invertigo hayfever

14. Retirement home for Millenials

So uh this is proabably a good time as any to ask, have you guys checked out my tracker music soundtrack replacement for Sonic CD yet? Who doesn't love modding a 30-year-old game with 30-year-old technology? Just search the "hedgehog masque replica" tags.

I looked at my hair in the mirror the other day and I can count the individual follicles now.

15. I do not "get" poetry

I got complex feelings on Rupi Kaur. Some of her stuff is actually quite good....but it's probably also plagiarized based on what I've seen.

That said, Rupi Kaur has provided a very useful service to me. Ever got a terf frustrated enough that they start ranting about their bodily secretions? It's surely much funnier than they intend, and I get to call it "Vogon Rupi Kaur" and, like, people understand what I'm talking about.

I think it's true, that there's good poetry out there.
One day, we'll know who wrote it.

16. What's for Dinner

Long-form posting of the sort I've tried to do more of on here doesn't lend itself well to a daily posting schedule, and I've been pretty lackadaisical in posting these; no offense to those engaged more closely in microblogvember, but it's not as much of a priority for me.

Anyway, because we were planning to have some friends over for dinner since we're here on our own. I usually join up with my parents here but they went back to their home along with my brother, so it's just my wife and I for the weekend. Friends ended up with other plans but we still had all the food, so the answer for probably another day or two is: leftovers. And yes, they're tasty.

17. Juggling

I never did learn how to juggle. As you can see, I barely can metaphorically juggle multiple tasks. Anyway, finally getting these blog prompts done.

I mean I guess I can juggle two things at once, which isn't very impressive but it works.

18. Cartoon Animals

As a kid, I didn't have a lot of stuff of my own. We had all the needs met, but as far as more luxurious stuff went, we didn't have it. It's hard for me to be mad about this as an adult.

However, as a kid, I remember that one of the sorts of dumb things that helped me manage my horniness was some of the covers of the Sonic comics where the girl characters had more visible cleavage. Times were tough and you had to make do with what you had. Supposedly table skirts exist for similar reasons, that the Victorian-era white people were sickos with the horniness levels of teenagers constantly, so you had to hide the table legs from them lest they start tryihg to feel 'em up as if they were a lady's.

Anyway, I think experiences like this are a key part of why I'm not a furry yet so many of my friends are.

19. doctors hate her!!

I'm glad my wife gets along with the doctors she's seen. I haven't even bothered getting a pirimary care physician after grad school, because I got hit with the anxiety diagnosis and now am convinced that now I won't get my symptoms taken seriously anywhere.

Which is fun because I had a decent suspicion that I had some afib-like symptoms that may have led to a stroke at one point. Around the same time I was alternating between existential angst and suicidal depression at the end of grad school, I got what felt vaguely like some stroke symptoms. Nothing too severely onset, but, like, limb tiredness more easily, difficulty getting up without losing my breath, loss of energy and memory, stuff like that. But who knows, maybe it really was anxiety.

My brother used to wear a heart monitor when he was in kindergarten but he's now older than I was in grad school, and seems fine.

20. witch weather

The day I should have posted this I think we got hit with some pretty intense rain storms. I presume that's what this topic is about. I should have spent more time that weekend walking around in what was surely the last days of comfortable weather for the year, but I am a fool whose time management skills this year went out the window with daylight savings time for some reaosn, and now everything is a blur of terribly-mismanged effort.

Mysticism is the part of religion that I relate to least, possibly because I am prone to magical thinking when left to my own devices, so I don't have a lot to relate to with the way a lot of people speak of paganism, as in the context of old, otherwise largely-abandoned European historical customs.

Anyway rain here is always worth celebrating, and it was good to have outside weather that was more in line with how I felt inside.

21. Fuck computers

I don't know that I have a lot to say here that I wouldn't have already placed in, say, the "anti-hardware club" hashtag, but now that DOScember is once again approaching, I want to get mad at old tech more. You all really deserve a good, unhinged, all-caps rant about the awfulness of the Soundblaster-16 line.

For a guy who complains about computers, I sure do like having a lot of them!

22. what's in a name

I have never been one to be preoccupied with names. Some people get weird into nominative determinism,as if we lived in a bad superhero comic, and as a guy who's read and written code before I don't get it. Self-documenting code is great when it's done properly, but all too often you end up with code comments that no longer reflect the underlying reality of what a program is or does. Names for things are often misleading if you take them too seriously, especially when they've been through a mushy long-term process of cultural mutation.

