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Documentation for The Psalms - my blog about software’s intersection with culture. Not just for the website - for the entire process (correspondence, notetaking, drafting, *revising*, editorializing, promoting, discussing, and even reflecting.)

Home Page: https://bilge.world

License: Other

CSS 0.23% JavaScript 0.05% HTML 99.56% Less 0.01% Rich Text Format 0.02% Jupyter Notebook 0.06% TeX 0.03% Mermaid 0.05%
css writeas writefreely blog writeas-customization writeas-blog custom-css editorial theme markdown

bilge's Introduction

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The Psalms Editorial Documentation


Note: THE TECHNICAL DOCS HAVE MOVED. For the sake of my own sanity, all technical documentation regarding Write.as/WriteFreely has been moved to a dedicated repository.

This repository encompasses the whole of both the editorial and developmental processes involved in creating bilge.world.

See my 2020 reflectory post for a few more details.

Psalms Project Board

Git

  • As part of my continued exploration of Git as an editorial tool, I have done my best to make use of as many GitHub-specific features as possible.

  • The Psalms' Project Board tracks ideas, notetaking, research, documentation, drafting, revision, and extra-site discourse (like Tweets or HackerNews comments.) Its left-most column also documents style and technical changes to its code.

  • I've been using Issues to document just about anything, including all of the above, as well as any other specific subject involved (ex: an "official" wallpaper pack.)

  • Commits function as a chronological revision-tracker which I have indeed made use of in a few, particularly dire writing situations.

  • I've been slow at integrating the Wiki, but its uses - such as documenting specific editorial definitions - will continue to be expanded.

  • Discussions are an intriguing possibility for external feedback (stop by and say something! really!,) but explaining why my general audience should have a GitHub account to participate even if they have zero interest in dev shit is going to be difficult.

  • Within the code, you'll find my voice notes, an image library, and a variety of other miscellaneous associated files (better organization is coming.)

Cute Git


This section is currently a work-in-progress.

The Psalms (alternatively/interchangeably entitled Bilge) is a monobyline World Wide Web Blog written by David Blue (good morning!) observing and selectively amplifying the characters, organizations, and stories surrounding the most abrupt, profound, and spectacular communicative renaissance in the history of the human species.

Less abstractly, its beat is wholly digital, namely in tools (software, services, and methodologies) and culture (music, film, podcasts, and media) from a distinct lens established at good distance from California.

It is entirely written in public largely via this GitHub Repository, supplemented by experiments on a variety of other platforms, including (arguably) my Twitter account.

Contact

David Blue


Technical Documentation (Writeas Blog)

Documentation for my blog, bilge.world.

I proudly use Write.as as my blog's CMS. I am relatively new to Git and GitHub, but it occurred to me that a repository would be a great place to track technical changes and even versions/revisions of drafts.


Writeas Customization

Installation (Bilge Theme)

To "install" my theme on your own Writeas blog, copy and paste the contents of Custom CSS.css and Custom Javascript.js into the respective "Custom CSS" and "Custom Javascript" fields in your blog's customization menu.

See: "Customizing Writeas"


Bilge Three Point Oh Footer

The Psalms is proudly hosted by Write.as - a new sort of blogging content management system built atop Markdown and maintained by a company which explicitly shares my commitment to a better, Open web.

A somewhat-outdated version of this site's theme is listed among others in Writeas' official themes list. The full, up-to-date CSS and JS can be found below and on in this GitHub repository, which I created in November, 2020 as an experiment in using Git to track editorial changes. (That means you can see current in-progress drafts!)

  • Download the entirety of this blog in EPUB format here.
  • Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed here.
  • This blog is federated at @[email protected].

Typography

Body Text: Adobe Caslon Pro

Nav/Headers/Other: Proxima Nova & Variations

Colors

The Psalms Colors

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bilge's Issues

"The Honks that Fell Silent"

Technically, my automotive web show only ever published 5 episodes (plus the Toyota Avalon video,) but the amount of unpublished Honk material should just about match what’s available now if/when I’m able to gather the required funds and external drives to outsource the editing work. 6 years and two days ago (are you getting tired of the milestone thing, because I certainly am,) we recorded my thoughts on the 2011 Mitsubishi Eclipse GS Spyder (or something ridiculous like that) – the then-latest manifestation of an automotive product which we’d literally spent years disparaging as the lowest of the low in the design, cultural, and practical senses. Unlike the Juke or Versa, the Eclipse did nothing but affirm its crucifixion – I still vividly remember the sensation: operating the Eclipse feels like you’re driving an enlarged plastic pedal car.

I distinctly recall several car mechanics from different shops in a handful of separate municipalities independently making a point to emphasize how important it was that I buy just about anything but an Eclipse when I was going on 14 and prone to those premature conversations about buying my first car. Lewis – the talented mechanic my stepdad hired to restore the machine that would become my first – my brother-in-law’s early-90s extended cab Toyota Pickup – included something like “at least you didn’t end up with an Eclipse” in that last conversation before we drove it home, a thousand-yard stare of sincere trauma on his face.

There is nothing redeemable about the Mitsubishi Eclipse. This I have suspected for years, and now confirmed. It is vulgar to look at, depressing to be around, and genuinely demeaning to drive.

But what was the purpose, exactly, of such an embarrassingly bargain-bin coverband of a vehicle? For a tiny, performance-oriented company like Mitsubishi to have survived the SUV and (now) Crossover eras thus far in the 21st century, they needed a popular sell. Yes, for the opportunity to have enjoyed that glorious Evo X, I must in large part thank the Eclipse, which has been killed since and succeeded by the Eclipse Cross as the Brand’s Breadwinner.

Shortly after filming with the Eclipse, a curious theory smacked down upon me: what if the entire existence of these products with their mighty names had always been a grand, century-spanning industry joke at the literal expense of the West’s most ignorant car buyers? Malignant, maybe – but not malicious. What if Mitsubishi simply knew that America’s tasteless young men and women had long existed in a foul, rabid state of hunger for their dearly-beloved Wally World✪ Car? What if they recognized this weakness as their one opportunity to capitalize on the market trend they were least-equipped – even least-willing, perhaps – to survive?

Though a banker may suppose otherwise – as per their historically-pale market share – Mitsubishi is more than capable of such a plot, intellectually. The Lancer Evolution is a marvel of suspension and powertrain design.

✪ Wal-Mart

"Through an iPhone 4's Lens"

Seven years ago, the fourth generation of Apple’s iPhone instigated a change in our perception of digital photography. Now – thanks to Google Photos – I’d like to reflect on my favorite shots of mine.
When iPhone 4 handsets began shipping in the Summer of 2010, I’d been carrying my first generation for three solid years – since its now history-stricken release, in fact – and its age started to become a problem. I’d drop it screen-down on a rock in the airport parking lot just before going back to school for my Junior year, splitting a crack in the screen that wouldn’t quite kill it – it was the demands of iOS 4 on its 412 MHz CPU and meager 128 MB of RAM that would ultimately cease its usability.

