Every Day Carry

Tuesday March 18th, 2025

Tags: archive, life, personal, photos, review

I'm not that big on stuff, but the few possessions I do have, I'm pretty attached to. I've seen a few folks post their everyday carry or personal inventories, so I thought it'd be fun to share mine. This is all stuff I've found that works best for my personal context; if yours is similar to mine, you may find some of it useful. I'm not making a commission or anything, this is all stuff I actually recommend.

Backpack

• Red Oxx Sky Train

This was a very expensive purchase I made in 2017, when I was still single and making what (for the time) was a decent income. It was a "buy it for life" decision, because I was sick of buying cheap backpacks and having them fall apart within a year. This one's a little beat up, and some of the zippers have broken off, but I don't doubt it'll be a functional backpack for the rest of my life. It has a lifetime warranty, and I could probably send it back and have the zippers fixed, but that could take weeks and in that time I wouldn't have a backpack, so I haven't taken them up on it yet. I think visible mending is cool, but the paperclips are maybe not the coolest example of it. I'd like to figure out a more attractive solution.

Wallet

• Wanderings leather passport wallet

I bought this when I got my passport in 2016. It's held together quite well (the passport, not so much.) I don't really care about the RFID blocking, I don't think having my credit card data skimmed from the NFC chip is a plausible threat model, this was just the most affordable leather passport wallet I could find at the time. So far it's been a very good buy.

Watch

• Timex Expedition Scout

Like the backpack, I bought this because I was sick of buying new watches every year. I've had this one for about 3 years and the fabric band is holding up well; more importantly, it's designed so I can replace it myself without special tools if it ever does break. Sorry about the scratch, that's my fault. I try not to think about it.

Headphones

• 3M Worktunes Connect

Critical piece of gear. Wireless hearing protector headphones help me go out into the world without my worst sensory issues being triggered. Vital for bus rides, walking near traffic, big box grocery stores, obnoxious neighbors, hot rod drivers, fireworks, crowds, fans and air conditioners, sirens, pretty much every aspect of urban life. I replaced the foam ear cushions with the silicon gel ones so I can wear them all day, which I do. Both things typically last 1-2 years.

Phone

• Samsung Galaxy A16

(artist's impression)

I wrote about this in a previous entry. It's "fine". It's also my camera, ebook reader, mp3 player, GPS, compass, calculator, calendar, translator, notebook and alarm clock, so it cuts down on the number of things I have to carry around every day considerably. There are a lot of downsides to the smartphone business model, but needing to buy and replace all of those things separately would arguably be worse. 🤷‍♀️

Speaker

• Altec Lansing Baby Boom XL

Shockingly good for its size. I wouldn't want to listen to all my music on it, but for occasional background music or podcast listening, it punches above its weight. Doesn't get nearly as much use as the headphones, but it comes in handy sometimes.

What's actually in my bag

Aside from the speaker, I always have snacks, medicine, band aids, candy (andes mints are a favorite), cough drops, a bike lock, tape, a sharpie, my work badge and lanyard, deodorant, cleansing wipes, a wide-toothed comb and a detangling comb.

What's not

• A laptop

It's too bulky to carry around all the time and I'm rarely in a situation where it would get any use. I'll bring it if I know I'll need it.

• A hacked 2DSXL

It's a very good handheld, but again I don't have enough occasions to use it that it's worth being part of my EDC. But, it's indispensable on laundry day.

• A water bottle

I don't find myself in many places with a water cooler or drinking fountain, so this wouldn't get much use either. I spend most of my time at home and work, where I drink from a glass.

...but should be

• Some kind of multitool

My keychain is a carabiner-style clip with a few fold-out tools, but it was just a cheap promotional giveaway. I could stand to get a good one, or at the very least a decent knife.

• A proper first-aid kit

I have some band-aids and OTC painkillers cuz that's what I need the most, but it's never a bad idea to have a more complete kit.

Thanks for reading 🦝

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Flow (2024) Review and Analysis

Sunday March 09th, 2025

Tags: archive, cats, movies, review

I'm not super into movies, generally. I'm not saying that to be contrarian jerk, there are just entertainment media that work better for my specific brain. My primary interest is games, and then after that, books. Then video essays, movies, comics, blogs, and finally TV. So movies are pretty high up there, they're just not my go-to.

When I do watch movies, I prefer animation over live action, and I prefer the dialogue to be sparse and naturalistic. Basically I want a movie to be as far as possible from the uncanny artifice of a stage play. What people who make movies ("Hollywood") think people want to see other people pretend to do in a movie typically holds very little interest for me. Movie dialogue is less interesting than a book, which engages my imagination. Action set pieces are duller in movies than in games, where I'm not just observing but participating in the action. What I want from a movies is naturalistic or surreal storytelling that engages me through primarily visual means.

I'm also not trying to be a jerk when I say I initially dismissed Flow as "another indie cat thing". We've seen a spate of indie games with cat protagonists recently, many of which feature a "cozy" aesthetic: The Good Life, Stray, Little Kitty Big City, Calico, Cat Quest, Catlateral Damage, etc. I don't think these games are bad, and many of them are on my "to-play" list, there's just a lot of them, there's too much new stuff all the time to keep up, and since I'm not that interested in movies, I mentally filed Flow as Another One of Those. Not out of spite or apathy, but because I'm being bombarded with information all the time, and I need heuristics lest my brain become overloaded and my head explode like some sort of zany 1980s movie robot.

Anyway, through osmosis I started learning facts about Flow that made me realize it might be exactly the kind of movie for me. The director had only made small solo films before. They don't have dialogue. He's been animating since he was 16. Flow is his first major feature-length film, and it has not only no dialogue but no human characters at all. It was animated entirely in Blender and rendered on the director's personal computer.¹ Despite all this, it won the academy award for best animated film.

Now, I put no stock whatsoever in industry awards; the gulf between what the academy cares about and what I care about is so wide you could drive two container ships through it.² But when a movie totally out of left field win a big award, it's usually a sign I'm going to like it. I'm probably the most cynical about the "best animated feature" award, because it might as well be called "the award for whatever made Disney the most money last year". Like, what movies did Disney and DreamWorks release? Those are your nominees. What was the most successful Disney movie? That's your winner. Time after time beautiful, unique, mature animated films are glossed over and often not even nominated to make room for more Disney slop. It's nauseating.

So when a movie bucks all the "Oscar movie" trends and wins, it's usually because it's so good it's impossible to ignore.³

To be honest, bringing a black cat into our family is what clinched it. Someone made a movie about Sunny? I have to see it. Gints Zilbalodis, the director, has made a point of specifying that the poster cat in Flow isn't black, it's dark gray. I don't think this is out of any kind of anti-black-cat bias,⁴ I think it's just the pragmatism of a filmmaker: if the cat was truly black, it would be too hard to see. As someone who's now taken more photos of a black cat than I've ever taken of anything, I get it. Even with my fancy new phone camera with all the HDR and low-light compensation, she can still appear to be a black hole from which no light can escape. Her facial features in particular aren't always easy to make out, and in a movie where all communication is through facial and body language, that's important.

