Prayers, etc.: * 03:30 – Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel * 04:30 – praying the Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, followed by the Memorare. * 06:00 – praying The Angelus * 08:00 – Readings from today's Mass include – Epistle: Isa. 7:10-15 and Gospel: Luke 1:26-38. * 10:40 – praying to Atone for Rome's 2025 Jubilee Mascot. * 12:00 – praying The Angelus * 16:30 – prayerfully reading The Athanasian Creed, followed by today's Daily Meditation found in Benedictus Magazine. * 18:00 – praying The Angelus * 19:00 – praying the hour of Compline for tonight according to the Traditional Pre-Vatican II Divine Office, followed by Fr. Chad Ripperger'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 Wednesday Prayers of the Association of the Auxilium Christianorum.

Health Metrics: * bw= 214.51 lbs. * bp= 152/84 (72)

Diet: * 04:15 – 1 cookie * 05:10 – toast & butter * 06:30 – 2 more cookies * 08:30 – cottage cheese * 12:30 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 15:05 – V8 juice * 15:30 – pineapple rings * 16:45 – snacking on cookies

Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 09:00 – following news reports from various sources * 13:15 to 14:30 – yard work, loaded up the green bin with leaves and branches from the back yard, tomorrow the city empties the bin and I get to load it up again for next week's pickup * 14:45 – following news reports from various sources * 16:45 – leisure reading * 18:30 – tuned into the Appalachian State Radio Network for the pregame show ahead of the mens college basketball game between the Appalachian Mountaineers and the Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns

Chess: * 08:00 – moved in all pending CC games

posted Wednesday, 2024-12-18 ~21:35 #DLDEC2024

This has been a day of making adjustments, and tomorrow will be another. The wife is taking a well-deserved 3-week vacation to the other side of the world, visiting family members she's not seen for decades, and grandchildren she's never been able to see in person. So I'm here at home, holding down the fort while she's gone.

Lord knows I've got plenty do do here. But for the next 3-weeks I won't need to wake early to fix breakfast and see her off to work. So today I've turned off the alarms I've been using to wake myself early. Wonder how long it will take me to get used to sleeping in. Heh. Guess I'll find out.

posted Wednesday, Dec 18, 2024 at ~8:50 PM #QNDEC2024

It is one thing to read about the mass graves in Syria 🇸🇾, but it is another thing to watch the testimonies from people forced to bury the bodies of men, women & children whose only “crime” was helping other Syrians suffering under a brutal dictatorship.

https://youtu.be/eevV8cuxpJY

[Mouaz Moustafa, the head of the U.S.-based Syrian advocacy organization, the Syrian Emergency Task Force,] told ABC News from the Syrian capital that the site in al-Qutayfah close to Damascus consists of “massive graves” where “lines or trenches were 6 to 7 meters deep, 3 to 4 meters wide and 50 to 150 meters long.”

“In my conversation with the gravediggers, they told me that four tractor trailer trucks each carrying over 150 bodies came twice a week from 2012 until 2018,” Moustafa said.

“The bulldozer excavator driver described how intelligence officers forced workers to use the bulldozer to flatten and compress the bodies to make them fit and easier to bury before digging the next line or trench,” he added.

The graves contained men, women, children and the elderly “tortured to death” by Assad's regime, Moustafa said. (ABC News)

The Syrian Emergency Task Force is attempting to identify the bodies via DNA 🧬 testing, which will help provide much needed closure for families still searching for loved ones.

For those with extra cash to spare, you can donate to the Syrian Emergency Task Force on Donor Box. This video below explains more about the Syrian Emergency Task Force from Moustafa.

https://youtu.be/JXWDIqNL_Iw

Note: The video below (provided for extra context) displays only a fraction of some of the people slaughtered by the Assad regime, & despite being (thankfully) blurred out, it is not for the faint of heart.

https://youtu.be/U0h0OvLVk1Y

To boredom

While staring at the ceiling,

Lost in mindless peering,

To me came the strangest idea:

The notion,

that reality is a tad bit too real.

