it becomes <em>thinkable</em> to cut police department
budgets, restrict police unions, end qualified immunity, scrap a bunch of
surplus military gear, fund alternative forms of emergency response, and fire a
lot of overt white supremacists.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✴ </p>
<p>And then meanwhile: The pandemic.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s been well over a month now since <a href="/2020/4/26/">I first felt like</a> social
distancing efforts had pretty well ended where I live. There&rsquo;s been almost a
kind of weird sense of stasis since then. Things are more open than they were.
The bar across the street is having bands in again. The road&rsquo;s full of cars.
But I think I underestimated the degree to which people were still laying low
in late April, and even now it&rsquo;s clear that things are far from normal.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="who-sitrep">WHO</a>: 6,535,354 confirmed cases and 387,155 deaths globally
<ul>
<li>Late April: 2,804,796 and 193,710 deaths</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/blob/master/us.csv#L137">NY Times</a>: 1,883,033 cases and 108,194 deaths in the US
<ul>
<li>Late April: 938,590 cases and 48,310 deaths</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://covid19.colorado.gov/covid-19-data">colorado.gov</a>: 27,615 cases and either 1,524 or 1,274 deaths</li>
</ul>
<p>It doesn&rsquo;t seem, here, like there&rsquo;s been the wild spike in cases I feared as
things loosened in April. Nor does it seem like it&rsquo;s anywhere near over.
Talking to friends scattered around the country about this recently, a rough
consensus: America ran out of attention span, now we wait and see how much of a
tragedy that is. Of course that&rsquo;s flippant and doesn&rsquo;t really acknowledge the
crushing economic and social pressures to reopen, but it&rsquo;s not exactly wrong.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ☆ </p>
<p>How does the state of the pandemic interact with mass street protest? I guess
we&rsquo;re going to find out.</p>
<p>How does the pandemic&rsquo;s function as an ideological pivot point interact with
mass protest? We&rsquo;re going to find out, but I already know I don&rsquo;t like the
answer.</p>
<p class=footnote><sup>1</sup>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Ahmaud_Arbery">wp: Shooting of Ahmaud Arbery</a>
</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/colorado">colorado</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/covid19">covid19</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/george-floyd">george-floyd</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/policing">policing</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/politics">politics</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/6/5/" title="5">5</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, May 25, 2020 - feeds: linkblogs</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/25"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/5/25</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, May 25, 2020</h1>
<h2>feeds: linkblogs</h2>
<p><em>Background:</em> I&rsquo;m <a href="/2020/5/8">writing some posts</a> linking to feeds that I
like.</p>
<p><em>Today&rsquo;s theme:</em> Blogs that curate interesting links.</p>
<p>Linkblogs were once a really common form, and if done lazily can be a formulaic
waste of time, but there are a few people with a real knack for sifting out the
good stuff who I find worth tracking. Three examples:</p>
<ul>
<li>Leah Neukirchen&rsquo;s <a href="http://leahneukirchen.org/trivium">trivium</a> is a low-volume, high-value roundup of
mostly-technical links that nearly always contains something worth my time.
<ul>
<li>Feed URL: <a href="http://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/index.atom">http://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/index.atom</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="http://danny.oz.au/blog/">Pathologically Polymathic</a> is a linkblog by Danny Yee, author of the
consistently excellent <a href="http://dannyreviews.com/">Danny Yee&rsquo;s Book Reviews</a>.
Math, art, lit, news, politics, transportation, science, etc.
<ul>
<li>Feed URL: <a href="http://danny.oz.au/blog/rss.xml">http://danny.oz.au/blog/rss.xml</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://waxy.org/">Waxy.org</a> is Andy Baio&rsquo;s blog - there&rsquo;re occasional
longer pieces in the mix, but often just quick links. Andy Baio is one of
the cool kids, and thus his tastes reflect cool-kid concerns that I don&rsquo;t really
share, but a lot of this stuff is good anyway.
<ul>
<li>Feed URL: <a href="https://waxy.org/feed">https://waxy.org/feed</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>I do some linkblogging of my own. You can see stuff I&rsquo;ve shared lately in the
&ldquo;linkdump&rdquo; sidebar on the <a href="https://p1k3.com/">front page of this site</a>, or
subscribe to:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://pinboard.in/u:brennen/">My public Pinboard bookmarks</a>
<ul>
<li>Feed URL: <a href="https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:brennen/">https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:brennen/</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="https://brennen.newsblur.com/">My shared posts from NewsBlur</a>
<ul>
<li>Feed URL: <a href="https://brennen.newsblur.com/social/rss/98457/brennen">https://brennen.newsblur.com/social/rss/98457/brennen</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The Pinboard one in particular is strictly &ldquo;stuff I want to remember&rdquo;, not
&ldquo;stuff I think anyone else cares about&rdquo;. It informs a lot of things I write
here or work on elsewhere, and stands a fair chance of being deathly boring for
readers who aren&rsquo;t me.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/feeds">feeds</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/25/" title="25">25</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, May 22, 2020 - feeds: stuff that makes me think</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/22"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/5/22</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, May 22, 2020</h1>
<h2>feeds: stuff that makes me think</h2>
<p><em>Background:</em> I&rsquo;m <a href="/2020/5/8">doing some short posts</a> linking to feeds that I
like.</p>
<p><em>Today&rsquo;s theme:</em> Some stuff that complicates how I think about the world in a
useful way.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✥ </p>
<p><b><a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/">BIG by Matt Stoller</a></b> is
technically an e-mail newsletter, I guess, but <a href="https://substack.com/">Substack</a>
provides RSS feeds so that's how I subscribe. The tagline is "[t]he history
and pollitics of monopoly power". Stoller is a thinktank type at something
called the American Economic Liberties Project. I'm not actually sure I have
much of a bead on his politics as such, and I'm frankly not smart enough to
evaluate a large chunk of the claims made here, but I've found its take on monopolies
pretty striking.</p>
<p><i>Feed URL:</i> <a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/feed/">https://mattstoller.substack.com/feed/</a></p>
<p><i>Sample posts:</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-the-spotify-joe-rogan-deal-and">On
the Spotify-Joe Rogan Deal and the Coming Death of Independent Podcasting</a></li>
<li><a href="https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/uber-grubhub-how-the-pandemic-is">Uber-Grubhub:
How the Pandemic Is Launching the Era of Online Platform Regulation</a>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✧ </p>
<p><b><a href="https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/">A Corner of Tenth-Century
Europe</a></b> is a blog on medieval history that talks about stuff like coinage,
charters, architecture, and administrative matters. A special kind of drily
fascinating, and a window into the kinds of deep research that you don't seem
to get from a lot of popularizing works.</p>
<p><i>Feed URL:</i> <a href="https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/feed/">https://tenthmedieval.wordpress.com/feed/</a></p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✪ </p>
<p><b><a href="https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/">Kiwi Hellenist</a></b>
offers detailed breakdowns of all sorts of stuff in classical antiquity and its
footprint in modern culture.</p>
<p><i>Feed URL:</i> <a href="https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default">https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default</a></p>
<p><i>Sample posts:</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/05/ancient-greek-colours.html">How to make sense of ancient Greek colours</a></li>
<li><a href="https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/02/bridges.html">Did Roman engineers stand under bridges?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2019/10/spartan-losers.html">Spartan losers</a> - especially good if you're looking for some <i>300</i> bashing.</li>
<li><a href="https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2019/01/sea-shanties-assassins-creed-odyssey.html">Shanties in <i>Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey</i></a></li>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✵ </p>
<p><b><a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/">Snakes and Ladders</a></b> - A while
back, I made an effort to follow more conservative (religious or otherwise)
outlets and writers, consciously trying to get outside of my filter bubble. A
lot of it didn't stick, but I kept reading <a href="http://ayjay.org/">Alan
Jacobs</a> in various formats. He's a writer, an academic, and the sort of
person who publishes in places like <i>The American Conservative</i>.</p>
<p>You should read that last as a disclaimer of many of his probable views,
because he keeps intellectual &amp; cultural company with some people I find it
pretty hard to stomach. Once in a while I come pretty close to unsubscribing.
All the same, I often read his work with some interest and find that it makes
me more aware of a conservative Christian intellectual culture that, while
super messed up about all kinds of things, is more complicated than the
American talk radio / Focus on the Family / Fox News / beat-your-children side
of things would suggest.</p>
<p><i>Feed URL:</i> <a href="https://blog.ayjay.org/feed/">https://blog.ayjay.org/feed/</a></p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❁ </p>
<p><b><a href="https://granolashotgun.com/">Granola Shotgun</a></b> has some
rich-guy-prepper-landlord vibes, which might be offputting here and there, but
also a ton of interesting thoughts and background on housing, urban planning,
regulation, etc. I take this one with a substantial grain of salt, but it's
filtered into my thinking about the dynamics of the American built landscape
and how much dry goods I'd like to have on hand. Also uses just piles of
photos, which while often individually mundane do an effective job of conveying
a story or idea when taken in the aggregate.</p>
<p><i>Feed URL:</i> <a href="https://granolashotgun.com/feed/">https://granolashotgun.com/feed/</a></p>
<p><i>Sample posts:</i></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://granolashotgun.com/2018/09/20/methodist-urbanism-ocean-grove/">Methodist Urbanism: Ocean Grove</a>
<li><a href="https://granolashotgun.com/2019/06/03/levittown/">Levittown</a>
</ul>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/22/" title="22">22</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2020-05-23T09:11:18Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - meta meta</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/20"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/5/20</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, May 20, 2020</h1>
<h2>meta meta</h2>
<p>Opening my notebook to where I left off, I notice that the most recent pages
are full of the distracted scrawl and half-hearted jottings that result from
leaving it open on my desk while I work. There&rsquo;s a scratchpaper quality to all
of it. Random TODOs, unfinished lists, scraps of conversation, doodles,
context-free exclamations. It was probably useful for thinking earlier, but it
doesn&rsquo;t tell me much now.</p>
<p>Musing about this in writing &mdash; writing about an act of writing, its
materials, etc. &mdash; is a particular kind of thing. Let&rsquo;s call it <em>meta</em>.
Meta-whatever:</p>
<ul>
<li>Metawriting</li>
<li>Metaprogramming</li>
<li>Metaprocess</li>
</ul>
<p>Writing about writing. Programming about programming. Meetings about
meetings. The mind reflecting on its own function.</p>
<p>Meta-whatever can be both potent and dangerously tempting. It&rsquo;s not for
nothing that it shows up so many places, and at times it yields deep insights
or significant gains in power. It&rsquo;s also striking how often it seems to trap
people in localized loops and hopeless ruts.</p>
<p>Methodology cults like Agile, Getting Things Done, and the recently emerging
nerd-frenzy over the Zettelkasten method are rife with process obsessions,
semi-stable patterns of recurring inquiry/argument, and people who mainly use
their methods of choice to refine their methods of choice. You don&rsquo;t have to
spend much time around any given large organization to notice how much effort
is burned on recursive bureaucracy, or how many contemporary jobs have
collapsed into closed-loop no-external-reality meta-work.</p>
<p>This is all frustrating both to observe and to experience, when it gets out of
control.</p>
<p>Maybe part of the reason it gets away from people is the high from when it pays
off. Runaway metaprogramming might turn into such a nightmare <em>because</em> it
starts with sharpening your tools to a keen edge, or with an act of
leapfrogging tiers of abstraction. Automating your automation can feel like
the purest response to that age old imperative of the hacker, that you make the
computer do the stupid shit.</p>
<p>Of course, follow that impulse too far, angle it the wrong way &mdash; and pretty
soon you&rsquo;re Mickey Mouse trying to bail while the ensorceled brooms flood the
whole joint.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ☆ </p>
<p>Writing about writing might not have quite the same potential for nested,
generative dysfunction, but it often produces artifacts just as unintelligible.
