A index.html => index.html +89 -0
@@ 0,0 1,89 @@
+---
+notitle: yes
+---
+
+<div class="page" class="index">
+ <main role="main" id="maincontent" class="pmain">
+ $for(posts)$
+ <article>
+ <a href="$url$">
+ <header>
+ <h1 class="title">$title$</h1>
+ <time>$date$</time>
+ </header>
+ </a>
+ $content$
+ </article>
+ $endfor$
+ <a href="/archive/" id="read-more">
+ Read more...
+ </a>
+ </main>
+ <aside class="pside">
+ <div id="me-pic">
+ acdw.net
+ </div>
+ <nav class="snav isnav">
+ <section id="introduction">
+ <header>Hi, I'm Case</header>
+ <p>I'm a poet,
+ bookmobile driver,
+ casual cartoonist,
+ occasional skater,
+ and hobbyist cook
+ in Louisiana.
+ My pronouns are he/him.</p>
+ </section>
+ $partial("templates/_pagenav.html")$
+ <section id="groups">
+ <header>post groups</header>
+ $groups$
+ </section>
+ <section id="links">
+ <header>get in touch</header>
+ <ul>
+ <div class="lgroup direct">
+ <li><a href="mailto:acdw@acdw.net">
+ email</a></li>
+ <li><a href="xmpp://acdw@404.city">
+ xmpp</a></li></div>
+ <div class="lgroup social">
+ <li><a href="https://writing.exchange/@acdw" rel=me>
+ mastodon</a></li>
+ <li><a href="https://tilde.town/~acdw/" rel=me>
+ ~town</a></li>
+ <li><a href="https://tildes.net/user/acdw">
+ tildes</a></li>
+ <li><a href="https://micro.blog/acdw">
+ micro.blog</a></li>
+ <li><a href="https://twitter.com/caseofducks" rel=me>
+ twitter</a></li>
+ <li><a href="https://keybase.io/acdw">
+ keybase</a></li></div>
+ <div class="lgroup coding">
+ <li><a href="https://github.com/duckwork" rel=me>
+ github</a></li>
+ <li><a href="https://gitlab.com/acdw" rel=me>
+ gitlab</a></li>
+ <li><a href="https://git.sr.ht/~acdw" rel=me>
+ sourcehut</a></li>
+ </div>
+ </ul>
+ </section>
+ <section id="feeds">
+ <header>feeds</header>
+ <ul>
+ <li><a href="/rss2.xml">rss</a></li>
+ <li><a href="/atom.xml">atom</a></li>
+ </ul>
+ </section>
+ </nav>
+ </aside>
+</div>
+<footer class="pfoot">
+ <span id="copyright">
+ © 2018–2019
+ <a rel="me" href="$canonical$">Case Duckworth</a>
+ <a rel="license" class="license" href="/license/">[CC-BY-NC-SA]</a>.
+ </span>
+</footer>
A pages/colophon.md => pages/colophon.md +132 -0
@@ 0,0 1,132 @@
+---
+title: Colophon
+description: >-
+ The technology, design, and state of mind
+ I used to build this website.
+---
+
+# Typography
+
+*acdw.net* is typeset in [Computer Modern][^fonts],
+originally developed by Don Knuth for TeX.
+I use the monospace and variable-width versions of the Typewriter family.
+If you'd like to download them for personal use,
+all faces are available from the [Font Library][cmu].
+
+[Computer Modern]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern>
+[cmu]: <https://fontlibrary.org/en/search?query=computer+modern>
+
+[^fonts]:
+ If for some reason your browser isn't downloading the fonts from my
+ servers, and you don't have them installed, you'll be seeing either
+ Georgia or your system's default monospace font.
+
+# Software
+
+I use a variety of software to publish this website,
+as much of it as possible open-source.
+I write the content of this site using [Neovim]
+on a [Linux] laptop, specifically [Manjaro].
+I transform the source material (which is written in [Markdown])
+to HTML using [Pandoc],
+and organize it into the site on your browser with [Hakyll].
+I keep track of the content and the generating code with [Git].
+
+For hosting,
+I've tried to go with smaller players to help keep a diverse ecosystem.
+I host the built content of my site with [Nearly Free Speech],
+and the source is hosted on [Sourcehut][^srht].
+
+[Neovim]: <https://neovim.io/>
+ (I'll use Vim at work as well, of course.)
+[Linux]: <https://www.kernel.org/>
+[Manjaro]: <https://manjaro.org/>
+ (I'm thinking of moving away from it when I get the time.)
+[Markdown]: <https://commonmark.org/>
+[Pandoc]: <https://pandoc.org/>
+[Hakyll]: <https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/>
+[Git]: <https://git-scm.com/>
+
+[Nearly Free Speech]: <https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/>
+[Sourcehut]: <https://sourcehut.org/>
+
+[^srht]:
+ The source for this blog specifically is in
+ [this repo](https://git.sr.ht/~acdw/acdw.net).
+
+# Me
+
+Of course, everything on this site is written by me,
+Case Duckworth, originally of Tennessee, currently of Louisiana.
+This is self-publishing, right here.
+We all stand on the shoulders of giants, as they say,
+so I've given those giants their due,
+but now I'd like to talk about myself for a bit.
+
+I'm going to be 29 this year and 30 next,
+which I only really realized the other day.
+I haven't done as much as I think I thought I would.
+I've only [published] a few times,
+I've only held a few jobs that I cared about,
+and sometimes I feel that I'm not going to be as well-known
+as I'd always assumed that I wanted to be.
+As I get older, though, I think that maybe
+I don't care so much about being well-known globally
+(or even nationally).
+Maybe I care more about being a good person in my local community.
+I'm still shifting in that, so the going is slow.
+But I understand now that it's more important to support those around me
+than it is to stress over huge societal problems
+that are outside of my control.
+
+[published]: </publications/>
+
+To this end, I'm a member of the local Unitarian Universalist church.
+I was trying to explain Universal Unitarianism to a lady taking my blood
+last weekend, and I had a hard time doing so
+(I definitely forgot to mention the [Seven Principles]).
+My personal faith is a kind of *[non-theism]*,
+as in, I don't believe in a god, but if there were one, it'd be okay.
+I try not to let questions of the supernatural and the afterlife
+get in the way of my day-to-day.
+I like going to the UU church, though,
+because it's structured like the Methodist church where I grew up
+(and those old comforts stay comfortable, regardless of philosophy)
+and because it's focused on *this* life,
+on social justice that we can achieve in our lifetimes
+without waiting around for a second coming.
+
+[Seven Principles]: <https://www.uua.org/beliefs/what-we-believe/principles>
+[non-theism]: <https://www.acdw.net/10470/science-as-a-god/>
+
+As far as my day-to-day goes,
+I'm an Outreach Library Tech.
+I drive a bookmobile around and read stories to children.
+I love my job and its purpose.
+I have a lot of free time at work[^freetime].
+I get to go home at the end of the day and my time is mine.
+
+[^freetime]: I'm typing this at work, for example.
+
+In my free time,
+I cook at home.
+I write (as is evidenced by this site).
+I foster dogs -- maybe I should blog more about them.
+I *was* in roller derby, but I stopped to focus on my upcoming wedding.
+Did I mention my wedding?
+I'm getting married to the love of my life this fall
+and I am excited!
+
+I also read a bit (not enough),
+and watch TV (too much),
+and surf the web (also too much).
+I'm a [bad vegan].
+To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut[^vonnegut]\:
+I'm here to fart around, and farting around I am.
+
+[bad vegan]: </10451/bad-vegan/>
+
+[^vonnegut]:
+ Would any self-indulgent long-winded "About me" be complete
+ without a quote from either Vonnegut or Bukowski?
+ And of course, I'm fresh out of Bukowski.
A pages/contact.md => pages/contact.md +39 -0
@@ 0,0 1,39 @@
+---
+title: Contact
+---
+
+I just read something tonight about
+[leaving links around the internet for a while][links].
+I feel like I've done that too.
+
+[links]: <http://tilde.town/~endorphant/blog/20160510.html#20160510>
+
+Some of them are listed here.
+
+- [email] me (please, no spambots or MLMs).
+- @ me on [Mastodon] or [Twitter].
+- clone me on [Github], [Gitlab], or [sourcehut].
+- [feel me] on [tilde.town].
+- doxx me on [Reddit], watch me lurking on [Hacker News],
+ or have a more stimulating conversation with me on [Tildes][tildes.net].
+- verify my identity on [Keybase].
+
+[email]: mailto:acdw@acdw.net
+[Mastodon]: <https://writing.exchange/@acdw> {rel=me}
+[Twitter]: <https://twitter.com/caseofducks>
+ (Though I never use it.) {rel=me}
+
+[Github]: <https://github.com/duckwork> {rel=me}
+[Gitlab]: <https://gitlab.com/acdw> {rel=me}
+[sourcehut]: <https://git.sr.ht/~acdw> {rel=me}
+
+[feel me]: <https://tilde.town/~acdw/feels/>
+[tilde.town]: <https://tilde.town/~acdw/> {rel=me}
+
+[Reddit]: <https://www.reddit.com/user/acdw> {rel=me}
+[Hacker News]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=acdw> {rel=me}
+[tildes.net]: <https://tildes.net/user/acdw>
+ (Not, so far as I know, affiliated with tilde.town.) {rel=me}
+
+[Keybase]: <https://keybase.io/acdw>
+ (I'm not actually sure what it's for or what it does.) {rel=me}
A pages/license.md => pages/license.md +19 -0
@@ 0,0 1,19 @@
+Copyright © 2018-2019 Case Duckworth
+
+This website's code and its content are licensed under the [MIT License][mit]
+and the [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
+International][cc] licenses, respectively.
+
+All of the content you can read here is licensed under the [CC-BY-NC-SA][cc],
+which is all the content in the `posts`, `pages`, and `static` directories, as
+well as `index.html`, `README.md`, and `LICENSE`. Everything else is licensed
+under [MIT][mit], unless otherwise licensed due to being downstream from a
+more restrictive license, such as the [GPL].
+
+Anything that isn't covered in this license statement is free to
+interpretation by only the most expensive lawyers in the state of arbitration.
+So I decree.
+
+[cc]: <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode>
+[mit]: <https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>
+[GPL]: <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>
A pages/links.md => pages/links.md +69 -0
@@ 0,0 1,69 @@
+---
+title: Links
+---
+
+I read a lament somewhere about the paucity of links pages anymore.
+It went something like
+
+> In the Olden Times, apparently,
+> before the Tech Giants had colonized the Internet and divvied it up
+> amongst themselves; when the West was Wilde and Free;
+> when People did Things Themselves on the Webbe:
+> there were Links Pages about that were Personal and True,
+> that did not merely Aggregate, but Curated as well.
+> They were by Human Handes, not the Cruele Clawse of Machine,
+> and we have Lost their Purity nowe.
+
+At any rate, here's my attempt at a links page.
+It's cool stuff I like, organized in a method
+
+# Cool folks
+
+::: note
+Just like me, some people have their own websites.
+There's actually a [growing movement][indieweb][^todo]
+to try and get more people to have their own websites.
+Here's a list of people I know about slash follow.
+:::
+
+-
+
+[indieweb]: <https://indieweb.org/>
+
+[^todo]:
+ I actually removed microformats and stuff
+ (the first iteration of being IndieWeb-capable)
+ with the redesign of this site.
+ I'll get around to fixing them ... eventually.
+ It's on my TODO list.
+
+# Single-purpose webpages
+
+::: note
+A lot of great pages on the Internet just do one thing,
+but I go back to them again and again because they are so complete,
+so perfect in the one thing that they do or are,
+that they become canonical.
+:::
+
+- [256 Colors Cheat Sheet][256co],
+ which lists all 256 colors of X11 and their names,
+ hex value, and RGB and HSL values.
+
+[256co]: <https://jonasjacek.github.io/colors/>
+
+# Search engines and other Big Web stuff
+
+- [DuckDuckGo], a non-tracking search engine.
+ I use it for all my searching needs.
+ It's actually great for all the other search engines
+ by using its [bang syntax], too.
+- [Wolfram Alpha], which you can type math-type stuff in
+ and it gives you the answer.
+ *And shows its work!*
+ There is a paid version,
+ but the free version works fine (as of this writing).
+
+[DuckDuckGo]: <https://duckduckgo.com/>
+[bang syntax]: <https://duckduckgo.com/bang>
+[Wolfram Alpha]: <https://www.wolframalpha.com/>
A pages/now.md => pages/now.md +72 -0
@@ 0,0 1,72 @@
+---
+title: What I'm up to
+---
+
+::: note
+Inspired by [KMS](https://kyle.marek-spartz.org/),
+see also [nownownow.com](https://nownownow.com).
+:::
+
+# Reading
+
+- *The Wake* by Paul Kingsnorth
+- *White Fragility* by Robin DiAngelo
+- *The Goodness Paradox* by Richard Wrangham
+
+I'm trying to read more than one book at a time.
+We'll see how that works.
+
+# Writing
+
+April just ended (yesterday as I write this),
+meaning Napowrimo 2019 is over.
+I wrote 25/30 posts, or about 83% of the days.
+I'm okay with that.
+It's a passing grade.
+
+I just completed a site redesign!
+I'm very happy with it.
+I'm still tweaking some things and I'm about to work on the backend a bit,
+but it looks very good right now.
+
+I'm considering beginning a very long project
+that could be very interesting.
+I'm nervous to start because it'll take years to do
+and I'm worried I don't have the follow through.
+I think I'll try though.
+Ultimately I'm only accountable to myself.
+
+# Listening & Watching
+
+I've been listening to a lot of ambient music lately
+(as in, *Alexa play Ambient Radio*[^alexa]).
+I'm also excited for the coming release of
+[Tank and the Banga's *Green Balloon*][tank].
+
+I've been watching *Scrubs* from the start on Hulu,
+and I've got to say it's not really holding up to my memory.
+The jokes don't age too well.
+Hopefully Season 2 gets better.
+
+[^alexa]:
+ I don't like name-dropping, and so implicitly supporting, Amazon here, but
+ that is what happens. I play music when I do dishes through the little
+ spyware device.
+
+[tank]:
+ <https://www.npr.org/2019/04/25/716059566/>
+
+# Life
+
+I'm getting married in October!
+I'm very excited.
+Planning is going swimmingly:
+we've got the venue,
+the DJ,
+the caterer,
+the invite list.
+We've sent out the Save the Dates
+and we just did our registry.
+This month we're getting our rings.
+
+*It's happening!*
A pages/projects.md => pages/projects.md +84 -0
@@ 0,0 1,84 @@
+---
+title: Projects
+---
+
+I've done a couple of larger projects over the years as well.
+Some are hosted elsewhere;
+when those elsewheres retire I move the project back here.
+Sometimes the whole thing is completely lost.
+I'll just tell you about those.
+
+# Writing
+
+[Interstitial] - [2018]{.date}
+: I decided to rebuild my site from scratch.
+ At first,
+ I was going to write my own static site generator with Python
+ but it [failed].
+ I put this up while I worked on the new thing.
+ In the interest of keeping everything,
+ I'm leaving it here.
+
+[Interstitial]: </projects/interstitial/1.html>
+[failed]: <https://www.gitlab.com/acdw/tuppence>
+
+[Autocento of the breakfast table] - [2015]{.date}
+: My master's thesis,
+ a hypertextual collection of pretty much all my work to date (in 2015),
+ including a lot of smaller projects like
+ *The Book of Hezekiah*,
+ *Buildings out of air*,
+ or my undergraduate thesis work.
+ It's not the *first* time I really used pandoc and Make to build a project,
+ but I lost the source code to the very first time
+ (my undergraduate thesis),
+ and it was the first time I built something like it for the web.
+ It's hosted at [Gitlab],
+ if you want to see the source.
+
+[Autocento of the breakfast table]: </projects/autocento/>
+[Gitlab]: <https://gitlab.com/acdw/autocento>
+
+::: {style="font-family: 'Comic Neue', 'Comic Sans', 'Comic Sans MS', sans-serif;"}
+[LOOSE POOPS] - [2015]{.date}
+: LOOSE POOPS are sometimes a surprise.\
+ LOOSE POOPS are an artist collective.\
+ LOOSE POOPS are because revision is sometimes tiresome.\
+ LOOSE POOPS are explorations into the child parts of ourselves.\
+ LOOSE POOPS are gorilla art.
+:::
+
+[LOOSE POOPS]: <https://loosepoops.github.io>
+
+E-Chapbooks - [2012]{.date}
+: I made some online chapbooks
+ for an undergraduate writing workshop I was in.
+ They were on the department webpage,
+ for a while,
+ but they've since been taken down
+ and forgotten.
+
+# Code
+
+Vim plugins
+: [vim-face]: a no-nonsense theme with very little highlighting,
+ inspired by syntax off and nofrils.
+ My current scheme.
+: [vim-hiliter]: precursor to vim-face, with highlights instead of faces.
+: [vim-tenhundred]: a spellfile to make you use the 1000 [most common words]
+ in English.
+
+Forks
+: [dmenu-overkill]: a fork of dmenu-ee, a fork of dmenu,
+ which I don't use any more anyway.
+ Why am I including it here?
+
+Others
+: [townie]: the source code of my presences at [tilde.town][tilde].
+
+[vim-face]: <https://git.sr.ht/~acdw/vim-face>
+[vim-hiliter]: <https://github.com/duckwork/vim-hiliter>
+[vim-tenhundred]: <https://github.com/duckwork/vim-tenhundred>
+[dmenu-overkill]: <https://github.com/duckwork/dmenu-overkill>
+[townie]: <https://git.sr.ht/~acdw/townie>
+[tilde]: <http://tilde.town/~acdw/>
A pages/publications.md => pages/publications.md +26 -0
@@ 0,0 1,26 @@
+---
+title: Publications
+---
+
+Every so often, I get my work published somewhere! Here's a list of those
+places:
+
+- "[In Bed]", in *[Sweet Tree Review]*
+- "[Sifting beans]", in *[Sweet Tree Review]*
+- "[Time looks up to the sky]", in *[Nude Bruce Review]* 5 (p. 83)
+- "[Rough Gloves]", in *[Sequoya Review]* 2013 (p. 47)
+- "[The Difference]", in *[Sequoya Review]* 2012 (p. 28)
+- "[The Mountain]", in *[Sequoya Review]* 2011 (p. 58)
+- "[The Storm Crosses the Threshold]", in *[Sequoya Review]* 2010 (p. 38)
+
+[In Bed]: <http://www.sweettreereview.com/in-bed-case-duckworth/>
+[Sifting beans]: <https://www.sweettreereview.com/sifting-beans-case-duckworth>
+[Time looks up to the sky]: <https://issuu.com/nudebrucereview/docs/final_layout_issue_5/84>
+[The Storm Crosses the Threshold]: <https://utcsequoyareview.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/sr-2010.pdf>
+[The Mountain]: <https://utcsequoyareview.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/sr-2011.pdf>
+[The Difference]: <https://utcsequoyareview.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/sr-2012.pdf>
+[Rough Gloves]: <https://utcsequoyareview.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/2013-sequoya-review.pdf>
+
+[Sweet Tree Review]: <https://www.sweettreereview.com/>
+[Nude Bruce Review]: <https://nudebrucereview.com/>
+[Sequoya Review]: <https://sequoyareview.com/>
A posts/book/2017-07-03-instructions-to-the-cook.md => posts/book/2017-07-03-instructions-to-the-cook.md +21 -0
@@ 0,0 1,21 @@
+---
+title: Instructions to the Cook
+subtitle: by Glassman and Fields
+tags: [readlist, zen, cooking]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/779/703/9780517703779.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780517703779"
+---
+
+It's funny -- as I was cleaning up my [Readlist], removing things that had
+been on my Amazon wishlist that I'd already read, I noticed that *Instructions
+to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life that Matters* (Glassman &
+Fields) was included. It was funny to me because I forgot that was on my list,
+and checked it out from the library a few weeks ago on a whim regardless.
