Rubenerd

Sitting at this coffee shop on Christmas eve, the barista who served me is Indonesian, and his coworker is from Argentina. The guy at the table next to me is talking on his phone in Cantonese, and the one opposite is speaking Japanese. Another customer just arrived who sounds Filipino, and the one who came in before her sounded suspiciously Liverpudlian. And to top it off, another person just arrived who has an accent just like Clara’s, so her parents might be from Hong Kong or the surrounding area too.

This is one of the things I love about Sydney, and what I loved about Singapore and San Francisco. Must be something to do with S.

Today’s the annual anniversary that I lost my mum Debra to the big C. I still think about her every day, and “what would she do or think?” continues to be a valuable moral lens to for everything I do. I put on an old Bread album she used to listen to, and the lyrics to the second song did it:

You sheltered me from harm
Kept me warm, kept me warm
You gave my life to me
Set me free, set me free
The finest years I ever knew
Were all the years I had with you

And I would give anything I own
Give up my life, my heart, my home
I would give everything I own
Just to have you back again

This year has hit harder than most. Maybe it’s the two years of Covid fatigue we’re all feeling, or the fact we just lost her brother and my dear uncle a few weeks ago as well. I’m also still wallowing in post-operation pain and self-absorbed blues! My ongoing anxiety issues, which I was supposed to be taking leave for, has also deteriorated further with all this extra stuff.

But it’s also important to do the needful, which in this case is to remind ourselves of the good.

My dad’s health continues to improve after his heart surgery and wrist injuries. My little sister got married to someone who I’m honoured and happy to be introducing into the family. I don’t know how we would have got through any of this stuff with my dad’s new partner being a responsible, caring voice. The relationship I have with Clara is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, whether it be our Friday night Minecraft sessions, choosing boba after dinner, sharing in Japanese culture, or reading on the couch while the lights on our tiny Christmas tree sparkle. I’ve never had a massive circle of friends, but the ones I do have are special, too. Even work is doing well, and I enjoy spending time with my colleagues, even if virtually.

Dare I say as well, this year has also proved to be a turning point for this blog. The outpouring of fun comments and regular feedback has bowled me over, despite my dips into neurotic posts like this! That was almost mistyped as erotic, and would have taken this in a whole other direction. You all have your choice of writers, so I appreciate you giving me a bit of your time every day to let me ramble.

The world continues to face uncertainty, and I’m sure we’re all feeling a bit on edge. But I’ll wager dimes to doughnuts we’ll get through this. I only have a handful of American dimes, and I’d prefer a bagel, but this sentence has nineteen words.

I hope you’re going well. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the last two years, its that we need to take care of ourselves, too. ♡

Such a good chorus.

And you can’t talk about it;
And isn’t that a kind of madness?
To be living by a code of silence;
When you’ve really got a lot to say?

Another helpful and fun email from Hales of Haelstrom, this time regarding my comment about plants growing in the shadow of road infrastructure:

Yes there are a lot of plants that prefer indirect light and will die if put in direct sunlight. Many of them evolved in a “forest floor” environment, go on a bushwalk in a foresty bit and you will see dark, broad-leafed plants everywhere.

Off the top of my head:

• (all?) ferns and treeferns. We’ve lost some at my place from sun exposure. They get “burned” and die back when blazed. Our tree ferns have limited lifespans (~10 years?) because they grow too tall, then we can’t fit the shade sails over them in summer.

• Elephant ear. Grows crazy fast and like mad inside the house. Ours is more than 2m and dribbles nectar on us as a sign of affection. Keeps turning its leaves towards the window nearby, greedy and possibly haunted.

• Lots of climbing plants (these go up the trunks of trees in the forest until they get to the top; so they have to tolerate everything from dim to full sunlight)

In your illustration they use climbers on the pillars and possibly some more normal tress (hopefully shurb/height limited!) in the light gap (centre). Their “grasses” look a lot like weeds :P but of course that depends on what’s endemic to the region. Good choices will provide some green all year round, bad choices will get replaced by weeds that are better adapted.

I’ll admit that I now understand why I killed two houseplants that I put on our balcony to get a bit of greenery during the first Covid lockdowns. Our old balcony downstairs had a roof that shaded them, but our new one doesn’t. I read this email from Hales a week ago and moved them back inside, and the happy plant especially is doing much better already.

I’m sure Hales Horticulture will add that to my ever-growing bill, or to the piles of coffee or other beverages I owe him when we meet one day.

City Beautiful did a great video recently about the need for more corner stores and local shopping. He made the case for accessibility, walkability of suburbia, health benefits, and how such stores can bring communities together. He touched on the zoning challenges such stores face in the US, though I’m sure the same applies to Australia and other suburban countries.

