monkinetic the blog

Was pointed to this standard test of executive function (or at least one’s experience of it) called the ESQ-R, the “Executive Skills Questionnaire, Revised”. Always one to see what these self-reporting tools say about by neurodivergence, I took the test here.

No idea as to the test’s ultimate validity but this tracks:

Went to the theater last night with my girlfriend(😁 👋), like a real adult.

Except it was a shockingly hilarious parody puppet show version of The princess Bride (By S. Morgenstern) by the All Puppet Players, complete with alcohol, musical numbers, 4th wall breaking, flubs, ad-libs and improv.

And I will never hear the lines “I’m going to do him left handed… if I use my right it’s over too quickly!” the same again (Vizzini the puppet: “We didn’t change those lines – at all!!)

Guess it’s time to revisit the blog engine here. I wrote Goldfrog a few years ago and it’s been chugging along on this Digital Ocean instance fairly well, but at the time I had in mind a two-way sync between gitlab, where I maintain a separate repository of my archived content, and the filesystem/db in Goldfrog.

It worked, sort of, for a while, but the deployment on DO is NOT simple to remember, uses Ansible and code from 2 different git repos to set up or update the server, and was just 3 times more clever than it should have been.

I also implemented a flexible/configurable POSSE feature that is supposed to send updates to my mastodon account but … isn’t right now? And the logging setup on the site is abysmal.

I still like parts of my system. If I did it again, I’d still want:

• My custom posting UI that works like the ancient Radio Userland sites did: post form at the top of the home page list of posts:

And my version in Goldfrog:

• A small web app - not a static site generator
• Content stored ultimately as markdown files so they can be stored in git or similar
• Content indexed in sqlite for searching. serving various archive pages (tags, etc)

UPDATE: As long as I’m dreaming, I wish it was easier to run a small web app like this off a container. I probably could with Digital Ocean’s app platform, I haven’t looked into it lately, and I’d still have to solve the “index in a sqlite db file” problem.

In the 1960s, Disney discovered and used an incredible “greenscreen” technique to film the Mary Poppins actors in an animated scene, perfectly capturing flowing semi-transparent clothes and motion blur and sharp animated characters. They then lost the tech.

Corridor Crew found out about it, someone figured out how to replicate it, and they worked to demonstrate it. And it’s fucking amazing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk

Love love love these “ancient future” #paintings by Karla Night, and I am so there for Jason Kottke’s description:

Hilma af Klint as the production designer for Wes Anderson’s Stargate

via kottke

This is a little picture of what #climatechange means: Sitting on my back porch in Arizona this morning at 5:45am, enjoying only the second summer monsoon rain this season. Sipping a coffee in a damp wind, with the temperature at 82ºF (28ºC).

I realized that – after nearly a month of temperatures over 110ºF (43ºC), a record-breaking length of time even in Arizona – I had forgotten what 82º felt like. This is not typical, normal, or a cyclic phase.

This is a permanent, ongoing, man-made problem.

Fedi/Mastodon programmers… with the #MastodonAPI, and given a url to a post on any instance (assuming I have access to the toot from my account), how might I get my instance to fetch it and give me a “local” ID that is suitable for passing as the “inReplyToID” in a toot payload?

Wondering if I need to:

• perform a search (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/search/)
• find the relevant status in the results
• use the ID for the status

Would that be the “local” ID?

#MastodonAPI #fediverse #programming #blogging #indieweb

Yehuda Rothschild republished (with permission) a presentation by Lara A Jacobs, Mvskoke citizen and Native scientist, on settler colonialism - what is it, what is colonization, what happened when settlers (in North America) arrived.

The whole thing is excellent, and I hope there’s a video version, or one is done one day.

Some particular points I want to mention/synthesize:

Colonization is not a historical event, but a continuous process that requires ongoing support through social and legal systems and institutional violence.

Colonization doesn’t just mean moving in and kicking out indiginous people, though it definitely means that. It’s also continued occupation of their “lands, waters, and environments”, the forced breakup of families and communities through unjust and cruel laws and foster systems, the intentional obliteration of native peoples’ languages, cultural practices, and value systems (often through forced fostering and the original residential homes).

We (the White European Settlers) operated – and still operate – under a value system and ideologies that are manifestly destructive (the following is quoted):

• Conquer and defeat their surroundings
• Biases against undeveloped areas
• Associated uncivilized areas with evil
• Commodity-based utilitarianism (e.g., extractive practices)
• Extraction of ‘natural resources’ (e.g., forest products, marine fisheries, mining, etc.)
• Capitalism

All of these in direct opposition to the beliefs, ideologies, and practices of Native cultures and communities, which had been existing largely in balance with their environments for many thousands of years before settlers arrived.

There is much much more in the slides that were shared and I’m grateful to Lara and Yehuda both for making these available.

I recently learned about a small town in Alabama that has not held a public election for more than sixty years. The town is Newbern, Alabama. While nearly eighty-five percent of the town residents are Black, before 2020 the town never had a Black mayor.

An unbelievable and yet completely believable story of voter suppression in the deep south

Guy Nave, Jr gives a well-written and succint history of voting rights for former enslaved Black people in the south, then tells the story describing the incredible “hand-me-down” white mayorship in the majority-Black town.

“We’ve never had an election out here. We don’t have ballots and machines to do it.” Stokes became mayor in 2008, when he inherited the position from Haywood Stokes Jr. Their ancestor, Peter P. Stokes, served in the Confederate Army and “owned” enslaved Black people when Newbern was a cotton plantation town.

And now for something different from NovaColor: Understanding the Color Gray and Its Shades

I use NovaColor acrylics for my artwork, and love their occasional articles on the theory and history of pigments. #art #painting #arthistory

Over on Mastodon, @[email protected] said:

I’ll be excited to beta test another blogging platform. (Still a Tumblr nerd at heart.)

Unfortunately I’m not sure I’d inflict Goldfrog on anyone at this point. 🤣 However, it’s still fun to hack on, so here are some salient points:

My favorite features:

• A Twitter-sized posting form right at the top of the home page for posting short notes, supports Markdown, has a character counter for fun
• Posts support tags, and #hashtags in posts are auto-linked for searching by tag on the site
• I have a separate posting form I can use for longer posts
• Posts can be syndicated to Mastodon, POSSE-style

As for running Goldfrog, it’s just a Go binary running off a config file, a theme directory, and a directory of content. There’s a separate tool for indexing posts from the filesystem into sqlite (usually only done when installing or updating from git).

