2024-11-23 — Saturday, November 23, 2024 — 21:26
Glenda’s on a Joy Division kick.
I’ve always loved the album art for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, even before I knew what it actually was. And then finding out that it’s the data from Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery of the first detected pulsar? Beautiful.
A month or two ago, I saw Integer Division posted on the Fediverse and […]
stack_rank_star_wars — Monday, October 21, 2024 — 18:18
Stack Ranking Star Wars
Stack ranking things is mostly a dumb exercise. It’s incredibly reductive and does next to nothing to help you actually understand things. In some cases, it can be actually destructive. And yet… sometimes … it can be just some silly fun. So this is not to be taken at all seriously, at least two of these move around for me depending on my mood, and if you’ve got different ideas that’s awesome. […]
u9fs_on_macos — Tuesday, October 15, 2024 — 11:43
Running u9fs on macOS
I use the following technique to run u9fs on macOS. I’m currently running this on macOS 14 (Sonoma), but I believe I’ve used the same technique on several prior versions.
My primary use of this is to serve a root file system to Plan 9 running under qemu. I have it perform real Plan 9 authentication […]
2024-10-08 — Tuesday, October 8, 2024 — 11:54
Follow-up on twtxt v2
I got some feedback on my post commenting on some of the “twtxt v2” discussion, and there’s also, of course, been a bunch of other discussion on the topic. So a follow-up (and a small new thing at the end).
Follow-up […]
2024-09-25 — Wednesday, September 25, 2024 — 00:32
Notes on twtxt v2
This is in response to the 2024-09-25 draft of the twtxt v2 specification
tl;dr:
2024-09-04 — Wednesday, September 4, 2024 — 05:42
Five years ago just about right now, my partner and I were at the transition from expectantly waiting in a dimly-lit room to everything-is-happening- now. Our kid would be here real soon now.
We’d gone to the hospital for a planned induction, and for most of a day, basically nothing happened. The meds were doing their thing, but slowly. My partner’s body wasn’t quite ready to let go of this kid yet (looking back, I get it; I often don’t want to let go of her, either). […]
us-osqi — Thursday, April 4, 2024 — 11:39
The XZ attack and the creation of an OSQI in the US
The recent attack on XZ Utils and liblzma has much of the software industry in a bit of a panic, and rightly so. The attack was very sophisticated, both technically and in terms of the social engineering and time commitment. It represents an escalation of the risk which has previously been considered largely theoretical, and highlights the resources of the attackers, even as their identity remains unknown. […]
2024-03-27 — Wednesday, March 27, 2024 — 17:28
A newsletter I subscribed to which used to use MailChimp, but has been dormant for a few years, recently re-launched, and in the process moved over to Substack. I think that was a really terrible decision, and given what Substack has very clearly said they’re about, and what they support (both implicitly and, financially, explicitly), I’m not okay continuing with that. I wrote the guy behind it the letter below before unsubscribing.
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lab_reports — Thursday, October 26, 2023 — 12:02
Lab Reports
I’ve been thinking a lot recently that I wish I could’ve told myself 20+ years ago to put in the little bit of extra effort to make some of the weird tech projects I’ve worked on publicly sharable.
I rebuilt my website a few years ago, using an evolution of the same technique I’ve used since ~1998, and realized it’s not far off from […]
netflix-dvd-shutdown — Wednesday, April 19, 2023 — 11:53
Some Thoughts on Netflix’s DVD service
Yesterday, Netflix announced that they’re shutting down their DVD rental service, after 25 years of operation.
I rented my first DVD from Netflix in 2005. Daisies, a 1966 Czech New Wave film. It was recommended to me as an interesting bit of film history, and I wasn’t sure where to get it. In the years prior to my […]
2022-01-16 — Sunday, January 16, 2022 — 17:10
A few days ago I got a Monroe 425 calculator which I think is going to get hacked up a fair bit (it didn’t work when I got it). I haven’t had much of a chance to work with it yet, but I’ve started a separate project log for that.
