spaceraser

spaceraser, 19 days ago to random

#Polymaths Represent

spaceraser, 22 days ago to random

lol sharing a little one minute video of the clouds outside my store yesterday on the fedi ended up being strangely buggy, at least from my phone. Mastodon will take it and serve it but the vid didn’t federate from Mastodon to this GtS instance along with the text from the post. Pixelfed apparently doesn’t do video unless it’s a <30 sec story. Might futz with it on the computer but I can just feel the force of gravity telling me to just throw it on YouTube and link it in a post and call it a day.

https://fosstodon.org/@spaceraser/112365650971675185

spaceraser, 1 month ago to random

Find yourself someone who loves you the way my daughter loves graham crackers.

spaceraser, 2 months ago to design

Does anyone in the #FediverseRecommends a #Logo #Design #freelancer? Could go to fiverr but I want to support the #fedi if I can. #LogoDesign #FediHired #Hastags for discoverability.

spaceraser, 2 months ago to random

So, there’s a large Ukrainian family that sits in front of my family at church on Sunday. Parents, five kids. Maybe 5th grade to preschool.

Their presence and belonging to my church makes it very difficult to make allowances for Republican brinksmanship re: funding for Ukrainian defense. That’s really putting it mildly, their obstinacy makes me very angry.

I’m not ethnically Slavic at all. We hail from northern barbarian blood, mainly. Warlike peoples, both in Europe and then again, truthfully, in our adoptive home in America. People who use war to solve problems, and seldom make excuses.

But it is a miracle of the gospel, I think, that the Holy Spirit can make a man from barbarian blood into a pacifist in the tradition of The Lamb of God, and then also incite that man to anger for a people that he does not know, in a land he has not seen, because these people are my family. Their people are my people, their heartaches are my heartaches.

So as for me and my house, we will #StandWithUkraine. Still. Pray that God breaks the archer’s bows and brings peace in Eastern Europe, and if you’re American, contact your elected representatives.

spaceraser, 2 months ago to random

Hey all, how do I smush together “necromancy” and “computing” or computery words to make into a skull themed logo and hashtag for my dark and forbidden resurrections of old computers?

spaceraser, 2 months ago to random

I got my daughter some @amin merch the other day

spaceraser, 3 months ago to amiga

Is there a text based resource that #Amiga geeks could point me to about the history of the Amiga and why I should learn about it today? I never owned one but the love is still strong in the Amiga community and I'd love to learn why. #Retro #computing #commodore

spaceraser, 3 months ago to random

There's a thought that I'm having a difficult time teasing out at 5:30 in the morning, but it's been with me for a little bit. I don't know that a lot of people have room, in their conception of computing and tech, for the legitimacy of what my brain is calling aesthetic taste, or doing something for the artistic merit it has. Let me try to explain with examples.

I follow a couple of open source hardware projects that are very active right now, the @mntmn Reform series of computers and the Tangara music player from @jacqueline and co. Both are boutique, small batch electronics, made by people who seem to be driven mostly by the desire to see something exist in the world. It would be nice if something like this caught on and they sold a couple million open source laptops, but I don't think that's a reasonable expectation from these teams. There is appreciation coming from the public, but there's also a lot of criticism focused on the price of small batch, hand assembled electronics ($250 for an mp3 player? My sansa clip was $3 on ebay and it does the same thing!) or on the "impracticalities" of the design decisions made by the team. My phone can do what this thing does, it's not practical to carry around a music player. My ThinkPad is cheaper and does more work, and is half the size. This chonky boi laptop isn't practical.

There just seems to be a blindness to the importance of, and the validity of, the power of an emotional response to a piece of consumer electronics, the same way a piece of fine art might move you. We can accept that a painting is valuable, primarily, as an object that elicits a human response, that requires a human element for the "thing" to "work" at all. An oil painting isn't practical. It requires care and a bit of maintenance and a big wall to hang it on and who has the time? It's just a picture. There's a guy out there making custom one-off computers using techniques from fine furniture making, trying to imagine and create a world where this semi-magical piece of human ingenuity, the product of countless hours of labor, care and creativity, isn't consigned to the e-waste pile after a couple years. Tech people are baffled. How are you going to upgrade it? Why use wood, it's not as thermally efficient as aluminum. It's not practical.

The instinct to tear something down, just because it's primary merit is artistic expression, isn't present in other disciplines. When someone shows up to a dinner party in a nice outfit, and the wearer shares that they made it themselves at home because they couldn't buy something exactly the way they wanted, people are impressed at the effort and might ask more about the construction. If they share that they're trying to buy less clothing because the waste in textiles and fashion is ATROCIOUS, SIMPLY A MONSTROUS ATROCITY BY ANY MEASURE, people may admit that they don't share that conviction that strongly, but good for you. Or maybe they'll say "well that's well and good but you aren't as good a sewist as the person from checks tag Bangladesh that constructed my outfit so keep trying." What you don't hear from the majority of people, right off the bat, is that you're dumb for spending all that time making your own or paying a sewist to custom make it for you because you could have bought something to cover yourself for $20 at walmart.

So I guess I just want to validate the emotional response to a piece of computing hardware as a good enough reason, on it's own. The joy of ownership of a device that not only fits your taste but also has a story and a particularity. Something with stickers and spray paint and dents and wood scrollwork and a CRT monitor. Because you like it. Because it's yours, and it's made the way you want it, and it's made for you to use.

I'll conclude with a similar thought I read in a book about building and renovating kitchens. The author spent a lot of time in the introduction opposing the HGTV-ication of the entire conversation of a kitchen renovation. How much do we spend, how much did the value of our home rise? What finishes and fixtures do we use, which do we avoid? We don't want to negatively impact the value of our home, we don't want to put custom cabinetry in because we'll never get the money out of it that we put in to it. What if they don't like teal paint, they may not pay as much for the house. Completely left out of this conversation is how much you will enjoy using the kitchen in the intervening time between you renovating this kitchen and you selling this house! You're the one who spent the money, you should enjoy using the kitchen!

You should enjoy using your stuff. If you'd enjoy it more if it was spray painted neon green, then break out the rattlecan. Make it yours. Even it it's less practical.

spaceraser, 3 months ago to random

If you've ever heard about "Slavery in the Chocolate Trade", the vast majority of forced labor they're talking about is children who work on family farms because their parents can't afford to do without their labor and send them to school. There's a large minority of children/preteens and teenagers who go to work in chocolate for the season in the Ivory Coast because their opportunities in their home country are so poor, and those working conditions are often terrible and they are not free to leave and go home if conditions become intolerable. They use children because the pay isn't enough for an adult to support a family doing that work.

If you want children to be able to go to school, and chocolate growers to use adult laborers, your chocolate is going to have to cost more than it does right now. By some estimates, twice as much.