Self-referentiality in fiction can be a real punch in the brain pan sometimes,
but stories about stories get tiresome sooner or later. Taking the framework
apart and putting it back together can be amazing; it can also become deeply
annoying when a reader&rsquo;s looking for a framework that <em>contains</em> something.</p>
<p>Sure, all narrative is a sort of trick &mdash; but artifice that&rsquo;s purely
interested in its own mechanics eventually leads to <em>boring tricks</em>. It&rsquo;s like
painting that&rsquo;s purely about how paint adheres to a surface without any
particular interest in or reference to external objects and context: There&rsquo;s
nothing <em>wrong</em> with that sort of thing, but there&rsquo;d be something kind of
depressing about a world where it was the only kind of painting.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❃ </p>
<p>To circle back to notes about note-taking, because that&rsquo;s where this started:
It&rsquo;s a fruitful line of inquiry, up to some limit of circularity, some moment
where you risk crawling up your own asshole about refining a System instead of
using it to learn other things and think other thoughts.</p>
<p>This is a reminder I need, periodically.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes">notes</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/systems">systems</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/writing">writing</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/zettelkasten">zettelkasten</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/20/" title="20">20</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Thursday, May 14, 2020 - the world computer: a marginally coherent bathtub rant</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/5/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Thursday, May 14, 2020</h1>
<h2>the world computer: a marginally coherent bathtub rant</h2>
<p>I was pondering Amazon just now, as I sat in the bathtub sweating profusely and
reading an installment of <a href="https://www.marthawells.com/murderbot.htm"><em>The Murderbot Diaries</em></a> on an old e-ink
Kindle in a sandwich baggy.</p>
<p>I started thinking about how I <a href="https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/artificial-condition-1">bought a DRM-free edition of the book somewhere
besides Amazon</a> and jumped through several hoops to get it in a
readable format on the Kindle (a device given to me by a former employer so I
could participate in a book club for reading the blend of self-help, technical
propaganda, and management porn that the class of people who go through startup
incubators pretty much swim in).</p>
<p>And then I thought: For fucksake, the sheer <em>futility</em> of this kind of
exercise, when we as people who read books all more or less live inside the
machinery constructed by Amazon. I mean, sure, I have a copy of a book that I
can stash for later and read on some other gadget, which has some practical
value. But if you think of it as some minor act of resistance to the bullshit
status quo&hellip; I mean, it feels good, I indulge in this kind of theatrics all
the time, but fundamentally Amazon still owns publishing and for fractally
similar reasons total assholes still control most of the code on pretty much
every device on the planet.</p>
<p>From one reasonable but doomed point of view, the Kindle is a special-purpose
computer I own. But that elides a whole lot of its essential nature, doesn&rsquo;t
it? What the Kindle <em>really</em> is: A fragment of Amazon&rsquo;s computer that happens
to be physically located in my house, interfaced with both my credit card
balance and my brain.</p>
<p>And then I thought: We&rsquo;re over the threshold. It&rsquo;s not so much that there
are a lot of computers. 20 years ago there were a lot of computers. Now it&rsquo;s
more like there&rsquo;s one massive computer and we&rsquo;re all inside it. We&rsquo;ve
collapsed into the state where cyberspace isn&rsquo;t just a meaningful concept; it&rsquo;s
very nearly coterminous with human existence.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✶ </p>
<p>The same thought from a different angle: I was reading a thread about this
<a href="http://strlen.com/treesheets/">pretty interesting piece of desktop software</a>, and <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/7catij/how_do_you_take_notes_organize_your#c_9syeuc">someone
said</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>This does look intriguing, but I can’t help but be disinterested in it
because it doesn’t look like you can share and collaborate over the Internet.</p></blockquote>
<p>And I thought: Right. This is where we are. Abstractions like &ldquo;a kind of
file that this software can read&rdquo; have become implementation details for the
technical class. Even for the technical class, what doesn&rsquo;t open onto the
network is essentially dead. And in an age and architecture when scale and
corporate platform availability (Android, iOS, Facebook) are prerequisites for
meaningful participation, &ldquo;the network&rdquo; means what&rsquo;s wholly owned. The
network&rsquo;s the computer, the computer is the megacorporation.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✧ </p>
<p>But that understates the case. The <em>meta</em>-megacorporation is the network is
the computer. Amazon doesn&rsquo;t own the whole machine, or Microsoft, or Apple, or
Facebook, or Google, or the governments of [the United States, China, Russia,
&hellip;]. Vast territories are delineated within the network, but their boundaries
are permeable and ill-defined. It&rsquo;s impossible to cleanly disentangle client
hardware from operating systems from databases from protocols from supply
chains from datacenters. Just as it&rsquo;s impossible to disentangle computation
from the flow of money, the flow of goods, the flow of surveillance, the
software-riddled cognitive state of populations. Scale permeates everything,
even scale.</p>
<p>So: There&rsquo;s a computer and most of us live there now.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/amazon">amazon</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/business">business</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/murderbot">murderbot</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Friday, May 8, 2020 - feeds for your consideration: a preamble</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/8"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/5/8</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Friday, May 8, 2020</h1>
<h2>feeds for your consideration: a preamble</h2>
<p>It&rsquo;s 2020, which makes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed">RSS and its siblings</a> something on the
order of 20 years old as a technology in actual use. It&rsquo;s been a bit over 7
years since Google killed off Google Reader, and a year since <a href="/2019/1/2/">Firefox removed
feed discovery</a> features, the last visible form of support in a mainstream
browser.<sup class=footnote>1</sup></p>
<p>And yet: Feeds are still widely published and remain surprisingly effective
for reading a slice of the web that isn&rsquo;t overtly terrible.</p>
<p>Maybe this is an accident, or an emergent nerd conspiracy. Feed publishing
isn&rsquo;t that hard for programmers to implement, and rarely comes to the malign
attention of marketing departments or upper management. It remains baked into
enough widely-used software (WordPress, for example) that a lot of sites
probably publish feeds without even realizing it. Podcasting is a whole thing
and is built on the same underlying tech, which probably helps too.</p>
<p>This is tech I still use every day, and I feel like more people would benefit
if they knew about it, but unlike the last few times I&rsquo;ve written about this
topic, I won&rsquo;t waste space on the (doomed) idea that a browser vendor or the
software industry as a whole might behave any differently. After decades of
very hard work, we&rsquo;ve achieved the natural equilibrium of the web: It totally
sucks. The infrastructure is all owned by assholes with bad ideas and the
technology is dominated by grotesque, unwieldy nonsense.</p>
<p>Instead of worry about that, I thought maybe I&rsquo;d just write a series of short
posts linking to feeds that I enjoy or get some value out of, so look for that
when / if I get around to it&hellip;</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✤ </p>
<p><strong>Edit:</strong> How do you subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds, you might reasonably ask?
Well, you need a feedreader.</p>
<p>On the web, I use <a href="https://www.newsblur.com/">NewsBlur</a>, a paid option with a free trial
that&rsquo;s also open source. On the desktop, I&rsquo;ve used
<a href="https://lzone.de/liferea/">Liferea</a>. If you want to self-host a web app,
<a href="https://tt-rss.org/">Tiny Tiny RSS</a> is popular. For Firefox and Chrome,
there&rsquo;s a plugin called <a href="https://nodetics.com/feedbro/">Feedbro</a> that doesn&rsquo;t
seem to be open source (which sketches me out a bit), but does seem to offer a
decent user experience.</p>
<p>In Firefox, I use the <a href="https://github.com/nt1m/livemarks/">livemarks</a>
extension to see when pages have a feed I can subscribe to and turn some of
them into &ldquo;live bookmarks&rdquo;. For Chrome, Google offers
<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-subscription-extensio/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd/">RSS Subscription Extension</a>.</p>
<p class=footnote><sup>1</sup> I use both "noticeable" and "mainstream" lightly
here, given that the features were buried in a settings menu years before their
removal, and Firefox itself exists at the financial and technical sufferance of
the adtech search monopoly that owns the only browser anyone cares about
supporting.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/feeds">feeds</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/firefox">firefox</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/syndication">syndication</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/web">web</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/5/8/" title="8">8</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, April 26, 2020 - fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (2)</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/26"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/4/26</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, April 26, 2020</h1>
<h2>fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (2)</h2>
<p><em>Disclaimer: I don&rsquo;t know what I&rsquo;m talking about. These posts are snapshots of
what I was thinking on a given date so I can check myself later.</em></p>
<p>As I write this, early Sunday morning:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="who-sitrep">WHO</a>: 2,804,796 confirmed cases and 193,710 deaths globally</li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/blob/master/us.csv#L97">NY Times</a>: 938,590 cases and 48,310 deaths in the US</li>
</ul>
<p>In my rough personal chronology, I&rsquo;m marking today, or at any rate this
weekend, as the point at which it seems like any very effective degree of
social distancing ended locally. A steady trickle of people in neighbors'
yards, a straight up party a few blocks down the way, a trip to the beer store
where it was pretty clear that no one shopping or working there had any fucks
left to give about transmission-limiting measures. Big packs of old guys on
Harleys and young guys on crotch rockets, rumbling and screeching,
respectively, through town. It&rsquo;s probably not evenly distributed, but I&rsquo;m
guessing it feels similar a lot of places up and down the Colorado Front Range.</p>
<p>So: Does the disease move like I think it does after reading far too many &ldquo;an
expert said this&rdquo; articles, or is it somehow not as bad as all that?</p>
<p>I think we&rsquo;re going to find out, because it seems like we&rsquo;ve just about
exhausted whatever social / political / administrative capacity we had to
mitigate things in a lot of the US.</p>
<p>We&rsquo;ve been stricter than average about limiting contact with people outside our
household, I think. We&rsquo;ve got computer jobs that can happen from home, which
makes that a lot more possible. Still, the social pressure to give up on it is
substantial. I can feel myself shifting into the category of humorless,
uptight asshole in the context of my relationships around town. Mostly, people
are going to yield to pressures like that, sooner rather than later.</p>
<p>I wonder what this is going to look like in a week, or a month. I have some
guesses and I hope I&rsquo;m wrong about all of them.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/colorado">colorado</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/covid19">covid19</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/26/" title="26">26</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, April 21 - fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (1)</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/21"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/4/21</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, April 21</h1>
<h2>fragmentary notes from a bad time getting worse (1)</h2>
<p>This isn&rsquo;t going to be well-written and it&rsquo;s probably not worth your time. I&rsquo;m
just pinning some thoughts where I can see them and check myself after a while.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✦ </p>
<p>As I&rsquo;m writing this, the <a href="https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200421-sitrep-92-covid-19.pdf">WHO situation report for today</a> lists
2,397,216 confirmed cases and 162,956 deaths worldwide. For the United States
it has 751,273 cases and 35,884 deaths. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html]">New York Times map</a>
shows 804,701 cases and 40,266 deaths for the US, though it&rsquo;s not yet reflected
in their <a href="https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data/blob/master/us.csv">CSV data</a>.</p>
<p>Both numbers are lower bounds on both the number of people infected and the
number of dead. I&rsquo;m wildly unqualified to guess how much bigger the real
numbers are.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✮ </p>
<p>I tried to look back in my notes and see when the virus first really entered my
awareness. The best I can come up with is that I remember talking about it on
the phone with my dad. I was standing in a hotel lobby at a conference in San
Francisco, full of coworkers who&rsquo;d traveled internationally to attend. The
27th or 28th of January, I&rsquo;d guess. It was in the news by then in an
escalating kind of way.</p>
<p>A throw away line in <a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/1/">an entry from the airport</a> a few days later:
&ldquo;People in face masks because the network made them afraid of a potential
pandemic.&rdquo;</p>
<p>I think the fear really set in towards the end of February. My mom was in town
and we were in the car coming back from lunch one day. I opened a laptop to
check work mail and skimmed some headlines and it hit me: <em>This one is
happening.</em> I was nervous about her taking a plane back home. The same day she
left, I drank beers with a bunch of old work friends and we very carefully
didn&rsquo;t talk about it.</p>
<p>I began stocking up on canned food and dry goods in earnest somewhere around
then. Work events started getting canceled. I remember a series of social
gatherings haunted by that sense that this might be the last one before things
got real. A series of those conversations where people said &ldquo;wait, you really
think this is going to be a big deal?&rdquo;</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❁ </p>
<p>I haven&rsquo;t regretted those early trips to the grocery store for a second.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✪ </p>
<p>I started bookmarking some of my reading <a href="https://pinboard.in/u:brennen/t:covid19/">under a covid19 tag</a>
on the 1st of March.</p>
<p>In the weeks after that, I argued with older relatives and talked to neighbors
and realized that the nature (and existence) of the disease had become a
partisan question and a focus for the kind of conspiratorial paranoia that
usually centers around chemtrails and cell towers.</p>
<p>Fewer people tell me it&rsquo;s just the flu now. My nearest acquaintance with a
chemtrails / deep state / 5G / FEMA camps obsession decamped for New Mexico a
while back. I don&rsquo;t think the conceptual shear has gotten any less pronounced
overall, though. The focus has just shifted a little.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✧ </p>
<p>It was always clear that, at best, Donald Trump is morally vacuous and
profoundly stupid. For a long time I had conversations where people who shared
that premise would ask how much it really mattered. Sure, Trump was personally
appalling, every bit the mobbed up piece-of-shit real-estate con artist you
knew you were getting. But was this administration really any worse or more
extreme in terms of outcomes than x-random 2020-era Republican would have been?
I haven&rsquo;t heard anyone ask these things lately.</p>
<p>Of course, a lot of people don&rsquo;t share that premise. In the early days, back
when I still had the capacity to worry about things like national elections, I
said: It seems like the only way Trump is likely to lose the election in
November is if the pandemic and its consequences get bad enough. I expected
some kind of reversal in popular understanding if a lot of people died and a
lot of jobs went away, but what we seem to be getting instead is a hardening
cultural divide over whether the virus is itself a serious threat and whose
fault it is if so.</p>
<p>So: The US is decently likely to have federal leadership which combines
world-historical incompetence with actual villainy for the duration of this
thing. As a bonus, we&rsquo;re now a population permanently unable to agree on the
most basic questions of fact about an event that&rsquo;s going to reshape politics,
culture, and the economy for decades.</p>
<p>Then again, I guess you could say the same about a majority of the really big
things that have happened during my lifetime.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ☆ </p>
<p>Today I feel like the American federal project is collapsing. This is an
empire not just in slow decline but in a state of active disintegration. How
much of that did I think already? How deep down did I feel it? I&rsquo;m not sure.
