Sometimes I feel guilty about the advantages I’ve enjoyed over the years. At work I find myself pretty consistently applied to things. There’s never a shortage of stuff for me to work on, ever, it seems. My coworkers complain pretty frequently about working help desk, or even help desk having no tickets for them to handle. I’m rarely ever left alone to just dick around for a day. Part of that probably comes from me pressuring my employers to pay me more every opportunity that I get. Whether job-hopping or other means, I’m always looking for more money. Typically, if someone’s paid amply, you keep that person engaged and going, hacking away at whatever stack. I guess that’s part of it.

I don’t write as much as I used to. I’ve gone through periods where I could write page after page of all sorts of thoughts popping into my head and I could just bang out idea after idea. Actually, I don’t really know if that’s true or not. I think I’ve been more prolific than in recent times, but I don’t have numbers to support that theory. One thing I do know is that I’ve sat at this keyboard, at a post not unlike this one, and I’ve erased the first line. Then I would write another first line. It too would be erased. Then I deleted the new post and just went back to staring blankly at a YouTube video. It’s not that I don’t have feelings to express, it’s that the motivation to express them just dwindles. It used to be a way to purge myself of negativity and find some contentment. It gave me an opportunity to untangle a mess in my mind and set things straight. Writing just to write can be incredibly therapeutic. I just haven’t lately. I haven’t been able to. Even this post is really more an excuse than therapy. It’s to let you know that there will be more interludes and less genuine expression of emotion or thought.

It has easily been something like two decades since I’ve been to the Renaissance Festival. I’m excited, but my excitement is also tempered by the reality that I was far easier to impress twenty years ago. However, the absolute redemption I’m expecting from this is that you can get a giant ass turkey leg and a beer. I think that should be a decent enough trade-off for middle-aged me versus myself two decades ago. I think the Renaissance Festival should hold up quite well in that regard.

I started using Byobu with tmux for sessions on my various machines, and overall I have to say I’m really impressed. It’s an awesome addition to the arsenal, but if you’re not super familiar with some of tmux’s finer points, byobu can really fuck with your head.

I noticed that disabling the “F-Keys” in byobu gives you access to F1-F11, but F12 is still fucked. That’s because it’s added as a second prefix. On the fly you can fix it with:

Twitter, to me, is an excellent example of why monolithic platforms are bad for society. Jack Dorsey had ultimate authority to manage Twitter as he saw fit since Twitter’s inception. As soon as Elon bought it, you could see Musk starting to shift the “culture” surrounding Twitter to his silly little man-child libertarian bullshit.

Facebook, Myspace, Twitter; They all share the same problems. They also all share the same fate. They’re destined to die. They will start life humbly, expand, peak, and eventually whither and die. It’s the cycle of “monolithic platforms”.

I’m currently running a simulation on this PC. For reference it’s a Hewlett Packard z440 with an Intel Xeon E5-1620 with four cores and two threads per core. It has 64GB of RAM and a M.2 SSD. The simulation is taking half an hour so far. It’s not even a hard simulation. The problem is the simulation software, it’s not exactly utilizing the power of this machine. The calculations are done inline, single thread, and the virtual machine has a maximum of four gigabytes of allocated memory to work in. Honestly, it’s like taking a Ferrari or Pratt & Whitney custom racing engine and strapping it on a Geo Metro transmission filled with mud instead of transmission fluid. Engineering choices like these make me sad for humanity. “Doing the right thing would be too expensive, so we’re doing the next best thing.” Why do we even bother? The two design choices are so far away from one another that the second choice isn’t even worth pursuing.

If you haven’t watched it yet, absolutely go check out the Netflix series about the “Amber Heard / Johnny Depp” trial. It’s wild to see everything that came out in that trial, and Amber Heard’s ridiculous attempts to cry on demand in front of the court. I also felt really bad hearing audio of Depp himself admit that he was abused. I’m only two episodes in, but I think the third episode (my prediction before actually seeing it) will highlight Heard’s borderline personality diagnosis, which is probably the point that the wheels absolutely fell off the trial. Man, that audio, though. It resonated with experiences I’ve had, it really did. That way she tried to bait him into meeting her violence with violence and him just brokenly responding with what little he had left. Man, I bet Depp never gets with another borderline ever again.

At our house we enjoy some trashy reality TV from time to time. One of our guilty pleasures has always been the “90 Day Fiance” series. It always seems to be a cauldron of desperation and dirt that makes an amazing amalgam of human trauma. It’s wild to see the rollercoasters these people subject themselves to from the immediate highs when they first meet to their first huge fights, to the almost guaranteed conclusion of divorce or separation. It really is some entertaining shit.