Anyway if I can be said to like my name, it is mostly because the process by which it was chosen was a ruthlessly, hilariously efficient one. In that respect I could not possibly seek to change it.

My mom wants to get a robot vaccuum for Christmas. She mentioned this in a group chat she has with my wife and me. Looking on websites which furnish people with appliances, I found one for an affordable price which seemed suitable, and forwarded it to my wife. She was like "You're giving gifts for the home for your mother? Gifts for the home are for the home!" and, like, she's right, but was apparently asleep when the subject came up and didn't see the context.

I get what my wife is saying, but she also got frazzled when I started loading up laundry, about an hour ago, as if it was supposed to be her job and I was undermining her.

24. there was an app for that

I love android devices, but more of them, especally when they're single-purpose devices and not phones, like media players or gaming devices, should always come with root access that apps can use if required

Yes, this is me still upset that my Mechen H1 isn't rooted. And unlike the average android 6 phone, there isn't a ubiquitous stock firmware to download that can be patched up. You can do su inside adb, but that's, apparently, not enough.

This is frustrating because I'd just learned of the magical world of usbgadget and was hoping I could use the device for loading bootable OS isos for diagnostic, restorative, or other similar purposes. Perhaps I'll have to look for cheap rooted phones that I can also use as usb touchpads.

Paired with my AlphaSmart Dana, I'll have the world's most sicko mode wired desktop accessory kit.

25. bigolas dickolas wolfwood

I recently watched a web video called "I want to fistfight Colleen Hoover" and so much of it expresses perfectly my feelings on the modern romance subgenre. I've talked about this a few times (and I'm pretty sure it came up in a previous prompt!) but I think there are habits inspired by fanfiction communities that lend itself to questionable creative practices, where too many stories read like they were written by a checklist, definitely marketed based on a trope checklist, and borderline creatively bankrupt as they try to (even if they don't realize it) retell Pride nad Prejudice without understanding the reasons why we regard that story as a literary classic. It was more than "wow, this lead guy is a jerk".

The crux of the argument of the video in question as far as it pertained to Hoover is that her writing is really jarring to read, because it bills itself as romance when basically all of the romantic interests are creeps, weirdos, and probably shouldn't be allowed around too many other people. She's described some of her writing as being inspired by her parents' relationship, which probably helps ground the characters and makes the drama feel more real than soap-opera-ish like these kinds of stories sometimes can, but a statement like that opens more questions than it answers.

While most non-fiction writing has (at least among good non-fiction writing) a pretty clear and usually explicit thesis, fiction writing also exists to put forward a specific viewpoint. Sometimes that's as basic as "yeah this is hot" and that can be terribly sujective and hard to relate to for some people! "Who is the audience for this work" is not a question that should have an easy answer; if it does, the work is probably pandering and cynical.

It is difficult to read Hoover, even in small passages, and not take her works as apologia for abuse as romance. Given that she suggests she grew up in a household where that was normal, I can see why she wants to make it the focus of her writing. But

It does not bring me pleasure or satisfaction to say "I wish she had spent more time working out her thoughts with a feelings profesional of some kind before trying to present them to the world as a way of working through it publicly", but that's the overall impression I get from her work, and it just makes me really sad to think about.

I think it's incredibly possible to tell stories like this. Lord knows I love network television comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and know that if Rebecca Bunch were a real person that I know, we would have been arrested for crimes together. But while that story tries very hard to empathize with all its characters despite their flaws , foibles, and frequently-inappropriate behavior, it's also less of a traditional romance than it might let on, and was very refreshing to me

(It was also refreshing to me because it's good to see other music/theater/musical theater fans who are also fair-minded critics of those media, because in high school it always seemed that liking musical theater was an all-or-nothing approach. I like The Music Man. I like Assassins. I struggle with Rent, and it's utterly hilarious to me how so many people completely misread Dear Evan Hansen on the basis of, I guess, one of its songs. Anyway, my dream job is working with Rachel Bloom to make a musical, loosely in the vein of A Chorus Line and Assasins, about working a call center and the hostage-taking industry and how similar they can look at times. But this is getting far afield of the topic at hand.)

