Random Thread: Spring 2023 to ???
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Piggy
in March 20th, 2023 @ 11:05First post!!!
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Tesseract
in May 12th, 2023 @ 13:58Hey there, Piggy and Robert and anyone else who still happens to stumble on through. I’ve been thinking about you guys a lot lately as I find myself back in a real internet community for the first time in… since whenever I was last active on here, really.
Said internet community is a fan discord for a Critical Role ship, for the curious. I found my way into CR via TAZ a few years back, got really into D&D as a result and now play in a couple of campaigns, and the past year or so I’ve gotten back into writing fanfiction in a big way. It’s been a great creative outlet—I was always sort of gun-shy about really trying my hand at writing fiction, despite the fact that I’m now editing it professionally, and I’m having a blast.
But anyway, finding myself chatting with wonderful faceless strangers has me feeling pretty nostalgic for my first internet home. You guys meant, and still mean, a lot to me, although it’s been ages since I’ve been in touch with anyone. I have a lot of really fond memories on this site. I learned a lot here about people, and perspectives, and communication, and community; you guys were among the first I told about my first kiss when I was fourteen and among the first I came out to when I was eighteen; I felt nurtured in my nerdery and always welcomed and supported. It’s absolutely wild to me how much time has passed, and maybe even wilder that this site is still quietly sitting here, waiting for us all to swing back by.
The requisite life updates: still living in Brooklyn, still working in book publishing, still playing my oboe and saxophone when I can (have been participating on and off in a marching and symphonic band). My childhood dog died at 17 early in the pandemic and my parents recently got a new puppy. We adore each other. I got really into embroidery during COVID, plus the aforementioned D&D and the fanfiction writing, and I’ve been trying to embrace creative audacity, i.e. brute forcing my way through crafts like making cosplay pieces by leatherwork or refinishing bookshelves despite not knowing what I’m doing. Generally it works.
I changed employers last summer and am liking my new job much better than the old—same kind of work, different boss, very welcome change of pace. I now live with my lovely girlfriend, who I’ve been dating for four and a half years. We are, and I am, very happy.Much love to you all, and anyone who knows how to find me on other social media, please never hesitate to reach out. It’s nice to see what folks are up to. In the meantime, I’ll try to remember to swing back by here sooner rather than later. <3
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Piggy
in May 15th, 2023 @ 13:33Hello there, Tess! Welcome home. It’s good to hear you’re doing well. I’m surprised that you think the site is sitting here “quietly”, when the wungs have been working so tirelessly on their “Oops! All Cannons” arrangement of the 1812 Overture over in the tearoom, but either way, here we are. I’ll definitely second the sentiment about people, perspectives, communication, and community. So much of what I now am and believe I can trace back, in large part, to the people here and our conversations together. If I hadn’t learned here what I did learn here, I can’t fathom where else I would have learned it, and probably I wouldn’t’ve.
Happy early birthday, by the way. Will you be having cake or pie?
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Robert Coontz (Administrator)
in May 25th, 2023 @ 13:44Hello, Tesseract! How is life in n-space?
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Robert Coontz (Administrator)
in June 11th, 2023 @ 20:35I feel a tremor in the Force. Could Keiffer be in the vicinity?
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gimanator
in August 24th, 2023 @ 10:37I’m back for the latest dispatch! I was mistaken about two things: I thought this post would be about two months earlier and I thought I would have finished all the books I committed to reading. Well, sic semper the best laid plans. At the very least, it’s not such a long hiatus and I did make it through two of the books I outright planned, plus a handful of others. Life on the Mississippi, alas, still waits behind another 80 pages of Islamic history. Soon!
The coding boot camp mentioned before went about exactly as planned and was definitely the largest impact event of the last 5 months. Exhausting, all-consuming, helpful for the curriculum/alumni network that let one learn on their own (isn’t that always how good education goes?) and the opportunity to work on large(r) projects with teams of other engineers, less helpful for the lacking expertise of the instructors (as I assumed going in). On the whole, seemingly pretty worthwhile! Thanks to previous study I enjoyed a relative facility with the material and contributed a bit to teaching my peers.
Maybe most unexpected were the demographics. We lined up fairly well with averages: age, probably just north of 30; gender: more balanced than the tech average, but still skewed heavily male. Mainly, I didn’t expect so many people with medical backgrounds! There are some things I should have learned from enrollment in conservatory, too. Namely, from a base rate you’re likely to end up at the institution that has most recently invested in advertising and a cohort expansion. Extrapolate to personality and life circumstances accordingly. Regardless of background, we’re there because our previous life course didn’t pan out and we’re willing to shoot for a shortcut; I think we all quietly nursed a fantasy that enrollment would bring a job without the usual stresses of the hunt. As the market has cooled, I’ve heard enrollment has dropped sharply in the program, which means we were on the very tail end of a bubble.