+Like, I guess I'm interested in Zen and cooking, right?
+
+Anyway, the book was terrible. I ended up reading maybe 20 pages of it and
+returning it because Glassman seemed to only talk about how much *he* had
+gotten out of his Zen practice, not actually *how* to practice or what to do.
+It seemed really egoistic, so I just put it down. And there's my first review.
+
+[Readlist]: https://acdw.gitlab.io/readlist
A posts/book/2017-07-08-words-and-meaning.md => posts/book/2017-07-08-words-and-meaning.md +72 -0
@@ 0,0 1,72 @@
+---
+title: A Wizard of Earthsea
+subtitle: by Ursula K. Le Guin
+tags: [wizards, magic, le guin, language, fantasy]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/742/773/9780547773742.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780547773742"
+---
+
+Stories about wizards have always held great charm for me, and in reading *A
+Wizard from Earthsea*, I have finally come to understand why. Wizards' magic
+fulfills the promise of language, that words have meaning and are powerful,
+that they have their own existences beyond their uses as hooks to meaning, as
+metaphor. I remember in *Gulliver's Travels,* Swift describes a land where
+people have foregone words, choosing instead to carry all the objects of their
+conversations on their backs; for Le Guin, words *are* the things that are
+carried, to use for good or ill, as weapons for as balms, for friend or foe.
+
+As a writer (or at the very least, a Word Nerd), I'm fascinated with my use of
+words, and by extension our uses. It's trivial to say that words are
+important, that they can affect change in the world through persuasion,
+flattery, or plain tricks, but I think -- I've thought for a long time -- that
+words are more real than that, that they have some sort of reality beyond what
+they signify. For example, I heard on the radio (some *TED Radio Hour*, I
+think, though I might've read it or seen it or just thought it, you know how
+that is[^1]) that without language, humans can't really tell right from left,
+or make more complex spacial relationships regarding our world. The experiment
+started with mice: they got put in a square room with different patterns on
+each wall, and shown where to get some food -- say, it'd be left of the
+checked wall. If they were picked up, turned around, and made to try to find
+the food again (in the same spot), they had to start over. They couldn't work
+out, "I need to get to the left of the checked wall." Okay, you say; that's
+just a mouse; who cares? *Well:* the same thing happened with people when
+researchers knocked their language facilities out of their heads (temporarily,
+of course). So in that small way, at least, words wield real power in our
+lives: they root us where we are and allow us to get around the world.
+
+In *Earthsea*, of course, words do more than that. There's this concept of the
+True Language of the world, and every thing[^2] has its own name in the True
+Speech, by which it can be called and manipulated by a wizard. Additionally,
+if you want to change the nature of a thing, you have to change its name,
+which will ripple out to the other things around it, changing in some way
+their natures. Basically, as far as I can figure, Earthsea is defined as a
+number of objects in loose relation to one another, where they each have their
+own nature but are defined in terms of each other as well. I suppose all
+that's an implementation detail; the real interesting thing is that words and
+names are tightly bound to the things they represent, so much so that they
+cease to represent them and actually *are* those things. There's a passage in
+the book that mentions that the entire Universe is just the syllables of one
+long word, spoken slowly and inexorably by the stars. There's a beautiful sort
+of completeness in that, an echoing of the gospel of John or of (I think)
+Jewish mysticism: once the word's done, it's done. The breath is out.
+Something something heat death of the universe, right?
+
+What are we to make of this? I'm not sure. Obviously words don't have the kind
+of power they do in Earthsea, but they definitely have more power than *Sticks
+and stones may break my bones* nursery-rhymes would have us believe, and I
+think they have more power even then the silver-tongued confidence man would
+have you believe. They're somewhere in the realm of unicorns, maybe: because a
+unicorn has been described and defined, even though you'll never see one or
+hear its breath, it must exist somewhere, right, somehow? Or like the one idea
+of death I heard about another time on TED: that after we die, we're all
+ushered to a waiting room to hang out until our second death, when our name is
+said by the living for the last time. There's a real tragedy in that last
+death, in the knowledge that one day, all knowledge will be lost, even if it
+will just as surely be refound: because at that refinding, is it still the
+same knowledge? And how many times has it happened already?
+
+[^1]: Incidentally, that's a great idea for a longer post. Maybe I'll come
+ back to that at some point, who knows.
+
+[^2]: Which, incidentally, I just learned comes from Old Norse meaning *a
+ meeting of disparate elements*. Fun fact!
A posts/book/2017-07-10-space-battle-lunchtime.md => posts/book/2017-07-10-space-battle-lunchtime.md +74 -0
@@ 0,0 1,74 @@
+---
+title: Space Battle Lunchtime
+subtitle: by Natalie Riess
+tags: [comics, food, aliens, sci fi]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/135/103/9781620103135.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781620103135"
+---
+
+I love comic books. I love how they're able to live in that space between
+books and cinema: they're as visually stimulating as a film, but as portable
+and seekable as a book. You can feel the amount of time put into them, the
+love labored out over inking, coloring, writing. They're great.
+
+The best thing about them is they can be consumed very quickly. In fact, I
+read comic books so fast I almost disappoint myself; I feel like I should take
+more time with them, savor the images and stories. Maybe I should read them
+more than once.
+
+I haven't read Natalie Riess's *Space Battle Lunchtime* (volume 1) more than
+once, though now that I'm thinking about it I might go for it again tonight. I
+just finished *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom*, after all. At any rate,
+what I'll write now will be first thoughts.
+
+*Space Battle Lunchtime* is a lot of fun. It's a play on Food Network shows
+like *Chopped* or *MasterChef*, but in SPACE! And with ALIENS! And kidnapping
+and murder thrown in! It follows an Earthling baker, Peony, who's cast to the
+eponymous intergalactic hit cooking contest show after one of the contestants
+drops out suddenly. I thought there'd be some, "Oh look, we're in space! It's
+so strange/interesting/post-scarcity/complicatedly political" expository stuff
+at the beginning, but it turns out not to be the case. Peony's thrown into
+production along with us and the show gets going.
+
+The copy I read was the first 4 issues of the comic book bound together. In
+it, the show goes through your standard cooking-competition elimination rounds
+while hinting at a darker underbelly to the competition. One of the chefs,
+Melonhead, is back from a devastating loss last year, and let's just say he
+wants that title. Between him and the other alien chefs, the ingredients, and
+the setting, the comic book is beautifully drawn, as well. I really like the
+style, which to my mind is something like *Steven Universe* or other modern
+cartoons -- clean lines, bright colors, a little anime influence.
+
+I think I'll have to re-read this book when I get home to tide me over til I
+can find the next one. It ends when the action is just getting interesting.
+
+## I read it again!
+
+Okay, so I just reread Volume 1 of *Space Battle Lunchtime*, and let me say
+\#1 rule of reading: *read things more than once!* I got so much more n u a n
+c e out of this reading, and could see where the great and the working-on
+were.
+
+The detail in this book is richly imagined. Riess obviously watched a lot of
+*Chopped* and *Iron Chef* to get the pacing of the cooking scenes down, and
+her use of dynamic page composition helps it really feel as though you're
+*watching* an intergalactic space competition. There are loads of other little
+goodies, too, like when Peony's handler (I guess that's what she is? Anyway,
+she found her for the show) explains the stakes and her clipboard says,
+"Explain Stakes." And the way that the space food is drawn looks alien and
+delicious all at once -- I'd love to try some of the dishes that are featured.
+
+The one thing this novel is missing out on is character development. When the
+show isn't rolling, Peony hangs out with the crew and with who I think is
+going to be a love interest, another competitor named Neptunia. I got the
+feeling that I was supposed to be getting to know these characters in these
+scenes, but the pacing is a little slow and the dialog a little too generic
+for me to really know anything about them. That said, most cooking shows we
+don't know anything at all about the contestants other than where they're from
+and that they love cooking, so I wasn't expecting too much
+character-development-wise. It is cool that Riess is working to add another
+dimension to what could easily have been just a fun take on cooking
+competition shows.
+
+The next volume (I think of a two-volume series) isn't at my library yet, but
+it's processing. I'll reserve it and write about it in a new post when I can!
A posts/book/2017-07-18-cinderella-ate-my-daughter.md => posts/book/2017-07-18-cinderella-ate-my-daughter.md +21 -0
@@ 0,0 1,21 @@
+---
+title: Cinderella Ate My Daughter
+subtitle: by Peggy Orenstein
+tags: [nonfiction, feminism]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/534/711/9780061711534.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780061711534"
+---
+
+Orenstein has a pedigree writing about womens' liberation issues for
+publications like the *New York Times*, or whatever has a lot of caché
+nowadays. That sounds like I think it's dumb -- I don't, promise; I'm just
+pumping these reviews out so blehgh. Anyway, this book made me even more
+afraid to have children than I already was! It made me realize that no matter
+what values I might try to instill in a daughter or a son, like Orenstein, I
+will fail to protect them from a classist, sexist, consumerist world that
+constantly bombards them with its messaging: "BUY MORE SHIT!" "BE THIS WAY!"
+"DON'T DO THAT!" "YOU ARE THIS, NOT THAT!" "GOOD IS NARROW!" etc. I think it's
+good books like this are here, though, because they're the only way to slowly,
+slowly push the prow back in the right direction, to sail onwards toward that
+ever-receding horizon and the rising sun.
+
A posts/book/2017-07-18-down-and-out-in-the-magic-kingdom.md => posts/book/2017-07-18-down-and-out-in-the-magic-kingdom.md +17 -0
@@ 0,0 1,17 @@
+---
+title: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
+subtitle: by Cory Doctorow
+tags: [sci fi, doctorow, transhumanism]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/360/304/9780765304360.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780765304360"
+---
+
+A fun little jaunt into what happens when nothing is scarce anymore: it's the
+near future, and death has been cured, as well as all scarcity. Instead of
+currency, people trade in Whuffie, which is basically esteem of everyone
+around. Doctorow shows us the joys of transhumanism, computer-brains, and
+post-scarcity economics, but he also shows us the existential angst that can
+go along with it. His main argument, it seems to me, is that we need something
+to work toward or against, so if a natural opponent is taken away, we'll make
+them ourselves. It was a fun book, and funny, but it didn't make me think
+anything Big.
A posts/book/2017-07-18-even-in-paradise.md => posts/book/2017-07-18-even-in-paradise.md +29 -0
@@ 0,0 1,29 @@
+---
+title: Even in Paradise
+subtitle: by Elizabeth Nunez
+tags: [lear, modernizations]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/395/754/9781617754395.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617754395"
+---
+
+Elizabeth Nunez's novel is a modern, post-colonial take on *King Lear*, and it
+was decent (I thought the ending was a little where-are-they-now,
+end-of-documentary summation, and the writing style was, I don't remember, but
+something was a little off, okay?), but it really made me remember my whole
+thing with the *King Lear* story. First off, *King Lear* is *not* the first
+iteration of that tale; like many Shakespearean plays, its roots are much
+older, and a story very much like it is told [all over the world]. The first
+place I heard it was in *Grandfather Tales*, a collection of Appalachian folk
+tales, where the youngest daughter, instead of saying she loves her father as
+much as is her duty, tells him she loves him "As much as meat loves salt." I
+was thinking about the differences between the two, between duty and salt, and
+I think I like the second better because I don't like the power-dynamic
+implications of words like *duty*, especially in regards to the machinations
+of love. Love should be freely given, and accepted as a gift: if someone loves
+only to fulfill some duty, that is not love, but loyalty. Which is not to say
+loyalty is trash, of course! But it isn't love, and I'm not a fan of the idea
+that love is a thing that can be demanded as fealty. However, the *salt* thing
+I like, because as the story bears out, without salt, meat is nothing,
+meaningless; life without love is the same. Plus it's a cool metaphor.
+
+[all over the world]: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/salt.html
A posts/book/2017-07-18-interstitial.md => posts/book/2017-07-18-interstitial.md +36 -0
@@ 0,0 1,36 @@
+---
+title: The City and the City
+subititle: China Miéville
+tags: [city, fantasy, sci fi, journalism]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/529/497/9780345497529.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780345497529"
+---
+
+I'm in that interstitial space between books, a no-book on the other side of
+two covers. I just finished reading *The City and the City* (Miéville), in
+which interstice is a character: the novel is about two city-states that share
+the same geography (are *topogangers*, one of Miéville's wonderful neologisms
+to describe the political, bureaucratic, and geographical nature of the
+cities), where breaching the borders between the two is an existential crime.
+The book itself is a gripping murder mystery that uses its setting almost as
+another character, and the setting pulled me in completely. As I was reading
+it, I began to feel paranoid even in my normal life, worried that some unseen
+presence underneath or between what I could see was watching me, waiting for
+something. I also began to notice interstices around me: the ways in which I
+(I hope *we*) unsee those around us on the street, deciding we don't know
+them; the places that are unnoticeable because they are nowhere, but between
+two others; those times when we're getting ready for something or finishing
+something else, and really aren't doing much of anything, but are truly
+living. Yesterday, it was raining very hard for about an hour and I went out
+the back door of the office, to an interstice between our building and the
+house next door. There was an unused loading dock there, and a mysterious
+motor of some kind, I guess a wench or something like it. I was in the middle
+of a city but I felt as though I were on another planet, maybe in that planet
+of a short story (I don't remember the name or who wrote it, only this) where
+it had rained for hundreds of years, constantly. I was nowhere; I felt free.
+Or whatever. I mean, I did in that moment, but it's pretty ridiculous looking
+at it that way now. Or is what I'm doing now, discounting the experience, a
+normalization of an experienced moment of interstice? Some sublime unknowable
+thing that exists nowhere and everywhere at once? I don't know. I have no
+organized thoughts. If they're organized, if I put them into buildings, won't
+I have dark alleys between them where anything can happen?
A posts/book/2017-08-04-atlas-shrugged-i.md => posts/book/2017-08-04-atlas-shrugged-i.md +87 -0
@@ 0,0 1,87 @@
+---
+title: Atlas Shrugged I
+subtitle: by Ayn Rand
+tags: [rand, fail, series]
+series: Atlas Shrugged
+series-note: >
+ I'm currently reading Ayn Rand's 1000-page epic about (as far as I can
+ tell) steel, trains, and strangely-named thin people. Since it's taking
+ me a while to get through it, I thought I'd live-blog my experience
+ instead of writing one big post at the end of my journey.
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/144/191/9780451191144.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780451191144"
+---
+
+# Somewhere in chapter VII
+
+Okay, I admit it: I have a really hard time reading books with long chapters.
+I need lots of little breakpoints, like commercial breaks, that let me get up
+and get something out of the fridge, or a drink of water, or something. So
+this book is hard for me to read for that reason alone.
+
+That's not the only reason though! I don't know if you know this, but if you
+know me, like, *at all* IRL you know that I'm about two hairs shy of a raging
+socialist. I mean, I don't like labels because I think they're limiting and
+because they have a whole cloud of connotations that, especially in America
+(thanks, in part, to Ms. Rand!), are extremely negative, and as such tend to
+shut down dialog instead of expanding it. But regardless, I'm definitely
+*left* **left** **LEFT** of center in regards to the function of society, the
+way I feel about laissez-faire capitalism, and social issues. So I went into
+*Atlas Shrugged* knowing that I'd disagree with many points, and actually
+that's a big reason I did: I've railed against Rand-toting idealogues on the
+right often enough that my girlfriend asked if I'd actually ever even *read*
+Rand, and all I've ever really done was *The Fountainhead* a long time ago,
+and my mom bought me that book because, and I quote, she thought it'd "make
+\[me\] think about becoming an architect." Which the architecture is very nice
+in that book, but it's really not what it's about, is it?[^1]
+
+So I'm currently somewhere in the middle of Chapter VII, when (spoiler alert!)
+Rearden Metal has just been condemned by the governmental body as being unsafe
+for public use, and Dagny and Rearden are shitting their pants (in a
+dignified, objectivist manner, of course). My thing about this kerfuffle is
+that it's too cartoonish: yes, the State Science Institute is absolutely in
+the wrong here by condemning the metal on political instead of scientific
+grounds, but I'm not convinced of the metal's safety myself. It seems as
+though Rand just wants us to *trust* Rearden's metallurgical intellect
+*because* he's the hero; as far as I can tell neither he nor Dagny ever test
+the Metal in any meaningful way to determine if it is, in fact, safe, or would
+have issues after a lot of wear-and-tear. The narrative of the book totally
+glosses over that necessary part and expects us to believe that just because
+Rearden wants to make money in an unregulated market, he's sufficiently tested
+the metal -- which isn't how that's played out, hardly ever, in the real
+world. I mean, look at lead in gasoline: it was added to reduce knocking and
+increase profits, but they didn't do any safety testing on it, and actively
+worked against the guy who found out its very real public health risks, to
+keep the status quo. If the book works the same way, it'd be like if the
+bridge they're building with Rearden Metal were to shear and begin to crumble
+and Rearden actively worked against fixing it or letting people know there was
+a problem. Which I guess he's not *going* to, since he's some Golden God of
+progress, but I think there should've been at least some allusion to the
+surety that the Metal had undergone some rigorous testing so that we know it
+really is what it says it is.
+
+That's the other thing about this book, by the way, the Golden God-ness of the
+main characters. It seems to me that in Rand's worldview, Dagny, Rearden, and
+for a while, D'Anconia are perfect people in every way, and she writes them
+without flaws, or anyway without real flaws. All characters need some kind of
+flaw to make them human, to really make me care about them; otherwise the book
+turns into nothing more than a flat allegory (which I guess *Atlas Shrugged*
+is? but it could be more interesting). Most of the time we spend with Dagny or
+Rearden is a constant discussion of just how *great* they are, stoic, patient,
+trying to be patient with mere mortals who just *don't get their genius* or
+are cowardly. I can see how these books appeal to young readers, because most
+of them think that way about themselves: I know I did when I was that age,
+even if I didn't want to admit it. And maybe that's what makes them kind of
+unbelievable to me -- by the time people reach the ages of these characters,
+they should know better, no matter who they are.
+
+That's my main thinking right now. Let's see where this book takes us from
+here!
+
+[^1]: And, fun fact, apparently a lot of people try going to architecture
+ school after reading it, where it's like the *Top Gun* high five: anybody
+ who does it is immediately called out for being there for entirely the
+ wrong reasons.
+
+ [here]: https://www.acdw.net/read/09874.html
+ [1]: https://www.acdw.net/read/09883.html
A posts/book/2017-08-07-atlas-shrugged-ii.md => posts/book/2017-08-07-atlas-shrugged-ii.md +72 -0
@@ 0,0 1,72 @@
+---
+title: Atlas Shrugged II
+subtitle: by Ayn Rand
+tags: [rand, fail, series]
+series: Atlas Shrugged
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/144/191/9780451191144.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780451191144"
+---
+
+I've made it to Chapter IX: The Sacred and the Profane. I've just finished the
+violent sex scene between Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, consummating the
+dance they've been circling around each other since they began working on what
+became the John Galt line, at the end of the first successful run on that
+line. I'm checking in because of the conversation Dagny and Rearden had with
+Ellis Wyatt in his home, looking over his oil field; during it I wondered how
+Ayn Rand would've responded to the climate change crisis we're facing.
