Evelyn loves that Alexa can make up bedtime stories that insert her as a character. But she’s frustrated that Alexa’s repertoire is limited to stories not about her favorite TV-Y7 superhero team. So I agreed to cobble together something that her music player could use to make up and read her self-insert superhero stories. And because why not, I’ve put a version on my website, though this version has for understandable reasons been modified to use Original Characters Do Not Steal. Enjoy:
Normally this time of year, I remind everyone to celebrate the historical figure named Columbus who is credited with discovering something on account of being the first European man to notice, despite the fact that the locals had been well aware of it forever: Renaldus Columbus, “discoverer” of the clitoris.
But this year, I’m going to try something else…
Just, uh, one thing, sir. Now, you said that you discovered this whole continent. And I’ve been going around and around in my head. Now my wife, she says I’m making a big deal out of nothing. But I just can’t stop thinking about it. It’s these little inconsistencies, sir. They drive me crazy. Because you said that you discovered this continent in 1492, but now I’m hearing that there’s this group of indigenous peoples who came over on the land bridge, ten thousand years ago. Now what do you think about that, sir? How can you discover a continent in 1492 when there’s already been people there for ten thousand years? It just doesn’t add up, sir.
And speaking of not adding up. You said that you thought you were in India, because everyone else believed the world was flat. But sir, the circumference of the Earth was determined by Eratosthenes of Alexandria to be 25,000 miles. And okay, sure, he was off by a little bit, but sir, but for you to have thought you were in India, you would have had to believe the circumference of the Earth was only 16,000 miles. That’s got me scratching my head, sir. You’re an educated man, but you under-estimated the size of the Earth by a third, two thousand years after Eratosthenes? Now me, I get lost going across town to Joe’s Diner. You ever been to Joe’s? They make a bowl of chili, you’ve got to- but never mind. I’m just saying that I get lost. But I don’t get ten thousand miles lost. And you, sir, you’d been sailing since you were what, ten? And you expect me to believe you missed India by ten thousand miles and didn’t notice?
I don’t believe it sir. I think you were working a scam, sir. Because I called around to all the courts of Europe. And I found out they’d all heard from you and your crazy plan to “Go East by going West.” And they all told you to take a hike, because everyone in the Age of Exploration business knows that if the Earth is 25,000 miles around, the only way you could survive the western route to India would be if there was a continent in the middle where you could resupply. I believe you saw that there was a new king and queen in Spain, eager to make a name for themselves, so you went to them, and you told them the same cockamamie story you told all the other royal houses of Europe, and you cut a third off the size of the Earth to make it sound legitimate, and you planned to take the money and run. But you got caught, didn’t you, sir. You got caught with your three ships out in the middle of the Atlantic on a voyage you couldn’t possibly survive, except that you just happened to get lucky and find this continent, sir. And so to cover up the scam, you told everyone that you’d “discovered” it, and you launched a campaign of colonization and genocide lasting for centuries. Isn’t that correct, sir?
I wasted a lot of time over the weekend being unhappy and writing a VPN server, so here’s a humorous thing I noticed when breaking into a box of “healthy snacks”.
Yes, I often think to myself, “I’m a bit peckish. I think I’ll eat one whole head of cauliflower.”
A small fragment this week because I’m feeling a little stuck writing it. It’s part of an idea that came into my head a while back, but fits in pretty late in the story. This started out in my head as normal prose, but it had some very obviously ludic elements so I leaned into that and found the idea sort of gently trending toward a place that’s somewhere between Psychonauts, Persona, Silent Hill and Disco Elysium, only slightly hornier. Anyway, we’ll see where it ends up.
Glass in hand, Ian took a step back from the bar. Some ways off, near the dance floor, he caught a glimpse of her. She hadn’t seen him yet. He wondered if she’d actually expected him to show up when she’d mentioned it. He steeled himself to make his way over and say hi. On his third step, he passed through the shadow of a wiry man in a leather shirt.