I’m now ten weeks into job searching — expected for a typical search and certainly typical for a season of a job market flooded by laid off engineers and scant startup funds. Still, job applications as a full time job are exhausting. At its best, I have a totally flexible schedule to begin applications at 7 and then go for a hike a little after noon with bonus time to read textbooks! All too often, though, meeting the quota I’ve set for myself takes all the energy I have. I don’t blame my peers with whom I’ve lost contact — it’s hard not to get depressed after the umpteenth blank rejection! It helps to remember that software engineering skills are a kind of superpower I’ve been granted: if I can imagine some software, I can probably build it given enough time to puzzle out the details. That’s what I try to do around the periphery; why would you not exercise that ability?
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I, Robot was decidedly a worthwhile reread. There was a bit of clunkiness to it (weird to see language firmly from the 40s and 50s in a sci-fi book), but some of the failings were more relevant than I realized. Like you pointed to, Piggy, some of it has resurfaced in modern conversations. Asimov treats robot functioning with a lot of hand waving; there’s a lot involving assumptions that certain behavior would be perfected or proven without any gesturing as to why. Normally I’d chalk that up to poorly realized fiction …if that wasn’t exactly what some modern commentators also do today. I recently read an account of a hypothetical future that read like a retelling of “The Evitable Conflict”. I can’t exactly call it prescience, but a lot of the similarity comes down to the opacity of a linguistic interaction layer. Maybe something about the presence of a veil obscuring inner workings inspires us to read heavily into them — for Asimov, it seems to be the assumption of perfection; for others today, I guess it involves extrapolating out LLMs to human-level consciousness. I sometimes worry that I’m missing something obvious when I hear the AI doomsday scenarios of the last decade — maybe I just haven’t researched enough (if people have proven game-theoretic optima that involve certain outcomes, after all…). I, Robot makes me think I can attribute at least a little of their thinking to the same patterns in Asimov’s thinking.
Another recent read that made an impression was the first in Knausgaard’s horribly named series. The book is one of those bloated types that has so much scope you can’t fault it for being writing about writing at times — and usually, those are some of the strongest sections. It’s not what the book is about, since the book is about all sorts of things, but I really appreciated a kind of core thesis that the strength of writing comes from reproducing the atmosphere of a moment, especially down to minute details that one notices. Probably not universally true. Still, there are a lot of descriptions that read back as experiences I know but have never seen on the page.
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A final thought on this one: on a recent shopping errand a teen girl walking with her father in the grocery spontaneously offered me a rose out of the bundle she was holding. A very very brief interaction. I’m left speculating that the point of buying a bundle in the first place was to offer them to strangers? It seems unlikely it was nothing but a one-off. Or if it was, it’s still pleasant: a very trusting gesture towards the world. I’ve done a bit of trying to emulate that attitude since, but I don’t wear it as naturally. Mostly just more smiling at strangers and occasionally speaking to them. I’d like to get to that point, though, where I’m improving strangers’ days as much as she did mine.
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Piggy
in November 7th, 2023 @ 08:34I’ve realized that since my employer finally made me take a company laptop a few months ago, after a few years of using my personal computer to work from home, I haven’t been opening MuseBlog every day like I usually do. I have some RSS feeds set up to notify me of any new comments, but it’s important to me that I actually come here. So here I am, confessing my self-defined sin. I still harbor fantasies of discovering that one of my acquaintances is actually an old friend from here, masquerading under a paperwork name, but I’m mostly content to have known all of you as much as I do for as long as I have. The prospect of another visit to DC seems distant given my present responsibilities, but if ever the opportunity arises, Robert, I’ll certainly be meeting you for lunch again. Your Great Books of the Western World set holds pride of place on a bookshelf unto itself in our parlor, reachable without leaving my reading chair.
Did you have any luck, good or bad, in the job-hunting operation, Man-Gator? The prospect of undergoing that has helped me look past any small complaints I may have about my current job.
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gimanator
in November 10th, 2023 @ 23:22Goodness, that’s an anagram I haven’t seen in a long while!
I’ve been watching for your resurfacing, Piggy. I even (briefly) wondered if the site outage could have spooked you–in a more sober moment I’m remembering it would take something much stronger to keep you away. I’m surprised using an RSS feed didn’t occur to me earlier. But, then again, losing the anticipation of looking at the top of the recent comments means a seriously deficient experience, I think.
Alas, I seem to have entered a season of doldrums on the job hunt. We’re well up into the hundreds of applications now, leaving me with the impression there’s simply a mismatch between what I have to offer and what employers are seeking. Part of the torpor, I know, is self-imposed; there are untapped resources and a level of active desperation I have yet to rise (or sink?) to. I rarely email hiring managers directly to toot my own horn, for example. For that I blame my quiet fear that my horn isn’t yet worth tooting–emphasis on the yet.
From the last several months, I found my way to a single interview. It was a referral to an internship meant for college students, and one from a markedly different world (corporate OOP-types) than my study of web frameworks and quick iteration. Technical questions were brief and generally laughably easy, but I had a hard time explaining some simple terms I had seldom (or never) encountered. Evidently what I thought was a reasonably good impression wasn’t. Coming from from a program where the rare graduate jumps into a senior role directly, flopping out of a referred internship interview was a pretty unpleasant emotional blow. On the more positive side, one of the interviewers was happy to provide feedback–against protocol–about where I could improve. So for the next while I’m on a schedule I’ve set myself to build and deploy something addressing those lacunae. I frequently ask myself, “what would somebody who’s notably extraordinary do?” and then try to work towards that as a starting point. I imagine it to involve things like meaningful improvements to database implementations, compilers, or an OS (or building some from scratch, which is the more realistic goal), but that will wait a little longer. For now, it’s just a product with a more involved architecture than I’m used to and teaching myself Java.