The single 2 megapixel rear-facing camera would surprise one at times, but was never lauded as anything but what it was – a mobile phone-bound sensor capturing very celluar-looking images, but Steve Jobs wasn’t three minutes in to his iPhone 4 presentation at the June 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference before he pronounced the design’s closest possible “kin” to be “an old Leica camera,” associating his device with photography in its first impression. The equivalent of the first generation’s rear-facing camera could now be found facing you, and the fourth’s primary sensor now shot at 5 megapixels (2592 x 1936) with autofocus and 5x digital zoom, setting a fundamental smartphone sensor configuration standard that’s still adhered to by the industry.

After unleashing Google Photos upon the ~15,000 images on my home machine’s hard drive last year, I have been constantly reminded of my own photographic history – for better or worse – and regularly shown five, six, seven-year old snaps in a manner that wouldn’t have been possible (or have made any sense) before. Recently, I was astounded to find that I took many of the better shots with my iPhone 4, so I thought I’d share a few from my high-school days in loving memory of my trusty little rectangular companion.

All taken with iPhone 4, left unedited. View more on Flickr.

"Pfaall For President"

Our fake news™ Editor-in-Chief addresses the commotion surrounding aggregated misinformation and the meaning of the "media company" label.
My favorite short sto­ry of all time was pub­lished by the South­ern Lit­er­ary Mes­sen­ger in the sum­mer of 1835. It com­piles all of my favorite sto­ry ele­ments into one painful­ly tedious body: absurd prop­er nouns, com­plete­ly unbe­liev­able premis­es, lighter-than-air craft, explorato­ry con­text, and an utter­ly unsat­is­fac­to­ry aftertaste. Tech­ni­cal­ly, it’s a hoax, and could only have been spawned by the most frus­trat­ing com­ic of them all — Edgar Allan Poe.

If you find your­self one day read­ing his col­lect­ed works cov­er-to-cov­er, The Unpar­al­leled Adven­tures of One Hans Pfaall is how you’ll be intro­duced. I’m sure the ‘ole sadist would be pleased at the thought of you crawl­ing your way through his exhaust­ing thir­ty-page-long descrip­tion of the bellow-mender’s space bal­loon and its bizarre journey.

Originally, I’d remem­bered incor­rect­ly — a bit of light research says Pfall was a bit too absurd to be over­whelm­ing­ly believed, but it was believed — that an indebt­ed labor­er obses­sive­ly con­struct­ed a DIY diri­gi­ble which he flew to the moon before managing to convince a lunar­i­an to use it to deliv­er his sur­gi­cal­ly-detailed chron­i­cle of the jour­ney to be read pub­licly in front of his township’s civic lead­ers, only to have the scoop exclu­sive­ly bro­ken by a small arts periodical.

In fact, it caused enough hub­bub to inspire an entire subera of sim­i­lar­ly-styled hoax­es, many from the orig­i­na­tor, himself.

It’s no secret that Poe was as bit­ter as he was bril­liant, so I’ve found myself again and again won­der­ing, late­ly, what/if he would have spo­ken amidst his country’s 2016 elec­tion for Pres­i­dent. As I’ve known him — much more inti­mate­ly than most; much less than a few — I would posit that his bril­liant, suf­fer­ing mind would’ve been locked in the most pro­duc­tive year-long mania of his career. He was the sort of extra­or­di­nary man who was dis­gust­ed by the exis­tence of any­thing less.

I think he would’ve played the tricks of Search Engine Opti­miza­tion, engage­ment, and news aggre­ga­tion with a verac­i­ty that could’ve swung an elec­tion, if we accept the recent ver­dict against some good-humored Mace­don­ian adolescents.

His laugh­ter would be abrupt­ly stayed, though, if you told him that ten per­cent of the adult pop­u­la­tion is illit­er­ate, two cen­turies lat­er and twen­ty years into the sin­gle most pro­found renais­sance in the his­to­ry of human communication. Though a near­ly-equiv­a­lent upset could prob­a­bly be had by inform­ing him that his best-known work by a vast mar­gin has since been The Raven, but I’ll spare you that sub­ject for a less-top­i­cal dissertation.

How do I begin an argu­ment about intel­lec­tu­al dis­par­i­ty in America?

"You got the President you deserve"?

“Deserve” is no less igno­rant of a con­cept as “truth,” so that’d be awful­ly hyp­o­crit­i­cal. Not that hypocrisy gives me any sort of pause, what­so­ev­er, as a pur­vey­or of fake news. Per­haps I should begin with an overview of Extra­tone’s bias on advertising.

Total adver­tis­ing rev­enue we have received to date: $0. Total num­ber of adver­tise­ments that have appeared on extra­tone dot com to date: 3. Total num­ber of adver­tise­ments for non-defunct com­pa­nies that have appeared on extra­tone dot com to date: 0.

As of this moment, adver­tis­ing is Google, more or less, which means they are one of the few com­pa­nies on Earth with the sort of cash flow to even con­sid­er attempt­ing to craft a stan­dard of mali­cious­ness (the only use­ful spec­trum I could come up with that could accom­plish the goal of “elim­i­nat­ing finan­cial incen­tives that appear to have dri­ven the pro­duc­tion of much fake news.”)

I sup­pose the first author­i­ty on intent would be the Church, but I — a fake news writer — have been unable to arrive upon the method Jesus Christ would choose to go about elim­i­nat­ing communion.
But The Lord has for­sak­en this place — we have only Google, now, and — as the res­i­dent omnipo­tence, it is They alone who can stay what They have made. So per­haps that smelly gen­tle­men won­der­ing aloud about the “sec­ond com­ing” on the bus stop bench is actu­al­ly smarter than you, but unable to fore­see the dig­i­tal set­ting of his apocalypse. If Google is our neo-God, sure­ly Walt Moss­berg is now the pope. Yes­ter­day morn­ing, he addressed Face­book (neo-Hell,) com­mand­ing them to behave like the “media com­pa­ny” he believes they are.

I would like to imag­ine that Mark Zucker­berg is hiss­ing, currently.

He cites a Pew Research Cen­ter study that was con­duct­ed this past Spring, which found that “44 per­cent of the U.S. adult pop­u­la­tion got at least some of its news from Face­book.” I’d like to point all 2000 of my greasy, thump­ing, slan­der­ous fin­gers at the begin­ning sen­tence of the next para­graph, though: “but that puts a heavy respon­si­bil­i­ty on Facebook…”

Why?

Who exact­ly is plac­ing this bur­den on Face­book? Have we actu­al­ly reached the point of social media as a pub­lic service? Per­haps their influ­ence on the country’s psy­chol­o­gy is enor­mous enough to exempt from all of the cheques that guar­an­tee free­dom of infor­ma­tion exchange.

Thank God... perhaps FarmVille shall finally face its Day of Judgement.

