Author Archives: bluedepth

Being Contrary

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The central questions, “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?”

I think of it constantly. I also dwell as much as I can within the Golden Rule. Would I want this recycling taken outside? Yes. Okay! I’ll take it!

The troubles come when you default to “Someone else will deal with it.” Only because everyone thinks that way. It’s the default. So, be obnoxious. Be different. Buck the default and do what must be done. Not for reward, but because it needs doing. Nobody is too pure and perfect to not pick up a mess. Partially I do it out of duty, partially to be contrary.

In a lot of ways, being contrary can also power pure altruism. You are altruistic because you learned that pure altruism is a fantasy and you like to confuse and piss people off, especially when they have decided what slot you should be stuffed into. And then you break out. Because you’re contrary. Then when you break out of one mold, that first time, you discover the liberty of being an ass. Of being contrary. And you catch that whiff that life could be different. That it’s refreshing to find a standard and bludgeon it into a new shape.

You could walk right past the recycling bin. You could. But you don’t. You pick it up and you grab other full ones too. Because it bucks a trend, it jumps the default, it isn’t expected and nobody is there to appreciate you for it. But you took the plainness of life out to the shed, hit it with a hammer, and now it’s ever so slightly oblong and different. It’s somewhat new again. Plus you really love to drive people who completely doubt anyone would behave in such a fashion totally apeshit batty.

Silently, without seeking approval or appreciation, without fearing punishment. Because the little things you emit into the world change everything. A flap of a butterfly wing. Have faith that your small unnoticed service will have an effect on the world.

The raindrop doesn’t believe in the flood.

What Is Their Nature?

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Mmmm… question first, what do they fear. Then question what do they covet. Find this and know the nature of the man.

I adapt the tone a touch, what drives modern man is what they fear and what they covet.

Fear more than anything else. Fear drives most. Fear of loss, fear of the truth, fear of the other. How do you respond?
Well, if you have no fear and you do not covet, then one would possibly say that one is clear minded enough to start having a rational conversation.
With the notion that we all think we are having rational conversations but we are riddled with fear. So we are not. We imagine we would like to be, but we are not. In many ways, this is why people get that feeling that folks are not listening, that all of this is just opera. It’s a lot of singular arias screamed into the void.

Question: what do you fear?

Heights.
People with power.
I fear the extinction of bees.
I fear the end of our world.
And I fear that the reason why the night sky is so static and so dull is that no culture has survived their own folly. That the Fermi Paradox is true. That the universe is a dead sterile place with nothing in it because life defeats itself before it can succeed and make a breakthrough. And then I see it in my own species and I feel a little sad because of it.

Brett Kavanaugh

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Except… it’s a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. And with him travels the end of Roe v. Wade. Then women’s bodies will be instruments of the state. And they’ll start performing abortions in alleys with coat hangers and dying of internal injuries. So it all has real ramifications on very immediate parts of our lives.

All of this, all of this is a shit show of the highest order. We are upset in the short term because life will suck. And then we are even more upset in the long term because life is going to end. And it isn’t just a onesy–twoesy sort of death, it’s a terminus for civilization. It’s an extinction level event for H. Sapiens. So while there is technically no point in arguing about any of this because we are all quite well doomed, we do make little noises because, in the short term, it’s going to be us floating in a full latrine for a while before the ocean claims us.

Well… he lied to the Senate last time he came up for a confirmation hearing. He’s lying again. He’s a blackout drunk who abuses women and when confronted with this, he becomes petulant, snotty, and whiny.
He was vetted by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society, groomed to do one thing, to champion conservative causes and to explicitly detonate Roe v. Wade.

Five women have all called him an abuser, a rapist, or a liar. His best friend wrote a book about him, saying similar things.
Even his wife flinched.
But the Senate knows that if they do not pass him, that they will all be losing their jobs after November 6th, and then all of this will be ending when the Democrats take power in the Legislature and we return to a fully functional legislative branch of government.

So it’s all scorched earth policy. They have only one hail mary pass to make, do this one thing, their swan song. Get it done. They got taxes done, they packed the courts for 40+ years, it’s the last thing. They know it, so they will do everything they can to force it through.

It isn’t good for the country, it isn’t good for the people, and it isn’t good for women. The overwhelming message here is that Rich White Men hate fucking women and will do everything in their power to subjugate them and turn back the clock. Make women property again, take away their humanity, take away their rights, take away everything they can. Because Rich White Men are afraid, and when they are afraid, like any cornered animal, they will lash out.

So we have confusion and gray areas and people willing to ask “What does it matter?” – Indeed. What does it matter. We’re pretty much just arguing to preserve a little spot of sanity before everything fucking ends. So in the grand case, the world is fuxxored. This is all pretty much just trying to stab-and-scrabble some small little acre of sanity before then.

Politics and The Muse

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Today was a rather good day for writing about politics. Sometimes my best creative writing happens while I’m in a conversation with friends and family. 

