Here's the recipe to generate your favorite 2FA token without taking your hands off your keyboard.

Step 1

Store your login credentials and 2FA secret in a password manager like Bitwarden. https://bitwarden.com/help/password-manager-overview/

Step 2

Install Bitwarden CLI. https://bitwarden.com/help/cli/

Step 3

Login using bw login command and then export your Bitwarden Session Key BW_SESSION to an in-memory environment variable.

Step 4

Fetch the id of the record for which you want the 2FA token.

bw get item <credential name>

Step 5

Add the below lines to your .bashrc or .zshrc.

alias cp2fatoken="bw get totp <id from step 4> | pbcopy"

Step 6

Use cp2fatoken

Use this to track scheduled job failures. It helps to reduce alert fatigue by alerting only when a job fails.

https://deadmanssnitch.com/

https://github.com/ByteByteGoHq/system-design-101

https://opensource.com/article/22/3/visual-map-kubernetes-deployment

EditorConfig helps maintain consistent coding styles for multiple developers working on the same project across various editors and IDEs.

The EditorConfig project consists of a file format for defining coding styles and a collection of text editor plugins that enable editors to read the file format and adhere to defined styles.

EditorConfig files are easily readable and they work nicely with version control systems.

https://editorconfig.org/

Madge had spent the weekend in a contemplative mood, enjoying the space to do not very much. She had finished her book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and she had been so thoroughly immersed in it, she had managed to keep away from the screens. It felt liberating to finally be able to read properly again. Losing her memory all those years ago had played havoc with reading but it seemed that she was rebuilding the skill. She was chuffed. The lovely daughter had now gifted her with a beautiful copy of Pride and Prejudice and though it didn’t promise quite such a feminist slant as far as she could tell so far, it was nonetheless a beautiful book. Gorgeously bound with gold edged pages.

In between reading and cooking, she had been thinking much of her grandmother. The next day would mark 8 years since she had died and it still seemed like only yesterday. She couldn’t believe how much life had changed since that dreadful time and she was glad that her darling Nan had not had to see it all. She would have been devastated by the news, the reports of wars and children dying. She would have been unimpressed with the government, respectful though she was about those in charge. The woman recalled a time years ago when the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown was being mocked in the media. “They shouldn’t say such bad things darling. After all, he is the prime minister.” There had been an innocence about her Nan, experienced in life as she was. Madge missed that a lot.

She missed so much about her grandmother that it was rarely possible to put it into words. She spoke of her daily, spoke to her often and she knew that all of her friends felt that they knew the tiny woman, even if they hadn’t met her. She was Dot and she was fab.

The woman allowed herself the luxury of really sitting with the memory of her nan as the sun rose and the week began. Mondays were always for what she would call her ‘post office work.’ She had been a highly organised woman who lived within her means and kept in touch by airmail with friends and family all around the world. In the old days, she would make all her calls on a Sunday, taking it in turns with relatives to make the call. Dot could talk all day on a Sunday after she had been to church and said her prayers. She had connections mainly in India, Australia, Canada and America and over the years, until she reached her 70s, she would travel to visit as often as possible. The loss of Dot had been huge, despite how diminutive she had been. Madge knew the whole family missed her.

She imagined that like herself, they missed the early morning birthday calls, and the knowledge that Dot would always remember. She remembered everyone’s birthday and it was only now that Madge could really see how that had instilled a sense of worth in people. It was important that you had been born and it was a reason to be celebrated. Madge loved that and hoped that she now conveyed some of that to her loved ones on their birthdays. She didn’t dare do a 6am rendition of happy birthday but she aimed to send messages that told people that they mattered. People do matter she thought. It’s just that sometimes, we think we don’t and therein lies the trouble. Even more trouble comes when we think we matter more than others and again, Madge thought about her Nan.

Dot had been a very steady person, keeping to her routines, eating simply and enjoying a flutter on the horses before Saturday bingo. It was one of those oddities that Madge still smiled about. Deeply devout, committed to Catholicism, always willing to place a little 25p bet on the Saturday horses. Her late wife had also loved a flutter and it was one of the connecting points between the radical feminist lesbian from an Irish family and a devout, tiny Indian woman with grey hair and a permanent set of Saints medals pinned to her jacket.