All the requests from one acquain­tance of mine are stress­ing me out, and fed­er­al employ­ees have not forcibly changed their foul-ass col­or scheme yet, so I can­not nav­i­gate deep enough to block her with­out becom­ing phys­i­cal­ly ill. Don’t get me wrong — hang­ing Mark Zucker­berg by the Neck Until Dead for trea­son would make for quite a spec­ta­cle, but I can­not help but won­der if you have for­got­ten one of your most irri­tat­ing expres­sions: don’t blame the messenger.

I hate to be rude, but POTUS Tumper is the def­i­nite sign: you are respon­si­ble for your choic­es and your igno­rance. Voli­tion in informed media con­sump­tion is the only effec­tive weapon with which one should com­bat deception.

For some per­spec­tive, know that I came shame­ful­ly close to falling for a fuck­ing phone scam a few days ago. I didn’t end up cost­ing my com­pa­ny, but I came with­in inch­es of doing so. I hadn’t expe­ri­enced such all-con­sum­ing embar­rass­ment in a decade. But — as life expe­ri­ences tend to be — it was hum­bling, and prepara­to­ry — I’m sure — for the next time I must iden­ti­fy dishonesty.

I appre­ci­ate the sen­ti­ment of per­son­al­i­ties like Moss­berg and the effort they expend in the name of my pro­tec­tion as a user, but I must be allowed to dis­cern the nature of con­tent for myself, espe­cial­ly when using a ser­vice who’s CEO is pub­licly cry­ing “we do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves.” Whether or not Face­book has the cash to delib­er­ate on, design, or redesign algo­rithms and/or oth­er soft­ware to com­bat inau­then­tic con­tent sources is irrelevant.

Max Read’s account of the process as it relates to the elec­tion is the sharpest one-take I’ve seen thus far. In it, he sug­gests that the sheer size of Facebook’s audi­ence “would seem to demand some kind of civic respon­si­bil­i­ty.” And — while it is now unde­ni­able that it is “the most effi­cient dis­trib­u­tor of mis­in­for­ma­tion in human his­to­ry," I must speak for the gen­er­al read­er­ship and note that when we are “mis­led,” it is out of our own fail­ing dili­gence, intel­lect, and/or edu­ca­tion as bal­lot-eli­gi­ble adults.

As far as myself and my edi­to­r­i­al course are con­cerned, it is tremen­dous­ly dis­re­spect­ful to remove a reader’s voli­tion in their con­sump­tion. If there is “blame” for the votes in this elec­tion, the sin­gle polite course of action is to leave it on the vot­ers, indef­i­nite­ly. Any alter­na­tive is what we’d brand an acute theft of will. Volition in informed media con­sump­tion is the only effec­tive weapon with which one should com­bat deception.

It’s not a con­tentious sen­ti­ment — assum­ing com­pe­tence from all par­tic­i­pants when leg­is­la­tion or demand are con­cerned. If it were, the safteynet wouldn’t be focused on such a small por­tion of dig­i­tal dis­in­for­ma­tion as mis­ag­gre­gat­ed news rep­re­sents, but instead on the high­ly-potent cul­ture of Google AdWords cons, or the long­stand­ing insti­tu­tion of email phishing. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not the biggest fan of Zuckerberg’s Cul­ture­suck. I found­ed our flag­ship pod­cast around rep­re­hend­ing it, and see plen­ty of evi­dence that it’s pro­found­ly effect­ed West­ern psy­chol­o­gy in a star­tling way, but attack­ing the issue in an eth­i­cal con­text is tremen­dous­ly inef­fi­cient, if noth­ing else.

Yes, it would make for an enter­tain­ing sto­ry, watch­ing Google and Face­book hurl their mass­es of cash at the 9th com­mand­ment, but it’d be much bet­ter spent remak­ing the crit­i­cal read­er­ship in Amer­i­can soci­ety. A fed­er­al pro­gram to con­front the ~10% adult illit­er­a­cy rate might be a better place to start.

"Rock Springs, Wyoming"

TRAVEL FILTH / FOOD BILE
 
A quantitative, industry-grade review of a stranding, unsettling, and scarring little town in Sweetwater County.
Hawthorn and I were on what was supposed to be the last leg of our cross-country roadtrip to Portland, blasting up the vast, otherworldly Interstate 80, about 90 minutes East of the Utah border. It was late afternoon and we were both beginning to get hungry, so we decided to stop in Rock Springs, which the roadside signage had been emphasizing for a significant distance. Despite its miserly population of less than 25,000, the area is the fourth most populated municipality in the state. (Incredibly, Cheyenne - capitol and most populate of Wyoming - has only 62,845 occupants as of 2014.)

I spied and set course for Exit 104, but hit some kind of massive, traumatic fissure in the asphalt with my XJR’s right-front tire (this will become important information momentarily.) The sort of impact that makes you yell, but doesn’t quite worry you about a puncture or damaged suspension, though perhaps it should have worried me, considering that I’d already destroyed two tires and a wheel in a particularly-harrowing pothole strike in July, back in rural Missouri. Regardless, the twenty-year-old, massively overladen Executive Saloon had already endured so much more than I would’ve expected from it in the past four days of the trip - including the moderately treacherous Loveland Pass near Keystone, CO - that my confidence in its invulnerability had been significantly bolstered.
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I also posted the following section on Yelp! - my new toy - as my review of the Renegade.

The exit’s ring-around-the-rosy revealed a nearby oddity: a banner for “AMERICAN AND CHINESE FOOD” around a rather neglected looking diner situated in the center of a decaying asphalt parking lot. Hawthorn had been craving Chinese cuisine for weeks. I parked us quite close to the entrance and winced too late at my contextually-idiotic getup as we entered - my borrowed black women’s skinny jeans and the bright red “FUCK TRUMP” pin on my jacket collar were likely the cause of the trouble included in the long-lingering stares we received. The place’s demeanor indicated a regular-saturated atmosphere - two young couples in working clothes would come and go in the hour or so it took us to get our food and eat. The rest of our company were significantly elder - quiet and weary.

Our waitress seemed to be neutral to us and professionally welcoming. She took our orders promptly and tended to our coffee consumption politely, despite my waning farm boy manners. Of course, we were the loudest of the whole bunch, shuffling around a huge road atlas, laughing at the television’s display of Fox News, and admiring from a distance the user interface of the “Renegade Restaurant’s” prehistoric point-of-sale system. The menus were simply split equally between “Chinese” and “American” dishes. I’m 90% sure I ordered a burger and fries, which were forgettable, but my taste is subpar enough to be totally irrelevant. Hawthorn reported seeing a cook drop a carrot on the ground before adding it to a dish. She ordered “something Chinese,” but would experience enough disgust that she prefers not to recall more specifically.

“It was bad. I didn’t take pictures of it because it was too grotesque to look back at. I felt ill during and after the meal. Slimy.”

After we ate, we crossed Highway 191 to fill up at the Flying J, which was so well-stocked and spectacular (I found the most beautiful CB radio I’ve ever seen) that we ended up lingering in the store for some twenty minutes before pre-paying for our fuel. As we walked back to the car, I noticed something odd about the right-front tire - a ten-inch gash in the outer sidewall had appeared sometime since our last stop in Colorado, late that morning. To me, it looked like tread separation - the beginnings of the outer tread’s leave from the rest of the tire - which can be quite dangerous, at speed, and is often caused by pothole strikes. Naturally, I assumed immediately that it was that mid-lane-change event just before our exit that caused the wound.

