keep me, claim me, grant me grace

Let's begin with something that should be obvious, and apparently isn't: regardless of what you think about them, if you use someone's pronouns when they tell them to you, you make the person less likely to exit the world early.

An Oklahoma University students decided to stage a stunt and submit an assignment that was a personal attack on the person that was grading it. Unsurprisingly, she failed the assignment. Also unsurprisingly, others have decided to use this as a way to attack the grader and all other trans people, and the grader has been the only one punished for this, because the crime of being trans and in a position where you might pass or fail someone is much greater than deliberately provoking an outrage machine to work on your behalf. Because, of course, the student claims being failed was because she spoke her religious truth, and not because she intended to provoke an outrage machine.

The national Girl Guides organization in the United Kingdom was forced into banning all trans girls from participating in Girlguiding under the threat of being sued into the ground for continuing to admit trans girls. Similarly, the Women's Institute was forced to exclude trans women from their organization because of similar threats. Ma href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c773vm4n3n0o">The Labour party says they have to ban trans women from the main events of their Women's conference. The animating problem in all of these decisions is the morally bankrupt UK Supreme Court decision that defined women according to their assigned sex at birth and visible sexual characteristics rather than by some standard that would actually include all people who are women.

Steve Cropper, legendary musician and involved in an awful lot of music that people would know by listening to a few bars, is back with bandmates at the age of 84 years. The only reason I know that name is because Steve Cropper was one of the band members playing behind the Blues Brothers, in both movies, and presumably in many of the other skits involved with the Blues Brothers. Damn good musician.

( Plenty inside, from people behaving badly to zooborns )

Last out for tonight, drag the Pantone company for the entirety of this upcoming year, as they chose an anodyne shade of white for 2026. While that may be accurate, in that's what the U.S. administration wants to have happen in the year, removing all traces of any color other than white, surely the people picking colors could have done a better job than thinking that whiteness was the way to go in this day and age.

What might happen when the suffering child of Omelas is murdered, and how much Omelas will do its best to put things back the way they used to be, because they all believe the lifelong suffering of one child is better than the possible suffering of many children.

The punk spirit never dies, but Everyone Asked About You had a revival due to an old album having been uploaded, and then discovered, and rediscovered, and then became entirely more popular than they would have ever imagined.

And a story about how a writer was almost ground into paste because people preferred the LLM version of the writing to the authentic thing, and how a friend managed to claw back a space where the pablum was not considered the pinnacle.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

18: Essayist

Text is my most comfortable medium. It's certainly where I've put most of the points into my skills. And there's more than enough material in the archives, if you want to go have a look at other pieces of writing that I've done. Most of the time, I'm engaged in the essayist's form, although probably not formal or informal or styled enough to be a regular newspaper columnist, or some nationally-syndicated pundit. For one thing, about the only thing that someone can be a pundit about on the kinds of deadlines that newspaper columnists have is the news or politics, and you see that I can only manage it every so often. At best. I am the infrequent contributor to the discourse, and I would like to believe that my infrequency allows me to do something more than have a hot take and shout it into the aether as swiftly as possible, so that mine is the one that gets re-shared endlessly across all the social media platforms before someone else can have the same thought and post theirs.

Plus, weren't we all supposed to have pivoted to video a long time ago? The hot take in the microblogging form is certainly alive and well, and especially in places where the algorithm rewards that kind of behavior, and especially that kind of behavior if it originates from people who are trying to make their takes as antisocial as possible, so that they will be "engaged" with by others, because in that world, all heat is good heat, regardless of whether it's X-Pac heat or not. Pictures and short videos are the spaces where we receive all kinds of hot takes now, only some of them provided by people with journalism classes, or with the appropriate expertise to be knowledgeable and correct about what they speak of. Which is not to be crass and say that only the finest experts should be platformed, because I also think the finest satirists should be, as well, and those who are good at making us laugh at jokes that don't require you to be a racist, classist, sexist, misogynist, or otherwise punch down at people instead of punching up. Bill Gates getting a pie in the face? Spread it far and wide. Some elected official or influencer trying to tell me that the real cause of my problems is that we let women get out of the kitchen? Obliterate it, from both my timeline and from the platform, if you please. I know, however, that platforms continue to believe that their best options are to promote the people who get all the eyeballs, because the point is not to have content that is anything other than what will draw wyes to the advertisements that come with the content. Or ears, in the case of podcasts. If we had decided to do something more sustainable than capitalism and advertising, we would just have people doing things, secure in their ability to have a good life while doing the things they want to do, whether that's art or otherwise. (Sure, you can incentivize work that people don't normally like to do by making it possible to have a better life with that, but nobody should be a starving artist in a world where there's enough for everyone to live comfortably.)

That, and I claim very little expertise on most matters, and one of the chief requirements of being someone who makes their living on hot takes is to believe yourself an expert in all things such that you don't need to do much more than do a surface reading of something and declare you have it solved. (And, if you turn out to be wrong about that, to not acknowledge it and simply have new hot takes to provide to others.) It is not possible for me to inhabit that kind of space without doing significant damage to myself. Or that damage already has to have been done to me to get me to be that kind of reckless and brash about it all. I don't like it, and I don't want to encourage that in myself.