+
+Wyatt is an oil man; his house perches on a hill above a wide berth of oil
+field. During dinner, he mentions that soon he'll have oil enough for
+thousands of years (or something to that effect) because of the new process
+he's developed to extract oil from shale. The thing is, since 1957 (when the
+book was published), we've developed a process to extract oil from shale, and
+it has done great things for industry and all; however, it's also precipitated
+great harm to the environment in terms of ruined ecosystems and increased
+greenhouse gases, which (as we all should know) are really fucking up our
+futures on this planet. But of course, for Rand's characters, what's most
+important is profit --- my question is, in the short- or long-term?
+
+When the story dealt only with Taggart's rail line and Rearden's steel mills,
+with the increased productivity a new, better (if untested, see my previous
+post) metal, I was frustrated along with them at the bureaucratic bullshit in
+the form of laws that enforced state-wide monopolies and forbade people to own
+more than one business: of course those are anticompetitive and ridiculous
+laws meant only to enforce the status quo while playing lip service to
+"greater equity." Where Rand loses me, however, is in the idea that all
+business, all profit, is inherently good *of its own sake*, in a vacuum
+outside of the concerns of the society or ecology around it.
+
+The plain fact of the matter is that there are many people (and, for that
+matter, animals) that have no say in the way things as a whole are run,
+because they have not had the opportunities the Dagny Taggarts and Hank
+Reardens of the world have had. Rand's thinking, as far as I can tell, leads
+directly to the prosperity-gospel rationalizing of poverty as an indicator of
+moral corruption, and the idea that people deserve whatever it is they have,
+which is simply and demonstratively untrue: for every rags- to-riches story of
+a young upstart with a heart of gold who makes his way to the very shining top
+of industry, for every fall-from-grace story of a corrupt oligarch who meets
+his just deserts[^1] by being found out, there are hundreds if not thousands
+of stories about people who stay in their socioeconomic level through their
+entire lives, whether they're good or bad, smart or stupid, enterprising or
+complacent. We tell ourselves stories of the outliers because they're novel,
+but people like Rand seem to think they're the norm, which is incredibly
+dangerous. In fact, I'd say that kind of thinking led us directly here, in
+2017, to rising sea levels, obesity and opioid epidemics, a dismal
+international diplomacy outlook, Brexit, and Donald Trump.
+
+So I'd love to bring Ayn Rand back from the dead and begin by asking her what
+she thinks about climate change. Would she maybe change her mind about the
+benefits of ceaselessly chasing profit over the health of the planet (which
+would affect long-term profit), or would she staunchly defend her philosophy
+of "rational self-interest?"
+
+*Addendum, 8/8: I just read the first part of Chapter IX. WHAT THE F IS WRONG
+WITH THESE PEOPLE?? They have seriously unhealthy feelings about sex, love and
+intimacy. WTF.*
+
+[^1]: Fun fact: it *is* just *deserts*, one *s*. It's a usage of *deserts*
+ that means *being deserving of something*, and it's still pronounced
+ *desserts!* WHO KNEW!?
+
+ [first]: https://www.acdw.net/read/09871.html
+ [third]: https://www.acdw.net/read/09883.html
A posts/book/2017-08-16-atlas-shrugged-iii.md => posts/book/2017-08-16-atlas-shrugged-iii.md +56 -0
@@ 0,0 1,56 @@
+---
+title: Atlas Shrugged III
+subtitle: by Ayn Rand
+tags: [rand, fail, series]
+series: Atlas Shrugged
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/144/191/9780451191144.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780451191144"
+---
+
+I couldn't do it, yall. I couldn't finish *Atlas Shrugged.* Honestly, the
+biggest problem wasn't the politics or any of that; it was the
+heavy-handedness with which Rand described her characters and had them
+interact. I quit in the middle of Dagny's track-down of the engineer from
+Twentieth Century Motor Company, because every single person in the chain is
+the same person: sniveling, degenerate, constantly babbling about themselves
+and how "it's not my fault that I failed," which I suppose is Rand's
+characterization of the socialistic/anti-objectivist type, but which for me
+just grated. What I'm saying is, I'm in favor of a lot of social welfare
+programs and shared-ownership schemes; I think that laissez-faire capitalism
+is inherently flawed in the way it rewards those who seek short-term profit
+over long-term durability, and in the way it encourages monopolistic business
+practices that end up causing huge income inequalities, which are
+self-perpetuating and self-sustaining; and *I* hated the non-Dagny-Taggarts,
+the non-Hank-Reardens of the book too.
+
+In fact, by setting up such a fictitious (I mean *fictitious* in that it would
+never actually happen; *Atlas Shrugged* is a novel-length straw man, as far as
+I can tell) dichotomy between the golden capitalist gods and the sniveling
+worms of everyone else, Rand reduces her book to mere propoganda for her
+philosophy. It's worked, obviously, because her novel is expressly pitched at
+people of the age where they really think they know everything, and that
+people can get ahead merely by virtue of their business acumen or
+intelligence; maybe since I'm reading it a bit older I can see through that
+lie. The fact is that many people (to borrow a phrase that has been making the
+rounds more since the inauguration) are born on third base, and Rand is not
+just assuming, but proclaiming loudly that they hit a triple.
+
+That's not to say that Rand doesn't have some salient points. Her insistance
+on an objective reality and an absolute truth are admirable, in my opinion: we
+should spend more time on debates reaching a consensus on the absolute facts
+of a matter before sparring on our viewpoints. I wonder how Rand would feel
+about today's Republican party that claims to hold her so dear to its heart:
+how would she feel about InfoWars using fear and conspiracy to sell quack
+cures, for example? how would she feel about the party of Trump, whose reality
+is a forever-shifting hurricane of bullshit and doublespeak? Would she ignore
+all of the right's propoganda, which is increasingly reaching Soviet levels of
+insidiousness, because Republicans claim to favor a free capitalist
+marketplace? Would she embrace her proteges?
+
+I have no idea. But I haven't been able to concentrate on the story of *Atlas
+Shrugged* these almost-three-hundred pages because of all my questions. Maybe
+I'll try to crack this nut again in a calmer political era, but for now --
+*shrug*.
+
+ [one]: https://www.acdw.net/read/09871.html
+ [two]: https://www.acdw.net/read/09874.html
A posts/book/2017-09-08-three-body-problem.md => posts/book/2017-09-08-three-body-problem.md +73 -0
@@ 0,0 1,73 @@
+---
+title: Three Body Problem
+subtitle: by Cixin Liu
+tags: [sci fi, liu, aliens, physics]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/030/382/9780765382030.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780765382030"
+---
+
+::: note
+Disclaimer: It's been a little while since I actually read this book, so my
+review might be missing some details or nuance of a fresh read. On the other
+hand, it will have aspects that a fresh review won't have: the color receding
+into the distance, the more general shape of the book, how it's faded into the
+background of my thoughts.
+:::
+
+Cixin Liu's *Three Body Problem* has been described as China's best science
+fiction novel, and been compared to *Dune*, so I knew I'd want to read it for
+a while before I actually got around to doing so. It mostly lives up to the
+hype: it's got that great sci-fi combination of the technical, the political,
+and the human, and the story unfolds by gradually revealing details in two (or
+maybe three) different time periods. I personally enjoyed reading it for the
+illuminating description of the shit of the Revolution in China and for the
+realistic exploration of how humanity would react to contact from another
+world.
+
+I usually don't care about giving spoilers, but with *Three Body Problem*, I
+want to tread lightly, so I'm going to skip the synopsis and go for the three
+sci-fi components that work really well. The technical aspect of this book
+centers mostly around the virtual world of the video game *Three Body*, which
+features a world with interleaving Chaotic Periods and Stable Periods. During
+a Chaotic Period, the conditions are (duh) chaotic, varying wildly from
+ice-cold nights to scorching days of completely random lengths of time. A
+Stable Period is the opposite: day and night fall into rhythms, and life can
+flourish until the next Chaotic Period. We're introduced to the game because
+the main character begins playing it in connection with an investigation, and
+he begins trying to figure out how the world works. Through him figuring it
+out, Liu explains to the reader the concept of the Three Body Problem of
+classical physics, as well as posits a virtual reality suit that players use
+to fully immerse themselves into the game. Although I at first thought the
+segments dedicated to *Three Body* were distractions to the main plot, they
+eventually reveal themselves as integral to the development of the story, and
+by the end of the book were my favorite segments.
+
+Any science fiction worth its salt will use the genre to comment on its day's
+political situation: that's what the genre is for. Liu's book does the same
+for the twenty-first century Chinese political situation, which was
+interesting on its face because I don't know much about it at all. The book
+opens with a description of a brutal beating and killing of an intellectual
+during the Chinese Revolution, and that brutality, the extreme dedication to
+an idea disregarding its cost in human life, persists throughout the book. The
+interpersonal dynamics in *Three Body Problem* feel real, as do the
+international politics that are represented in those dynamics, especially
+during the summit meetings held later in the novel. Liu spends some time
+discussing theories as to how we would react to extraterrestrial communication
+(spoiler alert: it's almost certainly going to be terrible), and through the
+novel explores how those theories might really play out.
+
+The human aspect of the story was the hardest for me to get into. I'm not sure
+if it's something to do with the cultural difference between myself and the
+author or something else, but it was challenging to be rooting for a character
+one minute to have them betray all of humanity the next without much
+explanation as to what led them down that path.
+
+The book has a few loose ends as well: for example, a mysterious countdown
+that does not get resolved. However, I found out that *Three Body Problem* is
+only the first of a trilogy by Cixin Liu, so I'm sure the ends will be tied
+together by the end of book III (I definitely reserved the next in the series
+from the library as soon as I finished the first!).
+
+Overall, I'd recommend *Three Body Problem* as a new science fiction novel
+that explores some really interesting territory and sheds light on a country I
+personally knew little about.
A posts/book/2017-09-22-goliath.md => posts/book/2017-09-22-goliath.md +33 -0
@@ 0,0 1,33 @@
+---
+title: Goliath
+subtitle: by Tom Gauld
+tags: [comics, historical fiction, alt narrative]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/652/460/9781770460652.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781770460652"
+---
+
+Gauld's first graphic novel is an alternative-perspective on Goliath (as in,
+*David and*). I'm a sucker for alternative-perspective stories, from *Grendel*
+to *Wicked* (and I have *The Last Ringbearer* ready to read whenever I can get
+a Kindle or something), so I was excited to pick up *Goliath*.
+
+The most interesting twist of *Goliath* is its characterization of the title
+character: Goliath is just a big guy who is more interested in book-keeping
+than fighting, and has been happy in his desk job during the Hebrew-Philistine
+war until an enterprising middle-manager of a general convinces the king that
+a "Fight of Champions" will win the war with no cost to the Philistines. Of
+course, Goliath is that champion because of his size, though he is kept in the
+dark about his mission for as long as possible.
+
+Gauld's sparse style lends itself well to this story, most of which has
+Goliath sitting at a pile of rocks at the bottom of a gorge and reading the
+pre-written challenge to the Israelites. David doesn't even feature except as
+a premonition of death from the mist, just before he hits an unprepared
+Goliath in the head and kills him, ending the story. The boy the story is more
+interested in is Goliath's shield-bearer, who looks up to Goliath and is
+probably the only person to mourn his death.
+
+I was surprised by *Goliath*, both by its shortness and depth: Gauld has taken
+scant source material on one of the Bible's most infamous characters and given
+him, if not a full life, a sketch that points to his humanity, and reminds us
+that there is never only one side to a conflict.
A posts/book/2017-09-22-youre-all-just-jealous-of-my-jetpack.md => posts/book/2017-09-22-youre-all-just-jealous-of-my-jetpack.md +18 -0
@@ 0,0 1,18 @@
+---
+title: You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack
+subtitle: by Tom Gauld
+tags: [comics]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/048/461/9781770461048.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781770461048"
+---
+
+I first became familiar with Gauld's work through his [tumblr], which is
+titled the same as his book and features the same: cartoons he's drawn for
+*The Guardian*. I was originally drawn to his comics by the clean line and
+coloring style, and by the literary humor that lampoons genre, the publishing
+industry, and popular (or even "canonical") works. That being said, *Jetpack*
+is probably best-suited for sitting on a coffee table for occasional leafing
+by guests. I read it straight through, and after about forty pages of similar
+jokes, found myself rushing to have it over with.
+
+[tumblr]: http://myjetpack.tumblr.com/
A posts/book/2017-11-23-boundless.md => posts/book/2017-11-23-boundless.md +33 -0
@@ 0,0 1,33 @@
+---
+title: Boundless
+subtitle: by Jillian Tamaki
+tags: [comics]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/878/462/9781770462878.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781770462878"
+---
+
+I picked up *[Boundless]* from the graphic novel section because I liked the
+cover: the title and author's names handwritten in big, skinny letters around
+a picture of a woman putting her hair in a ponytail. The picture is all
+penwork, with lots of close hatching for the shadows, with a great expression
+in the woman's face -- she's looking down and to her left, as though deep in
+thought or consideration of something. The stories in Tamaki's book look at
+you in the same way. Each story is sort of like an amuse bouche, small and
+surprising and interesting and then over, leaving you wanting more. My
+favorite was "1.Jenny," about a mysterious mirror Facebook that features
+versions of people that diverge from their own lives, exposed on the social
+network. The story doesn't waste time figuring out how the mirroring works, or
+whether the two doppelgangers are linked somehow (though it seems to be that
+they are, and the use of "mirror" leads to that conclusion as well), but
+rather uses the situation as a vehicle for the main character, Jenny's,
+personal transformation to a more healthy person, both physically and
+mentally. I also loved shorter stories like "The Clairfree System," "Darla!"
+and "Half Life," about a woman who begins shrinking one day and finally
+disappears. The art is most expressive, and I think the best, in "Bedbug,"
+which uses a bedbug infestation as a metaphor for marital infidelity and stays
+on the cheater's point of view -- which I haven't seen many times before and
+is interesting, to see her side of things. Overall, it's a good book with
+great art and I want to read more [Tamaki].
+
+[Boundless]: http://jilliantamaki.com/books/boundless/
+[Tamaki]: http://jilliantamaki.com
A posts/book/2017-11-23-practical-magic.md => posts/book/2017-11-23-practical-magic.md +23 -0
@@ 0,0 1,23 @@
+---
+title: Practical Magic
+subtitle: by Alice Hoffman
+tags: [hoffman, magic]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/371/190/9780425190371.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780425190371"
+---
+
+I read this book because I saw [the movie] and thought it was pretty good, but
+also clearly a movie adaptation of a book. I could tell that the novel would
+have more detail about the characters, their lives, and their motivations,
+which interested me because the characters were great. So I picked up the
+book, and honestly it's very different from the movie. The plot is slower,
+more thoughtful, with less of an overarching arc. It's more a life-spanning
+novel, if that makes sense; it explores the relationship between the two
+sisters through their lives through multiple vignettes. The aunts, which
+feature very heavily in the movie, don't as much in the book, but the
+daughters do very much more. I liked the multi-generational depiction of
+women's struggles, which I think is really what the book's about, and I'm glad
+the book did not feature the climactic scene from the movie, which I thought
+was awkwardly tacked-on.
+
+[the movie]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practical_Magic
A posts/book/2018-04-09-just-write-and-the-rest.md => posts/book/2018-04-09-just-write-and-the-rest.md +55 -0
@@ 0,0 1,55 @@
+---
+title: A Drifting Life
+subtitle: by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
+tags: [manga, comics, eden, publishing, art, writing]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/746/299/9781897299746.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781897299746"
+---
+
+A few days ago I finished *A Drifting Life*, Yoshihiro Tatsumi's fictionalized
+autobiography about growing up in postwar Japan drawing manga. It's a great
+book -- its depictions of every day life for Hiroshi Katsumi, the book's
+protaganist, and his friends, family, and rivals rang true to me, and the way
+the creative process is rendered made me remember why I got into writing in
+the first place.
+
+Hiroshi has no small share of problems throughout the book. He fights with
+his brother, who has a lung disease for the first chapters until imported
+drugs cure him; he fails his university entrance exam by not showing up due to
+an existential crisis; he is taken advantage of by publishers; he struggles
+with finding his true manga, gekiga, and figuring out how to present it.
+However, Hiroshi never has trouble actually drawing, at least for any amount
+of time: when he has trouble with a longer-format story (which is what he
+really wants to do), he draws four-panel manga instead, or when his publishers
+don't want him publishing with other houses, he uses a pseudonym. He is
+constantly creating throughout the entirety of the novel, with an ease that
+surprised and inspired me. He never assumes anything other than that he *is*
+a manga artist, even when he's hit a dry spell or isn't feeling up to task.
+
+Now I'm writing this out, I realize that much of that feeling that I so envy
+is due to the narrative device of the novel being *about* manga. I'm sure
+Yoshihiro Tatsumi had stretches of his life where he didn't create much of
+anything, or felt doubt in his drawing or writing abilities, or in some other
+way wasn't able to hack it. But the book stands on its own, and Hiroshi's
+ease of being an artist is still something I want to strive for.
+
+Maybe I'm writing this now instead of a couple of days ago because I'm
+currently reading a book where the artist is similar. David Bourne of
+Hemingway's *The Garden of Eden* is similarly sure of himself as a writer, in
+fact it may be the only thing he is sure of himself. He uses his writing as a
+refuge from the conflicts of his marriage and transforming wife, and is proud
+of himself as he finishes a story. One scene that struck me is how he reads
+over the part of the story he's already written, correcting as he goes, and
+not judging himself or wondering how he's going to fix it, like I do. At
+least I have *that* in common with Hiroshi -- he doesn't read his manuscripts
+over after he finishes either.
+
+Neither of these characters, as far as I can tell, have any problem (of their
+own) sending out work to be read and published either -- something I struggle
+greatly with (and the reason I started [LOOSE POOPS], or tried to, and in part
+why I began this blog) and that gives me a lot of anxiety. I think these
+books are signs for me at this point in my life. I think they're telling me:
+"Just do things -- just write, and the rest will follow." I'm trying to do
+that. I'm trying.
+
+[LOOSE POOPS]: https://loosepoops.github.io
A posts/book/2018-04-14-pale-fire.md => posts/book/2018-04-14-pale-fire.md +36 -0
@@ 0,0 1,36 @@
+---
+title: Pale Fire
+subtitle: by Vladimir Nabokov
+tags: [poem, novel, experimental]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/424/723/9780679723424.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780679723424"
+---
+
+Vladimir Nabokov's *Pale Fire* is one of the strangest and best books I've
+read. I was recommended it by a penpal of mine (hi, V!) and I'm glad she told
+me about it. It takes the form of a posthumously-published poem by a
+fictional Great Author, John Shade, and commentary by his friend and neighbor,
+Charles Kinbote, who is from the distant land of Zembla. Upon reading the
+commentary, it becomes quickly apparent that Kinbote will not discuss much of
+the poem's actual content (that which he does discuss he usually misses the
+reference), but instead uses the commentary to talk about his homeland and its
+recently-deposed king. Only slightly less quickly apparent is the realization
+that Kinbote is indeed that king in disguise, or maybe is making the entire
+thing up out of a powerful delusion. More than anything else, *Pale Fire* is
+a novel of the strange machinations of the mind of Kinbote, who hates his
+subject even as he admires him. It's one of those books I'll need to read
+again at some point, to see if I can catch anything new.
