sunday seven

As I’ve mentioned, I am winding down my Facebook experience. There are a couple of things I need to do before I deactivate my account there for good, including completing the email subscription version of this blog, and writing what is likely to be a fairly emotional good-bye / explainer post. That’ll all happen in the next few weeks, most surely before the election. But it’s happening; I’ll be taking my leave from that platform for good. More on the whys and wherefores later. For now, I’ll just say I am getting regular confirmation that I’m doing the right thing when I snooze someone for 30 days, realize I may never see them again…and I feel nothing. Just, bye rando. I mean, of course there are other people I’ll miss very much and that’s why the goodbye will be emo. But overall, the feeling is that of being in a dying relationship when your partner does something you don’t like, and knowing it won’t matter much longer.

BTW, I will soon be calling for some beta testing help on the email system. Stay tuned.

I finally got the pool put away today. I don’t think I ever mentioned that we got a pool this summer. But we did, the kind where you put them up and take them down every year. Fifteen feet in diameter and four feet deep, with a real filter and chemicals and the whole bit. It was a good decision, spearheaded by Leah. My only regret is that we didn’t do it earlier in the summer. Our backyard is well-suited for it, with privacy, and good afternoon sun. I got a lot of quality floating time in, holding a beer on my belly and listening to Jason Isbell’s various live Bandcamp releases, and lots of folklore. I’ll get the pool up earlier next year, for sure. We’re already talking about a better base for it than the current dirt patch. Supposedly, with care, these pools can last for five years, which is about the minimum timeframe we have left in this house. Works out well.

That said, any discussion of the future, whether it’s putting the pool up next May or listing the house in five years, is fraught for me right now. Hell, I’m not sure how the doctor’s appointment I just made for November is going to work out. It seems to me the probability of a rapid emigration, or some other action that dramatically impacts my freedom of motion, has grown massively over the last few months, and will only increase between now and January, or whenever we finally agree who the president is. I’ve got longer thoughts on this queued up, too, but I’m a little sheepish about sharing them. You’re going to think I’ve lost my goddamn mind. Maybe I have. Or maybe a substantial portion of my countrymen have. The armed, aggrieved, vengeful portion.

I think I’m coming down with a cold. I usually do this time of year. The symptoms don’t appear to be those of Covid, as I understand it. I have no fever, and there’s a lot of congestion in my head. My SpO2 is 98. I may get tested anyway, because it’s easy and cheap, but it’s a cold and I’m not going to freak out about it. And, really, what difference would it make in my behavior? I don’t go anywhere anyway.

It’s Sunday morning, October 25. In one of the more stunning events in baseball, or indeed world history, the White Sox and Cubs have made the World Series, and split the first two games. I awake early, eager to consume as much news about this absolutely historic, magnificent moment. But it’s a Sunday morning, and every website, every newspaper, and every sports radio station—local and national—are dedicated 100% to covering who you should sit or start on your fantasy football team, and/or what the sharks are betting on this week’s card. Looks like the smart money is all on the over in the Jets/Bills game. Let’s talk about that for four hours. Or all fucking day.

Extremely niche point: the random art that OpenSSH generates to make public key fingerprints more recognizable sure looks a lot like old Empire maps. It’s a damn shame that game never caught on, but it was in some ways too far ahead of itself. Multiplayer, real-time games are the norm now, but the primitive text-based clients available thirty years ago left this game to only the most select group of highly online nerds. I thought several times about borrowing the game’s best ideas and refactoring them into a modern MMO, but I lacked the skill and resources to do that when it was still competitively possible. Companies that bring those ideas to market nowadays require 10-figure capital investments and a team of hundreds. I barely have time to build an email system for my blog.

You can see they’re quite similar in structure, if not in detail. Like that OpenSSH map has more oil fields and bridges than would otherwise make sense, and that Empire player is quickly going to have more food than they could possibly know what to do with.