Ian swayed, almost knocked over by it. A wave of malice unlike anything he’d ever felt before. He stumbled away, looking for a place to sit. There was an open corner booth, secluded enough. He slipped into it. He tried not to stare, but took a quick glance at the wiry man. There was a sort of dark smudge around him now, almost like a thick black outline were traced around him. Ian gave a quick look around himself. The noise and crowd was its own kind of privacy. Not ideal, perhaps, but he felt a strong urgency that wouldn’t let this wait. He touched the mark on his wrist and traced out the sigil of communication with his finger on the tabletop.
“What are you doing? We’re not expecting a check-in until tomorrow.” Ugh. He was hoping he’d get Keith back. Were they keeping them apart for some reason? Donna always sounded so judgmental.
“I saw something,” he told her. “By accident. And it’s weird.”
“I’m bringing your location up now. We’re not tracking anything in your area. Are you some kind of magnet for this? We’re supposed to be the ones sending you out. I’ve never seen anyone have two random encounters in a week, let alone three. Use the tracking sigil on it and we’ll follow up tomorrow. No point in causing trouble now.”
“It’s weird, though,” Ian told her as he drew the lines and swirls of a tracking sigil. “It felt a lot stronger than anything I’ve felt before. And now I’m seeing things.”
“Seeing things?” Donna asked. That her tone had switched from annoyance to alarm was not lost on Ian. “Seeing what?”
“Not sure. A kind of black halo?” He glanced back at the man. Something about his body language rubbed Ian wrong.
“Stop. Don’t finish the sigil,” Donna said forcefully. “You should get out of there.”
“What?” Ian asked. She’d been just a hair too slow; he’d finished forming the sigil as she’d spoken. Everything went sideways for a second as he was overcome by a flood of nausea and anger. The man looked up suddenly and… Was he sniffing the air? He didn’t seem to notice Ian specifically, but something had alerted him.
“He’s about to do something. I need to-”
“You need to stop and leave, right now,” Donna said, forcefully. “This isn’t for you.”
Before Ian could respond, he was hit by another wave of malice. Without quite processing how, knowledge forced its way into his mind. The wiry man, or the thing inside him, was hunting. Looking for prey. It was going to do- Ian physically recoiled at the feelings leaking from the black halo. The dark thing was looking toward the dance floor. Looking toward-
“No time. He’s going to hurt someone. I have to…”
“You can’t,” Donna demanded, but Ian was already tracing the sigil. “Bullocks,” she grumbled. Her voice was fading. “Hold on-“
So I still own my old house in Baltimore from back when I lived there, and we had a management company looking after the place, but they flaked out during the pandemic, and… Well now we know I guess.
The mailbox remembers cicada season.
That crack in the back wall was not there before.
Yeah, so you open the back gate and I guess there’s a portal to a sylvan otherworld now?
I think I saw this happen in an episode of Doctor Who?
There’s a whole Christmas tree back here somehow?
Doctor Livingston, I presume?
Having excavated my way to the porch, I discovered someone had allowed a desk to return to nature. Not clear how it decomposed faster than the Christmas tree.
I ran out of lawn bags and also blood glucose, but I did manage to render the back yard passable and knocked the bush down below the level of the fence.
Then Leah came back the next day and actually finished it.
The biggest part of the walkway blockage was a vine full of purple berries.
I look like I went Lady Macbeth on The Grimace.
I’ve had that shirt roughly the same amount of time I’ve had the house. They’ve held up about equally well.
The exciting conclusion, built around a punchline I did not, in fact, have planned from the start, but which only came to me while writing the previous part.
In Which a Party is Held, and the Geode is Finally Caught.
Rabbit had such a good time on his geocaching Expotition that he immediately told all of his friends and relations. And when one has as many friends and relations as Rabbit, well, suddenly geocaching had become less of a Expotition and more of a Popular Fad.
