2020-08-10-Long-weekend-and-many-replies

Long weekend

( cw: alcohol, mental health, also fairly long [not the alc/mh- part] )

I was off Friday because I worked last Saturday, so I had a long weekend. I felt pretty bad Friday emotionally; I think it's because I drank a lot on Thursday and my brain chemistry was off. Or did I drink a lot on Friday? I might've done that as well. ---- Oh no, it was Thursday, though I'm such a lightweight that three beers was enough (on an empty stomach, so this isn't totally ridiculous) for me to black out so I don't remember getting the pizza I'd ordered (I do remember ordering it!) and I didn't eat any of it til the next day for breakfast. I also woke up about 3:30 AM and wasn't able to fall back asleep until like, 6:00 AM. And then I fell *back* asleep about 7:00 AM while listening to an Emacs video on YouTube and then just was blah all day. So. That was Friday.

I *did* get some starter started though, so I was able to bake bread on Saturday. I use a pretty basic sourdough recipe; check at my

breadlog

sometime to see it. I'll eventually post it up there, along with the other bread recipes I made this weekend.

Speaking of other breads, I also made some Naan to eat with a sort-of quick curry I made up. The bread was good but the curry was watery. I didn't really go off a recipe and just sort of put the extra vegetables we had in a pot then covered them with veggie broth until they were cooked through, then added some coconut cream from a can. The flavor was pretty good, but like I said, it was soupy. So I need to figure out how to make the sauce thicker.

OH and then yesterday I made some drop biscuits from this recipe that's already in my HTTP breadlog,

here.

I added blueberries in the ones I made yesterday, and they were quite good. Could use some fat though, I think. Maybe should've added butter.

All in all, a very good baking weekend for me, though I didn't really do traveling through geminispace. Yall were all very talkative this weekend (!), and there's much I wanted to respond to.

Responses to various missives around the NQ2¹

How do book characters look in my head?

re: ~bouncepaw

I honestly don't know where book characters' images come from when I think of them. I know part of it comes from descriptions in the text, part from cover art or movies if they exist, and part from ... I guess the same place dream faces come from. Some characters don't have very strong imagery, some do. I usually don't imagine really specific faces, I don't think -- or again, they're dreamlike and shifty. Main characters who don't have descriptions that *don't* look like me I think generally tend to look like me. Maybe that's why I've hesitated writing fiction, haha -- I'm worried it'd be too easy to write a Mary Jane!

I'm kind of weirded out while answering this question, because I have a pretty vivid imagination -- I think of objects and stuff with a pretty high level of imagistic precision I think. But when it comes to faces, I have a hard time holding on to them, if that makes sense -- they feel more shifty, like sand or something. Maybe I'm low-key face blind. But I recognize people very easily. Hm.

Favicons

re: hannuhartikainen

also re: makeworld

I've got to say, I just like having *any* character as a favicon. It seems more "fair," I guess, to the entire Unicode space? I'm thinking convention will keep most people using "non-text" characters, such as blackletter or emoji or weird math symbols or whatever. I think if someone wants to use a number, that's on them -- this is all unofficial, anyway.

Though now I'm thinking *more* about it, you'd have to (for technical reasons) say, "no <BS>, no <NL>, etc." -- Probably simplify that to "No non-printable characters". But then you think some more, and honestly the confusingness argument for ASCII characters is pretty compelling -- so you say, "Okay no ASCII -- codepoint 128+ in Unicode" -- but how is that different than the current spec? I'm pretty sure (too lazy to look it up) the current just limits the codepoints it'll look at.

However, favicons *are* fun. I never implemented them in bollux(1), but that was just because I never got around to adding caching/etc to the browser -- if I'd cached it it'd be easy-peasy, plop it in the title of the window or something.

PS re: elpher

Elpher isn't showing *any* emoji right now, and I think it's because Emacs doesn't display emoji. I have no idea how to fix this. I think there's an emoji mode? Or unicode-fonts??? IDK.

Gloggery ?!

re: ~easeout

> gloggery now has command line arguments with pretty ok defaults, instead of baking my own setup into code. It also builds only posts that are new or changed, unless you include an argument to rebuild. About all that's left to do is a readme, I think.

Please do a Readme! If this software is what I think it is, it's very exciting! I can't wait to read the me ;)

Keyboard hegemony

re: ~solderpunk

I have a sort of opposite problem from solderpunk. I've used a US keyboard my whole life, and I run into problems when I try to input accented characters for coworkers' names or when using loanwords. It's pretty frustrating to have to go to the Wikipedia page for Beyoncé to input the character I just did (there's actually a toot or a tweet about that that made the rounds recently, so it's not just me). I can't even imagine trying to use common coding characters on a non-US keyboard! I feel that honestly, keyboards should just all be customizable / remappable, but of course that makes them more complex and expensive, and they'd still have defaults anyway, so the hegemony is still there.