Anyway, Flow is brilliant. The animations are incredible. It's the best-looking 3D CGI film I've seen in, well, possibly ever. It eschews the photorealism of bigger-budget 3DCG in favor of a more impressionistic look that (1) actually looks like animation, and (2) shows animals that are more lifelike and "real" than reality. The score is phenomenal. The sound design is perfect. The story is incredible, all the more so for being conveyed entirely without words. It transcends genres and cultures. It's a masterpiece.

You should watch it, and you should go in knowing nothing else about it. It's currently only streaming on HBO Max, but there are plenty of folks out there willing to lend you a digital copy. You just have to do a little soul-searching. (I intend to get the DVD once it's available.)

I'm going to give my analysis of the movie below, and spoil everything, so read on only if you've watched the film.

Sunny Interlude

Sunny fact: she's a quarter bat on her mother's side.

Analysis ⚠️Spoilers⚠️

Flow is a movie about cultures clashing in the face of ecological crisis. One of these cultural battles has already taken place: the humans have been gone for a long time. The only physical evidence remaining is the ruins, the objects, the artifacts. There are no bodies or bones to be seen. It's clear from the boats hanging from trees that the flood has happened before, and took humanity with it. It's not as clear-cut as death by drowning, however. There's something mystical happening.

Animals are central to the cosmology of this universe. The rural culture recognized their importance, and lived lives of simple joy inspired by the animals around them. It's clear that they lived in a peaceful egalitarian society, because they had much time to devote to great works honoring the animals they lived with. In contrast, the urban culture spurned nature and lived in great cities, separate from and in defiance of the animal spirits that protect them. They started worshiping themselves, and this is reflected in the only human form seen in the entire movie: A great statue of a person, submerged except for the head and one uplifted arm, reminiscent of Ozimandias' half-sunken visage. The floods are their divine retribution.

When the movie begins, a second cultural battle is in progress, this one among the animals. Each animal species embodies one of the fatal flaws of homo sapiens: the secretary birds, whose wings give them natural dominion over the other animals, represent our lust for power and violence. The lemurs, whose cleverness and dextrous paws let them manipulate the objects left behind, represent our materialism and vanity. The capybara, who can swim well enough to weather the floods and subsist indefinitely on the plentiful fruit, represents our apathy and complacency. The dogs, who are loyal but short-sighted, represent our impulsiveness and inability to look to the future. The cat, who stands alone, represents our fear and solipsism. The deer, who are there when the floods come and when they subside, represent nature, both good and bad; the overwhelming force, the great abundance, and the indifference to creatures who get swept up in the waves. The "whales"... I have a theory about them, which I'll get to later.

Each of the central characters is an outcast in some way. The cat and the capybara are solitary by nature. The dog got separated from her pack. The peaceful secretary bird giving the cat a fish is taken as a sign of weakness, so it was cruelly beaten and cast out of the flock, its wings battered and rendered unusable. The lemur is desperate to collect trinkets and gain the acceptance of his kind, but upward mobility in a property-based hierarchy is a myth. The ones who accumulated wealth first make the rules.

It is their differences that make them come together, and it is their differences that make them the only ones who can stop the floods for good. We see in the background huge, ancient stone spires, older than any of the ruins that surround them. We see the cat dream of being in a strange stone labyrinth at the center of the spires, encircled by innumerable deer. The cat is the POV character, but I think the other animals also dream of this place. The outcasts are all drawn towards it. It's important. They don't know exactly why, but they know their survival depends on it. The other animals are too absorbed in their petty power struggles; if they dream of this place, they're unable to see its significance.

As the unlikely heroes come together, they slowly grow to trust each other, rely on each other, and learn from each other. The cat is shown kindness and learns to trust the other animals. She learns to swim by watching the capybara, and catching fish becomes key to her own and the dogs' survival. The capybara learns that they can't just drift about aimlessly, they have to take the rudder and gain control over their destinies. The lemur learns that his value isn't defined by the objects he holds, or the acceptance of the elite, but his relationship with the animals around him. The dog learns to control her impulses, and that saving her friends is more important than chasing the rabbit. The secretary bird learns that, although it was badly hurt and exiled by its own kind, it is worthy of love, and so are the animals around it.

When the bird finally reaches the labyrinth, and is drawn up into the northern lights, it showed the spirits courage, kindness and compassion above and beyond its nature. It's given back its flight, and is drawn into the other world, presumably an animal paradise. It will soar above the clouds and look over the others forevermore. Satisfied, the spirits withdraw their judgment and let the flood waters recede.

As the water drains, our heroes have one final crisis to overcome, safely navigating the plunging depths, which they do with the power of courage and teamwork. In the final scene, the animals discover the sea creature who helped them along the way, the whale or sea monster or leviathan. It's stranded, unable to get back to a body of water and not long for this earth. The animals show it respect and heart-wrenching tenderness. I'm tearing up again thinking about it.

The whales, I think, are us. That's why there are no human bodies or bones, no overflowing cemeteries and crematoria, no sign that we were in any danger whatsoever. That's why they're not just whales, but strange abominations, the only animal of supernatural origin in the film. The humans didn't die, and I don't think they simply vanished, I think they were changed. For defying nature, the humans were cursed with a form that is completely subservient to the whims of nature. They live and die by the coming and waning of the flood.

For more on humans being turned into horrendous whale monsters as divine punishment for man's hubris, see Final Fantasy X (2001)

This leviathan must have known its fate: by helping the animals on their quest, it knew it would be unable to save itself. It made the ultimate sacrifice so that the animals might live.

The final somber moments of the film are a reflection on us. We, too, are animals. We, too, can be redeemed. We have a choice: we can respect nature or we can worship ourselves. Human civilization chose the latter, and paid dearly for their egotism. But in the post-credits scene we see one of the sea creatures swimming freely in the open ocean. It's a hopeful message: there is a future for us. Whether we embrace it is up to us 🦝

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How To Clean Your Glasses

Thursday February 27th, 2025

Tags: archive, health, life

If you're like me, you've worn glasses for a large percentage of your life but were never taught how to properly clean them. I've used disposable alcohol-based lens wipes, I've breathed on them and wiped them with a tissue (or my shirt), I've used those little microfiber cloths until they gained sentience, and none of it really does the job beyond a level I'll call "tolerable". My spouse has shared with me the secrets of proper spectacle care, and I thought I'd pass the information on to anyone else who struggles with lens maintenance.

1. Turn on the warm water and give the lenses a rinse. This is to wash away any dust, eyelashes, dandruff or other debris that might scratch the lenses, and to make step 2 easier.
2. Put a drop of dish soap on each side of both lenses. The water from step 1 should help the soap adhere to the lenses as you turn them over.
3. Rub the lenses between your thumb and finger. Spread the soap over as much of the lens surface as possible.
4. Rinse the lenses thoroughly. Continue using warm water, as switching to cool water at this stage can cause fogging. Rinse until you don't see any suds or a colorful soap sheen; all that should remain is droplets of water.
5. Pat the lenses dry using a soft clean cloth. Microfiber works best for this purpose. You don't want to wipe them, as this can cause unpleasant streaking (and may cause scratching if an insufficiently soft cloth is used.) Just gently pat the lenses until all the water droplets are gone.
6. Wipe away any water that got onto the frames. If you don't need to wear them immediately, you can also leave them to air dry.