I thought of trying a little series and showing off some neovim plugins I use on a daily basis.

To start somewhere, I'll go alphabetically with autopairs.lua.

Config

return {
	"windwp/nvim-autopairs",
	opts = {
		fast_wrap = {
			highlight = "IncSearch",
		}, -- setup function and press <M-e> to use fast_wrap
		check_ts = true,
		map_c_h = true,
	},
}

For autopairs, I like it if it doesn't get in my way, and autopairs.lua does a good job here. The feature I love the most is fast_wrap. You simply hit <M-e and it will ask you where you want to wrap it. Simple and clean. :)

That's it. A plugin I wish would be shipped with Neovim already.

---

61 of #100DaysToOffload

#log #neovim

Thoughts?

#002025 – 13 de Dezembro de 2024

Já perto, o vento atira-me com chuva gelada e horizontal. Abrigo-me precariamente numa paragem de autocarro e lá chamo o Uber. Os dois metros até entrar no carro, faço-os com o carapuço. Dentro está confortável e quente, e a música é uma agradável bossa-nova, na voz da Maria Rita. Passado um par de minutos num silêncio tranquilo, e porque o motorista se chama Mateus, penso, que bom ter apanhado este brasileiro, e arrisco: “que música boa, lá fora está inverno mas aqui é... tropical”. Mateus respondeu-me num belo e inequívoco sotaque do Porto: “é, vou ouvindo rádio para me distrair, é trânsito o dia todo. Mas às vezes mudo de rádio e tá a dar a mesma música”. O meu comentário teve o efeito inesperado de rebentar aquela bolha momentânea de sossego. Lá fomos falando a caminho da Praça Velásquez, vendo o semáforo fica vermelho mais que uma vez. Ao chegar, os poucos metros até à clínica foram de vendaval, quase cinematográfico. Quase me apeteceu ter uma gabardina esvoaçante, em vez do hoodie. À espera da consulta com o nutricionista, escuto a habitual muzak, de tons jazzísticos, desta vez com temas natalícios. Mudou o ecossistema, os cliques do rato da recepcionistas e as buzinas dos automóveis lá fora compõem a atmosfera sonora. Antes do último ponto final, escuto ainda uma folha a ser impressa e um telemóvel a vibrar.

Never fear changing scenery

Some days the sun Never rises. Shroud of guilt weighing Like an elephant

Crushing the Breath of Hope, Stifling the blood of The future.

Another day delivers Brilliance and warmth Burns away the clouds of Hopelessness.

The rays of faith Slay the great beast Filling with an undeserved Strength and desire

Burning now with joy Melting the heart of ice As it is held up to the sun Suddenly shining like a mighty one

And leave the world A better place For the price that was paid

---

---

Welcoming comments and critique since 1984

#poetry

I'm writing this mostly for the sake of my own mental accounting, so I can look back at this years from now and gauge whether my assumptions or position has since changed.

Until recently I had no idea who Jesse Singal was. I still don't know much, but my Bluesky feed has told me all I really need to know:

• Jesse Singal's presence on the mainline Bluesky network makes many tens of thousands of people feel unsafe.
• Several people whom I defer to for their expertise in community health have proposed Jesse's removal from the network as the best course of action.

There's been a lot of talk about whether Jesse's behavior has explicitly violated Bluesky's Terms of Service, i.e. their declarative community rules. But a community is primarily successful on the merits of its implicit ruleset, as determined by cultural norms.

Emerging out of this debacle, two things stand out to me as techno-social utilities currently lacking in Bluesky:

• Multiple sandboxes
• Community governance

Multiplayer Sandboxing

Many have rightly pointed out that this clash between Bluesky's moderation policies and the wishes of the community would have been a trivial issue in the ActivityPub-powered fediverse. In the federated model, Jesse would “simply” have to find himself an instance that aligns with his values and general demeanor.