What are the complaints about the job, out of curiosity? And how did that refactoring/generalizing project from March pan out?
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gimanator
in November 27th, 2023 @ 20:33Now that I’m here, I also have a long overdue thanks for the recommendation of Life on the Mississippi: it was the perfect suggestion. It had been a long while since I’d last lead Twain and a couple of things stood out to me. I had forgotten how flowery his writing could be. It was unexpectedly quite beautiful, in fact, and was part of the reminder of historical parallels. That is, I think of the American South as a place/time very distinct from the world of Victorian literature (particularly the work of Tennyson and his ilk), but both came out of the same inherited corpus and tradition. Very interesting to hear Twain’s opprobrium extend to that very stuff which apparently populated many southern coffee tables (also surprising, though it probably shouldn’t have been, just how consistently scathing all of his writing was).
At the other extreme, the violence shocked me–both in the local stories Twain relished retelling or what he and his peers idolized as boys. It reminds me of the universality of (some) experience: funny (and a little unfortunate) that the more grisly passages of the pie wars were children performing as they ever have.
The book absolutely captured the tiny pieces of a life defined by another world and its restrictions. And for the claims about being overpolished, I was pleased to discover the patchwork structure of the book–geology to personal history to travelogue isn’t a sequence I’d expect to find anywhere else!
As a bonus, I had forgotten in which chapter Ben Coontz appeared and didn’t realize it was towards the end; I spent nearly the whole book expecting to encounter him on the next page.
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In other reading, I passed through Kripke’s Naming and Necessity a little while back. It’s the sort of philosophy that veers dangerously close to merely discussing the fuzziness of human language while thinking it’s describing something profound about reality. Most of it has to do with how comfortable/uncomfortable we should be with the necessity of essentialism when identifying people, objects, and intents in logical statements (without it, it turns out it’s hard to be certain what exactly you’re talking about), accompanied by a disquisition on determinism by another name (how many truths of the world ‘necessarily’ follow from other known truths, how many remain ambiguous)–here, the issue seems to be that what Kripke deems a ‘necessary’ truth is totally arbitrary and mostly justified by scientific hindsight. So, little recommendation from me on the actual core of the book.
But–it did prompt a few interesting questions in the margins. In particular, I’m now curious to know what a sufficient ‘core’ of a logical system is. Said another way, what set of axioms would be sufficient to recreate everything else? That, I hope, may be addressed when I finally make it to reading about ZFC. More broadly, I’m curious if there’s a predictable bound/lack of bound to the amount of data that needs to be collected before a deterministic system can be predicted. I know basically nothing about chaos theory, but my limited understanding is that it predicts near complete knowledge is a necessary bound. Another still, which is maybe too topically interested in neural networks: if the quality of a network’s output is always bounded by the quality of the training input, what are the laws of information loss? In other words, how much approximation (or tuning of nodes according to probability) is enough to recreate the ‘real’ pattern it was sourced from? Is that a known threshold? I assume there must be a model out there in which quantity of observations and weight ascribed to each observation both act as fidelity coefficients, for lack of a better description.
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Piggy
in November 27th, 2023 @ 23:30I ought to pick out some Twain to read myself. One of my half-treasured possessions is a dark green hardback set of his works published in the 1930s or so that I took from my grandfather’s basement after he passed away. His biography of Joan of Arc has been on my list for a while–maybe I’ll look at that one.
As for complaints about my job, I guess they’d mostly revolve around the management, which has its pros and cons. The company was a literal “started in the founder’s basement in the ’90s” job, still entirely owned and run by that founder. As it’s grown fairly quickly, for the industry, in the last decade or so, it’s maintained that sort of flat hierarchy, without much in the way of formal job titles and responsibilities. On the one hand, that’s meant that I’ve been able to sort of define my own position and find what I like to do and what I’m good at. I’ve found that I’m quite good at a certain type of “soft” leadership, driving large and long-term work without ever actually telling anyone what to do or how to do it. I also adopted DevOps-ish work purely on the basis that no one else was doing it and I was annoyed at the inefficiencies I saw, and I really enjoy tinkering with that when I get the chance. On the other hand, it’s rarely clear what the most important or urgent work is, and communication and coordination between different areas of the software department is pretty poor. It’s very common for one team to work for a few months on some feature, only to learn after they’re done that the same feature has already been implemented in some other team. There’s also a lot of pressure to get new features out as quickly as possible so the company can be first-to-market, without much discipline about regression testing or paying down technical debt. As I haven’t worked anywhere else, I don’t have other experience to compare this to, but those would be my biggest basic complaints.
