-🔞🔞

Setelah setengah jam lebih Tawan mengendarai mobil nya,akhirnya ia sampai juga di salah satu club terbesar di Jakarta,Tawan mulai memasuki tempat itu matanya langsung di sajikan lampu warna warni yang menyakiti mata dan lautan manusia yang sedang bergerak dengan bebas

Matanya menyapu lautan manusia itu untuk mencari seseorang yang membuatnya datang malam ini “ketemu” ucap tawan sambil berjalan dan menampilkan smirk nya ——————————- “Lu si ciw” ucap New yang sedang duduk di salah satu bar sambil memasang wajah panik “Kok gua anjing? Yang mabok lu yang di salahin gua” ucap Gun sambil melihat wajah temannya yang sedang panik itu

“Udah lah gapapa,kapan lagi ngewe sama pak boss” ucap Gun sambil tertawa “Ngawa Ngewe,kalo gua di pecat gimana anjjing?” “Yaudah si lu udah kaya ini,tinggal minta uang sama Bokap nyokap lu”ucap Gun santai “anjing gua kan masih belom baikan sama bokap nyokap ciw”

“ya lu tolol” “udah lah gamungkin juga di pecat,masa di pecat malah di samperin langsung, ke club pula” “Ya kali aja dia mau nampol gua dulu gitu sebelum di pec-“

“Newwie thitipoom” ada suara berat yang masuk ke indra pendengaran new,new memutar badannya dan saat itu juga ia merinding sambil berusaha meneguk salivanya dengan susah “I-iya pak?”

—————————————————- Saat ini new sedang panik dan bingung,pertama ia panik karena ia berada di dalam mobil bos nya yang habis ia kirimi “DrunkText” yang kedua ia bingung karena ini bukan daerah apartemen nya

“Emm p-pak maaf kayanya ini bukan daerah apartemen saya deh?”Ucap new setengah takut “Siapa yang bilang saya mau antar ke apartemen kamu?” New bingung apa maksud bos nya itu “terus kita mau kemana pak?” Tanya New lagi

“Apartemen saya” ucap tawan sambil tersenyum,bukannya jatuh cinta oleh senyum bos nya itu New malah merinding setengah mati —————————————— New langsung di dorong ke kasur kingsize milik bos nya

“Oke Newwie thitipoom,coba kamu ulang ucapan kamu di chat tadi” ucap tawan sambil senyum yang menurut newwie itu sangat mengerikan

“I-itu pak emm-nghh” ucapan New terpotong saat dia mendapat serangan mendadak dari bosnya,saat ini tawan sedang mencium leher jenjang karyawan nya,Lalu dengan cepat Newwie meraih leher itu dan melumat bibir bos nya,tidak ingin kalah saat ini tawan yang memimpin ciumsn panas mereka

Tawan menyudahi lumatan mereka dan mulai membuka kancing kemeja New satu persatu,kemeja New sudah terlepas semua kancing nya

“Kenapa diliatin pak?haus ya?” Ucap New yang sudah tidak ada takutnya “Kalo saya haus kamu mau kasih saya apa?”ucap tawan dan langsung kerah baju tawan di tarik oleh New

“MMH—NGHHH” lenguh newwie,saat ini tawan sedang menyedot buah dada New dan tangan kanan tawab yang tidak lupa memilin puting karyawan nya itu “Nghh—pakkk” Newwie bangun lalu mendorong tubuh bos nya itu dengan cepat membantu tawan membuka bajunya dan sekarang dia merangkak mundur ke arah PENIS milik bos nya itu

Newwie dengan sengaja membuka resleting celana tawan dengan mulutnya sambil matanya menatap tawan “FASTER NEWWIE,don't waste time” ucap tawan yang sudah gila melihat ekspresi Newwie seperti tadi

“your cock will be mine tonight”Ucap Newwie

“Dengan cepat Newwie menarik celana bos nya dan mendapatkan PENIS bos nya yang sudah sangat tegang

Pertama newwie menjilati ujung penis bos nya itu,lalu mulai memasukan penis bos nya Ke dalam mulutnya,dengan cepat dia mulai memaju mundurkan kepala nya

“Mmmhhh-nghhh AHHH FASTER NEW” penis tawan mulai bertambah besar di dalam mulut newwie,Newwie yang tau boss nya akan melakukan pelepasan langsung menghentikan kegiatannya