That's not to say Bluesky has to be fully federated in the same way as ActivityPub to support a similar kind of community sandboxing. That “simple” after all is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Massively Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, which are operated as fully centralized cloud services, still have multiple different instances for their players to inhabit. Partly this is due to scaling concerns that don't apply to Bluesky's architecture, but these games also have specific types of instances that allow players to self-sort into the style of gameplay they're looking for.

The most common distinction is between PvE (Player versus Environment) and PvP (Player versus Player) instances, or designated zones therein.

This separation is necessary because while some players just wanna enjoy the expansive world and story on their own terms, others enjoy the thrill of clashing with player-characters who present a greater threat than any dungeon boss the game can muster up, since they can literally chase you to the ends of the earth with the tenacity that only a human foe possesses.

We don't all want the same things in our online experience, so it's essential that we have separate sandboxes to play in. I am not however advocating for an instance-picker at the start of the Bluesky signup process, nor is this about seperating The Good Place from The Bad Place.

What I'm saying is that the decision space available to the T&S team becomes a very binary block-or-not when Bluesky is operated as a monolithic super-instance with no further segmentation possible.

Jesse Singal makes my friends deeply uncomfortable, so I don't want him in the same room as us, simple as. That doesn't mean I think Jesse has no right to exist on the open social web. We need a separate room for Jesse.

I can't say yet exactly how I think this should work, but I've jotted down some initial thoughts on “How fedi-instance belonging can be resolved”:

1. be a member of more than one instance (think dual citizenship)

2. able to view/follow any public instance’s local feed

3. default way for instances to ‘disagree’ should be default-hide whole instances, not hard block (no walls between tenants, just tall shrubs)

4. ratio-blocks per instance should block user from that instance

5. instance-blocks are enacted democratically

This isn't specific to any protocol, it's just what I believe ought to be possible as a happy middle ground between the prior art of the AP-based fediverse and the emerging ATmosphere.

The main idea here is multi-instance belonging. You may already be familiar with composable moderation; let's also have composable spaces. The difference is that moderation protections are chosen defensively, whereas we choose our spaces on the basis of being drawn in by the people already there, and the notable absence of those who are not.

Erin Kissane talks about picking the right pair of shoes. I recently heard her say on a podcast that we shouldn't have to pick just the one pair; that's exactly what a proper implementation of nomadic identity ought to make possible for us. Credible exit implies a pluriverse if spaces to enter and leave at will.

Let the server instances provide the party venue and then, if you're feeling the vibe, Bring Your Own Identity over for a good time.

Community Governance

'Is Bluesky Decentralized?' has been an ongoing conversation (a delightful one at that). Technicalities aside, it's pretty clear that governance power in the Bluesky community is highly centralized.

Christine Lemmer-Webber's definition of decentralization applies just as well here, even though we're not talking about protocols:

Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.

Stack as many moderation services together as you want, but there's only one institutional node with the power to delete Jesse Singal from Bluesky inc's public square.

That centrality of authority is exactly what is making a lot of people very upset, especially when the authority insists that their hands are tied so long as there’s no egregious violation of their ToS, as if there cannot be other levers of change to address edge cases unfit for standard procedure.

Note: I vehemently disapprove of anyone who directed their anger at the Bluesky team in harmful ways. The best explanation I can come up with for their behavior is that they want the people in authority to experience the unsafety that was imposed on them by the authority’s inaction. I understand the emotional response, but I do not excuse it, and I hope the worst offenders have faced consequences for the harms they caused. Be better.

It seems pretty clear that if the network held a referendum by putting the issue of 'Ban Jesse Singal?' to a vote, the network would vote him off the island. This can be inferred from the very loud signal of Jesse being the most blocked person on the Bluesky network by a large margin.