Just today, as I was helping someone at my job, and explaining that we don't have audible alarms for when computers are about to sign you out for inactivity because we don't want to contribute to the cacophony, the same noise that the person was indirectly complaining about, that person looked at me and asked me if I was a writer. "Not professionally," I said. (Yes, I've had my writing published, and yes, I have been paid for some of those essays and/or received contributor's copies gratis for it. No, I'm not a professional.) The person asked me what a cacophony was, and then if it was close to shenanigans. I said no, shenanigans is more like actions and deeds done, cacophony is related to sound. "But you do a lot of writing, I'll bet," the person said, before walking away. Now wrong, certainly, but that felt like I was being dissed for pulling out the silver-dollar words from my vocabulary.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have caught flak in my early years when perfection failed to manifest. I have also repeatedly caught flak from others in those years for earnestly trying to do well at my schoolwork, and also for being someone who wasn't afraid to show off their smarts. (Why would I be? I'm white, going through parochial and then public education, and because I'm sufficiently middle-class as well, I am already aiming for the university education. It's to my advantage to demonstrate my knowledge.) The usual form of the complaint is a variation on "Stop making the rest of us look stupid." The other form is a variation on "Okay, suck-up. Stop being a teacher's pet." When people talk about anti-intellectualism in the culture of the States, this is what they're talking about: our politics, priorities, and peers are consistently putting the message in our head that there is an upper limit to the level of intelligence any person should display, and showing more than the amount you've been allotted is a fast way for a thresher to come by and try to cut the tall flower down to size. As with everything in the States, of course, the amount of intelligence you're allowed to show is dependent on your perceived race, gender, and level of success at capitalism. Which is why rich cis white men without two brain cells to rub together and make a spark are hailed as visionary and successful businessmen with Big Important Opinions, who deserve their oversized salaries because of their great intellects, and who are clearly good candidates to be leaders of industry and politics, while a Black girl who could do the equivalent of Neo fighting Agent Smith one-handed against all of them together is treated as unable to understand even the most basic of concepts, except when she's supposedly scamming the welfare system and taking away money from the proper and deserving white poor. There's real cultural issues around showcasing the ability and willingness to learn, because that's often classified as "acting white." While there's obviously some amount of that necessary to survive, and to learn how to code-switch, the pervasive and racist stereotypes of all not-white people mean that someone genuinely showcasing their intellect as a person of color becomes the "articulate, well-spoken" exception to the racist stereotype, no matter how many intellectually savvy people of color there are around this stereotype-enforcing white person given the power to shape reality according to their prejudices!

The freedom I have to be smart also often means that I tend to jump in on things faster than I should, rather than allowing my coworkers to demonstrate their obvious capability and smarts themselves, and only coming in when I have to be the heavy about something, or when I'm asked to join in. When I realize I've done it, I apologize, but I don't have to weigh the consequences of every word and action that I take to determine whether or not I will be in greater danger for having done so. There are times where I've had to be called in to take over something from a colleague of color because the person refused to believe that my entirely-capabale colleague knew anything about anything and would only accept that the white perceived-man could help them do what they were doing. But, magically, when I showed this person the thing that my colleague had been trying to show them for the last several minutes, they listened and it worked. And when they left, they left with a snide comment about how nobody else in the library knew what they were talking about. (I'd like to believe it says I've managed to clear one of the bars, at that moment, that I recognized that entire interaction, right form the jump of my colleague passing it off to me, that there was definitely racism involved here, and I didn't give any credence to the barb thrown in departure. Not in a "give me the cookies!" way, but as in "Congratulations, you've met the minimum. And now, the next moment of your life.")

Because words are my most comfortable medium, I also like to use them as much as possible, and the rarer and less-common ones, too. I'm afflicted by the mindset that wants to use the most specific word that I have in my lexicon to describe something. While you can use the widely-applicable form of the word and get meaning across, I want to also express nuance and shading with the words that I choose, so that you understand that I'm enraged rather than annoyed, or enraged rather than furious. Because text is devoid of the emotional and non-verbal context, I have to try and make up at least some of that with word choice. Which sometimes means I get sniped at by someone who feels like the use of those words is showing off, ostentatious ornamentation of language, silver-tongued threads and tailoring holding together brocade and silk meant to shout "Look at me! I have so many intellectual resources to spare that I can devote them to these frills, fringes, and embroidery of language!" Someone who sees themselves in simple, homespun shirt and trousers, fitting loosely but covering everything important, reacts to the finery with various emotions. If you spun a wheel with all the possible ways to take it on there, you might have to land on 00 to find a reaction that's not negative. Among people who also like to use words, it's not as much of an issue, and I would like to believe that people who come here to read these words, as I pontificate about things that I may or may not have the requisite experience and expertise in, also like words and their usage and some of the less-common ones showing up.

I think I helped a coworker this week regarding words and their meanings, when one of them used "in my hubris" with the thought of chia seeds expanding themselves beyond the jar that they had been put in for a touch. I joked "Well, I'm not entirely sure which god it was that you defied there, but if that's the way of things…" At which point, my coworker seemed confused, so I explained: Hubris has a connotation of excessive pride or arrogance, and often specifically, pride or arrogance toward gods or in defiance of them. At which point, my co-worker said they've used the word to mean poor planning. "Oh," I said. "I might use 'in my ignorance' there, then." And the co-worker thanked me for helping out, and it seemed genuine, so hopefully, hooray, lucky 10,000 about this particular thing?

Required schooling was hard for me not to demonstrate the fullness of my vocabulary and that desire to match up meaning. Plenty of people who would tell me to "talk normal" or even ask "Do you even swear?" as a way of shorthanding the question of "Do you know how to sound like a normal person?" Which, yes, I do know how to swear, and have since I was of age to recognize the power of certain words. Not, perhaps, with the skill that R. Lee Ermey had, but because I thought of it as an odd question, when I used one of those words, the others laughed and made fun of me because it sounded like a Jeopardy! response rather than someone who knew how to curse inventively or instinctively, whien it was "Yes, of course I know how to use those words, and I'm not using them right now." University was less of an issue, because all the people at university are nominally there to broaden their horizons and collect knowledge that will be helpful to them in whatever field they choose to work in. Graduate school was where I learned most of my High Librarian, which usually comes out when I'm ticked off about something. It's one of those quirks I have - in an environment where throwing bleepable, unprintable words about decisions or people is not permitted or would be a bad idea to do, my formal register ratchets up significantly. My most formal language is almost always my most aggravated language as well. And then the creativity starts to come out, turning what might otherwise be a single, emphatic and profane word into a razor-sharpened and beautifully-decorated iron fan to flutter in front of my face. Decisions are foolish, regrettable, ill-thought-out, and the people behind them may have trouble finding their own backsides with two hands, a map, and a flashlight. All in the service of whatever newest initiative has come our way. (Some of my coworkers have commented on the sharpness of some of my remarks, while also noting that despite my meaning being clear and pointy, I didn't say words that could be easily perceived as negative. Figured speech achieved, I guess.)