I returned to the station for my change and asked if any nearby auto service shops were likely to be open (it was now after 7PM, local time.) The attendants took a beat to arrive upon a consensus: WalMart was probably my best bet. Hawthorn remained had remained in the Jaguar, where she observed a man behaving oddly - staring at her and the car, coming a bit closer than was appropriate.
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A failed attempt to slash our tire, presumably by one of our fellow diner-goers in reaction to our liberal-ass appearance.
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The Wal-Mart’s Tire & Lube department had just closed, but the manager was kind enough to step away from her counter and have a look. Her opinion echoed the statements I’d hear from at least three other tire service professionals: “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t drive on that.” Considering that we had another thousand miles of interstate with every last one of my possessions packed in the car, we decided we had little choice but to stay the night. As we entered the store to find alcohol and a bulb for the XJR’s just-extinguished headlight, I searched online for hotels. Though Days Inn advertised the cheapest-available room ($59,) total for the two of us in a single, smoking room was over $70.

Before resigning to the expenditure (our cash for the trip was, of course, quite limited,) we decided to bum around town for as long as we could stand it - first, lurking outside a just-closed Starbucks to steal their wifi before moving on to IHOP, where the waitresses graciously allowed us to remain until just before close, charging our devices and researching the area. I bought a copy of The Rocket-Miner - a surprisingly well put together daily newspaper serving Southwestern Wyoming. Whilst Googling “Rock Springs,” Hawthorn happened to notice the word “massacre,” which would lead us to discover - and mildly obsess over - an infamous historical manifestation of hateful murder which stained the area’s aura forever.
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It was nearly 11 when we conceded to the ideal of a restful night. I found the elderly night watchman suffering from some horrible affliction. By the manner in which he spoke and walked, he appeared alarmingly close to death. In fact, I’m not so sure I didn’t actually revive him from his grave - after we parked in the circle drive, it took a significant moment for him to appear from the darkened corner of the Inn’s meager lobby, and his responses could barely pass as verbal communication. Mostly, he gurgled. However, he graciously waved the usual cash deposit for us and still maintained a more cheerful demeanor than I would, in his position.
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Our room, itself, was… something else. I’ve stayed in my share of shady motels, but a few especially-bizarre, long-outdated features and our continued preoccupation with Rock Springs’ bloody history combined to make the night especially unsettling.
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I’d forgotten how bad smoking rooms smell in places like these - they’re especially neglected by the cleaning staff and must only be frequented by the sort who smoke Decades and Pall Malls, watching ancient MASH reruns at three in the morning. Perhaps that’s just what I’d like to think - at least ours didn’t smell like piss, though the door’s peephole was stuffed with dirty tissue, the bathtub had a large whole that was surely causing actual water damage each and every time it was filled, and the couch’s faux leather was visibly greasy.
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Free wifi was also advertised, unsurprisingly, but our room was just out of usable range of the router - close enough to tease connectability, which fooled me for half an hour of frustrating attempts to log in the archaic, HTML-only page.
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Then, we made the mistake of turning on the old CRT television, and quickly discovered the unsettling spectacle that is the public information cable channel of nearby Greenville, Wyoming, which played a slideshow of absurdly-designed PowerPoint cards to a skipping CD of Tchaikovsky’s “Grand Sonata in G Major.” Through them, we were introduced to the Nightmare Parade (a Halloween occasion - we estimate the presentation had not been updated since July) and The Tremendous and Terrible Pete Rust, Mayor and Lorde of the Land, all of it behind an everpresent and enduring watermark: “WELCOME TO DAYS INN.”
Thing are happening in the community, indeed. It’s important to remember, though, that Days Inn is a two-star establishment, and - if anything - the “quality” of our room was on-par or above with that of most alternatives within its price bracket. It’s not as if we were hurt or robbed – as if our room was not utterly luxurious compared to the nightly dwellings of the vast majority of human beings, even. The only actually troubling experience was the literature we discovered about The Rock Springs Massacre.
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In 1885, Rock Springs was a mining town with a fairly large population of Chinese immigrants and a history of building violence against them. They’d built the railroad networks that fast-industrialized the West coast, and had stayed for good money.

“If they were careful, in a few years they could save a lifetime’s fortune to take back home.”
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The Union Pacific railroad owned the mine, and had for decades been increasing pressure on the culture of Chinese and white miners, who had worked “side by side every day” but maintained speaking “separate languages and [living] separate lives.” They’d lowered wages and encouraged employees to buy day-to-day necessities at company-owned stores for inflated prices, spawning worker strikes that would escalate to firings in 1871, and the presence of federal troops in 1875. By 1885, the two were utterly split – the 300 whites lived downtown, and the 600 Chinese lived in Chinatown in the northeast. That Summer, there were “scattered threats and beatings” of Chinese men in three major Wyoming settlements: Cheyenne, Laramie, and Rawlings, but they were more or less ignored by Union Pacific.

Most resources on the matter mention the disgruntled white miner’s Union – the nazi-named Knights of Labor – supposedly formed because of the Chinese workers’ willingness to work for lower wages, which naturally ceilinged wages across the board. A member of the latter was killed by white employees in mine No. 6 on September 2nd in a scuffle, spawning a viciously escalating wave of “100 to 150 armed white men” who eventually mobbed Chinatown, unbridled, burning children alive in their dirt basements and publicly & horrifically mauling men and women in the streets. All in all, 28 Chinese were killed, and 15 wounded. They destroyed millions of today’s dollar’s worth of homes and demanded that “the Chinese should be no longer employed” before they’d cease and resume work. The governor of Wyoming began sending long, frantic telegrams to then-President Grover Cleveland, detailing the carnage and emphasizing their law enforcement’s desperate requirement for military support, which wouldn’t arrive and assemble for three days. Eventually, the “Knights” would be stayed, and many of the fleeing workers rescued, but the survivors’ post-massacre plight was far from heartwarming. Despite having provided the context to one of the worst hate crimes in history, their employer would soon issue an ultimatum to the Chinese miners who remained in the area: report to work, or be terminated and simultaneously banned from ever riding a Union Pacific train again.
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It would be inappropriate for me to express any thoughts beyond my horror reading associated newspaper clippings and Isaac H. Bromley’s account – The Chinese Massacre at Rock Springs, Wyoming Territory – save for my bewilderment at my own ignorance. I’d never encountered the event in any of my high school history classes, nor amidst the thousands of hours I spent watching the History Channel as a child. Even now, research turns up very little in the way of resources or organizations devoted to archiving, tracking, or reporting on hate crimes against Asian-Americans, save for Asian Americans Advancing Justice, who launched their tracker just this year. Neither Hawthorn nor I are spiritually-attuned people, per se, but it was difficult to see the community of Rock Springs without blood stains after learning about such swiftly-escalated murder spurned on the land around us, a century prior. Despite our independent attempts to restrain ourselves from cross-referencing the historic map of Rock Springs with the goddamned Maps app on iOS to see where our bed for the night was in relation to the killings, we’d both do so, discovering that – while our Days Inn (northwest area) was still across Bitter Creek from Chinatown (northeast area) – victims had been slain amidst their attempts to escape in all directions. We weren’t visited by any livid miner’s ghost, but perhaps we should have been.
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Interesting, isn’t it – given this knowledge – that our first encounter with Rock Springs, Wyoming was in the form of an “American & Chinese Restaurant” called “Renegade?” Some light digging turned up a single piece of evidence that another establishment bearing the same genre was once operating in town, but the only offered phone number has been disconnected, and their Map listings suggest that they’ve been out of business for a good while. According to City Data, there were still 306 remaining Rock Springs residents who identified themselves racially as “Asian” in 2015, though virtually all cultural evidence of the massacre seems to have been erased. The acreage where the Army base – which was constructed and manned for thirteen years afterwards – once stood was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970s, but has since been removed.

