The Art Of Not Asking Why

Spent a big portion of the morning working on the Archive page. Added the old links that I took out of the navigation bar, expended on RSS feeds, and went into a rabbit hole of pages on Hugo for two hours 😅

A few more tweaks and I will be done. Considering bringing back the org-mode/Emacs category

This morning, I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea of web mentions. The explanation is simple enough, yet somehow I don’t fully get it… need a working example. Microblog (where I host my blog) implements this, and I want to make sure I take advantage.

Just another note (I’m on a roll today) that I just added TinyLytics to my site. In a nutshell, it’s a hit counter: it tells me you read a post, what country you’re from, and what OS you’re using. Nothing more (this is not Google Analytics!)

It’s hard to stay away from extremes these days. Everyone has an opinion, there’s so much noise, and we constantly get mentally bombarded in today’s social networks era.

Is it just me, or does it seem we use more unnecessary emphasis in everything we say? Instead of saying “I’m happy about this,” we say, “I’m super happy about this,” or “I’m super excited about this,” and there are those that would add “super super” to make sure we understand they are indeed excited. There’s the whole obnoxious “literally” that’s been around for years, and a bunch of other words. I like to grump, so I’d blame social media and move on.

But I can’t just do that, can I? Nope. Let me tag a few elephants (whales! super whales!) in the room, but I promise not to do more than that. It’s 2024, and we have an election coming up; there’s the Middle East stuff, the AI stuff, and the Ukraine-Russia stuff. Again, everyone has an opinion, a huge and loud one (me included; I’m human), so we have to go out there and let it out..!

A week ago or so, I encountered one such angry comment on Mastodon. It was your general provocative emotional post with an image. Since it showed something that challenged what I knew to be true at that point, I replied and asked for the source so I could read more about it. I was surprised (I shouldn’t have been, but there I was) to get an answer from the poster saying they don’t have one; they just got it from a friend who posted it on Twitter (they called it Twitter, so I call it Twitter. Personally, I don’t give a beep about how it’s called these days).

Why was I shocked? Because this was an educated, smart person whom I followed. This person posts good informative comments. As I checked this person’s feed, I was saddened to see post after post of similar magnitude, many of which were also challenging what I know to be true. Mastodon has an option to mute someone for a given time period, so I chose that, hoping that at some point, I could get back to “normal” with this person.

Look folks, I know I’m an idiot. I’m a grumpy dude in his 40s. That’s why I’m happy to learn more, because there’s always more to know. Just a couple of days ago, a friend challenged my emotional intelligence (or, apparently, lack of it), and after I cooled down, I re-read what I said to them in anger. Well yeah, I was angry and said stuff based on things I thought they said, not what they were trying to say. I didn’t have the mental capacity to understand them at the time because I was angry, and I knew that, but we were both too engaged in arguing to “take a breather,” which was needed.

When I was at school, one of the simple “tricks” our teachers had for us angry students was to tell us to step out and “go wash your face.” Everyone knew what this meant: splashing one’s face with cold water. It works for me, and according to a quick search, there’s some research about it. An extra tip from me: if you’re upset, close your eyes and hold the water (chilled) to your eyeballs for a moment. Press very gently so water don’t go through your eyelids, but enough to feel your eyeballs through the eyelids against your hands. If you have short hair or are bald like I am, you have another excellent advantage and can also get some cool water over your noggin. It doesn’t hurt to try, right?

So go wash your face.

You’d laugh. It’s so basic. And as I said, I don’t know much, so take it with a grain of salt. But it works - for me, anyway. If you’re angry and you find yourself at your keyboard typing away… don’t. Just hang on a bit. Don’t worry; you will still be angry enough to write the stuff later, only, hopefully, with more reason in you. And you’ll be able to link the dots for people, hopefully leading them away from obnoxious pukeboxes like Twit-eX. (Ha! I like the name. I’ll keep it.)

