<a href="https://smidgeo.com/notes/deathmtn">deathmtn</a>

10/3/2023, 2:31:16 PM

Hour run, twelve pull-ups, ab stuff. I didn’t mean for it to be an hour, but I ended up on the other side of the lake again, and there was no short way back.

The route sucked! It’s very hard to avoid running alongside busy streets around here, plus I ended up in this stretch of McMansions in Arlington and Winchester. They’re strangely desert-like. There’s no shade, and things are designed so that you feel like you shouldn’t be stopping to sit down anywhere.

I guess if it was a place that encouraged you to enjoy it, it would be a park, not a rich guys’ neighborhood. What an incredible waste of resources. (That is the story of America.)

Getting to Oak Grove Cemetery was a huge relief. Tons of shade. I had a lie down and realized dead guys have it pretty good.
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10/3/2023, 1:19:36 AM

This is Signals in the Valley, which I made with relative-room-readers, which is a web app that simulates situations in which there are multiple players that are some distance from each other. So each player plays something, but it will take some time for what they play to reach the other players. When it does, though, those players will respond, and the cycle will continue.

Most of the responses will be just to play back whatever the player heard on the player's instrument, but they also have two other simple responses: to harmonize (in fifths or octaves) or to come up with a new riff.

The web app is hackware. The UI is just good enough for me to use, and I'm afraid that's all I have time for for a while. I do hope to revisit this, though.
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10/2/2023, 7:19:32 PM

My lesson for today: a quarter note is called a crotchet! Maybe in the ‘50s they were?
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10/2/2023, 1:59:12 PM

I took one step closer, and the turtle dove.
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10/2/2023, 1:57:17 PM

These are real but look fake.
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10/2/2023, 8:58:02 AM

The swordbill hummingbird! Ecuadorian hummingbirds have really good colors.
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10/2/2023, 8:49:15 AM

Momo was originally the default username for new accounts on Douban or Xiaohongshu. It then became popular in Douban communities like Goose Group — members used it to safely gossip about celebrities without being harassed by competing fandoms.

It’s like the old Twitter egg, but it’s being used in China to avoid the kind of harassment the Twitter eggs conduct.
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10/2/2023, 8:28:03 AM

I’ve been paying estimated taxes, but interest rates are so high that it may have been a mistake. If you paid $10K for the first period in March, by January that would have earned $300 in interest. (4% APR * 3/4 of a year.) That’s almost whole accountant’s tax prep fee! Maybe next year.
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10/2/2023, 6:49:21 AM

Roz Chast interview.

How did moving to the suburbs change that? I’m personally very interested in this question.

It was hard. I had to learn how to drive. I did not feel like I fit in — and I still don’t — but over the years I did manage to make a few very dear friends. Not tons. I remember going to a P.T.A. meeting and thinking, I hate this so much. I can’t stand any of these people. There was a field day — you know field day?

Oh, yes.

I had decided, in a masochistic fit, to be one of the parents who helped out, and somebody gave me a giant bag of ice to break up and I didn’t know how to break it up. I was hitting it with a branch! I didn’t know what I was doing and this woman, she took it from me with this, tsk! and she drops the bag of ice on the floor. But she just acted like, You’re an idiot — and I sort of knew I was. And all that stuff with going to the kids’ soccer games — this was a big thing in the town. Again, sometimes, in the masochistic fit you get asked to do things and you’re like, “I’ll do it!” You get asked to bring — not bring a “snack” or “some snacks” — you get asked to bring “snack.”
This, is more about being a parent than moving to the suburbs. It also happens in the city. Still, extremely relatable. It’s hard to have things in common with parents.
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10/2/2023, 12:01:29 AM

smidgeo.com wasn’t responding, so I got paranoid and did a hard reboot and a hasty upgrade. Maybe it is time I stopped running server and moved to various specialized cloud services.
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10/1/2023, 11:38:53 PM

There’s so much uncertainty about 2-3 years in our future that in our planning, we just had to create a “quantum” goal that could resolve to three different things.
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10/1/2023, 5:09:34 PM

