February 2021 newsletter
Published: 2021-02-28Word count: ~2780
Kind of a slow month for me. Bigger things have been in the works, and there's less to show for it.
Table of contents:
- timtimestim
- The phone """adventure"""
- People are crazy about Wordstar
- Extreme imagination
- Life sucks, but at least then you die
- Dumping ground
- Read later
timtimestim
- Here's a story I wrote for a competition I lost that compo with this story, sadly.
- A story about an assassin.
- Some more work on the Friendship is Optimal wiki page.
- Not much else. This has been a pretty slow month for me.
The phone """adventure"""
I'm in the market for a new smartphone.
Now, I should state for the record that I hate smart phones with a passion. But they're useful enough that I carry one around with me anyways. My current phone is the "Galazy S8 Active", which is atrocious on nearly all counts.
Here's a list of reason why my phone sucks ass:
- It's vendor locked in hard. You can't really root it, or even install a new OS onto it. Bloat ware up the ass. Forced updates. The whole nine yards.
- There's an awful "bixby button" on the side of it under the volume buttons. It's supposed to be a button that activates some stupid ass virtual assistant called bixby. The texture of the button is awful on my fingers, and it's way to easy to press and break you out of the flow of whatever you're doing.
- Really really difficult to repair. Not as bad as some Apple products, but it's still bad.
- This might be my fault due to overuse, but the audio jack port has become "loose" over time, making it easier and easier to accidentally unplug the AUX cord from it.
- It's getting old (by phone standards), and I can't really change the battery on it without wasting lots of time.
With all these problems, I decided I was going to look for a new cell phone. I want one that is built to last for the long term, since I don't want to have to keep buying a phone every 2 years. This means that it should be repairable, rootable, capable of installing a new OS, and not designed in a way that makes me physically ill. Basically the exact opposite of my current phone.
I looked around the internet, and I came across FairPhone. Here it was! It was perfect. This phone might as well be marketed directly to me and my own desires about what a phone should be. It's actually uncanny how much this aligns with my values about computer hardware. Yes yes yes.
Buuuuuuut I looked into it. And looked into a bit more. And I found this and this which explain that the FairPhone isn't sold outside of Europe and that the network connections and call connectivity isn't guaranteed to work outside of Europe. I happen to live in the USA, which means that I'm fucked.
This is incompetence at a level I can hardly even believe. You're telling me, in all honesty, that you started a phone company and have made an explicit decision to not sell it in the United States? What the flying fuck are you smoking and can I have some? I don't understand the actual difficulties of getting something like this to work in the USA, since I know that we use different radio frequencies here, but it can't be that hard, right? Billions of phones have been made in the world, and you're telling me that you can't just go on alibaba or some shit and get the right receivers or whatever it is you need? Are you somehow so locked into Europe-specific hardware that you can't even do that? Yeah that's great, let's just lock out one of the largest markets for cell phones in the world! We hate money! Yay!
I was excited to drop $400+ on your product. I was actually happy that I found a company that seems to have conformed to the really difficult to satisfy values of long-lasting consumer electronics. Fucking hell, people. What were you thinking? Hardly anyone makes long lasting electronics, especially in the cell phone world. Nobody does this, and yet you somehow blew it anyways.
*sigh*
But that's the decision they've made with their product, and I won't get anywhere by acting like a spoiled brat who's mom won't buy him a new toy. I looked into a bunch of forum posts about FairPhone and it seems like they've been promising to release this thing outside of Europe for at least 5 years now. It's probably not going to happen by the time I'm ready to drop my current phone in the garbage where it belongs. Still stupid though.
My other alternative at the moment is to get a used phone that is easily repairable and has already been rooted/cracked to install a new OS onto. It'll be way cheaper than the FairPhone anyways, at the cost of some of my sanity.
Cell phones are a scourge upon reality. Fuck everything.
