Yesterday
06:32 Sunday, 12 November 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 60.4°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 53
Yesterday was Veterans Day. I'm a veteran. I decided to skip the long discursive meditation that I post here from time to time. (This being a relevant example.)
Suffice to say, service is an opportunity to make meaning. Meaning matters more than money.
Your time here is limited, and you get to choose.
✍️ Reply by emailTube: The Killer
06:36 Sunday, 12 November 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 60.4°F Pressure: 1022hPa Humidity: 97% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 101
I enjoyed the new Netflix David Fincher flick, The Killer. Kind of a thinking person's John Wick, though I suppose that may be an oxymoron.
What it most reminded me of though was Man On Fire.
While Wick eschews any moral questions, Man asks, "Will God forgive us for what we've done?" Killer dispenses with the question by embracing nihilism, the only law being, "Do what thou wilt."
Of the three, Man On Fire is most appealing to me, because a journey of revenge became a path toward redemption.
Life is meaningless. We bring meaning to life.
Do what thou wilt.
✍️ Reply by emailTube: Chemistry
06:43 Sunday, 12 November 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 60.64°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 91
I love this show so much, but it exacts a price. As a guy who cries at Kodak commercials (obscure cultural allusion, likely now also anachronistic), I have to constantly remind myself it's just a TV show.
As an aside, if learning about slavery makes white kids feel bad, it's because they still have empathy. That probably works up until middle school, when empathy gets overwhelmed by hormones.
But I think it speaks volumes about the value of empathy in the homes of parents worrying about their grade-schoolers "feeling bad."
✍️ Reply by emailTube: Mankind
06:46 Sunday, 12 November 2023
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Words: 89
Well, I suppose it was inevitable. I was looking forward to the return of For All Mankind, but now I don't care.
I can't help but hear Marc Andreesen's dumbass manifesto as the subtext.
Ron Moore is an intelligent man. It feels like he's set up his alternate history/future to avoid climate change, and now we're going to avert the limitations of finite planetary resources by mining asteroids.
I'll probably watch the show because it's interesting as an intellectual exercise; but I don't think it'll be especially rewarding.
✍️ Reply by emailTube: Upload
06:57 Sunday, 12 November 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 59.99°F Pressure: 1018hPa Humidity: 93% Wind: 9.22mph
Words: 60
Mitzi doesn't like Upload, but I enjoy it. It's pretty on-the-nose ("Betta" as "Meta" for instance), but I like its sensibility.
Billionaires take a beating in the video streams. Maybe that's an "opiate for the masses." We get to mock our masters on TV so we don't put their heads on pikes IRL.
My, that went dark fast.
✍️ Reply by emailGyre: Fake Valor
09:14 Sunday, 12 November 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 61.16°F Pressure: 1015hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 13.8mph
Words: 641
I'm going to start categorizing posts more often. "Gyre" is going to be the category of things that came to my attention that led to other things or related in a serendipitous way to other things.
Bear with me.
I subscribe to a blog called Irrational Exuberance. I don't recall why I subscribed to it in the first place, and there's been less and less that I've found interesting so I was just about to unsubscribe to it today. (I will have by the time you read this.)
But as I glanced at the posts I hadn't read, something from yesterday's (he doesn't post every day) caught my eye:
Ben Horowitz’s quote from The Hard Thing About Hard Things, “Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six.”
"Sometimes you gotta roll a hard six." There are some readers who will recall where that phrase entered our consciousness. It was an episode of Battlestar Galactica, where Adama was telling Apollo not to lose his favorite lighter. (FWIW, Bear McCreary's "A Good Lighter" is one of my favorite songs.)
Battlestar Galactica, you will recall, was a reimagining of the 70s series of the same name by Ron Moore. Ron Moore, who's also responsible for For All Mankind.
Ben Horowitz is the Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz. Andreesen is the author of a recent manifesto, which rationalizes the conduct of tech billionaires.
But the part that made me throw up a little bit in my mouth was the construction, "wartime CEO."
And of course he posted that on Veterans Day. Because "wartime CEO," right?
So I did a duckduckgo search on "wartime CEO," and got even more nauseated.
I get the idea of using war metaphors for business. I guess business is "violence by other means." But it still makes me sick. Especially since I'm willing to bet you a sawbuck that none of these motherfuckers throwing around the term "wartime CEO" has ever served in uniform, let alone in combat. (I might lose that bet. There may be one or two.)
