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I’m currently reading a book (A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge) where 2 voyages get stranded at the same faraway star system, one is a totalitarian autocracy and the other is a free trading culture. The totalitarian regime gets the upper hand, takes over via manipulation and sabotage, and tries to stifle and outlaw all money and trade. They end up spying on the underground black market trade that pops up and manipulates people into trading and doing work for the regimes benefit without their knowledge… If not money, then goods and services, or any other analog for such. Certain people will always try to accumulate “wealth”, whatever that wealth may be, it doesn’t necessarily have to be legal tender.

The book feels extremely relevant to current events, as the autocratic regime employs a ubiquitous police state and uses an even less ethical analog for AI to control it all. It was published in 1999.

Still doin’ their thing, they released a new album last year! They went on a small new-album tour and that’s when I was able to catch their show.

I found the source of the quote on the bookmark, and it was a quote by Plato out of Phaedrus so it definitely is real lol. It’s somewhat different on the bookmark, but depending on what translation you look at the quote will probably be slightly different anyway. It’s sections 274e to 275b

But when he came to writing, Theuth said, “This branch of learning, O King, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories, for I have discovered an elixir of both memory and wisdom.” The king replied, “Oh most ingenious Theuth, one man is able to invent these skills, but a different person is capable of judging their benefit or harm to those who will use them. And you, as the father of writing, on account of your positive attitude, are now saying that it does the opposite of what it is able to do. This subject will engender forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it, for they will not make use of memory. Because of their faith in writing, they will be reminded externally by means of unfamiliar marks, and not from within themselves by means of themselves. So, you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. You will provide the students with a semblance of wisdom, not true wisdom. For having heard a great deal without any teaching they will seem to be extremely knowledgeable, when for the most part they are ignorant, and are difficult people to be with because they have attained a seeming wisdom without being wise.”

I have my font set to Atkinson Hyperlegible, so the lowercase L has a little tail to differentiate it from the capital i, which has its serifs… but in the quote block, the font isn’t enforced for some reason so I had to copy/paste it into this textbox to even see what letter that was.

Interesting stuff that I would have never noticed or thought about otherwise…

I have a bookmark made by the band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum that was sneakily tucked into my merch haul last time I saw them live, and it has a quote on it that I will need to wait until I get home to properly remember, and I also want to do more diligence to figure out if it is an actual quote. At the top it says “A WARNING ABOUT READING”, and the quote says something like:

Beware the written language, man was never destined to record their every thought. How will we continue to remember ourselves when we are now able to cast our essence into this new medium, to remove the memories from ourselves so that we are wrought into perpetual forgetfulness?
-Allegedly some ancient guy from the dawn of books

The “Boops Boops in a bucket” photo used to be the main article image on Wikipedia and it tickled me in just the right way, I screenshotted it in 2021.

I went to check on it a couple years later after telling someone about it, and the photo was completely gone from the article! I was so sad. But I still had my screenshot.

Looking now, the bucket photo has returned further down the page!

Looking at the Wikipedia history for this page is funny, there are so many edits for one page for a small little goofy fish. Really shows how much work goes into maintaining that encyclopedia! And looking at the little spats about such things as the color of the bucket, and whether or not it is appropriate to mention such in the caption… Fascinating. EDIT: I keep going deeper. The caption for this exact image has been HOTLY contested. Also it has been said that the bucket is blue, and also that the bucket is turquoise. Also it can’t be decided on if “Boops boops in a bucket” is an appropriate caption because it is literally correct, or if it is “roflcopter nonsense” simply because the name of the fish happens to be silly…

I have a Dell XPS 13 9315, which is roughly the same size as the 11" air (actually slightly smaller), and I absolutely adore it. I didn’t get the highest-end because I didn’t need it, but it’s available with some decent processors and up to 32Gb RAM. It just sucks that everything is soldered to the board and non-upgradeable, and it has only 2 USB C ports, but that’s the price you pay for the size. The battery life is actually astounding, too, I am constantly amazed how long it lasts. The new XPS13 has the weird square flat keys and no border around the touchpad, I’m really glad I got the model I did because the new ones look like a pain to actually use.

Like I can actually do a little bit of light Solidworks on it if I’m not near my desktop, which blew me away. It plays the indie games I like, too, so it basically just does everything I need.

My winter project is to install Linux on it and get it all working the way I want.

Give the book Ra by Qntm a read
The synopsis is strikingly similar… It’s not lazy writing, I really enjoyed that book.

Frozen Nutty Buddy wafer bars were my dad’s favorite growing up… Unfortunately the cheap chocolate that coats them loses the tenuous temper it once had and becomes a liquid sludge at exactly 1 degree below room temperature so it melts all over the place and makes an absolute mess.

My brother and I got good at eating them straight out of the plastic wrapper without touching them.

I’m not in IT, but I was trying to get a coworker to send me a file they were supposed to have generated. I sent them a PDF and I wanted them to update it with current procedures (they were the area supervisor) and type it out in a word doc so it could be edited and rev controlled.

They never got back to me, 2 weeks passed. It was a 2 page document, so I emailed them to ask if they had finished. They responded that oh yeah they had finished a while ago, and I could find the completed document attached.

They sent me back the original PDF I sent them. After a confused follow up email, they again sent me back the original PDF.

I went over to their desk, which I had never been to before, usually I interface with them out on the assembly line. I was like “Hey what’s up, could you send me the .Doc file you created?”

Their response? “I forget what I named it so I can’t find it.”

