deathmtn

Up and at them!

While talking to Sam at lunch today, we realized that most of the planning and scheduling techniques for art are really about tricking people with jobs into not quitting art. At least it is for us.

I figure that good stuff will get done as long as you keep at it long enough. Can you keep at it in the face of frustration, though? If you convince yourself that you're not making enough progress, whatever "enough" is, you very may well quit.

At this point in time, what's making feel the most hopeless is that I snatch time when I can, and that is unpredictable. And when I do take it, it is often at night which 1) cuts into time I can spend with Katt and 2) messes with my sleep.

And so once again, I have devised another schedule for myself! This one involves going home after taking the guy to school and before going to work to work on projects. It's a space I didn't see before because it's natural to go right to work after dropping the guy off.

It also involves getting up earlier, which I'm terrible at.

These procedural animations are killer. Maybe I should be doing stuff in Processing!

The trailer for The Circle seemed heavy-handed at first, then I realized, wait, reality is way more heavy-handed than that. The part where they address the company by the demonym really landed for me.

The guy had a friend over who started talking about ending the life of a bad guy who steals and punches people in the face. He brought this up independently of the guy, who also talks about death a lot. AFAIK, this friend is not exposed to any sort of real or fictional violence.

It seems all four-year-olds are Charles Bronson's who believe that all transgressors must pay the ultimate price, regardless of the extent of their crime. They also accuse each other of being bad guys a lot.

Welp, this is the end of my day off. I spent most of the day walking around and doing stuff with Katt, finding out that hot chicken is too hot for me, messing around with remedial 3D modeling (which is really satisfying), and cooking.

I think it was a day well-spent! But of course, I wish I also had another day to knock stuff off my project task list, which has enough stuff to stretch out to April, according to the optimistic automated projection.

For now, I think I'm at peace about having to allow these two metaphorical cats — the Cat of Enjoying Your Life and the Cat of Finishing Art — battle forever.

Verified: hot chicken is too hot for me. I ate about 40% of the two pieces and quit. Am now chewing ice.

Getting some hot chicken. Was warner by waitress. 😨

Died three times in Dream Quest while in line at the post office. I'm the worst at wizard.

I was just wondering if Thrombosis is a band name. Excellent logo, great name choice, Thrombosis!

Via Amin: A reflection on my month without Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon

The mobile phone part of this is incredibly hard. I didn't know about Sailfish; I thought there literally were no other surviving smartphone OSes other than iOS and Android. The author actually had to give up on installing Sailfish because mobile carriers lock down their phones so hard.

Here's a very short version of my own experience avoiding Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

Apple

Still using an iPhone SE because I thought there was literally nowhere to go besides Google and Apple.

I use my work-issued MacBook Pro at work, and I used my Dell XPS laptop with Ubuntu 18 at home. It definitely does not look as crisp, but it's worth not handing an extra $2K over to these monopolistic tax evaders. What incredibly self-important misers.

Microsoft

I do not think much about Microsoft. Until they bought GitHub, I didn't use any of their products.

Now that they have, I have a lot to think about. My $7/month goes to an organization that sells services to ICE. It seems moral to stop that.

Would it be enough to just stop paying GitHub and be on the free plan? I'm still in effect promoting GitHub, though. Suffice to say, I didn't think this would happen, and I find that buyout highly unpleasant.

Though really, would it be any different if Microsoft hadn't bought GitHub, and ICE had repos on GitHub? I think it is clearly wrong to support businesses that actively support racist organizations (e.g. building things specifically for ICE), but I don't know where to draw the line on generic automated services.

If I were to say that it's OK to just provide the same things to ICE as they would provide to any other group, how is that different from arms manufacturers selling to anyone. Now that I type that out, I see that it is one respect: Arms are most certainly going to be used to kill people. Then again, if you provide pens and paper to ICE, they are most certainly going to use that to do something terrible, given that their entire mission is racist.

Does it matter, then, that they can get pens and paper anywhere? This is a kind of a converse to my decision to not try to work for the Democrats because the kind of help they wanted could have been provided by anyone. Since I wouldn't have been making a difference, I felt I hurt nothing by not volunteering my services. Does it follow then that if the help you offer to a harmful organization is highly fungible that it didn't really matter that you helped at all? I don't know!

OK, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be!

Google

I use Open Street Maps on the desktop. On my phone, I use Apple Maps (which yeah, is one of those companies) because Google Maps always thinks I'm offline for some reason now.

Duck Duck Go is fine for search. Fastmail is great for email. It loads…fast. It does not have a 30-second load time in Firefox like Gmail does.

I do still use Google Spreadsheets, but now that I think about it, there is no reason to do so.

Facebook

I quit Facebook around five or six years ago. I don't miss it at all.

Recently, though, we have benefited from my wife being on Facebook (a familiar story about a dude quitting Facebook). She is in a local parent group that's had a lot of helpful information. That's just part of being so dominant; a group like that will always appear on the most dominant communication platform. This is a big part of why their terrible ethics have such devastating effect – they can't be avoided.

I do think we could live without that parents group, though.

Amazon

Conveniently, we were done with diapers when we quit Amazon Prime. So, we've been fine! There's plenty of online and offline place to buy stuff. I actually enjoy going to my local bookstore.

Incidentally, for people thinking of trying out a social media break, the author says this about it:

I still think Apple is a ripoff and Facebook continues to get pwned by lawmakers for its mishandling of user data and disinformation. After I left Facebook, however, I found that I liked being off of social media so much that I also deactivated my only other social media account—Twitter. I have often heard that leaving Twitter when you work in media is a recipe for career suicide. For journalists who depend on it as a tool, this may very well be true. In my case, however, I’ve found that now that I have excised social media from my life I am far less stressed and have a lot more free time. I read more books and devote more time to my actual hobbies rather than scrolling endlessly through timelines.

6-6-4-4-4-4. By the end, I wasn't sure if I had counted the middle sets correctly. Still, it was refreshing. I might try doing a first set of 2 when it's this cold, then shoot for the big set second because it's so hard to warm up.

Recoloring of "Kabul Regime's militias caught by Muj."

They look a lot less sinister in the original!

President Trump is vowing to sign an executive order that would seek to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children born in the United States to noncitizens, a move that most legal experts say would run afoul of the Constitution and that was dismissed Tuesday by the House’s top Republican.

As brownpau says, this is an attempt by Trump to strip citizenship from people like me.

My parents are citizens, but at the time I was born, they were legal permanent residents and were not naturalized until later.

So, who else is falls into this category? Basically, a huge swath of non-White Americans that have known no other country, much like the DREAMers. This is nothing less than ethnic purification.

While this is something straight from Trump's id that isn't legal, the lesson of the last two years is that a lot of things thought impossible in government were enforced by convention only. I think this one is a bit more of a stretch that his Muslim travel ban, so I don't think this is likely. I will never forget this, however.

Speaking of which, I do know a really nice person that thinks Lindsey Graham is essentially a nice man, so I want to remember this:

Trump’s comments to Axios were cheered Tuesday by some fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), who has long sought to end birthright citizenship. “This policy is a magnet for illegal immigration, out of the mainstream of the developed world and needs to come to an end,” Graham said, adding that he would introduce legislation toward that goal.