Tawan memasang wajah bingung sedikit kesal,Newwie yang mengerti raut wajah boss nya itu langsung tersenyum “jangan keluar sekarang honey,keluarin di dalam aja” ucap newwie menggoda sambil membuka celana nya dan sekarang mereka sama sama bertelanjang tanpa sehelai benang pun

“Kamu harus di hukum thitipoom,jangan salahin saya kalo kamu gabisa jalan seminggu kedepan” tawan berjalan ke laci samping kasurnya dan mengambil botol lube yang memang dia letakan disana

“Ok thitipoom waktunya hukuman” ujar tawan yang sedang menuangkan lube ke penis nya “ARE YOU READY BABY?” Ucap tawan sambil menampar pantat sintal New “NGHHH” desah New saat tawan menampar pantatnya kencang

Dengan sekali hentakan tawan memasukan penis besarnya itu kedalam lubang karyawan manis di depannya

“AHHHHH BOSS”ucap New kaget karena tidak ada persiapan “CALL ME TAY TONIGHT” ucap tawan

Dan dia diam sebentar menunggu lubang Newwie terbiasa dengan penisnya

“Tee c’mon, don't waste time” ujar Newwie membalikan perkataan tawan tadi dengan tidak sabar

Tawan tersenyum dan mulai menggerakkan pinggulnya dengan cepat “Nghhh—TEEE” Newwie Mendesah

“Ahhh lubang kamu sempit banget New”

“AHHHH NGHH Iya disitu teee iyaa AHHHH” tawan tersenyum saat tau dia mendapatkan titik kenikmatan new

“Tawan menambah kecepatan Tempo nya,dan dia mulai memainkan penis karyawan manisnya juga”

Newwie yang mendapat kenikmatan double itu mendesah lebih kencang

“MMM-NGGHHH” “AHHHH TAY TAWAN”

”Yash say my name baby”,tawan terus menggerakkan pinggul dan tangan nya

“AHHH aku mau keluar tay” “Keluar bareng baby” ucap tawan dan saat itu juga mereka melakukan pelepasan dengan bersama

“Ahhh” “AHhaHHAH” mereka bertatapan dan tertawa lalu tawan memeluk New

“Jadi apa maksud kamu New selalu sange kalau ngeliat saya?” “Ahhh udah pak jangan di bahas lagi,saya malu” ucap new sambil memukul dada bos nya itu “Hahaha,saya kira kamu sadar kalau saya suka ngeliatin kamu New”. “Hah?” New bangun dari tidurnya “maksudnya gimana pak?”

“Kamu beneran Gatau kalau saya suka curi pandang ke kamu?saya suka sama kamu new” “kamu fikir saya mau sex sama kamu karena apa?” “Saya ga sembarang having sex dengan seseorang”

New yang kaget mendengar ucapan bosnya itu langsung memeluk dan mencium bosnya

“I Love you pak” “I Love you too New”

-Endd

For those of us who live inside our heads a bit too much (hi there!), the hardest thing is to let something go. Out into the world, out from the place of safety and concealment.

I don't believe much in New Year's resolutions, but I suppose this year it's “more doing, less thinking” for me.

Just hit send. Just hit publish. Post. Toot. Tweet. Whatever the button says, it's getting clicked.

Austin Kleon, on “taking it and turning it.” > I feel like my readers see me as a fairly positive person, but I doubt they know how much I am driven by my disgust. > > The trick is: I take the thing I’m disgusted with, imagine the opposite, and push that out into the world.

There’s a lot to unpack in just those two sentences.

Source

photo: students today, serious about capitalist outcomes

Interrupting my otherwise pleasant pre-New Years holiday, I made the mistake of reading this piece, headlined “More info is available about which college majors pay off, but students aren’t using it”. The gist is that data tying specific majors to earning potential is now available but (sacre bleu!) students aren't using this data in order to select majors as much as the people making said data think they should.

I have a lot of objections to this piece, including the way that it jams together quotations in ways that demolish all nuance. But the biggest problem is in the way it makes you think that it somehow makes sense for students to see education solely as a pathway to a job and, further, that that job should be measured on the singular metric of salary.