What else have I been up to lately…. A lot of my day-to-day thought is still taken up by autism and ADHD and neurodiversity, I guess, regarding both myself and the rest of my family. My sister and her husband and two sons were in town for a couple weeks for Thanksgiving, and it was hard to see her and her husband, as well as my parents, constantly scolding their older son, who I’m sure is ADHD and possibly autistic, for fidgeting in his seat at the table or running around the house. My wife and I are always trying to find ways of allowing our kids, especially our oldest, to fidget and stim and self-regulate as much as possible, and hearing my nephew get told to “sit on [his] bottom” thirty times per meal was kind of heartbreaking when we’ve gone through four high chairs trying to find one that will let our son move more. I don’t know if or how to say something, though. The most I did was sending my sister a link to the sensory/chewy toys we like, and one time when my temper got the best of me and I snapped at my mom that she didn’t have to be angry at her grandkids all the time.
Other than that, I’m still spending most or all of my free time on homelab/smart home stuff, which has been my specialest interest for the last couple years. Our oldest will not sleep without the ocean sounds specifically from the Google assistant, which fails if the internet ever goes down in the middle of the night. (He will not accept any other ocean sounds.) Last week, though, I found a link to download that exact sound file, so I’ve been tweaking some automations to play that from the local network instead, recovering gracefully if anything goes wrong and the like. And today, while messing around with the Bluetooth-connected Ember coffee mug I splurged on for Black Friday, I got sucked into learning some more advanced Jinja, which is a kind of cursed and frustrating templating engine.
I’m trying to think of another book recommendation…. Something about philosophy and human language reminded me of Gerald Murnane’s A Million Windows. I only read it once, five or six years ago, and I don’t remember all that much about it, so I don’t know if I can really say I recommend it, but I do remember that I enjoyed it and that it was one of the more unusual books I’ve read. All I’m reading currently is Katherine May’s Wintering, as well as Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes for the third time. I guess I’m also working through The Complete Peanuts as I buy more of the volumes, which appear to be becoming unavailable, and so I want to get them all bought while I still can.
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Piggy
in December 27th, 2023 @ 12:59Well, today marks my 17th ‘Blogiversary. Somehow that number, anything less than my current age, sounds too small, as though my self and my MuseBlog self are identical; but I guess there really was a period of time in my life before MuseBlog. What a boring few years that must have been! The wungs have cake and punch in the tearoom for anyone that wants to celebrate with me.
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ZNZ
in January 4th, 2024 @ 16:14I’m not sure exactly how I ended up back here, but I was so pleasantly surprised to see posts as recent as these last! It makes me happy to think of you guys all out there in the world, and of people occasionally still swinging through here. I’m doing relatively well. I… hm. I often feel embarrassed to even say hello to people I haven’t seen or spoken to in a long time, because of a strong feeling that I haven’t done anything very impressive any time recently, or don’t have anything much to show for myself. But at least I’m getting more able to catch that the resultant avoidance isn’t a helpful pattern, and that the embarrassment is worth pushing through–and to recognize that the fondness with which I think of old friends isn’t dependent on their/your being able to report on impressive achievements.
Actual life updates. Moved a lot right after university. Had a fairly dramatic mid-pandemic nervous breakdown; in a lot of ways I’m still recovering from that. Have now settled down somewhat living with good friends in Tennessee, working a reasonably agreeable retail job (local chain of mid-sized grocery stores) where they let me listen to audiobooks and I get on well with all my coworkers. Haven’t been reading as much as I want to since school, but I started going to the movies a lot in the past couple of years and that’s been very good for me, even if I still feel very much a pseud thinking of myself as some kind of “film person.”
Also I transitioned! Or, came out, first as nonbinary and then as a trans man, and am transitioning. I’m a little more than eighteen months on HRT now, and this past August I had top surgery, which is wild to think about and which changed my life very much for the better; I feel more like a human being than I have maybe ever, or since I was a small child. My other big hobby of the past several years is cycling, and I used to tell people that I loved riding a bicycle because most of the time I felt that I was either completely disconnected from my body or I was inside my body in a way that felt like being trapped, and cycling was the only time that I felt my consciousness settled inside my body in a positive and productive way. I still love my bike, but since transition I don’t need my bike to access that kind of relationship to physicality. I find myself getting there all the time.
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ibcf
in January 10th, 2024 @ 14:36Same problem has kept me away like a pool of flesh eating bacteria, ha. Never mind what I’ve had to show for myself since; the ignominy of the nonsense I put out while I *was* here is too much to bear. But it’s a part of my life whether I like it or not, and like you said (to paraphrase) you gotta look your shame in the eye and punch it in the face. That’s why I keep crawling back every so often. Congratulations on your transition by the way! I don’t think we knew each other too well back in the day but you seem like a cool person. Are you on any social media these days? I’m on discord and the website formerly known as twitter under the same name if you ever want to stop by for a chat about movies, especially if they’re animated. (That goes for the rest of you too!)
As for my own life updates: came down with Hodgkin’s lymphoma a couple times. Got chemo and a bone marrow transplant, still fortunately in remission. Of all the cancers to get it’s one of the least worst (apart from skin cancers and whatnot). Nice excuse from work and better than lung cancer and the dentist cause no one says it’s your fault. Wouldn’t recommend it in general though.
