Nate Dickson Thinks...

For a choice to have meaning It must also have cost: There must be something selected And something else lost. —Nate Dickson

Listening to music on streaming services gives us the fatigue of having everything, but not being able to decide what we want out of the mess.

When writing the Jala Jones stories, I came up with two different ways to do faster-than-light travel in Jala's universe.

These both played a part in Chapter 4 until they were cut almost entirely. But they were fun to write and I didn't want to waste them. So here you go!

David Tennant Does a Podcast With... has a charmingly simple premise: David Tennant interviews someone on his podcast. They chat for about an hour. There are so many podcasts like that, of course. The magic in this one is David Tennant.

Shaving your face (should that be a thing you need/choose to do) is one of those perfect activities to ritualize, because the criteria for success are so simple:

1. Have less hair on your face than when you started
2. Don't bleed too much or for too long.

That's it! Success is defined solely by those two metrics. No matter how well or poorly you do the job, you're going to do it again before too long. So you can safely obsess about all the various methods and accouterments, safe in the knowledge that they make very, very little difference.

So I'm going to!

I've played every Heroes of Might and Magic game, and loved all of them except for Might and Magic: Heroes VI, UbiSoft's terrible mauling of the entire game in the service of their horrible Uplay network. So when they released Might and Magic: Heroes VII I basically ignored it. I figured it was probably more of the same.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. Excerpted from Wikipedia Emphasis added.

Once, many years ago, I was on a software development team. One of the younger developers called the lead developer over and asked “what does this method do?” The lead developer looked at it and said was skeptical. “Wow...yeah, what does this do? This is terrible. What is even going on here? Who wrote this?” They used the git-blame feature and discovered, of course, that the lead developer had written it. Once he saw his own name on it he saw it in a different light. “Well, okay, I guess I see what I was going for. Yeah, okay, this makes sense. Yeah, this is really good...”

There's an old saying, “The cloud is just someone else's computer “, which is technically accurate but misses the point. “Someone else's computer” evokes an image of custom-built hardware run by a company that is specifically offering cloud services. They built their machines to specifically provide the services you need.

But we all know that's not true. As far back as 2016 ZDNet reminded us all that “the cloud” isn't someone's server, it's just rented space in a data center.

I've been playing around with the Pimoroni Keybow again. It's a nice little device that is delightfully simple to tinker with for far too long at any given time. Each key can be programmed to have specific lights and do hideously complex things, should you so desire. Macros are fun!

I've been thinking about the ways in which I relate to time, as a concept.

One view of time divides it up into goals and deadlines. It's like a race. Our goal is to cross each finish line, to complete our tasks, and reach a theoretical perfect state through this series of steps. We are at state X, we want to be at state X++, which will be “better”. An example of this is how we relate to work weeks: We work through the week, to Friday, where we get happy because we have a weekend! But then the weekend ends, because time doesn't stop. This is true of just about anything. There was a book I saw once, called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry that makes this point in it's title. I never actually got around to reading the book...

One of my favorite Latin poems is known “offically” as Catullus 85, but is more frequently called Odi et Amo.

It's a short little poem:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

or in English (according to Wikipedia):

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.