In this post, and the posts to come I share some of the writing. It’s somewhat stilted because there is an edited-out other, that was done to protect their privacy and identity. 

Before you continue to read, as a kind of trigger warning it is relevant to state that I am profoundly left of center. If you have tribal triggers or you are a troll, this is where you are invited to stop reading right now. As this is my blog, my space, my little corner of existence I do not have to guarantee anyone adherence to their First Amendment rights, this is my soapbox. I invite you to get your own. Obnoxious comments will be eliminated without consideration. Now you know the rules of the road…

Continue reading →

The First Purge

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The First Purge was an ok movie, kind of blunt and chunky. The plot was a ice-cream truck, you could hear its sing-song tune from miles away.
 
Pretty spot on themes, like ripped from the headline themes. America post Nero the Pigfucker, circling the drain, and what comes of that. Funny how they got a doughy-faced actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tucker Carlson to play the role of the political slimeball.
 
There is a bit of a conversation piece to the movie as well, a showcase for what could be a natural consequence/sink for trickle-down economics. Beyond all the gunplay and stabbing, it ties off trickle-down economics with a possible solution, especially trickle-down with the current seasoning of kleptocracy that we have now.
 
Reverse Robin Hood, steal from the poor, give to the rich, while the discontent grows in the poor class, they are too uneducated and dim to understand where their anger should be directed, so it just floats about like an aimless fog. Then you have the premise of Purge Culture thrown on top, an ignition and a tacit approval of lawlessness for one night. It’s almost downright poetic, after trickle-down economics strangles the economy and creates an immense sea of angry poor people, the 99%, encourage them to kill each other in one night of Purge.
 
The movie franchise itself doesn’t really stab at this, it only hints at it. Much like a lot of other things in our world, folk don’t really think it is that bad, because how could it? That’s not what America is. Until you trip and fall off the edge and catch glimpses that not only is it as bad as you feared, but it is much worse and much more pervasive and inescapable. In some ways, we are actually already past the drain-hole and heading down the pipe, we just don’t really get it yet.
 
With these movies, the culture is expressing this novelty, so it is a part of our common cultural discourse now. The media plays for us like a magic mirror, showing us aspects of ourselves in many different ways. You can see it in movies, like this franchise, as well as in popular news media with the monomaniacal passion for equal time and balance. There is good and bad in every story, good and bad with everyone, and a heaping pile of bad requires at least lip-service to something good, even  if it must be ginned up to get it over the hurdle.
I don’t really think we’ll ever have a purge culture, but it is fascinating to watch the magic mirror play this out for us as it does.

FreeBSD 11.1

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Every few months I take a little time out and evaluate the GPL/BSD Linux(y) space for readiness and usability. Always these operating systems prove themselves out quite handily for their indigenous niche, which is behind the scenes and in server rooms.

I like to evaluate systems like these to see if they’ll ever be ready for a breakout performance on the much more visible stage of front-room existence.

I start with VirtualBox on my MacBook Pro. I provide every VM about 4GB of RAM, about 40GB  of storage, and the understanding of what installation on a limited medium like this means for any OS. I won’t be pulling punches about raw performance, because in a VM, performance is not a priority. I evaluate these systems with the idea of “Mr. Average User” in my mind. How can “Mr. Average User” carry on with whatever I review?

Starting with FreeBSD 11.1, the installer was textual which was perfectly fine if a little low-brow. Most users are much more comfortable with pretty graphical installers right from the beginning. One oddity was that the FreeBSD boot manager did not detect the installation media and make the right choice to boot to the VM’s Virtual HD after primary installation was successful. I had to halt the system, remove the installation media, and start it again. Honestly if you were looking at a physical computer, the end user would likely remove the installation media from the USB port or DVD drive anyways, so this isn’t a problem. It does bear that Linux handles this much more elegantly.

The base system installs with CLI entry only. There is no GUI option, you have to resort to Google to get to that point. The command is fine, however getting into root if you don’t know how to by using “su” from a default install doesn’t work, your end-user account isn’t defaulted into the sudoers file, this could have been eliminated if I had added the right group to the plain user account, like “sudoers”, however I am unsure if FreeBSD follows that convention or not. In any case, all of this immediately drops the user into Google-Fu. We’ve already lost the most basic users now, and we’re only carrying on with those that have some geek experience.

Getting to the GUI level is a rather involved process. The nature of BSD has always been couched in my experience as “You get the system you asked for explicitly, not the one you implicitly assumed you would get.” So an installation of X comes with the core system and twm, a zero-frills window manager. Also, there are basic commands that need to be added with using the pkg tool, like vim and screen, although that is a lot less of a problem since other Linux platforms also don’t include some of these packages as default throw-ins. You have to install X, then you have to install your special Window Manager choice, like gnome3 for example. The actual installation is hands-off, which is very good to see, but users must come to FreeBSD with the notion that you aren’t going to get a polished Ford Mustang with just one ask. You should expect a stripped out Ford Fiesta without doors, first, and then add on extra components until you build yourself up to a Mustang.