Creative High Librarian often comes out the most when I'm penning articles to submit for a publication, because if I'm moved to write something for a call for proposals or a publication, it's usually because there's some aspect of it that I have complaints about. This is a failing of my organization, because they do so many things that they should be dragged through the mud over. Or it's a failing of a national or international organization who similarly deserve, in my opinion, to be roasted for. I would love to have more positive things to talk about in my profession, but the things that are positive in my profession tend to be practical (and therefore suited to the presentation format over the essay format) rather than political and policy-related. Which often gives the presentations a tinge of "despite the obstacles in our way, we succeeded at this thing," or "if we weren't too busy fighting crises heaped upon us by others, we could do this cool thing," or "if our policymakers weren't dunderheads about this, we could be doing this cool thing instead of these uncool things." So much of the ambition and optimism I had coming out of graduate school has been boiled off from all of the constraints that come from working in an actual library system, with its budgetary, community, and administrative concerns. I still harbor grand dreams, just in case an opportunity comes along to enact one of them, but for the most part, I've resigned myself to the understanding that my sphere of influence over everything is greatly reduced from what it should be, and that the practical parts of running a library often mean that there's no spare capacity for creative things or for exploring things that could be very valuable to our communities, if only we could offer them.

You could make an argument here that the ease in which I can create something that showcases all the negativity says something about how I don't see the positives in life, and you would be right about it. Strong emotional memories for me are usually negative, because easily and regularly recalling strong negative emotions are another one of my maladaptations, one meant to protect me from getting hurt again. If I remember that when I did this thing, I got scolded and told off for it, that makes me less likely to do it again, and since some nonzero number of the things that I get scolded and told off for are things that I'm not fully consciously doing, associating strong negative emotions either makes it less likely I'll do the thing, or makes it less likely that I'll do anything in the ballpark of that thing, which qualifies as a good result, too, in the avoidance of things that could lead to hurt. And since I've always been a "sensitive" person and prone to big feelings, you can see how that closes off some things for me if I try to approach them directly. And why I don't like to be perceived when doing things that I'm not fully confident in my ability to execute them at a level where I'm confident it'll meet my tastes and yours. ("Take a fucking compliment!" is something you could say at me, and you'd be right.) I have extensive experience working with text, and because of that disconnection, where you only read words and have to imagine what the person saying them is like (except for those of you who have seen and heard me recently), I can say things that I might not otherwise be able to put to audio of any form. It is easier to write the words than to say them aloud. And, quite possibly, it is easier for you to read the words and take them wherever they will best go than it would be to hear them and do the same. (We're funny creatures about that.)

I don't intend to stop writing any time soon, regardless of how it's received or perceived by others. It would not go over well for me, not being able to get my words out. And at the same time, while I have an extensive back catalogue of materials to look at, I still have to approach the idea of writing somewhat obliquely, and to gather the fabled courage of the mediocre white man to submit things to publications where I have crafted them, or to hit post on some entries. Indirection and trying to convince myself of the truth of "the worst they can say is no" is important in this regard. Often, what starts as writing up notes and snippets soon becomes a full essay, and then, when I've created the damn thing because my brain wouldn't let go of it, I may as well submit it, and see whether it gets accepted. It often has, and so I use those strings of successes as the benchmark of "well, I'm a mediocre what man, and I'm submitting, so, you, person with perspectives not generally heard, and who I consider to be competent and either a peer or better-suited to this than I am, will you also submit, please?" I will probably never actually know when this happens, but I think it would be thrilling to submit something for publication and have it sent back with a rejection of "this is a great piece, and we think it will go somewhere else, but we've just had too many people with perspectives and lived experiences we don't usually see submit great essays, too, and so we're going with them." I'll be disappointed that I didn't get in, but I will recognize that reason as one of the best possible reasons why I didn't get in.

And in the meantime, I'll just keep writing.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

17: Persistence

As someone who is comfortable with installing and reinstalling and restoring configurations and working my way back to what it was before, just with time and scripting, and exporting and importing, it's not the end of the world when an entity or a corporation pulls a milkshake duck, or decides they, too, are going to chase the snake oil bubble and start cramming LLM-related features into their browsers, or operating systems, or any other piece of software they can control. I will freely admit that it sucks to have to do all of those operations on the regular, or even on the occasion, but it is something that I have become used to, as I've been throwing things around here and there, and making it work better. The hardest part, sometimes, is re-learning where you've stashed all your configuration tweaks and where they get applied to. But the more it gets done, the easier it is to remember where all the pathways are, and what you want to do with them. Perhaps in some future world, I'll remember to save the configuration files first, and back them up, and then retrieve and paste them back in and all will be well.

And, when I make these kinds of decisions, as it turns out, sometimes I learn some new and interesting things, like the way that some apps, even if they don't exist in the package manager, are self-contained enough to run on the system. Therefore, I now have my preferred browser running on a system that doesn't have it in the package repositories. At least, not at the moment, since the new version is built on one version up from where my current distribution wants to be.

This is also a crossover post with the Adventures in Home Automation series, because, for the third time, I have managed to get my television with the attacked Raspberry Pi and the broken IR receiver talking to Home Assistant, and being controllable from there. In the previous incarnations of this situation, I managed to clone some git repositories, recognize that some of the things they wanted to do with containers and running the thing as they would like to wouldn't work, because they were asking for some much older versions of Debian, which were probably the newest versions of Debian at the time, but whose archive pointers had completely fallen off and were no longer available. One promising entity written in go worked for a little while, and then the go language changed versions, and the old script just went "nope" compared to the new version, and I don't program in go, so I couldn't fix it. The second promising entity was written in python, and in a previous version of Debian, I seemed to gather all the right libraries from the system tools and get very close to making things work, before I dropped a piece from a completely different script, meant to make it possible for a remote control to function as a game controller, I believe, into the other script, because it looked like it might work. And it did, to my surprise. So that was version two, running stably and with a systemd service for running on boot, happily working its way along.

Then the Debian version underlying the single-board computer's Linux changed, and that meant not only rebasing, but reinstalling, reconfiguring, re-adding, and otherwise bringing things back into the system I had, and reinstalling and reconfiguring the communication broker so that the SBC could communicate with Home Assistant (and the router, now that it had some Optware installed that would send information about router operations and connected machines over that same protocol, using that SBC as the broker for the messages.)