I've taught thousands of students at this point. I can tell you why they don't just use this data and flock to majors that pay more. It's because they're not automatons whose sole concern is how much money they'll make down the road. It's because they have pressures and wants, desires, or needs that vary from person to person and at different times in their education. It's because a job is not a career is not a life and, for the most part, students have some awareness and even a touch of wisdom about this. Most of them have some pressure from parents, from themselves, from communities at large to have a “viable” career path. Some make that a priority; others not so much. Some balance needs and wants in complex ways with multiple majors or delayed gratification. Some may want to rebel from what people expect (that was me, though in the very nerdy sort of rebellion which involves a Ph.D. in an unexpected subject). Some of them think that there are rewards that aren't just monetary. And maybe some of them just make choices that make sense to them at the time but don't prove great in the long run (shocking! shocking that people would not always make the most rational data-driven choices for their life based on data given to them by someone else...).

There are some things which aggregate data like that being peddled in this piece can actively obscure, particularly when the story is likely to be one about lots of individual variation.

The article is really sloppy in its quest to find a clean narrative here:

“Consumer preferences have changed considerably since covid,” said Carol D’Amico, an executive vice president at Strada and former assistant U.S. secretary of education. Now more than in the past, she said, education “has to be relevant to a career path.”

Even before this year, D’Amico said, people were changing the way they viewed college. A few years ago, “no one was even talking about students as consumers. Consumer information wasn’t part of the lingo. It has moved a lot.”

Not sure if this is being presented as a good thing or not so good thing. I strongly suspect this was a much more subtle point in that quotation before it went through the wash of becoming an article:

Two years after the groundbreaking collaboration began, however, students haven’t seemed to alter course, said David Troutman, the system’s associate vice chancellor, who oversees the project.

“What we find is that they’re not changing their majors,” Troutman said. “They’re following their passions.”

He and other advocates stress that they want students to continue following their passions. But they also want them to be aware that earnings vary widely among graduates, even when they have identical majors, from different universities and colleges, affecting not only their quality of life but their ability to repay their student loans.

That's a pretty artful use of quotation to lead into a bunch of other quotes where the line seems to be all about how there's an obvious choice of choosing a better major.

Debate over the language of students as consumers is of course nothing new. It's one cornerstone of the construction and subsequent critique of the neoliberal university, among other things. And there are plenty of folks advocating for the good of treating students as consumers or stating, correctly, the ways in which education is a market and should be treated as such. I get all that.

But the issue here isn't data or in fact whether students are consumers. It's what happens when you characterize students as consumers. I suspect that students themselves, at some level, both embrace and, at times, push back about being identified as consumers. For that reason, because it is as much about identity as anything else — whether students identify with being consumers or not — I think the data-driven outcome will never come to pass as this article presupposes it, inevitably, must.

#consumerism #minimalistedtech #edtechminimalism #teacherrant

---

I wrote about this a bit with a slightly different perspective a month or so ago: https://minimalistedtech.com/students-consumers-and-growth.

A bit late to the party, I downloaded Hades on my Switch a few weeks ago, and Oh-My-God. I haven’t enjoyed a videogame so much in a really long long time.

I have been passionate about videogame since I was a kid but, as I grow older, I find less and less time to play them. At the same time, whenever I may have some time to dedicate to them, I prefer to focus on other things.

As much as I like the fact that video games are getting more and more recognitions, I don’t have the time (nor the patience anymore) to sit through a ten minutes video every time a mission starts (looking at you RDR2). When I turn on my Switch it’s because I want to dive into the action, whether it is a strategy game or a rogue like action videogame like Hades. Basically, what I am looking for are 30 minutes of pure gaming, no intermezzi, no videos, no explanations. Just. Let. Me. Play.

During the last few years I found a few video games able to pull this off really well. The first ones that come to mind are Into The Breach, Hollow Knight, Dead Cells, and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. As you may have noticed, the first 3 are all indie games and I think that’s where my days as a video gamer are heading.

Anyway, going back to Hades...

Hades ticks all the boxes I was looking for in a videogame:

• No waiting. For anything. No videos, only basic instructions. You turn the console on and jump straight into the action.
• A short playing session is more than satisfying (and enough to arrive to the end, if you’re good and lucky enough).
• Easy to understand, difficult to master. The same can be told about the other games I mentioned before, especially Into The Breach.
• The story is interesting enough so you want to progress. Even after you finish the game for the first time, you will want to see how the hell it really ends.
• Beautiful art and sounds. It’s a indie game but it has nothing to envy to other AAA games.
• It’s cheap. In the past I bought some pretty expensive video games that I never finished and it’s pleasant when the opposite happens.