Maybe it&rsquo;ll look different in a season or five.</p>
<p>Right now you can watch the cracks open in realtime. I don&rsquo;t mean that there
won&rsquo;t be a United States of America when we wake up one of these quarantine
days. I think it&rsquo;s a fair bet American militaries will still be murdering
people for resource extraction long after my natural lifespan runs out. But
regional pandemic compacts between state governments, defunded public health
agencies, and governors making back-channel deals to smuggle medical supplies in
so they can&rsquo;t be seized by the feds: I don&rsquo;t think this stuff is ephemeral in
its effects.</p>
<p>Structures are failing. Money and power are going to build other structures to
compensate. Channels are going to shift, boundaries and systems are going to
reconfigure.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s useful to have read <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_Doctrine"><em>The Shock Doctrine</em></a> right about now.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❃ </p>
<p>Plenty of recent experiences have caused me to think some pretty anarchist
thoughts again. The pandemic has complicated that. Or maybe it&rsquo;s only
informed it. My politics don&rsquo;t feel any more coherent than they did 6 months
ago. Maybe it would be a bad sign if they did.</p>
<p>The already-patchworky set of stay-at-home orders and other restrictions are
about to loosen, driven partly by death-cult consensus politics, and partly
just by the impossible pressures of keeping a lid on so many people and
systems. Too soon and badly managed is what I expect out of this.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Fuck you I won&rsquo;t do what you tell me&rdquo; is simultaneously the best and worst of
American impulses.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/covid19">covid19</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/history">history</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/policy">policy</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/politics">politics</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/21/" title="21">21</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, April 13</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/13"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/4/13</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, April 13</h1>
<p>I learned how to dial on a rotary phone. Listen for the dial tone. Put a
finger in the hole over the number you want, turn it &lsquo;til it stops, and let it
roll back. Listen to the clicks. Repeat.</p>
<p>In the 90s, when half of what my dad seemed to do for a living was an elaborate
resource allocation game conducted in the menu trees of corporate voicemail
systems, he had this gadget that would play touch tones into the handset so you
could use the old rotary phones that were still littered all over the
landscape. The kind of technical ephemera that you get as one kind of network
thrashes its way towards becoming another thing altogether.</p>
<p>If you&rsquo;d told me back then that I&rsquo;d mourn fundamental qualities of that phone
system (with its by-the-minute long-distance charges and 14.4 modems) in a time
when I have access to hundreds of computers and an always-on Internet
connection, I&rsquo;m not sure what I would have thought.</p>
<p>My parents got rid of their landline earlier this year. I don&rsquo;t think they
would have, necessarily, but the service had degraded beyond usability by the
time they finally gave up on it. For a while there, it&rsquo;d go out completely if
it rained enough. There was strange crackling on the line, and finally just an
error tone of some sort when you tried to dial in. This is how the old world
dies: Piece by piece, quietly, at the edges, a decade or three after the fact
of its obsolescence.</p>
<p>(I wrote a draft of this fragment a month ago, and looking through my bookmarks
I guess it must have been prompted by reading &ldquo;<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/landine-phone.html">A Longing for the Lost
Landline</a>&rdquo;,
which is exactly the sort of NYT opinion piece you&rsquo;d expect from the title.)</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/phone">phone</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/13/" title="13">13</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, April 5, 2020 - wrt 7.0.0 - new features - title extraction and entry caching - a tagging system - json feed output - a repl for debugging - breaking changes - future work / observations</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/5"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/4/5</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, April 5, 2020</h1>
<h2>wrt 7.0.0</h2>
<p>Links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/wrt">wrt related entries here on p1k3</a></li>
<li><a href="https://metacpan.org/release/App-WRT">wrt on CPAN as App::WRT</a></li>
<li><a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/wrt">wrt repo on code.p1k3.com</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/brennen/wrt">wrt mirrored on GitHub</a></li>
</ul>
<p>It&rsquo;s been nearly a year since I released a version of wrt, the tool I use for
publishing this site from a collection of flat files. I hacked on it for a
while late in 2019, and got somewhere in the neighborhood of a 7.0.0 release
before getting sidetracked by illness, a fried computer, and holiday travel.</p>
<p>I checked on the state of the code last night and realized I&rsquo;d left a bunch of
changes dangling and had mostly lost track of the mental state I&rsquo;d built up
around my plans. I even had a release blog post mostly written. I went ahead
and cleaned up a few obvious loose ends and published a release, which I&rsquo;ll now
attempt to describe.</p>
<h3>new features</h3>
<p>Minor stuff: There&rsquo;s some refactoring, improvement here and there of how
things outside of ASCII are handled, and probably a slightly better test suite
(it&rsquo;s still abysmal, though).</p>
<h4>title extraction and entry caching</h4>
<p>I decided a while ago that wrt should know what an entry&rsquo;s title is, so that it
can be used to do things like populate <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> tags, display navigation links
for each entry, or generate an index for a site. I was already doing some of
those things, on an ad hoc basis, but I wanted a general solution.
Before this version, an entry like today&rsquo;s would have been made up of the
following files:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/index</code></li>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/tag-wrt.prop</code></li>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/tag-technical.prop</code></li>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/tag-perl.prop</code></li>
</ul>
<p>Where <code>index</code> contains the body of the entry for the 5th, and <code>tag-wrt.prop</code>
says that the entry has been tagged &ldquo;wrt&rdquo;. The <code>.prop</code> extension indicates a
&ldquo;property&rdquo;, and right now it just represents a boolean or a flag - either an
entry has a property or it doesn&rsquo;t.</p>
<p>I considered adding values to properties, based on the contents of the file,
and then using <code>title.prop</code> to specify an entry&rsquo;s overall title. So, for
example, <code>2020/4/5/title.prop</code> would have contained the string &ldquo;App::WRT
7.0.0 &hellip;&rdquo;.</p>
<p>It was easy to implement this, and it <em>worked</em>, but I wasn&rsquo;t happy with it as a
user. I like to change entry titles as I&rsquo;m writing, and I sometimes have more
than one top-level heading, or a set of subheadings in an entry that I&rsquo;d like
the title logic to capture. I&rsquo;ve also never bothered teaching wrt to display
any kind of a page / date header separately from the text of an entry, and
entry titles are typically just represented with inline header tags. It seemed
weird to duplicate the title into another file.</p>
<p>Since keeping titles in separate files is cumbersome, the other obvious option
is getting them out of the body of the entry itself. wrt now does this by
rendering the HTML for every entry in the archive and parsing it with a library
called Mojo::DOM, then extracting the text of tags <code>&lt;h1&gt;</code> through <code>&lt;h6&gt;</code> into
a title cache which can be queried later.</p>
<p>Out of laziness, I started adding this feature by storing the rendered HTML for
each entry in memory, and accidentally discovered that by doing so I can avoid
rendering most entries at least twice - once for an individual date and once
for the display of every entry in a month, with a handful additionally showing
up on the index page and in feeds.</p>
<p>As a downside, this is really slow for an operation like rendering a single
entry. But at least displaying an entry can reference data extracted from
all the other entries.</p>
<p>I feel a bit queasy about loading thousands of blog entries into memory at once
in order to display any given one of them. But in thinking about it, I&rsquo;m
pretty sure it would have worked fine even on the machine I used to write the
first version of wrt (originally called display.pl), circa 2001. In 2019 I
guess I don&rsquo;t really have a problem assuming that the systems I use for this
will have at least half a gig of RAM. It would probably be good if wrt adjusted
its behavior for really constrained environments, but my gut says that even a
low end laptop or cheap shared hosting shouldn&rsquo;t be too affected by this.</p>
<h4>a tagging system</h4>
<p>I&rsquo;ve been using, as mentioned above, property files named like <code>tag-foo.prop</code>
to add tags to p1k3 entries and display them on a <a href="/topics">topic index</a>. This
was partially supported (if undocumented) in wrt, but mostly made up of ad hoc
stuff in the <code>Makefile</code> that generates p1k3.</p>
<p>Although it&rsquo;s still not really documented and probably has lingering issues,
this release of wrt now fully supports a similar scheme, where the filenames
become something like:</p>
<ul>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/index</code> → <code>index</code></li>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/tag-wrt.prop</code> → <code>tag.topics.wrt.prop</code></li>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/tag-technical.prop</code> → <code>tag.topics.technical.prop</code></li>
<li><code>archives/2020/4/5/tag-perl.prop</code> → <code>tag.topics.perl.prop</code></li>
</ul>
<p>A property file starting with <code>tag</code> is treated as a link between the entry
containing it and another entry path with dots as directory separators, so
<code>tag.topics.wrt.prop</code> tags <code>/2020/4/5</code> as related in some way to <code>/topics/wrt</code>.
If <code>/topics/wrt</code> exists in the archive, it&rsquo;ll be rendered like usual followed
by a list of tagged entries. If it <em>doesn&rsquo;t</em> exist, it&rsquo;s treated as a
&ldquo;virtual&rdquo; entry and the tag list still renders.</p>
<p>This is kind of confusing, but it allows for an arbitrary number of
user-defined tagging schemes.</p>
<h4>json feed output</h4>
<p>wrt 7 uses JSON::Feed to output <a href="https://jsonfeed.org/">JSON Feed</a> data in
addition to Atom feeds.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not really sure how many feedreaders support this format, but it was
relatively painless to implement, and at least <a href="https://www.newsblur.com/">NewsBlur</a>
seems to handle it.</p>
<h4>a repl for debugging</h4>
<p><code>wrt repl</code> in a repository root will now yield a simple commandline where you
can interactively inspect the <code>App::WRT</code> object. Handy for development
purposes, more than anything.</p>
<h3>breaking changes</h3>
<p>I removed <code>entry_map</code> from configuration and hardcoded its assumptions about
how entries are laid out. This is a major change if you were using it, but I&rsquo;d
be even more surprised if anyone had been than I already would be if anyone
were using wrt in the first place. (As always, if I&rsquo;m wrong, please do let me
know.)</p>
<p>I got rid of the <code>embedded_perl</code> toggle, since turning it off would have broken
templates. (The underlying embedded Perl feature is still in place, though I
may deprecate it in future. It really shouldn&rsquo;t be used for anything besides
templates.)</p>
<p>The old (undocumented) tagging system has been ripped out and replaced, as
described above.</p>
<p>Since it uses Mojo::DOM to parse the HTML of rendered entries, wrt will now
issue warnings for parsing errors. For the most part, I don&rsquo;t <em>think</em> this
will break anything, but it may surface stuff like character encoding issues.
It led to me noticing that I had some 20-year-old entries originally written
in&hellip; Well, something that definitely wasn&rsquo;t UTF-8, at any rate.</p>
<h3>future work / observations</h3>
<p>Apart from improving and fully documenting the tagging system, I&rsquo;d like to
spend some time making sure wrt could actually be used by someone else without
the scaffolding and assumptions built into the one site where I routinely use
it. My thought right now is to build a manual published with wrt itself.
We&rsquo;ll see how that goes, I guess.</p>
<p>In some ways this release feels a little shaky. It&rsquo;s got ideas in it that
deviate from the stark simplicity of most of this code&rsquo;s history, and it brings
the total of external library dependencies to 16, at least a couple of which
are non-trivial. Mojo::DOM in particular makes me a bit nervous.</p>
<p>On the other hand, it adds a couple of things I&rsquo;ve wanted for years, and some
of the underlying changes are a good foundation for solving the problems that
remain. I continue to think of wrt as both a format for storing writing and a
concrete implementation of a tool for publishing that format. For what they
are, I&rsquo;m happy with both.</p>
<p>(Elsewhere: I&rsquo;m thinking hard about how I take notes and conduct research, how
doomed the web generally feels as a platform, and what language ecosystems I
want to spend my remaining time as a programmer in. All of that might
influence future extensions to the wrt format, or lead to implementations in
something besides Perl. Time will tell.)</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/perl">perl</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/wrt">wrt</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/4/5/" title="5">5</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-26T00:08:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Saturday, March 28, 2020 - a sheltered-in-place lawn and garden report</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/3/28"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/3/28</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Saturday, March 28, 2020</h1>
<h2>a sheltered-in-place lawn and garden report</h2>
<p>We start the day somewhere after noon with a Bloody Mary each and
egg-and-cheese sandwiches on English muffins. The bloodies are from a
store-bought bottle of mix, but I doctor the mix with homemade hot sauce and
the eggs are bartered farm eggs, so in terms of authenticity it could be worse.</p>
<p>Outside: Blue skies, a breeze out of the south, a little chill but warm enough
if you&rsquo;re moving around. We start cleaning up around the shed we plan to tear
down out back, moving piles of scrap wood and old brick and rocks to different
corners of the property. There are often slugs, snails, or earthworms on the
undersides of these objects. No mosquitoes yet, but here and there you see
little clouds of gnats. Patches of boxelder bugs mill around where the sun
warms a wall or fence.</p>
<p>There was snow yesterday. Today the grass is half-green, through the shag of
last fall&rsquo;s final growth. There are buds on the apple tree. I uncover my
strawberry patch and find that most of the plants have survived under the
mulch.</p>
<p>Later, after dinner, I start a batch of bread dough for tomorrow&rsquo;s baking.
This will make a week since I picked it up again, after better than a decade
out of the habit. The no-knead approach where you let it sit overnight has a
lot to recommend it, for a man as lazy as I am.</p>
<p>We try not to read the news.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/bread">bread</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/colorado">colorado</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/food">food</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/garden">garden</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/weather">weather</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/3/28/" title="28">28</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>tuesday, march 3, 2020</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/3/3"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/3/3</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>tuesday, march 3, 2020</h1>
<p>the old cat snoozes in his bed<br />
i sit at my desk, wrapped up in the<br />
immediate confusion of code and<br />
the remote-for-now thrum of pandemic anxiety<br />
suddenly a shadow breaks the sunlight<br />
blazing from just above the hills through<br />
the grime on my back windows<br />
wondering what in the hell,<br />
i stand in time to see a pair of enormous<br />
crows swooping down to pause on the dead<br />
grass</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/birds">birds</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/corvidae">corvidae</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/3/3/" title="3">3</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, February 25, 2020 - extracting filenames from packages available in debian</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/25"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/2/25</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, February 25, 2020</h1>
<h2>extracting filenames from packages available in debian</h2>
<p><a href="/2016/7/11">Back in 2016</a>, I wanted to check the names of existing
command-line utilities in order to avoid a collision when I renamed my blogging
software to <a href="/wrt">wrt</a>.</p>
<p>I wound up using <code>apt-file</code> data to see what binaries are available from Debian
packages, and I&rsquo;ve referenced the list of files I generated then a bunch of
times since. It&rsquo;s obviously way out of date by now, and today I had a similar
question to answer, so here&rsquo;s a scripted version of that process that worked on
my current machine, running Debian Buster:</p>
<pre><code>#!/bin/sh
# Make sure we've got apt-file and lz4 compression utils:
sudo apt install apt-file lz4
# Update lists:
sudo apt-file update
cd /var/lib/apt/lists
lz4cat ./*.lz4 | \
grep -E '^(usr/bin/|sbin/|bin/)' | \
cut -f1 -d' ' | \
perl -pe 's/^(.*)\/(.*)$/$2/' | \
sort | uniq &gt; ~/used_names.txt
</code></pre>
<p>Then you can <code>grep whatever ~/used_names.txt</code> to look for binaries.</p>
<p>The main difference here is that the contents lists are now in
<code>/var/lib/apt/lists</code>, as LZ4-compressed files named like
<code>deb.debian.org_debian_dists_buster_main_Contents-amd64.lz4</code>.</p>
<p>I haven&rsquo;t taken the time to investigate whether this data is still just loaded
for <code>apt-file</code>&rsquo;s benefit or is in some way more integrated with <code>apt</code> or what.