+
+The poem itself is pretty good, and I wonder if it the recurring image of the
+waxwing ("I was the shadow of the waxwing slain", etc.) is the inspiration for
+[*Waxwing* magazine][waxwing], which is run by an old teacher of mine. It's a 999-line
+poem in four cantos about Shade's childhood, his daughter's death, and his
+writing style, among other things. Kinbote's main bent regarding the poem is
+disappointment that it wasn't about Zembla, which he claims Shade promised him
+to write about. I'm really not sure what else to say here because the book is
+so singular and self-aware that I feel strange writing a review of what is,
+essentially, a review. So if you'd like to know more, read the [Wikipedia
+page] on the book or check it out from your local library.
+
+[waxwing]: http://waxwingmag.org/
+[Wikipedia page]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Fire
A posts/book/2018-04-15-black-blizzard.md => posts/book/2018-04-15-black-blizzard.md +42 -0
@@ 0,0 1,42 @@
+---
+title: Black Blizzard
+subtitle: by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
+tags: [manga, tatsumi, noir]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/126/460/9781770460126.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781770460126"
+---
+
+I've just finished *Black Blizzard* by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. I read about this
+book in *[A Drifting Life]*, Tatsumi's memoir, where he described the writing
+process as a burst of creativity lasting twenty days. I'm assuming Drawn &
+Quarterly, the publisher, published *Black Blizzard* after interest coming
+from readers of *A Drifting Life*, which was also published by them. The
+book's a quick read (it took me just over an hour) and it's pretty good, but
+it's also apparent that Tatsumi wrote it when he was twenty-one years old.
+
+It's about a piano player who's suspected of murder and handcuffed to another
+prisoner on a train through high mountains in a blizzard. When the train
+they're on gets wrecked in an avalanche, the two men must rely on each other
+to survive in the snow. While taking refuge in a ranger's cabin, the younger
+man tells the story of how he got arrested for a murder he doesn't remember
+commiting due to being so drunk, and how he cared for a young girl with the
+circus and urged her to get out to study singing. At first, the older
+prisoner (who's done prison time for three murders) doesn't think anything of
+the pianist, but as they survive together he comes to a kind of understanding
+of the younger man, which leads to the twist ending.
+
+I won't spoil it, but I think things are a little too pat at the end of the
+story. All the loose ends are tied up in a way that I don't think rings very
+true to life, but I suppose that's the way a lot of noir stories end. At the
+end of the day, they're about action and reaction; they're really just
+melodrama. This story has a lot of good action, and I did pick up on the
+cinematic layout of the panels, which apparently was pretty rare at the time.
+
+*Black Blizzard* has made me want to read more of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's work in
+particular, and early manga in general, to compare this work to the others
+coming out in post-war Japan by Tatsumi's contemporaries. It was an
+interesting time of economic growth and upheavel in the country, and I've
+noticed that art seems to be the most interesting coming from those periods of
+time.
+
+[A Drifting Life]: https://www.acdw.net/read/10120.html
A posts/book/2018-04-25-children-of-time.md => posts/book/2018-04-25-children-of-time.md +61 -0
@@ 0,0 1,61 @@
+---
+title: Children of Time
+subtitle: by Adrian Tchaikovsky
+tags: [space opera, sci fi, empire, humanity]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/301/273/9781447273301.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781447273301"
+---
+
+I usually don't read books on my phone; I find the screen too small and blue
+to make any serious reading worthwhile. It took a really extraordinary novel,
+*Children of Time* (Adrian Tchaikovsky), to get me to enjoy the process. I
+read the entire book on my phone except for a very short stint while on a road
+trip, when I listened to a recording from [YouTube]. I finished the novel
+last Monday but it's been knocking around in my head ever since, which is
+always a sign of a great novel.
+
+I think you could call it a space opera because of its scope: the novel opens
+with the botched deployment of an intelligence-boosting nanovirus on a
+terraformed world just before the self-immolation of the human race, then
+immediately skips forward thousands of years to tell the story of (a) the
+woman-AI hybrid who's been orbiting the terraformed planet, going slowly
+insane, (b) the race of spiders that have become infected with the nanovirus
+and thus have become intelligent, and (c) the crew of the ark ship
+*Gilgamesh*, the last vestige of the survivors of humanity's ancient civil
+war, and how all three interact with each other over the span of another 2000
+years. The time spans are able to stretch as long as they do because of
+hibernation technology and an ingenious plot device by Tchaikovsky: he uses
+the same names with each successive generation of the spiders to enable them
+to become representatives of their species.
+
+Speaking of the spiders, it's obvious Tchaikovsky has put a lot of thought
+into what intelligent spider society would look like. To paraphrase my mother
+when she describes *A Watership Down*: "they're just spiders being spiders."
+They are communicative, tool-using, social creatures, but they still spin
+webs, eat their mates, and see the world as a complex web of interconnections
+(as opposed to the humans' view of ownership and scarcity); that is, they are
+still very much spiders. That Tchaikovsky was able to find those commonalities
+that would make them compelling, sympathetic characters to his human readers
+is a feat I haven't seen much in fiction. (Apparently his other novels deal
+with insect-infused humanity; I might need to check those out later.)
+
+Theme-wise, *Children of Time* is heavy on violence and humanity's
+relationship to it -- the Old Empire of humanity is wiped out through civil
+war, and civil war constantly threatens the lives of those on the *Gilgamesh*.
+The spiders are not free of violence, but most of theirs is from outside their
+species: Tchaikovsky states plainly that the spiders think more of conquering
+and integrating enemies into their society, rather than completely destroying
+them. In this way, the spiders act as foil to the humans, eventually finding a
+way out of the main conflict of the novel that eludes even the last Sentry of
+the Old Empire. In this way the novel as a whole is sort of an answer to the
+bleak portrayal of galactic social theory laid out by Liu Cixin's
+*[Three-Body Trilogy]*, where there can be no trust between different
+species and so the only possible answer to contact is to completely destroy
+the other to ensure one's own survival. *Children of Time* pointed out the
+inherent anthropocentricity of the ["super-predator view" of Fermi's
+paradox][superpredator] and gave me hope as to the possibility that other
+species may not share our particular, human penchant for destruction.
+
+[YouTube]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxe_rww2etc
+[Three-Body Trilogy]: https://www.acdw.net/read/09906.html
+[superpredator]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature_of_intelligent_life_to_destroy_others
A posts/book/2018-05-07-citizen-an-american-lyric.md => posts/book/2018-05-07-citizen-an-american-lyric.md +31 -0
@@ 0,0 1,31 @@
+---
+title: "Citizen: An American Lyric"
+subtitle: by Claudia Rankine
+tags: [politics, microagressions, race]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/903/976/9781555976903.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781555976903"
+---
+
+I don't know what I can say about this book that hasn't, I'm sure, already
+been said. It's been four years now since it was published, and I'm only now
+getting around to reading it for some reason. And at first I wasn't sure if
+it had affected me that much, but since reading it I've noticed so many other
+discussions about race, from [Gambino's *This is America*][gambino] to
+[Coates's article on Kanye][coates], *[Dirty Computer]*, and others.
+
+*Citizen* (by Claudia Rankine) is mostly a laying-bare of the various
+micro-aggressions the speaker (author?) has experienced, which includes a lot
+of erasure. It also talks about tennis more than I'd expected, about Serena
+Williams's career, about her anger that stands out more against the whiteness
+of her sport. It also includes a lot of evocative art.
+
+I guess I'm saying I'm reminded again how big of a problem race is in America,
+how rotten the foundations are, but I'm still at a [loss as to what I can
+do][loss]. I'm writing this as a hook for my [readlist] and as an admonition:
+read this book. It's important.
+
+[gambino]: https://youtu.be/VYOjWnS4cMY
+[coates]: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/
+[Dirty Computer]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdH2Sy-BlNE
+[loss]: https://www.acdw.net/poem/10146.html
+[readlist]: https://www.acdw.net/read/index.html#readlist
A posts/book/2018-05-08-ancillary-justice.md => posts/book/2018-05-08-ancillary-justice.md +38 -0
@@ 0,0 1,38 @@
+---
+title: Ancillary Justice
+subtitle: by Ann Leckie
+tags: [sci fi, AI, politics]
+series: the Imperial Radch trilogy
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/620/246/9780316246620.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316246620"
+---
+
+It turns out I like political, grand-scale space operas. I've written about
+my reading of *[Children of Time]*, and I've always been a fan of *Dune*. I
+suppose you could even say that *Hitchhiker's Guide* is, in some ways, a space
+opera, or a satire on the genre. At any rate, they get me going. The latest
+book I've read of the ilk, that I really enjoyed in fact, is *Ancillary
+Justice*, the debut novel by Ann Leckie.
+
+[Children of Time]: https://www.acdw.net/read/10136.html
+
+The universe Leckie has envisioned is the far future, during a moment of
+upheaval in the Radchaai empire that controls nearly all of humanity. The
+narrator is an A.I., formerly a troop carrier for the empire, currently only
+one ancillary soldier, the robot in human body. The narrative flashes between
+the events that led to the narrator's (called Breq in her human form)
+diminished reach and her current push for revenge. In an interview included
+at the end of my library copy, Leckie mentions that having the narrator be a
+ship is a great "hack" around the limitations of first-person narration, while
+keeping the benefits of it. She's absolutely right; reading *Ancillary
+Justice* was the closest I think we can get to getting inside the head of a
+ship.
+
+The most interesting part of the novel was the giant intelligences of the
+ships, as well as that of the supreme ruler of the Radchaai. Each of them are
+made up of thousands of bodies, seeing and hearing and doing everything at
+once. I wish we could've got more of that; maybe in the sequels (apparently
+it'll be a trilogy) we will.
+
+The rest of the storytelling was a mix of thriller and mystery, and I enjoyed
+it a lot. I highly recommend this book.
A posts/book/2018-05-17-dawn.md => posts/book/2018-05-17-dawn.md +46 -0
@@ 0,0 1,46 @@
+---
+title: Dawn
+subtitle: by Octavia Butler
+tags: [sci fi, alien, earth, humanity]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/775/603/9780446603775.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780446603775"
+---
+
+*Dawn* is the first novel of a trilogy by Octavia Butler, and before I
+finished it I requested the next from the library. This book is one
+of the best I've read in a very long time. It's about two species:
+humanity on the brink of collapse after World War III, and their
+saviors/captors the Oankali, aliens who traffic in genes. The book
+follows Lillith as she's Awoken from suspended animation, made to
+learn from and teach the aliens, and to try and train a group of
+humans to live on a refreshed Earth.
+
+The book is incredible for a few reasons: first, it deals with a lot
+of characters deftly, giving each of them real personalities and
+wants. There's an understanding of even the most selfish characters
+that they're reacting to what's in many ways a terrifying, completely
+alien situation. The Oankali, apparently, have seen it all, and
+they're utterly nonviolent to their "partners," almost to a fault.
+
+The second wonderful thing about this book is how it deals with the
+issue of consent. The main theme throught the book is how much choice
+the human characters have to participate in the aliens' crossbreeding
+program. On the one hand, they'd be dead if not for the Oankali; on
+the other, by working with them, they're losing their humanity. The
+Oankali make sure to give the humans a choice, most of the time, but
+even when a choice is presented it's between alternatives so uneven
+that it makes no sense to choose against what the Oankali want. I
+read somewhere that the book is an allegory for slavery, which I
+didn't get while reading it (probably because of my privelege as a
+white person -- I don't have to live with the reality of the history
+of enslavement), but it makes complete sense in retrospect.
+
+The world-building of *Dawn* is amazing, too. Butler unfolds the
+world through Lillith's eyes, so we learn about the living ship, the
+Oankali, the return to earth, as she does. We're left in the dark on
+some details as well, which I like because it's how real life works,
+and it means that the descriptions never got pedantic like how an
+Asimov or Clark novel can get sometimes.
+
+I highly, highly recommend this book to anyone who's listening. I'm
+sorry I didn't discover Octavia Butler sooner.
A posts/book/2018-05-25-the-insides-by-jeremy-p-bushnell.md => posts/book/2018-05-25-the-insides-by-jeremy-p-bushnell.md +45 -0
@@ 0,0 1,45 @@
+---
+title: The Insides
+subtitle: by Jeremy P. Bushnell
+tags: [magic, not great, fantasy ]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/469/195/9781612195469.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612195469"
+---
+
+This book was good, but it took me a while to read. Something about it made
+it hard for me to really get into in the way it feels people must mean when
+they say a book is "fresh" or that it "had me on the edge of my seat" or one
+of those other near-cliches that circulate around reviews nowadays (I don't
+really read many reviews (maybe I should)). I didn't get lost in it the way I
+got lost in the [last][ancillary] [two books][butler] I read, which maybe says
+more about the last two books I read than about this book, or more about my
+tastes. At any rate, I was satisfied on finishing *The Insides*, but not for
+all of the right reasons.
+
+First, let's talk about the good: Bushnell has done well with the language
+here, the dialogue (easy in a kind of cinematic way, breezy, even) and the
+narration (heavy on slang, but in a conversational instead of *Clockwork
+Orange* way) do a lot of world-building work, which is fine since the world is
+basically ours but with a patina of magic. He also switches between the two
+main characters, Ollie and Maja, deftly, juggling their very different
+personalities and concerns with skill. I also liked what I could get out of
+his conception of magic as just finding, or making, importance in the world:
+it's kind of a more explicit reading of a trend in magical writing that seems
+to be going on more recently, kind of a "low fantasy" thing that's in vogue.
+
+The problem is, magic doesn't get much more of a treatment than that --
+there's no real magical battles or drama outside of this thing called the
+Inside, which is described as the area behind the stage of the world, and one
+creature that comes out of it. Maja is able to magically track anything or
+anyone at all, and to divine their histories by looking at them, but past the
+first few chapters that ability is taken for granted, and its god-like power
+becomes pedestrian, almost. There's a bit about ancient magical weapons that
+feels shoe-horned in at the end, even though it's the whole reason the book
+goes forward; the real problem here is that the villain, or really anyone,
+doesn't have a clearly-defined motivation behind their actions. Magic is best
+used to force a character's will on the world, but none of the characters in
+this novel really use it for more than finding things, getting promotions, or
+making people fall in love with them. The patina of magic is simply too thin.
+
+[ancillary]: https://www.acdw.net/read/10150.html
+[butler]: https://www.acdw.net/read/10158.html
A posts/book/2018-05-30-fuzzy-by-tom-angleberger-and-paul-dellinger.md => posts/book/2018-05-30-fuzzy-by-tom-angleberger-and-paul-dellinger.md +37 -0
@@ 0,0 1,37 @@
+---
+title: Fuzzy
+subtitle: by Tom Angleberger and Paul Dellinger
+tags: [sci fi, youth, school, robots]
+cover: "https://origamiyoda.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/fuzzycover-424x600.jpeg"
+cover-link: "https://origamiyoda.com/the-books/"
+---
+
+I picked this book off of the bookmobile at work to read during my
+down-time, and I finished it today, due partly to its middle-school target
+demographic, but mostly to its breakneck pacing. The story is about Max, a
+student at Vanguard middle school in the near future. She befriends a new
+robot named Fuzzy for its (his) fuzzy programming capabilities: the robot
+can reprogram itself. His creators have him in a middle school to learn
+how to think on his feet and react to social situations, and he ends up
+doing much more of that than anyone had thought was possible.
+
+The novel explores emergent A.I. as well, through the school's robotic vice
+principal, Barbara, who seems to have a vendetta against Max as she
+continuously gives her discipline tags and re-grades her tests to make her
+appear worse off than she is. I thought Barbara was the most interesting
+character in the novel, since her emergent properties are slowly revealed
+to the reader (spoiler alert, I suppose?). Barbara was also the vector
+through which the most biting social commentary came through: Angleberger
+and Dellinger take hits at No Child Left Behind and the practice of
+near-constant testing with great results.
+
+The more global sub-plot was less developed, which is a shame. There are
+some complex geopolitical machinations going on in the world of *Fuzzy*,
+which the teenagers reading this book probably wouldn't find interesting.
+I wish there were another novel set in this world for adults, that could
+delve into SunTzuCo's (great name, by the way) dealings on Mars and what
+they found there, as well as the wider social fabric in America that's only
+hinted at in this novel. In a world where nearly everything is automated,
+there's bound to be interesting frictions. However, this book focuses on
+the school, Max, and her friends, which made for a fun read at ground-level
+about a near-future possibility.
A posts/book/2018-06-01-ghostopolis.md => posts/book/2018-06-01-ghostopolis.md +37 -0
@@ 0,0 1,37 @@
+---
+title: Ghostopolis
+subtitle: by Doug TenNapel
+tags: [comic, youth, death]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/287/210/9780545210287.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780545210287"
+---
+
+Here's another teen book I picked up on cover alone and read in a couple
+of hours at work (don't tell my managers or they might give me something
+to do!). It's by Doug TenNapel, who I thought I'd never heard of before
+but turns out is also the creator of *Earthworm Jim*, that vaguely
+unsettling but genius cartoon of my youth! This comic book, about a
+terminally-ill boy being accidentally sent to the Underworld and unlocking
+his True Potential(R), is equally funny, slightly disturbing, and poignant
+in its exploration of death, love, and family.
+
+Honestly, I thought the book could've been much longer -- it's even a rich
+enough world that if I were an executive at Nickolodeon or Cartoon
+Network, I'd want to option it for a series a la *Gravity Falls* or *Over
+the Garden Wall*. Many of the plot elements that are only sketched here
+-- the main character Garth's terminal disease, for example, or the
+Supernatural Immigration Task Force agent's relationship with Claire
+Voyant, or the Task Force's history itself -- could stand to be greatly
+expanded, and I think the author's thought them through enough that they'd
+make great additions to the story. The politics of the Underworld are
+complex, as well: it seems like the kind of place where all dead from all
+time go, so dinosaurs and mummies coexist with people who aren't even
+technically *alive* yet, in the linear timeline of the mortal world.
+Also, the mortal characters have ghost-like powers in the Underworld (it
+turns out that it's different physics in the Under- and Overworlds that
+enable ghosts to fly and walk through walls), and I think that'd be great
+to further explore.
+
+I guess what I'm saying is that this book is great, I really enjoyed it,
+but I would've loved to have been reading it for much longer. Maybe I'll
+write Mr. TenNapel and see if anything is in the works for this story!
A posts/book/2018-08-31-killing-it.md => posts/book/2018-08-31-killing-it.md +79 -0
@@ 0,0 1,79 @@
+---
+title: Killing It
+subtitle: by Camas Davis
+date: 2018-08-31
+tags: [meat, vegan, butchery]
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/071/980/9781101980071.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101980071"
+---
+
+I first heard about *Killing It*, and about Camas Davis and the Portland Meat
+Collective, through an interview on *Fresh Air* while driving home from a
+practice. Though I'm vegan (I feel it necessary to state this up front, sort
+of as a disclaimer: *Here is the lens I am looking through*, I'm trying to
+say), I was struck by Davis's candor about what she does, and the reverence
+she holds for the animals she kills, butchers, and eats. Her book, a memoir
+of her journey from losing her job as a magazine editor, through learning
+whole-animal farming and butchery in Gascony, France, to starting and running
+the Portland Meat Collective, glows with the same luminous honesty, an
+honesty that refuses to turn away from the uncomfortable truths of eating
+meat.