And this is where instance segmentation comes in to lower the stakes, because the people of Bluesky Island can then resort to shipping the unwanted resident over to a neighboring island, as opposed to dropping him in the water.

I don’t have all the answers, but I believe there’s a great opportunity here for liquid democracy in action. Democratic community governance is arguably even more challenging than designing a user-friendly, open and plausibly decentralized social network, so I know I'm asking for a lot.

Still, if you have brought 25 million people together and you're not trying to leverage the wisdom of the crowd for communal sense-making, what is the point of your platform?

I got somebody absolutely gorgeous photos and I'm fucking exhausted I'm about to go pass out.

Yesterday when I was out in the blackness of the night, the sky was very cloudy and so it looked like a sort of blanket over the stars which weren’t visible, but they gave a silvery golden glow to the dark clouds. It looked ominous but yet at the same time not bleak

It looked more like a gothic horror sky than a cyberpunk like sky with the TV set on a dead channel. (That with the TV is from the opening in Neuromancer, Chiba City Blues or something. It’s one of the best openings I’ve read.)

Nonetheless, there was in the middle of there, in the sky, a little square shaped window in the clouds and through that opening shone the full moon. I saw the full shape of the full moon through there. Just for ~ five minutes.

If that isn’t a sign from above, a signal to keep struggling or whatever, then I don’t know what is!!?

Ambivalence .

My life is a fruit salad of sorts. There’s kiwi and pineapple, apple and banana, right?

A lot.

Now I just need to get the onions out of there, as they are ruining it, obviously..

There are two pieces right now which I’ll need to carefully extract.

The first one is all of my managers like I told about some days ago.

The second, most pungent one is a bit tricky as it involves my sister.

One can argue that one should not let such things affect, and just eat the salad, as it’s nutritious and all of that.

That may very well be true, but I’ve got my sense of smell back and it amplifies the pungency of the taste.

The taste of bullshit.

Je suis faible, et la technologie moderne ne m’aide pas : il suffit parfois que j’entende parler d’un livre intéressant pour qu’il rejoigne presque immédiatement ma « pile à lire ».

C’est ce que s’est passé avec ce livre Avant nous le Déluge !, sous-titré L’humanité et ses mythes, dont j’ai entendu parler son auteur, l’anthropologue Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, dans l’émission Les idées larges sur Arte Radio. Le sujet m’a tout de suite passionné et l’approche du livre me semblait intéressante :

Une déambulation dans les mythes qui accompagnent l’humanité. Comment ils émergent, se partagent, circulent. Un émerveillement de récits, dans le monde entier, depuis nos origines.

Depuis le début de l’humanité, nous inventons des récits, les mythes, pour mieux comprendre notre monde. Jean-Loïc Le Quellec les collecte, les étudie, les compare, à toute époque même la plus reculée, dans tout peuple, dans autant de langues que possible.

On explique l’universalité des mythes aujourd’hui par une transmission au fil des migrations. Cette diffusion n’est pas systématique, elle se fait ou pas, ou de différentes manières, dessinant ainsi les évolutions des peuples en une fabuleuse cartographie historique du monde.

Mythes cosmogniques ou héroïques, animaux mythiques (jusqu’à notre pangolin)… L’auteur nous emmène dans une histoire infinie, poétique, puissante, pour réfléchir au rôle des mythes dans notre humanité.

Ce tour du monde nous invite à nous détacher de notre perception européano-centrée, à revoir nos certitudes (mythiques elles aussi ?). Une lecture jouissive et éblouissante.

Si je devais présenter cet ouvrage, je dirais qu’il s’agit d’une bonne introduction à la mythologie comparée, c’est-à-dire la discipline qui cherche à étudier et comparer les mythes de plusieurs peuples, dans le temps et dans l’espace.

C’est une bonne introduction car l’auteur fait preuve de pédagogie pour présenter et expliquer les concepts de base qu’il mobilise, les illustrer par des exemples parlants, le tout dans un style qui m’a semblé accessible à toutes et tous.