Went down to LA to visit my grandma a few months ago and the trip unexpectedly bloomed into a culmination of my lifelong animation obsession. Got serendipitous invites to both a tour of the Roy E. Disney animation building in Burbank and an (entirely unrelated) visit with a couple professional animation buddies in Little Tokyo. Not for an animation job or anything; turns out animation is hard and making a living in it is even harder. Most significant outcome is I got to eat takoyaki for the first time (not bad, but less flavorful than I’d imagined). The Disney animation building is of course grandly designed–topped with a giant Mickey sorcerer hat–and the hallways were full of beautiful production art from their classic films, likely in honor of their 100th anniversary. Very friendly staff, at least when they didn’t mistake me for a gate-crasher. Felt a bit Disneyland-ish even “behind the scenes.” I suppose they dress it up nicely for the occasional guests and Hollywood execs, and at least to some degree the employees really do seem like sincere Disney lovers. Guess they have to be to work there.
Fixed my politics over the past decade, too. I recall dumping some bracingly awful contributions to the “Hot Topics” et al threads around here; rest assured I’ve read some books since then. What the heck are you supposed to know as a kid? Plenty, I guess, if you’re a precocious MuseBlogger, which I was not.
To Robert and the rest: thank you for putting up with me in my underdeveloped years. There’s some stuff that can hurt to remember, and I tend to recall the negatives, but I can’t say there weren’t fun times. I’m not a famous scientist or artist or assistant professor or anything, but I’m pretty happy with the person I am now, and my time here surely had something to do with who I am today, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what. And thanks again, Robert, for keeping the lights on around here. See y’all next time!
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You can call me "Fitzy"
in January 25th, 2024 @ 01:56I was never a user of this site. Never a user of any blogs or forums on the internet really. Never got the hang of the social internet, and ADD means out of sight and out of mind is a barrier to these sorts of things. I’m doing homework for a college course on evolution and a memory resurfaces. A print-from-home trading card game called Phylo(mon). A short web search later brings me to why I know about this game: Muse magazine wrote about it. They even published a deck (called the Musemon deck) with original art from readers, still downloadable from the Phylo(mon) website.
I really liked Muse as a kid. I loved their articles, the themes, and the goofy characters that accented the magazine. I loved the in-jokes that I was too young to have seen begin (though I remember a letter to Crraw explaining how “orange” and “door-hinge” rhyme). I was there in 2015 when the Muses were phased out of the magazine, and the final fan letter pages were filled with adult fans in the spotlight. Mostly I remember reading and rereading those magazines in my collection, devouring every page in a simpler time in my life.
The magazine is still in print? But it was never the same after the Muses left. I wasn’t enjoying it as much, and I stopped requesting renewals. But now I’m here. Visiting the quiet forums of a fanbase I never really interacted with but considered myself a part of. Mourning the loss of something I valued and the seeming inaccessibility of it even with the miracle of the internet.
Still, it’s cathartic to see how long people stayed active and in touch. I think I’m here to say thank you. I see you. I’m glad you were here. I’m glad I can feel connected to you, strangers, over something we shared for a time. I hope you are all doing well, and I hope the artists and the writers and the editors who brought me a lot of joy and who influenced so much love of the subjects I study even today know in some way that I loved their work and am glad they were a part of my childhood.
I’ll try to keep my eye on this page in case anyone else sees it. To the hypothetical you who is reading; So long, and thanks for all the pies/pranks/factoids/software/hardware/rhymes/doughnuts/friends/stars/chases/HPBs! I’ll see y’all when we get the collective signal from intelligent air, and world domination conspiracy finally comes to fruition.
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Piggy
in January 30th, 2024 @ 09:46Hello friends! I’ve been trying to think of something meaningful to say for the last couple weeks, but nothing quoteworthy has come to mind. When people drop by, it feels like a high school reunion in a dark, quiet gymnasium, just one or two people at a time stepping inside, paying their autobiographical dues, and heading back outside to the light of their their busy lives again. I’ve been sitting here by the punch table this whole time, and I’m so glad to see you guys again–although I suspect you’ve driven away already. Robert must have ducked into the restroom or something, because I haven’t seen him lately either. I hope your lives continue to grow, despite or thanks to nervous breakdowns and lymphomas.
To keep the book conversation up-to-date, the pile I have on my desk next to me currently are, from bottom to top: the collected poetry of Robert Frost; Ted Kooser’s Kindest Regards and The Poetry Home Repair Manual; Loup River Psalter by William Kloefkorn; and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Guiltily, I see the outsides more than the insides.
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You can call me "Fitzy"
in February 4th, 2024 @ 17:35I sent a post a few weeks back, but I don’t think it was approved. I stumbled across this place a few weeks ago and did some brief digging into it. It seems like a nice community. I hope y’all are doing well.
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Robert Coontz (Administrator)
in March 24th, 2024 @ 16:48Sorry about that! We were besieged by spambots and had to do a lot of preliminary moderating before we could even see your posts. Welcome!
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Sinusoidal Polyglot
in February 18th, 2024 @ 15:04Hi! Sinusoidal here! This is my first post on MuseBlog. I come from ChatterBox (See my posts there). If I’m not supposed to give my email, why is it required? Anyone up to talk about particle physics and the mass of a photon? I’ve heard that MB is like CB but for STEM.