+
+Davis begins with a description of the first time she saw a pig being
+slaughtered, at the Chapolards' farm in Gascony. The Chapolards are one of a
+few "seed-to-sausage" farms that grow their own hogs, grow the feed for those
+hogs, and have a stake in every step of the process of turning those hogs into
+food. Davis's descriptions of her time there evoke the beautiful country of
+Gascony in summer, with golden afternoons, delicious, simple food, and a lot
+of hard work. A main concern of the book is whether she is romanticizing what
+raising and killing an animal for food takes, both in body and spirit; she
+repeatedly stresses how important reverence for the animal's life is to even
+be able to eat any of it, a viewpoint I found refreshing.
+
+The weeks in Gascony and the months afterward, finding the people who would
+help found the Portland Meat Collective, were also a time of intense personal
+change for Camas Davis, and she attempts to interweave those changes with the
+story of figuring out what ethical meat means to her, to mixed effect. As I
+was reading, I repeatedly thought, "I love this book, but I'm not sure I like
+*her*." She involves herself in a love triangle, judges other women who
+aren't in France for what she thinks are the right reasons, and while she
+isn't sure she deserves all the press she receives once she's back in the
+States, she accepts it anyway. Of course, I'd think that as I was reading a
+particular section, but after I put the book away and thought about it some
+more, I realized that this is a memoir. Memoirs are written by people who've
+been through intense personal change, and reflect who they were at the time.
+And maybe Camas Davis wasn't the best person she could be at that time, but
+now I'm writing this review, I respect her for being transparent about who she
+was, and brave enough to let us -- strangers -- into that complicated time of
+her life. And I can see how, for her, her personal life and her work life
+were inextricable from each other.
+
+In fact, a main theme of the book (and her philosophy on what she does) is
+transparency. There's a TEDx talk she gives (the book made me want to
+research further, follow her footsteps so I could see with my eyes what she
+made me see in my head) where she compares it to those paper fortune tellers
+we made in middle school, and how what she tries to do, with her classes and
+her advocacy, is to unfold those fortune tellers so we can see all of the
+process of meat at once, from growing the feed to boiling the head. I think
+she included the personal parts of her story in *Killing It* to enact that
+philosophy of transparency in her writing, and I do admire her bravery. She
+got a lot of flack from vegans, vegetarians, and even meat-eaters for her
+transparency in butchery, and I wonder how the people featured in her book
+feel about the parts they played in her life.
+
+After reading this book, I'm not going to start eating meat again. I was
+fascinated by the descriptions of how to "open a pig like a book," or
+separating the loin from the ribcage, or scooping the brain out of the skull.
+Intellectually, I would love to attend one of the classes offered by the
+Portland Meat Collective or a sister collective around the country. People
+like Camas Davis and the farms and butchers she works with are eating meat in
+the most ethical way possible. But for me, eating meat is about more than the
+treatment of the animal in its life and death. What I kept reminding myself
+of as I was reading this book, and becoming interested in the methods within,
+was that animals are intelligent creatures, with their own rich inner lives
+that, while alien to our own, are worth no less. Regardless of how well
+they're treated, they do not deserve to die to fill our bellies, at least in a
+bountiful country like America, where alternatives abound. However, since I
+know we're not going to stop eating meat anytime soon, I hope Camas Davis's
+methods and ethos begin to gain steam. If I did eat meat, I'd only want to
+eat meat done her way.
A posts/book/2018-12-15-handmaids-tale.md => posts/book/2018-12-15-handmaids-tale.md +92 -0
@@ 0,0 1,92 @@
+---
+title: The Handmaid's Tale
+subtitle: by Margaret Atwood
+tags:
+- sci-fi
+- atwood
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/943/879/9781328879943.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781328879943"
+---
+
+::: note
+I want to open this review with an admission that I saw the Hulu show first.
+The show has a number of departures from Atwood's novel,
+most important being the change of scope
+from what, in the novel, is a very close telling
+that ends up within a frame of academic remembrance,
+to the show's more immediate,
+more dramatic telling of the story in a world that is much closer to our own.
+Since I came from the world as described in the show,
+I read the book with certain prejudices
+that I would not have had if I were to read the story fresh.
+I don't know what they are,
+but they exist,
+I'm sure.
+:::
+
+Margaret Atwood's *The Handmaid's Tale* is a story that takes place,
+from 2018, in the slight past.
+It's not completely clear what the year is,
+but I believe it is around the turn of the millennium,
+given the way the Eighties are talked about.
+I was surprised at the timing of the story,
+but then I realized the book was written in 1985,
+so Atwood was clearly concerned immediately
+about the trends she was seeing in society at that time.
+I wasn't around then,
+so I have no knowledge of what it was like.
+This isn't how I wanted to begin my review of her book.
+
+I'm not sure how I want to begin.
+There's a large part of me that feels inadequate to pass judgment on the *Tale*,
+since I'm a man,
+and I see the *Tale* to be a sort of testimony
+to the very real fears of a woman as to her place in a society
+that constantly treats her as *lesser than* someone like me.
+I feel that it is a man's place,
+it is my place,
+in these situations to listen
+and to come to an empathetic understanding of the fears thus laid out
+in order to help eradicate their reasons.
+I suppose I can begin there, then,
+and state that I resonated with the emotional core of the novel
+as the testimony of Offred during her time as a handmaid in Gilead.
+I call it a testimony because of the second great stroke of this novel:
+the coda that frames the preceding text as a transcription of an artifact
+found in Bangor, Maine,
+a hundred and fifty years after the events of the novel.
+Giving us that distance,
+from the point of view of a world that's moved on from Gilead,
+lends hope to an otherwise hopeless story:
+although Offred's own future,
+and those of the women who suffered alongside her,
+the world did eventually move on from the religious extremism of Gilead.
+It offers a relief from the almost claustrophobic circumstances of Offred,
+which I appreciated,
+especially after watching two seasons of the show
+where that claustrophobia is a major thematic element.
+
+The world was, of course,
+richer in the novel,
+as it usually is in the source material from the adaptations.
+You have more room in a book, after all.
+I liked how fleshed out the world-at-large seemed to be,
+how much thought had been put into where the rebellions would be,
+the geopolitical landscape that would allow Gilead to exist at all,
+and the machinations of the government
+to raise money and keep the population in check.
+There was also a continual double-vision surrounding the city,
+since Offred lived there,
+in the time before,
+that reflected the double nature of a fundamentalist government like Gilead's.
+I liked it, overall,
+though it took me a long time to read.
+The dreaminess,
+the lyrical nature of the prose
+paced the book slowly,
+making it hard for me to sustain attention.
+But it was exactly,
+I think,
+what Atwood was going for.
+It's exactly what transcribed audio would sound like from someone
+who's just escaped such an abusive society.
A posts/book/2019-01-12-buddha-vol-1-kapilavastu.md => posts/book/2019-01-12-buddha-vol-1-kapilavastu.md +63 -0
@@ 0,0 1,63 @@
+---
+title: "Buddha: vol. 1, Kapilavastu"
+subtitle: by Osamu Tezuka
+date: 2019-01-12
+tags: manga, buddhism,
+# vim: ft=pandoc
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/565/234/9781932234565.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781932234565"
+---
+
+Osamu Tezuka is best known as the writer of the universally acclaimed
+(though I've never gotten around to reading it)
+*Astro Boy*,
+but I've seen *Buddha* on the comics shelf at the library for years
+and just decided the other day to get into it.
+It's the story of the Buddha,
+Siddhartha Gautama,
+and his journey to enlightenment.
+At least,
+as far as I know:
+I've come to the story knowing very little about the Buddha except that
+he's the founder of Buddhism,
+he grew up a prince,
+and he's *not* the fat smiling guy.
+And he only appears in the first volume, *Kapilavastu*,
+toward the very end,
+when he's born.
+None of this is to say that it's a bad book
+or that I was disappointed in any way.
+Quite the contrary:
+I greatly enjoyed reading the story
+about Chapra, the slave boy, his mother,
+the monk Naradatta, on a holy mission,
+and the pariah Tatta,
+and their adventures through India as their fortunes change.
+In fact,
+I'm not sure how their stories will intertwine with Siddhartha's,
+but I'm excited to find out how they do in later volumes.
+
+I've read one story by Tezuka before:
+*Ode to Kirihito*,
+which is a story about a doctor who goes to investigate a rare disease
+that makes people look like dogs,
+but gets infected with the disease in a complex political conspiracy.
+It was a strange but gripping story,
+and *Buddha* looks like it's going to be similar.
+The art style in both books is humorous and beautiful:
+some pages in *Buddha* have so much detail it's like looking at a work of art,
+and there are some site-gags too,
+like the author inserting himself in a cameo
+and some fourth-wall-breaking commentary.
+Maybe it's the language difference,
+but I thought some of the jokes fell flat.
+However, they didn't detract from the rest of the book.
+Much has been made, as well,
+of Tezuka's cinematic style of paneling,
+and I agree.
+Some fight sequences read as though they're moving in real time,
+like a movie.
+
+Overall,
+I'm pleased with the first volume of *Buddha*
+and looking forward to reading the next seven.
A posts/book/2019-01-31-children-of-blood-and-bone.md => posts/book/2019-01-31-children-of-blood-and-bone.md +15 -0
@@ 0,0 1,15 @@
+---
+title: Children of Blood and Bone
+subtitle: by Tomi Adeyemi
+tags: fantasy, epic, colorism
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/972/170/9781250170972.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250170972"
+---
+
+I've heard *Children of Blood and Bone*, the debut novel from Nigerian-American author Tomi Adeyemi, described as the "Black *Harry Potter*." I presume it's because both books feature magic and teenagers, but I think the comparison stops there. *Harry Potter* takes place in a world where magic, though hidden from muggles, is celebrated and loved for its usefulness. In *Children of Blood and Bone*, however, magic has caused so much fear in non-magical people (called *kosidán*) that, when magic mysteriously died, the kosidán King used the opportunity to systematically kill every *maji* in the kingdom of Orïsha. The beginning conditions of the novel are much more bleak, and these bleak conditions allow the novel to explore much more nuanced societal pressures than an epic battle between good and evil.
+
+*Children of Blood and Bone* is a deeply imagined book, with a fully-built world, which means it requires a lot of world-building in the first chapter. As such, the book takes a little while to get going, but once Zélie, a would-be maji or *divîner*, meets Princess Amari on the run from the palace, the story picks up speed. Amari has found an ancient relic that awakens Zélie's powers, and they embark on a quest with Tzain, Zélie's brother, to restore magic to the entire kingdom. Hot in pursuit is Amari's brother, Prince Inan, who has fully drunk his father's *magic-is-evil* Kool-Aid. However, a complication arises when Inan and Zélie experience a magical connection, which leads to what I thought was a Prince Zuko[^zuko]-esque redemption arc for Inan.
+
+Along the way, Adeyemi's novel tackles some heavy themes, such as colorism, genocide, child abuse, torture, and self-hatred of the oppressed. Being a book for children, it would be easy to gloss over such topics to keep the appearance of "family-friendliness," but I'm impressed that Adeyemi refused to shy away from the lived experiences of her characters, including all their pain, old and new, on the page. She also manages to address systematic injustice in an accessible way, exploring the issue of the maji from all angles, so that we can see how genocide can arise from seemingly familial trauma: King Saran's final decision to kill all the maji and systematically un-people the divîners arose when his entire family was killed by maji, I'm assuming in a political power grab. The blood between maji and kosidán has been bad for a long time in Orïsha, which makes the book's resolution even more compelling.
+
+I didn't know before reading *Children of Blood and Bone* that it was the first of a forthcoming trilogy from Adeyemi. With the world-turning ending of the first installment, I cannot wait to read the rest of the series. The ending of the novel was satisfying on its own, but it will feed into more problems that I'm excited to see play out.
A posts/book/2019-02-13-the-marrow-thieves.md => posts/book/2019-02-13-the-marrow-thieves.md +57 -0
@@ 0,0 1,57 @@
+---
+title: The Marrow Thieves
+subtitle: by Cherie Dimaline
+tags: sci fi, post apocalyptic, colonialism
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/863/864/9781770864863.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781770864863"
+---
+
+I forget where I heard about *The Marrow Thieves*, which is a shame because
+I'd like to know what else this person recommends. Cherie Dimaline's novel,
+set in the late 20th Century after the world has been destroyed by global
+warming, follows French, a Canadian Indigenous boy, as he runs from
+"Recruiters," white people who harvest Indigenous people for their marrow.
+You see, only the Indigenous can dream any more, in a world utterly without
+hope, and the key to their dreams is in their marrow. It's a high concept,
+and I would've appreciated a bit more world-building on that detail, but it
+ends up being a conceit to put pressure on the main character and his family
+as they run.
+
+In the very beginning of the book, French is with his brother Mitch, who is
+"recruited" to serve in what is a sci-fi re-imagining of the infamous Canadian
+Indigenous schools. What I know about the historical schools is limited to
+the information in a children's book I read, but they were basically centers
+of erasure: they erased the Indigenous' culture, their language, and
+metaphorically, their dreams. The Canadian government has since apologized
+for ever using them, but Dimaline's novel takes the cynical view that when
+life gets hard, the people in power are quick to forget their humanity.
+
+French is found by a group led by Miigwans, the patriarch of a "family" of
+displaced Indigenous people. The rest of the novel follows them as they run
+North, trying to get away from the cities and the South where crime, ruin, and
+despair abound. The book is not particularly hopeful in the short term; it
+never shies away from how hard the main characters' lives will be. However,
+they take the long view, knowing that their people have survived through more,
+and will continue to survive.
+
+The real gem of the novel, to me, was the relationships of the characters. So
+often, Indigenous people are portrayed as stereotypes in fiction, or at least
+as some Others that aren't truly knowable to the main characters. *The Marrow
+Thieves* turns that trope on its head: all of the characters are Indigenous,
+and they're all fully realized human beings with their own complicated
+relationships to one another (of course they are!). I feel strange writing
+this out, because it's obvious that everyone is people once you say it, but
+the fact is that books featuring Indigenous main characters are not really in
+the mainstream, and that enables their further marginalization.
+
+*The Marrow Thieves* is a really well-written book with great characters who
+_happen_ to be Indigenous, though now that I write that I realize it's not
+right either. These characters are deeply tied to who they are, to their
+senses of self and community, and to the traditions they've lost. French
+talks about hoarding up the small snatches of "the Language" Miigwans and the
+other elder, Minerva, speak to the group. Their main issue isn't that the
+world is ending, but rather that they are being routinely hunted and bled like
+animals by white people, because of who they are. These characters don't just
+_happen_ to be Indigenous, and to say so is to risk colorblindness. They are
+completely themselves, and the novel forces the reader to recognize that.
+That's the true power of Dimaline's novel. I hope to read more like it soon.
A posts/book/2019-03-21-cain.md => posts/book/2019-03-21-cain.md +63 -0
@@ 0,0 1,63 @@
+---
+title: Cain
+subtitle: by José Saramago
+# vim: ft=pandoc
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/178/840/9780547840178.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780547840178"
+---
+
+I'm a fan of stories told from a side character's perspective.[^parallel]
+These stories include
+[_Goliath_](https://www.acdw.net/09921/goliath/),
+[_Grendel_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grendel_(novel)),
+[_Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
+dead_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_and_Guildenstern_Are_Dead),
+[_Barrabas_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas_(novel)),
+[_Foe_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(novel)),
+and others
+(I didn't enjoy
+[_Wicked_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_(Maguire_novel)#Adaptations),
+but it wasn't for the foundation but
+the author's inability to tell an interesting story).
+The most recent of these that I've read
+is _Cain_ by José Saramago.
+In it, Abel's murderous brother is taken on a tour
+through much of god's greater Old Testament mistakes,
+from the Tower of Babel through to the Great Flood.
+In _Cain_, god isn't the Christian-imagined,
+all-loving Father of the human race,
+but more of a middle-manager type,
+making everything up, literally, as he goes along.
+As for cain[^1],
+while he is selfish and self-serving,
+and while he did kill his brother
+(as well as a few others by the end of the novel),
+he's portrayed in a largely sympathetic light,
+a simple man who's been screwed over by god at every turn
+and is righteously angry at him.
+With these two main characters and the device of time travel,
+Saramago weaves an excellent,
+bitingly funny satire of Christian religion
+by pointing out the obvious inconsistencies in its conception
+of the deity.
+
+[^parallel]: I just found out these are called *parallel novels*, and that
+ there is a [list of them on
+ Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Parallel_literature)!
+ Looks like I have a new reading list.
+
+[^1]: Saramago dispenses with capital letters for names in his novel,
+ and so shall I here.
+
+# Selected quotes
+
+> Crying over spilt milk is not as pointless as people say, it is in a way
+> instructive because it shows the true scale of the frivolity of certain
+> human behavior ...
+
+> Yes, your god perhaps, but not theirs.
+
+> Cain is the man who hates god.
+
+> I am endowed ... with a conscience so flexible that it agrees with whatever
+> I do. [god]{.cite .inline}
A posts/book/2019-03-26-mental-load.md => posts/book/2019-03-26-mental-load.md +59 -0
@@ 0,0 1,59 @@
+---
+title: The mental load
+subtitle: by Emma
+tags: feminism, comic
+# vim: ft=pandoc.markdown
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/188/809/9781609809188.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781609809188"
+---
+
+I think I first read the comic ["You should've asked"][comic] some time ago,
+I'm not sure exactly when.
+At some point recently,
+I found out that the author, "[Emma],"
+has a new book out titled *The mental load* after a phrase in the above comic,
+and I knew I had to read it.
+So I grabbed it from the library and read the whole thing.
+
+[comic]: <https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/>
+ ""
+[Emma]: <https://english.emmaclit.com/>
+ "The site's available in both French and English."
+
+The rest of the comics in *The mental load* deal with social justice issues,
+and run the gamut from women's issues
+such as the male gaze, being "shrill," and sexual health,
+to race-based problems like racism in policing and the French burqa ban.
+She does a really good job of accessibly explaining her points,
+and taking the reader along as she traces her own journey of "waking up,"
+as she calls it,
+to the inequities inherent in modern society.
+
+One story in particular is an allegory to the burqa ban in France
+that imagines a different future:
+Europeans have migrated en masse South,
+to a country where no one wears a shirt at all.
+The main character of the story has a mother who does where her shirt,
+and she does as well,
+as part of her identity;
+she's shunned and discriminated against because of a simple wardrobe choice.
+By reframing the burqa debate in an easier-to-relate way
+for Western audiences,
+Emma is able to show how a burqa ban really makes no sense
+and is, in fact, a form of oppression of a minority group.
+
+The comics on motherhood were also eye-opening for me,
+though the little breakdown she does showing how bad French parental leave is
+made me cry a little on the inside:
+at least the French have *any* parental leave!
+We really have it bad in the U.S.
+I don't have any children right now but when I do,
+I'm going to make sure not to fall into those gendered patterns
+of letting R take care of everything.
+
+Emma's art is simplistic and spare,
+and lets the words do most of the work.
+I think the format works a little better for a website than a printed book,
+but I'm glad she's able to get the notoriety (and money)
+that a book brings over a blog.
+I highly recommend going and reading her blog, at least.
A posts/book/2019-04-10-seven-types-of-atheism.md => posts/book/2019-04-10-seven-types-of-atheism.md +58 -0
@@ 0,0 1,58 @@
+---
+title: Seven types of atheism
+subtitle: by John Gray
+tags: nonfiction, atheism
+cover: "https://images.booksense.com/images/092/261/9780374261092.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374261092"
+---
+
+For about the first third of *Seven Types of Atheism*
+I was ambivalent about it.
