Tag Archives: shortstories

Week 2203

The world is still nuts. The right wing forces in the government are attacking Dr. Fauci. Sinclair media, who own a huge percentage of local news tv stations, is going to release a truly insane conspiracy report alleging that Dr. Fauci is responsible somehow for creating the coronavirus. Tons of people are going to see it. One of my friends has been whatsapping me some really disturbing stuff that makes me worry about him – ‘context’ around the police beating a guy in a wheelchair, ‘privilege’ from some country music guy, etc.

Biden said Trump was the first racist president, ignoring the one who actually enslaved human beings. It’s gonna be a long 4 years even if Trump loses. It’s incredibly depressing because I really think Biden can screw this up, but even if he wins, he’s pretty conservative and will probably be a really effective block to meaningful change.

Effective work will have to bubble up at city and state levels before it makes it to a federal level.

Family

We bought a car! Now we own a hybrid Rav 4 and it’s pretty cool! Sam did tons of work and found a deal with 0 down, 0% financing for 5 years. So it’s just incredibly easy on us and cheaper than the Budget monthly car rental we’d been doing. I’ve put in a dash cam and it’s a pretty good generic car. I got us the car insurance as well and we saved a few hundred bucks by returning the rental car early. Celebrated with some Aperol Spritz’s and they are STILL the reigning champ drink of the summer!

Got an offer on one of the Brooklyn apartments and accepted it – looking to get the deposit on it and get into contract! Now we’re wondering do we really want to sell the last one or turn it into a rental instead or what. (I really love living there, I just don’t think we can fit back into it.)

Did a little more bike riding with Zebus – she wanted to ride her bike all the way to the bakery to get a cookie! I’m so impressed with her. She did it, too!

Swale found some educational plugin for minecraft that lets you do chemistry, found the recipe for latex and how to make balloons and then tied balloons to chickens so they could fly. He’s also been saying just the sweetest stuff to me. Lots of I-love-you’s and his own special praise to me.

We spent a $60 gift card from work on a crazy strong blender from Cuisinart and its grrrreat. Already made some milkshakes and smoothies and frozen margs.

My Laptop crashed! I was going to have to ship it out for a month to get fixed, but then it started working! That’s terrifying. Good thing I do a lot of git-push on my repos, back up important stuff to our Synology DiskStation NAS. I did a bunch of work as I set up a new account for work on Sam’s laptop to get my jumpstart script to be smoother on OSX.

DIY

Sam found a cool wallpaper and we struggled it up in the downstairs bathroom and it looks great and I never want to do wallpaper again. It’s so tricky!

In the backyard I got up on a ladder with a pole saw and cut down some branches from the mulberry tree in the backyard, months too late to save the trampoline under it from turning into a giant mulberry collecter/fermenter. I either need to get a sawzall or a mini chainsaw or something to deal with all the branches – my small tension saw isn’t realllly cutting it for this many cuts.

Kinda stalled on the patio for a while.

We’ve foamed up some cable holes in the walls, need to go spackle and paint them. Also started adding trim to the bottom of the bathroom sink cabinet – trimmed off one of the cabinet shims with a Dremel to make the trim flush. Also put in some under-sink rolling trash and recycling cans in the kitchen and put handles on the cabinets.

Reading

Fun week! I’ve put http://www.morelightmorelight.com/2020/07/24/after-the-cops/ in my Kobo, along with a new Annabel Scheme book by Robin Sloan. (I love a book that comes with a makefile to get an epub, but you can read it online if that’s not your jam.

Work

Did some stuff around making documentation easier, and thinking about how to make your docs and walkthroughs look good, but be testable. Nobody likes a stale documentation site! Also getting ready to launch in the UK. Office re-opening is postponed until at least September. I don’t see it happening.

Nerdery

I installed Regolith as a tiling window manager for my laptop and it seems pretty cool. Took a little while to get used to, but I’m wondering why it isn’t easier to just drag windows into tiling window manager with the mouse. I spend a fair amount of time fiddling with things to get them looking right, so why is this better then just dragging a bunch of windows into the right spot?

If you’ve got a terminal open right now try this:

http://wttr.in/?format=v2

Pretty cool! They have tons of formats available so you could make widgets on your desktop or tmux statusline.

How to Safely Win an Impossible Book

When I heard that Charles Yu was giving away the mysterious “Book from Nowhere” from his novel I was terribly excited. The book is a McGuffin/plot point in Yu’s novel “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” – the protagonist is the author who gives himself the book before shooting himself in the stomach.

It’s one of those books.

The publisher actually created a physical mockup of the all-metal book from the story and let Wired give it away in a contest – best comment wins the tome. I dashed off an entry and a few days ago I learned that I won that contest.

My winning comment was what I could get done in a little bit, but I’m so excited to have won that I cooked up a special presentation of the story I wrote.  Charle’s book deals with fathers and sons and families and regret and time and loss and paralysis and so does this.

Click here to read “How to Safely Live on in a Science Fiction Universe”

I wrote this.  I can’t illustrate worth a damn, so I wrote some code to do it for me.  Every time you load that page, it will reach out to Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images on the subjects of mistakes, loss, time, etc.  Much thanks to Tove Hermanson and Sam for their help as my editors.  There are also links in there. Click them.

For Sale: Small Table, Evil

r.n.i table by chul an kwakI bought it because it was beautiful and because it was horrible. Some people want a house out of Home and Garden, I like a bit more of Haunted Mansion.

At night, when you sleep, it eats anything you’ve left on it and grows more tentacles. First a stack of mail and my penny jar disappeared, later I was searching for my black vase full of black roses. When I was looking for my car keys I noticed the nubs sprouting from the previously smooth underside.

The stray cats disappeared from the shopping market. The trees emptied of birdsong. The table became too long for the hall I had put it in, so I moved it to the foyer where there was a bit more room.  I had to buy an area rug to cover the deep gouges it made in the floor as it paced at night.  No matter, it looks great.  I wouldn’t be selling this awesome table, but my fiance insists.  It has learned to climb stairs.

I never should have shown her the scratch marks on the bedroom door upstairs.  Now she won’t sleep over.

For sale to good goth owner, $666 or O.B.O.