• Runs on a DO droplet, currently deployed with ansible
• The only “admin” functionality is posting and editing posts, everything else is editing a config in git. “Admin” is based on a security-through-obscurity login url and a hardcoded user and password in the configs. This is dumb ;) and I’m experimenting with supporting Gitlab OAUth for login.
• Posts are stored in git as Markdown files with yaml headers
• posts are read into a SQLite db for serving and searching

I enjoy hacking on Goldfrog, and sure I’d like it if someone had a barebones product like it, but I have no interest in supporting either an actual open-source product, or running an entire damn “platform”. 💜

KOSA uses two methods to “protect” kids, and both of them are awful.

First, KOSA would pressure platforms to install filters that would wipe the net of anything deemed “inappropriate” for minors. This [is effectively] instructing platforms to censor, plain and simple. [Countries] that already use content filters have restricted important information about suicide prevention and LGBTQ+ support groups, and KOSA would spread this kind of censorship to every corner of the internet. It’s no surprise that anti-rights zealots are excited about KOSA: it would let them shut down websites that cover topics like race, gender, and sexuality.

Second, KOSA would ramp up the online surveillance of all internet users by expanding the use of age verification and parental monitoring tools. Not only are these tools needlessly invasive, they’re a massive safety risk for young people who could be trying to escape domestic violence and abuse.

Write and call your representatives now. Stop KOSA can help.

PS. If a politician is evoking “the children” in a bill, it’s a red flag.

Atopia

Archiving our anxious fears as precious artifact
We make a Story
Stripped to bare words encoding our natures faiths and selves
These and all in grit and grim warning 
Dystopia

Bleak grey hued rough hewn the view from future's window
Staring eyes in hope forlorn
Dust and ash the gifts our benefactors leave in progress' wake
Every memory and bright treasure stripped melted for coin

Mechanized servant eaters of all growing green feeling loving things
If not fled are fed
The shining things from heart head and gut once born now consumed
Our inner voice fed back become lies so sterile and ape'd

Semi-sentient vastly parasitic the collectives cancerous intent to only grow 
Choked full on us it is us in the mill in the dirty grist
The fluttering trembling lights only ours to give are drowned in grasping dark

In mirrored certainty the self-satisfied boast ignorance toast ignorance
Read our troubled Story and see
Utopia

Danah Boyd: What if failure is the plan?

Network effects intersect with perception to drive a sense of a site’s social relevance and interpersonal significance.

#twitter #failure #socialmedia

When people praise the lack of #viral content on Mastodon (or the #fediverse in general), it’s seems to be mostly white tech folks, happy for our clever bubbles to be left alone.

But for people who desperately need to be seen and heard, going viral on Twitter is one of the only ways for their stories to get told. #BlackLivesMatter, oppression in the middle east, genocides in Rwanda and South Asia, the #metoo movement – these movements couldn’t be ignored because they grew fast and visibly, making it hard for them to be ignored, dismissed, or covered up.

The Fediverse as it exists right now would see these movements isolated, defederated, gated by content warnings, and probably DDOS’d by bad actors running malicious instances. (“Mal-odons”?)

I guess right now I don’t want to see posts and think pieces about how “content can’t go viral” on the Fediverse (whether or not it’s true) is only a net-positive. For all its faults Twitter has been a positive force for social change and visibility in millions of people’s lives.

We must learn from it and ask how — if we are going to make a case for the Fediverse as an alternative to Twitter — we can be better while not throwing those of us in the most need back to the wolves.

What with Twitter (aka birdsite, hellsite, muskosite) flailing in the clammy hands of Dr. No, and interest in the federated web re-emerging, I figured it was time to review my own web presence and see what was the situation.

Dear reader, it was Not Good.

Warning one was hitting this site from my work network and getting a BitDefender screen of doom saying the site was serving a keylogger. NOT GOOD.

Then the site - which was hosted on Linode and runs my own homegrown blog software, Goldfrog - went completely down. After some “where did those ssh keys get to, where is this thing anyway” I got logged in and figured out that my server had been hacked in some way, TLS and letsencrypt removed. I haven’t had time to troll the logs for evidence as to how the server was accessed, but I downloaded them and have them set aside to look later.

We Can Rebuild It

Thus entered a week of figuring out once again how the heck Monkinetic is built and deployed, migrating the code from Github to Gitlab (which I’m more familiar with due to $dayjob), and refactoring the Ansible code that builds the server and deploys the blog/content.

Finally today I got it 85% done, which is pretty good for a full migration between hosting providers (I also moved from Linode to Digital Ocean where I already have some other services).

Masto-tootly-don

With the insanity on Twitter, I logged back into my Mastodon account on toot.cafe and enjoyed the huge stream of new folks migrating from Twitter to federated platforms (mostly to mastodon.social since that’s the first/largest instance, but folks are making their way from there to smaller instances as they get more comfortable).

Apparently Mastodon 4.0 is out (release candidate) and they’ve changed the annoying-until-it-was-gone “Toot” to “Publish”. I’d have preferred “Post” myself, but 🤷‍♀️.

Maybe servers should just change it to suit their audience?

In 8th grade my Art teacher recommended I pursue (somewhat disdainfully I suspect) “commercial art” (graphic design, in the 70s) because I loved straight lines and geometric shapes. If only she’d studied Hilda af Klint, Paul Klee, and other abstract artists, I might be an artist right now instead of a computer nerd 🤣 #notlikely

Fred Joseph asks:

One thing that’s been interesting about Trump’s presidency is how accessible it has made conversations about white supremacy.

I wonder how invested white people and the media will be in racism and anti-racism after he’s gone.

I’ve been wondering the same thing: assuming Biden wins, will white liberals (myself included) sigh in relief and go back to our pre-Trump, pre-Breonna Taylor, pre-George Floyd comfort?

I know that I’ve been working hard on following and learning from Black Americans and POC, and it’s been good work, but white liberals have just scratched the surface of what we must learn from the lives and histories of POC.

Trump has been SO awful that it has been a catalyst for many of us to finally face the systemic injustice and racism that allowed him to rise to prominence, riding the post-Obama racist reaction. But a Biden win will not fix anything yet, it just puts a better public face on the administration. The hard work will be continuing to fight to reform the Senate, our law enforcement and justice systems, all the entrenched ways of thinking and working that our nation has been built on.

My “worst case” scenario right now is a Trump removal, Pence win. Pence is the “nice” face of a corrupt administration, and will happily go along with anything the abusive GOP can think up, bringing even the never-Trumper Evangelicals with him. And I know white democrats who are outraged at Trump-the-character, but not so much his racist, unjust policies.