Maybe I&rsquo;ll revisit at some point.</p>
<p>Today&rsquo;s <a href="/2020/2/25/used_names.txt">used_names.txt</a> is attached to this post
just in case it&rsquo;s helpful to people coming in from web search.</p>
<p><em>more:</em> <a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/25/used_names.txt" title="used_names.txt">used_names.txt</a></p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/apt">apt</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/debian">debian</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/shell">shell</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/25/" title="25">25</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-26T00:08:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>thursday, february 20, 2020</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/20"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/2/20</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>thursday, february 20, 2020</h1>
<p>i took the trash out just now,<br />
and turning around to go back inside<br />
caught the layer of new snow in the porch light<br />
it shines more perfectly than<br />
any i've seen in recent memory<br />
almost incorporeal<br />
offers no tangible resistance to my steps<br />
and when i scoop a handful from the ground<br />
in the seconds before it collapses into slush<br />
and meltwater, the outlines of individual<br />
flakes all set on edge against one another are<br />
visible in sharp crystal relief<br />
gleaming stars and polygons, lattices and<br />
near-symmetries.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/20/" title="20">20</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Saturday, February 1, 2020</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/1"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/2/1</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Saturday, February 1, 2020</h1>
<p>I&rsquo;m sitting in an airport bar at roughly 11am after my employer&rsquo;s annual
all-hands meeting in San Francisco. I have just paid $15 for avocado toast
(which was pretty good) and I am carefully not thinking about how much for a
mediocre bloody mary.</p>
<p>SFO is science fictional as fuck, in the way that modern airports along the
money&rsquo;s path tend to be. Automated trains along elevated tracks. Concrete
shapes that would work on the cover of some trade paperback featuring a
slightly abstracted spaceport. People in face masks because the network made
them afraid of a potential pandemic. In the distance out the windows, through
the fog slowly burning off, the surface of California&rsquo;s engineered vastness.</p>
<p>A <a href="/2019/2/1">year ago</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>Downtown SF in 2019: A grotesque and surreal environment. Gleaming towers,
all the trappings of an unfathomable wealth, the sidewalks and doorways
scattered with people in the throes of debilitating addiction and untreated
mental illness. You&rsquo;re quickly socialized to ignore the screaming and step
around the bodies and assume that someone else will attend to it if this or
that figure sprawled out across the pavement is dead instead of merely
unconscious.</p></blockquote>
<p>This hasn&rsquo;t changed, as far as I can tell. Maybe it&rsquo;s worse.</p>
<p>I usually try to travel light these days. A backpack with some changes of
clothes, a laptop, a notebook and some pens, toothbrush and some laundry soap
for the hotel sink. But of course the lightness of these habits is mostly a
fiction, apart from the convenience of skipping baggage claim in airports.
What I&rsquo;m <em>really</em> carrying is ready access to credit and enough social capital
to get me through any very likely situation, along with a home in a prosperous
and stable region, white skin, a steady job, health insurance, and all the rest
of it.</p>
<p>Self-flagellation about having good shit in life seems like a pointless
exercise, but I&rsquo;m aware these days of what feels like a divide becoming a chasm
between me and the set of people tending bar, waiting tables, driving for Uber.</p>
<p>The threat of precarity is real for nearly all of us, but it isn&rsquo;t evenly
distributed. Like most people, I&rsquo;m one bad hospitalization away from financial
ruin. In relative terms I also have a hell of a lot more buffer than it&rsquo;s
likely the guy who made my drink does. As long as I stay lucky and stay useful
to some slice of the technocracy, that&rsquo;ll probably stay true. There&rsquo;s a
feeling of sickness in knowing these things. In the movie of my life, it&rsquo;s
something dissonant and droning swelling on the soundtrack while I bullshit my
way through these paragraphs on an expensive laptop in a gleaming airport.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/airports">airports</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/california">california</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/san-francisco">san-francisco</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/2/1/" title="1">1</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - watching: solo: a star wars story</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2020/1/7"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2020/1/7</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, January 7, 2020</h1>
<h2>watching: solo: a star wars story</h2>
<p>The prequel: On the one hand, a narrative frame within which storytelling that
nominally coheres with its source material is usually flattened, trivialized,
and robbed of any sense of freedom or possibility. A sure-fire antidote to the
sense of expansiveness or openness that once attended a big story.</p>
<p>On the other hand, a frame which typically renders efforts at revelation and
expansion totally incoherent.</p>
<p>But: Donald Glover does a heck of a good Lando.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/movies">movies</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/star-wars">star-wars</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/watching">watching</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/" title="2020">2020</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/1/" title="1">1</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2020/1/7/" title="7">7</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>wednesday, december 18, 2019 - notes to a much younger self, to the extent that i can reconstruct him</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/12/18"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/12/18</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>wednesday, december 18, 2019</h1>
<h2>notes to a much younger self, to the extent that i can reconstruct him</h2>
<p><i>(posted wednesday, july 13, 2022)</i></p>
<p>i'll start by saying that it's<br />
better after a while<br />
for you at least</p>
<p>the dimensions of your<br />
life, they do expand</p>
<p>it's worse, too, and<br />
sometimes for years on end</p>
<p>there are things ahead<br />
that are going to destroy parts of you<br />
there are things ahead<br />
that are going to tear at the whole frame<br />
of the world you inhabit<br />
one of the things that life is<br />
is a series of losses<br />
that you never quite recover from</p>
<p>and in all that,<br />
you're going to fuck up a lot<br />
you'll learn most of what you learn<br />
the hard way<br />
you'll fail altogether<br />
to learn far too much</p>
<p>but all the same you'll make some friends,<br />
fall in love more than once<br />
and in more than one way<br />
wake up on some mornings<br />
to find yourself strong and able</p>
<p>maybe fear will always be with you, and<br />
far too much of it<br />
but the walls that arise in your mind<br />
between you and some imagined truer self<br />
they fall away with time</p>
<p>along, maybe, with the idea that<br />
there's any truer self to be found.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/12/" title="12">12</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/12/18/" title="18">18</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>thursday, november 7, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/11/7"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/11/7</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>thursday, november 7, 2019</h1>
<p>the light through the library windows<br />
the leaves still on the trees, just<br />
against the fog rising from the snowmelt<br />
on the mountainsides<br />
the road rising gray through the grass<br />
all bright in its browns and yellows<br />
russets and dull greens<br />
frostcolored and the patches of early<br />
snow the black cattle here and there<br />
on the hillsides between expensive<br />
houses and failing barbed wire fences</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/11/7/" title="7">7</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, November 4, 2019 - ...or you might just get it</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/11/4"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/11/4</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, November 4, 2019</h1>
<h2>...or you might just get it</h2>
<p>I woke up this morning thinking about the class of technical problems where for
years you hope for some kind of solution to emerge, and then when it finally
does, the solution entails such an egregious technical and political context
that you wonder if you ever should have wished for it in the first place.</p>
<p>FOR EXAMPLE, I wanted straightforward, usable transcription of speech. Well,
it&rsquo;s 2019 and it&rsquo;s there if you want it, more or less. All it took was massive
data hoarding, warehouse-scale computing, and universal networked surveillance
under the control of a handful of megacorporations. A little piece of the
Panopticon in every pocket. What I probably <em>thought</em> it would require was
something on the order of better software and more computing power. What it
took in practice was nothing short of a revolution in human affairs.</p>
<p>The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like these problems are
everywhere. Oh, you wanted to travel to that far off place where your family
lives in a day or so? Wait &lsquo;til you get a load of the environmental, cultural,
and political footprint of automotive transit. You&rsquo;re gonna love it.</p>
<p>The crucial difference is that things like cars and the modern road network
were in place by the time I was born. Now I&rsquo;m getting old enough to have
watched expectations I had for the future unfold in realtime. And they&rsquo;ve come
not just <em>with</em> unintended consequences, but <em>as</em> consequences of entire
undesired systems.</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s some kind of lesson here. Probably.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/idealogging">idealogging</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/systems">systems</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/11/" title="11">11</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/11/4/" title="4">4</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, October 27, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/27"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/10/27</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, October 27, 2019</h1>
<div class=photos>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8711.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8711.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8744.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8744.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8777.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8777.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8817.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8817.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8823.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8823.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8842.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8842.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8846.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8846.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8900.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8900.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8903.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8903.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8908.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8908.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8920.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8920.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8927.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8927.JPG" width="200">
</a>
<a href="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/IMG_8939.JPG">
<img height="200" src="/files/photos/./2019-10-27/Thumbs/IMG_8939.JPG" width="200">
</a>
</div>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/cat">cat</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/gallery">gallery</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/27/" title="27">27</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>tuesday, october 22, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/22"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/10/22</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>tuesday, october 22, 2019</h1>
<p>outside my back window leaves swirl in the wind<br />
and the streetlight over the alley flicks on<br />
against the sky pale blue and pink</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/22/" title="22">22</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, October 20, 2019 - on rms / necessary but not sufficient</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/20"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/10/20</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, October 20, 2019</h1>
<h2>on rms / necessary but not sufficient</h2>
<p>I&rsquo;m old enough now that, of the famous people I admired when I was young, more
have fallen in my estimation than not. At best I&rsquo;ve learned about the
difference between a person and the construct of their fame, and something
about how to put the work I still admire in context and acknowledge its
problems. At worst, well, plenty of days I&rsquo;m just disgusted. The idea that
you shouldn&rsquo;t have heroes at all resonates in these times, even if there are a
few I still find it hard to let go.</p>
<p>I couldn&rsquo;t tell you exactly when I first ran into Richard M. Stallman&rsquo;s
thinking. I spent an ocean of time on Slashdot and IRC in the 90s. I probably
read <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html">&ldquo;The Right to Read&rdquo;</a> right after it was published. I was running
a Linux desktop by late 1998, and read <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution">Steven Levy&rsquo;s <em>Hackers</em></a> right around then. I
was 17, which must be right about the age when radical ideas take hold with the
most ferocity: You&rsquo;re old enough to entertain big thoughts, but not old enough
to have many defenses against taking them on wholeheartedly.</p>
<p>Since then, I&rsquo;ve built my working life and quite a few personal beliefs on
ideas that originated and developed in hacker culture. Even so, most of the
people, places, and institutions that crop up in the hacker mythos have stayed
in the realm of abstraction or distant figure for me.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve shared both antipathy and (I hope) friendship with people from the orbit
of MIT, but it was never anywhere near my orbit. American East- and West-Coast
cultures crop up repeatedly in my life, but they aren&rsquo;t exactly <em>my</em> culture either.
I haven&rsquo;t worked on public projects of much significance (until recently,
anyway), and I don&rsquo;t do conferences all that often.</p>
<p>As a result, I&rsquo;ve never been in direct social proximity to RMS, the staff of
the Free Software Foundation, or most of the people who work on GNU projects.
I also haven&rsquo;t spent much time on the mailing lists, forums, or IRC channels
that would have given me more experience of them as distinct individuals. I
suspect the same is true of many people who rely on GNU tools, advocate
software freedom, publish work under the GPL, and donate to orgs like the FSF.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> &nbsp; </p>
<p>The way it now reads to me, RMS has behaved like an asshole for a long time,
and the moment of his resignation from the FSF after ill-advised opinionating
about the Epstein scandal was bound to come in <em>some</em> form eventually. A lot
of people in that scene have written to the effect that there&rsquo;s a long term
pattern here, and/or that they and others tried and failed to get him to behave
less like an asshole.</p>
<p>Some links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu">thoughts on rms and gnu</a></li>
<li><a href="https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/">Joint statement on the GNU Project</a></li>
<li><a href="https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84">A reflection on the departure of RMS</a></li>
<li><a href="https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/16/rms-does-not-speak-for-us/">Richard Stallman Does Not and Cannot Speak for the Free Software Movement</a></li>
<li><a href="https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2019-10/msg00007.html">Re: conflicts in the gnu project now affect guile</a></li>
</ul>
<p>I don&rsquo;t think these read as simple efforts at character assassination, and they
appear to come from people who share the values of the movement and have put in
the work to prove it.</p>
<p>I also find it credible that there&rsquo;s been an ongoing problem here because I
paid a little attention during a couple of previous blowups about RMS, and
I sent this to the FSF late in 2018:</p>
<blockquote><p>Howdy,</p>
<p>I wasn&rsquo;t really sure where to write, but as someone who continues to support
the FSF financially, I wanted to register with the organization in some way
that I broadly agree with what Bradley M. Kuhn has to say here:</p>
<p>http://www.ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2018/11/22/gnu-kind-communication-guidelines.html</p>
<p>Regards,</p>
<p>&ndash;
Brennen Bearnes</p></blockquote>
<p>And then: I&rsquo;ve talked with women who have said that RMS&rsquo;s behavior is
alienating or that they&rsquo;ve stayed away from the FSF because of his reputation.