They had been sweet together and the day they had taken Dot to the casino in Leicester Square had been a highlight of their adventures. Dot had loved the experience of the casino although she had been a little confused around the roulette table as she watched people play with piles of cash chips. “What happened to the credit crunch darling?” she had asked in her Anglo Indian lilt. Madge had laughed as she so often had when she had been with her Nan. She missed that so very much.

When her late wife was given an OBE by the Queen, they had taken Dot to Buckingham Palace and it had been a dream come true. Madge had loved her wife for making that happen for her. They had laughed together that Dot kept her anorak on the whole way through the ceremony. “Lovely house darling but little chilly.” Afterwards, they had visited the Diana memorial because Dot had loved the Princess as if she had known her all her life. Now both Nan and wife were gone and life was very different for all of the world. Madge thought about them both, hanging out somewhere in the stardust. She wasn’t sure about heaven and hell and all that it entailed to believe in such, but she did like the notion of the two fabulous women who had loved her and who she had loved, sitting together, feet dangling over a cloud as they swapped tips for which horses they fancied for the race and drinking tea together. Tea had always been important.

Remembering the tea, the adventures, the smiles, the absolute love and the lessons in moderation, Madge smiled, her heart warmed. We must take time to remember, even as we sit in the present she thought. The kettle was calling. She sent out the cosmic hugs, reminded her friends that they were the treasures of her life and wished the world a hahalala week of moments that matter. The sun was up and it might just stay. Big love xx

On this last day of Confirmation classes, we celebrate the feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, a religious, a mystic, and a Doctor of the Church. I think she’s an excellent saint to reflect on today, because she teaches us how one person can change the world for the better.

Saint Catherine was born at Siena, in the region of Tuscany in Italy. When she was six years old, Jesus appeared to Catherine and blessed her. As many parents do for their children, her mother and father wanted her to be happily married, preferably to a rich man. But Catherine wanted to be a nun. So, to make herself as unattractive as possible to the men her parents wanted her to meet, she cut off her long, beautiful hair. Her parents were very upset and became very critical of her. But Catherine did not change her mind: her goal was to become a nun and give herself entirely to Jesus. Finally, her parents allowed it, and her father even set aside a room in the house where she could stay and pray.

When Catherine was eighteen years old, she entered the Dominican Third Order and spent the next three years in seclusion, prayer and works of penance. Gradually a group of followers gathered around her—men and women, priests and religious. They all saw that Catherine was a holy woman and they flocked to her for spiritual advice. During this time she wrote many letters, most of which gave spiritual instruction and encouragement to her followers. But more and more, she would speak out on many topics and would stand up for the truth. Because of this, many people began to oppose her and they brought false charges against her, but she was cleared of all of wrongdoing.

Because of her great influence, she was able to help the Church navigate a rocky period of two and eventually three anti-popes, men who claimed to be the pope but were not legally elected. She even went to beg rulers to make peace with the pope and to avoid wars. At one point, Saint Catherine convinced the real pope to leave Avignon, France, where he had been staying in exile, and return to Rome to rule the Church, because she knew that this was God’s will. He took her advice, and this eventually led to peace in the Church.

Catherine had a mystical love of God, and his goodness and beauty was revealed to her more and more each day. This is what she wrote about God: “You are a mystery as deep as the sea; the more I search, the more I find, and the more I find the more I search for you. But I can never be satisfied; what I receive will ever leave me desiring more. When you fill my soul I have an even greater hunger, and I grow more famished for your light. I desire above all to see you, the true light, as you really are.”

Saint Catherine is one of just four female Doctors of the Church, being named that by Pope Paul VI in 1970. Doctors of the Church are men and women saints who have written great works of theology and spirituality.  There are just four women who are Doctors of the Church: Saint Catherine, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Therese of Liseaux, and Saint Hildegard of Bingen. Saint Catherine is also the co-patron saint of Italy, along with Saint Francis of Assisi.

I think the story of Saint Catherine is amazing for a couple of important reasons.  First, it shows that God wants to be friends with us.  God reached out and called Saint Catherine in a special way and blessed her, but he also calls each of us in our own special way to be his friends.  Second, Saint Catherine’s story shows the important contribution of women to the Church.  Many people think the Church does not value the contribution women, but nothing is further from the truth.  Over time, countless women have contributed so much to what the Church knows about God and the spiritual life and living the Gospel.  On Easter Sunday, we heard about the witness of the women who came to the tomb after Jesus was buried, and without them, we would not have known the Good News that he rose from the dead.  Without the contribution of Saint Catherine, our understanding of God’s fierce love for people would be much poorer.