That's it! Put your glasses on and see with perfect clarity for the first time since they were brand new. Repeat every few days as needed. Thanks again to Izzy for teaching me this technique without making me feel gross or dumb. Sometimes we can't see what we're always looking at 🦝

Edit: thanks to Pixel for mentioning that dish soap may damage some protective films or special coatings (e.g. for antireflectivity.) If your lenses have this, check the care instructions for recommended cleaning options.

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How To Distim Your Doshes

Friday February 28th, 2025

Tags: archive, fiction, garblet

If you're like me, you've been a gostak for a large percentage of your life but never had a good grasp on how to properly distim your doshes. I've tried whiffling them, I've tried using a sepulka, nothing seemed to get the job done. Luckily, my zheena comes from a long line of gostaks and has taught me the value of using a proper distimmer. I thought I'd palaver out some steps for anyone else who aspires to world-class distimming.

1. Put on some good distimming music. Anything with a strong steady rhythm is suitable, but beginners are encouraged to stick with 4/4 at approximately 100-120 beats per minute.
2. Grasp the dosh firmly in your dominant hand. The lomticks should all be pointing away from you and unobscured by your fingers. If your dosh has lomticks on more than 1 or 2 of its litsos, you shouldn't proceed without protective eyewear.
3. Grasp the distimmer firmly in your other hand. Ensure that it's in working order by depressing each knopka. Do not at any point depress more than one knopka at the same time. You should hear a "click" as each one bottoms out. If you hear a scraping or squeaking sound, apply a drop of distimmer oil to the offending knopka and depress repeatedly until the action is silent.
4. Gently press the distimmer against the smooth side of the dosh. The distimming port should be flush with the dosh. Unusually-shaped doshes may require trial and error to make sure you have good contact. Press the lowest knopka to test. If you hear the sound of rushing air or a "raspberry" sound, the port does not have good contact. Try a different area.
5. Once the distimming port has a good seal, depress the second knopka. You should hear a "wibbling" sound emerge from the dosh, this is totally normal.
6. Rotate the dosh until the first distim is visible, and inspect it. If it's bluish-green in color, great! You have a healthy dosh and can finish distimming it. If it's red or purple, it's not ready yet. Return it to the canister and select a different dosh.
7. Continue rotating the dosh and depressing the knopkas in order from lowest to highest. Use the music to help you get into a rhythm. Lovely bluish-green vlax should begin plesking from the dosh's lomticks.

That's it! Your dosh has now been properly distimmed. When stored properly the vlax should be good for 2-3 weeks, so you'll have plenty of opportunities to share with your friends. Before long they'll be asking if you can help them become gostaks, too 🦝

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The Last Time I Called Someone "Sir"

Saturday June 11th, 2022

Tags: archive, personal

My first job as an adult was at a local chain gas station in a podunk town with a 4-digit population. It was right off an exit ramp of a busy interstate, so things could get very hectic, particularly on heavy travel days, right before or after holidays, etc.

Sometimes, even with both cash registers crewed, there would still be two lines back to the cooler display. Sometimes that's just the way it was. There usually wasn't a third person present to take over, so sometimes I didn't get to take breaks. I wish I knew then what I know now about labor laws. I wish I knew a lot of things. I wish I knew just how much they robbed me in the form of stolen breaks and unpaid overtime.

When you have to stand at a cash register for hours, you dissociate. I didn't know that word at the time, but that's what it was. You have to. That's the only way you can do a job like that and retain your humanity. I went into a fugue state, my mind left my body, I operated on pure muscle memory.

A short bald person with big thick glasses stepped up to the counter. An image of Mr. Magoo involuntarily popped into my head. The person dropped a few snacks and drinks on the counter. "Will that be all, sir?"

I was just following the script. That's never all. They always need to pay for gas, or want to buy cigarettes, or snuff, or lottery tickets. Unless it's a kid, of course.

The person was silent. I thought that was peculiar. They're supposed to say something. Going off-script brought me out of my fugue. I actually looked at the person. It was a teenage girl, probably only a few years younger than I was at the time. Her gaze was downcast.

"Sorry... miss?"

She nodded, not making eye contact. I finished ringing her up. I told her the total. She handed me the money. I wordlessly finished the transaction and bagged up her items. I didn't know what I could possibly say.

What I did say was "I'm really sorry."

She was crying. "It's okay," she sobbed, quickly turning and heading out of my life forever. I wanted to run after her, I wanted to try to offer some sort of explanation, say anything to try to make her feel better, but I couldn't. She probably wouldn't have cared about my explanation. She probably didn't want me to bother her anymore. And I couldn't leave if I wanted to, I still had a line of customers going back to the coolers.

That was the last time I ever called anyone "sir". It's no big loss. I never liked calling people sir anyway. No one who would be offended by not being called "sir" is someone who deserves my respect. I do still call people "ma'am" from time to time, because when you grow up in appalachia (and probably the south) there's a certain type of old lady it's almost impossible not to address as ma'am. They were destined to eventually someday become ma'ams. If I tried to get their attention with "hey", like I do with people I perceive to be men, they'd probably faint gently to the ground like a leaf in the breeze.

But in general, I try not to address anyone with any gendered honorifics or pronouns unless I'm 100% sure that's what they want. It's just not fucking worth it if you guess and get it wrong. I learned that lesson the second-hardest way. In hindsight, I'm glad it's a lesson I learned early, but I'll always bear the shame of causing more pain to someone who was already hurting. I can never fix it, I can only try to do better next time 🦝

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I Hate The Person Linux Turns Me Into

Saturday April 12th, 2025

Tags: archive, LinuxSaga, rant, tech

I don't have anything planned this weekend outside of the usual chores, so I embarked on the project of setting up linux on my computer. I had made the decision weeks ago, but I wanted to wait until we finished this round of archipelago streams, because I knew it might take days or weeks to get my streaming setup working and stable again. We finished on Thursday, so on Friday I backed up all my essential files, and today I did a clean install. I had stuck with Windows 7 as long as possible, but it's time to finally pull the plug.

Archipelago is the thing that finally convinced me: most of the game integrations don't work with Windows 7, and the April 1 update killed Windows 7 support completely. I could've stuck with the old version--none of the newly supported games are in my wheelhouse--but my options would still be extremely limited. Most supported games that otherwise run fine on 7, like VVVVVV, have randomizers that require windows 10. It doesn't make sense to me, because you can write a program for Windows 7 and it'll still work on Windows 10. There's backwards compatibility. I don't know why people use new APIs just because they exist.