All of that is to say that I'm not surprised This is How You Lose the Time War eventually got some really masive attention by word-of-mouth. It's written in a more experimental style, it's about a less-explored setting than "what if mr darcy worked starbucks, or was in your twitter DMs", it has actually put thought into expressing its themes beyond eroticism, and it has lesbians. Seriously, the romance market is somehow both vast enough to have space for dreck like Red, White, and Royal Blue but also so small that it's nearly impossible to actually sponsor lesbian romance as a subgenre? Insulting at all levels.

I know nothing about the guy this prompt was named for other than this specific book promotion, as it caught the attention of basically all of the romance-writing internet.

26. you're turning into your mother

Especially over the past year or so I've noticed that I'm becoming like my mother in ways that are not flattering. I am more selectively attentive, more prone to questionable decision-making, more frustrated, slightly mre impulsive, and frequently more tired. I can get aloong with my mother, as long as there's physical distance between us most of the time.

She had the most wonderful decision back when I left grad school to peruse my resume, and I, carelessly, allowed her to, not realizing that she has replaced my phone number on it with hers (the first 7 numbers are the same). Why was I in such a bad mental state back when I was leaving grad school gee I can but wonder it is a real fuckin mystery there huh.

Don't worry, I've learned my lesson and will only send her my resume again if she has a software engineering position open.

8. that's not a real place

This prompt got me looking into something and it's my new favorite piece of information: There's a fake town in New Mexico that doesn't exist.

A little bit of context: right before the 2008 financial collapse, there was a lot of development in some of the larger cities of New Mexico, under the expectation that the same sort of population increases happening in a lot of the rest of the American West -- Texas, Arizona, Colorado, hell probably even Utah -- was going to hit New Mexico, which is still quite small in comparison, even in its major cities. Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico, has about 550K people in the city proper and around 950K in the larger metropolitan area. These numbers are comaprable to Tucson, only the second-largest city in Arizona, and its resepective surrounding area.

The thing is, Albuquerque has a lot of limitations in how far it can expand, due to directly abutting sovereign land in the north (Sandia Pueblo) and south (Isleta Pueblo). As a result, a lot of development was targeting the area in and around Las Cruces, a smaller town near the Texas border in the southern part of the state, near El Paso. Because it is penned-in by sovereign territory, there was room to develop land for luxury homes, new business parks, and headquarters for new companies that might make some of the more empty desert land useful for scientific purposes. Think like Spaceport America, which was developed from plans in the 90s, and started being built around 2006. The actual spaceport is about as close to Las Cruces as is reasonable for a site dedicated to launching spacecraft, about half an hour or way by the highway.

This sort of development, happening right up to the 2008 financial crisis, is the context for the town that I'm going to talk to you about, a place actually quite far in the east of the state, a place called CITE.

The location for CITE wasn't around Las Cruces. It's in an even smaller town called Hobbes, which is about as far south as Las Cruces but is nearly adjacent to the panhandle of Texas, rather than Texas's westernmost edges. It has a population of around 40K people.

While Hobbs is one of many New Mexican towns with a higher-education learning facility, it's a private institution, the University of the Southwest, that has an enrollment of just under 1000 students, making it the largest private institution that grants PhDs in the state. It's also a non-denominational Christian university.

Which is to say that if you're simply intent on setting up a lab or research institution and looking to get people coming right out of a degree program, you'd be looking to build a faciility, if it didn't already exist, somewhere around Albuquerque, Las Cruces, or maybe Soccorro, all of whom have significantly larger programs and are public universities. Of course, CITE, as you probably guessed based on its relationship to the prompt, was far too large to be built anywhere around any of those places.

CITE is here in all-caps because it's actually an acronym. It's short for "The Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation". It is often referred to as simply "The Center". Near Hobbs, it was going to be about 15 square miles...and have no people living there, at least not permanently. It was planned Pegasus Global Holdings, and was supposed to be constructed around 2012, when due to the market for everything having bottomed-out, would have likely been relatively cheap to construct.

Now, you might ask what the purpose of having a city with no people in it would be. As you might guess, with how I've introduced it and its name, it was designed with the purpose of being a testing facility / skunkworks for various infrastructure projects. Think stuff like green energy generation or self-driving cars. An article in Popular Mechanics asked, in its headline, the question "Why is a Tech Company Building a Ghost Town in New Mexico?". Summarized, the developers were inspired by Disney's EPCOT (go figure!), and planned to use it to test things like, per example in the article, smart thermostats and their potential for energy efficiency in controlled conditions. It could also, like Epcot, serve as a potential tourist destination and support real towns in the area where people who could visit the facility could live.

