Your posts take me back to 2007 where I was doing the same thing on the Nintendo Wii’s Weather Channel.

The Wii hit different.

Meanwhile, over at the grand exchange (Amazon), someone is offering, “gold armor trimming, 10k”

To me, using default face emoji gives off the same kind of vibe as still having the setting that adds “Sent from my iPhone” to the footers of your emails enabled. Or driving around a car you’ve purchased with the car dealership branding badges and license plate covers on it. Or using a laptop with all the factory stickers still on it. It signals a kind of “this is fine” lack of care or concern by allowing your own expression to be polluted by pre-canned expressions from a corporation.

Here you have a short list of milquetoast, approved-by-committee standard-issue emotion pictographs. Only the most broadly applicable ones. Perfectly weaponizeable for some airplane food communication by some brand on Twitter or Facebook. And people look at these and go, “Look! That one’s sad! I’m sad! These emojis really ‘get’ me! I’m gonna use them!”

They’re expressive, but only in the ways the platform is permitting you to be expressive. A valid counter argument would be, “Some is better than none”. But I can’t shake feeling like I’m being railroaded into communicating my feelings by approximating them into a small handful of simplified, standardized emotions. And I don’t understand how others are satisfied with that.

Emojis only render a specific way on a specific platform, too. So if you’re using an emoji that feels like it fits your current emotion because it has a very specific, nuanced look to it, but you’re on a platform that doesn’t render them the same for every user, you’ll unwittingly send a completely different signal than you were intending, as your emoji will become mangled into some slightly different emotion depending on who receives it. The only two ways out of this are either staying inside a platform’s walled garden so you only use their standard issue emojis, or you just relegate your communication to being described solely by the broad, vague notions that the emojis represent. Both options are restrictive in ways I dislike.

That isn’t to say that I hate emojis, or that I don’t think they can be used creatively. Ironically, in my opinion, the best uses of emoji are for when you’re using one to communicate any emotion other than the one it was intended for. Exhibit A: how 💀 has almost entirely supplanted 😂 in some circles. Usages like that are communicating more than the sums of their parts in only ways that emoji can achieve, and I find that fascinating. It almost feels like a form of social “recapturing”, taking them away from their usual stiff, corporate vibe and making them something transformative.

It only lasts for a time, though. As the mass market clues in on it and starts to cater to it, the novelty disappears. There was a time when 🍑 and 🍆 were clever innuendo. Nowadays there’s no joke there. That’s just what they mean now. The only ones who think themselves clever or fashionable by using them in that way are doing so in shitty Facebook memes.

The problems I have with emojis mostly only affects the face ones, specifically. The way the human mind is a hyper optimized facial recognition machine amplifies the platform exclusivity problem. Like, you can never have just a smiling emoji. You have to use this platform’s smiling emoji, the way they drew it, expressing all the little microdetails they decided to put onto it. And given how complex emotions can be in particular, the inflexibility of a standard set of face emoji to express yourself with feels significantly more restrictive than, say, not being able to find an emoji for some random object.

Just my two cents, though. At the end of the day, if you send a message to someone, they receive it, and they understand exactly what it is you’ve sent, that’s successful communication. Send those emojis with pride if you believe they enrich what you have to express in ways words can’t. As long as you’re being understood by someone, never let anyone, especially not me, tell you how you should and shouldn’t be able to express yourself.

This failure of the word “open” to mean one clear and specific thing just feels like an echo of the failure of “free” to mean one clear and specific thing.

Someone came up with the term “free” in the context of software, and a bunch of people asked, “Ah, so that means I don’t have to pay for it?” And half the room went, “Yep, of course!” and the other half of the room went, “Ehrm, not exactly…” And from that point on, we’ve had to amend the word “free” with awkward qualifiers like “as in freedom, not as in beer”, or attempt to introduce a clarifying companion term like “libre” to try and capture one of the competing meanings.

I’m sure the “open” in “open source” is doomed to the same fate. “Source available” is to “open source” what “libre” is to “free”. An awkward clarifying companion term that only dorks like us bother to distinguish.

zippocat

Does it actually, though?

I’m not trying to insinuate that it doesn’t. I’m just jaded at how many mutually exclusive Markdown-adjacent standards there are out there, and how many implementations there are which claim to adhere to one of the major standards but in actuality either don’t fully support it, extend it with their own nonstandard bullshit, or both.

Pretty sure this is asking about entertainment literature like novels. I have no real opinion, as I very rarely read those.

Now, technical books like school textbooks and reference texts, physical. Absolutely no contest. I loathe clunkily scrolling around on two separate axes to negotiate pages where the content is nonlinear, broken up by interspersed photos, figures, and tables.