I am clearly not the only thinking it like this since Hades a record 98.9% of positives reviews on Steam.

If you haven’t done it yet, do yourself a favor and try it.

👉 Hades on Steam

#videogames

Korte Persconferentie Sneeuw Update

Goedenavond dames en heren, kijkers in Nederland. Ik kan u vertellen dat we langzaam vorderingen maken maar de vorige week gevallen sneeuw blijft een een groot nationaal probleem. Het is ons opgevallen dat de sneeuw is gemuteerd in onopvallende miezerende en doorzichtige sneeuw. Dit is overgewaaid uit het westen van Europa. Deze neerslag is opvallend moeilijk te bestrijden. U moet daarom de ijzers, valhelmen en stokken blijven gebruiken. Uit voorzorg om meer uitbraken van valpartijen zoals onlangs in Brabant te voorkomen gaan we over op extra maar dringend noodzakelijke maatregelen. Het is ons eigen belang, om u te behoeden voor de zwaartekracht en de gevolgen van deze krachten op ons kwetsbaar gestel. De lokale overheden gaan drie wekenlang strooien op alle wegen van 's ochtends vroeg tot 's ochtends vroeg de volgende dag. We installeren langs alle mogelijke wandelpaden zij leuningen zodat u zich bij het wandelen op van die moeilijke momenten vast kan houden. Moet u zo nodig buiten bewegen is ons dringend advies neem een flinke plastic zak strooizout mee en besprenkel de grond voor u rijkelijk. Op dit moment is in heel Nederland nog code Okergeel en Kobaltblauw dat wil zeggen dat er nog overal nieuwe sneeuw haarden uitbreken en kunnen uitbreken. Op het staatsomroep journaal heeft u gisteren de beelden kunnen zien van het Poolgebied en Noord Oost Rusland dan weet u waartoe deze neerslag allemaal in staat is. Het aantal valpartijen en slippertjes ten gevolge van de natte doorzichtige sneeuw vroeger bekend als regen is en blijft volgens onze gegevens te hoog, mensen klagen ook over nat haar, stinkende honden en kleren. In Oost Nederland is een andere variant neerslag actief, mistige sneeuw. Voor die regio komt hulp wellicht te laat. We vrezen dat we dit gebied moeten teruggeven aan de natuur en de bevolking aan hun troebele lot overlaten. Dit durf ik echter nog niet met zekerheid te zeggen want volgende week is er weer een persconferentie en moet ik wat anders bedenken om u te informeren aan de hand van de mij geschonken gegevens over alle vormen van neerslag en klimatologische omstandigheden die ons soort mensen maar blijven teisteren. Dus. De avondklok houden we aan omdat het zo lekker rustig is en ik met eigen ogen kan aanschouwen dat het dus niet per c nodig is dat jullie alsmaar autorijden zolang iemand anders het maar zegt.

The Independent Clause

The independent clause is a clause or a sentence phrase that stands alone. These are used in sentence diagrams. Its antithesis is a dependent clause. An example to an independent clause is, “A cat eats a rat.”

A dependent clause is a clause or a sentence phrase. that does not stand alone. In sentence diagrams, a dependent clause is grammatically called a fragment. An example to a dependent clause is “Because the rats are pests”; the sentence structure sure sounds like a fragment (even if you were typing on a word processor application on a computer, it would show a green-underline which requires a grammar check).

While independent clause and dependent clause are not only limited to sentence diagrams, they are also reflected in humans and many other objects in pairs. A pair is two dependent clauses that are merged into an independent clause. Shoes and socks are pairs. Animals are pairs. Humans and humanoids themselves are pairs.

It is written: “A man is not independent of a woman, and a woman is not independent of a man.” In the name of truth, man and woman are a pair of human beings. Male and female are also a pair. A male needs a female, and a female needs a male.

Man, or male, is a dependent clause. Woman, or female, is also a dependent clause. Uniting male (man) and female (woman) to one creates an independent clause. This independent clause is the will to return to the kingdom of his Innermost.

