Deep breath.
Okay.
I locked the blog down for a bit because the government’s crazy talk (and that of the fascist think tanks that are writing the playbook) triggered panic attacks. I am unlocking it again because:
- The panic attacks stopped (pretty quickly).
- The crazy talk has escalated from “designating 4 million Americans as violent extremists” to “designating 200 million Americans as violent extremists” and has gone from frightening to point-and-laugh ludicrous.
- If anyone reads this and thinks I’m “nihilistic” or “violent”, then they’re so far disconnected from reality that it simply doesn’t matter what I do or don’t say. It isn’t that I hate the opposite of what the fascists hate, it’s that I am opposed to hate. It isn’t that I want to bully them for their views that I disagree with, it’s that I don’t want anyone to bully anyone and that’s 100% why I disagree with them.
You know what’s violent, nihilistic extremism? Federal agents breaking into an apartment building, trashing people’s homes and dragging zip-tied naked children — American citizens — into the street and into U-Haul vans. Right-wing talking heads saying that “a few school shootings every year are the price we pay for gun rights.” Renaming the Defense Department to “The Department of War” and gathering the generals together to tell them beards are not okay but war crimes are totally fine. Taking funding away from schools and hospitals to punish them for being inclusive.
Those things very recently were considered extremely “Unamerican” but this is what they are trying to turn America into. I don’t think they’re going to succeed in this attempt, and neither do some of the hardcore fascist thinkers who are now afraid of “leftist retribution” in 2029 (again, that’s not our thing). But very real damage is being done right now, and more needs to be done to resist and reverse it, especially by those who are supposed to be representing us in government and those who are reporting on all of this.
Okay, so what else is happening? With me, not the country.
We have an official release at work, finally, after weeks of testing and fixes. The #1 priority now is to improve our QA/testing situation. We have a great deal of automated testing, but it by no means represents complete coverage of features and combinations of features. Anything that relies on the GUI (and there’s a lot of it) is either tested manually or using a third-party automation suite — and changes to the GUI by the development team have far outpaced maintenance of those tests by the perpetually understaffed and overworked QA team. I feel like it’s almost impossible to entirely untangle it, but we’re going to make what incremental improvements we can.
The carpenter guy says he should be able to deal with our busted deck this week. He didn’t name a specific day, and communication and response times have been a little lacking… so I’m crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. I was right on the edge of pursuing a partial DIY solution, because that old deck is more unsafe every week.
I’m taking a little bit of time to gather my thoughts on the next album project. While I’ve been getting really amazing beautiful drone textures lately (either with dual Mesmerisers, the new Dawesome Kontrast, or experimenting with Just Friends or Rings) and considered doing an album consisting entirely of drone snippets, I also have MD2 and Polyllop leading me into a sequenced/moving direction. Really though, I want this to be another album with a specific, let’s call it magical, intent. This won’t be the first time I have done that, but I’m just contemplating the mechanics/process right now.
Recent books:
Rowan Alexandria Bennett, Symphony of the Sojourn: a fantasy tale told by several members of an adventuring party (it’s not shy about being influenced by RPGs), it’s nevertheless a unique setting with some interesting characters… burdened a little by a few very silly character names. I enjoyed it quite a lot anyway, but I did prefer The Tightest Embrace Etc.
Maria Ying, The Moth of the House of Hua: a very short entry in the series about uber-rich lesbian sorceresses and monsters. Honestly, skippable.
Martha Wells, All Systems Red: so I had the idea that I was going to reread all the Murderbot books. Except, I don’t actually have all of them, some were library loans. Also, while I enjoyed it and had some laughs, it was better the first time around and doesn’t particularly need rereading, at least not yet.
Benedict Patrick, The Flight of the Darkstar Dragon: a weird fantasy setting and some likeable characters. Fun but not really a rock-your-world sort of thing, I’d say.
Benedict Patrick, They Mostly Come Out at Night: a grimmer fantasy setting. I only am a little ways in and I’m not super into it but I’ll probably keep going.
Gordon White, The Chaos Protocols: I read this a while back. It’s more or less about using chaos magic in the present day. The first chapter talks somewhat astutely about the economics of the world (slightly pre-Trump), and how things are not designed for our benefit. It says we need to reject the idea that those economics are our objective reality, and remember that the whole system is imposed on us. Okay, yeah. It mentions “the black iron prison” of that Philip K Dick book I started reading and gave up on… meh. Then there is a questionable interpretation of quantum mechanics and an insistence that there is no doubt that psi powers are beyond doubt, and I started twitching. Then a self-initiation ritual that syncretizes a bunch of stuff and I just had to nope out and abort the reread. This isn’t my path.