The last component that needed to work was the bridging script that reported information using HDMI-CEC to read the bus for status and then transmit commands from Home Assistant to turn that screen on and off. In the intervening time, the library that the python program used to communicate had jumped a major version number and changed its entire syntax in the process. Luckily, the error that appeared mentioned that a single flag could be set so that it would use the old version of how it was set up, and that saved me a lot of grief trying to figure out how to re-spec the script to use the new library. The flag may deprecate at some point, and then I will have to walk the script up from the previous version to the current version. Hopefully, when that's necessary, there will be a nice conversion guide posted somewhere that explains what the equivalent commands are, and where to put the components of the previous command in the new syntax. For now, however, the scripts themselves are sorted, thanks to adding one piece of code at the right place to the thing itself.

What's not working is that in this new version based on Debian Trixie, the library I had installed from the earlier version was no longer present. And that meant a significant amount of looking around to see if there was something suitable that would serve in its place. The testing repository, the one that would be in the next release (Forky), had the library I thought I had installed on the previous version. So, I did something that is recommended against, and added the testing repository and pulled the version of the item from there, expecting it all to set up and go.

No dice. So I uninstalled that particular set of libraries, because pulling from different releases is a good way to break it. Option two: since it's a python script, I can potentially set up a virtual environment for Python, separated from the system-managed Python installation, then install the necessary libraries through the pip package manager to the virtual environment, and run the script out of that, so long as said script can communicate out and have Home assistant pick up what it's laying down. That's easier to manage with some software packages like pipx to handle the creation and management of the virtual environment. I get the environment set up, and the library that I think will work installed, and the script bombs again with the same error as it had before, So the virtual environment approach isn't going to work, either.

All this time, I'm using my search engine skills to try and figure out what the error is, but there aren't a whole lot of posts on the subject, and most of the time, it keeps coming back to a couple of places, including a GitHub issue that seems like it's exactly about the problem that I'm having, and that somehow the problem was fixed in a subsequent release of the software, but I don't see how they got from point a to point b, as I read and reread the information and keep trying to figure out where the library is that I need to install from the package manager to get the functionality I had before.

This is one of those things where sometimes you need to let your brain background solve a task. Humans are, after all, persistence predators, and while flashes of insight are often cool, they often come more after you have been chewing on a problem for a while, letting it background-process while you work your way toward greater understanding. There was a study, I believe it was in one of my graduate school texts, where a professor gave students a list of riddles to try and solve over the course of a day. At the lunch break, the professor collected the tests and had the students do their lunch break activities, but at places along the way in the building, the professor had placed representations of riddle solutions, and the thing that was being tested was whether the presence of those solution prompts helped the students solve more riddles. I can't find the study, and so I may not be representing it accurately, but sometimes you go through an entire something and as your brain twists and turns on it, and eventually, you do some up with something that actually qualifies as a solution to the problem. It's the idea of "distracting" your conscious processes so that some other process can take over the solving of things, or the integration of information. Sometimes sleeping on it is the right answer to the situation.

In my case, the actual solution came when I finally realized that I was making an assumption that one of the forum posts explicitly denied was a good one to make, and that instead of installing a package from a repository with a similar name, but not actually containing what was needed to succeed, what I instead needed to do was follow the instructions that were given in the right place and compile the damn library myself. Which there was definitely a recipe for, and for the specific architecture and device that I was using. Download source, pass appropriate flags to the compiler, make, make install, all of the things that are involved in compiling a library from source, and guess what? As soon as I had compiled the correct library, the script worked perfectly as I ran it, with the "use the old version please" flag set for the library that did some of the work.

I felt very stupid afterward, because everything kept funneling back to these posts that said "no, that package is not the library you need, you have to compile the library from scratch, and this is the way to do so." I didn't want to do that because I'd rather use the package manager to produce the thing that I needed, instead of compiling something from source. Actually doing what the thing said only took a few minutes and would have avoided many months of grief and not understanding why things weren't working, even with the ability to search up the specific error message and find the post that described it accurately and said what the solution was. Once I managed to read the post correctly and drop the preconception I had, things went much more smoothly.

So this is about the persistence of solving problems, of trying to get to a solution that works for me, and sometimes the disappointment that comes when someone is satisficing rather than looking for a full solution. It's about persistence, because apparently I keep wanting to tweak and shuffle and suggest and do things until they're exactly right, instead of mostly right. It's also about how that persistence sometimes means it's hard to let go of the situation if it's not perfect and optimized and works in all cases. And how it can be annoying to have to deal with people who deliberately want to keep introducing nonsensical edge cases into your perfectly working system, or who believe that if you don't debate them on their nonsensical edge cases or absurd questions, they have somehow "won" and proven themselves smarter than you, because you refused to engage with bad faith tactics. As the somewhat ineffectual advice given would tell us, we can only control ourselves, we cannot control other people. (In pursuit of perfection, we seek control, and sometimes the control that would produce perfection is the control of others, and therefore, perfection will always be beyond us. In theory, this realization is supposed to help us not seek that level of control. In practice, there's still a lot of frustration that comes from not being able to do the things flawlessly and well, and sometimes even more aggravation when things are going out of our control and we don't even know why.) Given how often I end up having to engage with the absurd and the nonsensical, I'd like to believe I have a greater tolerance for other people being Wrong on the Internet (or in my workplace), but there's still sometimes that bit where I want to believe that with enough persistence, I will be able to prevail over the things that bother me, or the people that bother me.