I was finally able to get a Gnome3 X-Windows system up and running, only had to Google a few items, like adding my standard user to the wheel group for access to the su command, and then adding sudo and configuring that, to make it easier to add more software. There wasn’t any software management system in Gnome3, but I didn’t really look that hard for one either. The pkg installation routine is easy to understand and works well, generally. The one issue I did notice was that the mouse was quite difficult to use, but I expect that there would be some issues where it was a VM and I was asking it to run a lot of stuff all at once.

I find myself frequently referring to a metaphor from HG Wells’ Time Machine book. There are Morlocks and Eloi, and how the two groups can mingle as a way to discuss how these operating systems can be used by the two different kinds of people. FreeBSD is very much a Morlock system. There is no way a Morlock could find its way into an elevator, pick the surface, and have afternoon tea with an Eloi in terms of FreeBSD. In an Eloi’s viewpoint, FreeBSD is a smooth black box that makes little rattling noises, but beyond that is almost totally inert and worthless.

As always, FreeBSD is best for deep back office tasks. It has a lot of technical greatness, from the ZFS file system to the Fortuna PRNG, but it is best left to the basement level for the Morlocks to use. It would make an excellent server, but a terrible workstation.

 

 

On The Domain?

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At work a funny question came up. Should we put an important user and their super slim executive-style laptop on the Windows Domain or just use a Local Account? There is really only one user who fits this bill, and so we’ll leave that obvious bit out because I don’t include names in any of my blog writing.

The question comes down to reliability. Can we trust that the Windows Domain account will always work? Eh, that’s the 64,000 dollar question, now isn’t it? The user cannot under any circumstances ever see “This laptop cannot form a trust relationship with the selected domain.” error that pops up rarely and irregularly around our Windows Domain.

Obviously the answer is, since it’s Microsoft, apply the KISS Principle. We keep it simple, we keep it a local account, because we simply cannot trust Microsoft at all. Maybe the domain will work, maybe it won’t. Maybe Kerberos will work, maybe it won’t. Right up there with the worthlessness of Windows Domain GPO’s, will they apply? Well, they appear to, but they do nothing in practice. In my experience GPO’s are a mixed bag at best, sometimes they work, like home drives and printers, but sometimes they just bellyflop. We don’t really do much with GPO’s because Microsoft’s technology is so hilariously poor. Roll out software through the Domain? Hah. Never works. Fiddle with settings on the Domain? Never works. Never ever ever works. GPO’s are essentially a crock of shit at best, and a waste of time at worst.

So, if you have a mission critical user on a computer, do you use a Windows Domain? Only if you like putting 2×4’s up against your legs and whacking your ankles with a sledgehammer. Yeah, that’s the level of suffering and agony that is Windows. We’ll skip it, thanks.

I will say, I did briefly consider calling Microsoft Technical Support once a long time ago when we were looking at GPO’s for something in the long ago. But you know, that’s not a serious offer either, and creates way more work and suffering than just skipping the entire thing and declaring that whatever it is simply cannot be done. Not that any requests have actually come in that way, our interest in GPO’s were purely in-department wonderings. One foray into them, they don’t work, spread gasoline on everything and light a match and let it all burn.

It’s been a long time since I wrote this bit, but it still holds true and will for the rest of time. Microsoft is the worst company on Earth and I regret every experience coming into contact with them. I only use their “technology” because I have no other choice. Microsoft rules a kingdom of shit. May they all die in a fire.

So no, we won’t be using a Domain Account.

Ysabel Progress

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Our new little kitten, Ysabel crashed hard-core and slept for six hours! When she woke up she was famished. I made a plate of food for her and she polished it off. Then she ran around the room like a crazy kitten and started to meow. Her incision looks perfect still, and the store on her tongue is progressively getting better and better. I think she has integrated in the flow of the house, next it’s to meet Bailey and Keeley. Step by step.

Cat’s Megamix

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I have a 25 hour long playlist on Spotify that is solely composed of Cat relaxation music. Currently it’s playing throughout the house and especially for felines, and also for their hapless human lap-warmers, the slowly paced lullabies and carefully composed music interspersed with isochronic beat patterns have chilled all felines right to unconsciousness. Instead of mobbing the door leading to Ysabel’s welcome room, they are on my lap, or near me, totally lounging, sleeping, and napping. Even the new kitten digs the music, and has likewise fallen asleep.

It may be wishful thinking, but this music seems to be having the same effect as Felidae does.

There is another note of kismet in all of this. The way we discovered Ysabel, just how free and easy all this has been so far. Right down to the right gadgets and the service and the music to bring it all together. It feels effortless, although I freely admit that this has only just started, but perhaps if I stay optimistic everything will follow suit and work out for the best.

This all assumes the music doesn’t put me out like it is the cats. Who thought it, music enhanced introductions. What a marvel!