Please see also:

https://juanmiriethauriel.writeas.com/man-and-woman

https://juanmiriethauriel.writeas.com/the-ancient-definition-of-marriage

The Not-Fucking-Around Club

What the hell is really going on?

Be safe. Be cautious. Don't do this. Don't do that. Follow this procedure. Do it this way. Don't let this or that get you. Plan for this and that. Watch out for this and that. Prepare for the worst. Ensure you checked all of the boxes. This is going to get you. That will befall you. This is wrong with the country. That is wrong with the world. This and that is going to happen.

Does being a human being now mean to be a frail cowering pathetic lump of soft wet shit?

Why have we forgotten ...

... that we are strong. ... that we can fight. ... that our bodies are built for health. ... that we don't die that easily. ... that we are the predators. ... that we are the competition. ... that we can do miracles. ... that we are so damn powerful.

Why do we choose to live like ants again and again and again. So afraid of everything, so cautious of everything.

I'd rather court death and destruction than experience life with such a scared and impoverished spirit.

Lazy people use this asshole phrase all the time ... “Well, I'm only human”.

Well it's time to leave out the “only”.

Guess what. I am human, and I am part of the not-fucking-around club and I am not fucking around any more.

To be wild or to be dead. Fuck everything else.

La Cina è l'unico paese sviluppato ad aver avuto una economia in crescita nel corso del 2020, l'anno della pandemia di Covid-19 partita proprio dal paese del dragone. L'economia cinese dovrebbe aver chiuso il 2020 con una crescita pari a circa il 2%, non male per il paese dal quale il virus è partito un anno fa. Il rimbalzo è visibile soprattutto confrontando la produzione industriale di Novembre 2020 che ha visto una crescita pari al 7% rispetto allo stesso periodo del 2019.

Insomma sembra che le durissime restrizioni imposte dal governo cinese all'inizio della pandemia abbiano agevolato il rimbalzo economico successivo avvenuto con la riapertura.

#notizie

Near the beginning of quarantine, I went on my first virtual date with my then-crush. She was a US military dependent living on a nearby base, and like many Americans in Japan, had a special attachment with anime and Japanese pop culture. We decided to spend a few hours watching anime and chatting between scenes.

The date probably should've ended after I asked her about her opinions on panpsychism. Well, it's a- It's a philosophy, right? That like everything is actually conscious, but just to varying degrees... I stammered as I struggled to explain complex, new-to-me arguments for panpsychism under first date pressure. After a seeming eternity agonizing over the most precise terms for every facet of the idea, I smiled and asked her if my explanation was clear enough. “Yeah. That's stupid.” concluded her response. Instead of accepting her response and moving on, I decided to press, doubling-down to defend a philosophy that I only learned of weeks ago.

I don't think it's stupid. How do you resolve the... How do you decide what's conscious? I mean... Yup, I messed up.

However, the experience has left me thinking about cultural beliefs with regards to consciousness. Most Japanese people would probably be fairly receptive toward the idea that everything is conscious given its proximity to the concept of the kami in Shintoist belief. Americans, however, tend to subscribe to the Christian notion that only humans (and not even animals) have “souls” which are the source of sentience. Of course, the question of “what qualifies as human” remains a potential debate in Christian theology. As a side note, western Atheists have a habit of believing that some part or structure of the brain “creates” consciousness, which harshly clashes with panpsychism. I tentatively conclude that the western dismissal of panpsychism is much more frequently due to its disagreements with conventional western ideology and theology than actual flaws in the belief system.

With all of that said, I do not consider myself a panpsychist. I thought about discussing panpsychism as part of my piece on Joi and consciousness (read it here). However, I simply do not understand how the gradients of consciousness or sentience that panpsychists recognize can be defined or explained. I cannot evaluate how sentient Joi is using panpsychism if panpsychism doesn't provide a means with which sentience can be evaluated. The update would essentially be a single sentence: “perhaps Joi is necessarily conscious because everything is conscious.” Conscious in what way? Nobody knows. In that sense, regardless of its validity, panpsychism almost seems like a pointless philosophy that doesn't help us better understand consciousness.

My personal view of consciousness derives from Taoist ideas of unity. I like the idea that we are all part of a conscious whole, and that we do not have distinct consciousnesses. However, is the logical conclusion of such a belief that a thermometer is just as conscious as myself? I don't know.