People are crazy about Wordstar
I have a passion for people who are passionate for small near-irrelevant things. It makes me happy to see people dedicate a lot of time to a niche thing that they love. If you actually follow this newsletter for some insane reason, you'll see this trend in a lot of things I do.
One of the best things about the internet is that you can get exposure to these kinds of people and their niche passions without having to go out of your way to see them. It's lovely.
I came across this page by Robert J. Sawyer that talks about using "WordStar", a text editing program from DOS which made its final release in 1992. It's an old program -- not open source and not supported, made for an operating system fundamentally different from the kinds that we use today.
That doesn't matter, though. This word processor seems to have a small cult following with, shall I say, old crowd of writers. This includes, but isn't limited to, George R. R. Martin. You can see the dedication to getting this ancient thing working here, where Sawyer explains exactly how hard you need to skull fuck your computer into submission before it'll run WordStar.
Let me be abundantly clear. I use Vim for my own text editing (technically Neovim, but it's all the same). The interface, key bindings, and general ethos of Vim have become so engrained into my fingers that using other editors has become a chore so annoying that I try to avoid it at all cost. This document is being written, at this very moment, using (Neo)Vim. The initial release of Vim happened in 1991, and it's only through the efforts of a massive team of volunteers and other madmen that I can use this editor with ease on a modern system. That isn't to mention that the original editor that Vim is based off of, vi, is even older being release in 1976.
I am no stranger to using old technology, and forcing it to be used more than the original creators intended. It's just your choice of poison, honestly. I'm not mocking people for liking WordStar, I'm celebrating them. I'm celebrating them because I understand, and I respect it.
With that said, WordStar looks like an absolute trash garbage text editor that the creators should be ashamed of. Okay, maybe not that bad, but writing that sentence in a forceful way makes the joke funnier, so it stays.
I tried to use WordStar (emulated through the JOE editor), and gave up in a few minutes because I tried to use Vim shortcuts and they didn't work. Which I really should have expected, but my fingers did the actions and my brain did the revulsion and I had no real concious control over my immediate desire to run away screaming. I then realized I didn't know how to exit the editor, which was the cherry on top. You're never going to get a real WordStar review from me, sorry.
What I can say is that the software you choose to use for the long term has implications. I know that a lot of the times you don't really have a choice, that you imprint on software from an early age, but if you do have a choice, please for the love of god choose something that is going to be easier to use in the future. Don't go with the impossible to maintain impossible to use WordStar, and instead use something opensource and stable like JOE or whatever. You don't want the interface changing on you all the time, so make sure you pick something that's already pretty old and isn't maintained by a bunch of losers who think adding features equates to better software.
You're an author, and your business is typing words into a computer. You probably want that experience to be as natural as possible through your entire career. If you have the choice make sure to pick tools that you know are going to last into the long future, instead of WordStar, which needs to be resurrected from the dead like a necromancer trolling people with roadkill. Vim -- or at least editors like it -- is so popular in programmer circles that there's no way that people are going to let it die.
I love the idea of people working hard to use their favorite word processor, but I also kind of hate the fact that people have to put so much effort into it just because it's a closed source piece of garbage. Oh well, it's passion and it's fun.
Extreme imagination
Here is an exhibit from the University of Glasgow called Extreme Imagination (media heavy link).
It talks about people who are at the very extremes of imagination abilities: aphantasia and hyperphantasia -- or not being able to visualize anything vs being absurdly good at it.
I think that it's a good thing that people are looking into how different everyone's subjective experience of being alive is. There's enormous variation in the way that people experience being alive and it's only through a thin veil of similarities that we can relate to each other at all.
As for me, I'm pretty sure I lean more towards the "hyperphantasia" end of the imagination spectrum. I might not be totally hyperphantastic (love that word), but I know for a fact that I do have a rather strong imagination. I know for a fact that there's people out there with way stronger imaginations that mine.
I love this exhibit because I have a quiet obsession about how other people experience being alive. Our differences are intriguing.
Life sucks, but at least then you die
I'll let you in on a little secret: I have no intentions of dying.