Every time I start something new with my web build system I think maybe this will be the time I finally clean it up enough to be worth sharing, but there’s just always a little more than I want to spend […]
zine-rc — Sunday, November 7, 2021 — 10:37
Last night I wrote (most of) a toy program to serve up text zines via telnet or dialup, inspired by Dial-a-Zine which is used to serve A New Session. If you aren’t familiar with A New Session, it’s a literary magazine delivered primarily via telnet, emphasizing queer and trans voices. I highly recommend checking it out. Submissions are open for issue 2.
The toy version is a simple shell script. It doesn’t yet do index […]
clonedance — Monday, September 13, 2021 — 23:24
Plan 9’s ‘clone dance’
Plan 9’s ip(3) interface is wonderful. It makes network programming dramatically easier than any other environment I’ve seen, so much so that many “network programming” tasks can reasonably be done by simple shell scripts. There are two bits that aren’t obvious at first, though, the most important being that the file descriptor returned by reading the clone file (e.g. /net/tcp/clone) needs to be held open […]
limbaugh — Wednesday, February 17, 2021 — 21:53
We learned that Rush Limbaugh died today. He was a terrible human being who did great harm to the world.
This is a brief story of how he inadvertently helped make me a progressive.
I grew up listening to him a lot, because if I was in the car with my dad & the Yankees weren’t playing, it was pretty much that or […]
short_sales — Thursday, January 28, 2021 — 17:03
My dad, a career broker, used to really like to talk about his work. As a kid, I was totally uninterested and mostly tried not to listen, but it’s amazing how much snuck in.
I remember two conversations we had about short sales. The first was when I was 10-12ish, first time he explained it. I forget how it came up, I think somebody on the radio mentioned it and he asked me if I knew what it meant. He liked to quiz me about things we heard on the […]
donny_went_down_to_georgia — Wednesday, January 6, 2021 — 11:39
Donny Went Down to Georgia
Now Donny went down to Georgia ‘Cause he was lookin’ for some votes to steal And he was in a bind, ‘cause he was way behind And he was willing to make a deal.
So he called up Georgia’s Sec of State […]
2021_01_05_celeste_likes — Wednesday, January 6, 2021 — 07:50
A roughly orderd list of things my daughter loves:
christmas_2020 — Friday, December 25, 2020 — 20:21
Christmas, 2020
I think this year I’ve finally figured out why I prefer the more somber Christmas songs. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” has always been my favorite of the common ones. Sure, some of it is just aesthetics (that progression on the opening “Emmanuel” from the minor sixth to the minor third…), but there’s something else. The more purely jubilant songs just feel like they miss part of the story. The somber ones are […]
master_in_tech — Tuesday, June 16, 2020 — 00:57
“Master” terminology in tech
I saw a helpful hint a while back about changing the name of the default branch git creates. Out of the box, when you run git init to create a new repository, git names the default branch “master”. This is a poor choice for a number of reasons, but the reason it’s coming up again now is the fact that “master/slave” terminology isn’t great given a desire to exorcise racist and/or oppressive language from our […]
running_for_pcp — Wednesday, January 29, 2020 — 22:53
I just went by the county courthouse to turn in my form SEL 105. I’ll now officially be on the Democratic ballot in May as a Precinct Committeeperson (PCP) candidate for Precinct 35, Southeast Scappoose. I’m serving in that role now, appointed to a vacancy off-cycle, but this will be my first time running for the position. Running for any position (aside from some vague memory of running for class secretary or such in 4th grade, maybe?).
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mom — Sunday, January 19, 2020 — 22:42
Mom
Today would have been my mom’s 79th birthday. She passed away last month.
I’ve struggled to come up with anything coherent to write about it. I still don’t know if I’ve got anything coherent, but I really wanted to write. […]
origin_story — Wednesday, November 6, 2019 — 18:23
I’m a mutant.
We figured this out when things started going south with Orion. They did a bunch of genetic tests on him to see if anything was going on there. They found a mutation that ended up being irrelevant to him, but that he got from me. While the fact that I survived to adulthood pretty much ruled out it having negative impact on his development, the medical team did a bunch of research to find out what the […]
celeste-care_and_feeding — Wednesday, September 18, 2019 — 00:37
Care and Feeding
Whenever we go see a medical professional about our (adorable) daughter, Celeste, they want to know how she’s eating and what’s up with her diapers. We had a decent sense, but hadn’t really had a good accurate count. Also, we want to make sure she gets enough to eat, and had sometimes been struggling to remember how much she’d eaten at the last few feedings. Emma looked at a few apps to do this, but we […]
celeste — Wednesday, September 11, 2019 — 22:17
Celeste
Celeste Octavia Luciana Sorace was born with the sunrise on September 4th, one week ago today, and I do not have the words for the light she has brought into our lives. She’s sleeping in my lap as I write this, and it’s hard to not just stare at her instead. It’s hard to do pretty much anything except pay attention to her.