So what happened to CITE? Well, despite the location, it was still not feasible to acquire the land around where they wanted, as it was adjacent to a national monument (Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks, specifically) and by the time the project was supposed to have been built, June 2014, they were looking for new locations. No ground has been broken anywhere for the facility.

An article from the time in Albuquerque Business First ("CITE hopes to build test city on remote stretch of I-10" by Dan Mayfield) explains that Pegasus sought to build CITE in a different location instead. Where did they plan this new location to be? A bit north of Las Cruces.

Any further progress from that had probably been put on hold as a result of the pandemic. The website for the project, cite-city.com, doesn't appear to have been updated since 2018, and is not furnished with details about project development status or even location.

The facility should not be confused with "The Center" whose web presence is thecenternm.com.
That is an indoor soccer (futsal) training facility, just one of many confounding factors that make trying to find any sort of recent news about the project basically impossible to find.

9. book club

The closest I've been to a proper book club is a few research reading groups. Most of them were done at the colleges I attended (i.e., Univ. of New Mexico for grad school). Discussions were what you'd expect for a graduate paper review course -- everyone reads a paper (or at least, are supposed to have), they come in for a session to make sense of it, and they review it on its merits. I remember complaining a lot about the way in which these papers did math. I understand that print copies of journal articles have resources to optimize, but I will always be frustrated that so many projects would have dense equations with rhos and sigmas that could represent anything and never release any actual source code for auditing, review, and replication. One of the reasons I work in computers is that the mathematics is more intuitive because the notation is more flexible! A property like "Momentum_x" is nearly always going to be a more intuitive value than, say, a lowercase rho.

At the same time as these seminars, I was active in a Facebook group that was a bit more like a book club. Split off from The Atlantic's comment sections for Ta-Nehisi Coates's writing, a community that was placed in jeopardy by the site's management being unable to maintain a consistent comment feed service, it was populated by a lot of academics, journalists, and writers. It was thus the perfect target audience for articles from The Toast, and was an unofficial discussion group for everything that got posted there, as eventually someone would share it, and had a major influence on the community's inside-jokes. It's still around but by the time the pandemic hit I spent relatively little time posting there, and I think a lot of its activity has moved to Discord.

While most of what was shared there was short-form writing like articles and essays, it certainly strikes me as the sort of group that would form as the result of a book club. Aside from discussion about writing, it was also a group tha tshared advice about social dyanmics and "is it safe to eat this?" questions, about home repair and fashion and politics. A vital source for making sense of the protests in Ferguson, which were happening at the time I was most active in the community.

I've obliquely referenced it a few times in passing here. If I talk about the ways in which power imbalances in romance start getting colonial, it's from seing it brought to our attention by some of the fiction writers in the community who hated that they had to be a part of any of the system promoting those works to get ahead. Ugly stuff, too. This was the same time that Kate Breslin's "For Such a Time" was getting attention -- if you're not familiar with the story, it's the one in which a female holocaust victim gets romanced by a male death camp guard. Certainly not fluffy, certainly not something that could constitute "romance", with such a stark, deadly power dynamic between the characters. The book was nominated for awards: "Best First Novel" and, for reasons that hurt my brain to even attempt to process, "Best Inspirational Romance".

Ever since that moment, the Romance Writers' Association has been at schism, dealing with the backlash to that and some tone-deaf responses from its board, petty attempts at revenge, and its failures to represent the breadth of the community of authors that it claims to, rather than just middle-class white women. Massive organizational shakeups came right around the time of the pandemic, though due to the pandemic I'm not prepared to expound on how much they've actually shifted the principles of the organization or their membership.

10. trespassing

I tend to not try to bend the rules too much if I can get away with it. Some of it is about minimizing complacency and normalization of deviance (@lupi on here has a post on this concept in terms of engineering disasters I've probably referenced before) -- something out-of-spec can seem safe if it doesn't break immediately, but that doesn't mean it's resilient, and you need conservatism in safety estimates in order to make sure if things do go wrong, they can still be managed in a way that doesn't cause larger, systemic issues. So much of the misery in the past 15 years comes specifically from eroding those safety buffers until catastrophy hit seemingly ever major component of our infrastructure, multiple times, and eroding away what little resiliency was left in the meantime.