It's also, though, about persistence, the concept that we first learn about when object permanence makes it into our head, that the world is not, in fact, limited to what we are experiencing with our senses, and that our senses (and our minds, if you want to get Zen about it) are misleading us about the nature of our reality. Just because the ball disappears behind the paper doesn't mean it winks out of existence entirely, only to return into reality when the paper is raised. (At least, at the Newtonian mechanics level. Quanta and their friends behave very differently, and we are finding more and more that the act of observation collapses all the possibilities into an observed real, such that whatever organ we are using to perceive the possibilities with inscribes what the result will be onto those possibilities.) The past and the future are constructions, only Now is reality, and only for the now that we experience Now. Many of those constructions are useful, and society rests on our ability to construct things about past, future, and pattern so that we can attempt to impose some amount of order upon the chaos, so as to make it livable and manageable. (That's karma, baby.) We persist in things all the time. Error. its opposite. The horrors persist, and so do I (or but so do I.) Nevertheless, she persisted. He's baaaack! So many things that we have in our history and our lives are about the application of human-sized amounts of influence and force until the desired result is achieved, sometimes even with a great array of things standing athwart, sabotaging, or attempting to cause failure in the way. Because we are not the kinds of beings that let go easily, or give up, and we do much greater work when there are more of us, so we can each take a turn at persistence while someone else rests up for their next turn. The idea about the arc bending toward justice is not a thing that happens by itself, it happens because there are people bending the arc into the desired shape. We will not complete the work in our lifetime, but neither are we excused from doing the work during our lifetimes. And through the ages, thanks to our persistence, we build and sustain things that are greater than any one person and one lifetime. (It's frustrating not to see when it finally clicks into place, but ours is not to know the day or the hour, apparently.)

Only a little while longer, and some of the decisions that I made in the past, decisions that were absolutely correct, will finally have discharged their consequences. It always seems impossible until it is done. Keep at it.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

16: Badger

If you like, put on Badger Badger Badger. (Personally, I'm here for the Mosesondope.EXE Demoscene Edition, because of the visuals and the sound, but the original is also good and will serve.)

The key word for this entry comes from the Lucy A. Snyder piece Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes, and then the subsequent book, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (and other oddities) that took the single article and created more from that world, packaged up into a small set of pages.

I'll admit that replacing the operating system on a computer is not a task for the faint of heart. This is also another one of those cases where having a spare machine, or even a spare hard drive to devote to the installation, makes things much more approachable than they might otherwise be in trying to make things happen with just one drive and one computer and therefore one chance to get it right, without additional help from recovery utilities. For a good amount of time, I had Linux on one drive and Windows on another. Actually, I still do, it's just that Linux now gets the faster and better drive now, instead of Windows.

To make some of those situations less frightening, there exist things like the Windows Subsystem for Linux, that you can install and enable and then download a compatible distribution to get terminal access to that distribution. (It doesn't do GUI.) Or there were projects that basically set up an image inside the already partitioned drive, so that there wasn't any need to repartition the drive and worry about what might happen to data as it gets shuffled around. And most Linux distributions have a live environment on their install images so that someone can at least poke around a little bit and see what it might be like to use that particular distribution, how it manages software, what things it includes as a default, and what desktop environment it believes is the best one, and therefore is the one it puts forward as the default option.

Because just about every Linux distribution is Opinionated about these things, it can take a certain amount of trial-and-discard before you find one that you're willing to work with long enough to figure out whether you're truly compatible, or whether it still does things over time that will annoy you to the point where you find you have developed Opinions of your own about how you want your Linux to function, and then you will be able to read distribution documentation and hype statements to find out whether or not their Opinions match yours. I started trying to run Linux in my undergraduate university days, and the experience was so rough I jettisoned the idea entirely for my undergraduate period. By the time graduate school rolled around, and a Linux environment was the best option for me to do some of my schoolwork, instead of trying to flatter Apple by buying into OS X, sufficient improvement had happened that the process of installation and use was much more on the Just Works side instead of the problem-ridden situation I ran into. It could be that I selected very poorly in my first distribution choice, as well. In any case, graduate school and my first few years of independent living were relatively smooth in terms of making it all work out, and I had a Linux machine with a TV tuner that I could use to watch most of the cable channels I had available to me. in my apartment.

So, in the sense of not necessarily needing large amounts of technical skill and fiddling with configurations, and that most distributions contain an installation wizard to set specific environment variables, partition drives appropriately, and install the software, it's not that difficult to install Linux on a desktop machine. Laptops are a little fiddlier, and the single-board computers, like the Fruit Pi lines, are the fiddliest of the lot. That said, the desktop installers work 99% of the time for laptops, and the Fruit Pis generally have their own installers / image writer programs to ensure that everything gets put in the right place. Significant amounts of work goes into the installers to make sure that they function well, cleanly, and without errors, so that someone can feel confident that the potentially most dangerous part of the process is simple enough, and that all of the options they need to make sure their machine will come out the other side running optimally and with any and all of the tweaks or packages it needs to do so already enabled.

The story that provides the keyword for the entry is much more like what it can be to try and port Linux to a new set of hardware, or trying to figure out how to get all the drivers in place and running smoothly, and any adjustments that need to be made to the kernel to make it happen. All of which is arcane wizardry well beyond my level of current understanding. I am in user space, not in kernel hacking space. (And there you can see why I think "Oh, I'm just running other people's software" is an appropriate deflection for any kind of praise for things that I'm doing with that software.) It's a lot easier than it has been to install Linux on a dead badger, or any other animal of your choice, than it has been before, and it will likely get easier as time goes on and the installers and distributions are refined even further, and Linux is available for a wider range of possible hardware and components attached to that hardware. Because Linux people want us to adopt a distribution (and preferably theirs), they're trying to make it as simple as they can to get it done. So having done it several times at this point, and changed distributions, and mostly just used the tools available to do it with, I don't consider having installed a Linux to be a particularly praiseworthy thing for me in most circumstances. (It's recipe usage. Just follow the directions and you'll be fine, pay no attention at all as to how following recipe almost always has an underlying assumption that you know all the techniques that it's going to ask you to do.)

George, the original-model Chromebook, is an exception to this. It was still recipe-following, but I had to be a proper information professional to find and extract the recipe from where it was being stored. Pulling the same feat again with a different model of Chromebook is pretty impressive, since that still meant finding the appropriate spots on the circuit board to disable the write protection and doing the thing the recipe needed to do that disabling. (I think it was removing a screw, in this case, instead of using electrical tape to prevent a connection.)