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Apollo50 — Saturday, July 20, 2019 — 10:31
Today is the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon.
It’s a tremendous achievement, and a genuine concrete milestone for us as a people. It’s also the culmination of an astoundingly optimistic effort, especially the more you know about the technology at the time.
We weren’t ready for this.
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rlt — Monday, March 4, 2019 — 21:44
NAME rlt – run commands in a loop with transformed arguments
SYNOPSIS rlt –r substitution [ – r substitution] – c command args…
DESCRIPTION Rlt runs command for each argument in args, with the results of […]
starting_a_media_log — Sunday, January 20, 2019 — 23:27
Inspired by similar lists and logs from Khoi Vinh, Steven Soderbergh, and Jason Kottke, I’ve started keeping track of the media I consume in 2019. As a reader, Kottke’s “media diet” posts are the level of detail and formality I enjoy most, but I suspect I’d have a hard time keeping up with it as a writer, at least until I’ve gotten into the habit a bit. Instead, I’m going to start off modeling it after Soderbergh’s list, with occasional commentary mixed in. I’ve just backfilled the year to date (having been keeping track in my Field Notes book so far […]
12_days_2018-12 — Sunday, January 6, 2019 — 00:23
Happy 12th Day of Christmas, everyone!
Today’s gift goes to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. St. Jude does research on childhood cancer and other catastrophic diseases, and helps kids get well. They want every child to be able to survive a bad diagnoses. For children in their care, they have an 80% survival rate for childhood cancer, up from 20% when they started, thanks in large part to treatments developed at St. Jude. And, of course, to their […]
12_days_2018-11 — Saturday, January 5, 2019 — 00:12
Happy 11th Day of Christmas! Today’s gift goes to NARAL.
I moved from Ohio to Oregon this year, but I’m giving this donation to NARAL’s Ohio chapter. While in the current political climate, abortion rights shouldn’t be considered “safe” in any state, Oregon is in much better shape than Ohio. Here in Oregon, in this most recent election, an explicit anti-abortion bill was defeated by roughly a 2:1 margin, and our existing progressive governor won re-election in significant […]
12_days_2018-10 — Thursday, January 3, 2019 — 22:26
Happy 10th Day of Christmas!
Today’s gift goes to KBOO, Oregon’s listener-supported non-commercial radio station. They’re mostly volunteer-run, with only 9 actual employees, and produce a variety of original shows on music, news, and culture, as well as syndicating some really intersting stuff. I first heard about KBOO well before moving out here, at a talk with Democracy Now! ’s Amy Goodman, where she talked about their long relationship […]
12_days_2018-9 — Wednesday, January 2, 2019 — 22:40
Happy 9th Day of Christmas! Today’s gift goes to the Lupus Research Alliance.
Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease which affects about 1.5 million Americans (including my favorite one). Like many autoimmune disease, its causes and how it operates aren’t very well understood, and there’s often limited treatment options. The Lupus Research Alliance is the leading private funder of lupus research, and if you donate, […]
12_days_2018-8 — Tuesday, January 1, 2019 — 23:43
Happy 8th Day of Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy… Feast of the Circumcision of Christ? “Happy holidays” indeed.
I’m kicking off 2019 by supporting App Camp for Girls, a program to help girls, transgender & gender non-conforming youth learn about the practice and business of technology with hands-on experience, and inspire them towards tech. It’s a great direct action approach to combating some of the problems leading to the remarkable […]
12_days_2018-7 — Monday, December 31, 2018 — 21:34
Happy 7th Day of Christmas, and happy New Years' Eve!