Just thoughts.

Fediverse tags: #Panpsychism #Philosophy #Consciousness #Sentience #Writing

This is, again, not a polished piece. Just trying to get some thoughts out!

I am a firm believer in the power of psychotherapy. I have many friends who have been helped immensely by qualified therapists, and throughout my life, I have met many suffering people who would've been helped immensely by therapy. I have often heard therapy analogized to martial arts. It's training, but for your brain. It's practice, but for your emotions. Both therapy and martial arts are also nuanced and personal. They both requires experimentation, understanding, and trust. They both seem to demand a certain commitment to exploration and learning, even in volatile and scary spaces.

But whether because of the curious nature of martial arts or the strange requirements of therapy, the analogy doesn't really hold upon closer examination. While I would, in earnest, encourage you to participate in the amateur MMA promotions and BJJ tournaments littered in every major city, I would never tell you to visit an amateur therapist. You can't get a purple belt in therapy and start training other people's brains, and in fact, some absolutely brilliant therapists absolutely wouldn't earn a purple belt (untreated mental health issues are incredibly common in all medical professions). Most disappointingly, you can't teach your little brother how to do a brain heel-hook so that he wins every playground quarrel (“Oh yeah? Well! How does that make you feel?”).

I wonder where the fundamental difference lies. Therapy seems to be almost necessarily asymmetric, while martial arts is much more of a community exercise. Perhaps our minds are just easier to hurt. Perhaps conversational “submissions” are just harder to “tap out” to.

Just thoughts.

Fediverse tags: #Therapy #MartialArts #Writing

I wasn't intending on producing a series of articles on messaging apps, but it seems that's what's happening. I recently posted an article explaining why Signal is a trustworthy messaging app, but I would be remiss to ignore its issues. In this article I discuss why Signal sucks.

---

Signal is en end-to-end encrypted secure messenger, and a direct competitor to WhatsApp and Telegram. Without going too much detail, Signal is a well-designed, secure communication platform that ensures a high level of privacy. See my article on Signal for more information on Signal's merits, because in this article I will only be discussing why Signal sucks. There are four main reasons Signal sucks, which I will be explaining in descending order of practical importance.

By default, sealed sender only applies to contacts

Sealed sender is a feature Signal uses to prevent metadata leaks. It does this by encrypting the sender. This ensures that while Signal's servers can know when you receive a message, their servers cannot know when you send a message. What this does is it prevents metadata from leaking who you talk to, and when. However, since it only applies to contacts by default, a malicious server could still know who you talk to. They could not know when or how often you talk to them, but they can know that you talked to them. They can also know when the first time was that you talked to them.

While Signal has a strong policy of not collecting user data, and this policy has even been proven in court, any exception to Signal's zero-trust security model is potentially problematic. Sealed sender can be enabled manually for non-contacts, at the risk of receiving increased spam. Enabling sealed sender for non-contacts will mitigate this risk.

Signal requires a phone number

Signal requires a phone number to use. Depending on who you are, this may not seem like an issue, but it isn't negligible. Signal's requirement of a phone number is a partial exception to their zero-trust design. It allows Signal to know who uses their service, and who doesn't. This does not allow them to track who you talk to, except as mentioned in the previous point. While it is possible to use Signal with a fake phone number, buying physical burner phones is not possible in some countries, and using online services such as Twilio can have its own privacy issues.

Signal requires GSF

Signal's app is reliant on GSF. GSF, otherwise known as Google Services Framework, is required for many apps to serve push notifications to users. This allows apps to receive notifications without needing to check periodically, and therefore saves battery live and increases device performance.

The issue with GSF is it relies on Google servers. Many people who use Signal don't like that Google spies on users en masse, and uses the collected data for targeted advertising, as well as other purposes we might now know about. While Google officially states that they don't sell user data, it's widely known that the tech giant uses various loopholes to profit off the data they don't technically sell. As we know, whenever you see the word “technically” it's not a good sign. They shouldn't be not technically selling data. They should be not selling data.

Anyway, now that I've completed my tangent, I hope it's clear now why Google relying on GSF is an issue. On the bright side, Google never gets access to message contents or metadata. Only the fact that you received a message is revealed.

As a side note, Google can also use GSF to tell when your device is connected to the internet.