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Robert Coontz (Administrator)
in March 24th, 2024 @ 16:51Hm. Not exactly. Maybe I’d better let Piggy explain.
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Sinusoidal
in February 18th, 2024 @ 15:07Can someone create a guide on how MB works and how to use it and post and all that? What are the kinds of topics MB talks about?
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gimanator
in April 13th, 2024 @ 19:31Salutations! There’s a little bit of explanation in the HG2MB (in particular an explanation for the email), but I think the ‘blog has shifted a bit in the years since its heyday. In general, threads were administrator (GAPA) created, frequently at a blogger’s request. In theory, some of us older hands have the ability to create threads. In practice, we’ve slowed down so much that just commenting on the random thread is probably sufficient.
If you’re circling back around to read this explanation, you’ll understand the pace is a little glacial these days; we’re slightly above our recent nadir, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see a month or two pass without activity.
As for topics, I think things are generally fairly open so long as discussion is civil. Historically, that’s meant discussion of books, films, topics of study (including, but not limited to, STEM), life updates, Elizabethan English, even politics (though were that to return, it might merit the rebirth of the Hot Topics thread). That berth comes with the caveat that not everything is guaranteed to pass a GAPA zap-filter. That said, the majority of what occurs these days is older residents stopping by to say hello after a time away. Don’t let that stop a conversation you want to have–if you have thoughts on photon mass (or the absence of it), we’re all ears!
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Cat's Eye
in March 8th, 2024 @ 17:00Hello, all!
I’ve had a busy few years since I last dropped in – published a book, wrote a sequel, endured a few rounds of COVID, and got top surgery! I’m still living in NYC – this last September marked my ten-year anniversary – and I’ve done some traveling recently: Edinburgh, Montreal, New Hampshire, Denver, and next month a drive up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Memphis.
Publishing a book was wonderful in some ways, but very, very stressful in others. My publishing house is not particularly well-managed right now and I got the brunt of a lot of staff turnover. But I’m still very proud of the book, and some people seemed to really love it. I’m hoping that the publisher will put in the effort to set up a few events in new cities when the sequel’s published, though my hopes aren’t high.
I spend a lot of time with friends, but I do find myself taking most of my pleasure in reading these days in a way that I haven’t since I was younger, which is nice. I find myself really hungry these days for anything that helps me have long, slow thoughts, rather than snap judgments. I also read Life on the Mississippi recently, as a matter of fact! I was really moved by Twain’s description of the death of his brother, and the guilt he carries around it, and I was really amused by the way he talks about Walter Scott – I’d always been a little skeptical of his reaction to Arthuriana in Connecticut Yankee, and this really helped put his feelings in context. Now I’m reading Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World by Thomas C. Buchanan, which is really fascinating, and really makes me see how little about American slavery I’d read after leaving high school, and how much more I’d like to learn. All of this is meant to be pre-research for next month’s road trip, of course, though whether I can mentally connect the sights and sounds in Twain and Buchanan to the sights and sounds of 2024 remains to be seen.
I’m also reading Joan Didion for the first time. I love and hate it when I finally read someone whose prose I keep hearing about, and their prose really is that good – the stuff itself is one of the great joys, and then again, I get annoyed at myself for avoiding that writer up to this point for no reason at all! But as a matter of fact I finally came to her because she was recommended to me specifically as someone who would remind me of Joseph Mitchell, whose collection of essays Up in the Old Hotel I’d just read, and who became one of my favorite writers of all time in a matter of weeks. His writing is life-changing for me – it’s so patient, it’s so curious, and it’s so passionately in love with the world and with people. I’d reread Diane Duane’s Young Wizards while I was recovering from surgery, the scene where the heroes read from a book that names the world (and New York in particular) exactly as it is so beautifully and truly that it becomes more of itself, that it remembers how to be itself, and his descriptions of New York Harbor are the closest I’ve seen anything come to being that in real life. And he names his favorite book as Life on the Mississippi, so I suppose it all comes full circle!
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Robert Coontz (Administrator)
in March 24th, 2024 @ 17:00Welcome back, Cat’s Eye, and thank you for the fascinating update. (Fun factoid related to Life on the Mississippi: as Piggy noted, my great-great-grandfather Benton Coontz makes a brief but pivotal appearance in chapter 56.)
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gimanator
in April 13th, 2024 @ 18:53My, what a lovely flurry of activity here! Although I’m a little slow to reply to it, as usual.
Funny to see our project as a sort of subject of paleontology–and at such a young age! Look no further, I say, for evidence the kokonspiracy succeeded. Of course, Fitzy and Sinusoidal are a piece of this living history too, now. Should either of you return, I’ll certainly be interested to hear your thoughts on said assimilation.
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I suppose I’ll dispense with the news from my end first. The biggest updates: I’ve since secured a job and have moved to be closer to it! It took me 7 months and a little over 600 applications (as it goes in these sort of things, it was a referral that got me past all the initial screenings), or a little less than one year after quitting my last job to make the pivot. It’s a small startup in south SF bay working on a fitness app–well, I’m working on the website and server instead of the actual app, but that’s the product. Similar to your position, Piggy, it’s a company owned by a founder who began things as a hobby project and then slowly grew. Less explosive in size and a bit younger (about a decade now), but also a flat hierarchy with room to dedicate oneself where one wishes. In my case that’s mostly been backend work, which few of my coworkers seem interested in, for some reason.