I have every reason to think that this <em>kind</em> of thing drives people away from
a movement that&rsquo;s supposed to be liberatory and fundamentally concerned with
human agency.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> &nbsp; </p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not writing this to throw fuel on any fires. Not that it would be needed;
reaction in some quarters has been more or less on par with the systemd
flamewars of these last 5 or 6 years or the least pleasant threads I&rsquo;ve slogged
through on Wikimedia mailing lists.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m tired of that kind of thing. I&rsquo;m tired of technical work and technical
politics being defined by fear and loathing. I&rsquo;m far less willing than I used
to be to participate in the outrage cycle that&rsquo;s overtaken social media and
journalism. I&rsquo;m weary of callouts, pile-ons, and network-amplified harassment.
I&rsquo;m way beyond jaded by the dysfunctions and endless self-immolation of
activist culture. I have friends and colleagues who are decent people without
sharing many of my beliefs, and for the most part I&rsquo;m happy to collaborate with
them on things that seem beneficial regardless of that.</p>
<p>So: As little sympathy as I have for the view that free software isn&rsquo;t a
political project, I understand the desire to avoid getting drawn into the
unrelenting nightmare of partisan politics and its ancillary culture war.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> &nbsp; </p>
<p>But free software <em>is</em> a political project.</p>
<p><em>Software</em>, broadly speaking, is a political project, and it&rsquo;s one that has
come to govern human existence. So far it&rsquo;s done so mostly without the consent
of the governed, and it operates to an intolerable degree in the interests of
concentrated wealth and unaccountable power.</p>
<p>Computation is everywhere. Less and less of it is subject to the understanding
or control of its individual users. Or, for that matter, to any democratic
representation or governance. Systems that define our jobs and social lives
are managed by a technocratic class beholden to megacorporations and
billionaires. These systems' workings are opaque, their maintenance is an
unrelenting nightmare, and everyone involved is fundamentally compromised.</p>
<p>Free software saw much of this coming and tried to stop it. It failed, in ways
large and small. It&rsquo;s a very incomplete set of answers to a problem of almost
incomprehensible scope. But any humane future for computation is going to
require ideas and practices that have thrived within the free software
movement. The content of the ideas matters, and without them we&rsquo;re basically
fucked. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s at stake.</p>
<p>Accordingly: I think it&rsquo;s reasonable to ask better of people with authority in
our community, and <em>imperative</em> that we outgrow cults of personality as an
organizing principle. I&rsquo;m not still in this after 20 years because I admire a
particular dude. I&rsquo;m in this because at heart I&rsquo;m an anarchist a lot of the
time. Free software isn&rsquo;t whatever RMS says it is. Free software is what we
make of it: We who want to be free, we who want others to be free.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> &nbsp; </p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve been using the phrase &ldquo;state of total defeat&rdquo; when I talk about the goals
of free software and related ideas, but I recognize that that&rsquo;s hyperbolic and
not especially nuanced.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m writing this on a computer that, even if I can&rsquo;t inspect it all the way
down to the metal, runs <a href="https://www.debian.org/">an operating system</a> and a bunch of
applications I can crack wide open any time I feel like it. The OS and its
package repositories are a product of anarchy in the real sense, assembled over
the course of decades into a mostly-coherent whole by a distributed collective
of volunteer hackers from the work of thousands of other projects.</p>
<p>Free and open source software has given me both a tolerable scope for my
individual use of computers, and the ecosystem where I make a living. To the
extent that free software was about wanting the freedom to hack and freely
exchange the fruits of your hacking, this hasn&rsquo;t gone so badly. It could be
better, but I remember the 1990s pretty well and I can tell you that much of
the stuff trivially at my disposal now would have blown my tiny mind back then.
Sometimes I kind of snap to awareness in the middle of installing some package
or including some library in a software project and this rush of gratitude
comes over me.</p>
<p>The elephant in the room is that open source, combined with the networks it did
so much to help build, has provided much of the technical architecture for a
proprietary control over computing that exceeds all but the wildest dreams of a
few decades ago.</p>
<p>There are plenty of ways that RMS-style obsession with terminology has done
more harm than good in the last few decades. The conflation of &ldquo;free/libre
software&rdquo; and &ldquo;open source&rdquo; into one thing might even be a good idea, provided
the political motivations of the &ldquo;libre&rdquo; side of the question are retained.
But it&rsquo;s still worth making some distinctions, and worth knowing some history.
Open Source&trade; set out partly to make open code palatable to business, and
it succeeded in that.</p>
<p>In fact, tons of people taught business that open source / FOSS was a good way
to get economic leverage: At one end of the scale, just people like me and a
lot of my coworkers, who started out as amateurs on shoestring budgets, wanting
to make a living with the stuff we already knew and liked. At the other end,
straightforward predators of the sort who found tech companies and hold upper
management positions: People who looked at open code and open standards and
saw unpaid labor and a commons ripe for enclosure.</p>
<p>Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Netflix, Uber, and so on down the
line: To varying degrees, they&rsquo;ve all used FOSS as a basic technical
foundation for their current empires. Google and Facebook&rsquo;s history is riddled
with instances of using an open technology or medium to gain the leverage
necessary to subvert the tech&rsquo;s openness: Mail, RSS/Atom, the web itself.</p>
<p>Android and Chrome use open source rhetoric and development practices to drive
their adoption while operating purely in furtherance of Google&rsquo;s agenda &mdash; a
pattern you can see replicated in countless products and systems. Locked-down
APIs replace protocols, personal computers are relegated to the status of
&ldquo;client&rdquo;, and keystone projects like web browsers become impossible to replace
without billions in funding and hundreds of engineers.</p>
<p>The scale, complexity, and rent-seeking of megacorps have poisoned our
expectations for software and the practice of software development to an extent
that&rsquo;s hard to get your head around. Technical work is well-paid, at least for
the skilled and well-connected, but that typically comes at the price of a
livelihood held hostage by terrible people in service of terrible goals.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> &nbsp; </p>
<p>It could be otherwise, but I think we first have got to recognize that the
existing tools of FOSS aren&rsquo;t remotely sufficient to remedy everything that&rsquo;s
broken about software. What the communities writing and publishing all this
code have accomplished is astonishing, but it remains embedded in a system of
exploitation and a profoundly damaged larger culture.</p>
<p>Technical culture is broken, generally concentrating rather than diffusing the
inequities and pathologies of the one that surrounds it. Employment is broken
and jobs are rife with bullshit. What Diana Thayer calls the poverty gun &mdash;
the relentless, asymmetrical threat of unemployment pointed at anyone in
conflict with the whims of capital &mdash; stifles most meaningful dissent.
Capitalism, however inevitable or useful some of its basic elements are, is
broken.</p>
<p>I don&rsquo;t know how to solve those problems. What I think I know at the moment is
that free software is necessary, but it&rsquo;s not sufficient. As something
necessary, it needs to be better. As something insufficient, it needs to be a
place where more people can find a home.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/free-software">free-software</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/politics">politics</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/20/" title="20">20</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Saturday, October 5, 2019 - sfe</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/5"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/10/5</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Saturday, October 5, 2019</h1>
<h2>sfe</h2>
<p><em>Note: I&rsquo;ve edited this since initial publication, mostly to add links to other
entries, but there&rsquo;s some new text as well.</em></p>
<p>Late summer into middle fall seems to be a time when things get kind of loose
around the edges and I think about what I&rsquo;m doing and, often enough, make
decisions that change the whole structure of my life.</p>
<p>Not coincidentally, it&rsquo;s coming up on 5 years
<a href="/2014/11/3">since I quit SparkFun Electronics</a>. They&rsquo;ve been eventful
years, for good and ill both. I&rsquo;ve had some times, man. Even so, I
wonder in a clichéd way how it&rsquo;s been this long already.</p>
<p>Mostly, SparkFun gets further from my mind all the time. Every passing year
fewer of my friends are trapped there while it decays into the kind of thing it
used to repudiate just by existing. I&rsquo;m still bitter, but it&rsquo;s a bitterness I
don&rsquo;t have to think about very much. Still, it comes back in waves now and
then. This time I wondered: What did I learn from all of that?</p>
<p>There was probably a lot. After all, it was seven years of my life, and on one
end of it I was still young and on the other I wasn&rsquo;t really. I probably knew
a lot of things in the middle of that experience that I&rsquo;ve lost since.</p>
<p>So, first: You won&rsquo;t always know more than you used to.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❦ </p>
<p>When I started working on sparkfun.com it was an e-commerce site written mostly
in a programming language called PHP, and when I left it was still an
e-commerce site written mostly in PHP. We made plenty of mistakes along the
way, but I&rsquo;m pretty sure we were right not to do a wholesale replacement of a
functioning system using trendier tech.</p>
<p>If you are not familiar with the politics of programming languages, a thing you
should understand is that it&rsquo;s important to the way technical culture operates
that some tools (and often by extension the people who use them) be understood
as generally bad and without value. PHP is, in this model, marked as
fundamentally misguided and thoroughly regrettable, and is thus an acceptable
target of derision and mockery.</p>
<p>Just as important are two other facts: First, that despite its nastiness and
reflexive contempt, this understanding is in many ways <em>correct</em>, insofar as it
applies to tooling. Second, that it errs mainly in being applied so narrowly.
Which is to say that yes, PHP is a bad programming language, but generally so
are the programming languages preferred by PHP&rsquo;s most vocal detractors. (I
should know, as I have often been a vocal and ardent detractor of PHP.) I have
yet to find an exception to this, though I continue to learn programming
languages and may one day be pleasantly surprised.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;ve spent most of my working life using tools that are, as I&rsquo;ve written
elsewhere, terminally unhip. SparkFun was an extended lesson in the difference
between something&rsquo;s received reputation and its consequences in practice.</p>
<p>See also:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/2014/9/6">language things</a></li>
<li><a href="/2010/12/11">and all history unfolds before you</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✪ </p>
<p>I learned that you should be kind to customer service reps and tech support.</p>
<p>There were a lot of times I was unkind to the people I worked with, and I&rsquo;ve
learned to regret that.</p>
<p>I learned that &ldquo;the customer is always right&rdquo; is poisonous, and that there&rsquo;s
some joy in explaining to the kind of person who has always used that notion as
a weapon that their business isn&rsquo;t worth the abuse.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✴ </p>
<p>I already knew how to program when I started at SparkFun, or at least I thought
I did. While I was there, I learned how to make software. A bunch of the
apparatus and the tooling, but more than anything that you have to work with
people. That it&rsquo;s a shared thing. That, mostly, you&rsquo;re going to do it
together or you&rsquo;re going to fail at it.</p>
<p>I learned a lot about unintended consequences, and the ways that design
decisions unfold into patterns you never anticipated. I learned to mistrust
cleverness and prize the explicit.</p>
<p>Models are always wrong, maps are territories unto themselves, and shared
understanding is a harder thing to build than almost any other kind of
technical artifact. If people use the tools you create, even if they helped
you build them, they&rsquo;re going to do it in ways that break every expectation you
had and put the lie to every unstated assumption you made.</p>
<p>I discovered all that at painful length, and then I thought that when I got
into the wider technical world I&rsquo;d find out how unsophisticated we&rsquo;d been about
the whole thing. In some ways that&rsquo;s what happened, and it&rsquo;s painful (but also
funny) to think about how little I knew back then. In others it turns out that
most people are groping in the dark and a lot of what gets sold to you as
sophistication just curls back around into wishful thinking, technical debt,
and bureaucratic churn.</p>
<p>In <a href="/2013/11/7">late 2013</a> I wrote this:</p>
<blockquote><p>Programmers must, as long as we hope to be effective, sustain a dispassionate
awareness that all we do is dust in the wind: That entropy is destiny,
disorder is law, and futility is the architecture of existence. We succeed,
to the extent that success is possible, only as long as we remember that our
efforts are but brief disturbances in the ordinary course of time’s certain
triumph over the integrity of all built systems. Everything you make will
surely die, and unlike the children of your body or the structure of a great
city, the code you write will probably die long before you do.</p></blockquote>
<p>See also:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/2013/12/4">on software</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✵ </p>
<p>I learned that salespeople will find a way around you, and that no one is more
susceptible to marketing than marketers.</p>
<p>I came to think of marketing itself as an aggressive ideological cult, or maybe
just the most visible part of one &mdash; a complex of ideas spidering out into
most domains of human endeavor, and hungrily grasping at whatever cognitive
territory remains unconquered. Marketing as a mask worn by something deeper in
the culture and harder to name or delineate, let alone contradict.</p>
<p>See also:</p>
<ul>
<li>This one on <a href="/2013/9/6">the idea that numbers create meaning</a></li>
<li><a href="/2013/12/4">on software</a></li>
<li><a href="/2014/11/24">so spam is normal behavior, but what if you stopped?</a></li>
<li><a href="/2019/7/9">still creepy</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ☼ </p>
<p>I learned that you should moderate the comments, <a href="/2012/11/10">if you have them at
all</a>, and <em>maybe</em> something about how.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✤ </p>
<p>I learned to ride a bicycle again, commuting as many days as not on an aluminum
road bike from the early 80s with downtube shifters and straps on the pedals.
A coworker found it on craigslist and helped me tune it up - the first bike
I&rsquo;ve ever owned that <em>wanted</em> to go fast.</p>
<p>Despite an ocean of beer and liquor and all the attendant bad decisions, I was
probably healthier then than I&rsquo;ve been any time before or since. I was
definitely more plugged into the landscape and the seasons where I live. Every
working day bookended by little adventures.</p>
<p>See also:</p>
<ul>
<li>This one <a href="/2009/1/3">about bikes, garden carts, technological determinism, utility</a></li>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❁ </p>
<p>Some things about hiring:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>It&rsquo;s hard and very often the people doing it are flailing.</p></li>
<li><p>Interviews are mostly nonsense.</p></li>
<li><p>Hiring your friends (and maybe relatives) is an entirely rational way to go
about things, <em>to a point</em>. What you have to deal with is this: Some of your
friends might be incompetent or worse, and even if they&rsquo;re not, leaning too
hard on your existing social connections reinforces all the privileges and
biases and latent power structures that put you in the position to hire
somebody in the first place.</p></li>
</ul>
<p class="centerpiece"> ☆ </p>
<p>I learned how much quality matters and how much it doesn&rsquo;t: From how hard we
tried to get things right in the software and how little it probably mattered
in the final analysis. From selling things that were basically pretty good and
also from selling bottom-dollar no-utility garbage, both with enormous
externalities.</p>
<p>I was pretty good at not thinking about those externalities: Cheap labor and
industrial pollution in someone else&rsquo;s country. Fuel oil and gasoline and jet
fuel in transit. I was fully complicit, and I knew it on some level, but as
long as we were getting <em>something</em> right I <a href="2010/11/20">felt like</a> we were
ahead of the game anyway.</p>
<p>We sold stuff with open designs and open code and showed people how to use it.