Detroit, early 1980s, techno is invented by three friends who happen to be black:

High school friends Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, known as the Belleville Three, are known as the creators of techno music. Kevin Saunderson is the person who made sure techno music got to the masses by 1983.

The History of Techno Music from Black Music Scholar

Techno came out of Detroit in the 1980’s as underground dance music and subculture. Techno music took technology and made it a black secret.

The three tracks linked on that page would play in any house club today. I’d’ve danced the crap outta these when I was clubbing. HT to https://playvicious.social/@paralithode for suggesting I google “black inventor techno”.

#blackhistory #musichistory #erasure

(I may or may not be chairdancing to Tranzister right now)

Folks, this is Sister Rosetta Sharpe, the queer black woman who invented rock and roll, before Elvis, Little Richard, or Chuck Berry were out of short pants

https://www.theroot.com/sister-rosetta-tharpe-the-queer-black-woman-who-invent-1823198999

#blackhistory #musichistory #erasure

(Source: https://playvicious.social/@paralithode)

From a thread I posted on Play Viscious, re-posted here for posterity:

• My wife and I watched part 1 of the PBS documentary “The Vote” last night and I am learning a LOT. Some notes (a thread):
• If I learned anything about women’s suffrage in school was quickly forgotten, pretty much everything in there was new. I think I knew Susan B. Anthony’s name and Ida B. Wells.
• I think this documentary started to help me see intersectionality in action some? the fight for the ability to vote included conflicts over who should be granted the franchise first: educated white women, or black men. And black women getting left out either way (it was black men).
• The fight for voting rights for women was absolutely necessary, but it hurt to see the racist attitudes and decisions coming from the white suffragettes from leadership on down.
• Frederick Douglass was a huge proponent of women’s suffrage - and he and the black women’s suffrage clubs were pushed out when it seemed like black involvement would set back the cause in the jim crow south.
• also: white men are bastards

John Gruber responds to a new article in The Guardian that people with even mild coronavirus systems can be having serious brain disorders (for example strokes, encephalomyelitis, and psychotic episodes):

Germany yesterday reported 298 new cases of COVID-19.

The U.S. reported over 55,000. Just yesterday. It is raging out of control here in the United States. It’s that simple. We’ve lost any handle on it we might have had, infections are now raging out of control, and a large segment of the population has decided to pretend it isn’t happening and isn’t a big deal if you do get it.

For those of us who’ve been taking this seriously since March, it’s soul-crushing that this is where we’re at after four months of isolation. It sucks. We who’ve done the right thing are the ones most yearning for — and let’s be honest, most deserving of — a few tastes of normalcy.

I am begging everyone I know - please recognize that it is insane, or worse cruel, to pretend this isn’t happening, or that it’s a plot from people on the other end of a political spectrum to inconvenience you or steal your precious individual liberties… this is hundreds of thousands of friends and families suffering or dead.

Do the right thing — stay home as much as you can, wear a mask and keep your distance when you’re out. You don’t want to get this and you don’t want your family to get it.

I might be hitting the wall on my Jekyll-inspired storage system for #goldfrog. GoldFrog uses Jekyll-style markdown posts as the “system of record”, but read into SQLite for serving/searching content. #webmention activity add a new type of data that I haven’t figured out how to store yet.

Soon we are headed out to California for 5 days just to get out of Arizona for a bit. But this is not “vacation”, this is “move the quarantine temporarily to another state”. We realized this morning that planning family #travel is more complicated now, with way less mental energy available to plan.

What used to be pretty standard “get us out of the house for 5 days” activities now feel like huge tasks which we have to accomplish with our brains 94% occupied by #covid19, #blacklivesmatter, #racism, and other current events. Just the idea of cleaning house (for the pet-sitter) feels insurmountable.

Governor Ducey - please take action NOW. #covid19

Sent today to the office of #arizona Governor Ducey:

Governor Ducey,

It is paramount that in the face of skyrocketing #COVID19 cases in Arizona, your office issue actionable guidance on mask/face covering usage to slow the community spread of the novel coronavirus. My family and I wear masks anytime we leave the house or our car, but we see almost no one doing the same right now unless the destination specifically requires it.

There are too many citizens who take your office’s “recommendations” as hand-waving suggestions, and the numbers speak for themselves.

Please, for the sake of your citizens, speak out quickly and strongly. Mandate mask usage in public for all our safety.

Sincerely,

–Steve Ivy Gilbert, AZ

Arizona residents: Contact Governor Ducey

To my shame, it took until the events surrounding George Floyd’s murder for me to really begin attempting to educate myself on “the rest of the story” of America’s history of institutionalized racism and violence. I’m trying to focus on 3 things:

• LEARN the facts, outside of what was in my history education (“we win war for independence, we win ww2, happily ever after” - at least that’s what I generally walked away with)
• LISTEN to black writers and voices about their American experience
• Focus my own small voice on speaking to my fellow white Americans on our complicity in these atrocities and the system they’ve perpetuated.

I have SOOOO far to go. In the meantime, talking to my wife we decided that something we could do was to donate to support these organizations fighting for racial justice:

• Black Lives Matter Global Network
• National Bail Out
• Know Your Rights Camp
• Black Voters Matter Fund
• NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund
• The National Police Accountability Project

If you feel like I do, please consider donating - it’s the easiest way to get started - but it’s not enough. We’re going to have to start acting too.

Mordecai Martin, a thinker and writer who I follow on Play Vicious, posted this powerful piece on the Jewish response to racial protests and - yes looting - during the 60s and now with the George Floyd protests.

I’m not sure that – being neither Jewish nor black – I have a platform for comment, but Mo’s writing speaks to his own Jewish people with real power and love.

As Artist Marcia X on Play Vicious responded:

imagine being this tender and powerful at the same time???

Research continues to show that masks/face coverings DO help prevent community spread of the #covid19 virus. Please, Arizonans: wear masks anytime you are well, most any place.

Population-wide face mask use could push COVID-19 transmission down to controllable levels for national epidemics, and could prevent further waves of the pandemic disease when combined with lockdowns, according to a British study on Wednesday.

Reuters: Widespread mask-wearing could prevent COVID-19 second waves: study

“Our analyses support the immediate and universal adoption of face masks by the public,” said Richard Stutt, who co-led the study at Cambridge.

He said combining widespread mask use with social distancing and some lockdown measures, could be “an acceptable way of managing the pandemic and re-opening economic activity” before the development of an effective vaccine against COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the coronavirus.

