deathmtn

The Talking Politics episode about Turkey is incredibly chilling. Ayse Zarokol spoke made the point that in many ways, Turkey has better checks and balances than the US. At the least, the Supreme Court is not appointed by the president. The description of the opposition to Erdogan was particularly unsettling. They're disorganized, they have a hard time connecting with voters, they—even now—don't understand how dangerous the situation is.

Me: Apparently, Thomas Edison—
The guy: THOMAS MEDICINE?!

If you like proggy guitar hero stuff with a ton of tapping, you should be listening to Sarah Longfield!

And if you like proggy black metal with occasional hand claps and vocaloid synths and 🎺, you should listen to Sigh.

10-4-4-4-4-4. First rep was super crunchy, like my arms were dried-out chicken.

I think it helped me with some project decision anxiety!

Three checks today.

I wish I was a sinecure.

Five checks today, but mostly to get anyone to listen to what I feel are great remixes.

Balk a Paleface Front!

I really like listening to music this way, which genuinely makes me wonder if there's something slightly neurologically different with the audio processing in my brain.

Good lord is it hard to make a web app spit out an ogg file of some audio that it made. Had to settle for wav for now.

I need a hard switch that kicks work thinking out of my subconscious so that I can take my rare nap opportunities in peace.

11 checks. Also, I should probably do something about the page links at the bottom of this finally, eh?

The House of Small Cubes and The Golden Hour (on Netflix, possibly elsewhere) are really good Japanese animated shorts. They're Japanese, but they're not anime — they've got a "drawerly" style rather than a cartoon one.

Hand animation always has these great artifacts that come from lines not being aligned perfectly from frame to frame. The rain in The Golden Hour, for example, looks amazing as a result the line jitters.

They're both stories about moving to a final stage in life. The Golden Hour follows the pattern about a character overcoming self-pity by having to help someone else. That character is an old floor unit TV at the junk yard.

The House of Small Cubes is about an old man who has built new levels onto his house over the years to stay above the rising water levels. Its story pattern is the one about the lone survivor who just has memories left to him.

(I was glad to see it because I t's a lot less bleak than another (non-animated) short I saw a while back, The Phone Call, which was built on the same pattern, in part.)

Saudi state media reported today that journalist Jamal Khashoggi died inside its Turkish consulate. It is the first time the Gulf kingdom has acknowledged the regime critic’s death.

Holy shit. They've been stonewalling until now. What motivated them to admit this?

8-4-4-4-4-6. It was a nice change of pace! I felt pretty ragged in the first set, so I didn't push it. (Contrary to popular workout glurge, I think it's actually important to NOT push it to the limit a lot of time, if you want your workout to have staying power.) Then, I happened to have more juice for the last one.

Used the Roomba remote for the first time this morning. We've had the Roomba for years.

After doing so, I have softened my judgment about its navigation abilities. Some of it is that it isn't capable of figuring out simple routes to the dock, but it also has some crude mechanical constraints as well.