Anyway, the installation went fine, all my hardware seems to be supported (it's a Thinkpad, so no surprises there) but every single facet of using the software has required painstaking research to figure out what I'm supposed to do. The app store on this version of linux (fedora XFCE) is called "dandified yum dragora", a terrible and meaningless name I'll never remember, so it will always be duke nukem forever to me. Some of the programs I want to use are on there, but a lot of them aren't. I installed VLC to watch videos, and it didn't come with any of the codecs it apparently needs to work. Codecs? I thought the whole point of VLC is that it doesn't require codecs. I was thrilled in 2009 when VLC came along and I no longer had to mess with "k-lite codec pack" and the like.

After googling and finding dozens of forum threads for ways to install the codecs and trying 3 or 4 of them, I finally gave up and took someone's advice to install VLC from "flatpack" instead. Flatpack is like DNF, but different. It doesn't have a UI, so I had to use a command prompt to install it.

The two main uses for a computer are 1. using the web, and 2. watching videos. Linux came with firefox, so #1 was at least taken care of, but I shouldn't have to go into the command prompt to do the very next thing on the list. Off to a bad start!

Once it said it was finished installing, it wasn't installed, so I had to google what to do next. I logged out and back in. It's there now.

Next I had to install Chrome for when my spouse wants to use my computer. This was a piece of cake! I went to the chrome website, I clicked the "get chrome" button, it downloaded a file, I double-clicked it and installed chrome. I hate chrome, but you gotta hand it to them, they make it easy to use their program. If only every program cared about whether people use it.

Next I needed to install bizhawk, for games. It's not on any of the app stores, but it wasn't too hard to set up. I downloaded a .tar.gz file (which is like a zip file but worse) and extracted the contents into a folder. I tried running the executable, but nothing happened. This took some figuring out, but basically the program doesn't run if you click the executable directly, you have to make a desktop shortcut. So I did that, and it launched, but I couldn't play any games. As it turns out, this version doesn't come with any of the firmware you need. Everything, everything on linux requires at least two or three extra steps nobody tells you about.

I googled the bizhawk firmware and downloaded all of them. I got a couple NES and PSX games to work. When I tried to set up the PSX controller, the icons for triangle, square and O don't show up. Just X. So I'll have to trial-and-error to figure out which fields correspond to which buttons. But first I have to figure out why all of the buttons on my controller aren't working. When I first tried to configure it, start and select weren't working. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Now L and R aren't working. When I use hardwaretester.com, all of the buttons are recognized, so I don't know what the problem is. AFAICT, Linux doesn't have a gamepad configuration tool, so I have no way to even troubleshoot it.¹

Okay, let's forget about programs for a minute and talk about UI: at a glance, modern linux desktops don't look too bad. Some of them even have themes where everything doesn't look completely flat. Nice! Way better than modern Windows.

However, even on themes modeled after Classic Windows, the illusion of user-friendliness shatters as soon as you try to use it. You immediately find yourself confronted with missing UI functionality you weren't even aware you need until it's gone, at which point you realize how indispensable it is.

For example, on my default installation, the color of the active window's title bar was the same as inactive title bars, no matter what theme I used. Not being able to tell which window has focus meant I would start typing a chat message in Discord, and suddenly whatever I had open in Firefox would start responding to a bunch of hotkeys I didn't intend to press. Maddening!

There are about a million different settings menus that sound like they might let you change UI colors, such as "Display", "Appearance", "Color profiles", "Desktop", "Panel", "Panel Profiles", "Window Manager", "Window Manager Tweaks", "XF Dashboard", etc. etc. Can you guess which one of these has the option to change the active window title bar color? If you guessed "none of them", you would be correct. I had to go into the folder for the theme I'm using, create a CSS file, and add a line of CSS I'd have never known about if I didn't happen to find a forum thread where someone asked this question. There isn't even a placeholder file with a bunch of example code I can uncomment, I have to somehow know what the elements are called.

What about the taskbar? Looks normal, but observe: The Firefox taskbar item isn't all the way to the left, even though it was the first program I opened:

The web browser has been the main program I use on a computer for at least 20 years. I have 20 years of muscle memory that says the web browser is always the very first thing on the taskbar. If this is ever not the case, I drag it all the way to the left so it is the first thing. On linux, of course dragging doesn't do anything.

I stumbled on the answer on my own, which is good because I have no idea what these things are called or how to google them. They're not icons; they have icons, but what do you call the thing the icon and text label lives on? The answer is "window buttons", apparently, but I've never consciously thought of them as "buttons" before now. I didn't need a name for them, because they worked the way they're supposed to.

Anyway, you have to go into "Panel Preferences"--"panel" is what the taskbar is called on linux, even though the word "taskbar" isn't trademarked and they could just call it that--and enable the setting for the "sorting order" to "allow drag-and-drop". Why isn't this the default? Why do I have to request special permission?

You are a computer. Let me drag. Let me drop.

Speaking of dragging, here's a UI thing no amount of googling or experimentation is helping with: when you move or resize a window, it has this little tooltip in the middle showing the current position and size of the window. I see how this could be useful in some circumstances, but there's a bug where it doesn't properly erase and redraw the tooltip when you move the window, causing this "snaking" effect I find incredibly annoying. So I'd like to turn this feature off please.

I had to take a photo of my screen with my phone, because there's no way to make the screenshot key take a screenshot. Pressing it opens the screenshot-taking program, but it won't let you open this program while a window is in motion. Want to take a screenshot while you're moving a window? "Fuck you", that's what linux has to say.

I can't find a single piece of documentation or official communication that acknowledges this feature exists. I found one reddit thread with someone asking how to turn it off, and no one had any idea what he was talking about. What are the magic words I need to find a solution? "XFCE window size tooltip" seems like a good bet, but googling that brings up nothing but unrelated problems using the same words. Is it not a tooltip? What is it? I want to throw my computer from the window of a moving train. I want to walk into the sea.

I hate what linux turns me into. I turn into a gibbering problem-solving maniac. I can't cope with everything being broken at once. It's not just adjusting to a new workflow, it's building a new workflow from scratch atom by atom. My brain wants to fix everything at once, and it's so hard to interrupt the doom cycle. My spouse practically had to physically drag me away from the keyboard so I could get to the laundry room before it closes. It's ADHD kryptonite.

It's like being overwhelmed by sidequests in Skyrim, except I get a new sidequest when I open the menu. I get a new sidequest for every page of the inventory, every tab on the skill tree, every item slot I try to equip. I press the "jump" button and I'm given a sidequest to complete before I unlock jumping. No quest targets appear on my compass except the ones to the north. I have to do sidequests to unlock east, west and south.

I would not play this game. I would uninstall it immediately. But this isn't a game. It's the software I need to do literally everything. No one should have to endure this.

Well, I could complain about broken UI literally all day. The whole reason I'm here is because of archipelago, so let's fire up the new version and have a lo--

Fatal Python error: init_fs_encoding: failed to get the 
Python codec of the filesystem encoding
Python runtime state: core initialized
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'

Current thread 0x00007f215ebd95c0 (most recent call first):
  <no Python frame>

Apr 13 2025 See Kami's response to this post, I'm sorry, but you're holding it wrong, and my response, Linux Mint.

