deathmtn

This Unity thing is like when a show people keep saying I have to watch ends up either bombing the ending or having its creator get cancelled, and I get rewarded for dragging my feet on doing stuff.

I grilled some hot dogs for lunch. (I trimmed the lawn while doing so, to make it extra Hank Hill.) Now I’m grilling sausages for dinner.

I’m saving my creativity for, uh, later, I guess.

ProPublica has a story about a transgender man dealing with life in North Carolina.

He remembers walking into one of the men’s bathrooms on campus the first week after the law passed. A man standing at the urinal turned and asked, “Are you allowed to come in here anymore?”

Henson frequently experienced panic attacks, fearful of potential assault and furious at public policies that restricted his rights.

He was driven to attempted suicide by living in this.

A friend told me that he won’t visit the south because he has a transgender kid. The south is unfairly maligned for some things, but not this. Imagine if it were still outwardly racist like it was in James Baldwin’s day (and this is how they are about trans people right now) and bringing your kid into that?

There are cities in the south where the norm is to respect trans people, but I think it’d be small comfort to say “OK, but people will treat you like a human being as long as you stay inside city limits.”

Though again, how must it feel to know you can only go so far outside your state (assuming you live in a state where people generally treat you like a human being)? This is one of the reasons it’s hard to feel like this is one country.

There are right-wing people everywhere, and they have a different conception of reality which again makes it hard to feel you’re all part of the same thing. But it is interesting to see how geography can matter when they have control of a state.

That should be “Seizoen 5” of De Mol that’s not as good. (I’m too lazy to edit the last post.)

We watched Seizoen 8 of De Mol (which you can download with English subtitles via the links in the description of this YouTube page), and it was really good, especially considering it was a reality show. (Don't look at it on Wikipedia if you don't want to get spoilered, BTW.)

I heard about it from the Eggplant podcast, and like they said, it was nice in that it's not a cruel, mean-spirited show like almost all reality shows, especially American one. According to the podcast, there are spinoffs of the show for other countries, and they all fail to keep the spirit of the original, which is from the Flanders region of Belgium. Even the Dutch version isn't right, according to Eggplant! (In Flanders, they speak Dutch. I can easily see why the Dutch version might be bad, though. All of the contestants are celebrities, whereas everyone's a normal person on the Flemish original.)

It's like a combination of Saboteur in that one of the contestants (De Mol) is secretly sabotaging the rest of them, and like Mario Party in that they do a bunch of minigames in order to earn money. At the end of every episode, they do a quiz that asks them for details about De Mol and whoever scores lowest is eliminated. So there is sort of a mild snowball effect for whoever guesses more correctly early.

I did not guess who De Mol was. In fact, when it was down to three contestants, it turned to be the one that I said was least likely to be De Mol. Katt, on the other hand, accidentally spoilered herself after the second episode, but much like with De Mol, I wasn't able to tell.

We're watching Seizoen 8 now, and it's not as good. The contestants aren't as likable, and they all look like each other, except one Black guy and one '00s-style hipster. There's like six blonde women. The design of the challenges is still really interesting, though. There was this elaborate museum break-in minigame which was practically a full-blown D&D module.

Intriguing book mentioned by Tom:

I can still talk about Achieving Our Country, which was a pivotal read. It’s a political-philosophy book on the left about the shifts in American leftism in the 1900s. It really clicked with me: someone who wants there to be a thriving left and is fully on board with the theories in Piketty’s Capital and many of Henry George’s ideas, but is constantly surprised and disappointed by the mainstream brand of socialism that I find in DSA chapters in major cities and online. I keep wondering why the American left is so enthusiastic about homeownership, skeptical of reform and political participation, accepting of libertarian-tinged ideas, and attached to a class politics and “class analysis” that seems skin-deep and more interested in identity than anything else. Why do they waffle about their support of Ukraine and give space to so-called tankies?

Achieving our Country gives a compelling theory for why: that the 1960s marked a shift from a reformist leftism to one dominated by radical and Marxist thought. Writing radical Marxist here might set off some “Fox news” alarm bells, but it’s meant literally: that people shifted from wanting to reform a system to radically replace it. And that the explicit influence of the Marxist strain of Socialism – his historical materialism, emphasis on labor, ideas about the proletariat - are the underpinnings of a lot of what you hear at the average DSA meeting or in your issue of Jacobin.

The right and center are just so, so dumb and bigoted lately, but what kinda really makes you want to just go to space is that left are also dum-dums, at least the parts loud enough to hear. Maybe I’ll read this. Then again, it’s probably a bummer, so continuing to think about the hypercube may be the way to go.

Back stuff, 13 pull-ups.

I ripped Sigh's Imaginary Sonicscape, and it now sounds like Castlevania SOTN boss music to me.

Just spilled seltzer on my pants so I went upstairs and changed. I was trying to remember what I would have done in this situation when I worked in an office. I guess some kind of awkward paper towel procedure. Never leave home if liquids are involved!

I checked out a CD/DVD drive from the library because I thought I had ripped a lot of my CDs, but there are more left than I thought. And with an external drive, I can just use my modern computer instead of breaking out the ol' 2006 MacBook.

I don't even have Master of Puppets! I feel like I hear it all the time, but I think it's more that I used to hear it all the time and forgot to check if I was still hearing it all the time. Also, I play Battery on guitar every week or so.

Ripping is pretty smooth these days. You `apt-get install abcde`, then uncomment the output format line in `~/.abcde`, then it's just `abcde -o mp3`.

If I were a crazy right-wing school harasser trying to get Animorphs, I’d hold up a sign that said BANIMORPH ANIMORPHS!

Someone was showingTidal Cycles at the music programming meeting tonight. It's another front end to SuperCollider, which I've bounced off of twice.

Tidal Cycles makes you write in Haskell, but it's surprisingly approachable. We only ran into trouble after we tried to write a function. There's quite a bit you can do without having to do that. I think it would have made it easier to put together Sleep Funnels with it.

There is apparently an even more approachable in-browser port of it called Strudel.

But I have to finish Flooding before trying any of that. Also, I need to start my business.

I decided that I was copying synth stuff between projects often enough that it warranted putting them in its own package, which has sometimes been a folly in the past.

While getting Flooding to work with it, I happened to fix the bug with the narration getting really quiet toward the end. It turned out I was applying an envelope to the narration events unnecessarily.

I really hope I finish this in 2023!

Re: Possibly expiring as a software engineer, I just ran into a problem in which I need to be able to use one of the five ways of running a GitHub Action with AWS credentials.

Several years ago, I would have just kept poking around until I found out. Now? I am (situationally unfortunately) sure that learning about OIDC and requesting the permissions to set this up in AWS are not going to be satisfying, nor applicable to anything else.

Hey, I actually did forget it was 9/11.

Here’s a message I got about the upcoming Behold the Arctopus album:

no distortion
no amps
no drum kit
no keyboards

I will admit to being intrigued. Is this just going to be super fast acoustic shredding and, like, a bucket?

Heh, as their apology for leaking my SSN, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP gave me two years of identity monitoring via Kroll Monitoring.

To sign up for Kroll, you have to give them your SSN.

I look forward to later posting about how my SSN was leaked again via a data breach at Kroll.