While it's possible to use Signal without GSF, doing so requires a nonstandard build of the Signal app.

Signal is centralized, and doesn't allow third-party clients

This is the biggest long-term issue with Signal, but provides the smallest immediate concern. The issue is of user freedom and long-term trust. In disallowing third-party clients, Signal reduces user freedom and violates the principals of free software (free as in freedom). As a more practical concern, Signal's centralization could allow Signal to eventually start collecting user data. As we've already seen with existing communication apps, the network effect will prevent people from moving to a better service, if this time ever comes.

(Note: This post was originally published at Opensource.com an appears here via a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.)

Do you need complex, feature-packed graphical or web applications to get and stay organized? I don't think so. The right command line tool can do the job and do it well.

Of course, uttering the words command and line together can strike fear into the hearts of some Linux users. The command line, to them, is terra incognita.

Organizing yourself at the command line is easy with Calcurse. Calcurse brings a graphical look and feel to a text-based interface. You get the simplicity and focus of the command line married to ease of use and navigation.

Let's take a closer look at Calcurse.

Getting the Software

If compiling code is your thing (it's not mine, to be honest), you can grab the source code from the Calcurse website. Otherwise, get the binary installer for your Linux distribution. You might even be able to get Calcurse from your Linux distribution's package manager. It never hurts to check.

Compile or install Calcurse (neither takes all that long), and you're ready to go.

Using Calcurse

Crack open a terminal window and type calcurse.

Calcurse's interface consists of three panels:

• Appointments (the left side of the screen)
• Calendar (the top right)
• To-do list (the bottom right)

Move between the panels by pressing the Tab key on your keyboard. To add a new item to a panel, press a. Calcurse walks you through what you need to do to add the item.

One interesting quirk is that the Appointment and Calendar panels work together. You add an appointment by tabbing to the Calendar panel. There, you choose the date for your appointment. Once you do that, you tab back to the Appointments panel. I know …

Press a to set a start time, a duration (in minutes), and a description of the appointment. The start time and duration are optional. Calcurse displays appointments on the day they're due.

Here's what a day's appointments look like:

The to-do list works on its own. Tab to the TODO panel and (again) press a. Type a description of the task, then set a priority (1 is the highest and 9 is the lowest). Calcurse lists your uncompleted tasks in the ToDo panel.

If your task has a long description, Calcurse truncates it. You can view long descriptions by navigating to the task using the up or down arrow keys on your keyboard, then pressing v.

Calcurse saves its information in text files in a hidden folder called .calcurse in your home directory—for example, /home/scott/.calcurse. If Calcurse stops working, it's easy to find your information.

Other Useful Features

Other features of Calcurse include the ability to set recurring appointments. To do that, find the appointment you want to repeat and press r in the Appointments panel. You'll be asked to set the frequency (for example, daily or weekly) and how long you want the appointment to repeat.

You can also import calendars in ICAL format or export your data in either ICAL or PCAL format. With ICAL, you can share your data with other calendar applications. With PCAL, you can generate a Postscript version of your calendar.

There are also a number of command line arguments you can pass to Calcurse. You can read about them in the documentation.

While simple, Calcurse does a solid job of helping you keep organized. You'll need to be a bit more mindful of your tasks and appointments, but you'll be able to focus better on what you need to do and where you need to be.

— Scott Nesbitt

#linux #cli #productivity

For me, an impact of COVID-19 has been an inability to watch an entire episode of almost any TV show. Some of it is probably just because of the low-grade anxiety that is always here now. It has made me generally fidgety when watching a TV show episode.

But some of it is also because of my nostalgia for the before times. I try to watch an episode and pretty soon it does not seem real—because the characters are hanging out together. They might be hugging, eating breakfast at a diner, playing cards, laughing....all without wearing a mask. All right up close to each other. Right up in each other’s business.

And realizing that the TV show is depicting the way it was. Not the way it is now. Any maybe, just maybe, might not be again—at least not exactly the same. Realizing that, makes me nostalgic. Nostalgic and sad.

Maybe because I’m an introvert the pandemic, in some ways, has not been as personally horrible for me as for others. I don’t know. But maybe it has impacted me just as deeply as anyone else—just differently in some ways.

Also, here’s a photo a spiderweb I saw while hiking in Oregon.

#COVID-19 #Pandemic #introvert