skells @skells@qoto.org

In the grand scheme of things, chopping things up by political party or by president or whatever is a great way of making sure nobody is responsible for anything.

I was watching a video about whether Biden was responsible for the inflation, and it made me realize how narrow a view you'd need to blame it all or not at all on him. It's a story going back at least to 1971 when Nixon ended gold convertibility and very much about the past 15 years since the great recession, and undoubtedly about the past 2 and a half years since the beginning of the pandemic, and it's about both political parties (and their counterparts around the world doing the same damn thing) because they've had basically the same policies in a lot of important ways.

But then you can just cut it off and go "Nope, new president last year, he's solely to blame" and move on to what you'll blame the next guy for...

Extreme helicopter skills! @adam

@skells we gotta pump those numbers up, those are rookie numbers

Irony is officially deceased

See in Sacred DemocracyLand, your voice matters

and now i'd like to introduce the new head of the school board curriculum, Mr Slaanesh

huh well lookie here

The UK's National Union of Journalists is strongly opposed to the extradition of Julian Assange, who they says is being "pursued for actions that are part of the daily work of any investigative journalist" and have called for his immediate release
https://t.co/9zakpbi5BA

If I can give one piece of advice to new programmers.

Being willing and able to read source code written by other people is a superpower.

Many newbie devs are too intimidated to jump into the functions and methods that they're calling from their own code.

It can be uncomfortable at first, but going through code that you didn't write, but rely on, is one of the best ways to gain a proper understanding of what's really going on.

Reading the code of other people also makes you a better dev.

Well, my friend mycroftiv is dead and I did not much want to hang out around here, it makes a feller think of death, it makes a feller think about plans, "That'd be nice, let's see if we can do that next year." and sometimes there's no such thing as next year. My grandmother died in March, I was away from FSE a few days and scarce for most of a week, and I figured I'd probably just stay quiet for a week or so again. Diis aliter visum.

mycroftiv, or Ben Kidwell, was an outstanding guy. I use his distribution of Plan 9, ANTS; he had to stop maintaining it because of his rheumatoid arthritis, which had stunted his growth and which was now stopping him from playing the piano, writing code, riding his bike around Madison, going out for space pancakes. We became friends because I saw him ranting on IRC and thought, "This guy's suicidal, someone should talk him down off it."

Turns out he was just upset by the death of his father, and for a while after that, in 2013, he was having these ecstatic visions that imbued everything with a magical quality. Thus the "space pancakes"; I gathered were just regular pancakes from a nearby diner that was open all night. He'd introduce himself to people as a moon computer, he'd tip the girl at the coffee shop $100, every day.

A musician that taught himself C by reading the Plan 9 kernel, definitely a unique mind, not the sort of man you meet very often. He made a text adventure for the Z-machine, and did this by porting the Z-machine to Plan 9, porting the compiler to Plan 9, and debugging them both at the same time. Here, attached, is the game, because his site is down; you will need a Z-machine interpreter to play it, but if you have a copy of ANTS, it comes with that. The game was one of the things he produced that he was most excited about, he was trying to convey how he perceived the world in the form of a text adventure game. I will see about making it possible to play this game over telnet or something.

Because of the events of 2013, and the subsequent events, a lot of things about my life changed. He helped me understand a lot about Plan 9, and is the one that introduced me to bytebeat. The pieces on my blog about 9P and namespaces, he was the one that took a pass at all of the drafts. It's an understatement to say the man had a big influence on me. Pot-smoking hippie that viewed the world magically, we were basically opposites, but good friends, and he was a great hacker. If he'd lived another thirty or forty years and accomplished the work he wanted to accomplish, he might have changed the world, but as things stand, he changed almost everyone he met, and I don't mean this in the trivial way like I'm delivering his eulogy and trying to pad it with platitudes. I'm just writing my thoughts about him because writing is a great way to organize your thoughts. (This is yet another reason people that are habitually disingenuous tend to step in it more frequently than people that lean into the autism; it's always better to think clearly, and you'll think more clearly if you write sincerely.) I changed for the better, and the people that knew him will say the same thing. Very painful to see him go, and worse because I had hoped to pick up where he left off with ANTS while he was still alive; a few years ago he was somewhat glum about an announcement that the author of an obscure programming language announced that he was terminally ill and was soliciting people to take over the project. (I do plan to get the project up and running again, but obviously Revolver is the top priority at the moment, and it is now too late to do so while he is still alive; maybe someone else will get there before I do, and in any case, I can't call it ANTS without asking him, which I can no longer do.)