There are no physical monuments to – or memorials for the victims of any kind, but our short visit proved that the history is wide-open, digitally, and not out-of-mind for those with ties to the area. In the morning, I’d chat up the only other Big O Tires customers present in the waiting room within their opening hour – a young woman who’d just relocated to Rock Springs from Portland with her husband and two children – who’d mention it immediately, cutting me off mid-prompt: “so, have you heard about…”

"The massacre. Yeah..."
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I’ve been a long-time customer of Big O - I recently worked for the company that owns most of the locations in the Missouri area, and the store in Columbia knows my XJR and I all too well. When I discovered their presence in Rock Springs, I’d thought my luck was just showing off - I’d bought their “Road Hazard Protection Plan” on my tires, which had already served me incredibly well when I’d destroyed two of them, back in July. By policy, both were replaced for only the cost of labor and disposal. Naturally, we wanted to conserve what cash we had left for the remainder of the road trip, so the potential of such a cheap fix seemed miraculous. However, after describing the gash to the young woman and successfully shutting down her insistence that I needed an alignment, the mechanic spent less than ten minutes with my car before returning it, declaring that he “didn’t see anything.” I warned him that - should the tread separate and kill us, I’d have our bodies delivered later that day, and all his family’s sons would be cursed for 13 generations, but nonetheless failed to coax anything else out.

On the way back to our motel, I made the split-second decision to stop by Plains Tire - Big O’s nextdoor neighbor - for a second opinion, since my eggs in one basket factor at the time was at its absolute peak. Despite knowing I wouldn’t have a bill to pay, they exhibited a wee bit more attentiveness in mentioning that that Rock Spring’s Big O Tires is actually the worst-rated location in the nation and - once again - that they “wouldn’t drive on that.” The manager suggested we proceed cautiously to the next nearest store, ninety minutes West, in Evanston. After taking it especially easy, the manager of that store suggested replacement after taking a look, but didn’t have access to the correct tire. He sent us to Salt Lake City, home of the Big O Tire distribution center for the entire country.

Suffice it to say, I did not get a definite answer until the manager of the fourth store we visited personally checked the wound with a depth gauge, consulted with one of his techs, and finally declared it cosmetic - just vandalism. It was late evening by then - the culprit had cost us an entire day, at least - but only because I’d forgotten the secret to dealing with such businesses - instead of politely requesting what one needs of car service folk, they must make themselves as much of a problem as possible. Not to be petty, but that’s in need of a change, I think.
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Astonishingly, Hawthorn and I made it safely to Portland along with all of our skinny jeans and progressive propaganda, despite Rock Springs, Wyoming’s best efforts. Quantitatively, I must give it a rating of hate crimes out of five stars. I doubt we’ll ever return again, should the punk who failed to puncture my tire decide to finish the job. Unless I suddenly become a celebrity Yelp! travel blogger, I can’t imagine a reason to go back, though I will never forget the Nazi shit that happened there - just a few miles away from where we “slept.”

If you ever find yourself headed West on I-80, watch out for the goddamned pothole just before Exit 104.

Update Social

Update Social page with links to the Social Directory on Notion.

Reading (Page)

Update /Reading with links to Raindrop, my Library database on Notion, and decide whether or not to keep raw list of favorites.

Software Thanksgiving | https://bilge.world/big-thank | 2020-11-25 21:00:16Z

https://bilge.world/big-thank?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Digital Leaves

Purposing a disciplined effort to reflect on those tech products which have remained too fair and/or too good to catch the attention of the alarmists in us, recently.

I've never been a big fan of holidays, nor do I think Thanksgiving should be a federal one, given its shitty, undebatably imperialist origins, but these opinions are entirely inconsequential. Regardless of how I feel, Thanksgiving will remain as pervasive as ever in the spaces around me, so I thought I'd change things up this year and actually participate in a substantial way. I did my best to travel back to a vastly less complicated self, letting all of the crud that's accumulated atop my love of computers in the past twenty years: wokeness, adtech, Obama wearing VR glasses, etc... When I thought the Native Americans were glad to see white people because they gave them guns and horses and assumed people made things because good ideas were the apex of currency. When I was able to respond to new software discoveries by screwing around aimlessly without wondering if they'd been stolen entirely from a handful of talented developers lacking in the resources and know how required to protect their ideas in the face of Microsoft's ruthless Embrace, Extend, Extinguish crusade.

Forgive yourself for a moment and return there with me. Or perhaps somewhere else, if you need - wherever and whenever you last remember feeling genuinely enthralled with The Future of Computers. (Perhaps it was yesterday! If so, Gourd bless you. Never change.) Let's take ourselves back to kindergarten, before we knew anything about the rapid cyclical consolidation and monopolization within the technology industry that had already established itself as a trend, by then, when all we knew of the software we interacted with was contained within our most visceral reactions: I like Ask Jeeves because I like red and I like Jeeves. I vaguely remember when Google (the search engine) first broached the general awareness of my elementary school's computer lab. I'm fairly sure I even remember the sort of feelings that were elicited the first time I actually set eyes on the Google.com homepage: it looked so modern, then, compared to the rest of the web. (After two decades, it currently looks like shit.) Upon the first first query, it was immediately clear that Google was superior to any of the other search engines we'd been using.

This sort of encounter - with a service that significantly alters one's perception of a given set of tasks - is precious in our lives as users.

A few examples from my own using life which come to mind:

The first time I witnessed a Skype call.
Downloading and using the beta Evernote client on the school machines in Junior High.
The first album I uploaded on Bandcamp.
Discord's first public release.
The "moment" I first put a name to Markdown. (I'd been using bits of the syntax for years before I actually read the word.)
And most recently, exploring Notion as personal catch-all documentation software.