To describe in words the sheer terror I feel at the thought of dying would require more words than I have time to write here. The only thing I can reasonably do is emphasize how hard it would be to describe.
Because of this terror, I have done quite a few out-of-the-ordinary things to maximize my chances of never dying. Chief among them is signing up for cryonics, which means getting my body and brain "frozen" (technically vitrified) and preserved for a time in the future where better technology might be able to revive me. This is expensive, difficult to sign up for, and causes the people around you to think that you're insane.
I have long since known that my will to live is abnormal. Even in my darkest days when I was overwhelmed to the point of complete dissociation with depression, suffering the worst mental anguish I have ever felt, living a life that I hardly considered worthwhile, my will to live never ever allowed me to think suicide was an option. That isn't me bragging, it's me trying to emphasize that I have a pathological need to stay alive.
Even when I was a kid I've always been appalled at how... dismissive the majority of people seem to be of their own lives. Not suicidal, but not exactly devoted to it either. If I were to ask the question, "Would you rather live forever or die right now?" the amount of people who would answer "die right now" is deeply confusing to me on a fundamental level. So many people out there are totally okay with the idea of dying, of never existing again. This isn't even taking into account the religious people who think that they're getting eternal life if they follow X and Y rules.
I remember, as a young child, explicitly thinking that people who didn't want to be immortal were ignorant. I've since changed my tone on my judgement of people on that front, but the point is the confusion about how people don't seem to care.
I mean, come on! It's death! How could you possibly ignore it? How could you possibly be okay with it?? If I think about my own death too explicitly, if I decent into that mental pit, I can legit send myself into a panic. And you can walk around saying that it's okay to die? That you don't want to live to be, say, 500 years old? What the fuck?
This is a deep problem in my mind. I've come up with many many theories as to why people seem to think this way. Sometimes I think it's ignorance, or stupidity, or refusal to accept responsibility. Sometimes I think it's a social issue where the culture has cultivated the expectation of being okay with death even when it doesn't make any logical sense. Sometimes I think it's something deeper, that there's just a fundamental difference between my brain and the majority, like how aphantasia is different from the norm of visual imagery in a subtle but profound way. Sometimes I drink and blame it on myself for not being convincing enough.
One theory I hadn't considered is that people just don't think life is worth living for. That their lives are full of such overwhelming existential despair that they can't imagine having to live it for thousands of years or longer. This post taught me the theory. I'm not exactly sure if it's right, but it might be a large piece of the puzzle. Check it out, it explains the whole situation better than I want to summarize.
(Make sure to read some of the comments on that page too, since there's some good discussion about it. Also realize that the post is from 2011, so there might be some outdated info on there. Especially read some of the ones that are refuting the article. What if the problem isn't that people don't want to live forever, but a deeper problem of motivation, for example? There might be a false assumption that sufficient desire will cause sufficient action.)
One of these days I'm going to have a massive blog post / wiki page explaining all of my thoughts about death in a single location. As it stands, I think I'll leave the conversation here before it gets out of control and I end up typing for 5 hours straight.
Dumping ground
- A branchless UTF-8 decoder written in C from nullprogram.com
- Getting started with qemu from drewdevault.com. A quick intro to using the QEMU virtual machine.
- Incompatibilities between C and C++ by David R. Tribble. C and C++ are very different languages.
- Pagemon, a computer memory monitoring tool.
- Cosmopolitan C Library, which is an interesting attempt to decouple C from the annoying platform specific things dragging it down. Not sure if it'll work out, but it's cool.
- ClearDental, an open source dentist's suite. Really interesting.
- Using a C preprocessor as an HTML authoring tool by Jukka Korpela. This is really interesting, even though it's wildly impractical. Screw Markdown, I make my website in C.
Read later
- Web design timelines
- Etude in C minor, writing music in C.
- A bit of a historical computer science thing titled How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.
- The history of UTF-8 as told by Rob Pike