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Linux Mint

Sunday April 13th, 2025

Tags: archive, correspondence, LinuxSaga, rant, tech

In response to my last post, Kami wrote a reply which boils down to:

Just get Linux Mint.

A reader named Mark sent a reply with much the same advice. I appreciate both of your responses.

When I used Mint, I had a number of problems similar to the ones described in my previous post, but the worst is that the filesystem would gradually become more and more corrupt as I used it. I would randomly find myself unable to do anything because the entire hard drive would become locked down to "read only" mode. When I rebooted, the OS wouldn't load, and it would bring me to a grub prompt. I could run a fsck command, which would temporarily fix the problem and allow me to use the computer a little longer, but the filesystem would inevitably become corrupt again. Each time I ran fsck, it took a little bit longer, eventually needing 30-45 minutes to run its course; and each time this happened, I would have less and less time before the filesystem shit itself again. Eventually it would reach a point of unrecoverability, and I would need to wipe the hard drive and reinstall the OS. This happened about once a month.

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Mobile Data Banditry

Thursday May 01st, 2025

Tags: archive, hacks, internet, long, phones, tech

I have a cheap no-contract phone plan that offers a couple gigabytes of data plus "unlimited talk and text" for $15 a month. Since this is supplementary to my home internet, the couple GB is usually enough, if I'm careful to use mostly text-based applications. Every once in awhile there's a new podcast I want to download and listen to immediately, or I want to look at a site on the adweb, but these occasions are rare and I've gotten pretty good at rationing my data to last all 30 days.

In April, I ran out on day 29. So close! I knew I'd be fine without for a day, I could still text my partner and I could still call someone if there was an emergency. But when this happens, I get curious whether there might be a way to circumvent the data restriction.

You see, my phone is still receiving data. Text is data. I can visit the website for my phone carrier and pay my bill. I can send and receive multimedia messages, that's potentially a lot more data than a text. My phone still says I'm connected to LTE. Clearly there's a normal data connection there and my carrier is just limiting what sources of data I can connect to. But what if I can fool the network into thinking I'm doing approved data activities when I'm not?

I touch on technical concepts about which I have some basic understanding but am not an expert. If you don't care about my kibitzing, here's the

TL;DR

I didn't find a way to fool it, but I think MMS has some untapped potential, I discovered a loophole that gives me access to some useful google web functions, and I might have forced my cell phone provider to fix a very cute exploit.

background: what is a phone?

I pride myself on having approximate knowledge of many things, but I'll be honest, I don't have a clue how phone networks operate. Modern ones, I mean. When you're talking about old copper-wire POTS¹, I can trace a conceptual line from the telegraph and electrical sound modulation to pulse dialing and switchboards with human operators; then to touch-tone dialing and electronic switchboards controlled by DTMF tones. I may not understand the fine details, but I get the gist.

Now that everything is cell phones and VOIP, I have no clue. It's a black box. I know people have set up their own home PBX/VOIP systems with software like asterisk, but I can't conceptualize how it works. I know it involves "leasing" a phone number, but how? From who? Who owns phone numbers? The government? Do I call up the FCC and say "one phone number, please"? I think it probably involves multiple levels of intermediate wholesalers, and I can't imagine the total expense is anything but prohibitive.

Likewise, I have no idea how cell phones differentiate "stuff that comes through the phone number" and "stuff that comes through the internet". So, my first idea is totally hypothetical and based on shit I don't understand.

method 0: MMS

Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is an extention of the old Short Message Service (SMS) used for texts. These days, it's most famous for being abused by texting apps that want to cosplay as full-featured chat programs, with reactions and rich media, so if you're in a group text with a bunch of people using iphones, it's this annoying bullshit smeared over dozens of sprawling incoherent messages:

The future of communication.

But before Apple did what Apple always does to standards, it was a perfectly nice way to send pictures or voice messages to your friends. It seems like the maximum size for an MMS message is 300KB, 600KB, or 1MB, depending on which google result you believe and whether your carrier is using the most recent standard.

So, it seems like it should be fairly simple to send any size file you want in chunks encoded as png images or Base64 text.

The hard part would be automating a system that can send via whatever pipe MMS messages are sent through. I don't have a computer with a phone number, and I don't know how to send anything to a phone number.

But interestingly, the server my carrier uses to relay MMS is http!

Luckily, the photo editor on my phone has a weird bug that makes images look gnarly and cybre whenever I use the pen tool. Redaction-core!

If the MMS data is sent over http—assuming it's not somehow encrypted (the "wapenc" in the url could be a clue that it's being encrypted or it could just mean encoding, I have no idea)—it should be possible to snoop on the packets, figure out how they're being sent, and reverse-engineer a way to send your own data through that pipe. And this is where my well of technical knowledge has run dry. I have no idea how to do what I described. I just suspect it may be possible.

method 1: hang on a sec

But wait... you don't necessarily have to text someone from a phone number. Every (?) cell phone carrier gives you an e-mail address. It's your phone number @ a special domain, like 5558675309@txt.carrier.com. So you'd just need to encode the data chunks, e-mail them, then reassemble. This is a system someone could actually build. Sending large amounts of data this way might cause you to get rate limited or throttled, but ah, that would mean the "unlimited texting" they promised is a filthy lie, wouldn't it? Then they got a lawsuit on their hands 🙃

But hey, with smaller files, encoding shenanigans might not even be necessary. At first, I assumed that MMS systems won't let you attach arbitrary file types, because when I try to include an attachment in a text message, the options presented by the android UI are pretty limited:

But if I'm sending an email, I'm not restricted to what this UI will allow me to attach. Can I text myself Super Mario Bros.?

Hm, okay, "Please check the message in detail." I can probably do that by... uh... "long-pressing" on it?

This time I cropped out the part of the UI with alpha transparency and it didn't fuck it up at all. What's the deal, phone?

Okay, 41KB. Mario is in there somewhere, in some form. How do I get him out? Mario's not equipped to survive in computer world. He doesn't have a frisbee made of light or anything.²

At first I assumed it's impossible and the system isn't built for these kinds of attachments, so I went through a whole bunch of rigamarole trying to send it with a .txt extension, copy the text, and turn it back into a .nes file on the other end, which didn't work (it just strips the part where all the binary data's hidden.) Then I tried to encode the rom into Base64 and decode it, which also didn't work. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong (I think it has something to do with incompatible line ending format between the two programs I was using) which is part of what made it take so long for me to finish writing this.

But I had an epiphany, and none of that was necessary. Turns out all I needed to do was long-press on the message and choose the worst-named function in UI history:

"share" 🙄

It gave me a list of different apps I could share it with. One of the options was the file manager. When I "shared" the message with it, I got to choose a location where I wanted to save it:

And there you have it. It always appends 001 to the filename for some reason, but otherwise it's the same file. I texted myself an NES rom via e-mail and it works in Nesoid. No metered data required.

Finally, Mario the way it's meant to be played: while smooshing your thumbs against indiscernible spots on an unyielding glass screen.