A faction of us free software partisans fought pretty hard on that <em>open</em> part,
and got listened to for a while. A lot of the people I worked with were
teachers in the best and simplest sense. I couldn&rsquo;t begin to guess how many
people learned to solder and write a simple program from SparkFun workshops and
tutorials. It worked for a long time. Maybe we <em>were</em> ahead of the game.
Maybe we made people more free, gave them greater agency in a time when the
tech in general is spinning wildly out of their control.</p>
<p>Then again maybe we mostly taught the children of technocrats to put more tiny
computers in everything, to the long-term advantage of the billionaires and
authoritarian scumbags currently hastening civilization along to an end state
that&rsquo;d slot pretty cleanly into the <em>Mad Max</em> franchise.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s hard to say exactly.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✩ </p>
<p><a href="/2014/3/23">Erik Winn</a> always said business ruins everything. I learned I
think he was right, for the most part. I also learned that you have to work
with people to get anything done, and that businesses are a lot of where that
happens, for better and worse both.</p>
<p>&ldquo;Community&rdquo; has to be one of the most abused and debased words in the
contemporary vocabulary. There&rsquo;s this Greg Brown recording I half remember
where he makes fun of the idea of intentional community and says that
community is what happens when you have to get along with the people you&rsquo;re
stuck with.</p>
<p>Well, for years I went to work in a gray-carpeted room in a shabby building in
a half-empty suburban office park, and after a while I woke up looking forward
to it as often as not, because I was going to work with my friends.</p>
<p>The <a href="/2014/11/23">Sunday after my last day at Sparkfun</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>It can be an astonishing thing, in a certain sort of life, to look around and
understand that you have, and have had for a long time now, a lot of friends.</p></blockquote>
<p>I still feel like that.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✪ </p>
<p>A lot of what I learned from SparkFun came right at the end.</p>
<p>I learned never to mistake an aesthetic for an ethic. That the signifiers of
style can&rsquo;t be relied on as the signs of a lived belief or a worked
understanding. That a keg in the break room and a high tolerance for stoner
hijinks makes a pretty good smokescreen for lousy wages and bad faith.</p>
<p>I learned just how easy it can be to kill something from the top, even if it
got built from the bottom up.</p>
<p>I knew for a long time before SparkFun that employment was mostly bullshit, and
that the interests of the owners are not the interests of the workers. I
managed to set that one aside for a while, but it all came back in a rush: More
complicated by all the contradictions of experience, but true all the same.</p>
<p>As long as there&rsquo;s no shared power that can check and hold to account the
owning class and their enablers, we&rsquo;re <em>all</em> their enablers. Individual
workers are, more often than not, left with rage-quitting an organization as
the only means of signalling meaningful dissent. And at that it&rsquo;s a form of
dissent open only to the few who are cushioned enough by their skills, family
wealth, or social status to exercise it at will.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❁ </p>
<p>It&rsquo;s late on a Saturday night and I&rsquo;ve been trying to write this for days
without getting half of what I wanted to say into it.</p>
<p>I guess for now I&rsquo;m going to call it good and close this set of entirely too
self-serious reflections with some dialog from the Coen brothers' <em>Burn After
Reading</em>, as quoted on IMDb.com:</p>
<blockquote><p>CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?</p>
<p>CIA Officer: I don&rsquo;t know, sir.</p>
<p>CIA Superior: I don&rsquo;t fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.</p>
<p>CIA Officer: Yes, sir.</p>
<p>CIA Superior: I&rsquo;m fucked if I know what we did.</p>
<p>CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it&rsquo;s, uh, hard to say.</p>
<p>CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.</p></blockquote>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/business">business</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/hardware">hardware</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sparkfun">sparkfun</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/work">work</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/" title="10">10</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/10/5/" title="5">5</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>monday, august 19, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/8/19"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/8/19</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>monday, august 19, 2019</h1>
<p>it was damn near a hundred again today<br />
over at the airport where they measure<br />
a little cooler here on the edge of things<br />
the river is running low, like it's august in fact<br />
as well as by date</p>
<p>so like you expect,<br />
the grass turns gray-brown and gold in the sun<br />
but all told it's been a green year in colorado<br />
the way the locals seem to remember their childhoods:<br />
thunderstorms in the summer afternoon,<br />
big rains and little ones</p>
<p>the orb weavers, growing fat now, build outsized<br />
webs on what will hold still long enough &mdash; my bike,<br />
the trashcan by the corner of the house,<br />
the bucket hanging on my garden fence</p>
<p>bees hum where i've let the herbs go to flower<br />
i wonder if some of them fly home to the hive<br />
in the cracked brick walls<br />
of the first house i lived in here<br />
it's fourteen years this month<br />
or a couple of lifetimes depending on how you count</p>
<p>in the mountains, my niece is learning to crawl</p>
<p>while out on the plains my family waits to bury<br />
my great aunt, gone at 95, who had already seen<br />
i can't begin to guess how many lifetimes<br />
by the year i was born</p>
<p>everything is always happening<br />
all at once</p>
<p>and i'm not sure i can tell any more<br />
all the joy from the grief<br />
or the longing from the gratitude</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/colorado">colorado</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/8/" title="8">8</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/8/19/" title="19">19</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, August 12, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/8/12"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/8/12</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, August 12, 2019</h1>
<p>I&rsquo;m sitting in a Barnes &amp; Noble Starbucks, a class of institution I don&rsquo;t
really expect to exist a few years hence. Heavily sweetened coffee drinks
aren&rsquo;t going anywhere, of course, but chain bookstores feel pretty doomed and
it&rsquo;s not really clear to me that this one can manage a transition to selling
random toys and board game crap instead of books.</p>
<p>I love independent bookstores, and spend most of my book money at several, but
I&rsquo;m going to have some feelings when B&amp;N kicks the bucket. I grew up in the
country, and the mall bookstore chains in the nearest city big enough to have a
mall were my primary option for anything I couldn&rsquo;t get at our small-time
library. Those first trips to a big, well-stocked Barnes &amp; Noble were
revelatory. The SF&amp;F section alone felt bigger and more expansive than the
entirety of a B. Dalton / Waldenbooks.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s strange to think of that sense of things opening up as a side effect of
the end stages of an entire economy and medium, but I suppose that&rsquo;s more or
less what it was.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/8/" title="8">8</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/8/12/" title="12">12</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2020-01-15T06:49:58Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - still creepy</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/7/9"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/7/9</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, July 9, 2019</h1>
<h2>still creepy</h2>
<p>I read a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/opinion/email-tracking.html">New York Times opinion piece by Charlie Warzel</a>, about tracking
behavior in a mail client called Superhuman &ndash; it embeds tracking pixels in all
its sent mail so it can report views back to the sender. The piece starts off
with a succinct and reasonably accurate reading of how this sort of thing
usually plays out:</p>
<blockquote><p>Call it the Five Stages of Privacy Erosion.</p>
<p>Tech Company builds popular product.</p>
<p>Product is exposed in the press for doing something shady behind the scenes.</p>
<p>Tech Company apologizes/clarifies/signals a fix.</p>
<p>Brief phase of collective rejoicing and moving on.</p>
<p>It’s revealed (usually by the same people) that Product was never really fixed.</p></blockquote>
<p>&hellip;and then midway through it comes to this disclaimer:</p>
<blockquote><p>(I want to pause here to offer an email-tracking disclosure and some
clarification. Tracking is a tricky subject. It isn’t inherently nefarious.
This newsletter tracks things like how many times the newsletter email is
opened and what links are clicked, which helps to improve the newsletter.
But like all privacy issues, it’s a matter of transparency and
expectations. When it comes to marketing emails and newsletters, which
often come from corporate entities, there’s often more of an expectation
that open rates might be tracked. In Superhuman’s case, as Davidson notes,
the tracking takes place with every personal email sent, which is more
likely to violate the expectation of privacy.)</p></blockquote>
<p>Which I think demonstrates how fucked we are just about as well as anything.
The tracking is creepy, under this model, when you don&rsquo;t expect it from an
individual quite as much as you do from a <em>company</em>, which has legitimate
reasons to hoard your data. Don&rsquo;t you want the newsletter to improve?</p>
<p>This is the mode of reasoning that&rsquo;s gotten us where we are now, after decades
of principled objection from people with both functioning consciences and a
coherent grasp of privacy: to an ever-ratcheting state of intrusive,
unregulated, irremediable surveillance. Surveillance as a cornerstone of the
economy and a baseline expectation of business, publishing, government, and
law.</p>
<p>I don&rsquo;t mean to pick on Charlie Warzel and if he reads this I hope he doesn&rsquo;t
take it as mean-spirited. I don&rsquo;t disagree with the rest of the column, and
including that parenthetical disclosure shows more self-awareness than the
majority of editorializing you read about this stuff, hosted as it is on
websites with dozens of embedded trackers and ad services. But! When a
journalist specializing in privacy topics explains that the technology he&rsquo;s
calling out as creepy isn&rsquo;t creepy <em>when it&rsquo;s built into the platform he writes
on</em>, it says something about what understandings are possible and allowed.</p>
<p>It&rsquo;s possible to understand that these behaviors <em>are</em> inherently nefarious,
but taking that idea seriously, let alone saying so out loud, isn&rsquo;t compatible
with keeping a lot of jobs. You always have to soften the blow, to acquiesce
in ways that undermine either your own awareness or your honesty. You might
try to fight it, but in most situations it&rsquo;s like shoveling back the tide with
a fork. I&rsquo;ve tried more times than I can count and I&rsquo;ve lost pretty much every
time, in every way that matters.</p>
<p>All the same, that this is an intractable situation for anyone whose livelihood
is caught up in it doesn&rsquo;t change that the shady behaviors are shady. The
creepy stuff is still creepy even when a respected media outlet does it for
reasons that seem to bolster the media outlet&rsquo;s interests.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/new-york-times">new-york-times</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/panopticon">panopticon</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/surveillance">surveillance</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/7/9/" title="9">9</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, July 3, 2019 - word of the day: wildering</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/7/3"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/7/3</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, July 3, 2019</h1>
<h2>word of the day: wildering</h2>
<pre>
$ dict wildering
2 definitions found
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Wilder \Wil"der\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Wildered}; p. pr. & vb.
n. {Wildering}.] [Akin to E. wild, Dan. forvilde to bewilder,
Icel. villr bewildered, villa to bewilder; cf. AS. wildor a
wild animal. See {Wild}, a., and cf. {Wilderness}.]
To bewilder; to perplex.
[1913 Webster]
Long lost and wildered in the maze of fate. --Pope.
[1913 Webster]
Again the wildered fancy dreams
Of spouting fountains, frozen as they rose. --Bryant.
[1913 Webster]
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Wildering \Wild"er*ing\, n. (Bot.)
A plant growing in a state of nature; especially, one which
has run wild, or escaped from cultivation.
[1913 Webster]
</pre>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/dict">dict</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/7/" title="7">7</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/7/3/" title="3">3</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, June 25, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/25"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/6/25</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, June 25, 2019</h1>
<p>I rode my bike for utility this morning: Dropping off a vehicle at the shop
and pedaling the dozen miles or so home. I&rsquo;m years out of this habit, by now.
