ㅁ Time retreats, yet frozen, making curved frames for geologic, emergent, processes and shaded subtle colors - bands of sand and stripes of turquoise - until at last the next thing happens.
– a reverse nonnet.
Month: March 2019
Caveat: Tree #74
Here is a strange looking tree.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: A year later…
[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]
This blog [meaning that other blog] is one year old today. I founded it on Saint Patrick’s Day, last year. That’s why there’s that little shamrock on the first entry.
I really haven’t posted as much as I intended, here, over the last year.
My life underwent such huge changes, mostly unexpected. I ended my 11 year residency in South Korea and moved back to Southeast Alaska. I’m still in a bit of transition in terms of career, and meanwhile living off my savings.
I took a break from the OGF admin team last summer, then worked really hard the last few months. I have become very frustrated with trying to do admin on that site. Indeed, I have become deeply disillusioned – mostly with myself, and my inability to maintain a charitable and good-willed mindset in dealing with a never-ending onslaught of faceless trolls and juvenile idiots. I’d rather cope with a classroom of unruly 7th graders.
In a few days, I’ll be traveling to my mother’s in Queensland for a few weeks: a long crossing of the Pacific. I’ll be constrained by obligations to relatives, so I’m taking a leave-of-absence from OGF and geofiction. I have resigned the admin position permanently. It will be hard to let go, but I feel I must do so for my own peace of mind.
Music to map by: Olga Bell, “Пермский Край.”
Caveat: Poem #959 “Some signs on a map”
ㅁ I read on the map: "Ice-creature seeks cool solace." I drew red circles.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #73
The merest reflection of a tree.
But a damn nice pothole, eh?
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: on literacy
One of my hobbies has been to assist managing a website, related to my geofiction hobby. I’m not very good at it – I find managing a classroom of unruly 7th graders easier than managing what is, presumably, one of the better-disposed regions of the internet. I just don’t seem to have the right sort of charity in my character for coping with faceless trolls and idiots.
I had a kind of insight today, as I was reacting to a complaint that the documentation on the site is “too inconvenient to read” and that we should make videos explaining how to use the site and its toolset.
Here’s my thought, condensed semi-aphoristically:
There are two types of literacy: there is the ability to read, and there is the willingness to read. Arguably, failure in education is more about failure in the latter than in the former.
Caveat: Poem #958 “Trying to keep the library well-stocked”
ㅁ infinite monkeys in some argentine bookshop all clacking away
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #72
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]
Caveat: There, in the calm of some Platonic dream
This poem, below, was not written by a human being, as best I understand. It was written by one of those new “learning algorithm” AIs (Artificial Intelligences), where you give the AI a large pile of “training data” (i.e. in this case, a vast corpus of human-written poetry) and then say, more or less, “OK, give me a new one like that.” It works similarly to the way google-translate manages to make sense out of changing one language to another, without actually understanding a damn thing. It’s statistics, writ large.
Methinks I see her in her blissful dreams:
Or, fancy-like, in some mirage she lies,
Majestic yet majestic, and of seems
The image of the unconquerable skies.
Methinks I see her in her blissful dreams:
—Or, fancy-like, in some majestic cell,
Where lordly seraphs strew their balmy dreams
On the still night, or in their golden shell.
There, in the calm of some Platonic dream,
Sits she, and views the unclouded moon arise
Like a fair lady full of realms divine;
And, all at once, a stony face and bright
Glittering in moonlight, like the noon-tints of a night.
I found it, and other AI-generated poetry, on the slatestarcodex blog.
All very interesting.
Caveat: Poem #957 “An oscillation in phase states”
ㅁ rain and snow and more rain: they oscillate in the atmosphere with stochastic movements, dodging the windshield wipers. and then a bit of sun climbs out, illuminating the mountainside.
– a reverse nonnet.
Caveat: Tree #71
Yet another tree appeared before my eyes.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Poem #956 “A poem with no verb”
ㅁ the brutalist trees like dead monumental arms of recumbent gods
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #70
Wow, I found another tree.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: Poem #955 “The truck”
ㅁ a truck trundles by along that pothole-pocked road smashing through the slush
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #69
A tree growing.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage
AOC was talking at the SXSW conference. An excerpt:
We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should not feel nervous about the toll booth collector not having to collect tolls anymore. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.
[…]
We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in. Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.
[…]
Capitalism is based on scarcity. What happens when there is enough for everyone to eat? What happens when there is enough for everyone to be clothed? Then you have to make scarcity artificial. And that is what has happened.- AOC
Then the moderator said: that’s “Full Star Trek Socialism.” AOC just smiled.