So we have much for which to be grateful on this feast of Saint Catherine.  Through her intercession may we all have a deep appreciation and love for the depths of the mysteries of God.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Today’s readings

I’m sure we have all had the experience of pruning a shrub or a tree. When you’re a homeowner, there’s always landscaping to be done. Pruning keeps the shrub or tree from growing out of control and becoming unsightly, but it also keeps the plant healthy. To keep a plant healthy, very often we have to cut away dead branches, or even live branches if they are overgrown. Sometimes, to make the shrub more vibrant, branches have to be radically cut away.

Jesus talks about pruning in today’s Gospel.  And he does that to point to the fact that we have to give in to that kind of painful process in our own lives too. We have to be willing to get some of us pruned away if we are to grow as healthy and fully human people.  That’s our task in this world: to become fully human, fully the people God created us to be.  So whatever gets in the way of that fullness has to be chopped off, and that’s rarely a pleasant process.  Pruning ourselves is painfully difficult, but we recognize that the things we prune away can be really destructive: relationships that entangle us in ways that are not healthy, pleasures that lead to sin, habits that are not virtuous.  However enjoyable these relationships or activities may seem to be, and however painful it may be to end them, end them we must in the name of pruning our lives to be healthier, to be more fully the people we were created to be.  There is no other way.

There’s one other thing that our Gospel today tells us that we must do in order to become what we were meant to be, and that is to remain in Christ.  That’s what he says in the Gospel:

Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.

And I’d have to say that they key here is the word “remain” because Jesus uses it four times in that short quote!  “Remain in me,” Jesus says, as the branch remains in the vine.  “Remain in me,” Jesus says, so that you can bear much fruit.  “Remain in me,” Jesus says, so that you will not wither and dry up only to be pruned off and burned as rubbish. “Remain in me,” Jesus says, so that whatever you truly need and want will be done, and so that you can bear much fruit and be my disciples.

If we want to be truly happy, if we want ultimate fulfillment in life, if we really want to be the wonderful creation God made us to be, we must remain in Jesus, because, as he says, “without me you can do nothing.”  And that’s true.  How many times have we tried to better ourselves and lost sight of the goal before we even started?  How many times have we tried to stamp out a pattern of sin in our lives, only to fall victim to it time and time again?  How many times have we tried to repair relationships only to have egos, hurts or resentments get in the way?  When we forget to start our work and continue our work with God’s help, we are destined to fail.  Apart from Jesus we can do nothing.  Well does he advise us to remain in him.

But what does “remain in me” look like?  Unfortunately, we don’t get a clear-cut blueprint for that in today’s Gospel. And the truth is, remaining in Christ is going to be different for every person.  Just like pruning shrubs isn’t a once-and-for-all activity, we are going to have to do some pruning every now and then so that we can remain in Christ.  And so we’ll have to continue to be on the lookout for parts of our lives that are not ultimately life-giving and prune them away.  But we’ll also have to look out for opportunities that will fertilize our growth.  We have to check our growth daily, we have to examine where we are remaining every day.  That might start with Sunday Mass attendance, and perhaps move on to daily Mass, praying devotions like the Rosary, reading Scripture every day, and taking time at the end of the day to see whether we’ve been part of the vine, or are in danger of breaking away from it.  We have to be willing to renew ourselves in Christ every single day of our lives.

It’s not so easy for us to be most fully the wonderful human creation we were made to be.  But that, brothers and sisters in Christ, is our calling and our joy.  May we all support one another in our times of pruning and through our journey of remaining.

Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

• 🥳The horrible COVID headaches are gone!
• 📒I got a reusable notebook: Rocketbook Fusion and some blue and colored Pilot Frixion Synergy pens in 0.5mm. It comes with a black 0.7mm and I prefer writing in blue. I really like the feel of writing on it, it's exceptionally smooth. I haven't had much time to use it, I'll test it more in the following days.
• ✏️I realized (not surprisingly) that handwriting makes me slow down, it's good for me! And my handwriting got worse over the years. Gotta practice more!
• 🚲Me and my partner went for our first bike ride of the year after the winter. It was a total of 37km, I was completely exhausted after the ride but feeling great! It was 21C, perfect weather. I anticipate some post-exercise muscle pain tomorrow.
• 📺We got 30 days of Amazon Prime (trial) and we caught up on the “The Grand Tour: Sand Job (S05 E03)“. Just fun with cars and gorgeous visuals, this time they start in Mauritania and drive all the way to Dakar in Senegal.