I work from home and find some plausible rationale to ride more than half a
mile maybe once every couple of months.</p>
<p>It brought me back to thoughts I used to have constantly: Speed is a kind of
abstraction over distance. Rolling wheels are a kind of abstraction over
surfaces and spaces not really accessible by foot or rarely traversed at less
than 35mph by car. The landscape and the culture built on top of it are so
much different at every speed.</p>
<p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/25/" title="25">25</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2020-01-19T01:57:17Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, June 18, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/19"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/6/19</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, June 18, 2019</h1>
<p>Some weeks ago, I read <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/books/review/upheaval-jared-diamond.html">a New York Times review</a> of Jared Diamond&rsquo;s
latest:</p>
<blockquote><p>If you’ve ever been at a wedding or conference or on board a United
connection from O’Hare, and been cornered by a man with Theories About It
All, and you came away thinking, “That was a great experience,” have I got
the book for you.</p>
<p>Jared Diamond’s “Upheaval” belongs to the genre of 30,000-foot books, which
sell an explanation of everything. I travel often and see them a lot: at
airport bookstores, where Steven Pinker and Yuval Noah Harari (both of whom
blurbed “Upheaval”) and Diamond, of course, deserve permanent shelves; and in
the air, where I’ve noticed that a pretty disproportionate fraction of
readers who read in the quiet of 30,000 feet have a preference for writers
who write from the viewpoint of 30,000 feet.</p>
<p>&hellip;</p>
<p>When Diamond describes “highly egalitarian social values” as an ethos that has
“remained unchanged” in Australia, despite having written a chapter about the
country’s history of legalized racism, he is using a definition of egalitarian
that applies only to white people. When he says, “Social status in Japan
depends more on education than on heredity and family connection,” he is
ignoring what it means to be born a woman. “Of course, my list of U.S. problems
isn’t exhaustive,” he admits. “Problems that I don’t discuss include race
relations and the role of women.” You know, the problems affecting the vast
majority of Americans.</p></blockquote>
<p>I don&rsquo;t quote this by way of piling on Diamond. I&rsquo;m pretty sure I won&rsquo;t read
<em>Upheaval</em>, but I also doubt it&rsquo;s going to do as much damage in the world as,
say, any given bestseller by the NYT&rsquo;s own Thomas Friedman.</p>
<p>I mention it here because that review got me thinking about a time when I was
really drawn to this kind of book: Big, framework-y pop science and history
narratives with (at least ostensibly) a grand cross-disciplinary synthesis to
communicate. Stuff like Diamond&rsquo;s <em>Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies</em>, Steven Pinker&rsquo;s <em>The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature</em>, E.O. Wilson&rsquo;s <em>Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge</em>. (Subtitles
included for maximum effect.)</p>
<p>I pulled that specific grouping of books out of memory, but the list probably
stuck in my head in the first place because I wrote <a href="/2004/9/13/">this p1k3
entry</a>, or others like it. It&rsquo;s cringey material, like a lot of
things I wrote in those years. I was at the time 23 years old, inexperienced,
constantly drunk, and months out of a mediocre undergraduate degree with no
idea what to do next. I had spent time around very smart people who were
nevertheless too much in the grip of Evolutionary Psych and similar ideas, and
I was too lazy by far to be a tenth as well-read as I pretended to be. In
general I was insufferable, and it comes through in the text.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✵ </p>
<p>As usual, &ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t understand a lot of things when I was younger&rdquo; is true, but
not very interesting. I have plenty of regrets, but if I couldn&rsquo;t forgive
myself for being a posturing jackass when I was trying to figure out my place
in the world, I&rsquo;d just be permanently crippled by self-loathing, which is no
use to anyone.</p>
<p>Anyhow, what strikes me now, aside from a lot of ideological drift, is how much
my own hopes and ambitions have changed since then. I once wanted to write
something big, encompassing, cross-cutting, etc. I wanted, even if I didn&rsquo;t
have the work ethic or the cognitive capacity, to understand as much as I could
and abstract it across as many domains as I could touch. I was inclined to
manifestos, grand plans, programs, prescriptions, the idea of an overarching
research project. At least I thought about those things a lot. And even once
I&rsquo;d mostly given up on <em>designing</em> that kind of project, maybe I sincerely
thought that something more or less whole, greater than the sum of its parts,
could emerge from the slow iteration of my work. (<a href="/2007/4/1">One from 2007</a>
and <a href="/2016/1/14">one from 2016</a> suggest as much.)</p>
<p>In 2019, I still hold plenty of strong opinions (a few even grounded in
experience), but I hope I have fewer illusions about their coherence or my
grasp of the overall set of problems. I think a lot about just how brittle and
partial and misleading the materials of history tend to be, how difficult and
fallible it is to construct science, journalism, or historical narrative that
doesn&rsquo;t crucially misrepresent the world. The feeling that once kept me from
writing fiction &mdash; an uneasiness about my ability to describe or portray any
experience outside my own &mdash; has deepened and spread to other domains.</p>
<p>These days I&rsquo;m uncomfortable, despite a long-time <a href="/2010/6/28/">fixation on the idea that
you should write <em>for</em> someone</a>, with the idea of publishing at all,
at least in the deranged and weaponized shitstorm climate of the modern
network. I haven&rsquo;t given up on the <a href="/notes-on-notes">long project</a> of a
lifetime&rsquo;s jotting and correspondence. If anything I do more of it &mdash; but I
don&rsquo;t expect it to yield much besides a better memory and some communication
with friends. Those are good things in themselves, and I&rsquo;m not seeking any
broader justification for the habits that underpin them. Still, they&rsquo;re very
different from the work of the writer I might have become, if I&rsquo;d had more raw
ability and worked harder at it.</p>
<p>I&rsquo;m not altogether sure that&rsquo;s a bad thing.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❦ </p>
<p>(As a postscript, I want to acknowledge the strong possibility that I&rsquo;m still
insufferable.)</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/history">history</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/jared-diamond">jared-diamond</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/steven-pinker">steven-pinker</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/writing">writing</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/19/" title="19">19</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Thursday, June 13, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/13"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/6/13</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Thursday, June 13, 2019</h1>
<p>Maciej Cegłowski, <a href="https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm">the New Wilderness</a>:</p>
<blockquote><p>So why have the gravediggers of online privacy suddenly grown so worried
about the health of the patient?</p>
<p>Part of the answer is a defect in the language we use to talk about privacy.
That language, especially as it is codified in law, is not adequate for the
new reality of ubiquitous, mechanized surveillance.</p>
<p>In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth
century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications
between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure. Third parties that are
given access to our personal data have a duty to protect it, and to the
extent that they discharge this duty, they are respecting our privacy.</p>
<p>Seen in this light, the giant tech companies can make a credible claim to be
the defenders of privacy, just like a dragon can truthfully boast that it is
good at protecting its hoard of gold. Nobody spends more money securing user
data, or does it more effectively, than Facebook and Google.</p>
<p>The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is
suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon,
after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.</p></blockquote>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/facebook">facebook</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/google">google</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/panopticon">panopticon</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/policy">policy</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/politics">politics</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/scale">scale</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/surveillance">surveillance</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/13/" title="13">13</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, June 2, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/2"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/6/2</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, June 2, 2019</h1>
<p>I recently read <a href="https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/intermediate-vim/">At least one Vim trick you might not know</a>, which is
a pretty high-quality example of the stuff-about-text-editors blog post.</p>
<blockquote><p>There are- very roughly- two categories of Vim users. <strong>Purists</strong> value
Vim’s small size and ubiquitousness. They tend to keep configuration to a
minimum in case they need to use it on an unfamiliar computer (such as
during ssh). <strong>Exobrains</strong>, on the other hand, stuff Vim full of plugins,
functions, and homebrew mappings in a vain attempt to pretend they’re using
Emacs. If you took away an exobrain’s vimrc they’d be completely helpless.</p></blockquote>
<p>Not too unreasonable a model of the thing, probably. I&rsquo;m definitely
<a href="/notes-on-notes">somewhere in &ldquo;exobrain&rdquo; territory</a> at this point.</p>
<p>I ought to write one of these eventually - or maybe follow Tyler&rsquo;s lead and
write a <a href="https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2017/06/14/literate-vimrc/">literate .vimrc</a>. My <a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/bpb-kit/src/branch/main/home/.vimrc">existing one</a> has a lot
of comments, but it&rsquo;s not exactly a coherent document.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/vim">vim</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/" title="6">6</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/6/2/" title="2">2</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>thursday, may 9, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/9"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/5/9</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>thursday, may 9, 2019</h1>
<p>a may snow, all day<br />
the skies gray and<br />
the grass growing taller<br />
while it falls, tulips<br />
blooming round the side of the house<br />
the frogs across the street<br />
sounding low and slow through<br />
the patter of barely frozen<br />
water falling on the just-unfolding<br />
leaves</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/9/" title="9">9</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Wednesday, May 8, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/8"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/5/8</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Wednesday, May 8, 2019</h1>
<p>Thesis: The complexity ratchet in technology is designed (or has evolved, take
your pick) to drive the concentration of administrative power.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/8/" title="8">8</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, May 7, 2019 - App::WRT v6.0.0.</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/7"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/5/7</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, May 7, 2019</h1>
<h2>App::WRT v6.0.0.</h2>
<p>Links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/wrt">related entries on p1k3</a></li>
<li><a href="https://metacpan.org/release/App-WRT">on CPAN as App::WRT</a></li>
<li><a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/wrt">on code.p1k3.com</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/brennen/wrt">mirrored on GitHub</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Despite the bump in major version number, this one is <em>mostly</em> a bugfix
release. A hypothetical user wouldn&rsquo;t notice many changes, but I&rsquo;m rearranging
things further in a direction I <a href="/2018/4/9/">started on a year ago</a>,
abstracting interaction with the underlying directory structure to a class that
caches the full set of entries and some metadata about them. More on this in
the <a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/wrt/commit/be13fadb7c428cf801bad3e2fd00d12fec1032d5">latest commit message</a>.</p>
<p>This kind of change has gotten easier as I&rsquo;ve added more tests, even if the
tests themselves are sort of ridiculous, which is a useful lesson.</p>
<p>As I wrote last year:</p>
<blockquote><p>This was an interesting way to kill some time, both because I revisited an
algorithm I’d forgotten about, and because every time I hack on a project like
this I’m in a dialog with basic decisions I made before I knew how to write
software at all. And maybe, by the same token, looking with fresh eyes at norms
that I’d take for granted in any more modern context. wrt isn’t a good piece of
software by any contemporary standard, and the approach it represents isn’t one
I’d use for anything bigger than a trivial shell script at my day job, but
there’s a curious durability to it all the same.</p>
<p>Every few years I revisit some facet of this tiny, mundane tool and apply a bit
of understanding I lacked when it was first written, and some structure comes a
little clearer that lives in the space between my ignorance at 20 and my
experience, such as it is, at whatever age I’ve reached.</p></blockquote>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/perl">perl</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/wrt">wrt</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/7/" title="7">7</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-26T00:08:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Monday, May 6, 2019 - reading: the raven tower</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/6"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/5/6</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Monday, May 6, 2019</h1>
<h2>reading: the raven tower</h2>
<p>(Structural spoilers may follow.)</p>
<p>Previously:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="/2015/10/20">Reading: <em>Ancillary Justice</em> and <em>Ancillary Sword</em>, by Ann Leckie</a></li>
<li><a href="/2018/1/1">reading in 2017</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Leckie&rsquo;s earlier novels have fallen roughly in the space opera / military SF
zone. This one is fantasy, with recognizable genre apparatus (swords, horses,
fortresses, hereditary nobility, etc.), but in terms of plot mechanics and tone
it&rsquo;s not a radical departure. It&rsquo;s concerned with a world where gods are real
and intervene routinely in human life, but once you grant the basic premise it
unfolds a system of rules and consequences in a way that rings far more science
fictional than mystical or theological in the usual sense.</p>
<p>I read the whole thing in a sitting last night, having wrecked my ability to
fall asleep by combining too much of microbrew, espresso, and cheap cigars into
a low-level panic attack, so I was grateful for the distraction.</p>
<p>The ending felt a little rushed, but on the whole I think the author may have
gotten better at pacing since her first big trilogy. I would happily spend
more time with these characters. Recommended.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/ann-leckie">ann-leckie</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/6/" title="6">6</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>saturday, may 4, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/4"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/5/4</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>saturday, may 4, 2019</h1>
<p>few animals<br />
are as satisfying to contemplate<br />
as the bumble bee, all round and<br />
purposeful</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/poem">poem</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/" title="5">5</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/5/4/" title="4">4</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, April 14, 2019 - App::WRT v5.0.0</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/4/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/4/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, April 14, 2019</h1>
<h2>App::WRT v5.0.0</h2>
<p>It&rsquo;s been almost a year, so I&rsquo;m putting together a release of wrt, the site
generator I use for p1k3:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://metacpan.org/release/App-WRT">on CPAN as App::WRT</a></li>
<li><a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/wrt">on code.p1k3.com</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/brennen/wrt">mirrored on GitHub</a></li>
</ul>
<p>v5.0.0 abandons the idea of running persistently under FastCGI, <a href="/2018/5/28">handles
character encoding more gracefully for Atom feeds</a>, adds <code>wrt ls</code>
and <code>wrt config</code> commands for listing entries and dumping configuration values,
refactors a bunch of the logic for finding and displaying entries, and fixes a
slew of minor bugs. It should be substantially more performant, though as a
tradeoff it uses more memory.</p>
<p>Here&rsquo;s (I think) the full changelog since the last time I pushed this thing to CPAN:</p>
<pre><code>v5.0.0 2019-04-14
- Add bin/wrt-ls for listing entries in current archive
- Add bin/wrt-config for displaying configuration info
- Allow header tags with attributes
- Minor documentation cleanup
- Bump XML::Atom::SimpleFeed to 0.900; remove wrt-fcgi
- Concatenation instead of variable interpolation in HTML::tag()
- Remove hardcoded "public" from renderer directory path copying
- Remove unused feed_url param from wrt-init and example dir
- Remove an extraneous JSON-&gt;convert_blessed(1) call
- WRT::entry(): fix glitch with contents list for binfile_expr matches
- Correctly encode feed output - see https://p1k3.com/2018/5/28/
- Add App::WRT::Util::file_get_contents();
- Optionally cache included files in-memory
- Add EntryStore, a class for wrapping various methods for finding entry lists
- Refactor display()
- Use Carp for errors
- Remove old LaTeX markup stuff
- Add this Changes file
v5.0.0-alpha 2018-04-19
- Use 5 most recent entries for home page instead of latest month
- Remove accessor methods for instance variables / configuration
- Give absolute paths to imgsize() so it chills out on Cwd::getcwd() calls
- Remove local_path(), recent_month(), month_before, and feed_print_latest()
- Stop using a() in entry_markup()
- Cache get_date_entries_by_depth() results
- Swap out state vars for stashing things on $self in get_all_source_files()
- Add get_date_entries_by_depth()
- Tweak link_bar() behavior to retain link for current page
</code></pre>
<p>Actually, looking at some of this, I think my history of version numbers vs.