Putting aftermarket operating systems on phones and tablets is still recipe following, but in my case, for Android things, it requires operating from the terminal to achieve the desired results, as well as manipulation of buttons or finding ways to ensure that the correct places are being booted into to use those recipe tools. And while I've had success at every item I've attempted, there was one time where I straight-up botched the process by flashing the wrong thing to the device! While this would normally be a straight-up brick problem, on this specific device (an old Amazon Kindle Fire), with some digging in the information and reading more of the troubleshooting parts of the recipe, it turns out there's a pad on the circuit board that if you create the right kind of short to it, you can force the device into a firmware-upload acceptance state for a little bit of time. Which involved the dexterity and care needed to disassemble the device to expose the pad, to have the right kind of wire on hand to create the short, and to have the terminal command only needed the carriage return, so that I could hit my window of opportunity and flash the correct item to the device. And then, after that, to reassemble the device, after confirming that it had, in fact, taken the correct flash and could now function properly again. That was an adventure, and it'll teach me to read things more carefully the next time I get a wild hare in my bonnet about doing various things. (That said, this device was old, it was not mission-critical, and while it was much improved for having been put on this path, it still wasn't a very powerful device, and the version of Android built for it was several version numbers ago. So botching the flash was a question of whether I could do the recovery, not whether I had to do the recovery. Much less pressure.)

[Diversion: There is at last one cellular device carrier who locks the bootloaders of all their devices and refuses to provide any means of unlocking them to their consumers. The problem is, unless the seller already knows, and/or has already installed an aftermarket operating system on the device, there's no way of knowing whether a used phone that you're interested in will be one that you can put aftermarket software on, or whether it will be one of these bootloader-locked devices from this carrier. It's remarkably hard to source new old devices because of this, and there's enough confusion between carrier unlocking, where a device can be used on any of the carrier networks in a country, and bootloader unlocking, to install software, that a device proclaiming itself "unlocked" is often carrier-unlocked, and unknown about whether it's bootloader-unlocked. I would happily source a device from the manufacturer to avoid such nonsense if I could, but buying direct from the manufacturer is often hella expensive, and needs to be paid all at once. (That, and they usually only carry their newest models of the niches they're looking for, so trying to sneak an older model from them usually is a no-go.) I'd rather test phones that I'm getting from the used market for their suitability before buying them, but that can also be difficult to do over the Internet, unless, of course, the seller knows what I'm asking for and can do those tests themselves and show me the results.]

There are two exceptions that I know of to the idea of making Linux easy to install and then just use, so long as you agree with the opinions of the distribution creators. The first is Gentoo, which, having now read the Wikipedia article on the distribution, seems to have a few more options for providing pre-built ways into a system, that then get taken over by the way that a Gentoo system really wants to work, and was previously installed: by compiling everything from source, according to preferences set by the user to ensure that the software that they used was exactly the way they wanted it to be (and that had been optimized for their hardware and use cases, so that it would go faster and potentially use less RAM on that system compared to others that had not been optimized.) Even I, supposed computer-toucher and polymath-in-training, have never attempted to stand up a Gentoo system according to the official instructions and handbook there. Just from how it is described, I feel like it offers a jam choice problem to everyone who doesn't already know all the answers to the questions it will ask in advance, and therefore can just set the flags and switches in the manner they desire and leave the machine to compile everything. (Plus, updating the system for Gentoo has to take significant amounts of time to do all the compiling, so I would hope that the performance improvements more than make up for the increased amount of time spent building all the packages from source.)

I have, however, tangled with the second exception to the rule, and stood up several Arch Linux systems using their official methods. Arch's Opinion on Linux is that they actively try to avoid having one, past making sure that packages are built according to their specifications, and that they do not particularly care for large amounts of abstraction. Past the basics to get a system up and running, they have no defaults, they have no recommended packages, they have no application suite or desktop environment that they install by default. There are now a couple ways to go about setting up an Arch Linux system, one with a guided installation and one that follows the official installation process on the Arch Linux wiki. The Arch Linux wiki is the reason that Arch Linux isn't a niche distribution that only the hardest of hardcore users takes on. The documentation on the wiki is excellent, although sometimes it is esoteric, and the documentation is frequently more helpful than the forum users, who often demonstrate the kinds of stereotypical attitudes that people have come to think of Linux users, and of people who generally are unhelpful until you do the exact thing they're demanding, at which point they may give you a curt answer with no explanation to help you understand. So, for someone who believes in their ability to follow recipe, having a nice detailed recipe to follow and to refer to when things get a little squirrely is just the thing desired.

Thankfully, despite the flaws of its users, Arch is a distribution that fits with the idea of how I wanted to work with systems. On other systems and architectures, the developers and maintainers make easy the pathways they want users to use, and make very difficult pathways that the user might want to take that aren't what the maintainers want. And the update schedule for many distributions is slower than what I would like it to be. Debian updates, but there's enough that's been changed in the interim that I wouldn't be surprised if they recommend reinstalling rather than version upgrading in place. Ubuntu releases every six months, and Mint follows that schedule. Arch (and Gentoo) and their derivatives are, instead, rolling-release distributions, where updates to the packages are available immediately, rather than at specified update intervals. By remembering to keep the system updated regularly, or at your own decision of intervals, you can control a rolling-release for your own schedule, rather than having to set aside time when someone else wants to update. And because an Arch install from something other than the guided script has very few decisions made for you, it's perfect for cobbling together all of your favorite programs in one distribution, never mind how they might have clashing appearances with each other, based on what toolkits they're using for graphical styling.

Valve Corporation, in creating the operating system for their Steam Deck devices, SteamOS, took Arch Linux as the base and provided significant support to the distribution to ensure that it could continue to be used as the base for SteamOS. And, as they have done with many other things, the corporation created a very nice wrapper around Arch so that they could run Steam in Big Picture Mode on the device, and still allow for people to use the Deck as a desktop-style device, or to game in high resolution and power if they hooked it up to a dock. Arch's aggressive opinions about keeping the decisions in the hands of the user make it a great base for Valve to build upon, since they can choose what they want to apply and only what they want to apply.