As you will recall, the button left by the Piglet had been collected by Eeyore in return for a ribbon, which had gone to Owl, who left a quill in its place. Meanwhile, the spring left by Tigger was traded by Rabbit for a gardening glove,
The next day, the feather was taken by Early, who left in its place one of the nicest bottle caps in his bottle cap collection. The bottle cap was taken later that day by Late, who thought it would make a good birthday present for his brother Early, as he collected bottle caps. Late left a temporary tattoo of Lightning McQueen.
The gardening glove went to Henry Rush, the beetle, who felt it would be a lovely summer home. In its place, he left a guitar pick. The guitar pick, in due course, was taken by Small, who left a highly detailed 1:87 scale model of the 1987 Progress Rail EMD-SD70ACe-T4 Locomotive Unit 7240 out of Houston.
Even Lottie the otter took a turn, as did Gopher, despite not being in the book, and Beaver, and Kessie the Bluebird, and Lumpy, and even Penguin. And then, once all the animals of the Hundred Acre Wood had taken a turn at finding the Geocache, Christopher Robin himself found it. He signed the book, and took the very pretty rock that had been left there by Winnie-the-Pooh, and in its place he left… Well, actually, I’m not going to tell you what he left, because as far as I know, it is there still, and if some day you happen to be geocaching in the Hundred Acre Wood, you just might be the one to find it yourself, and then wouldn’t it be a lovely surprise?
The good stuff: 10% juice, 20% sugar, 80% water, and so Extra that it adds up to 110% and no one cares.
Because he saw how much all of his friends had enjoyed learning about Geocaching, Christopher Robin decided to throw a party in honor of Evelyn (and Red Zoomer) to thank her for introducing them to this grand new game. There was honey, and haycorns, and thistles, and carrots – both raw and cooked, as someone had heard Evelyn preferred her carrots cooked – and extract of malt, and little cocktail toasts with butter and sugar sprinkles, and American pasteurized processed cheese food product, and plenty of Tropical Fantasy Fruit Punch.
Everyone had tremendous fun at the party. There was dancing, and games, and music, and everyone sang, “For She’s A Jolly Good Fellow” along with other public domain songs, and then they all settled in to talk about the various treasures they had each found in the geocache and how much fun it was to go on a special expotition.
Presently, Roo decided to demonstrate a new bounce he’d been working on, except that it didn’t quite go to plan, with Roo ending up on entirely the wrong side of the picnic table and everything which had been on top of it being sent into a sort of very general disarray. And among the things which were sent into disarray was the very pretty rock which Winnie-the-Pooh had left in the geocache, and which Christopher Robin had subsequently taken out of it. And the sort of disarray it was sent into involved bouncing off the ceiling and then hurtling toward the floor, only with Piglet somewhere in the middle, such that he would have received a very severe bonk on the head, had Evelyn not been there to catch it instead.
“Oh thank goodness,” Piglet said. “I should have had a very nasty bump. Thank you, Evelyn.”
But Evelyn looked at the very pretty rock in her hand and said, “Oh dear. The rock must have broken when it hit the ceiling.” And she showed everyone how there was now a crack running the entire length of the rock, and as she held it up, the whole thing fell apart into two pieces. “Christopher Robin, I’m sorry your rock got broken,” Evelyn said. But the others looked surprised.
To everyone’s wonder and amazement, the rock was hollow. Moreover, the inside of the rock was lined with tiny red crystals. Owl flapped his wings in surprise. “I say,” he declared, “I do believe that is a-”
I am reasonably sure this is an artificially produced geode, but never mind that.
“It’s a geode,” Christopher Robin declared. “They taught us about them in school. Do you know what this means?” Everyone sort of nodded understandingly as if they all understood exactly what it meant, but then started to shuffle nervously because they very much hoped no one was going to ask them to actually say what it meant.
But finally, Edward Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh Bear (Pooh for short), Friend of Piglet (FoP), Rabbit’s Companion (RC), Eeyore’s Comforter and Tail-Finder (ECaTF), Pole Discoverer (PD) and Geocache Finder (GF), spoke up. “It means,” he said, in a suitably impressed sort of voice, “That Evelyn has Caught the Geode. The Geode has been Caught. By Evelyn.”