The other big reason I don't tend to do this much is that when I was young, it usually ended up backfiring. The question of whether I had a typical rebellious phase as a youth is up for debate -- having to think on it, I'd probably argue that a lot of it happened when I was too young to have enough power to get away with anything. So I don't have a lot of fun trespassing stories or anything like that. At some point I just got tired of the hassle associated with it, though these days I keep a low-enough profile that I could probably escape detection for a while.

I also think about how a lot of major retailers will let you get away with shoplifting, to a point, specifically so that they'll have records of you doing shoplifting enough times, for enough money, that they can then give you harder charges. Out of all the things to instill a sense of complancency in, acts that carry felony charges is some extremely bleak shit.

I've mentioned before that my workplace (though I'm remote nearly full-time these days) directly abuts soverign territory, and there's something to be said for staying to designated paths so that you don't end up doing, like, colonialist encorachment. If I climbed into your backyard, I think we'd both agree that's just an invasion of privacy.

That said, when I was young my dad and I would walk through under-construction houses in our neighborhood on days when nobody was on-site (weekends). Obviously, someone building a house on some land means someone's also bought the land, so we were on someone else's private property, but there was very little privacy to violate. One learns a few things about home construction just from watching the work-in-progress, and it's especially interesting with multi-story houses.

As they say, leave no trace.

11. unlikely teacher

Now, I inherited my fondness for Manfred Mann's Earth Band from my dad, but one of the reasons why it all sticks with me as hard as it does is in a specific DVD that I got one time, part of the "Evolution of Mann" career-spanning singles compilation box set which included stuff from the 60s as well as a lot fhe Earth Band material. The DVD featured music videos interspersed with interviews with Mann on a few funny anecdotes, process, touring, and whatnot. In the final interview on the disc, he's given a more open-ended question about the nature of the industry and his part in it.

While the 60s Manfred Mann pop group(s) could be easily compared to the Beatles, and their appearance outside of the UK was directly tied to the politics of the British invasion, Mann was open about the ways in which his politics didn't reflect those attitudes. The peace and love era was obviously not relatable to him, coming from apartheid South Africa. As he put it, if you put a flower in the gun of a South African officer, he'd shoot you. No room for that neoliberal peacenik stuff there, no. In that worldview, the 60s weren't the Haight-Ashbury counterculture or Woodstock -- it was the Kent State shootings.

Little wonder that a decade later I'd be in communities complaining about tasteless crap like that Kendall Jenner "share pepsi with the police" ad, and most of a decade after that bringing you the "Hedgehog Masque Replica" blog series.

12. fidget toys

'I'm a terribly distractible person, but I don't have fidget toys. Of course, now that we have six cats, I can always put one in my lap to give 'em face scritchies, but in general my relationhip to distractions is pretty weird, and is a core part of my computer sicko work. Why do I have a PalmOS word processor? Why does my personal laptop boot into ChromeOS? Why do I have an FM radio that runs Android? Why do I keep looking up OpenCore tutorials and Mac qemu-KVM demonstrations? Because sometimes I need my brain to be massaged in a specific way that gets all the clogging thoughts up. The need to cover every potential use case in any moment so that I'm not without some kind of distraction, and which turns into its own kind of focus -- what's the best hardware to cover as many bases as possible? Should I put Mac OS on my thinkpad? Should I be putting all the manuals for my systems on my Kindle, so I never have to go online to find them?

Putting a joystick on a cube seems downright quaint, frankly.

13. I do not dream of labor

The way I see it, there are two types of jobs that suck.

The first is the type that's typified by the notion David Graeber had of the "Bullshit Job". That's a concept I learned about in the essay Graeber wrote in 2013 that eventually was elaborated into a book. (No surprise that the TNC community was what brought it to my attention -- there's a callback for ya!) While I've not read the book, the article was insightful and clear enough that it explains the point quite nicely. Marxist discourse has been open about a lot of these concepts before; see, for example, the classic "The boss needs you, you don't need him" posters. Graeber focused more on his essay about jobs that exist to make the world, in a way, worse. Corporate lawyers were the signature example, as they serve to construct legal frameworks that protect the privileges of institutions over that of the people; Disney's IP attourneys may get paid well, but their job is to restrict the free expression of art as much as they can get away with, so that more of it can be bought from Disney. Graeber expands on this more to include also jobs that perform temporary solutions to structural problems as well, though I think there is necessity in short-term solutions as well as strucutral upheaval, even if it's worth noting that providing resources to one necessarily restricts the potential of the other.