I don’t, tbh.

Not out of any principle. I’m not, like, eager to be rid of past friends or anything. But if they slip away, well, it just be like that.

I’m more than content to Ship of Theseus my way through life’s transient relationships. You keep some longer than others. New people take the place of long missing ones. That’s just the cycle. It’s fine. Just hang on to the ones you can, and that’s enough. You can’t keep them all around forever.

I’m always receptive to meeting old faces. But I’m not discoverable on any public socials, and I don’t live where most of my old friends were. (And neither do they, for the most part.) So opportunities for it are extremely rare.

Mario Wonder is a fantastic game, but it has absolutely no business being on this list.

I had a period where I didn’t really understand the GPL or what it was trying to do. All I knew is that it was ““viral”” (whatever the hell that meant!) and that, supposedly, trying to use it would forever bind you and your creation to who knows what unforeseen legal horrors. I mean, look how long it is! It’s frightening! I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it at first.

Then I got a clue and actually read it. It’s quite straightforward. For almost all serves and purposes it’s basically just MIT plus copyleft. All the legal density is just an effort to squash every conceivable loophole to the copyleft directive. I’m no longer afraid of it, I think it’s pretty cool.

The thing I want to know now is why so many projects think their shit don’t stink and that they need to pollute the FOSS ecosystem with their own stupid permissive license that is functionally identical to the MIT license.

I often wonder how people would react if you showed up to a concert hall in, say, classical music era Europe or something and performed modern music. Assuming you could kit it to provide infrastructure for whatever your performance required, and the acoustics of the venue were idealized.

Would attendees hate it? Would the unfamiliar musical styles be repulsive to them? Would the sounds and textures of modern instrumentation like electric guitar and synthesizer upset or even frighten them? Or would they find something to appreciate about it? Would the music be copied and spread, becoming a time worn classic folk tune in an alternate future? Or would it be rebuked and suppressed, condemned for all time as evil influence? Which genres would have the best acceptance chances in which cultures, and which eras?

In my mind in particular, I think about this with the niche realm of video game soundtracks. If not just the music played as-is through some playback device (which would probably be rather boring, but who knows, maybe the novelty of recorded music alone would be fascinating enough) then perhaps arranged for live performance, like the orchestral performance of Undertale, or the Sinnohvation big band album. Or, of course, if the soundtrack was itself a recorded live performance, just perform it. These collections of compositions often outline rich adventures, communicated by a wide range of musical styles. I wonder if they are strong enough to stand alone, and if audiences would respond to them without the context that they were written to accompany.

Failing live performance (which would be trickier than one would think–to sound good, live music has to be written with its venue in mind, and I’d assume most modern music would sound like garbage when performed in victorian era concert halls or ancient ampitheaters), I’d also consider putting them to vinyl LPs and dumping them in old record shops in any era that had phonograph or turntable technology and see if they get discovered.

Why not just send back the video games themselves? I dunno. I guess I’m less interested in wowing them with futuristic technology and more interested in how they’d react to something they already have (music), but in a strange, new context.

It’s not usually where the big bucks are, but there is a nonzero amount of money in bad code.

To me it was quite clear that they were asking, “Why Arch over Mint for OP?” They weren’t asking why you like it, they were asking why you think OP would like it.

In that context I think experience is extremely relevant.

It’s a simple function definition that’s equivalent to:

function confirm(value)
{
    if (value == true)
    {
        return true;
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}

Not the most original punchline; I’m sure you’ve seen it before. We were just baffled to actually see it in the wild.

Judging from the way this function was used, there no evidence to suggest it ever contained extra logic that was refactored out over time. I’m wholly convinced someone wrote this as-is and thought it was okay. I also knew that there’s no way this was extracted for DRY purposes, as it was only called in one place, and the rest of the codebase was extremely allergic to DRY.

It was also formatted like complete garbage. Indentation level was not consistent line by line. And, presumably due to some carelessness handling line endings, the entire code file developed double-spacing. Somehow it was checked into version control in that state.

All these little nits, from the code’s utter uselessness to its appalling formatting, compelled us to preserve it. It was like the entire rest of the shitty codebase in microcosm.

I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.

The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.

Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.

I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.

Provided that your key store password can be made very strong, all the risk posed by having all your eggs in that one basket are, speaking from the perspective of an average computer illiterate user like my mom, far outweighed by avoiding the inevitable alternative of one password (or a family of derivative passwords) used across all services.

One extremely good lock is a step up from two dozen shitty ones if it’s a cascade failure either way.

As a child I was raised in a household of chewable Tylenol tablets. Those were the only pills I really knew, particularly for mild pain relief.