The atmosphere of elation about the future on which I so often lament has been replaced by wariness for most of us - from Californian software developers to tractor-hacking farmers. Now, the conversation is saturated with CEO appearances before legal committees, corporate memo leaks, and somber interviews. Of course, I have unquestionably contributed more than my share. In fact, I wish I could be twice as critical in twice the written volume, and I believe the tech media industry to be far too culturally-embedded within Silicon Valley to be nearly critical enough. For this holiday, though, I think a respite from the negative is worthwhile and essential. I know it is for my personal sanity, at least.

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A week ago, I shared this Google Form and asked you to reflect with me on the "really great" software/services you have encountered in your using life built by "technology companies who's business ethics align toward the benefit of us users and who's products are well-priced (or free!)" As of the time of this writing, nearly 80 responses have been recorded on the form, itself, and several more via comments on Hacker News. I deeply appreciate your participation! They're far from predictable, too - I've ended up learning a lot. The very first submission was for Logos Bible Software, which has quite a fascinating history. I feel like those less-secular of us go unexposed to theological software without participants such as the human who submitted this one (thank you, human!,) and end up missing out on an entire segment of software development. Having studied The Good Book in a very much analog fashion through Lutheran school, I wonder in retrospect how software solutions could've changed the experience.

I have never received this volume of feedback in my prompts before, nor have I ever really seen a reason to close any of them to responses, so I'm going to take a blind shot at the dartboard and plan to close the form on New Year's Day, 2021. Until then, please feel free to respond in any way you'd like and/or view all the live answers in this very bad spreadsheet full of these very good responses. (My apologies - I have absolutely no idea how to use Google Sheets.)

Software Thanksgiving Cloud


ⓣⓗⓐⓝⓚⓢ

I originally intended to go into relatively extensive detail for each of the entities on my own Most Thankful For list, but I do have to actually stop somewhere, so the commentary on these isn't remarkably insightful or educational. It is genuine, though, which is worth something, I hope.

  1. Bandcamp

Yes, I have tirelessly promoted my essay about Bandcamp's holiness for years now, but I have done so with good reason: here is a for-profit technology company which is building a one-of-a-kind product that invests directly in independent artists. I spent a whole summer scouring The Web looking for a single misstep or controversy and found absolutely none.

Over the course of this super link-laden journey, we’d consider the alarmingly hypocritical possibility that it’s been overlooked by mainstream conversations only because it has so long operated in the precise manner we claim is so hopelessly absent from its neighbors in its deliberate, principled, and innovative journey towards a transparent, progressive vision.

  1. OBS

Before OBS (Open Broadcaster Software,) streaming video was an absolute mess that usually involved paying for or pirating some proprietary software. Remember Ustream? Good God...

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OBS is the streaming video equivalent of Audacity and GIMP: an extremely powerful, infinitely-malleable set of tools that allow one to take full advantage of their hardware to capture and/or stream video and audio.

Typora - Gitbooks Slate Theme

  1. Typora

There's a file entitled "My Darling, Typora" sitting in my essay drafts folder, currently, which describes this text editor as "the perfect writing software." (See its notes page on Notion for more.)

From another recommendation I wrote:

Typora is an infinitely-customizable markdown editor spanning all platforms that's managed to become my primary word processor (and I'm someone who demands a lot from word processors.) It's immensely powerful in all the important ways - my use over the past two years has stress tested it with both enormous (100,000+ words) and extremely complicated (100+ images and embeds) documents. It's able to export even these chunkos to any format you can imagine instantaneously and never crashes.

From a comment I made on The Information's notetaking software comparison:

Typora is a Markdown editor with left sidebar file sorting, very much like Bear (several available themes can make it look actually identical, in fact,) but without its native iCloud-based file syncing. It is cross-platform, open-source, and definitely more powerful, though.

The Typora theming community has been especially on-point, as of late. In the screenshot embedded above, it's wearing the Slate variation of H16nning's Gitbook theme, which is by far the most beautiful configuration I've yet to see the editor in.

  1. GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program - which just celebrated its 25th anniversary last week - is one of the most powerful tools in its space and perhaps the number one exemplary example of open source software to cite when explaining the concept for the first time. I have used it my entire creative life for all manner of tasks and evangelized it plenty, but it wasn't until I returned to college this Fall and took advantage of Adobe's student discounts that I had an opportunity to thoroughly explore its proprietary nemesis, Photoshop.

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What I found was indeed a very powerful piece of software, albeit as arrogant as ever in its stubborn commitment to the original keyboard shortcuts set by default and other legacy artifacts, though not one I would compare to GIMP, necessarily. This shouldn't be breaking news: as far as I know, there are billions of posts comparing the two going back to the beginning of the written word. My personal conclusion: I can accomplish much more, much faster with GIMP in every single one of my own use cases.

  1. Audacity

I was browsing some FOSS-related article aggregation page a few weeks ago when a post caught my eye: "Audacity exceeds 100 million downloads." In reflection, I realized in that moment that perhaps no other single piece of software has been so thoroughly present in my "workflows" across all sorts of projects through the years, largely because of its God-sent Truncate Silence feature, which I have used to remove silence from audio files for as long as I've been working within the medium, basically. Every podcast episode I have ever published has passed through Audacity for this reason and others, as have voiceovers, high school punk band demo tapes, personal voice notes, and more.

blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"the world would actually be perfect if audacity's truncate silence feature could be autotied to video timecodes./p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/766786796898357248?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"August 19, 2016/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script

Until OBS came along, Audacity was where all recorded audio started for myself and my creative friends. It was Audacity that captured (and caused, technically) the death of my friend's soundcard in audio form during the recording process for Hamura, the first Drywall album, back in October of 2011.

iframe width="100%" height="auto" src="https://clyp.it/ycvt1wij/widget" frameborder="0"/iframe

Fucking around in Audacity through the years has led to some halfway creative results on my part, including "SLOWED 'N' THROWED" Hilary Duff tracks and legacy Windows sounds remixes. I still use it for every episode of End User and have recently created a macro for remastering Drycast episodes. (A big feat for me and reflective of Audacity's ingenuity.) As far as I know, there are zero competitors, proprietary or not, which can replicate Audacity's particular usefulness as an audio utility.

iframe width="100%" height="166" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" allow="autoplay" src="https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/516674979&color=%2300006b&autoplay=false&hiderelated=false&showcomments=true&showuser=true&showreposts=false&showteaser=true"/iframe

NeoCities Interactions

  1. NeoCities

Shortly after I discovered NeoCities last Spring, I signed up to be a Supporter for $5/month, not necessarily for the additional storage or bandwidth, but because the project immediately sounded like one I was personally obligated to uplift. Parimal Satyal's essay "Rediscovering the Small Web," along with the design of the website which delivered it, inspired me to make another attempt at building an HTML site by hand. So far, davidblue.xyz obviously borrows heavily from his CSS, but looking at the code itself was vastly more pleasant than one would expect. Recently, during the course of writing an academic research essay, I found myself listening to interviews with its founder, Kyle Drake and reading articles from its debut in 2013, which prompted me to take even further advantage of my account.