+I wasn't sure if I liked the content,
+which is a survey of "post-Christian thought,"
+as one reviewer put it,
+from present day on back to a few hundred years after Christ,
+or the tone, which especially for the newer,
+in-vogue Dawkins school of atheism,
+what Gray calls "evangelical atheism,"
+tends toward the dismissive.
+Which I understand why -- those guys are dinguses[^1].
+I wrote more about my thoughts on the first few chapters
+in an [earlier blog post][early].
+
+[^1]: dingi?
+[early]: https://www.acdw.net/10470/science-as-a-god/
+
+However, I found it hard to put the book down.
+By the end of the book, I realized that John Gray does a good job
+of delineating the different currents of thought in atheism,
+and how much of those currents are a direct result of their origin
+in Christian and Platonist thought.
+He made me realize I'd been believing in a myth of human progress,
+I'd been placing humankind on a pedestal as a replacement for God,
+I'd been thinking that science has all the answers, or if not all,
+most of them.
+In short, he made me realize that much of what we think,
+even in not believing in god,
+comes from a monotheistic, especially Christian, viewpoint.
+
+Not that he gives any solutions to the matter.
+I think that would actually be against his main thesis,
+because by offering a solution he'd be subscribing to the idea
+that history is a march toward a perfect world.
+I'm not sure what to do with this.
+I'm used to finding problems and then solutions,
+to at least talking about what should be done even if
+I lack the power or the will to make it happen.
+The thing with humanity, though,
+is that we're essentially the same as we've been for 10,000 generations
+and we're not going to change in any meaningful way for a while longer.
+The problems we have now are going to stay problems.
+Maybe we'll move toward a more equal world for a while,
+or a "better" one (whatever that means),
+but there's no guarantee that it's going to stay that way.
+
+I think that I've come away from this book agreeing with Shestov,
+at least in this: "History is one thing, and meaning another."
+I don't know what to do with this.
+I guess I need to make my peace with it.
A posts/book/2019-04-25-ancillary-sword.md => posts/book/2019-04-25-ancillary-sword.md +62 -0
@@ 0,0 1,62 @@
+---
+title: Ancillary Sword
+subtitle: by Ann Leckie
+tags: scifi, space opera, sequel
+cover: "https://www.annleckie.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Leckie_AncillarySword_TP.jpg"
+cover-link: "https://www.annleckie.com/novel/ancillary-sword/"
+series: the Imperial Radch trilogy
+---
+
+It's been quite a while since I read _[Ancillary Justice]_,
+Ann Leckie's first novel in what turned out the be a trilogy.
+So I began _Ancillary Sword_ with a little confusion.
+It starts off assuming the reader has a working knowledge of the world,
+as most sequels do,
+and I had read _Justice_ so quickly that it took some prodding
+(and some reading of synopses)
+to remember how we had got to the beginning of _Sword_.
+Which is not at all to the book's deficit, of course:
+in fact, it starts only a few hours after the previous ends,
+which I really enjoy in sequels.
+
+[Ancillary Justice]: /10149/ancillary-justice/
+
+However, after getting over the initial bumps of remembering,
+the story seemed to me to be more of a bridge
+between the first and third novels than as a story in its own right.
+There's plenty of set up
+for multiple huge conflicts to play out in the next instalment,
+but the story in this novel seems pat by comparison.
+
+Breq Mianaai is sent on a mission to the far-flung Athoek system,
+which grows most of the tea for the entire Radch.
+Once there, Breq finds a lot of injustice at the hands of those in power
+against the residents of the Undergarden,
+decks of the main Station that are in disrepair,
+as well as against the fieldworkers on the planet,
+and I appreciated Leckie's treatment of the subject of justice
+after a colonization as both nuanced and unafraid.
+But Breq herself feels almost like a Mary Jane character
+in that she's able to know every other character's thoughts and feelings
+and is hardly ever wrong.
+The middle of the book was a little bit of a slog
+as she went downwell[^downwell] to look into a situation
+with the daughter of a local beourgeois
+while in mourning for the alien Presger translator
+(whose death went unavenged in this novel,
+which I can only assume means it'll come to a head next novel)
+and got lost in local politics.
+
+[^downwell]: I really like this term in its colloquialness referring to the
+ gravity well of a planet; it's little things like this that really make a
+ world *real*.
+
+I think I understand what Leckie's driving at here:
+*all* politics are important,
+and *all* politics are local,
+but I was really hoping for more of the large-scale intrigue
+that I remember from _Ancillary Justice_.
+This book was smaller in scope, which I was not prepared for.
+I'm hopeful for a lot of action and galaxy-spanning conflict for the third,
+however, and I think Leckie will deliver.
+She's a strong writer with great ideas.
A posts/drawing/2018-05-31-splenda.md => posts/drawing/2018-05-31-splenda.md +6 -0
@@ 0,0 1,6 @@
+---
+title: splenda
+tags: []
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-06-02-xcv-1.md => posts/drawing/2018-06-02-xcv-1.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 1
+tags: [comic, questions]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-06-16-xcv-2.md => posts/drawing/2018-06-16-xcv-2.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 2
+tags: [sunsets]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-07-01-xcv-3.md => posts/drawing/2018-07-01-xcv-3.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 3
+tags: [sides]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-07-15-xcv-4.md => posts/drawing/2018-07-15-xcv-4.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 4
+tags: [bus, template]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-07-20-xcv-4a.md => posts/drawing/2018-07-20-xcv-4a.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 4a
+tags: [bus, rain]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-08-01-xcv-5.md => posts/drawing/2018-08-01-xcv-5.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 5
+tags: [eating]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-08-16-xcv-6.md => posts/drawing/2018-08-16-xcv-6.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 6
+tags: [floating]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/drawing/2018-09-01-xcv-7.md => posts/drawing/2018-09-01-xcv-7.md +7 -0
@@ 0,0 1,7 @@
+---
+title: XCV 7
+tags: [billboard, magritte]
+series: xcv
+---
+
+
A posts/essay/2017-07-03-a-proper-hello.md => posts/essay/2017-07-03-a-proper-hello.md +49 -0
@@ 0,0 1,49 @@
+---
+title: A Proper Hello
+tags: [metablog, review]
+---
+
+# First things first (or fourth, or ...)
+
+This is probably the fifth or sixth time I've tried starting some sort of
+blog. When my first girlfriend broke up with me, I word-puked all over some
+startup's Dropbox-linked minimal thing, but once that was done, it was done
+(and I'm not even sure if the host would still be there even if I remembered
+what it was). I put my [Master's thesis online],[^1] sort of like a blog, if
+you're willing to call something that is totally not a blog a blog (hey, I'm
+trying to self-promote here, though really I think the biggest thing that
+keeps me from writing is the constant editor in my head whispering *readers,
+readers* so that I can't do anything but think of that other person, the
+possible future reader, and what they'll think of me). At some point last year
+I tried (on this [Github repo] even!) to do some kind of "Failure blog"
+inspired by Baton Rouge's first annual [Failure Fest], but eventually I burnt
+out on that too (shocking).
+
+But I'm really going to try this time. I've decided I'm done with thinking
+about a reader, or posturing like I don't care, or whatever it is I've been
+doing that means I'm not writing. That's what I want to do; it's what I'll do.
+I'm also going to edit my own writing.
+
+So there you have it: first of all, this blog is a practice for my writing and
+an outlet for talking about the stuff I read or watch or listen to or
+experience.
+
+# My name is Case
+
+I'm a writer by training and a reader by trade. I get to read books to small
+children for a living, which is as fulfilling as I thought it'd be. Honestly
+the hardest part is figuring out which books are best for a big group: just
+today I tried *I'm My Own Dog* by [David Ezra Stein] and it did not work. The
+humor was lost on a big group of twenty, and kids to boot.
+
+Anyway, I've been journaling for a bit and now wanted to take it to *the next
+level*, which in 2017 is online. So here I am. Online.
+
+[^1]: I'm linking to the Github repo instead of a generated page because I'm
+ still trying to get these published. -- Note: LOL of course I'm not,
+ anymore at least! Here's the link: <https://autocento.acdw.net>
+
+ [Master's thesis online]: https://github.com/duckwork/autocento
+ [Github repo]: https://github.com/duckwork/duckwork.github.io
+ [Failure Fest]: https://www.businessreport.com/article/failure-celebr-at-brew-event
+ [David Ezra Stein]: http://davidezrastein.com
A posts/essay/2017-10-09-update-a-nearlyfreespeech-net-website-with-git.md => posts/essay/2017-10-09-update-a-nearlyfreespeech-net-website-with-git.md +81 -0
@@ 0,0 1,81 @@
+---
+title: Update a nearlyfreespeech.net website with Git
+tags: [metablog, git, nearlyfreespeech]
+---
+
+::: note
+This article is basically cribbed from a *Nerdess* ([archive.org link])
+article about the same topic. I used this method when first beginning my
+blog, though I'm now thinking about changing to rsync or something similar.
+Either way, this is here for posterity's sake, for what it's worth.
+:::
+
+# On your computer
+
+This is basic git setup-type stuff. If it doesn't make sense, you'll need to
+look at a git tutorial, because this isn't one.
+
+1. Download and install [git], if you haven't, and create a new repository in
+ a folder for your site:
+
+ git init
+
+2. Write your site however you write it, then add and commit everything to
+ git:
+
+ git add *
+ git commit -m "First commit"
+
+# On the server
+
+I use [Nearly Free Speech] for my server, but this should work with pretty
+much any server with SSH access.
+
+3. Connect to your server with SSH, navigate to your public directory (with
+ NFSN it's /home/public), and run the following:
+
+ mkdir .git
+ cd .git
+ git init --bare
+
+4. Now that the server repository has been made, you need to make sure that
+ files pushed to the repository are published to the public folder. We'll
+ do that with a post-receive hook:
+
+ vim hooks/post-receive
+
+5. A *hook* in git is just a shell script that runs on certain events, in
+ this case, after git receives files from a push. The most trivial
+ post-receive hook that'll work is this:
+
+ GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/public git checkout -f
+
+ Since beginning this blog, however, I've made my script a little more
+ complicated. The above file worked just fine though, especially if you
+ have a lot of static files you want to serve.
+
+6. Make sure the post-receive hook has the right permissions:
+
+ chmod +x hooks/post-receive
+
+# Back on your computer
+
+7. This step need to be done back "home," as it were -- you just need to add
+ your newly-created remote to git:
+
+ git remote add <name> ssh://<user>@<host>/home/public/.git
+
+Obviously, replace `<user>` with your username on the server, and `<host>`
+with the hostname, and don't forget to give your remote a good name -- I used
+"nfsn" but you could use "web," "website," or "fart," it doesn't matter to me.
+
+8. The last thing you need to do is commit your changes to your website:
+
+ git push -u <name> master
+
+And everything should be where it needs to be. Good job! You've used git to
+update a website, you hacker you.
+
+ [archive.org link]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160316095149/http://www.nerdess.net/blog/nerdy/git-by-example-how-to-update-your-website-on-nearlyfreespeech-net-via-git/
+ [git]: https://git-scm.org
+ [Nearly Free Speech]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net
A posts/essay/2018-02-10-not-quite-ready-for-primetime-but-i-m-getting-close.md => posts/essay/2018-02-10-not-quite-ready-for-primetime-but-i-m-getting-close.md +156 -0
@@ 0,0 1,156 @@
+---
+title: Not quite ready for primetime (but I'm getting close!)
+tags: [metablog, nearlyfreespeech, git, generated]
+---
+
+Today I'm working a lot on this website, so I thought I'd write a little blog
+post detailing what I'm trying to do and how it sort of works. I build this
+site using `pandoc` with a lot of lua filters and an index.py to stitch it all
+together. You can check out the actual code at the [mirror] I've set up at
+Gitlab.
+
+# Organization
+
+This site is organized simply: everything *I* write is dumped in `/text`, and
+the extension determines what folder it goes in at the root. For example, I'm
+doing this thing where I'm writing a poem everyday, so those go under
+[`poem`]. This blog post and others will go under [`blog`]. When I build the
+site, I just `make` and it uses `pandoc` to build everything (doing stuff for
+me like slugifying headers, converting `LineBlocks` to verse blocks, or
+automatically generating links across categories to stuff written on the same
+day). Then, `index.py` is called to make little indexes and finally make the
+index for the site. It's not 100% perfect (especially the site thing), but
+it's good enough for now---and I can always fix it later.
+
+You can read more about this stuff (eventually, when I get around to writing
+it) at the [Colophon].
+
+# Shuffling
+
+The biggest thing I'm doing *today* is working on my little shuffle-script to
+take texts and shuffle them around. I've already done that once, with "[The
+Snubs]", though that was with a thrown-together version of the script I'm
+including below. Today, I used an [article] I read yesterday in the *Oxford
+American* about the phenomenon of blues music in Tokyo and shuffled it around
+to generate something resembling a poem, which I then massaged into something
+that honestly, isn't great. But it's something!
+
+Here's the script (I'm copying it here since it's not currently under source
+control), `shuflr`:
+
+``` {.python .numberSource}
+import argparse
+import os.path
+import random
+import re
+
+
+class Shuflr():
+ def __init__(self, textfile, dedup=False):
+ self.words = None
+ self.dedup = dedup
+ with open(textfile) as f:
+ self.all = f.read()
+
+ def remove_punc(self):
+ # Convert dashes to spaces
+ nopunc = re.sub(r'--+|\s+-+\s+|[–—]', ' ', self.all)
+ # Convert curly apostrophes to normal
+ nopunc = re.sub(r'[‘’]', "'", nopunc)
+ # Remove everything else
+ nopunc = re.sub(r'[^ \t\n\r\f\v\w\'-]', '', nopunc)
+ self.all = nopunc
+
+ def splitwords(self):
+ self.words = self.all.split()
+ if self.dedup:
+ self.words = list(set(self.words))
+
+ def shuffle(self, cleanup=True, normalize_case=False):
+ shuf = []
+
+ if cleanup:
+ self.remove_punc()
+
+ if normalize_case:
+ self.all = self.all.lower()
+
+ if not self.words:
+ self.splitwords()
+
+ while len(self.words) > 0:
+ i = random.randint(0, len(self.words) - 1)
+ w = self.words.pop(i)
+ shuf.append(w)
+
+ self.words = shuf
+
+ def versify(self, minLength, maxLength, chance):
+ lines = []
+ count = 0
+ if maxLength <= minLength:
+ ml = maxLength
+ maxLength = minLength
+ minLength = ml
+
+ if not self.words:
+ self.splitwords()
+
+ for w in self.words:
+ lines.append(w)
+ if count < minLength:
+ count += 1
+ elif count > maxLength:
+ lines.append('\n')
+ count = 0
+ elif random.randint(0, 100) >= chance:
+ lines.append('\n')
+ count = 0
+ else:
+ count += 1
+
+ self.words = lines
+
+
+def write_to_template(words, outfile):
+ fi = 1
+ fixname = outfile
+ while os.path.isfile(fixname):
+ fi += 1
+ fixname = outfile + str(fi)
+ with open(fixname, 'w') as f:
+ f.write(' '.join(words) + '\n')
+
+
+if __name__ == '__main__':
+ parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
+ parser.add_argument("infile", type=str,
+ help="File to shuffle")
+ parser.add_argument("-p", "--keeppunc", action="store_true",
+ help="Keep punctuation?")
+ parser.add_argument("-l", "--lowercase", action="store_true",
+ help="Lowercase everything?")
+ parser.add_argument("-d", "--dedup", action="store_true",
+ help="Remove duplicate words")
+ parser.add_argument("-o", "--output", type=str, default="",
+ help="""Filename to write to.
+ If < file > exists, append a number to the name
+ til it doesn't.""")
+ args = parser.parse_args()
+
+ random.seed()
+ s = Shuflr(args.infile, args.dedup)
+ s.shuffle(not args.keeppunc, args.lowercase)
+ s.versify(4, 16, 50)
+ if args.output:
+ write_to_template(s.words, args.output)
+ else:
+ print(' '.join(s.words))
+```
+
+ [mirror]: https://gitlab.com/acdw/acdw.xyz
+ [`poem`]: /poem
+ [`blog`]: /blog
+ [Colophon]: /colophon.html
+ [The Snubs]: https://www.acdw.net/poem/10044.html
+ [article]: http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/1066-sweet-bitter-blues
A posts/essay/2018-02-19-on-recipes-and-food-blogs.md => posts/essay/2018-02-19-on-recipes-and-food-blogs.md +45 -0
@@ 0,0 1,45 @@
+---
+title: On recipes and food blogs
+tags: [complaint, cook]
+---
+
+[I love to cook]. It's meditative, substantive, and life-giving. It's the best
+parts of following directions and improvising techniques both. I cook nearly
+every day and I think I'm getting pretty good at it; not *Masterchef* level,
+by any means, but I am at the relatives-asking-for-recipes stage of skill.
+When I'm looking for something to make, I look in cookbooks (my local library
+is a wonderful resource!), of course, and I look where everyone is getting
+their information these days -- online.
+
+If you are like me and love cooking, or if you just like cooking, or if you've
+ever looked at a food blog before, I'm sure you've noticed that *every food
+blog has **a fucking ESSAY** before the actual recipe!* I mean, I get it,
+these people are mostly bloggers or photographers or whatever, or they're
+trying to leverage their skills at cooking and writing into like, a career,
+which is great. We need more cooks who are passionate about writing and
+writers who are passionate about cooking, like those are two pursuits that
+should be married harder than ... people who are really really married. Fine
+and dandy. But what *else* we need is like an online version of *The Joy of
+Cooking* or print cookbooks in general, but online: we just need. the fucking.
+recipe. With minimal introduction, if any. Give us weights, give us measures,
+give us preparation, method, *mise en place* -- we just don't need the story
+behind some dish. We don't care, we promise.
+
+If you *must* give us your story, possibly because it features Stephen Tyler
+or a spiritual awakening -- give it to us at the end, after the recipe, so we
+don't have to scroll for ten years when we're in the middle of stir-frying
+some mung beans or whatever. That's really annoying.
+
+-- That turned into a little bit of a rant, so here's my main point: on this
+site (actually in the [food part][I love to cook]), I include recipes of
+things I've made, mostly cribbed from other people (but I've checked IP laws
+around recipes; I'm pretty sure I'm okay as long as I rephrase them *in my own
+words*), but without much introduction or any photographs. The introductions
+are missing because of the reasons given above, though the missing photographs
+are more easily explained: I don't have a good camera and I'm lazy and I don't
+want to pay to host all those pictures. So if you want to see pictures of the
+delicious meals and dishes I've included in here, please follow the links to
+the source material -- you can be sure to find all the pictures you could
+want, and more backstory than anyone should have to handle.
+
+ [I love to cook]: /cook
A posts/essay/2018-02-20-a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-publish-this-website.md => posts/essay/2018-02-20-a-funny-thing-happened-on-the-way-to-publish-this-website.md +67 -0
@@ 0,0 1,67 @@
+---
+title: A funny thing happened on the way to publish this website ...
+tags: [metablog, life, nostalgia]
+---
+
+
+::: note
+That title did not turn out as well as I thought it might.