The concept of the “post-scarcity society” has been around for a long time. And now we find that AOC is fluent in this thinking – that was not a prepared speech, but rather a response to an audience question. I’m interested.
Caveat: Git topo
[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]
I finally got tired of dealing with Windows 10 drama, and decided to rebuild my preferred Ubuntu Linux desktop, as I’d been using in Korea before moving away last July.
I’ve made good progress on that, and have JOSM up and working again, and all that. But I became aware, as I was migrating my data and files, that I have a lot of files I would rather not lose, especially related to my geofiction. I need some systematic means of keeping stuff backed up.
I handled the issue of backup and redundancy for my creative writing years ago, when I started storing all my drafts and notes in google docs. It’s convenient, too, because I can get to my writing no matter where I am.
But I have no such system for all my .osm files for the geofiction. Especially important are the .osm files I use for drawing the topo layer, since those are never uploaded anywhere except temporarily at the time of an update.
I suppose I could just copy the files. But I decided I needed to store them in some kind of version-controlled space. About two years ago, I’d had them in a git repository but it was just copied out to an extra harddrive. I used git for some other stuff I used to do, so it wasn’t that hard to figure out.
I decided this time to try something different – I made a repository on github and decided to put my topo .osm files there. If I get in the habit of regularly updating the git repository, I’ll always have those topo files, no matter what happens to my computer or where I am. Further, if ever I go in the direction of wanting to collaborate on drawing topo files, this will make it really easy (assuming the other person is up to dealing with checking things out of a git repository). [UPDATE: this was a short-lived effort. Subsequently the files are just files, again, but they live on one of my HRATE servers]
If ever there will be a truly collaborative geofiction “planet” with a master topo layer, this might be a way to maintain that information, since practically speaking it can’t and shouldn’t be uploaded to the map server. Just an experiment, I guess, and meanwhile I’ll have a reliable backup of my work.
Music to map by: 선미, “가시나.“
Caveat: Poem #954 “As raindrops will do”
ㅁ the sounds of raindrops stabbing at the pale windows caressing the trees
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #68
Here is a tree.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Treehouse update
As some of you might know, I have this project going on: I want to build a treehouse. Not a full-scale house by any means, but not a tiny, kid-treehouse either. Just a kind of Arcata pumphouse-style outbuilding, I suppose.
I had originally meant for it to be down by the water. But I lost my confidence in the reliability of the trees near the water – although they are big and fat old-growth trees, they are old and their root-systems are precarious. I felt that putting a treehouse among those trees was likely to be fraught with the risk of one of those trees going down in a storm.
So I chose a spot among the third-growth trees up on the hillside, near the southern property line. Most of these third-growth western hemlocks and sitka spruce are about 8 inches in diameter – that’s enough to support a well-engineered treehouse, in my estimation.
When my brother Andrew was here, I consulted with him, because I know he has actual experience engineering and building treehouses. And he asked me for an update on progress, recently. I decided to post it here because other people might be curious too.
Progress is slow. I’ve cleared the spot where I intend for it go. It’s a rough quadrilateral with three 8-inch trees and one 6-inch tree. The 6-inch tree seems a bit small to support the treehouse, but it’s one corner out of four, and it’s attached to a hefty old stump, so if I rely somewhat on that, structurally, I think it will be OK.
I accepted Andrew’s recommendation to supplement my fat brackets that I bought specially for this project with cables to suspend the corners. So I bought the hardware for that.
I haven’t made much progress mostly because of the weather. Firstly, it’s been sunny and just below freezing, mostly, since Andrew left. That’s actually not good weather for working on this – the hillside has become very slippery, with old snow, repeatedly melted and frozen, turning into sheets of ice. Good old Prince-of-Wales rain would be better – that would make things muddy but manageable. This is a problem on the road, too, and so I’ve also decided to wait on going into town with the trailer to buy the additional lumber I need for this.
So meanwhile, all I do is go up periodically and judge the quality of my path up there, and clear spots of nearby brush.
I’ll hopefully make more effort once Art and I are back from our Australian venture, to start next week. We’ll see.
Caveat: Poem #953 “The alien met along the road”
I set aside my thoughts, just walking. The alien along the road appeared and gave me pause, his talking - his soulless pleadings - like a code made up of tangled verbs and meanings from which I got the barest gleanings. I followed through an open gate, his gestures seemed to show we're late, how could I know, could he be trusted? In dark and looming halls we roamed, his pointless words spilled out and foamed. We stopped beside machines, all rusted. And he explained what he had planned, but still I didn't understand.