AZCentral: Phoenix has its own ‘I can’t breathe’ case. The outcome was far different

“Three years ago, Phoenix had its own “I can’t breathe” case. But its outcome has so far been very different than that of George Floyd’s.”

Let’s see, black man doing basically nothing at the time:

“In 2017, Muhammad Abdul Muhaymin Jr. tried to take his dog with him to the bathroom at a city community center in west Phoenix. The police were called, discovered he had a warrant for his arrest, and decided to detain him.”

Sounds the same to me. Maybe the police response was entirely different?

At least four officers got on top of him and held him down. Some put their knees on his neck and head.

Exactly like George Floyd. Perhaps Muyaymin was released without harm?

“I can’t breathe,” Muhaymin is heard saying several times in police body camera footage. When officers eventually got off him, Muhaymin had no pulse, according to comments from officers in the video, and lay in a pool of his own vomit.

With the same unnecessarily violent, incomprehensibly callous response from law enforcement, same tragic outcome for a non-violent black man.

The outcome was exactly the same. The “outcome” that matters is the life or death of this black man. The rest is just wrap up.

Once the headline had to say Phoenix had it’s own ‘I can’t breathe’ case, it was too late. I want to see the headlines saying “Our community has not had a case of police brutality in 5 years”, “…10 years”, “… 50 years”.

It’s time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans, and this is so important to me. Trump’s election victory speech

When I hear Trump speak about “all Americans” - I cannot in looking at his actions believe that he means African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinx Americans, or any other minority, disadvantaged population here.

Armed white protesters are “very fine people”, black and brown protesters are “THUGS”.

Trump says that he defends the rights of “citizens”; but citizen is a legal/political construct that can be redefined and narrowed to exclude those without power or privilege.

Consider the new (Feb 2020) Denaturalization Section of the Justice Department:

The Denaturalization Section “underscores the department’s commitment to bring justice to terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization,” Joseph H. Hunt, the head of the Justice Department’s civil division, said in a statement.

No one wants “terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders” in the country, but –

“The Denaturalization Section will further the department’s efforts to pursue those who unlawfully obtained citizenship status and ensure that they are held accountable for their fraudulent conduct,” Mr. Hunt said.

Trump’s Justice Department considers entering the country illegally to be a crime (of the worst sort, considering the resources they have put behind CBP and ICE). There’s the real goal: the power to strip the rights and liberties from any immigrant who has been here as a productive member of society long enough (7 years?) to become naturalized.

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, established after the civil war to establish and protect the citizenship of former slaves, says in part:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The Denaturalization Section is in practicality an end-run around the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution. And to drag out a long post longer…

This clause reversed a portion of the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which had declared that African Americans were not and could not become citizens of the United States or enjoy any of the privileges and immunities of citizenship. Citizenship Clause (Wikipedia)

The goals of denaturalization laws now are the same racist goals as the Dred Scott laws of the post-US Civil War era.

From Sojourners in 2018, When White Nationalist Christians Redefined Their Neighbors :

Ludwig Müller, who became the Nazi-sanctioned Reich Bishop, went so far as to “Germanize” Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. In his 1936 translation, Jesus says: “Happy are those who are at peace with their fellow Germans [Volksgenosse];”

In doing this, he captures how German Christian nationalists had already redefined who counted as their neighbor. If neighbors can be defined primarily as the “non-foreign” members of one’s nation first, then one can morally justify all sorts of actions against people who are categorized as outsiders.

I want to focus on my own white Christian community here. We are seeing this redefinition in action right now in our nation. Americans who consider themselves Christians are reading Facebook, watching FOX News, and watching Trump’s speeches and going “you know we definitely do not want thugs or illegals in our streets! LAW & ORDER!”

But the “thugs and illegals” are whoever Trump considers them to be today. That photo op at St. John’s Episcopal in DC? Among the “violent protesters” that were dispersed with tear gas and flash grenades was a priest from the church Trump wanted to visit.

We must take stock and recognize how much even our faith has been shaped by the systematic recism of our nation, and re-evaluate our worldview in the light of the scripture we claim we follow:

Who Is My Neighbor?

Luke 10:29-37:

29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” …

This is what Müller’s false interpretation was targeting, for the same reason the questioner in Luke did: to narrow the definition of who he was expected to . But Jesus insists on the wider interpretation - even to the those whom the Jews considered heretics to be treated as dogs:

33 “But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out [his own money] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’”

36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

(Emphasis mine) While our cities burn and police departments are instigating riots… on whom will we have mercy?

If we are not heartbroken and angered at the every day treatment of black and brown people in our communities, cities, and nation, if we will not speak up for them, if we will not spend our resources to give them reprieve, then we no longer consider them our neighbors.

Our nation is deeply, systematically racist, and no amount of “I’m not like that” changes that. Anti-racism activist Jane Elliott says it perfectly:

“If you, as a white person, would be happy to recieve the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.”

“Nobody’s standing here. That says very plainly that you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you, I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or allow it to happen to others.”

I’m not standing either, and that makes me deeply ashamed.

Grandpa: Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles…

The Grandson: Doesn’t sound too bad. I’ll try to stay awake.

(from The Princess Bride of course, but applicable)

I stayed awake! 😂

I really enjoyed this whole series. Book 2 finds Kellen - magical outcast from his Jan’tep family - beginning to accept his new status as outlaw and trickster, while learning that there is a whole world outside the insular society he grew up in.

Kellen and his makeshift crew have defeated (most would say survived) a large number of assassins, bounty hunters, unnatural disasters, and his own persistently scheming Jan’tep family.

Now it seems there’s a… God out there he’s expected to deal with?

The last book in the 6-book Spellslinger series, which has been really fun.

Sebastian de Castell starts off another tale of magic and swordplay with The Traitor’s Blade. Falcio, Kest, and Brasti make a nice addition to the tradition started by Dumas’ Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. 😀

She’s 13, a brand new queen, and everyone is telling Kellen to kill her. But Kellen likes to make up his own mind, yeah?

Yeah, so that horrible curse Kellen lives with, that got him kicked out of his own family and society, and made the constant target of bounty-hunting magi? It’s even more complicated than he thought.

Sebastian de Castell keeps the interesting stories going of Kellen, the Jan’tep outcast and trickster, and the bizarre family that’s been forming around him.

Book #3 of the Swords and Fire series is typically fun and satisfying.

Jennifer Estep’s swords and magic Crown of Shards series is awfully fun.