I love it. In particular, I love that for the first time I properly have a job that 1) requires constant thought and 2) provides ample autonomy. Seeing your thoughts materialize into a useable thing is the miracle of software, and this setting really drives it home. The pivot was massively, massively worth it for that reason alone.
As a result of the hire, I am for the first time able to afford an apartment by myself, which is now stocked up with my (too many) books and tidily arranged furniture. Having never had this much space, the place looks a little spare when I spread myself out. My father assures me my possessions will only expand from here (though I wonder if I can’t prove him wrong eventually). The tiny studio I considered during my search, then possibly feasible, is already too small.
…which brings me to the modern dilemma of, well, the affluent portion of my generation, I guess. Now that I’ve secured a space all to myself and bury myself in books and my computer, where does my socializing come from? And I don’t want to dismiss those that I find online, of course, but I’m not sure it will quite provide all I need. I’ll find some in-person community eventually, I know, but for now I feel I’m looking out over a city of young software engineers, each sequestered in their own room.
Actually, let’s make that the main question I pose to the room this time around. If I’m to seek an arbitrary activity to pull people together (it doesn’t have to be something I already know about or have any competency in), what sort of activity sends a muserly signal? Or, asking the same question in different terms, what’s something that would unexpectedly pull you to meet with strangers?
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Robert, it’s lovely to see your breaching, even if only briefly. If you’re still sticking around, what’s been happening in your world, occupying your thoughts? That seems a question I’ve asked too rarely.
Piggy, what was the outcome of the homelab work? Is that still an ongoing project?
ZNZ, great to hear from you! It’s interesting to note just how many musers here are trans. I feel a similar way about physical existence these days–in my case, I used to absolutely abhor clothing; now, although it’s not always cooperative, I find it fun and expressive! Any particular films that you’ve appreciated watching in the last while, recents or older?
ibcf, have you been practicing animation yourself, even if not for employment? (And the adjustment of politics is absolutely an expected part of aging!)
Cat’s Eye, I definitely am of the same mind on looking for slower thoughts. Well, there’s an interplay of two competing instincts as I age: I both want to spend more time on slower things and become more and more aware of how quickly time passes and want to waste as little of it as possible. It’s still hard for me to grapple with the reality that every passing moment is the exercising of a trade-off. But at this point I can at least be certain worthwhile activity is usually not spent on superficial decision making. I’d be interested to hear if there are specific Joan Didion works that you recommend. I also have yet to read her. And do let us know the title of your book, if you’re willing! I’d hastily seek it out, for one.
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And, of course, on the topic of books recently read:
I’ve mostly occupied myself with computer books of late (The Pragmatic Programmer, The Algorithm Design Manual, The C Programming Language, Design Patterns, earlier SICP, and now inching my way through Patterson & Hennessy’s Computer Organization and Design, which has proven the most exciting of the bunch so far!)–there’s a lot to catch up on when you don’t start out with the degree your peers hold. Although, I’m finding the material enjoyable enough that I’m sure I’d be quite content to focus on it even if I wasn’t working in software. At my previous place, the stack of CS to-read books measured at least two feet tall; I still probably have several years of curriculum cut out for me.
But there’s more, too! After a discussion with some other Musers, I read Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell in the span of about a week. It’s surely one of the finest works of fiction I’ve ever encountered. Apparently, it was one regularly mentioned on the ‘blog back in the day, though I don’t recall. It does, however, reveal itself as a clear inspiration for my memories of the Alchemy RRR (which I refuse to go back and read, even though I’m not sure I contributed anything in the end), so holds a distinct muserly feel to me. Plenty of clever homage to other 19th century books, which was all the more satisfying on the tail of The Life of Samuel Johnson and, more distantly, Jane Eyre and Middlemarch. I understand there’s likely some cultural commentary I’m missing out on, too, but I’m mostly appreciative of the nods to other works in tone and structure, a compelling story, an ingenious description of a magical world, and especially the patient worldbuilding, doled out piecemeal, in tantalizing comments or footnotes.
Just now starting in on an abridged The Voyage of the Beagle, keeping the theme of that time period going.
Piggy, I’m eyeing that A Million Windows. I glanced briefly at Neurotribes but I’m particularly interested to hear what stood out to you that prompted three reads. Are there specific things you’ve learned from it that interested you? Or perhaps some specific appeal?
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Cat's Meow
in April 18th, 2024 @ 11:46re: socializing in-person and making friends
I can sincerely recommend Bumble BFF, trivia, and book clubs.
I moved to my current city about 15 months ago, and Bumble BFF was surprisingly lovely. It was nice to know that everybody on there was also looking to make friends, so if I found someone I liked, they would probably appreciate me reaching out. Similarly, that knowledge helped me be more bold about quickly transitioning conversations to some kind of in-person meet-up where we could go deeper and get a better sense of each other. I made a few solid friends out of that. Even the meet ups that didn’t go anywhere in the long run still built my confidence at meeting new people and could be fun on their own just to have a chat.