I’m wrapping the calendar year up with an easy one for me: City Fresh. Moving away from Ohio this year, City Fresh is, aside from individual people, the thing I miss most. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a non-profit Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group, connecting small farms in the area to people who’d like fresh, tasty, local veggies. It’s also the only CSA group I’m aware of with a social […]
12_days_2018-6 — Sunday, December 30, 2018 — 21:54
Happy 6th Day of Christmas!
The Dougy Center provides a space where children, young people, and their families who are grieving a death can share and process their experiences. They provide direct support to people, in the form of facilitating peer support groups, and also provide materials and training for people around the world who need to be able to handle similar needs. […]
12_days_2018-5 — Saturday, December 29, 2018 — 23:52
Happy 5th Day of Christmas!
This year I moved from outside Cleveland to a bit north of Portland, moving my nearest major body of water from Lake Erie to the Columbia River. Both are under a number of environmental pressures. Columbia Riverkeeper does a lot of legal work and community organizing to help protect the river. Right now, we’re dealing with a number of efforts to expand fossil fuel transport up and down the river (which is an […]
12_days_2018-4 — Saturday, December 29, 2018 — 23:08
Happy 4th Day of Christmas!
For this 4th day, I’m supporting Outside In, a Portland organization which works to provide services to local homeless youth and other marginalized folks. For 50 years, they’ve been providing housing, education, employment, medical care, counseling, and a variety of other services. They do a good job of understanding the variety of experiences that lead people into bad situations, meeting people where […]
12_days_2018-3 — Thursday, December 27, 2018 — 22:14
Happy 3rd Day of Christmas!
For this third day, I’m again supporting the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU remains the strongest independent legal defender of our civil rights, for nearly 100 years now. They list some highlights of their long fitht, and it’s quite impressive — and does a good job of illustrating their commitment to principle. They defend the rights of every American, even those we don’t like, but especially the most […]
12_days_2018-2 — Wednesday, December 26, 2018 — 23:24
Happy 2nd Day of Christmas — Boxing Day!
If your Christmas went anything like almost all of mine have, a big part of the celebration involved eating more food than is probably wise. This year, we made lasagna as our main dish, and my mom went way overboard (as is standard in our family) with pastries and cookies from our favorite Italian bakery in New Jersey. Breakfast this morning was leftover pastries, which means we’ve now maybe gotten about […]
12_days_2018-1 — Tuesday, December 25, 2018 — 20:29
Merry 1st day of Christmas, everyone.
To celebrate the 12 Days of Christmas, I’m going 12 Days of Giving again this year. This year starts off… rough. It doesn’t feel very Christmasy, but that’s sort of the point.
The Christmas story is, more than anything else, a celebration of a birth; the birth of an infant who’d grow into a man who told us to […]
voting_2018 — Monday, November 5, 2018 — 21:32
This year, for the first time, I’m an Oregon voter, in Columbia County. We vote by mail (or by dropping your ballot in a designated drop box), so there’s no issues with lines or whatnot. We’ve also got basically-automatic registration, which is nice. I do miss the ritual associated with going to a polling place (and the sticker!), but overall I think this is a win.
Federal issues […]
intelligencer_voting — Tuesday, October 30, 2018 — 13:54
Someone posted an idiotic article to Twitter (shocker, I know) where 12 young people explain why they likely aren’t voting. The whole thing is simultaneously infuriating and depressing, and while I don’t think there’s anything about them being “young people” that makes these dumb rationales unique, that is the demographic we most need to see turning out. So on the off chance anyone reading this has similar ideas…
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The_Little_Mermaid — Friday, October 19, 2018 — 14:44
A friend pointed out a BBC article where Keira Knightley mentions that some Disney films are banned in her house, particularly The Little Mermaid. “I mean, the songs are great, but do not give your voice up for a man. Hello!” I couldn’t agree more.
So I fixed it.
The Little Mermaid (2018) […]
misapprehending_misappropriation — Thursday, August 16, 2018 — 22:30
A contact I respect posted an article titled The Evils of Cultural Appropriation, and described it as “thoughtful”. I’ve long been interested in the complexities of “cultural appropriation” as a modern concept, and generally find the woman recommending it to have an insightful and reasoned perspective significantly different from my own. Despite mild concern over anything describing its topic as “evil”, I was interested in what it had to say.
