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This is a commonplace book, a collection of thoughts and clippings. I'm using it in preference to a microblog for certain things.
When the darkness starts coming early, it's time to listen to Bohren & der Club of Gore in the evening.
Currently listening to the album "Sunset Mission" and reading "In the Dust of This Planet" by Eugene Thacker, Horror of Philosophy vol. 1. Spooky season may be over, but existential dread season is forever.
Metaverse (n): MUDding for functional illiterates and finance bros (but I repeat myself). The next way in which the mandatory Web will get more expensive.
> "For these beings, fall is the only normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond...
>
> They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles — breaks.
>
> Such are the autumn people. Beware of them."
> — Ray Bradbury
> The late Vincent Price was a horror film icon. With perfect elocution, he delivered creepy invitations to haunted houses in such movies as House of Wax (1953) and House on Haunted Hill (1959). He was a regular on TV's Hollywood Squares and a villain on the 1960s TV series Batman. Price's deep voice narrated Michael Jackson's 1982 music video for "Thriller" and was an inspiration to director Tim Burton. But Price was also a foodie.
Is this something someone has already done? If not, it's certainly something I'd like to try. I would support basically the functionality of the OPDS catalog (searching, browsing by categories), and probably include cacheing so as to eventually produce a Gemini library of the most-requested public-domain works.
One thing I'm not sure about is whether to include every available format, or to settle on one (UTF-8 text? ePub?).
AI box thought experiment, but the AI is Jeffrey Coombs.
> ‘Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind,’
— Bertrand Russell
My technolust for today: a MacSE/30 running A/UX, with at least 64MB of RAM, a 68040 upgrade, and the third-party video card upgrade that lets the display show grayscale. I’m not even going to go look up how much this would cost on the collectors’ market; I’m sure it’s extravagant. I’ll just continue to imagine it in my happy place.
Jeremy Keith writes about the new accent-color property in CSS:
Trying to stop developers from styling checkboxes and radio buttons is like trying to stop teenagers from having sex. You might as well accept that it’s going to happen and give them contraception so they can at least do it safely. So I welcome this new CSS condom.
Honestly, if we had had this sort of thing sooner (and a decent multi-select widget), thousands of grievous offenses against usability might have been prevented (back in the early aughts; today it's probably entirely too late).
I’m listening to a collection of nocturnes by Gabriel Fauré that I used to listen to almost obsessively, but haven’t listened to in many years. It keeps out the noise of the cube farm, at least.
I have a nice hardback copy of The King in Yellow, which I bought from a small press when it was a much harder book to find (around 1998). It has a nice, yellow library binding with nothing in the way of ornamentation.
Perhaps it’s in the attic with my role-playing games books, though I can’t see why it would be…
I’m a tremendous fan of David Lynch’s weird 1990-1991 TV series “Twin Peaks”. Today I saw a link to one of the most unsettlingly filmed scenes in the show. In the forum it was posted to, and also on the video sharing site, people were commenting about how they watched this at a young age, and it gave them nightmares, or how they still can’t look into mirrors at night. Lots of 10-year-olds, some were as young as *five*. My eldest child (12) *loves* scary stuff, and I swear I won’t let her watch it (Seasons 1 and 2) until she’s 16.
> Coronation, n.: The ceremony of investing a sovereign with the
> outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown
> skyhigh with a dynamite bomb.
> -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
I got an electronically-controlled electric induction pressure cooker recently; basically an Instant Pot, but it’s a Chinese brand that was much cheaper. It’s been an absolute revelation as far as pressure cooking beans goes – much faster and quieter than the traditional pressure cooker on top of the gas burner. Good as a rice cooker. Going to try lentils in it tonight, I think; see if it’s easy enough to do the sauteing the garlic and onion as well as cooking the lentils.
I had a thought about something I wanted to write while I was driving, but I had no way to capture it at the time, and now it’s gone.
Tiling-Assistant¹ is probably the least-bad tiling window manager extension for Gnome that’s compatible with Gnome 4. The switch from Gnome 3 to Gnome 4 broke PaperWM², my previous favorite, and also broke Material-Shell and PopShell. There are a couple of others that work, but they seem a little weird. This one is really simple, and I may just stick with it. PaperWM is really cool, but it has its own tiling paradigm that’s not like Sway or other tiling interfaces.
I normally use Sway, actually, but I’m enjoying the graphical refresh of Gnome 4, and also just not having to do things like open a shell to connect my Bluetooth headphones.
Comments, complaints, and suggestions to jmcbray@carcosa.net on email or XMPP.
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