“My friends,” Christopher Robin announced, “All our hard work Geode-Catching has finally payed off. Today, Evelyn has caught the geode!” And everyone gave three cheers for Evelyn, and if they hadn’t already been having a party, they would have thrown a party for her. And Christopher Robin told Evelyn that even though the Very Pretty Stone had been his geocache treasure, he would very much like for her to keep half of it, while he kept the other half, so that wherever they were, they could look at their half of the geode and remember this adventure.
I’m not crying, you’re crying.It’s fine. This is fine. Just my little girl going off to school for the first time. Nothing to worry about. I’m sure she’s in good hands.Well fuck.It’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine.
I have about a hundred words left to write in the final chapter of the Winnie-the-Pooh story, but for dramatic purposes it will have to wait for shipping.
Instead…
So here’s a weird thing that happened. Was going to get rid of the computer I bought about 15 years ago when I got my first Real Proper Grown-Up Job, and I was stripping it for parts. When I pulled out the video card, the heat sink just fell away and the cooling fan crumbled at my touch.I whacked my arm on a halogen bulb and burned it. Hurt like hell for a few hours, but stopped quickly. When it healed, my freckles had migrated. Like, the new skin that healed over the burn was freckle-less, but the edge of the burn is now marked with a visible line of extra-dense freckles, as though the freckles on the injured skin had moved.
And we’re back. Ish. I guess. Getting there. My new computer arrived Saturday evening. Keep in mind that when the old computer died, I slapped the hard drive into an ancient laptop with a quarter of the ram, and it basically just booted up and aside from it not having enough horsepower, the main issue I had was convincing it which screen to use. So I figured this would be a snap. I popped the hard drive from the old one in and fired it up…
Now available in Right-Side-Up.
Yeah of course nothing is ever easy. First, I spend ten minutes figuring out that the old hard drive uses MBR and the new computer defaults to UEFI, so I had to figure out how to change the bios settings to use the legacy boot mechanism. It finally made it to the Linux desktop… And showed me a warning that it was using software rendering because it didn’t know what to do with the GPU.
This is a Small Form Factor machine marketed as a digital signage player. It can output ridiculous resolutions, but it’s not a super powerful GPU: it’s an on-board Intel chip, same as the old one. I wasted too much time on the assumption that the week my OS had spent Rob Schneidering in a laptop had just donked up the video settings, because you get very little feedback about why you aren’t using hardware acceleration, just that you aren’t and it’s bad.
And it’s bad. This thing was pegging its 8-core i7 4.7 Ghz processor to literally do nothing but show me a terminal window. Also, sound didn’t work, because we live in the HDMI era and sound is a function of video. The usual answer is, “You need to install card-specific video drivers,” except that’s what happens if you have a Fancy GPU, not if you have normal on-board Intel video. There’s an applet you can pull up to check for hardware drivers, and it just told me I didn’t need any, which is what I expected: Intel video drivers are built into the kernel. Finally – possibly after I started this process – I noticed that there’s a specific “Ask the Intel GPU how it’s doing” command, and I ran that. And it failed, which was kinda predictable, but it failed in a useful way: with the message that the 630-series video chip I had was not supported until the Linux kernel 4.15. I’d recently updated the OS on that box, but only to a 2018 version, and its kernel was 4.4. So, roll forward from Linux Mint Sara to Sylvia. No help. Sylvia to Tara. Tara to Tricia. Tricia has a 4.15 kernel but it still doesn’t work. I am on the edge of a breakdown. Both of my children are pestering me because their network-attached music players don’t work because the computer that serves the music database is broken. Push it to Ulyana and it still doesn’t work. But finally, as I am about to cry myself to sleep, I see that there’s an upgrade outstanding: a 5.4 kernel. What the hell, I think, and install it.
Boom. Video drivers work now. Of course, I’ve basically Buck Rogers’d this computer through the whole of the modern “Make potentially system-breaking updates every six weeks” era, so my video card works, but basically nothing else does now.