All of the pure Arch installs I've done so far have eventually wound up with certain kinds of problems that necessitated their reinstall or my choice to move a machine to another system. Usually it had to do with storage problems. On the one that had enough storage, the problem was essentially that the discrete graphics card in the machine was no longer supported by the proprietary drivers for the corporation that made it, and so the desktop environment choices were very limited, and even then, the machine was starting to struggle with doing all that many things. These could have been defeated in various clever ways, but eventually it was clear that the problem was going to only keep creeping up on me and getting thrown back after a little bit. So, admittedly, having done the thing, I eventually abandoned doing the thing for a more opinionated setup that still runs the Arch base, but goes from there to provide some better quality-of-life features, and which has a gaming edition, which is what I wanted in the first place. I'm not sorry that I did the Arch from scratch approach, it introduced me to some neat tools that I can use in the future if I ever need to stand things up, or use console commands to try and achieve various situations like starting up wireless Internet. And, doing the whole thing from the command line meant that I got a little more confident in my abiity to do things from the command line. (And, subsequently, understand why there are so many warnings on the Internet about not using combinations where you download code you haven't looked at and then pipe it directly into your shell. Even though I probably wouldn't be able to examine such scripts to see if they were malicious before executing them. I don't have that kind of specialized knowledge, I operate firmly in user space, and so I do a lot of trusting that the people providing this software aren't doing it for malicious reasons, and that they haven't had someone introduce malicious code into their project, whether by force or by social engineering to get themselves attached to the project and then push malicious changes. That it's worked out marvelously so far is a testament to what people can do when they cooperate with each other and are able to use tools at their disposal to sign their work and make sure that it's trusted.

Installing Arch isn't quite like installing Linux on a dead badger, that would have been if I'd managed to successfully get the Linux experiment I did in my undergraduate days to get up and running and doing what I wanted without a lot of frustration and aggravation. But it is something that rightly suggests that at least my abilities to follow recipe and to troubleshoot when something other than the expected result comes out of the recipe, so as to get it back on track and working again. This happens regularly, and in the distributions that I'm running now, the updater script they provide tells me when there are things that may need my attention, like new configuration files that I might have to tweak to make work again. It's good, it's powerful, I like the aesthetic of it, and the machines that need to run it can. (And I'm still taking care of all the rest of the fleet of devices as well, with their specific purposes in mind. Update day is usually an all-day affair for all of my items, but the nice thing about package managers and update scripts is that they do most of the work for me, and I just have to run the commands to make sure everything is in order.

So, if there aren't reasons why you have to stay on a particular operating system, maybe give a Linux a spin for a bit and see if you like it? Or several of the Linux-type items for a spin, and see if any of them appeal. Each time Microsoft decides a Windows version gets no further security updates, or Apple decides that certain computers no longer get macOS updates, or phone manufacturers decide they're done providing updates to their devices, there's an opportunity for a Linux to step in and keep the device going, so long as you can install it. And so long as you trust the community of developers who are interested in keeping that device going past the end of official support from the manufacturer. It's worked out for me pretty well since I switched to Linux as a primary driver of things, and now I can say that a lot of gaming is actually coming along nicely on Linux systems, so that's pretty cool.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

00: Fool

The Fool, in all his forms, represents unlimited potential. The Major Arcana places him at 0, the number that requires some other number than itself to provide the context of what zero means. Zero is cyclical, and represents both start and end of journey at the same time, ready to embark upon new adventure and learn, and returning and integrating what has been gathered so that the next loop goes with more information and knowledge. Zero is the first index value, which is a thing you have to learn and remember when working with computers. Humans generally start from one when they count, because zero holds no intrinsic value to them. (Zero is actually a fairly abstract mathematical concept, despite being crucial to most operations. I think its only rival for importance and many-faceted-ness in mathematics is one.)

Unlimited potential describes infants and children very well, since their brains are in their most plastic states, learning and absorbing the world, language, society, and how to operate their bodies in space at a phenomenal rate. Eventually, that learning rate tapers off as decisions get made about what to practice and obtain skill in, sacrificing plasticity for efficiency, but it never goes away entirely. We get all kinds of "human-interest" stories in the media about someone of a somewhat advanced age picking up and obtaining great skill in a discipline that they had no knowledge or practice in not that long ago. The entire system of athletics, whether for Olympic prizes or lucrative sport contracts, starts very young and demands both skill and discipline to rise in ranks where someone might challenge for those same athlons. And in other tracks, we see stories all about smart people doing smart things (and a fair number of stories about smart people doing things they believe are smart, but have consequences that are clear and obvious to people outside of their specific discipline.)

Carol Dweck, in the early 2000s, published a book called Mindset: The New Psychology of Success that introduced to us two new concepts to work with: a fixed mindset, where someone believes their intelligence is finite and there is no way of developing it further, and a growth mindset, one that believes there is development potential skills, abilities, and intelligence. This became simplified in the popular parlance and spawned a fair number of ideas about how to keep people, and especially children, out of the fixed mindset, usually centering around the idea of praising students for the effort they've put into their work rather than suggesting that they lack smarts or other fixed qualities that would make them good at things like schoolwork and the various subjects. Dweck came back to revisit these ideas with clarifications and to squash the idea that effort was the only quality that was praiseworthy in helping someone develop a growth mindset in a 2015 Education Week article. And to say that most people have a mix of fixed and growth mindsets about their skills, abilities, and applications of intelligence.

I'll say that mathematics is one of the spots where there's the easiest contrasts of fixed and growth mindsets, although there's some confounding coming from xkcd 385 that contributes to some students being steered heavily toward fixed mindsets. I mostly mention this in the context that I didn't hit my math wall until integral calculus, where I didn't fully understand how I was supposed to go about transforming an equation into forms that I could apply rules to by using the various exotic and trigonometric properties of one, as well as the occasional shuffling of various components to one side of the equation or other so that I could, again, put things into forms where rules could be applied. This makes a little more sense, because geometric proofs were the thing I disliked the most because of the way they made me go through logic and fill out what I knew from what was provided. Despite the fact that I like playing games and solving puzzles, which is the same kinds of things, just with different visuals.