– some kind of sonnet
Caveat: Tree #67
This tree wants to fly.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Messy desk, messy mind…
…I don’t really believe that.
But I figured with a clean, fresh operating system on my computer, I also needed a clean, fresh desk. So I cleaned it. I don’t do that very often, so I’m happy. I got a “two monitor” setup working, too. Actually I never saw the appeal of that (it’s popular with a lot of programmers and gamers), but I thought I’d give it a try.
Caveat: Poem #952 “Savings”
ㅁ With parsimony, the sky brightened an hour late: I saved some daylight
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #66
The sixty-sixth tree.
[daily log: walking, 4km; tromping, 300m]
Caveat: A linux-flavored bullet
I have bitten the bullet.
I installed Ubuntu Linux on my lemon HP laptop, in hopes that at least some portion of its lemonosity is derived from the Windows 10 operating system.
So far… well, it works, at least the basics. I’m updating my blog from the new operating system.
It will take a while to get it all working smoothly. I’m a bit rusty on the linux desktop, since I haven’t used it since I left my desktop behind in Korea, last July.
Caveat: Poem #951 “Settling in for a siege”
ㅁ some clouds came along and they set up battlements on the hills' ridges
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #65
This is a tree.
Arthur said, “didn’t you already take a picture of that tree?”
I said, “No, it was that other tree.”
Actually, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, at least this one’s from a different angle.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: Subway Philosophy
[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]
Someday, I will return to work on my great metropolis, Villa Constitución. And when that day comes, I shall take on the huge project of refactoring the complex subway system I designed.
When designing subways, one should have a philosophy of subways in mind. Here is an essay every subway designer must read: “Stoppism: Retrospects and Prospects“.*
*Footnote for the dense: the linked article is satire – a gorgeous, brilliant joke.
Music to design subways by: Silvio Rodríguez, “Santiago de Chile.”
Caveat: Backend changes
I’ve been a bit anti-social lately – more so than usual. I’m struggling with the feeling that my life is “on hold.”
So I’ve retreated into some computer stuff I probably could have done quite a while ago.
I’ve created a new host-space for my blog-photos, which doesn’t affect the blog’s appearance but which solves a problem that I’ve had since last fall, when I was forced to migrate from my prior blog hosting provider (Typepad) to my own wordpress platform, due to the former’s technical intransigence and poor support.
So all new photos are at my new host-space (also self-hosted on my own server, now). Unfortunately, there is no fast way (that I’ve figured out, yet), to update all the old photos. So that will be a slow migration. There are 1000s of photos on this blog, given its more than 6000 entries. They are about 60-70% on the new host-space, but most of the “URL pointers” still point to the old host-space. So I need a fast find-replace for those URLs. I’m working on that. And for the third or so that are still in limbo on the Typepad version of the blog, it’ll be an even slower slog – they need to be “rescued” from there, hopefully before I’m forced to pay another year’s membership to prevent them from being lost forever. Typepad, being a for-profit business, provides no easy way to get these photos in bulk – you must open each one and save it, one-by-one.
I’m also working on learning (re-learning? did I ever know it?) some basics of Ruby on Rails programming, so that I can move forward on some web platforms I’d been messing with before leaving with Korea, and that have been on hold for the last year or so. I’m trying to get Eclipse IDE to work with the remote server, but it seems very buggy. I need to maybe find a different IDE.
What I’m listening to right now.
Joan Baez, “Silver Dagger.”
Lyrics
Don’t sing love songs, you’ll wake my mother
She’s sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger
She says that I can’t be your bride
“All men are false”, says my mother
“They’ll tell you wicked, lovin’ lies
The very next evening, they’ll court another
Leave you alone to pine and sigh”
My daddy is a handsome devil
He’s got a chain five miles long
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he’s loved and wronged
Go court another tender maiden
And hope that she will be your wife
For I’ve been warned, and I’ve decided
To sleep alone all of my life
Caveat: Poem #950 “Misanthropy”
ㅁ When people annoy I turn to my computer and program something.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: Tree #64
It’s a small cedar.
[daily log: walking, 1km]
Caveat: Poem #949 “Among shadows”
ㅁ Outside my window, western hemlocks tower and confront the clear air while stale snow begins to melt. But in shadows it's cool; amid broad blue skies there are all these disturbing, brooding doubts.
– a nonnet.