Melissa Caruso’s story of magic and politics in a world of medieval city-states - started in The Tethered Mage - continues in The Defiant Heir.

Interesting characters and the story goes in some non-standard directions, so that’s kinda cool.

The conclusion to S. K. Dunstall’s excellent Linesman series.

Your whole society is based on magic, your dad is the head of the family and a powerful magi, your sister is a magical prodigy, and your magic just sputtered and died on the day of your magical trials.

Yeah, sucks to be you.

Wow, thanks to Idan Gazit for recommending Robert Jackson Bennett’s #scifi #fantasy novel Foundryside.

Every think programming is magic? IT IS. Ever wonder complain that your code is doing what you said instead of what you meant? BEWARE. Magic and technology, mystical hacking, sentient objects and the ancient and tormented souls that drive them…

You’re going to love it. Thanks Idan.

#reading #reading2020

Sort of Frankenstein mixed with Lovecraft… interesting but not a happy tale.

Sifting Through the Pandemic is a site about how to recognize misinformation on social media, focused – obviously – on information about the pandemic. OneZero provides an example in this article, where someone claiming to be a doctor posted that hand-sanitizer would do nothing to kill the coronavirus (False!).

What I love about the infodemic.blog system (SIFT) is how simple and memorable it is:

• Stop
• Investigate the Source
• Find Better Coverage
• Trace claims, quotes, and media to the original context

Trump seeks to further distance himself from increasingly unpopular and politically costly coronavirus lockdowns.

“Unpopular”, “politically costly”, but effective at flattening the curve. I think maybe people don’t realize that in order to #flattenthecurve on #covid19 you have to maintain the suppression activities over the life of the curve. If you stop, the curve goes back up.

This are projections for Arizona from CovidActNow.org:

Right now the “expected hospitalizations” curve is nice and flat, but lift the restrictions on activities too soon, and the demand for beds exceeds supply in about 10 days. Calling for new restrictions after they’ve been lifted would be a hard sell to a population frustrated with the isolation and hurting from the economic effects we’re already seeing. There’s no easy answer, but I believe that solutions are going to involved more government aid to – yes, small businesses – but especially to disadvantaged populations who are getting hit the worst.

#lockdown #stayhomestaysafe

I have friends and family for whom RSS is not easy to explain or subscribe to, and who don’t really follow blogs in general, but who have expressed an interest in my writing here, such as it is.

So I’ve hacked up an experimental feature, where I am sending out a nightly email (subscribe in the sidebar) that is comprised of all my posts for the day. Right now the blog posts and notes will be intermixed, so there might be some confusion in the content, it’s an ongoing experiment.

If this is something you’d like to try, you can subscribe form in the sidebar of the site or use the subscribe page.

“Klatchian coffee has an even bigger sobering effect than an unexpected brown envelope from the tax man. In fact, coffee enthusiasts take the precaution of getting thoroughly drunk before touching the stuff, because Klatchian coffee takes you back through sobriety and, if you’re not careful, out the other side, where the mind of man should not go.”

– Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett

#coffee #humor #reading

No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.

#reading #reading2020 #fantasy

Another Discworld book I hadn’t read yet! Yes, a pyramid can be too big. And woe be to the cosmological architects who build it!

Yeah, on a Terry Pratchett tear; this was a new one to me and a lovely read. #reading #reading2020 #fantasy

Jared Marcotte on Turnout.rocks: Los Angeles County Primary: Observations in Election Redesign

Some may also advocate for all-mail voting, pointing to states like Colorado and Washington that enjoy higher rates of participation. There are highly migratory populations that have participation problems if mailed ballots are the only option. There’s another concern around mail ballots: with so many jurisdictions looking to quickly switch to this model, no one knows what kind of strain this will put on the postal system.

So yeah, there are going to be issues with mail-in #voting for voters - while eligible - who do not have a permanent address, something many of us take for granted. Ultimately, solutions to fair and free #elections are going to have to be multi-modal.

Not much I can say about Terry Pratchett that hasn’t been said better already. A literary Wizard. (I’m re-reading the Discworld series because why the hell not) #reading #fantasy #reading2020

I’m no tailor, but I spent last night learning how to measure, cut, and yes, sew #diy face masks. We’re working from this series of videos on The Fabric Patch, a quilting site.

We acquired cotton fabric and some featherweight non-woven fabric (Pellon) from Joanne’s before the stay-at-home order came out in Arizona yesterday, so we’re working with that. I’m able to sew a straight stitch well enough, but struggling some with getting the fits right on family members, and we’re still experimenting with nosepieces (pipe cleaners are too soft, some 20g electrical wire might work)

I have always had huge respect for those who were wise in the ways of fabric, even more so now.

Picked up this omnibus edition of Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey (Wool, Sand). Apparently it was original released in serialized form, which would have been really fun to read.

What would life in a space lighthouse be like? Why would you need one? What if there were empathic alien dog/cat/lynx beasts? What if you could get a high from a gravity wave generator?

Read to find out. 😀

Yeah, I powered through this series due to #stayhomestaysafe, and happy I did. A really fun story, and enjoyed seeing many characters in theIo books introduced here in some more depth.

Between the two Io books and the three Tao books, I really want to read Io 3 (write faster, Wesley).

#scifi #reading #quasingwars

Book 2 of the Tao books by Wesley Chu. This series has gotten some guff due to The Lives of Tao being written as a National Novel Writing Month project, and perhaps I was more invested having read the Io books first, but dammit I really like these books.

Also, knowing that there was a third book in the queue, the ending of this one was a big WHAAaaa? (but it was worth it in book 3)

#scifi #reading #quasingwars

Having first read the Io books, I finally realized that the Tao books (which I had been skipping in the library list of scifi books for a couple of years, why I do not know) were set 20 years earlier in the same universe and introduced about half the characters.

The Quasing Wars world is really fun to read, and the relationships that Tao and Io have with their hosts are both similar and entirely different.

#reading #scifi #identity

Technology-enabled shared consciousness? Fascinating. Takes some interesting twists and turns, though the world the characters inhabit is somewhat under-developed. Would like to see more from the author.

Not a perfect concert, but I love this #playlist

“You are you”, and it took me until the just before the end to put the pieces together. Touches on #technology and #identity, #race and #racism, empathy, compassion, revenge, and a humdinger of an ending! #reading #scifi #reading2020

TL;DR: you still have mixed feelings about the protagonists. Very very good.