The other kind of shitty job is the one that people do normally without compensation on their own, tasks like household chores at the industrial scale. Because most people are able to do them, and many, if not most, people do do them, these positions are easy to hire for, and thus lack the sort of security that would otherwise allow labor to have bargaining power for livable wages and any sort of protections. Farming. Janitorial work. Roadside cleanup. Childcare. Lots of volunteer positions. All of it sucks, paradoxically, by its impermeable necessity of being done. This is not to say that I believe it must be so, but that an economic system that prioritizes inequality will guarantee such a circumstance. These essential tasks should be highly compensated because of that necessity, that they cannot be taken for granted in a functioning society. They do not protect the privilege of the empowered, however, and so they are not. They will still, generally, get done, because they must. This is why striking is such an important tool for the labor force, because then the dynamic that guarantees the work will be done breaks down, changing the relationship between privilege and those tasks.

My work in grad school was, in a lot of ways, both of these. Computer science theory is mostly tied to encryption, and encryption is a tool that power/colonialism loves to hold tight control over. As people mention who are involved in the BDS movement, a lot of work in the field is with researchers with ties to the Israeli government, and it is thus work that has benefit to settler-colonial regimes. This relationship between the work I was doing and authoritarianism took a toll -- and while I was happy to have the culturally enriching environment of the university to work in, and just barely enough money to pay my obligations like rent and food, it took a heavy toll on me and I could never get invested in it. Grad school is deeply competitive most of the time, and was even more so in the immediate wake of the 2008 crisis (I was undergrad class of '11), and being able to work in grad school meant that loans were deferred.

I am thankful that I have a government job in a niche speciality that is small. I have job security, and, broadly-speaking, my work is in the interest of the public and at least some of the code I write is able to be released in the public domain and has been used by institutions in the field apart from our specific lab and the groups we directly communicate with to aggregate data. For as much as we might say "I don't dream of labor", there are always tasks that must be done, because our world inherently has stressors. This is work I can do, I do it well, and I get paid nicely for doing it. I would always greatly prefer a job like this to any sort of creative freelance work, and while I'm always a bit disappointed that I'll never make a living off music, this is a far better circumstance for everyone.

This is why I don't get along with the "I don't dream of labor" movement. They've focused hard on the problems of the first category of bullshit job -- the bureaucrats, the layers of indirection, the enshittification committes -- and never engaged with the second. I saw a video by FD Signifier about the movement, and was surprised he was negative on it, not knowing this was the problem. While his focus is on the need of people to provide for their communities however possible, the videos he highlights as representative of the movement have a call to action that lays out the problem with the movement too perfectly: quit your job, make youtube videos because that's what you want to do, and make up for the lack of compensation for that with passive income sources.

Congratulations! You might not have a boss, but you've somehow managed to alienate yourself even further in the process. After all, that passive income has to come from somewhere...

To put it another way: I may not dream of cleaning my house, but I still want my house clean.

1. Trick or Treat

When I say that I bought the Alphasmart Dana off the recent vido by Cathode Ray Dude on an old word processor that's able to run DOS, I'm being honest. I don't actually know where I learned about the Dana, but I've always had a soft spot for PalmOS devices in general. I may have learned about it looking it up when one of my writer friends on Facebook talked about buying a different AlphaSmart off eBay. Exploring the model and learning some things about the product line on Wikipedia, I believe I saw that they sold a thing that, hey, that runs PalmOS! I love PalmOS, and wouldn't it be nice to have such a device that I can use as a general-purpose typing device?

This would have almost certainly been around 8 years ago when I was a broke college student. Finally treated myself to it thinking about it again a couple weeks ago and per a suggestion by WildWeasel -- and wouldn't you know it, there was a recent video about the AlphaSmart product line by This Does Not Compute, who does fun little short-form documentaries about consumer products with niche or outmoded use cases, with a specialization in Apple hardware and the occaisonal Game Boy mod. I don't know if this will drive up the price of these devices, but as budget writing tools they're quite useful, and the appx. $70 I spent on it (not inclucing SD cards and new batteries) feels pretty worth it to me.

Anyway, I actually watched that video with my wife last night to show her the product line since she wasn't familiar with any of it. That's to be expected, since these were mainly, if not exclusively, being sold to a US educational market and she didn't grow up here. But we agreed (she's a bit of an Apple fanatic) that these are cool devices, and I learned that the Dana's ability to serve as a USB keyboard is possibly the one defining feature of every device they've launched. A really neat trick that I find even more justifies the price I paid for it, because it's a very comfortable keyboard, and is currently the only device I have that works as a wired USB keyboard. (I have several wireless ones and a bluetooth device or two, though.)