+:::
+
+I don't know if you've noticed yet, and honsetly I wasn't going to mention
+it, but I've organized the pages on my site in a certain way: they are the
+numbered days of my life. I got the idea to number pages thus by trying to
+think of an easy way to increment and decrement URLs to use in my "yesterday"
+/ "tomorrow" links (adding or subtracting one is way easier than figuring out
+the date, what month and year it's in, etc.), and because my [10,000th][10k]
+day was just on December 10, 2017. So that's how I built my website, and to
+make things easier on myself I installed [`dateutils`][du] and wrote a little
+script that, surprisingly, *doesn't* use `dateutils`:
+
+~~~bash
+# lifeday [date]
+# find out how many days old you are! looks
+# for BIRTHDAY env variable, if it doesn't
+# find it, it uses my birthday. the optional
+# date is the day you want to calculate
+# (defaults to today). it'll accept whatever
+# `date -d` does.
+
+BIRTHDAY="${BIRTHDAY:-1990-07-25}"
+TIMEZONE="${TIMEZONE:--6}"
+
+today="${@:-today}"
+now="$(date -d "${today}" +%s)"
+birth="$(date -d "${BIRTHDAY}" +%s)"
+
+tzadj="$((TIMEZONE * 60 * 60))"
+# tzadj=0
+dysec=86400 # 60 * 60 * 24
+
+echo "$(( (now - birth + tzadj) / dysec ))"
+~~~
+
+You see that `TIMEZONE` line? That was written as `TIMEZONE="${TIMEZONE:-6}"`
+for quite a while, which knocked my whole date calculations off by 12 hours
+when writing posts, which means that most of my dates were off by a day. So
+I've had to [adjust things].
+
+[10k]: https://www.acdw.net/poem/10000.html
+[du]: http://www.fresse.org/dateutils/
+[adjust things]: https://gitlab.com/acdw/acdw.xyz/commit/2442c57e65a6b3392ef483821d907433d213992c
+
+So it's all well and fine, but here's the neat thing: it made me think about
+the arbitrary nature of dates. It doesn't really matter what day I wrote *x*
+on, or when *y* happened. In fact, I was going to keep everything the same
+except for that the way the error happened meant the little script I'm using
+for writing new posts would be a day behind all the time. It doesn't matter
+at all whether I wrote something on day [10065] or day [10064], just that it
+*was written*, I suppose.
+
+
+[10065]: https://www.acdw.net/poem/10065.html
+[10064]: https://www.acdw.net/cook/10064.html
+
+I read something once saying the same thing about history: the dates don't
+matter as much as the stories. So I guess this is me living that out, sort
+of.
A posts/essay/2018-03-05-installing-tinytinyrss-and-wallabag-on-nearlyfreespeech-net.md => posts/essay/2018-03-05-installing-tinytinyrss-and-wallabag-on-nearlyfreespeech-net.md +211 -0
@@ 0,0 1,211 @@
+---
+title: Installing tinytinyrss and wallabag on nearlyfreespeech.net
+tags: [metablog, self hosting, typo]
+---
+
+I've recently installed [tinytinyrss] and [wallabag] on this server (I'm not
+sharing the links with *you*; they're for me!) and it mostly went pretty well
+-- just some permissions-changing, really. Of course, it took me the better
+part of four hours to install wallabag, but it turned out after all of that it
+was because I made a typo in the name of my database: it's called
+`personal.db` but I had it in parameters.yml as `personal.sql`. I only cried a
+little bit!
+
+Now that I've recovered from the trauma, here's some instructions to get them
+running on your own [NFSN] instance. I'm writing these down because there was
+scant information online already about setting them up, and for a newbie like
+me, it would've been very useful.[^1]
+
+# Pre-installation
+
+Before installing either of these applications on your little slice of
+Internet, you'll need to enable MySQL if you haven't already. To do that, sign
+in to NFSN and click the `mysql` tab. On the sidebar, click
+`Create a New MySQL Process` and choose what you want in the options (I picked
+the default, `MariaDB 10.2 + InnoDB`), and click `Create New Process`. The
+first MySQL process on NFSN is free (outside the resource and storage costs,
+of course). I was able to put both of these services in one database, so one
+should be plenty unless maybe you're planning on having a public instance of
+either of these.
+
+Once you create the database, you'll get an email from NFSN about your new
+instance. Follow the instructions to change your admin password and create a
+new user for you. You can find the phpMyAdmin at
+<https://phpmyadmin.nearlyfreespeech.net>. Once all that's done, you're ready
+to install other stuff![^2]
+
+# Installing tinytinyrss
+
+If you don't know,
+
+> Tiny Tiny RSS is an open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and
+> aggregator, designed to allow you to read news from any location, while
+> feeling as close to a real desktop application as possible. -- tt-rss.org
+
+It's basically Google Reader or Feedly or whatever, but self-hosted. I compare
+it to Google Reader because most sites I read to figure out how to set it up
+did, and I think they did because they wrote them around the time that Google
+stopped Reader as a service, and I think the reason why there's no newer
+information is because people, as a whole, don't really use RSS anymore. They
+use Facebook feeds and Reddit and all that business (I was thinking about
+using tt-rss to collect my Facebook notifications off-site to read at my
+leisure, but alas, they disabled that feature in 2013). However, I like RSS
+feeds (by the way, you can subscribe to [my feed here], if you want) because
+it collects *my* sources that *I'm* interested in into one spot for easy
+reading. So here's the instructions (great thanks, if they need it, to [Nomad
+Physicist] and [robinadr] -- I read them to figure this out, and of course
+you'll want to reference [the official documentation]):
+
+## Download
+
+First, you need to get the tt-rss source, so you'll need `git`. NFSN already
+has `git` installed, but the entire repo's history is quite large and I didn't
+want to pay for NFSN to host it all, so I cloned it on my home computer and
+used `scp` to copy everything besides `.git` to the server. Here's the basic
+steps:
+
+```bash
+git clone https://tt-rss.org/git/tt-rss.git tt-rss
+cd tt-rss
+for file in *; do scp "${file}" <nsfnuser>@<nsfnhost>:/home/public/tt-rss; done
+```
+
+## Install
+
+Once you have everything copied over, you'll need to set up your database to
+handle tinytinyrss. Head over to <https://phpmyadmin.nearlyfreespeech.net> and
+sign in to your database. Click the `User accounts` tab and click
+`Add user account`. I used `tinytinyrss` as the username and generated a
+password. (Keep the `Host name` field the same.) Check the
+`Create database with same name and grant all priveleges`, scroll down to the
+bottom, and click `Go`. You can close the page after that.
+
+Now, you should be able to navigate to `<your-site>/tt-rss/install` and follow
+the instructions there. The rest of the setup is detailed on [tt-rss.org][the
+official documentation], it's really pretty easy. Really, setting up Tiny Tiny
+RSS was not the reason I wrote this post; now that I'm done with this section
+I'm not sure if I should've written it at all -- it's that easy.
+
+## Afterward
+
+After you're finished installing, the last thing you'll need to do is set up a
+cron job with NFSN to run the update script every hour (I also created a new
+user to aggregate feeds under, but I'll leave that as an exercise). Head over
+to your nearlyfreespeech member panel and select your site in the `sites` tab.
+On the sidebar you'll find a link to `Manage Scheduled Tasks`; click it and
+Add `/usr/local/bin/php /home/public/tt-rss/update.php --feeds --quiet` (as
+user `web`, in the ssh environment) every hour, or as often as you want ---
+though I don't think you'll get much use out of updating less frequently than
+a day. If you want to update your feeds right away (which you'll need to do
+whenever you add a feed if you don't want to wait for the hour), ssh into your
+site and run the same command.
+
+# Installing wallabag
+
+Wallabag is a Read-it-Later bookmark service, like [Pocket] or [Instapaper],
+but again, it's self hosted (technically they do have a hosted instance at
+<https://wallabag.it>, but it costs money). I have been using Pocket, but
+since I have this site now and wanted a project, I set up a wallabag instance.
+It was a little harder to set up because the documentation is not nearly as
+good as tt-rss, but here's what I did. The manual can be read [online], for
+what it's worth, but like I said, it's not very comprehensive.
+
+## Download
+
+You want to use the directions from the \[On shared hosting\] section of the
+install guide, since that's what NFSN is. Basically, you'll
+
+ wget https://wllbg.org/latest-v2-package && tar xvf latest-v2-package
+
+in an `ssh` to your server, then rename the resulting folder to whatever you
+want the installation to be. I used `walla` because `wallabag` is too long to
+type. You can delete the `latest-v2-package` tarball.
+
+## Install
+
+You'll need to create another user and database for your MySQL database for
+wallabag; it's basically the same instructions as for tt-rss, except you
+substitute 'wallabag' for 'tinytinyrss'.
+
+In your wallabag installation folder, edit `app/config/parameters.yml` with
+your database configuration. It should look something like this[^3]:
+
+```yaml
+parameters:
+ database_driver: pdo_mysql
+ database_driver_class: null
+ database_host: <database>
+ database_port: null
+ database_name: wallabag
+ database_user: wallabag
+ database_password: <password>
+ database_path: null
+ database_table_prefix: wallabag_
+ database_socket: null
+ database_charset: utf8mb4
+ domain_name: '<domain>/web'
+```
+
+If you don't want to run a public instance of wallabag, you'll need to include
+`fosuser_registration: false` in `parameters.yml` as well. It's on by default.
+
+Once your configuration looks alright, run the following commands and navigate
+to your site.
+
+ bin/console --env=prod cache:clear
+ chgrp -R web var
+
+You need to `chgrp` because you'll get a permissions error on the server if
+the files in `var/` aren't in the `web` group.
+
+It should work! If not, keep tweaking and twiddling for four hours or so until
+you realize that a typo is keeping it from working (if you're like me).
+
+## Afterward
+
+I created a new user for myself and began importing articles from Pocket right
+away. It worked okay until it didn't, but I didn't want to do all the
+troubleshooting when most of my Pocket articles are old anyway and not very
+*read-it-later-able*, as well (I threw a lot of videos and [Hacker News]
+comment threads in there for a while). I also installed the [Android app] and
+[Firefox] extension without much fuss at all -- the instructions for
+installing those are more helpful.
+
+One more thing you might want to do on Firefox is disable the built-in Pocket
+extension. Head over to `about:config` and change `extensions.pocket.enabled`
+to `false`.
+
+# Conclusion
+
+It really wasn't as hard as I thought it'd be to run my own instances of these
+applications, and I don't think it'll be very expensive either! It's nice to
+know that if I do change my mind, it's pretty simple to delete the whole thing
+or shut it down myself. My data is mine, for once.
+
+[^1]: I'm sure you're thinking, but you *learned* that way, in a way that
+ reading a blog post like this wouldn't teach you! To you I say, fa! I am
+ writing this also for my future self.
+
+[^2]: This article assumes you already have a site using nearlyfreespeech.net
+ and that you have it set up with `ssh` or some way to transfer files
+ there, as well as whatever DNS you need to make it work.
+
+[^3]: I used the 'web' folder of my domain because I couldn't figure out the
+ instructions to [set up a VirtualHost] and have the DocumentRoot at
+ `web/`. If you can figure that out, you probably don't need this guide,
+ but you also don't need to inlude `web` in the `domain_name` field above.
+
+ [tinytinyrss]: https://tt-rss.org/
+ [wallabag]: https://wallabag.org/en
+ [NFSN]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/
+ [my feed here]: https://www.acdw.net/feed.xml
+ [Nomad Physicist]: http://nomadphysicist.busbycreations.com/2013/tiny-tiny-rss-on-nearlyfreespeech-net/
+ [robinadr]: https://robinadr.com/2013/05/tiny-tiny-rss-nearly-free-speech
+ [the official documentation]: https://git.tt-rss.org/fox/tt-rss/wiki/InstallationNotes
+ [Pocket]: https://getpocket.com/
+ [Instapaper]: https://www.instapaper.com/
+ [online]: https://doc.wallabag.org/en/admin/installation/installation.html
+ [Hacker News]: https://news.ycombinator.com
+ [Android app]: https://doc.wallabag.org/en/apps/android.html
+ [Firefox]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/wallabagger/?src=search
+ [set up a VirtualHost]: https://doc.wallabag.org/en/admin/installation/virtualhosts.html
A posts/essay/2018-03-07-why.md => posts/essay/2018-03-07-why.md +48 -0
@@ 0,0 1,48 @@
+---
+title: Why?
+tags: [writing, indie web]
+---
+
+::: epigraph
+| Francis of Verulam
+| reasoned thus with himself
+| and judged it to be for the interest of the present and future generations
+| that they should be made acquainted with his thoughts.
+[Francis Bacon]{.cite}
+:::
+
+Funnily enough, Bacon's quote popped up today on my Facebook feed as one of
+those "memories" (or, I suspect, an attempt to bring low-engagement users back
+into the fold) and I thought it fit well as a sort of epigraph to my personal
+website. I'm writing these words for posterity, I suppose, but more for
+myself, or I want to work toward writing them first for myself.
+
+For most of my life I've been waiting for someone to notice me: when I was in
+middle school I remember thinking about someone coming up to me and offering
+me fame, money, happiness, because they could tell I *had it*, whatever *it*
+was. The movies that I'm guessing I got this fool notion from never told me
+what it was, anyway, but the desire for being recognized stuck.
+
+I think, honestly, that it led to some of my problems in pursuing writing
+really seriously, because I always had this fear or notion that whatever I
+wrote, even in my most private journals, be published in one of those
+incredible process-type things, like the big edition of *Howl* where it has
+facsimiles of the typewriter pages and Ginsberg's hand written notes, and that
+people would be disappointed that I thought all those impolite things about
+them. So a lot of why I'm writing this has to do with getting over that
+paranoia and just living my life.
+
+Another reason I'm writing these words is to try and keep myself accountable:
+I've got a [daily poetry folder] (it's not quite daily though; I'm still
+trying), I'm recording [recipes], I'm learning the very basics of web
+development. Plus, I read a lot about identity online and learned about the
+[Indie Web], basically the web of *people* instead of corporations, and I'm
+glad I have this site now to be a part of that community.
+
+Also, maybe I *am* a little vain, maybe I *want* to dip my toes a little into
+the self-promotion, develop-my-brand space that we Millenials seem to be so
+crazy about. So here's me. Here's my site, my little slice of Internet pie.
+
+ [daily poetry folder]: https://www.acdw.net/poem/
+ [recipes]: https://www.acdw.net/cook/
+ [Indie Web]: https://indieweb.org/
A posts/essay/2018-03-14-adventures-in-gardening.md => posts/essay/2018-03-14-adventures-in-gardening.md +64 -0
@@ 0,0 1,64 @@
+---
+title: Adventures in gardening
+tags: [garden, Stella, problem solving, table]
+---
+
+We started a garden this year, about two weeks ago. We went to the local
+nursery and bought some young (seedling?) tomatoes, jalapeños, bell peppers,
+basil, thyme, and parsley. They've been doing pretty well so far, which feels
+really good -- I always say, "They haven't died yet!" coming home. Of course,
+something that helps us a lot is living in [Zone 8b], meaning the growing
+season is long and warm. While the Nor'Easters are raging in New England and
+down the Mid-Atlantic, we've had beautiful early-spring weather.
+
+That is, until last night. It's been chilly for the past couple of days,
+chilly enough that I haven't been able to get the chill out of my bones in a
+satisfying way. And then last night, it was really *quite* cold, and I
+realized as I was getting into bed -- *the plants!* I know that tomatoes like
+it warm and I was worried it would get too cold for them. I checked the
+weather and it read a low of 41F over night, so I pulled myself out of bed and
+put all of them inside. I took a little picture of them this morning:
+
+![The plants inside this morning]
+
+and I went to work. They were doing pretty good when I got home for lunch,
+too:
+
+![The plants at lunch]
+
+And I went merrily back to work, mind at ease. That is, until I got home to
+Stella in her crate and an irate R, eye-gesturing between the dog and the
+pots. Finally I caught on: *Stella had dug in the plants!* She'd nearly
+snapped one tomato in half, and dirt was disturbed in about half the others. R
+did a great job re-soiling the plants, and I think that they'll be okay, but
+this was unacceptable from Stella. I was hurt, and mad, and surprised at
+myself for being so hurt and mad. Turns out, I was attached to these plants.
+
+![The broken tomato]
+
+I was also attached to this dog, though, so we had to come up with a solution.
+It's still going to be cold for the next couple of nights (it's actually
+getting down to 31F tomorrow; I am *not pleased*), so we couldn't put them
+outside. We also couldn't leave them on the floor, and putting them in another
+room was out -- not enough sunlight and we couldn't keep our eagle-eye on the
+pup (there was no trust anymore). Finally, I remembered we had a card table in
+the mud room. I brought it out, and now our plants are living in a high-rise:
+
+![Table plants]
+
+We did have to put two tomatoes out on the porch during the day, since the
+table isn't really built for more than the weight of a pack of cards and maybe
+some plates, but we can bring those in when Stella is safely crated for the
+night. And they're actually getting a fair amount of light, so I'm pleased. I
+think R is too.
+
+ [Zone 8b]: https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/
+ "Here's the map for the whole U.S. It's pretty interesting information."
+ [The plants inside this morning]: /images/plants-inside-1.jpg
+ "The little ladybug's name is Herman, or Hugo, or Melville, or Tom, or something (R says he's too pure for a name), but at any rate he watches over our crops."
+ [The plants at lunch]: /images/plants-inside-2.jpg
+ "I had leftover risotto with falafel, if you were wondering."
+ [The broken tomato]: /images/plants-inside-3.jpg
+ "Breaking my heart, this one."
+ [Table plants]: /images/plants-inside-4.jpg
+ "I feel like I should make a joke about Trump and high-rises somewhere, but honestly, I'm too tired to think of one worthwhile."
A posts/essay/2018-03-16-figuring-out-whether-a-table-is-empty-in-lua.md => posts/essay/2018-03-16-figuring-out-whether-a-table-is-empty-in-lua.md +106 -0
@@ 0,0 1,106 @@
+---
+title: Figuring out whether a table is empty in Lua
+tags: [lua, metablog, programming]
+---
+
+I'm currently working on a tagging system for this website using pandoc, and
+I've decided to take a little break to write about a function I wrote for the
+system. My tags aren't ready yet (I don't have a deduper yet, for example, nor
+do I have any setup to actually *make* the tag pages), by the way. I'm just
+proud of myself for getting this function together:
+
+``` {.lua}
+local function is_empty(tbl)
+ if type(tbl) ~= "table" then return false end
+ if next(tbl) == nil then return true end
+ for k, v in pairs(tbl) do
+ if type(v) ~= "table" then return false end
+ if type(k) ~= "number" then return false end
+ if k == #tbl then
+ return is_empty(v)
+ else
+ if not is_empty(v) then return false end
+ end
+ end
+end
+```
+
+I'm not sure if `is_empty` is really a good name for it, because it doesn't
+exactly tell you *that* (or not only that), but whether a table contains only
+empty tables. I decided to implement it because of the way pandoc implements
+metadata, and I use that metadata (namely the `tags` field) to build my tag
+file that will, hopefully, build my tag index. I could've just checked for the
+emptiness of, say, `tags[1][1].c`, but I think that's fragile (what if pandoc
+changes the structure?) and ugly. Thus, this function. Let's talk about it.
+
+``` {.lua}
+if type(tbl) ~= "table" then return false end
+```
+
+Obviously, if the thing passed to `is_empty` isn't a table, it's not an
+*empty* table. Easy so far.
+
+``` {.lua}
+if next(tbl) == nil then return true end
+```
+
+I needed to check the length of `tbl` next: if it's `{}`, we can go ahead and
+mark it as empty too. It wasn't as easy as it looked at first though: I was
+using `#tbl == 0`, which only checks for the numerically-indexed keys in
+`tbl`. Pandoc eventually has keys like `"c"` and `"t"`, which aren't numbers,
+so my function was returning `true` on tables that weren't empty. `next()`
+gets the next index of the table (I think; I saw the [answer on Stack
+Overflow] and the documentation is sparse), and works with both numerical and
+other - indexed keys.