In gradeschool, I had a day where I developed a splitting headache. I was sent to the ““nurse””, who, by nature of this being a small town American public school, was just the school office secretary armed with a bottle of child dose Advil tablets. I was promptly given a couple tablets to take, and was shooed off to the drinking fountain. Instinctively, I chewed the tablets. Within minutes, they came back to see me, along with my breakfast, and I was quickly sent home. The valuable lesson I took away from that day was, “chewables are for babies, grown-up pills are swallowed whole”.

Growing older, I became accustomed to increasingly annoying pills, which only further cemented that lesson. The culmination was probably being forced to swallow huge capsule pills while having a throat swollen and raw with strep. I just accepted that “real” pills are swallowed whole, and they suck, and that’s just how it is.

Much later in life, I was visiting my parents while recovering from a pub crawl. My mom offered me some Tums to combat some heartburn I was having. Somehow I made it far enough into life to drink alcohol but not know what antacids were. I was handed two US silver dollar sized tablets. Flashing back to my previous mistake when taking unknown pills, I swallowed them whole. I was embarassed to learn after the fact that they are, in fact, meant to be chewed.

The morals of this story:

1. I apparently have no problem swallowing any pill or tablet.
2. I am a fucking idiot and always have been.

I buy Royal Crown and mix it with Crown Royal.

The perfect marraige of the king of middle shelf soda and the queen of middle shelf whisky.

I was given a pair of HP ProLiant G6 rack servers for free from an IT director I had connections with when he was doing a routine hardware upgrade. Probably saved him some bucks on e-waste disposal costs. I kept one for myself and I gave the other to a like-minded friend.

I had no experience with homelabbing at the time. Was hoping this would be my foot in the door. Unfortunately that was the day I learned that enterprise rack servers from the pre-2010s sound like vacuum cleaners when they run. (They probably still do, I imagine, just maybe to a slightly lesser extent. I’m told enterprise hardware these days isn’t so much pursuing incremental leaps in speed and power as much as it is pursuing energy efficiency and noise.) Because of all that noise, I ended up not using it, as I have nowhere I can stick it so it can scream and not bother anyone. Ah well. It was a fun experiment nonetheless and cost me nothing.

I set it up in a LACK rack, which I still have. These days it’s just a slightly ugly, deceptively heavy coffee table in my living room. Might as well just toss it out at this point.

My office at work has a number of mildly curious things decorating it. Nothing alarmingly strange, but silly all the same.

Our office is one of the few separated rooms in our building (most of it is a large open room), and it has a typical false ceiling covered in square foam tiles. Evidently, the previous tenant cut holes into several of these tiles to serve as drop points for cables that they had run through the ceiling. Prior to us moving in, they must’ve taken out all such equipment and, to restore the look of the main space, swapped out all damaged tiles with pristine ones from the ceiling in what would become our office. That means we have all of the ones full of holes. We also happen to be immediately below where the aircon is blown into the building (in short, the duct abruptly ends and vents directly into the cavity above the false ceiling, and no, I do not know why they did this), making our room exceptionally cold, to the point where we sometimes run space heaters in the summer. At one point, we jokingly hypothesized that the cold air was leaking through those holes in the ceiling tiles and making our room too cold, so as a joke solution, we crudely plugged the holes by stuffing them with random trash we happened to have lying around. That being, loose plastic bags from the gas station and grocery store, and some bulk toilet paper packaging wrap. Due to some of the bags being a burnt orange color, we came to refer to these eyesores as our “Halloween decorations”. For over a year, we had several people enter the office, ask about the bags in the ceiling, and become bewildered at our assertion that they were Halloween decorations, particularly because it was June.

Our office has a tall, narrow window looking out into the main room next to the doorway. We usually have this decorated with those cheap gel letters designed to stick to windows and spell out generic phrases that you can pick up at dollar stores. We amuse ourselves trying to come up with clever anagrams with the available letters. Currently, we have a set that is intended to spell out, “hello spring”, but is arranged to read, “no girls – help”.

On the wall in a cheap picture frame from Walmart is a printout of some of the dumbest code we’ve found in our repository (we’re software developers), to forever enshrine it in infamy. Sometimes when deep in thought about a complex problem, we ritualistically gaze upon it in hopes of receiving a blessing of inspiration.

My coworker, with whom I share my office, has a very small mirror frame photograph standing on his desk, perhaps about 8cm tall by 5 cm wide. It portrays an image of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung (this one, specifically). He refuses to elaborate why. Hiding behind the tiny print is another nearly identical tiny print of the same image, except he has photoshopped it to give both of them fatter bellies and put a large, cartoonish dent in each of their heads. At random intervals, he swaps the two prints when no one is watching to gaslight people who visit his desk.