2. backup of a backup

The AlphaSmart Dana has two SD card slots, and with a maximum SD card supported of 1GB, the cards greatly dwarf the internal 16MB of internal memory on the Dana, which I use mainly to store alternate fonts like Comic Sans (because I am a sicko with a fucked up sense of humor) and packs for Vexed, because I believe that my distraction-free writing device should be able to play as many games as possible. The Neo might have modern WiFI support, but there's no way you can play Sega Swirl on that thing.

Point is, even if I load up the SD card with games, text documents simply do not take up enough space on the Dana to be a storage concern. Saving everything I can to the SD cards will still mean that I have leagues of storage space on them. Which of course means that they're a perfect place to store backups of the internal memory!

This is not, strictly speaking, necessary. It's handy, because it means that if I were to replace the batteries I'd be able to restore any data lost from power off. Those 16 MB are volatile RAM and require battery power to maintain. As far as I'm concerned, the average Palm device is basically a Game Boy for the office worker, and that's so deeply tied to why I love them. If you back up to the SD card, then you can immediately restore that data without issue, and you don't need to find the computer you normally sync it with.

Of course, all the data on the device's memory also get synced when performing a sync; having a more hard-copy backup of data that would otherwise be transient is a key part of why the sync operation was a core part of Palm device design. Thus either one could count as a "backup of a backup", because I can restore from SD card, or restore from sync.

3. Jared, 19

The guy who did the "Jared 19" vine was a fellow who at the time was going by the name Josh Kennedy, now Josh Ovalle. He is apparently from Seattle and age 25. Given that the video in question is about a kid who was never given proper language education while I'm here writing these posts on a device that was almost certainly originally used in an educational context (marked appropriately with a big ol' 14D right in the middle of it), I immediately wondered something...could Jared 19, if he were based on a real person, have ever learned to write with the help of this Dana? It turns out that I purchased the device from someone in Silverdale. If they had the device because they purchased it from Seattle's public school system when liquidating old stock, then it's entirely plausible. The inspiration for Jared, 19 could have used one of these in elementary or maybe middle school, as these devices were sold in '03-'04 and I could easily see them being used for most of a decade at least. I mean, I'm using this one right now and it's still an excellent writing device!

In conclusion, I believe that Jared, 19 might have used this device and it's honoring his can't-do attitude that I've loaded it up with stuff like Rush Hour, Sega Swirl, and SubHunt.

4. roleplaying games

So one of the fun things about the Dana is that while it has the full seelection of avaiilable buttons used by any standard palm device (4 launcher buttons and page up/down), the standard keyboard layout means that they don't exist where they would on a normal Palm device. so the kinds of games that the Dana is best suited to either use the touchpad (which works fine but is a little awkward since you'd want to keep the whole device on a desk to use it) or are slower and driven either by menus or text parsers. While you can install, say, HardBall, the 3-level breakout clone that came with the PalmOS suplementary software, you wouldn't actually want to play it so much because the button layout for it has you using four buttons in the top row and one (page-up) on the botom that is the second-function of the up arrow (so you hit function + up-arrow to use it). Something like Tetris might be even more confusing and awkward, though it is installable.

However, what does exist and unquestionably works incredibly well on PalmOS is the Z-machine interpreter, the software used to run the old text adventures on servers back in the days when "graphical interfaces" were a gleam in the eye of the developers at Xerox PARC. As far as I'm concerned, Zork is at least as much of a role-playing game as, say, Dragon Quest. Zork doesn't make sense unless you look at it as an attempt to model the interactions of tabletop games in a single-player setting (with a pre-planned story to tell, of course), I think. Otherwise the goofy not-quite-Tolkien setting doesn't make a lot of sense, and a lot of the humor in it will probably not make sense either. The notion of a game being played off a server more natually aligns with the idea of a dungeon master, too, than just as a piece of software that you interact with to tell a story.

If anything the more stereotypical notion of the RPG in the modern era comes from attempts to model tabletop games and text adventures on systems that didn't have a keyboard and thus would have been ungodly to try to implement a text parser in. You can't understand RPGs without looking at Dragon Quest, and you can't understand Dragon Quest without looking at Yuji Horie's immediately preceding project, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, and you probably won't understand that unless you look at the common vocabulary of interactive fiction (text adventures) that developed into the 80s.