#reading #scifi #reading2020

Dual protagonists, bodied and unbodied, that will drive you crazy not knowing whether to love them, smack them, or hate them, with stakes both personal and global? What’s not to love? #reading #scifi #reading2020

Ok, and I JUST realized that this is set in the same universe as Chu’s “Lives of Tao” books, which I skipped, but now have to read. I am facepalming SO HARD. 🤦🏻‍♂️

The Outside, by Ada Hoffmann, is a mix of #scifi and Lovecraftian #horror (what with the unknowable entities that will melt your brain thing), fascinating in its techno-religious imagery. Check it out. #reading #reading2020

The Linesman books from S.K. Dunstall are so good. #reading #scifi #reading2020

I really like Tim Pratt’s Axiom series! #reading #scifi #reading2020

Kate Manne, a philosopher at Cornell University, describes misogyny as an ideology that serves, ultimately, to reinforce a patriarchal status quo. “Misogyny is the law-enforcement branch of patriarchy,”

What we get wrong about misogyny

#misogyny #sexism #patriarchy

It’s not showing up on Elizabeth Warren’s site yet, but Axios is reporting that Warren is suspending her presidential campaign. I’m heartbroken – she was the smart, tough candidate that actually inspired me.

Senator Warren: Thank you for your leadership, your humility, your willingness to hold those in power accountable. You would have been an incredible president. Keep fighting for Americans and for what America should stand for.

(Image from Politico)

I’m sick to death of #oldwhitemen

What a cool idea:

All else being equal, these are the tools we use.

https://github.com/HangarOrg/defaults #engineering #bookmark

#supertuesday Get out and #vote!

The powers that be want us apathetic, or alternatively too cognitively and emotionally overwhelmed to get engaged. I’m struggling with this myself, and with Arizona was voting today.

Personally I support Elizabeth Warren. She’s smart, tough, and terrifies #oldwhitemen. All of which I can get behind.

Article: “Tech was supposed to fix X”

Narrator: “Tech made X far far worse”

“Tech” practices problem-space-reduction to reach MVP, reducing messy, complex, human situations to linear engineering problems, optimized for what “works in most cases” where “most cases” is bounded by systemic and institutional bias (including systemic racism).

Systemic bias is an inseparable part of organizational culture, the common pattern of thinking that goes with it, and the premises by which all human systems function. Therefore each of us has a systemic bias. However, we may be unaware of its unstated assumptions. compression institute, 2011

Hence, “Tech” makes many things far, far worse.

“Detach your identity from your work because the work will change and you will remain!”

Kelsey Hightower, via Dustin Jones

This is so me.

For the most part I appreciate the design decision that the #mastodon developers made to not show reply/boost/fave numbers on the feed lists, because it puts more focus on the content and less on gaming an algorithm for popularity or “engagement”.

but I also realize that this makes it harder to know if there are responses! For example, this post by Jun on #playviscious actually has an interesting thread that I’m learning from, but nothing in the UI signifies that there is more content to find connected to the post.

I wonder if there could be an additional affordance in the #UI that there are replies (boosts and faves not so much)?

I had no idea that the Apache Foundation had a blog app called Roller (Java, much engineered)

I’ve started messing around a bit with javascript-enhanced UIs for #goldfrog. Rather than use all of JQuery, I decided on a small subset of Jquery’s functionality as implemented by Sprint.JS.

1. I only load the JS for me, since I’m logged in.
2. It’s only used on the home page to power the new switchable post form, and
3. It powers a character-counter for the note UI.

Here’s the new posting UI:

I’m trying to implement some basic progressive enhancement - the forms work as is without javascript, but the switcher and the counter are niceties for me, the author.

Ran into a friend today at church and he asked me “hey I’m trying to learn Python, do you have any good sites or books to recommend? I’m kinda… bored.”

Now some of us geeks can’t imagine being bored learning something new, but I went through this when I first started learning Go. I had decided I wanted to learn a new programming language, and Rust was way too… Rust, so I picked Go and started building a small o-nothing web app. I got part way in an realized that I had no interest in what I was doing, and it (and some bits of Go that hadn’t matured) was killing my fun. So I put it down.

Fast forward to this year. I was ready to pick up Go again, but this time I also knew that I wanted to start writing again, and that the friction in my blogging process was killing my joy there, too. So I decided to write my own blog software (see #goldfrog), and I was going to write it in Go.

Suddenly I was energized to learn, because I had all these feature ideas for the site, and I had to learn the #golang techniques for tasks I’d only one in #python before. Also, it got me into the golang newbies Slack, and connecting with a community - for me at least - helps.

So my advice to my friend was:

• Find a project you’re passionate about, or at least really interested in
• Be willing to re-learn things you think you already know
• Find a #community!

Sometimes in software design it’s great to develop a visual of the system in question to help in the thinking process.

Josh Barratt is a software architect at Twilio, and blogs about system design at [Serialized.Net]((https://serialized.net/). His recent post Effective Technical Diagrams has some great guidelines for improving the technical diagrams that we use to communicate.

Images convey ideas and structure far more effectively than text. Especially for software systems, they can even help with reasoning about things like capacity, connectivity, reliability, security and performance.

Like any craft, methods of designing visuals that communicate effectively and efficiently can be studied and improved. We have probably all seen diagrams which led to an immediate “aha!” – and others, that after minutes of squinting, led to only more confusion.

I too, adore OmniGraffle, and have made my share of good and bad technical diagrams in my pursuit of a better design. Here’s one I made in the last year, the usefulness of which could be argued both ways:

A little something on the lighter side

I recently found the following in a bit of #python sample code:

random_data = random.sample(string.hexdigits, 8)

Wait, hexdigits? I’d use string.ascii_letters and string.ascii_lowercase before, but this was the first time I’d seen hexdigits, which is exactly what you’d think:

The string ‘0123456789abcdefABCDEF’.

That’s useful.

(Courtesy of Craig Maloney on toot.cafe)

Dammit

Evidence of the first Webmention GoldFrog has sent for a post on this site.

Horst just recently implemented Webmentions on his site, so I’m happy to be able to give him a link!

Now that I’m blogging more often, I often find myself uploading screenshots. MacOS’ capabilities are fine, except that I don’t really like uploading files with names like “Screen Shot 2020-02-10 at 10.38.34 PM”.

Yesterday I asked:

Are there any #macos screenshot utilities that will simply let me name the file before saving it? (My needs are simple, the OS’ own utility is quite sufficient except for the name thing)

My old Six Apart mate Simon Wistow mentioned Monosnap a free utility that does exactly that - lets me name the file before saving it.

(Conveniently, it also make recording gif screen captures stupid easy)

Unacceptable. Americans, please give this a read, Helen is speaking truth about us.