Par contre, je suis un peu resté sur ma faim pour deux raisons.

D’abord, j’ai trouvé que la structure du livre était un peu chaotique : si l’auteur propose un cheminement de chapitres en chapitres, sa logique n’est pas toujours évidente, et j’ai trouvé qu’il faisait parfois des digressions qui peuvent être intéressantes mais dont je me suis parfois demandé ce qu’elles faisaient à ce moment du propos.

Ensuite, j’ai regretté que l’ouvrage reste un peu superficiel sur la mythologie comparée proprement dite. Les premiers chapitres, qui définissent la notion de mythe, l’histoire et l’actualité de leur étude par les mythologues sont bien sûr nécessaires, mais prennent finalement beaucoup de place dans un ouvrage qui ne fait que 260 pages. De fait, cela laisse moins d’espace pour entrer ensuite dans le détail de la mythologie comparée proprement dite. Il y a bien sûr des exemples et des leçons à en tirer, mais personnellement j’aurais beaucoup aimé en savoir plus.

Je le redis donc : ce livre est à mes yeux une bonne introduction à la mythologie comparée, à lire pour une première approche de la discipline si le sujet vous intéresse.

Pour en savoir plus après cette initiation, je vais pour ma part me pencher prochainement vers un ouvrage qui s’annonce plus complet et plus complexe : Cosmogonies, La préhistoire des mythes de l’historien et mythologue Julien d’Huy, que Jean-Loïc Le Quellec a justement préfacé et qu’il cite dans ce livre.

Three distinguished car manufacturers are considering merging to improve their overall standing in the global automotive industry.

According to press reports Wednesday morning, the two Japanese carmakers are in discussions to consolidate under a holding company. The reports also said that Mitsubishi Motors, which has been working closely with Nissan since 2016, might join the grouping.

Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi confirmed the reports in nearly identically worded statements released later in the day. The three said they are considering a number of options including the plan mentioned in the press reports. (Japan Times)

According to @thejapantimes@mastodon.social, nothing official has been decided yet between Nissan, Honda & Mitsubishi, although I do not expect them to merge due to their distinct cultural differences.

While it would be cool to see them merge as one (note: what would they call the newly formed company‽), I expect we will witness a greater collaboration between the three, with each trying to complement the others' weaknesses with their respective strengths.

It is impossible, they say

Denying the results

Telling us we are mistaken

Ridiculing us to our peers

And then

When they can no longer deny

They steal the work

And call it their own.

#writing #poetry

Prayers, etc.: * 04:00 – Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel * 06:00 – praying The Angelus * 06:45 – praying the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, followed by the Memorare. * 07:20 – praying to Atone for Rome's 2025 Jubilee Mascot. * 10:45 – Readings from today's Mass include – Epistle: Phil 4:4-7 and Gospel: John 1:19-28. * 12:00 – praying The Angelus * 17:45 – prayerfully reading The Athanasian Creed, followed by today's Daily Meditation found in Benedictus Magazine. * 18:00 – praying The Angelus * 19:00 – praying the hour of Compline for tonight according to the Traditional Pre-Vatican II Divine Office, followed by Fr. Chad Ripperger'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 Tuesday Prayers of the Association of the Auxilium Christianorum.

Health Metrics: * bw= 214.51 lbs. * bp= 147/84 (69)

Diet: * 06:30 – toast & butter, 1 banana, 1 seafood salad sandwich * 10:30 – cheese * 15:00 – 2 pieces of fudge * 16:30 – 2 pork chops

Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored * 11:30 – following news reports on OAN * 13:00 – listen to relaxing music and leisure reading * 14:00 – help Sylvia pack * 15:00 – leisure reading * 16:00 – local news and weather * 16:30 – follow news reports on RAV.

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

posted Tuesday, 2024-12-17 ~19:30 #DLDEC2024