Have a good day, everyone, as much as you can, and drink plenty of water! (after you drink your coffee, of course).

Saw something controversial on Mastodon? Twitter X? Reddit? Not so fast. Check the source. Then look up the source (if you don’t know it) to see who’s the parent company (Wikipedia is a good place to start). Don’t know/can’t find? Please say so. Be honest.

Thank you.

Today was a bit of a downer, and I wasn’t in the mood. I also had to use my lunch break to get coffee since we were about to run out.

You know those times when you listen to something good that lifts you up? You don’t care you look like an asshole on a subway car, bonking your head up and down to the metal? Me neither. However…!

This did it. I recommend you listen with good earphones and high volume, and ditch YouTube for lossless if you can.

Polygon has a good introduction to Observation:

“Set in the year 2026, Observation’s story plays out on a titular low-orbit space station left stranded in the wake of some mysterious catastrophic systems failure. With no way to contact Earth or reliable means to ascertain the location of the Observation’s crew, medical officer Dr. Emma Fisher must repair the station’s systems, locate and secure any survivors, and re-establish contact with Earth to coordinate a rescue effort.”

“But you are not Dr. Emma Fisher. You are SAM: the Observation’s semi-omniscient operating system, rebooted following the blackout and tasked with assisting Dr. Fisher in the station’s repairs. Which is to say, you’re not aboard the space station. You are the space station.”

It’s a game geared toward people who like scary sci-fi stories happening in space and who enjoy puzzles and mystery-like narratives. In other words, me.

The game’s puzzles are easy, though it’s sometimes frustrating to understand the rules. I’ve gone in circles for a long time before I gave up and looked into a walkthrough to tell me that at this point in the game, I could blast through air vents or that the communication mode I’m looking for is in another tab on the UI for SAM, for example. These minor annoyances do not happen often enough to ruin an otherwise polished, well-made game.

You won’t find fast action here or explosions and guns (ok, /some/explosions), which I find refreshing. The game hooked me enough to want to keep going and see what happens next all the way to the end.

Even if you’re not a gamer but like a good sci-fi story, you should try it. The game is easy enough to pick up and play with a keyboard and Mouse on a modest computer (it’s 3D in space in parts, but the game wasn’t too demanding even when it came out five years ago), and you can probably find a deal for it somewhere on the web.

Polygon has a good introduction to Observation:

“Set in the year 2026, Observation’s story plays out on a titular low-orbit space station left stranded in the wake of some mysterious catastrophic systems failure. With no way to contact Earth or reliable means to ascertain the location of the Observation’s crew, medical officer Dr. Emma Fisher must repair the station’s systems, locate and secure any survivors, and re-establish contact with Earth to coordinate a rescue effort.”

“But you are not Dr. Emma Fisher. You are SAM: the Observation’s semi-omniscient operating system, rebooted following the blackout and tasked with assisting Dr. Fisher in the station’s repairs. Which is to say, you’re not aboard the space station. You are the space station.”

It’s a game geared toward people who like scary sci-fi stories happening in space and who enjoy puzzles and mystery-like narratives. In other words, me.

The game’s puzzles are easy, though it’s sometimes frustrating to understand the rules. I’ve gone in circles for a long time before I gave up and looked into a walkthrough to tell me that at this point in the game, I could blast through air vents or that the communication mode I’m looking for is in another tab on the UI for SAM, for example. These minor annoyances do not happen often enough to ruin an otherwise polished, well-made game.

You won’t find fast action here or explosions and guns (ok, /some/explosions), which I find refreshing. The game hooked me enough to want to keep going and see what happens next all the way to the end.

Even if you’re not a gamer but like a good sci-fi story, you should try it. The game is easy enough to pick up and play with a keyboard and Mouse on a modest computer (it’s 3D in space in parts, but the game wasn’t too demanding even when it came out five years ago), and you can probably find a deal for it somewhere on the web.