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facebook-feedback — Sunday, June 10, 2018 — 09:33
Today Facebook, a medicore but addictive web site I’ve been trying to use less and less of, asked me to take a brief survey. I did. Here’s my response for the “other feedback” box.
Participating in Facebook has continually felt worse and worse for the last several years. In 2018 I have been making a focused effort to […]
orion — Friday, June 8, 2018 — 23:34
Orion
Orion Lorenzo Sorace was born at 7:42 Pacific time on June 1st. He lived every second of his brief minutes in the arms of people who loved him.
Orion was born en caul, in a remarkably gentle delivery. I have never seen a more delicate and fragile living thing, the most tiny human […]
SuperBowl_2018 — Sunday, February 4, 2018 — 09:24
Anti-Fascist Super Bowl 2018
Today, I’m combining two great American loves: the Super Bowl and fighting fascists.
This went reasonably well last year, so I’m going to give it another run. Last year, though, it involved betting on the teams, and I learned that (entirely understandably) nobody actually wants the […]
voting_2017 — Sunday, October 29, 2017 — 19:22
A few notes on how I voted in the 2017 general election in Ohio. Aside from the content notes below: I voted early, driving down to the County Board of Elections. It was super quick, and there were exactly zero people in line and a handful of helpful poll workers ready to assist. And, of course, I got a lovely sticker out of the deal.
State Issues
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minimalism_is_not_a_product — Monday, July 31, 2017 — 21:19
Minimalism isn’t just a fetish
A friend shared an article titled “ Minimalism Is Just Another Boring Product Wealthy People Can Buy ” and there were a few things in it which bothered me. Now, to be clear up front, I have significant minimalist leanings, aesthetically, but my objections have nothing to do with an aesthetic defense (nominally, neither do the article’s original authors). The article did make some interesting points about […]
Lent-without-Facebook — Tuesday, February 28, 2017 — 20:45
Lent without Facebook
For Lent this year, I’m trying something different: I’m giving up Facebook. If we’re friends over there, you might end up seeing things from me because of things like Buffer or IFTTT, but I won’t be logging in or checking anything there. The app’s off my iPad (it hasn’t been on my phone for a long time), the site is blocked on my mobile devices, and I’m logging out of this right after posting this. […]
maps-real-and-imagined — Wednesday, February 22, 2017 — 09:14
Maps
I love maps. I’ve enjoyed pouring over them since I was little, and getting to hold and read the maps on vacations with my dad made the drive to find the hotel feel like an adventure. I fell in love with the works and world of Tolkien because of the maps in the books, particularly the giant fold-out map in the back of my school library’s copy of The Silmarillion. Inspired by that and a map from a D&D book, […]
Super_Bowl — Sunday, February 5, 2017 — 15:54
Anti-Fascist Super Bowl
This year, I’m combining two great American traditions: the Super Bowl and fighting fascists.
Vegas says the Patriots beat the Falcons by three points. To the extent I have a preference, I’m rooting for the Falcons. Really, though, I’m rooting against fascists. So let’s make a bet: […]
corporate_opposition — Wednesday, February 1, 2017 — 08:14
I’m currently working with a company called Synchronoss. They’re US-based, with lots of international employees and a few international offices. Yesterday the HR department sent out guidance for employees on dealing with the terrible Executive Order restricting travel into the United States by people from some countries (and suspending our refugee program, although that wasn’t covered here). It was entirely logistical in nature, which isn’t terribly surprising, but also isn’t sufficient in my mind. […]
12-Days-2016 — Sunday, January 8, 2017 — 18:12
So Christmas is over (unless you’re on the Orthodox calendar; in which case Happy 2nd Day of Christmas!). I’m now done with my 12 Days of Giving project for 2016, and I thought it would be worth taking a look at how it went. First, some notes.
Growing up, I went to mass pretty much every Sunday with my parents. Maybe the most profound thing I remember hearing was something one of the priests said during the homily: […]
12 Days of Giving—12 — Thursday, January 5, 2017 — 20:49
Happy Twelfth Day of Christmas. This season’s final recipient is NARAL Pro-Choice America.