+
+``` {.lua}
+for k, v in pairs(tbl) do
+```
+
+Here we go. Into the depths of the table. `pairs()` recurses through the
+table, returning keys and values (bound here to `k` and `v`).
+
+``` {.lua}
+ if type(v) ~= "table" then return false end
+```
+
+Another easy one: if `v` is not a table, it's something important like `1`,
+`"hello"`, or whatever. So the table isn't empty.
+
+``` {.lua}
+ if type(k) ~= "number" then return false end
+```
+
+Same idea as the `v` typecheck above: if `k` isn't a number (the default
+key-type in Lua), then it's holding information of some kind. For example, if
+you have a table that's something like `{ junk = {} }` I'm assuming you *want*
+`junk` to be an empty table, or you'd set it to `nil` and delete it. That
+being said, I might revisit this later if necessary.
+
+``` {.lua}
+ if k == #tbl then
+ return is_empty(v)
+ else
+ if not is_empty(v) then return false end
+ end
+```
+
+I've put all the recursion stuff together at the end. I'm not sure if it's
+tail recursion, but I don't really care for this use-case. It works, and
+that's good enough for me.
+
+First, we check if we're looking at the last item in the table. If so, we just
+check whether *it* is empty, using the same function we're building.
+Otherwise, we look inside the table and if it's *not* empty, we
+`return false`, or else we keep going with the `for` loop.
+
+Now just to `end` everything:
+
+``` {.lua}
+end
+```
+
+Wrap it all up in the function `is_empty`, and you've got a good way to look
+inside a table to see if it's turtles all the way down.
+
+ [answer on Stack Overflow]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1252539/most-efficient-way-to-determine-if-a-lua-table-is-empty-contains-no-entries#1252776
A posts/essay/2018-04-07-an-explanation-for-lost-time.md => posts/essay/2018-04-07-an-explanation-for-lost-time.md +71 -0
@@ 0,0 1,71 @@
+---
+title: An explanation for lost time
+tags: [metablog, markdown, annoyance]
+---
+
+If you're an avid reader of this site (hey R!) you may have noticed that my
+post frequency has really taken a dive lately. I've been spending a lot of my
+free time trying to learn [Flask] and a lot of other technology really fast to
+make this blog more [Indie-web] friendly.
+
+It isn't going as quickly as I'd hoped.
+
+For the first thing, I'm still stuck on what to use as a [Markdown] parser. On
+the site as it stands (which is a [Makefile and a prayer]) I use [pandoc], but
+version 2.0 isn't available on my web provider; they use [OpenBSD] which only
+has a deprecated port of pandoc 1.19, and I *need* pandoc 2.0 because I use a
+lot of lua filters that are new to that release. So as of now, I'm making the
+site on my home computer, uploading the whole thing, and `rsync`ing the
+published files to https://www.acdw.net. It's not very efficient and it uses
+way more space than I want.
+
+So I discovered Flask, and I thought, "Hey, I can port my site to that!" And
+it's possible, for sure, and it's really not that hard (I've finally gotten to
+that point in my Flask learning curve, which is nice), but all the Markdown
+parsers in [Python] are lacking in some way. I started looking at [mistletoe],
+which is fairly new but trying to be [CommonMark] compliant, but it doesn't
+render something as simple as footnotes. Then there's [mistune], which is
+similar, but again, doesn't do footnotes (with both of these I'm assuming I'd
+need to implement other stuff too). What I like about mistletoe and mistune,
+though, is that they're (a) pure python and (b) extensible. The other python
+markdown options, [python-markdown] and [python-markdown2], do footnotes and a
+lot of other stuff, but markdown2 isn't that extensible as far as I can tell
+and markdown is, like, old. Now that I've been looking into it, the OG
+markdown might be what I want to go with for now because of its ease of
+extending (I've already figured out a simple [LineBlock] class, which I use
+for [verse]) and because "it's like, old" is a dumb reason not to use
+something.
+
+The Markdown problem isn't the only problem I've been having getting my site
+off the ground: I'm also wondering what sort of caching I should use (if any),
+how my URLs should look, and how to store my source files, which doesn't even
+begin to worry about the indiewebification of my site. I've got to implement
+[h-cards], [webmentions], [and a whole list of other stuff] that seems at
+least a *little* complicated. So I've got a long row to how.
+
+That being said, I shouldn't have let it get in the way of *writing*, which is
+the whole reason I'm here. All the stuff I spent three paragraphs going on
+about is window dressing to the real stuff of the site, which is this that
+you're reading. So I'm going to start writing again, daily, regardless of what
+my progress is on the nuts and bolts of the site. Eventually everything will
+look really nice *and* be brilliant and stuff, but that'll come later.
+
+Here's to a new period-of-time.
+
+ [Flask]: https://flask.pocoo.org
+ [Indie-web]: https://indieweb.org
+ [Markdown]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
+ [Makefile and a prayer]: https://www.acdw.net/colophon/
+ [pandoc]: https://pandoc.org
+ [OpenBSD]: https://www.openbsd.org/
+ [Python]: https://www.python.org
+ [mistletoe]: http://mistletoe.afteryu.me/
+ [CommonMark]: http://commonmark.org/
+ [mistune]: https://github.com/lepture/mistune
+ [python-markdown]: https://python-markdown.github.io/
+ [python-markdown2]: https://github.com/trentm/python-markdown2
+ [LineBlock]: http://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#line-blocks
+ [verse]: https://www.acdw.net/poem
+ [h-cards]: https://indieweb.org/h-card
+ [webmentions]: https://indieweb.org/Webmention
+ [and a whole list of other stuff]: https://indieweb.org/Category:building-blocks
A posts/essay/2018-05-07-a-theory-as-to-the-origins-of-the-mandela-effect.md => posts/essay/2018-05-07-a-theory-as-to-the-origins-of-the-mandela-effect.md +108 -0
@@ 0,0 1,108 @@
+---
+title: A theory as to the origins of the Mandela effect
+tags: [mandela, rudolph, universe, conspiracy]
+---
+
+It's that wonderful time of year when Christmas songs get stuck in my head for
+no good reason. I guess my brain misses hearing the songs it hears on
+near-constant repeat for a sixth of the year after five months, so it queues
+them up on my mind-radio and lets them blast for a while. Regardless, one
+song that came up on the rotation today made me realize something huge. I'm
+talking bigger than flat earth theory, bigger than the Kennedy assassination,
+and *way* bigger than the Illuminati. I've figured out *why the Mandela
+effect exists.*
+
+For those readers who don't know, the *[Mandela effect]* is a phenomenon where
+large swaths of people share a memory that is, objectively, false. However,
+the exact same memory is in all these people's heads, and the weight of all
+those subjectivities exerts a curious pressure on the cool objectivity of
+written history. After all, isn't *objective reality* merely that which is
+agreed to be so by a majority of the population? -- the Mandela effect seems
+to ask. A common example (and the one through which I was introduced to the
+effect) is the "[Berenstein Bears]" problem: many people (myself included)
+remember the family of anthropomorphic bears with unimaginative names as the
+Berensteins, when in point of fact they are (and always have been, or so they
+say) the *Berenstains*, with an *a*.
+
+[Mandela effect]: https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/
+[Berenstein Bears]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenstain_Bears#Name_confusion
+
+Of course, explanations for these "lapses" in collective memory abound. The
+Berenstain bears are confused with the much more common ending "-stein", of
+Einstein and Jill Stein variety. *[Shazaam]* is actually some amalgamation of
+*Kazaam*, Sinbad's prolific film career, and some other mysterious sauce.
+However, I think these are all simply symptoms of a much deeper cause, one
+that goes as deep as the foundations of reality itself: they are the scar
+tissues surrounding the sutures of a parasitic universe as it's attached
+itself to our own.
+
+[Shazaam]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sinbad-movie-shazaam/
+
+Here's what happened: at some point in the relative past, a universe parallel
+to ours discovered our presence across the membrane and became jealous of us.
+I don't know why, and I won't pretend to guess at their motives, but they
+resolved to infiltrate our better universe and live here. I think they
+accomplished just that goal, and I think they used a Christmas song to do it.
+That song is "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer".
+
+Take a look at the lyrics to Rudolph's cold open [emphasis mine]:
+
+> You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen, \
+> Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen -- \
+> but do **you recall** \
+> **the most famous reindeer of all** \
+
+I have two questions for you: firstly, if Rudolph was invented for the song,
+how could we possibly *recall* him, and secondly, why would we even *need* to
+recall him if he were the "most famous reindeer," as the song claims, although
+(as pointed out in point one) he didn't even *exist* until the song?
+
+"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was the first salvo in an inter-universal
+battle that we haven't even noticed. It was the weapon that pierced the
+membrane between our universes and allowed the parasite to attach to ours, and
+the beings within it to begin infiltrating our reality. The parasite is
+nearly identical to ours, so we barely notice: but there are small
+differences, such as the spelling of an ursine surname, or the career of a
+nautically-themed comedian. Maybe there were bigger incompatibilities, but
+the masterminds behind "Rudolph" papered those over. Maybe the Mandela
+effects we experience were small enough to escape detection.
+
+Or maybe we are just wrong. Who knows.
+
+# Record scratch
+
+I've spent a non-trivial amount of time on this post now, so I'm not going to
+take it down. However, while doing my research I did discover this little
+piece of relevant trivia: "Rudolph" was a poem first.
+
+Apparently, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" was originally conceived by a
+Robert L. May, a department-store employee tasked with creating a [story for a
+coloring book][story], a full *ten years* before the song was released.
+What's more, while the song set the poem to the tune we know and love, it
+*added* the frontmatter at a time when Rudolph really *was* famous, making my
+entire theory null and void.
+
+[story]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer#publication_history
+
+As R says, this is a great example of researching your sources *before*
+writing your scoop, kids.
+
+# Unless
+
+It is, of course, possible that in the time between my discovery of the
+Rudolph Theory of the Multiverse and sitting down to write this post, during
+which time I told a few people of said theory, the Parasitic Masterminds were
+able to inject a narrative about the poetical origins of Rudolph as a
+smokescreen, to cause me to doubt my own findings and discourage me to publish
+them. It's possible that they haven't done the same with the discrepancies we
+call Mandela effects because they have a limited amount of power that they're
+waiting in the wings to deploy in a final, world-shattering effort, but their
+absolute secrecy is important enough that they did what they could to
+discredit this theory.
+
+It's also possible that this is one of the more ridiculous conspiracy theories
+around. But it's also possible that it's right. Like they say:
+
+> Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're not being watched.
+
+Stay vigilant.
A posts/essay/2019-01-03-helping-myself-write-more-in-the-new-year.md => posts/essay/2019-01-03-helping-myself-write-more-in-the-new-year.md +381 -0
@@ 0,0 1,381 @@
+---
+title: Helping myself write more in the new year
+date: 2019-01-03
+tags: writing, process, scripting, python, bash
+---
+
+Happy New Year!
+I'm implementing a Rulin'[^rulin] this year to write *something* every day,
+and publish it here.
+It's something I did for part of last year,
+but then I decided to change up my website,
+I got busy,
+and I fell *way* off.
+So here I am,
+renewed in my quest to post up an
+[essay](/essay/),
+[poem](/poem/),
+[recipe](/recipe/),
+[review](/review/),
+or something else every single day this year.
+
+[^rulin]: Blog post on this to come, I hope.
+
+To help myself be more writerly,
+I decided to write out a script to automate the basic task
+of beginning a new blog post.
+I've done this before,
+but new blog,
+new script,
+so I began again[^plus].
+I decided to try writing it in Python
+to get practice.[^script]
+
+[^plus]: Plus, I don't really know where I put the dang original script.
+[^script]: To jump to the script itself, click [here](#appendix).
+
+# The dark times
+
+My usual workflow is this:
+
+1. I type `vim ~/acdw.net/posts/2019-01-03-the-title.essay` in my shell.
+
+2. I manually type in the YAML frontmatter:
+
+ ```{#yaml-frontmatter .sourceCode .yaml}
+ ---
+ title: The title
+ date: 2019-01-03
+ tags: something, bs, whatever
+ ---
+ ```
+
+3. I write up my post.
+
+ Usually in writing up my post,
+ I decide I want to change my title.
+ So I change the title in the YAML block ...
+ but wait!
+ The filename is wrong now too!
+
+4. So I have to
+ - `:wq` from vim
+ - run `mv ~/acdw.net/posts/2019-01-03-the-title.essay
+ ~/acdw.net/posts/2019-01-03-the-new-title.essay`
+ - `vim ~/acdw.net/posts/2019-01-03-the-new-title.essay`
+ - __oh my god.__
+
+5. Rinse, repeat for who knows how many times, and for every post.
+
+This is untenable.
+
+# Beginning again
+
+I decided to implement a draft system in Hakyll[^draft], so I can put posts
+I'm working on in a `drafts/` subfolder of my site directory
+and they won't be published until they're ready.
+But I thought,
+I can do one better --
+let's work on a temporary file!
+
+[^draft]: I did something very similar to Jorge Israel Peña's method
+ as outlined in his [blog post](https://www.blaenkdenum.com/posts/drafts-in-hakyll/).
+
+Python has a library for that[^library],
+called `tempfile`.
+You can create a temporary file using `tempfile.mkstemp`
+that sticks around for a while, so I used that.
+It can also add the suffix '.md',
+so vim knows it's a markdown file,
+and a prefix so the user can know what they're working on at a glance.
+
+I just pop that into a function, and I'm good to go.
+
+```python
+def new_post(group, output_dir):
+ thandle, tname = tempfile.mkstemp(
+ suffix='.md', prefix=f'acdw-{group}-', text=True)
+```
+
+[^library]: Is this a meme?
+
+# Frontmatter
+
+Hakyll uses YAML frontmatter to define metadata about each post[^meta],
+so my next step is to get that frontmatter in there automatically
+when I start the script.
+I just use a constant defined at the top of my script[^space]:
+
+```python
+FRONTMATTER = """\
+---
+title:{space}
+date: {date}
+tags:{space}
+---
+
+
+""".format(
+ space=' ', date=date.today())
+```
+
+and enter it with a quick
+
+```python
+with open(thandle, mode='w') as f:
+ f.write(FRONTMATTER)
+```
+
+[^meta]: It looks something like the [YAML](#yaml-frontmatter) above.
+[^space]: I use the {space} variable because I have Vim automatically
+ automatically truncate end-of-line spaces on a save.
+
+# Editing
+
+Okay, now comes the hard part: actually writing the post.
+I just use a `subprocess.run` for that,
+passing the `$EDITOR` variable from the environment
+(with a sane default, of course):
+
+```python
+subprocess.run([os.getenv("EDITOR", EDITOR), tname, '+'], check=True)
+```
+
+# Saving
+
+Remember, I've done all this as a tempfile.
+Now I need to actually *save* the file in the `drafts/` folder.
+For that,
+I'll need the date of the post,
+the slug,
+and the *group*,
+which is basically my version of a category.
+I just pass the group in as a parameter to `new_post`,
+so that's taken care of.
+The date and slug need to be pulled from the YAML frontmatter of the file.
+
+I used the `re` library instead of PyYAML,
+because pulling in a whole YAML dependency is silly for two fields
+and because PyYAML complained about multiple documents
+when I used the two `---`s to delineate the metadata[^delin].
+
+[^delin]: You're *supposed* to use `---` for the beginning and `...`
+ for the end, but seriously, who cares?
+ Hakyll doesn't, I don't, so there.
+
+So I find the title and date by searching for their definitions in the file:
+
+```python
+title = re.search(r"^title:\s*(.*)$", metadata, re.MULTILINE)
+date = re.search(r"^date:\s*(.*)$", metadata, re.MULTILINE)
+```
+
+and then do a couple of sanity checks:
+
+```python
+if title is not None:
+ title = title.group(1)
+else:
+ title = ""
+
+if date is not None:
+ date = date.group(1)
+else:
+ date = date.today()
+```
+
+To generate the slug from the title,
+I just use my handy-dandy slugify function:
+
+```python
+def slugify(title):
+ words = [str.lower(word) for word in re.split(r"\W+", title) if word != ""]
+ return '-'.join(words)
+```
+
+And then I write the file and remove the tempfile:
+
+```python
+fname = date + "-" + slug + "." + group
+
+with open(output_dir + fname, 'w+') as f:
+ f.write(contents)
+
+os.remove(tname)
+```
+
+# Quibbles
+
+There are still a few problems.
+The first is how to tell my script what group the post should be in.
+I usually know what group I'm going to write in,
+but I'm not so sure where it'll go from there,
+so that makes sense to pass as a script argument.
+Thus:
+
+```python
+if __name__ == "__main__":
+ try:
+ group = sys.argv[1]
+ except IndexError:
+ print("Usage: acdw <group>")
+
+ new_post(group, DRAFT_DIR)
+```
+
+The second problem is that,
+sometimes I realize I jumped the gun.
+Like today,
+at first I was like,
+I'll write a poem,
+then I decided to write this essay about writing essays.
+So I had to `rm ~/acdw.net/drafts/2019-01-03-some-poem.poem`
+so I didn't clog up my drafts directory,
+which was very frustrating.
+
+The solution is just to split the file's contents along the `---`s,
+then see if the body section is empty.
+If it is, you can bail:
+
+```python
+ _, metadata, body = contents.split('---')
+ if body.strip() == '':
+ print("acdw: Post empty.")
+ return None
+```
+
+# Packaging
+
+So my script is all done, but it's a real pain to use.
+I set it up in a virtualenv,
+so if I want to use it I have to source the virtualenv
+and then run it with python
+and then deactivate the virtualenv.
+Luckily, we have bash for that!
+I wrote up a quick bash script that does all that for me
+and passes all the arguments to my python script
+and put it in my `$PATH`.
+You can see it [below], after my python script.
+
+[below]: #the-wrapper
+
+# Future thoughts
+
+Even though my script is good enough to use today,
+I still want to add some features:
+
+- Check if you're already working on something today,
+ and ask if you'd like to continue on that or start something new
+- Maybe a `draft` command that allows you to choose a draft to work on
+- A `publish` command to move a draft into the `posts/` folder[^publish]
+- A kind of search function so I can quit and come back to a post
+ without finding it in my drafts folder
+
+I'll work on these features later, though;
+too many times I've let tinkering get in the way of writing!
+
+[^publish]: I'm not sure whether this is a better command for *this* script
+ or for my Hakyll site script. This requires more thought.
+
+# Appendix
+
+## The script
+
+``` {.python .numberLines}
+#!/usr/bin/env python3
+
+import os
+import re
+import subprocess
+import sys
+import tempfile
+from datetime import date
+
+EDITOR = "editor"
+DRAFT_DIR = os.getenv("HOME") + "/acdw.net/drafts/"
+FRONTMATTER = """\
+---
+title:{space}
+date: {date}
+tags:{space}
+---
+
+
+""".format(
+ space=' ', date=date.today())
+
+
+def slugify(title):
+ """Turn a title into a slug."""
+ words = [str.lower(word) for word in re.split(r"\W+", title) if word != ""]
+ return '-'.join(words)
+
+
+def new_post(group, output_dir):
+ # Make a new tempfile
+ thandle, tname = tempfile.mkstemp(
+ suffix='.md', prefix=f'acdw-{group}-', text=True)
+
+ # Populate it with YAML frontmatter