There's a phenomenon where certain individuals will pretend to be veterans, usually highly decorated, combat veterans. It happens often enough that it has a name, at least within the veteran community, "stolen valor."
I think a subset of the same thing is happening here. It's self-aggrandizing. It's not enough to be the chief executive officer of a business, your business must also be a kind of warfare. To be clear, they're not making the direct comparison. They're describing different business cycles or environments where one may be more challenging than the other as the same as the difference between peace and war.
Well, gosh. Of course it is. I mean, who doesn't recall that famous quote by Sherman, "Business is hell"? A classic.
Ron Moore did a couple of semesters of NROTC in college, had a summer midshipman cruise; and as a talented writer, he picked up the vernacular and a little of the culture. It was one of the things I really enjoyed about Battlestar Galactica.
But to complete the circle, and for more about the connection between tech billionaires and science fiction, during yesterday's Tinderbox meetup, Mark Bernstein mentioned that Charlie Stross had posted something of a rebuttal to Andreesen.
I follow Charlie on Mastodon, but I'm not a completist, and I wasn't aware he had a blog (Shame on me, I'm subscribed now.), so I missed this. Had Mark not mentioned it, I don't know when or if I'd have stumbled on it. That's the beauty of the gyre. You can read it here.
It may be one of the reasons the first episode of season 4 landed flat for me.
Oh, and let's bring back the draft. See how much everyone loves militaristic metaphors after that.
Now excuse me. I gotta go brush my teeth.
✍️ Reply by emailAnother Glitch In The Matrix
07:00 Wednesday, 12 November 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 31.8°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 13.87mph
Words: 607
Not very often, but from time to time I encounter some strange behaviors in Tinderbox. I've been wresting with one yesterday and today. It may have been going on for some time, but I haven't done a more thorough investigation for reasons that I'll explain in a moment.
I added the On This Day in the marmot feature some time ago. Well, I can tell you exactly, I think. Looking at the Created attribute for the Agent that collects posts written on this day over the years shows that it was created on 1 January 2025. I like the feature because it reminds me of things, and sometimes serves as a bit of inspiration.
The Agent that creates On This Day looks at the PublicationDate attribute, and gathers all the notes (posts) written on that particular day regardless of the year. Publication Date is a User attribute, so I can edit it at any time. Sometimes I'll begin a post on one day, but not finish I until the next. Seldom happens, but if it does I change the PublicationDate so the post gets properly sorted in the monthly archive container.
I have to look at On This Day every day, because a few years ago I floundered around in the marmot and changed some of the export settings, which results in posts appearing with no paragraph breaks and no markup. You may have seen one of those, but probably not because no one has ever mentioned such a thing to me.
Yesterday I looked at what On This Day had collected, and there was a Thanksgiving post. That seemed weird. Further investigation revealed that a number of posts had had their PublicationDate attributes changed. So I exposed their Created dates in the Displayed Attributes portion of the post. Those too were changed and matched the PublicationDate changes.
What's odd about that is Created is a System Attribute, and short of going into the XML of the document itself, not able to be changed.
So I looked at the archived page for November 2023 and saw the posts and permalinks (created from PublicationDate) were all in the correct chronological order. The Thanksgiving post appeared on 23 November 2023, as expected.
Normally, I would rely on Created as the canonical date and time the note was created, but here was evidence that it had been altered for a number of notes in November 2023, and I cannot fathom how such a change might have occurred.
Today's On This Day showed similar corruption, with the difference between actual date and time of publication and what the Tinderbox file was showing being one week and five hours for at least the posts written on 12 November 2023. A quick glance at the some upcoming posts shows a different offset. (Edit: The delta may not have been one week and five hours. I'd been editing PublicationDate and may have made a typo. This time stuff really messes with my head anyway.)
So far, it seems that this hiccup only appears in the November 2023 archive, but I'm alerted to it now. I may have missed it before, and On This Day is an ephemeral page, it's not archived, so previous glitches went unnoticed.
Update: Don't know why I didn't check the other posts, but this corruption appears in other years as well. Everywhere? I guess I need to see if there's anywhere it doesn't appear.
Sigh.
It's not a difficult problem to correct, but I can't automate it. I have to view the canonical dates recorded in the published web pages, and then correct them in the Tinderbox file.
Oy! 🤬
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