Ro had this article sitting in his “saved” list, and I’ve been reading it all afternoon on and off. It’s by Helene Schouten, and was written in October 2015, and it’s a real eye-opener. I won’t quote it yet, because that would mean reducing it to “important” or “notable” parts and I haven’t spent nearly enough time with it to tell which parts to safely extract without breaking it.

Jacky Alciné is an active member of the #indieweb and #activitypub communities, and a web developer working out of Oakland.

Imma make this clear: I’m not building software for developers.

I’m working to building tools for people.

You shouldn’t have to know to maintain and secure a server to have your own independent identity online. You shouldn’t need to know what libsodium or similar library to be secure online.

That’s my objective.

https://playvicious.social/@jalcine/101366378320531511

I really like a good #codeascraft comparison. From DeployHQ, via Zeldman:

Woodworkers and web developers have this in common:

Visit a professional woodshop and ask a master carpenter what her favourite tool is. You may find it’s not a tool in the traditional sense, but a “jig” she built. In woodworking, jigs are patterns or templates built to make repeatable tasks more efficient and outcomes more consistent. Building a one-off bookcase may not warrant building a jig. But, if you’re building three or four of the same bookcase, it’s likely worth building a jig first, then using that jig to build the bookcases.

Our jig consists of a small command line application which integrates publicly accessible API’s from these service providers

Taking the time to make the tools to help do the work is the best thing to do, and knowing when to take that time is an important part of an engineer’s maturing process (see #yakshaving, Code As Craft)

I’m sure it didn’t happen to everyone, but can you see when my use of Twitter took off?

I’ve imported my old tweets as Notes on the site here, which is why I can show those stats. To be fair, my blog had not been very active for a while, but it’s interesting to see over 20 years where my posting activity went:

If you follow me on social media - Twitter or Mastodon - you may have seen lots of nonsense posts go by recently…

I’ve been working on improving my POSSE features here, which meant not only composing my posts and notes locally, and then publishing them to Twitter et al, but also being able to track where they “landed” (ids and links) and make it easy for users to find my content on the syndicated site.

So I dug back into my syndication code, rewrote it several times, learned some things about goroutines, learned how not to do some things with goroutines, and settled on a way that worked. With luck, this post and any other that is also published on Twitter or Mastodon will have links to those sites along with the post, and (at least for Twitter right now) have links to reply, favorite, or retweet the post.

As Dave used to be fond of saying:

Still digging!

Via old friend Jim Roepcke, from 2006:

Jacob G. Hornberger: How Hitler Became a Dictator:

But how many people know how Hitler actually became a dictator? My bet is, very few. I’d also bet that more than a few people would be surprised at how he pulled it off, especially given that after World War I Germany had become a democratic republic.

Although the National Socialists never captured more than 37 percent of the national vote, and even though they still held a minority of cabinet posts and fewer than 50 percent of the seats in the Reichstag, Hitler and the Nazis set out to consolidate their power. With Hitler as chancellor, that proved to be a fairly easy task.

I read this back when Jim first posted it in 2006, and a couple of times since, and it’s even more apropos today.

“Those cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – probably George Santaya

Senate Republicans just paved the road to American authoritarianism:

The precedents they have set are alarming. Trump’s defense partly argued that a president must violate a specific crime in order to be impeached.

The defense made the argument, probably with the guidance and support of the right honorable Mitch McConnell and co, who than affirmed it. This whole debacle was an exercise in providing cover for Republicans to make their predetermined votes. And their complaints about the House Democrats amount to “it’s their fault for bringing this to the Senate when they know we rigged it – what did they think was going to happen?”

But imagine the following scenario: This weekend, Trump tweets that he will pardon anyone who engages in blatant voter suppression or voter intimidation before the November election. Hundreds of henchmen take it upon themselves to act, helping ensure his reelection. Trump’s legal and constitutional authority to pardon them is unquestioned. It would be a corrupt abuse of presidential power, but not a crime.

Trump now has a blank check. We all know that he will try to cash it.

He’ll cash it, and cash it, and cash it, with the Senate Republican’s co-signing and cackling the whole time.

The only date format YYYY-mm-ddTHH-MM-SS

(knuckle tats generator)

Republican Senators today are telling us that none of us should be allowed a fair trial, while sending a signal to this and all future US Presidents exactly how to avoid impeachment, and to other countries that we don’t mean it when we tell them to fight corruption honestly.

https://twitter.com/allatti2d/status/1223376266893516800

Chris Aldrich wrote a blog post about manually adding Webmentions for links to his posts from sites that are not themselves Webmention-enabled.

This reminded me that I’d like to add a “I linked to you” feature for the post detail page in #goldfrog for this site. (Goldfrog does support Webmentions, so Chris should get an automatic link from this post :))

I think we’re looking at the coming end of a government with co-equal branches. The Senate Republicans, tying their pursuit of personal power to Trump’s own, have abdicated their Constitutional role and are effectively handing Trump a monarchy.

I suppose they cannot imagine a Democrat taking the position again, or believe in that case they will simply find a way to again redefine the Presidency on their own terms? I don’t know.

#kingtrump #uspol #crimeboss

This could be an embarrassing failure, preserved for posterity for all time!

this link goes to one of the test pages on webmention.rocks

Update: templates should now support h-card with u-photo better.

While we are definitely not “live off the land” #farmlife types, my wife and I live on an acre of land in a rural neighborhood tucked in a large swatch of suburbia in metro Phoenix.

Due to circumstances we still don’t entirely understand, we find ourselves now in “possession” of 6 adult chickens, and 8 not-quite-young-adult chickens. The adults quickly learned to fly - well, flap semi-effectively - over the 5’ fences we used to contain them. So on Friday I did some research on how to clip the chicken’s wings to keep them earth-bound, and yesterday my daughter and I spent 15 minutes grabbing chicks one by one from the coop and giving them flight-curbing trim.

The article I ended up using was this one on Instructables, simply titled Clipping Chicken Wings.

> The hardest part about clipping chicken wings is catching the chicken. Some chickens are docile and like being touched, others fear humans and run away like their lives depended on it (which I guess they do sometimes).

Finished Emily Eternal by M.G. Wheaton #reading #reading2020 #scifi #artificialintelligence

Really interesting, compare/contrast “artificial intelligence” v. “artificial consciousness”, also human-AI smooches

Resident Advisor reviews the new Claro Intelecto compilation:

Some say dance music lacks heart. This compilation might be among the best responses to that claim.