Git tags vs. releases is&hellip; Less than accurate. In future I&rsquo;m going to just
increment the <a href="https://semver.org/">semver</a> patch version for every commit and release to CPAN
routinely.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/cpan">cpan</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/perl">perl</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/semver">semver</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/wrt">wrt</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/4/" title="4">4</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/4/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Saturday, March 30, 2019 - skipping over already-visible workspaces in xmonad</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/30"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/3/30</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Saturday, March 30, 2019</h1>
<h2>skipping over already-visible workspaces in xmonad</h2>
<p>I recently went back to a two-monitor setup on my work system (an <a href="/2018/11/11/">Intel NUC I
bought back in November</a>). For the most part this has been a big
improvement, and <a href="https://xmonad.org/">xmonad</a> handles multi-screen layouts just as well
as I remembered. Each screen displays a workspace, and they can be switched
independently.</p>
<p>I have had one nagging complaint: I have a bunch of pre-configured workspaces
and tend to cycle through with them with the arrow keys. When I switched to a
workspace that was already displayed on the other screen, it&rsquo;d swap onto the
current screen. This seems like a pretty minor thing, but in practice it tends
to add confusion - I might, for example, have a page of notes up on one display
and be trying to quickly navigate on the other display for items from mail,
code, IRC, etc., to summarize in the notes. If that workspace jumps around,
it&rsquo;s easier to lose track of what I&rsquo;m doing.</p>
<p>I wondered if it was possible to &ldquo;lock&rdquo; a workspace to a specific display.
I still don&rsquo;t know the answer to that question, but skimming the docs for
<a href="https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib-0.15/docs/XMonad-Actions-CycleWS.html#g:5">XMonad.Actions.CycleWS</a>
I found an alternative that mostly solves my problem.</p>
<p>Originally I had the following keybindings in my <a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/bpb-kit/src/branch/main/home/.xmonad/xmonad.hs">xmonad.hs</a>:</p>
<pre><code> ("M-&lt;Right&gt;", nextWS)
, ("M-&lt;Left&gt;", prevWS)
</code></pre>
<p>These have been replaced with:</p>
<pre><code> ("M-&lt;Left&gt;", moveTo Prev HiddenWS)
, ("M-&lt;Right&gt;", moveTo Next HiddenWS)
</code></pre>
<p>In practice this means that the workspace cycling for mod-Left and mod-Right
will skip over any already-visible workspaces, leaving them in place on the
other display. There are other possibilities, including the next/previous
<em>empty</em> workspace, but this is pretty close to what I was looking for.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes">notes</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/xmonad">xmonad</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/30/" title="30">30</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Thursday, March 14, 2019</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/14"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/3/14</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Thursday, March 14, 2019</h1>
<p>Every time I declare tab bankruptcy and close the 15 to 25 things I have open
in a web browser, I suspect I&rsquo;m losing state I will later regret being unable
to retrieve.</p>
<p>That generalizes, I suppose. I have this sense that a lot of what we do in
software is something like writing code before the use of version control
systems became a norm.</p>
<p>All kinds of relationships and structures remain implicit, undescribed, and
impossible to model because they live purely in ephemeral application state.
The best we have in a lot of cases is fragile browser history, notification
backlogs in e-mail, or logs accumulated on other people&rsquo;s computers for
purposes directly hostile to our interests.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/version-control">version-control</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/14/" title="14">14</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Sunday, March 3, 2019 - notes on notes</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/3"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/3/3</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Sunday, March 3, 2019</h1>
<h2>notes on notes</h2>
<p>First of all, I wrote up some <a href="/notes-on-notes">notes on my current note-taking process</a>.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ❂ </p>
<p>I started to do this the other day as a regular, dated p1k3 entry, but it got
sort of long and I found myself wanting to do it as a standalone document that
I could update over time. It seemed like a table of contents would be nice,
but that&rsquo;s not something that <a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/wrt">wrt</a> supports, so I decided to see
how hard it would be to add based on the <a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/userland-book/src/branch/master/render.pl">hacky rendering script</a> I
wrote for <a href="https://p1k3.com/userland-book/">userland</a>.</p>
<p>That turned out to be a hassle to do well for various reasons, so I turned to
<a href="https://pandoc.org/">Pandoc</a>, which supports generating a table of contents out of the box.</p>
<p>There&rsquo;s a <a href="https://metacpan.org/pod/Pandoc">Perl wrapper</a> for the <code>pandoc</code> binary, so I first tried
using that to add a simple &lt;pandoc&gt;&hellip;&lt;/pandoc&gt; pseudo-tag to wrt&rsquo;s
markup processing the way I&rsquo;ve done for Textile, Markdown, and other things in
the past. It turns out that in order to get a table of contents out of Pandoc
while still generating an HTML fragment (rather than a complete document), you
have to write a custom template file. It also turns out that if you want to
automatically put self-links next to headers, you need to write a
<a href="https://pandoc.org/filters.html">custom filter to transform Pandoc&rsquo;s abstract syntax tree</a>.</p>
<p>I gave up on modifying wrt to handle this and switched to writing a small
<code>Makefile</code>, a <code>filter.py</code>, and a template to generate HTML for inclusion
by wrt. You can see the results <a href="https://p1k3.com/archives/notes-on-notes/">here</a> or
<a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/p1k3/src/branch/master/archives/notes-on-notes">on my gitea instance</a>. I kind of hate the
outcome and I&rsquo;m not sure I&rsquo;ll do anything this way again, but I definitely
learned some stuff about Pandoc. I suppose this might be a useful example
for someone.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/notes">notes</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/pandoc">pandoc</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/wrt">wrt</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/" title="3">3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/3/3/" title="3">3</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Saturday, February 16, 2019 - NOAA weather data</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/2/16"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/2/16</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Saturday, February 16, 2019</h1>
<h2>NOAA weather data</h2>
<p>Resources discussed in this post:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://github.com/jaor/xmobar/blob/master/src/Xmobar/Plugins/Monitors/Weather.hs">Current source of xmobar Weather plugin</a>, and
<a href="https://github.com/jaor/xmobar/blob/132c4c459763c81ddf60aeedf5b87b619bb5f1ce/src/Xmobar/Plugins/Monitors/Weather.hs">at the time of this writing</a></li>
<li><a href="https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/">Directory listing of decoded METAR stations</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.aviationweather.gov/metar/info">HTML list of METAR stations</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.aviationweather.gov/docs/metar/stations.txt">A more complete text list of METAR stations</a></li>
<li><a href="http://fungi.yuggoth.org/weather/">The <code>weather</code> utility</a></li>
<li><a href="https://xmonad.org/">xmonad</a> and <a href="https://xmobar.org/">xmobar</a></li>
<li><a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/bpb-kit/src/branch/master/home/.xmobarrc">My current .xmobarrc file</a></li>
</ul>
<p>This post is just about using public weather data to display a temperature in
my windowing environment, but at some point I&rsquo;d like to use it as a jumping off
point for more deeply exploring the available data. It&rsquo;s really cool how much
of this stuff is available as simple text files and the like. Your tax dollars
at work, but in a good way.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✪ </p>
<p>I use <a href="https://xmonad.org/">xmonad</a> for window management, and along with it a simple
status bar called <a href="https://xmobar.org/">xmobar</a>.</p>
<p>xmobar offers some monitoring plugins that display various bits of system
status and other things. One of them is a weather plugin that can grab
temperature and other values from NOAA-supplied weather data. I&rsquo;ve been using
the temperature from a METAR site at Denver International Airport, code <code>KDEN</code>,
but I wondered if there was something closer to home available.</p>
<p>I always have the vague sense that there&rsquo;s a ton of public weather data like
this out there, but I don&rsquo;t have a very good mental map of where it lives and I
usually wind up fumbling around until I hit a directory full of text files on
some FTP site. The docs for xmobar also aren&rsquo;t very clear on what the station
codes actually reference.</p>
<p>Some notes follow for the next time I&rsquo;m thinking about this.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✴ </p>
<p>xmobar&rsquo;s weather plugin (<a href="https://github.com/jaor/xmobar/blob/master/src/Xmobar/Plugins/Monitors/Weather.hs">source on GitHub</a>) uses
decoded METAR station data, available in text files <a href="https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/">from tgftp.nws.noaa.gov</a>.
The path to the site is, at this writing, hardcoded in the plugin.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METAR">METAR itself</a> (&ldquo;Meteorological Aerodrome Reports&rdquo;) is evidently a
standard that&rsquo;s been around since 1968 in some form. The data looks something
like this:</p>
<!-- exec -->
<pre><code>$ curl --silent https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/stations/KDEN.TXT
2019/02/16 21:48
KDEN 162148Z 36016G27KT 1 1/2SM -SN BKN022 OVC026 M02/M05 A2952 RMK AO2 PK WND 36027/2142 WSHFT 2118 SNB2057 P0000
</code></pre>
<!-- end -->
<p>And NOAA also offers decoded versions, which is what xmobar is parsing:</p>
<!-- exec -->
<pre><code>$ curl --silent https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/KDEN.TXT
DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, CO, United States (KDEN) 39-52N 104-40W 1640M
Feb 16, 2019 - 04:48 PM EST / 2019.02.16 2148 UTC
Wind: from the N (360 degrees) at 18 MPH (16 KT) gusting to 31 MPH (27 KT):0
Visibility: 1 1/2 mile(s):0
Sky conditions: overcast
Weather: light snow
Precipitation last hour: A trace
Temperature: 28 F (-2 C)
Windchill: 15 F (-9 C):1
Dew Point: 23 F (-5 C)
Relative Humidity: 79%
Pressure (altimeter): 29.52 in. Hg (999 hPa)
ob: KDEN 162148Z 36016G27KT 1 1/2SM -SN BKN022 OVC026 M02/M05 A2952 RMK AO2 PK WND 36027/2142 WSHFT 2118 SNB2057 P0000
cycle: 22
</code></pre>
<!-- end -->
<p>In Debian, you can install a package called <code>weather-util</code> which makes for easy
searching of the data. Here&rsquo;s a station at the airport in Longmont:</p>
<!-- exec -->
<pre><code>$ weather KLMO
Searching via station...
[caching result Vance Brand Airport, US]
Current conditions at &lt;UNKNOWN&gt;
Last updated Feb 16, 2019 - 04:35 PM EST / 2019.02.16 2135 UTC
Temperature: 36.0 F (2.2 C)
Relative Humidity: 70%
Wind: from the E (100 degrees) at 3 MPH (3 KT)
Sky conditions: partly cloudy
</code></pre>
<!-- end -->
<p>Finally, I couldn&rsquo;t figure out why I was just getting the string &ldquo;Updating&hellip;&rdquo;
instead of a temperature after swapping in <code>KLMO</code> for <code>KDEN</code>, then I realized
that you also need to change the station name in the template. Here are the
<a href="https://code.p1k3.com/gitea/brennen/bpb-kit/commit/c9d406b1a4590e3d5b4c49420a7ce37225ddd0a5">changes I made to my .xmobarrc while writing this post</a>.
They also include a tweak to display sky conditions and a slightly different
date format.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/bpb-kit">bpb-kit</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/data">data</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/noaa">noaa</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/technical">technical</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/warelogging">warelogging</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/weather">weather</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/xmobar">xmobar</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/xmonad">xmonad</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/2/16/" title="16">16</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry><entry><title>Tuesday, February 12 - reading: astounding</title><link href="https://p1k3.com/2019/2/12"/><id>https://p1k3.com/2019/2/12</id><content type="html">
<article><div class="entry"><h1>Tuesday, February 12</h1>
<h2>reading: astounding</h2>
<p>With the full subtitle, it&rsquo;s <em>Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov,
Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction</em>, by
Alec Nevala-Lee. I mentioned this one a bit <a href="/2018/1/1">over a year ago</a>. While
the author&rsquo;s preoccupations and tastes aren&rsquo;t always mine, <a href="https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/">his
blog</a> continued to offer up a lot of fascinating material over the
last year, and the book is such an obvious fit for my interests that I both
gave and received a copy of the hardcover for Christmas.</p>
<p>Literary and musical biographies have been a disproportionate part of my
reading in adulthood, despite the genre usually leaving an unpleasant taste in
my mouth. Writers, like musicians, are often difficult figures even when
presented charitably, and it seems to be the rare biographer who inhabits that
space between character assassination and outright hagiography. I think
Nevala-Lee manages in an interesting way here, though it probably helps that
I&rsquo;m going in expecting to actively dislike some of these people and already
have complicated feelings about the rest.</p>
<p class="centerpiece"> ✯ </p>
<p><a href="/2018/1/1">Last year in January</a> I tried to summarize my reading for 2017 and
wound up concluding:</p>
<blockquote><p>Because really what I read in 2017, in most of the last several years, was the
internet. Not even, in any real sense that registers, individual documents
hosted on the network, or the work of authors I can clearly identify. Just
the endless scroll.</p>
<p>The internet: A tide of incoherent technical documentation, error logs,
seething sociopolitical rage, ideological agitation and condemnation (somewhere
between authentic and engineered/rehearsed, on some spectrum it is no longer
possible for me to easily parse), clickbait, reaction, comment vitriol,
disinformation, machine-generated pseudojournalism, notification spam,
marketing, infographical non-info, hot-take product, autoplaying video, and
generalized memetic spew.</p></blockquote>
<p>I could have written the same thing today, I think. Maybe with the difference
that I&rsquo;ve retreated even further from the general stream of clickbait and
commentary, and post almost nowhere in public. Which in turn leads to
reading less of the stuff that people post about in endless, saturated loops of
indignation and competitive meta-analysis.</p>
<p>The general sense that the news is bad and getting worse has only grown
stronger, and click-mongering hyperbole aside I think that reflects an
underlying reality which is in fact pretty fucking grim. Somehow though,
paying the growing hum of the looming abyss less mind has left me, bit by bit,
feeling a little more able to deal with the grimness itself.</p>
<p class="tags"><b>tags:</b> <a href="https://p1k3.com/reading">reading</a>, <a href="https://p1k3.com/sfnal">sfnal</a></p><p class="datestamp"><a href="https://p1k3.com/">p1k3</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/" title="2019">2019</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/2/" title="2">2</a> /
<a href="https://p1k3.com/2019/2/12/" title="12">12</a></p>
</div></article>
</content><updated>2024-03-25T18:45:12Z</updated></entry></feed>
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