The Drywall Website

Last week, I moved my inactive automotive blog (dieselgoth.com) from a Writeas blog to a purely-HTML NeoCities website with disturbingly little friction. (I challenge you to spot any differences.) After discovering a backup of the original Drywall Website deep within my old files, NeoCities was the only reasonable host on which to archive it. After I'd finished uploading, I fell down what the youth call a "rabbit hole" of discovery, mesmerized by what I found on page after page of NeoCities' site browser. I did my best to save the best finds by following them within the sites dashboard and have since set up a Best of NeoCities GitHub repository with my absolute favorites among them archived thanks to wget.

blockquote class="twitter-tweet tw-align-center"p lang="en" dir="ltr"LOOK AT THIS GORGEOUS WEBSITE! a href="https://t.co/nahoRCEkeE"https://t.co/nahoRCEkeE/a a href="https://t.co/mzEfhGygWz"pic.twitter.com/mzEfhGygWz/a/p— David Blue (@NeoYokel) a href="https://twitter.com/NeoYokel/status/1328337497416458247?refsrc=twsrc%5Etfw"November 16, 2020/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script

Trust me when I tell you that *some of the best web design, ever can be found on NeoCities. What's even better: after my deep dive, I was pleasantly surprised by strangers commenting on what I'd found! Replying in a timely, substantial, and genuine manner seems to be a hallmark of the community: my (rather verbose) question regarding the well-manneredness of publishing such an archive without permission in the community Discord I discovered just this morning was almost immediately met with encouraging replies.

A Post you should probably expect soon: "NeoCities is 2020's Best Social Network." Going forward, I'd like to digitize my poetry collection on NeoCities in the near future while continuing to otherwise brush back up on HTML and CSS - both of which I am also* very thankful for, come to think of it.

Thank you again for your correspondence! May your Imperialism Day be a positive experience!

ʰᵉʳᵉ
ᵃʳᵉ
ᵗʰᵉ
ᵈʳʸʷᵃˡˡ
ʷᵉᵇˢᶤᵗᵉ
ᵉᵃˢᵗᵉʳ
ᵉᵍᵍˢ

DryBuy

software]]>

"Cracker Barrel Crucifixion" (True/False?)

Unfortunately, I'm an authority on Columbia, Missouri.

Just two hours away from the mathematical center of the United States by motorcar, the hundred-something thousand people of this midropolis find themselves clustered around the center of most intellectual spectrums, huddled together for company. The ideological one, in particular, is absolutely smelly with foot-to-foot-shuffling liberals, and they've had their palms facing a very particular fire for over a decade, now.

It's called True/False, and it must be the least famous most prestigious film festival in the world. In a local radio interview, co-creator David Wilson (who stopped by my house for dinner once, I think) claimed that 50,000 people showed up last year, but I can't imagine where they all slept. Perhaps on air mattresses in the back of their Subaru wagons. No, I have no use for cheap jokes anymore. (The Murano CrossCabriolet is the official vehicle of this godforsaken place, anyway.)

Let's just say that the population is halving-again around me as I write you, at least. It's not unreasonable to bet on an even more substantial turnout this year, given Tump's fundamentally anti-Columbian vocabulary, and well... the title of True/False.

The latest joke I've been tossing around is that this publication's primary coverage to date has actually been of my own emotional development. If this "true" from your perspective, I'm not particularly bothered. Reflection may not be New, but I think - and hope - it can be helpful in mitigating contradictions, discrepancies  and other species of obstacle in your own life.

A Confession

I fell asleep for the entirety of the last True/False screening I attended.
It was a film about the story of a young woman's flight from an abusive household. Or at least... something like that. I'd skipped sleeping the night before and found myself struggling to keep my eyes open just minutes after the lights had dimmed. 

And I didn't return to consciousness until they brightened again as the applause faded in and the occupant of the seat immediately to my left stood up, alone, and made her way to the stage. I'd slept through every frame of the documentary of which she was the subject, right next to her.

Guilt is one of those motivators that possess truly gargantuan, universal power over human beings. I decided that the culture and I were toxic for each other, and haven't been back, since. (I think that was 2015.)

It's day #1 of screenings, and I haven't slept, but I have every intention of introducing myself to my immediate fellow audience to confirm their lack of involvement in the production of the film, should I begin to lose gumption again.

Amongst the Real Magazine Boys, there is a culture of silence regarding day-to-day operations, personal career stories, and industry meta, in general, because their experiences with absurdly low wages and salaries learns them a mean greed of their words (and information, in general,) as they accumulate over time. It may be gluttony, but it is simply a law of nature in the exposure-bound servitude of the ad model.

Extratone's advertising chastity means that we are free to develop our own system of self-appraisal, and if our innocuous little website really is covering my late maturation, it is also covering itself, so it's worth noting that we have been given a media pass to this year's event, as much as I wanted to play it cool.

Technically, it's the first press credential of this - my nine-month-old Online son, and I am very proud. It's a big deal; True/False attendance can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars, and we get to send one body for nothing at all. To be honest, contacting the press office did not occur to me until a week ago, so I certainly didn't expect anything more than policy documents, but I received An Email just hours after my request.

I've already overlapped too much with this month's (upcoming) Editor's Letter, I'm sure, so I'll do my best to minimize transparency this weekend as much as I can. 

True/False's particular nature does not lend toward any sort of live coverage or urgent correspondence, and neither do we. But we are counterculture, so I'm going to brew up a liveblog dedicated to conversations overheard while queuing, and may continue this sort of unrevised "blogging" nonsense as my attendance progresses, depending on how bored I am.

The asses of Ben Stokes and Leo Marx have the pick of the lot over my own, which should be exciting news, given their unique perspectives on film and culture, respectively. I've been trying to convince Tim to wear his pink suit to the thing - especially the "VR Arcade." Do me a favor and bother his Twitter about it.

When neither are available though, I will be making every possible use of this privilege, even though my net worth is currently nill, so I may actually end up needed to keep a fucking loaf of bread in my car.

"Meaningful"

Facebook’s “new” commitment for 2018 is not a concession and its CEO has never sought anything more noble than the continued liquidation of your attention.

SCRUBS
 

Facebook is still your class enemy.

Mark Fuck’s tradition of publicly announcing his annual “personal goal” yielded a surprising result for 2018: Facebook’s CEO intends to… do his job. Wading through his vague, cringe-laden language remains a torturous trial, but - perhaps just this once - it is worth finishing if one has the fortitude, all the while remembering, of course, that its author holds the keys to the single most intellectually powerful property in human history.
A lot of us got into technology because we believe it can be a decentralizing force that puts more power in people's hands. (The first four words of Facebook's mission have always been "give people the power".)
If it were ever appropriate for Mark to use “us” in this sentence, it was years ago - decades, even. Whatever his original intentions, he has become the most powerful centralizer who’s ever lived, directly empowering him over virtually all “people.” At the risk of echoing a dozen old men in your life, Facebook is a business, and so exists primarily to make money. “Connecting people” has been, is now, and will forever remain little more than a mostly-pleasant side-effect of the service’s operation as long as it maintains a form at all resembling its current one. Somehow, the important names in tech journalism have spent the past year acknowledging that Mr. Fuck deals primarily in attention - directing his company’s resources into developing and optimizing methods of keeping you present as long and as often as possible - while simultaneously expressing that they “like” him. Granted, many know him personally (and most are paid with advertising dollars themselves.) I do not.