I’d never heard of this artist until I started listening to the track linked from the review, and I really like it. Will be digging into these compilations, and more of his back catalog as well.

Blogging is bookmarking – I scanned this post by Coda Hale and want to spend some more time with it.

Work Is Work

> In which returns diminish

Michael Stipe is selling recordings and videos of his new track, Drive to the Ocean, with much of the proceeds going to Pathway to Paris:

> Pathway to Paris brings together musicians, artists, activists, academics, mayors, and innovators to help raise consciousness surrounding the urgency of climate action and offers solutions to turning the Paris Agreement into action.

Purchased - and would have even if Micheal was putting all the proceeds in his lovely pocket - but I’m really glad to support Pathway to Paris as well.

@liamwong posts AMAZING photos of, well, Tokyo after dark.

Totally followed.

Michael Stipe, who just celebrated his 60th birthday, is making music again, and it’s really good music.

Hearing this makes me happy and sad. I can hear echoes in this song of some of R.E.M.’s work on Up and Reveal, which were departures from their previous work and were generally disliked by fans (myself included at the time). Listening now I feel like this was a direction Michael wanted to go a long time, but fans weren’t ready for it. I’m really glad he’s getting to make his own music now.

For 2020, I’m writing a new blog app. It’s just for myself, a toy to remind me why I love the web. It’s called Goldfrog, and it sounds a bit like “Go, blog!”

Why in the hack, in this day and age, would I spend time writing my own #blogging software, when you can’t sign up for a VPS anywhere without tripping over offers to help you set up Wordpress, or Ghost, or what have you?

A few reasons.

New Year, New You

2019 was shite-filled, and due to politics, the tech trashfire, and the friction of blogging through several variations of static, git-powered versions of this site, I simply stopped blogging. I’ve wanted to, but the effort killed the motivation before I could get some words out.

So I finally decided to write something myself, that did just the things I wanted. #goldfrog is written in Go, because while I will love Python to my dying day, my brain needed a kick in the pants this year, which relates to my next point.

The Builder’s High

Rands writes eloquently on the builder’s high. With family engagements and work over the last few years my hobby coding has dropped to almost nil (None if I were writing Python).

I needed something to reboot my creative juices, and trying to write something I really wanted, that thought would be quick, in a new language, seemed like a good way to go (I did want it, it wasn’t easy, and Go hates me. But I’m learning and that feels great!)

Goldfrog

A bit more about Goldfrog: the single feature I wanted was a posting form on the home page, right up front. Various Userland products had had this, and it always felt right.

Second to this was an “Edit” link next to every post, wherever it was found on the site.

Finally, my main technical “innovation”: My content is still stored on the filesystem as Jekyll-compatible Markdown files. However, build times via Jekyll or Hugo are fairly slow for my 2800+ posts (since 2000, baby) and I hate that. So #goldfrog indexes all posts in a sqlite database on disk. Post creation and edits go to the DB and to the filesystem, so I can still periodically sync the changes to the git repo I have checked out there. But all the list views, archives, tag pages, and search functionality go to the DB, and are really fast.

The Setup

This is really the app I’ve wanted for a long time.

• It’s hosted on a Linode “nano”
• The app builds on CircleCI and the binary is pushed to an S3 bucket.
• I’ve got ansible playbooks that setup the VPS pretty much from scratch with Nginx fronting Goldfrog.

Next

I really need to get my logging story fixed, and I’ve got some idea on adding basic metric tracking to the app.

R.E.M. recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the release of 1994’s MONSTER, an album that french-fried expectations of both critics and fans of R.E.M., after the success of the rich, string and mandolin-y flow of ‘92’s Automatic For The People.

Me? I loved AFTP so completely. I have multiple singles and special releases, including the one in an actual wooden box with vellum prints of the band (back when packaging was a thing). I was living in the states when MONSTER was released, and I recall rushing to play it for my small group of friends, who honestly looked at me like I was insane. Monster was SO different, so raw, simultaneously in your face and hiding behind a flash facade. Grinding electrics, stripped back thumping percussion, and Michael Stipe alternatively crooning or growling.

The first track, and first single, Whats the Frequency, Kenneth? – I was hooked from the first guitar, and Buck’s possibly-recorded-backwards-then-played-forwards solo left me agape. My CD copy of the single is scratched now beyond believe, but treasured.

Crush with Eyeliner’s droning guitar wah, backed by Mike Mill’s walking bass lines #chefskiss she’s three miles of bad road

Make your money – King of Comedy introduced voice-crushing compression on Stipe’s and Mills’ vocals, perhaps for the first time? I was all “whuuuh whoa”

I don’t sleep I dream, dreamy piano, atmospheric distortion, and a more tom-driven drum background that keeps the song less driven than almost rolling forward. Also featuring Stipe – Stipe’s falsetto – on lead vocals.

Star 69 starts fast, stays fast, and still Mike Mills lays down interesting bass lines throughout. The title makes sense to us olds, ask your mother. squirrelies didn’t chew the wire

“I don’t know, why you’re mean to me”, starts Strange Currencies, a slow, rising tune that doesn’t so much confront as much as wish. Stipe brings his plaintive, meaningful voice to this and I’m there for it. During a bridge, playing the strings above the bridge of his guitar, Buck adds a childish, toy-like section that is both sweet and creepy.

Tongue is a full falsetto crooner from Stipe, over a (likely Mills-provided) Hammond organ. Not my favorite track on the album, but I won’t skip it either.

Bang and Blame is a pretty full rocker, still with Bill Berry’s steady but tom-heavy drums keeping the song rolling more than driving. The guitars, with a long, echoey reverb, are more accent than impact.

Nice tag at the end, too.

I Took Your Name is another guitar-heavy rocker, with the wah and distortion cranked to 11. Another one that’s not a fave, but I usually won’t skip it. It definitely has its moments. There was some confusion, some confusion, as to who’s to blame

Let Me In – another song I will often put on repeat, Let Me In is Stipe’s, and the bands’, tribute to Kurt Cobain. The guitar is heavy, droning, omnipresent. I believe in concert Mike Mills sometimes played Cobain’s left-handed sky blue guitar for this track. Stipe’s voice is almost reverent, plaintive, then powerful as he sings out his love for Cobain.

Circus Envy – another WTF tune that is really fun to listen to even while SMH at the crawling, self-loathing lyrics. Put pepper in my coffee I forgot to bark ON COMMAND

You – I woke up in a sleeping bag, with no where else to run I love you crazy just keep on I love you madly just keep on I love this album just keep on