—-

Post 01/100 of 100DaysToOffload challenge (Round 2)!

#100DaysToOffload #100Days #weeknotes

Sunday 28/Apr/2024

Prayers, etc.: • 06:00 – Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel followed by the Angelus • 08:10 – The Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary. Followed by The Memorare • 08:40 – Thought for today from Archbishop Lefebvre: We are often ashamed to show that we are Catholic because of human respect. In front of people who do not believe, we do not dare to say that we are Catholic, we do not dare to show that we are wearing a cross or that we have a rosary in our pocket. But we must not be afraid, because it is an honor and a grace to be Catholic. We must not be afraid to speak of our faith and to show the signs of our faith. • 12:00 – the Angelus • 18:00 – the Angelus • 19:00 – The hour of Compline for tonight according to the Traditional Pre-Vatican II Divine Office, followed by Fr. Chad Rippberger's Prayer of Command to protect my family, my sons, my daughter and her family, my granddaughters and their families, my great grandchildren, and everyone for whom I have responsibility from any demonic activity. – And that followed by the Sunday Prayers of the Association of the Auxilium Christianorum.

Health Metrics: • bw= 225.20 • bp= 138/76 (71)

Diet: • 07:10 – ½ pb&j sandwich, 1 banana • 09:05 – 1 big stuffed omelet, sausage, stack of pancakes

Chores, etc.: • 08:45 – listen to relaxing music • 12:30 – begin assembling and testing cordless electric pole saw • 14:00 – follow the Texas Rangers vs the Cincinnati Reds MLB game • 15:00 – watch PGA Golf • 17:00 – follow news reports from various sources • 18:15 – Lost in Space – Steve Green's Right Angle • 18:45 – turn the radio to easy listening music, and will probably listen while enjoying leisure reading until head hits pillow later tonight.

Chess: • 11:10 – moved in all pending CC games

posted Sunday 28/Apr/2024 ~20:15 #DLAPR2024

The company I bought a tiny keyboard from asked me for a review of it for their website. I don’t know if they’ll actually post it, so I’m posting it here as well.

I have a keyboard problem. The Park sometimes makes it a struggle to type on my laptop keyboard. The keys are too light and too close together, and when my hands shake, I accidentally type double keys all the time. But I didn't have the same problem with my old Das Keyboard mechanical keyboard at home. I realized I needed to get a mechanical keyboard for work, too. But it had to be portable. It had to be something I could toss my bag and carry with me.

First I bought a Keychron K7 low-profile wireless keyboard. It was okay. But I didn't like the low-profile keycaps, and I didn't like the setup of the function keys. I couldn't customize it to work the way I wanted it to. So I began looking into keyboards with customizable layouts. And eventually that led me to the Atreus.

I liked how it was small, portable, hot swappable, and completely customizable—everything I was looking for in a keyboard. And it was fairly cheap compared to some other customizable keyboards that could run $200 to $350. So, I bought one. Bare bones. No switches, no keys. Just a tiny keyboard base. And ever since then, I've had a tiny keyboard problem.

First, it was the switches. Do I want brown switches, red switches, box brown switches, clicky switches, tactile switches, linear switches? Do I want a mix of switches on function keys versus letter keys? I’ve currently settled on Akko penguins for the letter keys and Gateron Aliaz for the thumb/function/layer keys. Silent, and I don’t accidentally hit space too many times in a row.

And then there are the keys. XDA, DSA, OEM, Cherry. I don't know what the differences between them are, but I've tried them all. Or most of them, anyway. Thankfully, a certain online retail behemoth has a friendly return policy or else I’d be swimming in unused keycaps. I’m currently using a dirt cheap set of Cherry profile keycaps.

But the caps and switches are just the tip of the iceberg. I can’t stop reconfiguring this tiny keyboard. There are only 44 keys, so you have to have layers, but how do you want those layers? Do you want the layers the way the Atreus comes with as default? That’s too easy. You need your own layer setup. So you customize it. You tweak it. You break it. You fix it. You customize it again. You think you’re happy with it. You think you’re done. But you’re not.

Soon you're constantly tweaking and tinkering. You think you have it all figured out and perfected, but then you read about miryoko layout or home row modifiers or Colemak-DH or all sorts of other ways you can configure the keyboard. And the tinkering cycle begins anew.