Last week, Facebook announced with a morsel more specificity its upcoming changes to its News Feed in keeping with Mark’s directive, this time relying on “meaningful interactions” as their new keyword.
By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.
Oh, bless you, Fuck! How noble of you to show such generosity in this difficult time!

The truth is, “meaningful engagement” is not a revolutionary new concession in the industry - it is a relatively rudimentary strategy as old as the advertising business itself, deployed as per SOP when your data says your audience needs more reason to… actually engage with your ads. Of course, it would be unreasonable to expect the public faces of a modern media company to be happy discussing bluntly all the ways it intends to profit off of its users, but the purple cloud of proximity to privilege hanging about the heads of those who should be holding them accountable has left the details catastrophically underreported. Last Fall, much of the general discourse surrounding Facebook was fueled by the disconcerting supposition that Messenger was using its access to smartphone microphones to “listen” in on day-to-day conversations in the interest of selling your most intimate & immediate wants and needs to its advertisers. Thousands of users experienced and documented bizarrely specific ads that were perceived to be far too timely to be coincidence, but advertising is anything but random. When Reply All investigated, they arrived - after discussions with ex-employees, concerned users, and industry authorities - at a disputed, but even more terrifying conclusion - the profiling techniques the service practices on its users are so thorough and complex, they supersede any need to actually overhear what’s being spoken. At any given moment, Facebook’s algorithms know more about the nuances of your consumerism than you could possibly state.

Nobody outside of the company knows the precise extent of this unfathomably powerful collection of information and that’s fucking dangerous before any consideration of the company’s suspected role in the outcome of the 2016 election. Regardless of transparency or motive - even if Mark Fuck has happened upon some kind of guilt-catalyzing crucible and come away with a newfound commitment to sacrificing a portion of his company’s profit and/or influence for the sake of our “wellness” - it is, as always, way too fucking late. If you could devise a method of summing up entirely Facebook’s cultural and psychological consequences thus far in a collection of images - a slide show, let’s say - and project them behind him as he read his posts and press releases aloud on stage, he’d be swiftly decked in the face. His distance from the realities of his two billion daily customers is enabled by the silicon valley groupieism all too prevalent among those voices in place to be critical.

Hypothes.is Sidebar Intrusive

After switching the Hypothes.is sidebar to auto-open in Three Point Oh, I've noticed it's quite intrusive upon the site's browsing experience, especially on mobile. Either find a solution before January or so, or turn auto-open back off.

"Minolta Weathermatic-A"

THE RUGGED SON

Discovering a forgotten need.
For the past few months, Hawthorn has been unironically and unconceitedly introducing me into the World of Film photography. I’ve taken a lot of photos in my lifetime, but almost exclusively in digital save for some pre-adolescent experimenting with a 35mm Olympus point-and-shoot, so let me disclaim this review as perhaps not the most useful to old time film nerds. For them, other resources like Forgotten Charm or Michael Butkus would better inform a buying decision.

Kodak’s 110 Instamatic film format led to a surprisingly diverse variety of “pocket cameras,” and a great many of them are exceptionally beautiful examples of design. Despite its original, limited intended function, the industry pushed 110’s limits in the 1970s and 80s, from keychain microcameras – little more than an aperture mounted on the cartridges themselves – to SLRs with adjustable focus, exposure, and interchangeable lenses.
omg you guys I just got my pentax auto 110 and ITS SO SMALL!!! i'm legitimately too excited to clean it off so take a big look!! pic.twitter.com/25Hk1G8E7h

— 📸HAWTHORN_JR🐚 (@hawthorn_jr) January 2, 2018

[siteorigin_widget class=”SiteOrigin_Widget_Image_Widget”][/siteorigin_widget]
The second great explosion of American Buddhism occurred in the nineteen-fifties. Spurred, in large part, by the writings of the émigré Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki, it was, in the first instance, aesthetic: Suzuki’s work, though rich in tea ceremonies and haiku, makes no mention of Zazen, the hyper-disciplined, often painful, meditation practice that is at the heart of Zen practice.

The Buddhist spirit, or the easier American variant of it, blossomed in Beat literature, producing some fine coinages (Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums”). Zen, though apparently an atypically severe sect within Buddhism, came to be the standard-bearer, so much so that “Zen” became an all-purpose modifier in American letters meaning “challengingly counterintuitive”—as in “Zen and the Art of Archery” or the masterly “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” where you learn how not to aim your arrow or how to find a spiritual practice in a Harley.

It was this second movement that blossomed into a serious practice of sitting lessons and a set of institutions, the most prominent, perhaps, being the San Francisco Zen Center.

Though separated by generations, the deeper grammar of the two Buddhist awakenings was essentially the same. Buddhism in America is simultaneously exotic and familiar—it has lots of Eastern trappings and ceremonies that set it off from the materialism of American life, but it also speaks to an especially American longing for a publicly productive spiritual practice. American Buddhism spins off museum collections and Noh-play translations and vegetarian restaurants and philosophical books and, in the hands of the occasional Buddhist Phil Jackson, the triangle offense in basketball.
Orbital plane, the rain stays the same. Make mine a regex and yours will be pain.

"Min Browser Review"

image

<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 450px;" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" src="https://raindrop.io/davidblue/min-browser-21297933/embed/sort=-created&theme=auto"></iframe>

Legacy

  • Min blocks ads by default.

  • "Browse Minimally" | Tedium

    Around for a couple of years, this browser essentially takes out as much cruft as it possibly can from the experience. (...)

    I think the reason why the browser is so effective at its goal of minimalism is because of how it manages tab overload. Rather than simply letting tabs fill up, you’re encouraged to create “tasks” that let you divide different use cases up. As a writer, the way I’ve been using tasks has been to create a new one for every story I write and research, so that I can separate those ideas out without them getting in the way of everything else. (I can also hide the usual junk that sits in the pinned tabs in its own task.)

  • "Let Your Unread Tabs Pile Up" | Slate

    An overabundance of tabs is a well-established problem among those who spend their entire days combing the internet, where distraction reigns king.

  • "Min Browser Muffles the Web’s Noise" | Linux Insider

  • "Min: An Open Source Web Browser for Minimalists" | It's FOSS

  • "Browsing the web with Min, a minimalist open source web browser" | OpenSource.com

  • "Minimalist browsing with Min browser" | Dev

  • Reading view is a little slow.

  • "Return to your previous task" is a lot more useful than "open where you left off."

  • Browsing entirely centered around the search bar.

  • It would be nice to be able to preview hyperlinks in the left-bottom corner just by hovering on them instead of having to right-click.

  • Customizable hotkeys are brilliant.

  • You cannot move tabs around, which supports Min's minimal tab argument.

  • I’m leaving Firefox” video

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