But until that, and with a fair number of other subjects, I was cruising with absorption of knowledge and doing well on tests, and all was well, at least in the realms that can be measured and quantified. My second grade teacher thought I might have a learning disability, because she never saw me do work in class. She saw that the work was good and done well, but she never saw me go to work on the worksheet and finish it while she was explaining and demonstrating the concepts and procedures on the board, such that I was done and quietly reading by the time she turned back around to give us time to work on our sheets. The tests came back that my weak spot was at least one grade level above my current space, and the opportunity to pick up that I did have something affecting me was lost, because that's not what was being tested. They wouldn't have diagnosed me then, anyway, because I presented atypically for my gender presentation at the time, and there wasn't any reason to test for it. These days, I think that if someone comes back as some sort of savant or "gifted" student, you should run them through a battery to see if they have any accompanying neurospice that could cause them great grief in their future.

This ease at things that others considered difficult meant painful emotional experiences when the perfect child turned out to be human after all. And I also had at least one physical altercation in my life because I saw something as simple that someone else found difficult, and they didn't like my attitude about it. (I'm not surprised that I would have come across as arrogant about it or similar. I wasn't intending to do it that way, but I'm definitely a poster child for "What I intend and how it's received are two different things, and I'm not great at accepting that it was received differently than I intended it to be.") It makes me sensitive to the disappointment of others, and it also makes me want to avoid situations of consequence or importance, because if it's important and I fail, then the fallout is both deserved and all my fault, regardless of how the failure happened, and someone will be by to punish me for failing soon.

Dweck is trying to encourage instructors and people who are working with others to adopt the idea of the growth mindset and try to foster it in others. Not just a matter of changing feedback so that it focuses on qualities and items that can be improved or the effort put into the situation (and avoiding feedback that references fixed or intrinsic qualities like "smart"), but also providing the scaffolding and feedback that allows for growth and learning, so that the skill can be not only practiced, but practiced correctly and well. It's not enough to praise effort if the answers are still coming out wrong and there's no understanding of what's going on and where the mistakes themselves are coming from. Humans are capable of learning and doing all kinds of things, many of them remarkably complex. Instruction and repetition and refinement are generally the ways that this works, and if we're going to require all of our small humans to go to school for twelve-thirteen years of their lives, we may as well make the environment as rich in opportunities to grow as we can. (There is an entire separate post here about the ways many educational systems provide the exact opposite of this growth-rich environment, and not all of it is the fault of the instructor and the feedback they give.) While that sometimes gets tritely summed up as "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right," that reduction makes it seem much more like it's a matter of willpower rather than one of opportunity.

Many of the creative arts, and several of the scientific ones, are less about people of great inherent talent having an inspired burst and then created a masterpiece out of whole cloth using nothing more than their raw talent. Musicians rehearse, writers compose, artists have references and practice works, dancers and athletes train and practice. The skill-taste gap is real, and while some things may be easier to pick up than others, the actual limitations of the brain and body are about whether the brain can translate verbal or demonstrative instructions into body movements, and whether the body in question can perform those movements at the desired level of skill and speed. Where I think a lot of our childhood pathways fail us is that we get told early on to focus on what we're good on, and our feedback tends to be in that form. The point of the schooling system (and the university system beyond that) is to get us in a state where we can perform labor for wage, unless we are one of the lucky few capitalists where we have enough for ourselves and our work is instead making others perform labor for us for wages. Creative arts and other such pursuits might be where our desire lies, but the necessities of not starving often prevent us from fully exploring those arts and pursuits, or they twist it into something that is used for not starving instead of for exploration, practice, and attempting to grasp a little of the numinous. The messaging about doing what you do well, combined with the artificial scarcity of capitalism, can often put us in fixed mindsets about creative arts, because the standard warps from "will doing this make me feel like a fulfilled and whole human being?" to "can I do this well enough for other people to give me money so I don't starve?"

The Fool and the concept of Beginner's Mind are intertwined with each other. Approaching any situation, including existing in a body of matter, with the curiosity of someone who doesn't know anything about the situation, but is interested in learning about it, or observing it and letting it move on, is to approach something with the greatest potential for growth. By shedding as many preconceptions as possible about the thing being approached, the full realm of possibility opens up before you. Admittedly, sometimes conceptions of things come with experience, and that's useful to bring in. Not approaching something with an expectation of how it will turn out, but being prepared in case it does go a way that you have experienced before. Zen, and its famed koans, and much of the practice of it revels in contradiction. Practicing meditation is so that you can get to where you already are. Sitting and observing the world as it goes by, without chasing after any one thing, lets the mind realize the impermanence of all things, the great constructions that take place within our very selves. Knowing about it makes it easier to jettison the whole thing and to practice approaching each moment of life as it is, rather than what it will be, or what it was, and without the structure of preconceptions clouding reality. It always seems impossible until it is done, and Zen tends to work toward the sharp flash of insight when it stops being a theoretical and starts being a practical. In response to another person saying they wanted to become a monk to "deepen their practice," a monk starts laughing and says the person seeking to become a monk already is one, and that there is no deeper to the practice of Zen, just the one level. The one, seemingly-impossible-until-insight level.

We see breakthroughs like this happen all the time with small ones and ourselves. It doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense, and then it does. With enough time, practice, and instruction, some things that were thought to be limits aren't, and it's not that the person is stupid, it's that they didn't have the right frame to work with. Or not enough opportunity to practice and refine. Or a low-stakes situation where they could get over the anxiety about it needing to be perfect or sale-worthy and instead focus on doing the actual practice.

There are going to be limits, where some things just won't happen, or be comprehensible, no matter how much good instruction and practice we get. I suspect, however, that most people don't actually reach their true limits on most things in their lives, because they don't get the opportunity to see where those true limits are. Many of the stories that appear in this and other series where I talk about myself are stories where I thought I wasn't "good at" something, but I could practice it and approach it in a Fool-ish way, and now it's (marginally) better than it was before. Because of the experiences my brain has had around praise and punishment, saying I have expertise in things is unlikely, but demonstrating that I have it is routine. And it's tempting to have a fixed mindset about things that are difficult, because I spent so much of my life with things that were not difficult to me. Letting myself overgeneralize into the belief that I used all my skill points on these things and there are none left over for anything else is an easier thing to believe, rather than it being a matter of time and practice. You'd think that being an information professional, where the formal training you go through is much more about learning underlying concepts and methods that then get put to use in specific situations, would make it easier for me to recognize and dismiss the fixed mindset, but, alas, brains. The best I can do is continue to be a Fool when I recognize the need for it.