And don’t even get me started on whether you should keep the kaleidoscope firmware or flash it with QMK. I don’t even know what any of that means, but I always come back to kaleidoscope and chrysalis

So what do you get from all this tinkering? You get a tiny keyboard that is entirely yours. A tiny keyboard that takes up no space in your bag, but that lets you type without hunching over your flimsy work laptop keyboard. Combine it with a portable laptop riser and it will change your mobile work life.

There will be some growing pains when you adopt the tiny keyboard lifestyle. I’m still getting the hang of the tiny keyboard, so my typing speed isn’t what it could be yet, but my hands don’t get as tired from typing. Even with my slower typing speed, it’s a more comfortable typing experience, which is invaluable considering how much time I spend on a computer at work. But most importantly, my tiny keyboard is a trustworthy friend. My lil buddy. My boon companion. The tiny keyboard will always be there for me, because it can, with a little tweaking, become whatever I need it to be. Possibly the best $109 I’ve ever spent.

Winding down a productive and pleasant Sunday. Though I stayed up later than I should have on Saturday night, watching a live broadcast of San Antonio's 2024 Fiesta Flambeau Parade, I woke reasonably rested. While eating a gigantic breakfast, I worked through a mountain of chess games.

Early afternoon found me assembling a new cordless electric pole saw. After that I came inside and followed a MLB game then coverage of a PGA Golf tourney.

Drinking my evening tea (Sleepy Time herbal) now, I'm anticipating an earlier bedtime tonight, and a peaceful sleep.

posted Sunday, Apr 28, 2024 at ~20:00 #QNAPR2024

From the time I was a wee nerdlet, I loved text-based adventure games, choose-your-own-adventure books—anything that let the audience, not just participate in the story, but influence how it played out.

As much fun as these stories are to read, writing a choose-your-own story can be a beast of an undertaking. I attempted several that I never finished before finally completing my first one—and even though I made it through, it took a couple of false starts. On the plus side, I made a few valuable learning mistakes along the way. I’m currently in the planning stages of a new choose-your-own story and, while it’s still a bit of a daunting task, I feel much more confident about how to tackle it than I was last time.

I’ve been seeing more interest in these kinds of narratives of late. In part I think because online publishing makes it much easier to share this kind of story with readers, but I’ve also seen a few writers playing with the form in print books (a chapter in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House comes to mind). So I figured I’d share some of my tips for writing a choose-your-own story without losing your mind.

#1: Diagram first.

I’m normally a seat-of-the-pantser. I might have a rough idea of where I want a story to go but, for the most part, I just start writing. That was my first mistake when I tried to write my first choose-your-own story.

The thing you need to remember is that, each time the reader gets a choice, that adds a new story thread you need to write out—and each of those threads is going to lead to further splits, creating an exponentially growing narrative tangle.

Plotting the big-picture movement first can help you to wrangle the word count and the number of scenes you’re going to write into a reasonable space from the start. It also lets you look for places that you could save yourself some work by having two threads lead to the same path, or putting in “dead ends” to prune some of the story branches. This also can help you get an idea for exactly how long your story is going to be once it’s finished, and roughly how many words you’ll have to play with in each segment to stay within your target length range.

#2: Establish a numbering or categorization system for scenes.

One of the challenges of writing this kind of story is how to manage your manuscript in progress. Keeping track of how the segments flow from one to the next can be difficult, especially once you’ve written out multiple plot threads.

I used a letter+number system last time, and it seemed to work pretty well so I’ll probably do that again. The way I approach it:

• Scene 1 leads to 2A and 2B
• Scene 2A leads to 3A and 3C; scene 2B leads to 3B and 3D
• Scene 3A leads to 4A and 4E… 

…and so on. I wrote all the scenes together in one Word document, using the letter-number label as a heading for each scene. Some people might find it easier to save each scene as its own document, all saved in the same folder. Whatever works for your brain, establish that as your system and stick to it throughout the drafting. 

#3: Use index cards, Post-It notes, or other visual aids.

If you think the writing stage of a choose-your-own project is challenging, just wait until you get to editing. You have to make sure the story is telling a cohesive narrative no matter what decisions the reader makes. You also have to expect that the reader is going to try multiple paths, so you need to make sure all of the paths feel both cohesive and like they’re interesting either alone or read together. 

I found an index card system absolutely key to getting through this process. I made an index card for each scene that had a brief plot summary, along with which scenes it leads to. Having these let me lay out the paths I was currently editing to look at them from start to finish. 