The upgrade process itself had a few hiccups. Namely:
So, upgrading between an OS release in most linux distributions is a little bit of a hack; they’d really prefer you start fresh each time. My systems are generally bespoke enough that I do not wish to do that if I can avoid it. In my distro of choice, Mint, there are two forms of upgrade. The upgrade between minor versions is easy, you just pick “Yes I really want to do the dangerous thing” from the update manager. If you’re on the last minor version, you have to use a special alternative updater to go to the next version. So there is a lot of alternating back and forth, and every time, it disables some stuff and removes some stuff and warns you that it could easily destroy you and everyone you care about. Starting with Mint 19, you are required to have one specific backup program installed. You’re not required to use it. Just have it. It checks and refuses if you don’t.
Also you have to switch from mdm to lightdm when going from 18 to 19. It will walk you through this but it will not explain that just replacing mdm with lightdm won’t leave you with a working computer. Because you also need to install and configure a “greeter” for lightdm. The default lightdm greeter is super ugly. Also, automatic logins work differently in lightdm, and no one will explain this to you either. Even if you configure a particular user to auto-login, it will just not do it and not tell you why unless the user is also part of the autologin group.
I use a package called nut to monitor the status of my UPS. This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this on an upgrade: one of the nut config files gets replaced with a stock version which defaults the minimum number of power supplies to 1, and it won’t start like that. I think the deal is that the updates are asynchronous, so when you start it, there are always zero power supplies connected until the first update completes, so restarts always fail in that configuration. This prevents updating the packages.
The mysql options relating to the query cache size are not supported any more, so the mysql server wouldn’t restart until I edited the config file. This prevented anything which depends on mysql from updating.
By the way, at some point mysql decided that “system” is a reserved word. Hope you weren’t using it as a column name.
Also, at some point mysql decided a SELECT DISTINCT query could only sort on fields you were selecting on. Hope you weren’t doing functions on them
I have a highly customized version of mythtv, so I don’t want to reinstall the stock version. The installer of course replaced my init scripts to start the default version, which was easy enough to fix. Harder was the fact that half the dependencies are no longer available, most notably, the Qt 4 libraries are just gone. You should be using Qt 5. You rely on something which hasn’t been updated for Qt? Well fuck you then. I found a PPA here that had forward-ports of everything I needed except the MySQL driver. For that, I just downloaded the package from an older Debian and forced it to install despite the dependencies not being right. This required hand-fiddling the dpkg database.
There is also a dependency on an older version of VAAPI. I just made a symlink from the old filename to the new one and seem to have gotten away with it.
Or maybe not. Mythtv is working as well as ever except whenever I try to use the OSD api to pop a message up on screen, the frontend crashes. It displays the message, sure, but it crashes right after. No clue why; the logs are incredibly unhelpful about this, refusing to provide me with a stack trace or anything.
Synergy is an application for sharing a keyboard and mouse across multiple computers. This is a huge deal for a media center-type computer where you don’t want to have to walk over to the keyboard all the time. And it too is gone. Apparently the Synergy developers are dicks or something? Anyway, I managed to find a compatible package here.
The music player daemon’s config file was quietly replaced with a non-functional one. Joy.
Perl libraries I installed from apt survived fine, but ones where I had to get them out of CPAN did not. So I have to manually reinstall ZOOM, a protocol used by the library of congress, because I’ve got some CGI scripts running that need it.
Speaking of CGI Scripts, systemd now runs apache with a private /tmp, so CGI scripts can’t drop files there for someone else to use. And sure, that is a reasonable security thing to do, but a little warning would’ve been nice.
Might as well mention since I’ll need it next time I do this dance: you need to blow away clearlooks-phenix or else any time you forward an X window, its GTK theming will be all donked up
Also you need to recreate root’s .XAuthority by doing xauth list as the logged in user and then dumping that into xauth add with sudo.
Almost everything is mostly-working now. Still haven’t gotten the notification popups to not-crash, but you can’t have everything. The new box is much peppier, has a huge amount of ram, and can be mounted right-side-up without making a grinding sound, so I think this will do me for a while.