I don’t begrudge anyone wanting their own slice of the Australian or American dream with a bungalow or house, but the idea of living out my days among endless tracts of cookie-cutter suburbia accessible only by car traffic sounds depressing beyond words. Wait, I used words to describe it. I’d rather live in a small apartment close to coffee shops, grocers, supermarkets, community centres, and a dependable train station.

But! I know I’m in the minority here. We should be doing what we can to encourage healthier, more sustainable living, regardless of where people are. Corner stores seem like an obvious addition that’d help everyone.

7-11’s aren’t exactly comparable, but I used to frequent the one closest to one of our apartments in Singapore, and got to know the people who worked there. I didn’t realise until recently how much I missed that; just like how I can’t see my favourite baristas as much anymore.

There’s probably an online shopping angle to this too, and how we don’t directly interact with any human in the supply chain. We’re living our lives in bubbles, either in cars between supermarkets, or in cardboard boxes shipped to our doors.

I didn’t realise Lance Ulanoff had a Medium account. I grew up reading his columns in PC Magazine, so this was quite a treat.

One of his most recent articles titled Social Media’s Fine Line Between Addiction and Necessity hits the nail on the head in a few ways. He discusses the benefits of technology and how its lead to us feeling more connected, but concludes (emphasis added):

… it doesn’t take a degree in psychology or computer science to understand that these systems that are programmed to feed you what you like based on what you do on the platform and not necessarily who you are is potentially harmful, and because they feed us what we want, potentially addictive. Getting what you want 24/7 isn’t always a good thing.

This is exactly why I push back against insinuations that social media algoritms are benign. These companies have it in their business model and survival strategy to keep your eyes glued to their platforms, and will use whatever data they can mine in whatever way to maintain this. Sometimes that works to our advantage, like discovering a new related channel on YouTube. Often though, it doesn’t.

I hadn’t considered Lance’s mental health perspective too. Addiction comes from reward, wiring ourselves to be receptive to it over time, and delusions about what it’s doing to us. I’ll bet doomscrolling plays into this, too.

Lance concludes:

Managing these addictions will always fall back to us: the adults who have their own issues, and their teens who need our guidance, rules, and help. It’s probably too late to get current teens off social media, though you might be able to curtail some of their time spent. Now, however, the time to engage with children under 10 to remind them that technology and social media are tools we use and not resources, like oxygen and water, we need to survive.

I’m not a parent, and feel at times that I even struggle to maintain a healthy relationship with it myself, let alone helping someone else cope with it. In some ways I’m relieved that ICQ, IRC, Friendster, and MySpace were the worst I had to deal with in high school, and those were nothing if tame by comparison.

That said, curtailing time spent on social media is probably best served by talking with young people candidly and honestly about its impacts. In other words, saying there are benefits to limiting your exposure, rather than blocking it wholesale.

I’m still on social media, but disabling all notifications, stopping myself idly going to it on my phone to fill small gaps of time, and allowing myself to ignore certain people and replies rather than satisfying the sugar hit of engaging, has made a huge impact both on my mood and attitute toward the platforms themselves.

Like all tools, they can be applied appropriately to a circumstance, or you can bash yourself silly. I know which one is less painful; and the other is to overuse social media.

Nature published an intruiging study into whether people were genetically predisposed to drinking black coffee, among other bitter foods and beverages.

I haven’t had time to read the whole paper yet, but their summary piqued my interest:

[O]ur genetic analysis suggests the psychostimulant effects of caffeine outweighs the bitterness of caffeine. A greater preference for caffeine based on genetic differences in the physiological effects of caffeine leads to a stronger preference for the taste/smell of coffee and dark chocolate. Similarly, greater sensitivity to the adverse physiological effects of caffeine was associated with avoiding the taste of coffee.

“Avoiding the taste of coffee” in this case refers to its masking with milk and sweeteners. I adore the taste of coffee, so will generally have it black.

The authors also touch on learned behaviours, which positively corrolate the bitterness of black coffee with the buzz one feels after having caffeine. I suspect this is the mechanism by which my afternoon decaf still wakes me up to an extent, though the authors note:

… the caffeine-taste sensitive variant (rs2708377 C) is associated with consumption of coffee regardless of how it is prepared but tends to be more strongly associated with caffeinated than with decaffeinated coffee.

My recent post about Kate on the Bird Site garnered more likes than almost anything I’ve posted in fourteen years, so I thought it was worth exploring here too. This is also my first blog post written in Kate in probably a decade or more. Hi!

Kate is the KDE Advanced Text Editor, and it’s one of the many, many goodies one gets when using the Plasma Desktop. You can install Plasma yourself (like I do on FreeBSD, thanks maintainers!), or there are Linux distributions such as KDE Neon and Kubuntu that ship with it by default for you. Others usually give you the option to replace their default desktop with it too, like Debian. Like other KDE applications, you can also run it on whatever desktop you want.