Post-Its would do this job just as well, and there are probably software programs that would let you do a similar thing. I personally find it helpful being able to physically see how the scenes connect, but I could definitely see advantages to a digital version—it’s more portable, visually cleaner, and probably more efficient.

Either way, though, you’ll want some kind of tool for quickly identifying how the scenes branch and connect once you get into the editing stage.

---

The downside to having completed a choose-your-own story already is that I know exactly how much work I have ahead of me to finish the next one—and it’s a lot, even if you’re well-organized from the start. But it’s also a very fun way to approach storytelling, as a writer or a reader, and I’m excited to give it another go.

 

See similar posts:

#WritingAdvice #InteractiveFiction

Kagi small web

I recently heard some unfortunate things about Kagi's lead developer, but you can use Kagi small web without contributing any funds to Kagi. You can check out their Small Web site with appropriately-old-timey-web-vibes and it will open a random “small web” site in an iframe immediately. You can scroll through random pages like this, or subscribe to the RSS feed, or access them in other ways.

While there is no single definition, “small web” typically refers to the non-commercial part of the web, crafted by individuals to express themselves or share knowledge without seeking any financial gain. This concept often evokes nostalgia for the early, less commercialized days of the web, before the ad-supported business model took over the internet (and we started fighting back!)

Kagi Small Web offers a fresh approach by promoting recently published content from the “small web.” We gather new content, published within the last week, from a handpicked list of blogs and surface it in multiple ways.

Safelinks are a fragile foundation for publishing

If you're reading this you are probably a librarian or tech person, so this blog post won't be news to you. And if you work in a large organisation you probably don't have any choice in how the email system is set up. But...

Here's my prediction. In the next five or so years, Microsoft is going to accidentally shut off *.safelinks.protection.outlook.com and a million copy-and-pasted links across the web are going to break.

The tl;dr on this is – if you're pasting a link from an email into something else, it's best to open the URL in a browser first, let it do all its redirects, (and remove all the tracking gunk), and then paste it into your document. Future readers will thank you.

As an aside, this also made me think about the DOI system and how if doi.org gets DDoS'd or fails for some other reason, most recent academic research will become a lot harder to locate.

They're looting the Internet

Ed Zitron sent this zinger out into the world a couple of weeks ago, and his follow up/companion piece (The man who killed Google Search) is decidedly more brutal. Not much in Zitron's post is new as such, but he lays out clearly what has happened to the “online experience” over the last 15 years and, to some extent, why.

We negotiate with Instagram or Facebook to see content from the people we chose to follow, because these platforms are no longer built to show us things that we want to see. We no longer “search” Google, but barter with a seedy search box to try and coax out a result that isn't either a search engine-optimized half-answer or an attempt to trick us into clicking an ad.

This is essentially the same thesis as Cory Doctorow's awkwardly-named “enshittification”, though I can't help but think both descriptions reveal some level of prior naivety:

The tradeoff was meant to be that these platforms would make creating and hosting this content easier, and help either surface it to a wider audience or to quickly get it to the people we cared about , all while making sure the conditions we created and posted it under were both interesting and safe for the user.

I mean sure, that was always the sales pitch from these companies. But there were people right at the very beginning who warned about the true nature of corporations and capitalism. It's certainly right and proper to point out that they are lying, making human societies demonstrably worse, and can't be trusted. But let's not buy in to the idea that this is a new development.

Are you interested in time travelling? Would you like to go back in time to see if the dinosaurs had feathers or something?

I wouldn’t.

I wouldn’t travel back in time, because I’ve watched too much Star Trek, so I know about the risks involved when messing with the space time continuum.

The butterfly effect.

Plus I don’t want to get in trouble with the temporal police.

Actually I think that thought of the multiverse that it’d just fork off and the original time line would be intact, but I’m not 100% sure.

Plus I am not curious or adventitious enough about anything in the past to want go there, like there’s lots of diseases like TBC and the Pest and shit like that in the past. Poor dental hygiene, poor hygiene in general and short average life spans etc.

I don’t wanna go forward either: I see the trajectory from where I stand and it’s looking like we’re headed towards some dystopian science fiction I am not motivated to see up close.

That is a change I realise now because I used to think the future looked bright.

It’s here in this time and space I have my life and I don’t want to change anything except my job.

I will travel forward in time but in the standard pace which is usually not considered to be time travelling: one day at a time.