So now that I know it works, it's time to test the limits.

First off, I don't know whether this is obvious, but you do need an active data connection to get the attachments. I tried turning mobile data off, and messages will come through, but it's just the SMS text notifying you that you received something; none of the data in the MMS layer is accessible over the edge network. Once I turned LTE back on, it came in properly.

I know it works on a data connection that's been suspended for going over the cap, but it wouldn't work if I were suspended for nonpayment; even though there is an active LTE connection, I wouldn't be able to get calls or texts.

• I tried it with the Dragon Warrior 3 rom, which is 512KB, and that went through fine.

• I wanted to see if it would allow me to send an APK, so I found one small enough, a tiny storage analysis utility called DiskUsage. It sent and installed with no issues.³ ⚠️ This should go without saying, but do not install random apk files from the web, or open any executable file from an unknown source. Doing so may may put your phone at risk. ⚠️

• I wanted to send a different file type between 600KB and 1MB, so I looked through my downloads and found a 700KB .mobi copy of Frank Herbert's Children of Dune. It also went through no problem.

• I sent a .7z archive of a GBA rom slightly more than 1MB, expecting it to fail, but it went through. Might the limit not be 1MB after all? Hm...

• A 5MB PDF? No probalo 👌

• A 16MB game boy advance rom? Well, now it gets complicated.

I assume it failed, and thus the file size limit is somewhere between 5 and 16MB, but I can't be sure, because it didn't bounce back on the e-mail end or give me some sort of undeliverable message warning on the phone end. It just silently failed. Or, maybe it hasn't failed yet.

This is where we get to the big caveat for this method: not only is it very slow, it's slow in an unpredictable way. A 5MB file might go through almost immediately, or a 50k file might take 10 minutes. The GBA rom might show up eventually, but at this point it's been half an hour, which is longer than any other file has taken, so I'm assuming the network unceremoniously discarded it. If this changes, I'll add an erratum here.⁴

Still, if it's not urgent, this is a way to get a non-trivial amount of data without counting against your cap. I can definitely see a scenario where it's practical to have a system where you send an SMS containing the URL for a file to an e-mail inbox on a server you control, a script fetches the file, and the system replies with the file attached. With a very low monthly cap, it's prudent to preserve every precious megabyte possible.

method 2: elite hacking skills

I have access to my carrier's website. What if I use the browser developer tools and drop an <iframe> on the page that loads the website I want?

Well, chromium-based browsers on Android (the one I use is Kiwi Browser) do have developer tools, just like Chrome on PC, but it's barely functional on a phone. When you try to edit a page element, the keyboard pushes the UI up to completely obscure what you're typing, so I had to type the tag in a text editor, carefully position my cursor, and use the paste button on the keyboard.

The ultimate development environment. A real hacker can sense the code.

I wanted the iframe to contain this website, so I pasted this just after the body tag:

<iframe src="http://bluelander.bearblog.dev">

Having the carrier website open in one tab and the developer tools open in another tab uses about 900% of my available ram, and doing anything at all with the dev tools slowed everything to a crawl, but eventually I managed to paste the tag and switch back to the site tab without the browser crashing. There was a big white box superimposed over the site that may have been an iframe failing to load the requested content, or may have just been general jank. I could no longer scroll or interact with the site in any way. I realize now that I should have used the TLS version of the URL, since it probably won't want to load an http iframe on an https site even under the best conditions, but if by some miracle the https version worked, this still clearly wouldn't be functional enough to rely on.

method 3: the samsung/telecom goodwidget pact

I have a samsung phone, so it comes with its own terrible built-in browser that I never use and can't uninstall. However, when I was experimenting, I discovered something shocking: even when data is restricted, google search is 100% functional in the samsung browser. Additionally, it's faster than any other website I use over LTE, ever.

I have an unlocked xcover 4 that originates from outside the US and a BYOP plan, so I assume samsung has worked out a deal with all the carriers to prioritize google search traffic, so people using samsung phones won't complain that the search widget sucks.

When I discovered this, I immediately set out to discover what limitations are placed on it. What I'm allowed to do is very granular: I can do a google search or a google image search. All of the instant search results still work, so I can find the weather for my area, or convert cups to millilitres, or calculate the square root of 7, or see the tallest punk singers in descending order of height.⁵

As soon as I tap on one of the results, the connection fails, even if it's an AMP page.

I can't go to most google subdomains directly, but some of them sort of work if I do a google search and then click on the link from the google search results. For example, nothing happens if I type books.google.com into the URL bar, but if I search for "google books" and click the link in the result, I have pretty much full access. I thought this would be a way to get to public-domain books, but gbooks itself doesn't seem to host any full texts, even ones it has the rights to. If I search for "Frankenstein", I can't find, like, a text version from Project Gutenberg. It's just various commercial publications, at best all I can get is a preview. You can find noncommercial versions, but they all link to a $0 purchase in the google play store, which I would argue is slightly less free than actually free.

I was able to get to google translate, which was exciting because there was a chance I could use the old anti-firewall trick: you can use google translate as a proxy to view whatever webpage you want, just "translate" a page that's already in english from another language into english. But no dice. Google Translate loaded, it looked like it was going to work, but when I clicked the link to view the translated page, just an infinite throbber.

While I was at it, I also took a stab at seeing if the google web cache would work, but nope, no connection.

Some subdomains are accessible, but less functional. If I search for "google drive", the link takes me to a splash page inviting me to log in, even if I'm already logged in. Clicking the link fails to do anything. Weirdly, youtube works, even when I type youtube.com into the address bar, but it has no video thumbnails and (naturally) I can't watch videos there. I guess this is so you can get fast results when you do a video search with the widget. And some subdomains like gmail and google news don't work at all.

I tried every google product I could think of that might be a backdoor to useful data—docs, sites, chat, voice, hangouts, blogger, podcasts, even weird shit like google arts and culture—and if I could access any of them at all, I was stymied as soon as I tried to do anything useful with them. They locked everything down as tightly as possible. That said, I consider this a small victory, because there are useful things I can do with my phone when I'm out of data. If I ever desperately need to prove who won the 1942 World Series to win a bar bet, there's nothing my telecom can do to stop me!

Oh no, I brought back the wrong sports almanac, this is the blaseball result!

method 4: sneak in through the help docs

This one's my favorite. Not only did it almost work, but it reminds me of a classic windows exploit only 90s kids will remember.

So, I'm back to Kiwi Browser. I load up my carrier's homepage. I'll be using this site to demonstrate the steps.

Tap the little lock icon in the URL bar, and tap where it says "Connection is secure".

It'll show you some info about the page's encryption status.

I didn't want the joke to wear thin, so I begrudgingly downloaded a different image editor. Don't worry, the glitchy isn't going anywhere.

At the bottom, tap "what do these mean?" and it'll take you to the google support page about TLS certificates.

Normally there's not many places you can go from here, but I'm logged in, and it's inviting me to take a look at my account settings.

From there, I can tap the waffle menu at the top and get access to a bunch of google services.