Patched this hole with double-sided tape and insulation tape (we’re out of duct tape) and cardboard until I can go get the patching stuff. It’s exhausting to explain why, but it’s done.
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10/1/2023, 11:39:18 AM

I requested Plastics for Artists and Craftsmen from the library. It turns out to be from 1972 and so probably refers to materials that are now either discovered to be carcinogenic or harder to work with than current materials. Also, the first picture in it is of a chair made from a sculpture for a scantily clad woman bent over. It’s filled with stuff like that.
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10/1/2023, 9:33:31 AM

Huh, some right-wing candidates are running for Cambridge city council. Like, “own the libs” hate trans and Black people conservative. (Cambridge is already conservative in the “vigorously protect the rich” sense.)
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9/30/2023, 9:10:24 PM

Always be advertising, I guess.

My hope is that in ten years, people will come across this while playing, and they’ll be like what is that?
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9/30/2023, 2:13:14 PM

You can see FOOTBALL from the music center. This has got to be someone’s dream lifehack. Attn: Jumbos superfans
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9/30/2023, 2:12:01 PM

Tempting! Imagine how good all those iPhone ringtones and Mario themes would sound on this.
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9/30/2023, 12:59:13 PM

45-minute run, 12 pull-ups, ab stuff. A real test of the “running doesn’t affect my back” theory.
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9/29/2023, 6:07:02 PM

Katt made sushi. Look at all these shapes and colors!
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9/29/2023, 5:53:40 PM

It took all day, but I finally got Relative Room Readers nominally working. It is an idea that I thought could take four hours to implement eleven days ago. I didn't work on it the whole time; I did about four sessions. But still.
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9/29/2023, 5:06:00 PM

Whoa, deep clone has been available in many browsers for about 1.5 years!
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9/29/2023, 12:30:10 PM

My audio-context-singleton was not very complex, but it seemed more complex than it needed to be. I couldn't remember why it had any async code at all.

It's because of close, which returns a promise. But in all of my usage of this module, I've never had to create a second context, and so don't really need the module to close the first one for me.

So, I've dropped the closing stuff, and now the module is as simple as I think it should be. If I do have to close a context, I'll just do it myself.
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9/29/2023, 11:10:05 AM

I filled up my SoundCloud account, so I started a new one.

I considered getting a pro account so I could upload more, but it's $100/year, and I mostly have it so I can participate in group challenges. No discovery happens for me on SoundCloud, either as a listener or artist, and they have not dealt with blatant spam accounts that have been a problem for years. Every single time you upload a track, some spam account likes it and they have some banner about paying for shares and other promotion.

I don't know what they're spending their dev time on, but knowing VC-funded business, it's probably something devastatingly stupid.
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9/29/2023, 9:07:06 AM

I feel more threatened by this latest acquisition of Bandcamp than the last one. Epic seemed like they just wanted small things from Bandcamp: Integration into Fortnite and a legal example to further their case against Apple and Google. It was a frivolous spend by a company that (at the time) thought they could be loose with money.

Songtradr looks very unlikely to leave Bandcamp alone.

There are not many great alternatives to Bandcamp. I’ve seen people sell albums on itch.io, but few are looking for music there, and the support for streaming and previewing aren’t there.

Also, I hope some researcher finds out what makes super rich founders like Ethan Diamond go from being super rich and satisfied with helping listeners and musicians to wanting to sell to Epic to becomes mega rich. That guy just did not seem all that interested in being the richest man in the graveyard.

There was some study that found that even millionaires felt poor. Was it that? Did he really believe Epic would be serious stewards of music culture?

He’s so far from being the worst CEO, and I’m not trying to tear him down. I think any reasonable human can get into whatever conditions he was in as a successful owner of an honest business and maybe make the same decisions he did. I just want to know more about what those conditions are.
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9/29/2023, 8:41:22 AM

I’ve found that 1/4” label maker tape is much less satisfying than 1/2” tape. So I’m getting more 1/2” tape even though we have perfectly good 1/4” tape.
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