NARAL is the oldest abortion rights advocacy group in the United States. They’ve been working to protect and expand women’s reproductive freedom since 1969, when Roe v. Wade was still four years off. They provide direct legislative support for lawmakers working to ensure those rights, organize public action against those to are […]
12 Days of Giving—11 — Wednesday, January 4, 2017 — 20:05
Happy Eleventh Day of Christmas. Today’s I’m supporting the Fund for Legal Name/Gender Changes.
A lot of folks are understandably concerned about what sort of changes the incoming administration is likely to bring. Really, anyone remotely paying attention ought to be, but for some people the impact is much more immediate and personal than others. The proposed cabinet and executive staff are packed full of some remarkably regressive […]
12 Days of Giving—10 — Tuesday, January 3, 2017 — 20:58
Happy Tenth Day of Christmas. Today’s recipient is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The EFF is the most important defenders of civil liberties online. From the particular aspects of speech which show up in digital realms, to aspects of how copyright applies to digital or electronic means, to what to do about strong cryptography, there’s a whole bunch of legal problems that our existing legal structures have no idea how to deal […]
12 Days of Giving—9 — Monday, January 2, 2017 — 20:53
Happy Ninth Day of Christmas. Today’s I’m supporting The Internet Archive, a remarkably important public service for the 21st century.
The Internet Archive aims to be a library for the web. They’re most known for The Wayback Machine, a collection of web page snapshots over time. Plug in a URL, and see what, say, cnn.com looked like on a given day. That’s tremendously valuable on its own (and has saved my butt more than once), but they do so much more than that. They’re currently […]
12 Days of Giving—8 — Sunday, January 1, 2017 — 14:08
Happy Eighth Day of Christmas. Today’s recipient is City Fresh and the New Agrarian Center.
City Fresh is absolutely the best CSA in Northeast Ohio. They work with local farmers—all within 75 miles of downtown Cleveland—to get great tasty fruit and vegetables (and occasional other items) to several hundred shareholders. I got started with City Fresh as a shareholder because I wanted tasty food, but I’ve gotten more and more […]
2017 — Sunday, January 1, 2017 — 12:34
Happy New Year, everyone. A brief diversion from my 12 Days thing for a fun thing someone pointed out on Twitter:
Type"my 2017 will be" and use autocorrect to complete the sentence
— Kate Gray 🗝 (@hownottodraw) December 31, 2016
On my iPhone, the default keyboard gives you three suggestions: left, […]
12 Days of Giving—7 — Saturday, December 31, 2016 — 20:30
Happy Seventh Day of Christmas. Today’s recipient is the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The ASPCA is the first humane society in North America, and is now one of the largest in the world. They do direct adoption/placement services, fund spay/neuter services, run rescue operations, provide millions in support for local animal welfare organizations, and work on legislation to provide a legal framework for protecting animals […]
12 Days of Giving—6 — Friday, December 30, 2016 — 20:45
Happy Sixth Day of Christmas. Today’s recipient is Kids Corporation.
Kids Corp works with elementary school students in Newark on improving literacy and math competency. They offer after-school and summer programs, in addition to things like medical care and school supplies. This incarnation has been working with kids in Newark since 1992, and their programs and support help their kids do up to 55% better on writing and math tests. They’re currently working with over 3000 kids. […]
12 Days of Giving—5 — Thursday, December 29, 2016 — 20:56
Happy Fifth Day of Christmas. Today’s gift goes to the Lupus Foundation of America.
Lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease with a wide variety of symptoms and severities. You can be stable with low-grade aches for years, or it can be super debilitating, or (most common) you can be mostly fine and then get flares where it gets really bad. It’s a fairly common disease—about 1.5 million Americans are estimated to have it—but it […]
12 Days of Giving—4 — Wednesday, December 28, 2016 — 07:03
Happy Fourth Day of Christmas. Today’s gift goes to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The order of these posts is absolutely not intended to be meaningful, and certainly not to imply an ordering, but it did feel right to put the SPLC and ACLU next to each other. There’s a lot of overlap in their mission, defending the rights and liberties of all Americans. But while the SPLC focuses narrowly on a particular type of threat […]
12 Days of Giving—3 — Tuesday, December 27, 2016 — 19:34
Day Three of this thing goes to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The SPLC is probably the most important legal adversary for hate groups and bias-based crime in the country. They’re the leading non-governmental experts on hate groups in the world. In addition to direct legal challenges, they provide services like training for law enforcement, educational resources, and run the Civil Rights Memorial. They’ve got an impressive résumé of high-profile wins against folks […]
12 Days of Giving—2 — Monday, December 26, 2016 — 20:44
Day 2 of this project goes to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. I have a hard time imagining a worse feeling than finding out your kid has a catastrophic illness. With my sister and I having good health, my parents mostly only had to worry about the stupid things we could do on our own, which is more than enough worry for any parent. The raft of other things that come along with a child with a serious illness is a whole other thing. Nobody having to go through that should get hit with the added burden of worrying about getting the […]
12 Days of Giving—1 — Saturday, December 24, 2016 — 23:42
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Today, Christians around the world are celebrating the birth of a dirt-poor, brown-skinned Jew to teenage parents who would almost immediately become undocumented Syrian refugees.
The Christmas story is inherently a subversive story. It upsets conventional lines of class, religion, nationality, and gender roles. […]
President for life — Tuesday, December 6, 2016 — 15:20
At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Alexander Hamilton proposed his own replacement for the Articles of Confederation, then the supreme law of the land. While Hamilton was an important advocate for a strong national government, his specific plan for what that government should look like was… extreme. He was no fan of the idea that the States were sovereign and should have a direct say in the election of the executive of the federal government. More significantly, though, he believed that the head of the government […]
Portman on the ACA — Wednesday, November 16, 2016 — 08:14
I’m doing a bunch of writing and calling my elected representatives this week. The urgent push for this is over the really terrible things we’re seeing coming out of the president-elect’s transition team and apparent executive staff and cabinet. In particular, naming Steve Bannon, a white supremacist, anti-semite, and misogynist, to the position of Chief Strategist (or any position in the Executive branch) tarnishes the office and, by extension, the Republic.
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transition — Friday, November 11, 2016 — 21:04
The Presidential Transition Team would like us to tell it how we would like to Make America Great. There’s a lot about this exercise that I find incredibly distasteful, most especially the “again” thing, the implication that America isn’t great today, and the connection to a horridly racist and misogynistic campaign. But y'know what? Fine. I’ll tell you what I want from my country. Here’s what I had to say on the subject.
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Ben Shapiro is bad at logic — Wednesday, October 19, 2016 — 08:22
One of the kids I used to work with posted a video in which Ben Shapiro is said to “destroy” Black Lives Matter with “simple logic” and “5 facts”. The video that follows contains really awful logic and very little in the way of facts. The video was a Facebook embed I’m not going to try to find an external link for, but it was posted by SubjectPolitics on 2016-12-22, if you’d like to go hunting. Shapiro is well-spoken and passionate—but quite wrong. Below is my response (with minimal editing). […]
trumptapes — Saturday, October 8, 2016 — 18:42
Yesterday, a story broke about a recording of the current Republican nominee for president with him saying some really vile stuff, from about eleven years ago. In it, he’s essentially bragging about commiting sexual assault, and the fact that his fame and power lets him get away with it. I wrote the following on Facebook, which sort of blew up a little bit:
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people about rape culture. A few […]
2001-09-11 — Sunday, September 11, 2016 — 12:16
Just about fifteen years ago right now, I talked to my friend R’s mother for the first time. Her mother lived in Hawaii, and it was way too early in the morning there to be calling anyone, especially someone I’d never spoken to; maybe 4:30. It was almost certainly the most awkward phone call I’d placed until that point, but when I’d called R to make sure she was okay, she’d told me that while she could apparently receive calls, she hadn’t been able to get a line out of the City all morning, and asked me to call her mom. “Let her know […]
nader — Monday, July 25, 2016 — 21:20
In 2000, I voted for Nader. Because I was a 22-year-old child who valued my own ideological purity tests above the practical considerations for the nation and my less-fortunate neighbors, and because I didn’t really understand the changes to electoral mechanics needed to make a popular third-party candidate something other than a spoiler. In retrospect, I would change that vote if I could, and am very glad I didn’t live in a contested state at the time.