Now, this modal didn't work when I was using google in the samsung browser: it gave me a throbber that spun for a minute but eventually errored out.

It would give me a similar error if I tried to tap my account picture.

But here, it came up right away. So I tap News, and it takes me to google news. I wasn't able to get there with the samsung trick! Excited, I tap the waffle menu again and tap "drive". It takes me straight to my google drive account. I can see all my files.

But something's amiss. I can see the file names, but there are no thumbnails, and the javascript or CSS didn't load properly, because the page looks broken (I was too excited to think to screenshot this, a shame I will never live down) but I tapped one of my files, and... nothing. A throbber that throbbed forever. I force-closed kiwi browser, opened it again, tried to get back to the google help doc, and this time nothing happened. They caught me. I don't know how they noticed it so quickly, maybe it's because I was already fucking around to see what I could get away with, but that door is now closed. Still though, what a thrill. For just a moment, I could say... I'm in 😎⚡🖥️

If you're not familiar with it, the Windows 98 trick involves using a byzantine series of help menus to bypass the login screen, as immortalized in this gif.

conclusions

Method #4 ended up inconclusive, but it was exciting to find a back door, even if they did immediately slam it shut.

Method #3 is interesting, but probably not an actual exploit, and I don't know how universal it is, i.e. whether it's all samsung phones or just my specific model, or even if it would still work if my OS was up to date. Still, it's an actually useful feature I didn't know I had before.

Method #2 was a silly idea I didn't expect to work, but it was fun to discover new depths of just how bad an interface can be.

MMS is definitely the most promising option. I never guessed it would allow you to receive any type of file, as long as you know how to operate the arcane UI. The 5MB limit makes it tricky, but I remember in the days of shaky dial-up and only-barely-less-awful DSL, it wasn't uncommon to find large files distributed as dozens of chunks you stitch together with a program like hjsplit. Desperate times call for creative solutions.

I think we could be getting more milage out of MMS as a text delivery platform, too. If I had the technical chops, I think the first thing I would make is a relay to accept text messages, turn them into a wikipedia search query, and reply with a text-only version of the requested article. This should work even on the cheapest pre-paid normalphones that aren't useful multimedia devices, and I know wikipedia has its limitations, but having a cheap device with a cheap connection that lets you instantly find information about anything, well, it reminds me of something

[view big] [transcript]

So uh, if you read this far, thanks! Hope you had a good time. The moral of the story is: fuck around and find out, because fucking around is fun, and learning is cool 🦝

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When I Ended My Relationship With Stuff

Tuesday June 14th, 2022

Tags: archive, media, personal

When I first decided I was breaking up with stuff, it was for purely selfish reasons.

It was the early 2010s, and I had just watched the movie Slacker for the first time. It's a little embarrassing to admit that such an inane movie had such a profound impact on the way I think about life, but well, life can be inane sometimes. The scene in question is this one but I'll briefly describe it here if you're not in the position to watch a video right now:

An old man and a young woman, presumably the man's daughter, are walking home with groceries. The old man is telling his daughter a typical long-winded old man joke-story, and his daughter is humoring him. When they get home, the front door is open. The camera moves to a stranger in their home, looking through a book and mumbling to himself. The man and his daughter, realizing something is off, peek in and try to figure out what's going on. The invader, caught off-guard, panics and draws a gun, which he points at the old man.

The old man relaxes. His posture is one of relief. "If you're here to steal something, you've come to the wrong place. Nothing much here. But look around, take whatever you want."

There's a pause, and the burglar isn't quite sure what to do. The man says "Why don't you let me put that up for you? It's really not necessary." The burglar allows the man to take his gun. "No one's going to call the police or anything. I hate the police more than you, probably. Never done me any good." He laughs.

Then he offers the robber a cup of coffee, they start walking around the house, he points out a portrait of Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated President McKinley. The old man starts talking about his anarchist beliefs, his dreams of pulling a Guy Fawkes on the Texas legislature, &c.

If there were 100 like him around today, it would change the world.

It wasn't an overnight transformation, but something about that scene stuck with me. The old man wasn't afraid. He knew the man with the gun wouldn't hurt him. He knew the man with the gun didn't want to hurt him. He was just desperate and afraid. The old man didn't have anything to fear. The worst that could happen would be that he loses some belongings, and that didn't matter, because he decided that his life would be more than what he owns.

This was much more effective at radicalizing me against stuff than Fight Club. In Fight Club, getting rid of stuff led to anger and senseless violence. In Slacker, it stood for peace and self-assurance. I wanted to be like the old man. I didn't want to be afraid.

It's not just thieves; if my home burns down, that would suck, but it would suck a lot less if I know I didn't lose anything important. If I lose my job and get evicted, that would be scary, but it would be a lot less scary if I know I didn't have to scramble to save the stuff in my apartment. If I didn't have to worry about the logistics of moving it all from one place to another. Life without stuff is a life of greater freedom and less anxiety across the board.

I've gone back and forth about what I think about Slacker as a whole, what it meant, what the point of it was, and I don't think it had a point. It doesn't really say anything about the nature of work or capitalism, it's just "haha look at these weirdos." That Richard Linklater might have considered himself one of those weirdos at the time doesn't count for much. There are characters who espouse radical ideas, but I don't think it's a radical film. It tries to present the characters neutrally, I think, but everyone talks in such a smarmy self-important way¹ that none of the characters come across as sympathetic. The old anarchist is maybe the most sympathetic character in the movie, but it undermines even him by having his daughter suggest that he's mentally ill and a lot of what he says about his life is nonsense. Maybe Linklater felt like he had to throw that line in or there would be backlash and the movie would be banned. I mean, any mainstream movie having a character who praises an anarchist who assassinated a US president, that talks about anarchism as anything but Lord of the Flies-style mob rule, it seems hard to accept that it's not radical. I guess it is, in the sense that it got me thinking about this stuff at all, even if the movie doesn't necessarily endorse it. But that's just what I got out of it; someone else might very well think "look at all these losers, I don't want to be anything like them", which would make it anti-radical. I dunno. It's complicated. The fact that Linklater was friendly with Alex Jones as recently as 2006 (He gave Jones a cameo in A Scanner Darkly) makes me view Slacker differently than I might've. I don't think he's thought about his political beliefs all that critically.

Anyway, I kept thinking about that moment, and it made me think about what's important in my life, and what I really need to be happy, and I started making the shift towards intentional minimalism. I had already lived pretty minimally, because I don't drive, and when you count on the kindness of friends to help haul your stuff from one home to another on moving day, you tend to want to make their job as easy as possible. (I do, anyway.) Plus, even when I wasn't living in abject poverty, I still wasn't exactly raking it in, so my ability to acquire stuff never got out of control. I still wanted stuff, though. I still regretted not having more of it. I was still jealous of people who had, and felt bad about myself for being a have-not. Slacker was the beginning of my shift away from accumulationism.

It wasn't long after that I started really learning about capitalism, our economy, how much suffering is inflicted and sustained to make all this stuff possible. It became obvious that a drive to consume and accumulate was incompatible with a world hospitable to human life. So I thought about it, and tried to figure out what stuff I really need if I want to be happy.