So I get word he's died, and instead of hanging out here, I stop in to visit the place he used to haunt, the place he built by writing the software and running it himself. Nicer place than FSE, because he was a much nicer guy than I am. (Not that I don't like FSE, I love FSE, but there are a lot of complete retards, mostly on other instances, and they have grievances, and my reaction to them is to determine the nature of their grievance, decide what to do, do that, and then if they don't like it, I wave my middle finger and dare them to try to get me to budge. If they keep whining, I tell them to fuck off. So that's me: some people are assholes, I'm an asshole. Anyway, this approach does mean that on the rare occasion that I'm actually upset, I don't much feel like hanging out in the place where I've got to tell two Erises to fuck off on a regular basis, all the other people that crop up from time to time because they've got some years-old grudge, whatever lynch mob has some problem and wants to try to conscript me, or some group of bellicose assholes that think I've got the wrong opinion. Life is far too short. There are a lot of nice people and dear friends here on fedi, but there are also a lot of people I have pissed off, especially since I announced that I was done being an admin and was going to just be the BOFH.) Anyway, a dear friend passed, I wanted to talk to some other friends and not get yelled at by dipshits while I do my "Bartleby the Scrivener, but verbose and with far with more scatological metaphors" routine with equal parts boredom and frustration.

So I try to say hello several times and I'm feeling some bad emotions that prevent me typing like my usual self; I leave a brief note, essentially that I heard the news and was sorrowful. I was in a state and figured I'd try to reboot. Lay down, sleep, wake up, sometimes that kind of thing helps. Hot that of day anyway. Iced tea, no help. Whiskey, no help. TV, no help. If I'm not resting, it's just loafing, moping. I've got time to rest, but I don't have time to waste. I can feel a bit of panic coming on, "Shit, shit, this is a waste of time, shit." and alternating between thinking about that and thinking about how little time we have and how it might be curtailed at any moment: not only do I have a lot of shit to do in less time than I'd like, but tomorrow's not promised to any of us. So I start rattling my head to figure out how to get to sleep.

Then, out of nowhere, the place starts to shake, whole building. This area's not in the flight path for planes coming out of LAX, I'm in the side of a hill. Aside from that, anyone can tell the difference between a fighter jet and a passenger jet, and one that's flying low will feel a bit apocalyptic. The animals are freaking out, I figure it's US fighter jets, right: if the Russkies or the commies are flying towards us, the jets scrambled from Edwards AFB will pass over first, and I'm northeast of downtown so enemy aircraft probably won't pass overhead at all. I hear a distant rumble: another one's coming and so I shoot towards the window to see if I heard correctly the first time, see if there are bombs falling or something, just look. Right overhead, I can't tell an F-16 from an F-22 off the top of my head and I was a few shots of whiskey in, but definitely a fighter jet. No missiles on the hard points but it was low enough that you could tell that; I think a thousand, two thousand feet overhead. Really fuckin' weird.

Turns out there's a baseball game going on and an F-22 and an F-35 did a flyover. War were not declared. Nothing quite like a concrete reminder of the perpetually looming prospect of a nuclear apocalypse to snap a guy out of moping, so I sit down and write this and I think I should probably get back to work.

Anyway, just a brain dump and a note that I might be melancholy or partially absent. Nothing in there tied to an action item (though I would like it if you played my friend's game, which is attached and which you can read more about at https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=blvdzahqq9xdb8f2 , and I continue to recommend, as I did while he was alive, that you try out his very useful operating system, because it is the best version of Plan 9).
harmonic.z8

By Sir Paul Couture - Cuter Sumo Football Sunday

By Tante_Neel - sumofootball

By Nykko Syme - Never Mind the Bullcrap