Oh, and "Alt Gr" stands for "Alternate Graph:" I know this because I've looked it up multiple times from trying to get Windows 10 at work to let me use the right Alt as an Alt Gr. And on non-International (talk about hegemony!) keyboards, Ctrl-Alt-Arrow rotates the screen for the same godforsaken reason that AltGr does with your keyboard. I.e., no reason at all, except maybe Bill Gates just wants to mess with us. Why is that so easy to do!? How often do the people at Microsoft just reorient their screen? I'm imagining at least 3, 4 times a day to make it worth their while to give it such a great key combo.

ANYWAY, AltGr is "supposed to" be mapped to Ctrl+Alt on US keyboards in Windows, but at least at my work, that is *not* the case. But all the articles I've found online talk about it like, "Oh yeah, that's all you have to do, no problem." So.

A PS for solderpunk

I'm just glad I'm not the only one to spam CAPCOM when re-uploading posts, hehe :)

We aren't smarter than this

re: ~mernisse

I feel this post so so much. I'm also in the US (if the keyboard bit above didn't tip it off), and "the economy" feels like god feels to an atheist -- it's a big mythical thing that people really care about but it just doesn't affect my life, except in the ways that the people that care about it make it affect my life. Like, the economy does not matter to me personally -- I have no stock, I'm paying into a pension with the city, I don't have an IRA (I know, I need one), etc. -- but if it gets bad enough, I could lose my job, miss a promotion, lose my house, pay more for groceries, you know. So like, I know it *does* affect me, I *know* what the economy is, but the way the people in charge are talking about it it's like it's God Himself or something. Which I guess to them, it is. I read someone talk about the stock market as "Rich People's Feelings" and boy, that nailed it.

I think the answer to mernisse's question is simultaneously very complex -- it deals with the history of anti-intellectualism, the American myth of individualism, the broken promise of the American dream, race relations, sex relations, the history of lending, regulatory capture, the myth of American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, concerted propaganda efforts, the Red Scare, protestantism (specifically Purtanism, Calvinism, and the newer Prosperity Gospel), a broken education system, broken prison system, lead in the water, medical costs, and who knows what else -- and very very simple: Americans, on the whole and when in positions of decision-making power, don't want to be better. It's extremely frustrating and saddening and infuriating. And I feel that the only tools I've been given to deal with these feelings, through the mythologizing of American history, is to "Stand Up And Do Something About It." But it's too big. And maybe I can stand up -- and I do what I can, I've been to protests, I'm vegetarian, I try to buy as little as possible, I don't give money to companies that kill the planet or people or whatever -- but who am I? I'm one little candle in a sea of darkness. And like, don't give me that bull about how one candle can light up -- it's still really really dark. Like, it's cold comfort.

The sad state of internet access

re: dctrud

We have Cox at home, and it's pretty crap too. The router keeps cutting out randomly which is frustrating because then we're using our 4G, which we only have so much of, and then will get charged extra for going over. But hey, I'm doing better than my parents, who *still* don't have DSL even, because they live 13 miles outside of a small town. They have satellite internet *now*, but it depends on the weather how good it is, and it's fairly expensive. Add the Internet to the big list of broken shit I wrote in the paragraph above. It's pitiful. But that's America -- talk the biggest game but fail in every way to actually commit to the promises.

I'm okay, though

Just realized there's a good amount of bitterness here. Taking a break to let yall know I'm actually feeling pretty well today! My shoulder hurts but I'm making good progress on the blanket I'm crocheting. I'm looking hard at ebikes (more on that maybe .. tomorrow?). I'm having fun. That bread really made my weekend.

Bonus! Emacs/elpher/browse-url woes

While writing this little missive I've been trying to hack my Emacs to browse-url-at-point the gemini links I've collected using elpher. I just can't figure the dang thing out. I've got this code right now in my init.el:

And I tried this code from EmacsWiki:

along with this to make eww the default browser in Emacs:

I'll figure it out, eventually, I suppose.

Footnotes

¹ NQ2 is the sky-quadrant for the Gemini constellation, according to Wikipedia. I think it's a good name for 'geminispace' that isn't so ... long.

bonus hilarious picture of Castor and Pollux

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Copyright (c) 2019-2020 Case Duckworth. CC-BY-SA.

History

Raw

HTML