Zork -- a game I could play on the Dana right now if I weren't trying to write to this prompt -- is an RPG.

5. What the fuck are the upstairs neighbors doing

While I currently live in a single-story single-family home, I do it mainly out of necessity, as it was per-month cheaper than paying rent on most apartments in the area for something of comparable size, and the whole point of a fixed-rate mortgate is that a locked-in low interest rate encourages spending over long periods of time, and that's good for consistent economic growth. I don't own a home to get "return on investment", but because rent is unquestionably a money bit that can, at best, maybe improve my credit score. Maybe. So it's cheaper for me to neither have upstairs neighbors, nor to be someone else's upstairs neighbor. Which is a shame, because I am absolutely a fan of dense housing structures over single-family stuff and would much rather live in a complex as long I had comparable living space.

That said, if I were that upstairs neighbor, I'd probably be inspiring that same question myself. When you sync the Dana, if it has sound on, a successful sync both starts and ends with a rather piercing set of beeps. I've been keeping the sound on while doing this, because I had previously run into some issues while trying to figure out what verison of Palm Desktop is best suited to use it, and having the beeps on makes it easier for me to diagnose connection issues, and to make sure the Dana entered the sync properly and nothing is hanging. Because the Dana can be used as a keyboard, most of the time when it's connected to a computer it's presenting itself as a USB keyboard, even if it only actually sends keystrokes when you enter AlphaWord. To get it to be recognized as a PalmOS device, it has to start a sync operation, at which point it will identify itself as one. Once you've done this, you can find the Palm device it presented itself as and use device manager to install the Aceeca PalmOS drivers over the not-working Palm device drivers it may have tried to use.

Otherwise the closest thing I can come up with for an annoying noise that wakes the neighbors is me blowing my nose due to my nostrils drying out really easily lately for some reason (probably slightly lower temperatures dropping the relative humidity). I do this and it bothers Rocket Raccon, one of the cats we have here. Any time I sniffle or blow my nose, especially when she's napping, she mutters out a little mewy sound, so I think it's disturbing her. The beeps of the Dana don't appear to be an issue for anyone in comparison. They just chill right through them.

6. green thumbs

I'm not much for gardening since the pandemic. While before it started I tended to be more active in keeping up my garden, it's been harder to do since then, a lot of the activities I've done to keep me engaged in the midst of lockdown procedures haven't been the friendliest to my arms. My wrists are in less than great condition. Which is a shame, because sitting outside in the sun and removing weeds tends to feel good to me in the longer-term and I haven't been getting enough sunlight this year.

I tell you what isn't helping, though. While my wrists are probably most doomed by strain from playing dumb phone games, the work-anywhere nature of the Dana on battery power means that I can sit anywhere and use the device while it sits in my lap. It works perfectly but isn't the most comfortable in that position, and would probably be better suited to a desk or a table. I'm a sicko who doesn't like moving around much: not even to the dining table, despite it being maybe like ten feet away at most.

However, the fact that the Dana has such long battery life and doesn't really require an external power source means that I might well spend more time just sitting in the backyard typing away on the Dana, enjoying all the, uh, brown grass growing...? it's dormant, I'm pretty sure...? around me.

7. The Best Places to Cry in Public

I think the best place to cry in public is probably a movie theater. It's dark, there's absolutely nobody who would pay attention to you, and if you're in the right one everyone else might be too. It would probably cost you the price of a movie ticket if you don't have someone to sneak you in, but depending on when and where that might not be terribly expensive.

The next-best places I could think of to cry in public are probably the sorts of places where you could take a legacy piece of writing hardware and not get too many stern looks about it. After all, one thing both cases have in common is that you're in a public area looking to avoid the potential shame of a disengaged public. I remember people getting really weird about Smith-Coronas in parks about a decade ago, whereas in my opinion the only awkward or confusing part of that is how heavy those things are to transport. But I'd say anywhere you'd feel safe bringing out a weird, almost novelty, typing device to take notes or jot down ideas on is a good place to cry in public. Parks, college campuses, diners, maybe even a coffee shop or library if it's not too quiet. Any of these would be as close to an ideal cry spot or writing spot as any.

So if you see me having a breakdown while writing something on my Dana while looking over a plate of bacon, eggs, and hash browns, just understand that it's because I'm profoundly committed to multitasking.