I should clarify that when I say "stuff", that does not encompass what I feel are the basic necessities that any humane society should provide: healthy food, clean water, safe shelter, protection from the elements, sanitation, a comfortable and private place to sleep, clean and comfortable clothes. I'm not one of those anti-civ anarchists who lectures strangers about how we don't need washing machines because "body odor is a social construct". I mean it is, but I don't think it's one of the social constructs we need to force people to get over. If you think the way to save the planet is to tell people they should stop wanting hot showers and go back to washing clothes by hand when they wash them at all, then in my opinion your priorities are backwards. Nothing against the crustpunks, live the life you want to live, but if you wanna convince other people to join you, it's going to be an uphill battle.

Beyond the basic necessities, here's what I need to be happy:

• A laptop made some time in the last decade
• A good pair of headphones²
• An mp3 player (mine happens to double as a phone, which is a nice bonus)
• A backpack to keep this stuff in
• An internet connection
• A comfortable place to sit while I read, write, and do recreational 'rithmetic

...and that's pretty much it. An ebook reader is a nice bonus, and since they're cheap and last basically forever I'll throw that in too, but my laptop or Mp3 player can also double an ebook reader in a pinch. Same for a game controller; it's nice to have, but I can use the keyboard and/or mouse.

This isn't everything I own currently, but anything else is ultimately disposable, and any of these individual things can be replaced for $50-100. Computer and phone makers don't like it when you use the same one for a long time, and they make your life difficult if you try, but if your hardware is old enough and you have a little technical knowledge, you can get a nice long life out of them.

But even the stuff that goes in the backpack is just tools; any physical object I lose is a temporary setback. The important stuff is right here. What you're looking at. What truly matters, the stuff that makes me me, is what I read, and what I know, and what I think, and what I write, and what I say. That's all digital, it can be infinitely duplicated, I have backups all over the place, I never have to worry about losing any of it. No one can take it from me.

The internet connection and the comfortable place to sit are things I once felt confident I could always find. There are libraries everywhere, there are coffee shops and restaurants and parks and all kinds of nice places I could sit and work and play as long as I needed, as long as I didn't bother anyone. I even imagined that I might one day live sort of an itinerant lifestyle; If I can fit all the personal belongings I need in a backpack and a duffel bag, I can take my life anywhere. If I could figure out some way to get the money I need for the basic necessities without being rooted to a particular place, that, to me, would be true freedom.

Of course, I never expected a global pandemic. I never expected my society's murderous public health response. I never thought the political class would so happily sacrifice their constituents to the beast of accumulation, the death cult of economy. They didn't even put up a fight.

I never expected that even these extremely modest desires I allowed myself would be crushed, too. I can feel the specter of Ronald Wilson Reagan looking up at me from his dark throne. "So, you can be happy without stuff, can you? What do you think of this?" Maniacal laughter.

Yep, you got me. Now that I have to spend all my free time in my apartment, I wish I had some stuff. Good one, Ronnie. We all thought you were rotting away in hell, but we underestimated you. Of course if there was anyone who could usurp the devil and bring about the end times, it'd be you. 666 really was the number of the beast, after all 🦝

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The Price of Eggs, the Value of Taste

Thursday March 20th, 2025

Tags: archive, cats, currents, food, music, no-ai, personal, politics

One of my coworkers has an entire carton of eggs in the shared fridge. I don't know what they intend to do with them. We don't have a proper kitchen here. Maybe they have a little electric hob or griddle they plug in at their desk. It seems like an awfully inconvenient way to eat eggs. Maybe the jacked-up cost of eggs has given them a perceived value beyond their actual worth. They must be worth all the hassle if they cost nearly $8/doz, right?

Or maybe they're not here to be eaten. Maybe whoever it is is simply trying to keep the precious ovoids away from whatever greedy hands are fixing to crack them.

Me, I don't really get it. I like eggs fine, but their main value to me is as a cheap source of protein. If they're no longer cheap, I can get protein from other sources. Eggs have a little vitamin D, some B6, a tiny bit of iron, but there are plenty of other cheap ways to get those too. I guess I'd be upset if eggs were some incredible delicacy, but I don't think they're that tasty. To me they're mostly a vehicle delivery for salt and pepper. To each their own, I suppose.

I'm not saying the skyrocketing cost of eggs isn't annoying, I just don't think it's as big a deal as a lot of people seem to think. For example, I don't think it justifies allowing a fascist takeover of my country's government. If the choice is paying a lot for eggs or voting in the fascists—it wasn't, but even if it was—I'd be perfectly fine eating more chicken salad until prices go back to normal.

There's No Accounting for Taste

This is one of those clichés that's been repeated until it's lost all meaning, but I think it's a good way to describe the ways recommendation algorithms and "AI art" leave me wanting. Computers are good at dealing with quantifiable information, and the qualia, the subjective internal experiences that define our artistic tastes, are unquantifiable. There are no formulae a computer can understand that will communicate the reasons I like or don't like a particular piece of art.

There are a million examples I could pick, but let's take music. I intensely dislike the band Rush. On paper, one might think they'd be in my wheelhouse. I like progressive rock. I like complicated guitar stuff. I like vocalists with unique and unpolished voices. But I can't stand Rush. They never did anything for me. My dislike could stem from the fact that they have right-libertarian beliefs and wrote an album inspired by Ayn Rand, but I didn't like them before I knew that about them.¹

A computer could look at the fact that I like classic prog like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, and epic guitar/synth shreds from jam bands like Phish and The Disco Biscuits; and it might conclude oh, of course this person likes Rush. There's no way they couldn't. These elements add up to a perfectly Rush-shaped sum. But I don't like Rush. There's no accounting for taste.

There's no accounting for why "AI art" makes my skin crawl. A computer can look at a bunch of disparate elements and add them up into what its programming concludes is the most logically perfect distillate of art. But that has no bearing on whether it's something humans want to look at. There's no function that defines what makes people feel things.

Now, I'm a materialist.² I don't think anything about this process is the result of a soul, or a god, or anything supernatural.³ But that doesn't mean I think all of our subjective experiences can be quantified and codified. I think there are processes in the brain that we don't understand on a technical level, and are probably unknowable. And that's cool. It means philosophy and art can never be "solved". Our quest to understand and express ourselves is a constantly-evolving journey of learning and introspection. If it were possible to program a computer to make perfectly enjoyable human art, we'd lose an important source of meaning in our lives. Thank goodness it's all bullshit

Cat Food Flavors

I don't know why they sell cat food in flavors meant to appeal to humans. "Mixed Grill"? "Salmon Dinner"? "Prime Filets"? I think my cat would enjoy it just as much even if the can was labeled "Poop". And, well, from my perspective that would be a more accurate way to describe how it smells. Sunny will still eat it up, though. She likes other cheap proteins, like chicken and tuna, but she'll also go bananas for various whimsical flavors of nauseating meat paste. There's no accounting for taste 🦝

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