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NRA-as-PETA — Thursday, April 28, 2016 — 04:57
“Australia-style gun control CAN happen here”
Please?
For whatever reason, my YouTube preroll ads are currently dominated by an NRA video they released about a month ago which is built like a 90s-era PETA-style exposé. It starts with the same sort of ominous-sounding music behind white-on-black title cards, ending with […]
nevada — Wednesday, February 24, 2016 — 13:41
Governor Kasich—
Hi, it’s me again. Last night was kinda crazy, huh? I mean, the whole primary process is a little wonky, and the caucuses especially seem like something out of pre-revolutionary voting, but that was just something else. As a total electoral geek, I’d love to see one of these some time, but it’s really hard to imagine that this is actually the best way to run a voting system in a developed nation. Wow. […]
kasich — Wednesday, February 10, 2016 — 15:54
As part of my Lenten practice this year, I’m doing a little bit of writing every day. I’m starting off with a letter to my Governor, John Kasich.
Governor Kasich—
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2016-38 — Saturday, January 2, 2016 — 20:03
2016 & 38
I gave up making New Year’s resolutions a few years back, but every year, between my birthday and the beginning of the new year, I can’t help thinking about what I’d like to see be different in my life. From 2011 through 2015, inspired by a friend’s 2010 list, I instead made a list of things—specific, actionable goals—to do during the year. My friend called it “10 in ‘10”, so when I started I did “11 in'11”… and […]
charleston — Saturday, June 20, 2015 — 13:21
This past Tuesday, I was telling a friend of mine the story of a local family I know. For most of the two decades before I met them, they had been living in refugee camps in Nepal after being deported from their homes in Bhutan. Some members of the extended family were born in the camps; for others, it was the only life they remembered. The rest had been forced from their homes in the ‘90s by the Bhutanese military or ethnic violence. After many years trying and failing to negotiate a repatriation agreement between Bhutan and Nepal, several countries, […]
darksky — Sunday, June 14, 2015 — 18:18
NAME darksky – prints weather report from forecast.io
SYNOPSIS darksky [ – acdhms]
DESCRIPTION Darksky prints the weater report for the current location. Options […]
jim — Thursday, June 11, 2015 — 11:08
A little while ago, I went to a neighborhood greasy spoon for breakfast. It was pretty late on a weekday morning, so the crowd was thin: just a young couple in a booth towards the front, and one large table with a bunch of older folks, I’d guess in their late 70s or early 80s. The big table looked like three couples, and two of the men were having a lively conversation I couldn’t help but overhear.
When I walked in, the conversation was circling around some issue […]
CityFresh — Tuesday, June 2, 2015 — 09:28
City Fresh
This week, the 2015 City Fresh season kicks off with a bunch of signup events around the city. It’s the best Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program around. Here’s why I love being a shareholder and working with them, and think you might, too.
I got started because I like good food. I really like to cook, and […]
BodyNorms — Friday, April 17, 2015 — 13:30
Body Norms
In March, I got a chance to visit the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York. I mostly went to visit Phillip Stearns' installation A Chandelier For One of Many Possible Ends but was fortunate enough to be shown around by Tony Bannon and Heather Gring, which was a real treat. Heather showed me around an exhibit called “Body Norms”, which they were just finishing putting together before […]
chandelier — Wednesday, April 8, 2015 — 11:54
[This is incomplete.]
Phillip Stearns' Installation at Burchfield Penney
In early March of 2015, I was in New Jersey, visiting my mom and sister, when Phillip Stearns posted a link to a new installation at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, in Buffalo, New York. The installation, A Chandelier For One of Many Possible Ends, was strking: […]
hello — Sunday, April 5, 2015 — 19:10
Hello, world.
I’m tired of not having a place of my own to put things I write, so I made one. It’s a bit of a hack and mostly looks like how I was maintaining corporate websites 15+ years ago, but whatever. It works, and it’s sort of fun to put together. All pages are static, generated via mk (and cron, in case I forget after an edit).
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NetNeutrality — Tuesday, February 24, 2015 — 14:06
Net Neutrality
What is Net Neutrality?
The short version: Network Neutrality (or Net Neutrality) is the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should not treat your data differently based on its destination. They should instead treat all data “neutrally”, all endpoints the same. […]