I am even more confused. After some general troubleshooting I ask them to open their documents folder, which they did not know how to do. It didn’t matter because it was empty. They then close out of Outlook, which had been fullscreened the whole interaction.

Their desktop was the most densely packed jumble of hundreds of files I have ever seen. Not snapped to grid.

Turns out every document they ever interact with gets saved to their desktop permanently, and to find things they use Windows search. This explains why I kept getting back the original PDF, they searched for the name of what the file was supposed to be, and they just grabbed the first result without looking and slapped it in the email.

I ended up finding the document by showing them how to open a finder window, navigate to their desktop, and sorting by “last modified”, then asking them what day they remember finishing the document. It was named New Document.doc.

It ended up being so bad I had to completely re-do it myself anyway.

But that’s none of those genres…

I would like their stuff so much more if the nu-metal parts went away.

I am unsure what makes something “Swing”, but I absolutely adore The Roar of '74 by Buddy Rich. I discovered it via my dumb rule of “See vinyl record with car on it, buy vinyl record with car on it”

It can fall under the same umbrella. Unrealistic beauty standards being set by the “rich”, who some people look up to as role models. If there were something that you could do that you might be able to afford, like botox or lip fillers, that you believe would make you more beautiful, closer to your role model… If that sort of thing matters to you, then yeah, you might go for it. I can even take the same analogy of watches above, because there are definitely cheap imitation versions of the gaudy diamond-encrusted ones.

I was sort of thinking more like this though with respect to extreme alterations…

It’s definitely a status thing, but I think the extreme it’s been taken to has more to do with an erosion and warping of reasonable beauty standards than anything. More of an act of “because I can” than anything. I think a lot of the people who you look at and think “what the fuck” actually think they are making themselves more beautiful and attractive. I don’t think someone who has everything and can get whatever they want would purposely make themselves look grotesque, but I’m neither rich, nor a psychologist, so maybe I’m totally wrong…

It’s kind of like how there’s a gaudy stupid looking hyper-expensive version of everything, like those giant hideous watches with diamonds encrusted on every surface… Someone think’s it’s beautiful or shows status, but most of us probably just think it looks stupid.

The Bogdanoffification has been happening for a while…

Pub cheese would like a word.

Also, I think you might be hard-pressed to find anyone who would consider sugary cake sponge to be “bread”. (Something something Ireland’s supreme court ruled that Subway’s bread isn’t legally bread for tax purposes due to its high sugar content)

It’d be like layering up some sourdough slices with sweet sugary icing slathered between them, most people probably wouldn’t call that a cake.

It wasn’t super relevant to the story, but yeah, I could just browse the files right on their PC, definitely a “Not intending to share it for free” kind of situation, completely devoid of any authentication or security.

I’ve actually taken note of my navigational skills over the last couple years… I grew up in one state, and then a few years after graduating college, moved to a different state. When I was growing up, phone navigation didn’t really exist as it does now, cars didn’t have built-in navigation, and standalone navigation devices were slow and not all that great (at least the ones I could afford).

I find that when I return home, even 10 years later, I am able to navigate all the places I used to go unaided with ease, back-roads, niche routes, able to travel for hours without getting “lost”.

When I moved, though, I had very recently gotten my first smartphone, and google maps was very convenient to “learn” the new area. I ended up just continuing to use navigation since it was convenient. I’ve found that beyond the major main routes, I don’t have the same kind of “built-in” navigational skill that I do for my original home-turf. I never really learned the area.

I am moving towards a smart-phone-less life, and I’ve been able to let go of a lot, but GPS navigation remains a sticking point. I need to start training myself to navigate unaided in my current area.

Many many years ago in the paleolithic era when 2.4GHz was king, a neighbor in the next unit over had an unsecured wifi network… I connected my old laptop, figured out where the connection was best (turned out to be beside the stove in the kitchen?), piped the connection out the ethernet port and into the WAN port on my router, and set up my own “secured” network lol. I’m fairly certain anyone with a straight-up unsecured wifi network doesn’t have the skills or knowledge to detect someone leaching their bandwidth. I did that for like 3 years without a single hiccup until I moved and finally had to start paying.

I think it was just an odd way of making him seem more human and normal. Also the fact that he doesn’t mention anything about it also happening in his previous lives leaves an interesting open question that could either lend credence or hinder his whole backstory… At least that’s how I interpreted it.

All in all, though… one of the less awkward and more impactful sex scenes in a science-y book, which is much better than the usual ones I remember because they’re terrible and awkward and don’t fit in with the surrounding plot lol

It’s ironic that I have an anecdote that I recently read that feels very fitting here.

Permutation City by Greg Egan. Post-human digital consciousness via uploaded brain-scan becomes possible, and there are interesting questions about how the “sense of self” is derived, and how much someone can change themselves before they are no longer the same person. There are many different characters that deal with a newfound immortality in different ways, and either embrace, or shun, the ability to change themselves at a whim to fit their needs or wants. It’s a very prominent part of the overall plot and is prevalent right up until the last sentence.

Also, separate from that, I have the exact opposite feeling as OP. When I’m reading a book, I feel like my world is expanded in new directions. I tend to see certain things from slightly different perspectives in the context of what I’m reading. I’ve been reading Greg Egan’s entire body of work (after reading Diaspora and absolutely fucking loving it), and some insight and thoughts I had about the book Quarantine actually pushed me to make positive changes in my life that have been really hugely impactful, and I don’t think I would have had the courage or drive to make them had I not been thinking about my life in such an abstract manner.