My move back to KDE full time it is a topic for a future post, but spending only a few minutes editing files with Kate again was enough for me to remember how spectacular it is. It punches far above its weight in polish, feature set, and performance, and it floors me that it isn’t as widely recognised.

Steve Gibson used to refer to the Tyranny of the Default when it came to security settings that nobody ever changes. I think it’s also a useful yardstick for software usability. If I grok software immediately after installing it, I take that as a sign that the developers and I are on the same wavelength, and therefore I’ll love using it.

I contrast that with my experience with Vim, and my brief foray into Emacs. I’ve come to appreciate it as a text editor, and I’ve developed muscle memory for its cryptic but efficient commands over many, many years. But to get it (mostly) into a state where I wanted to employ it as my daily driver required a ton of configuration, and maintaining multiple plugins. I can SSH into a remote box with vanilla with nvi or Vim to edit a file, and would still prefer to do so over something like nano or ee. But I don’t especially enjoy doing it.

I appreciate this touchy feely stuff is impossible to quantify, and everyone’s mileage will vary, but Kate is intuitive to me. Everything is where I’d expect it to be, and beyond hiding the toolbar and showing the path in the title (both of which are simple checkboxes in the Settings menu), I’m running completely stock.

It also has features that bring it closer to an IDE, like autocomplete, and Git integration that has no business being this good. From the sidebar I can get a summary of my uncommitted changes, or view a file browser, or a list of open documents. The footer exposes the language, insert mode, encoding, and detected file type. It’s also trivial to fold blocks of code or markup, enter a split file view, change colour scheme, and activate additional pre-bundled plugins for things like XML validation. It even has a scrolling minimap which I thought was a gimmick when I first tried Sublime Text, but it’s surprisingly useful.

It even has snippets, something I’ve come to rely on heavily in Vim for generating boilerplate.

And did I mention performance? It starts quickly, and scrolling through massive files is buttery smooth, even on my Japanese Panasonic laptop I bought for size not speed. This might sound like an odd thing to bring up, but in our dystopian world of Electron, it’s important to remind people that compiled, well-crafted software that respects your system does still exist.

A visualisation I’ve immediately come to appreciate is the line number tray, which indicates with a green or yellow bar whether a line of text has been changed since last save. This is brilliant for everything I write, but it’s especially a lifesaver for huge LaTeX and XML files where a subtle markup alteration can result in massive changes, or YAML where some inadvertently-altered indentation can break it.

And finally, the Terminal Panel. For a quick Perl script or to validate a document, it’s so handy to be able to pop up a terminal that switches to the directory to where your current file is. I achieved this in the past with Vim and tmux, but I love having it accessible without a second thought. That’s basically Kate in a nutshell; it takes all the configuration, tinkering, and fuss out of my environment so I can concentrate on what I want to do. I’m slowly realising how valuable this is.

Much of this isn’t new; Kate has been around for many years. But rediscovering it all has been a joy. There are even binaries for macOS and Windows now too, so everyone can give it a try.

The Evangelion franchise continues to get new merchandise more than two decades after the initial anime aired, which speaks to its enduring appeal and loyal fanbase. Maybe a touch of cash-cowism too, a phrase I’m sure doesn’t exist but should.

Unfortunately, I think most of the figs of the star characters have been underwhelming or downright painful to look at, and I’d argue nobody has copped this more than Rei.

So many sculptors took the characteristic mecha plugsuits from the series as an opportunity to run roughshod over the characters, forcing the heroines into all manner of back-breaking poses, fabric so tight I’d scarcely believe they could breathe, and body proportions well in excess of what the original character had. At some point they’re not even caricatures if the only thing the fig has in common with their reference is hair colour and a common number of eyes.

Wait, hold on, I have the same number of eyes as her too. Maybe I should adopt her posture as well.

By comparison, is a phrase with two words. Wave’s Dreamtech 1/7-scale Ayanami Rei is the best fig of her I’ve seen in years! Everything about her is completely reasonable… as far as anime goes. Her breasts aren’t water balloons (to borrow a phrase from my sister), and she won’t require spinal surgery after the fact. Even her expression is one I’d expect her to have, and her aforementioned eyes are faithful to the original art style of the series. Thank you Miki Ousaka!

This is a mixed blessing at best though, because now I might have to preorder her. I can already hear our scaled-down shelving infrastructure crying out in frustration. Clara just ordered another Prince Cat, but at least he’s squishy and compressible. Not like a spine.

James’s Coffee Blog recently featured my blog in his Advent of Blogs series. That sentence had the word blog three times, and now this paragraph has had it four times. Blog. Wait, damn it!

(He even noted the dark theme, which reminds me that I need to finish it! The colours still don’t match, and Rubi the mascot doesn’t appear in the sidebar because she doesn’t sport a transparent background).

James is one of the most considerate, interesting people writing today, and I’m not just saying it on account of being featured among some other great writers in this series. Thank you :).