One of those people invited me to a weekly trivia meet-up with other people she’d met on Bumble. I highly recommend trivia as an arbitrary activity to bring Muserly people together. Encourages and rewards nerdiness, and particularly a wide variety of nerdiness. The questions often lead into natural conversation topics (“why do you know that?”). Space between questions allows for other conversation. The group can be both regular (so you don’t have to make brand new plans every week) and flexible (okay for people to miss one, okay to invite new people).
I’ve also gotten into a great book club, which itself originated on Reddit with someone making a post on the local sub looking for a book club. I know book clubs can be hit or miss, but this one has been really nice and consistent for the last 8 months.
Speaking of books, the book “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously” by Jessica Pan provided me a lot of motivation to get out there and meet people. A big takeaway was that even though acting like an extrovert can be extremely scary to introverts like me, often the rewards are better and the risks less than you think.
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Piggy
in April 13th, 2024 @ 20:55Hello everyone! I’ve read all these comments the day (perhaps hour) they were posted, but never managed the gumption to reply to them, sadly (“sadly” referring to the gumptionlessness, not to the reply).
Hello, newcomers, if you didn’t give up already! This site is now mostly an archive of conversations past, although once upon a time it was a bustling hub for lovers of the magazine that then held the Muse title. The current magazine is quite a bit different, as far as I’ve heard, and lacks much of the charm that those of us here loved so dearly. It may be excellent in its own genre, though. Anyway, this site has never officially been affiliated with the magazine, and its connections to the current magazine are more tenuous yet. Nowadays it’s mostly a place for people to occasionally remember that one website they used to post on ten years ago and come back to check and see if it’s still online.
Hello, Cat’s Eye! It warms my porcine heart to see you again. Congratulations on the books! I suspect that’s an accomplishment that will remain on my to-do list while I’m having dirt scooped on top of me. My only personal confrontation with Didion was a “timed write” I did in high school on some excerpt of hers, which I remember fondly because the teacher commented that I had pointed something out which she had never noticed or considered before.
I’m glad you’re no longer a freeloader on our hardworking society, Giminator!
Regarding socializing, I’m far from the right person to suggest advice. I’m an antisocial hermit, and that’s only grown deeper as I’ve gotten older. I suppose it’s probably just that the companionship of my wife and kids satisfies what little requirement I have of human interaction. The only two ideas that come to mind for you don’t necessarily involve in-person hanging out, so they may not suit. The one is ham radio, which I’ve been reluctantly attracted to for the last year or so. I’ve been getting more and more interested in all kinds of radio stuff, except actually getting licensed or talking to people. Currently I’ve been messing around with something called Meshtastic. The other idea is open-source software, which I’ve had an affinity towards for many years now. I suspect good friendships could be forged through GitHub pull requests. Doesn’t really get you away from your computer, though….Regarding homelabbing, I believe it’s something that never really finishes, thankfully. It provides no end of learning opportunities.
Regarding Neurotribes, I think I just like hearing the history of the concept of autism, and seeing the connections between that and the current popular understanding of it. I’ve only read maybe six or eight books about autism, but only half of them have been worth reading, in my opinion, this being one of them. (Another would be Uniquely Human, although that focuses on autistic children.) My reading the book three times may not be as significant as it sounds, though; I have a habit of rereading books I like, in much the same way as I might frequently eat the same foods or wear the same clothes. I find it comforting and safe, I guess.
Now, I have a question I’m a bit worried about asking, which has only just occurred to me after so many years: how is the G in your name pronounced? As in “gif” or as in “gif”?
Anyways, as for myself, we just got back tonight from a trip to Texas to see the eclipse and visit my sister. It was eventful, to put it delicately. The house we were going to rent got cancelled on us three days before the trip, and the house we got to replace it was cancelled within a few hours. The third house, which we did actually manage to rent, was in rough shape: half the light bulbs were burnt out, a ceiling fan was about to fall from the ceiling, there were cockroaches, mice, and ants everywhere, the microwave tripped the breaker whenever it stopped, the coffeepot didn’t work, there were only two forks. For the grand finale, on the last day of the trip, the water main right in front of the house burst, and then it did it again as soon as they finished fixing it the first time. But thankfully, we did see the eclipse thanks to a last-second break in the clouds, and we spent some good time with my sister and her family. I’m utterly exhausted and glad to be home, although I’m also itching for the next road trip. That’s something my family did every summer when I was growing up, which I’m utterly grateful for, but it hasn’t been an annual occurrence yet for my kids. I’m hoping to correct that.
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Cat's Meow
in April 18th, 2024 @ 11:48Wow, I’m glad you got to see the eclipse, but that housing situation sounds wild.
How old are your kids now?
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Cat's Meow
in April 18th, 2024 @ 11:49Also, happy early birthday! (according to the sidebar calendar)
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Cat's Meow
in April 18th, 2024 @ 11:59It’s been 18 years to the day since my first post on MuseBlog! My MB life is now a legal adult!
Pleased to see all of you who have dropped in lately. I’m making a point of trying to type and not to think too hard about it, or else I risk never posting at all.
I currently work as an independent online tutor. Before this, I taught high school biology for four years. I have much better work-life balance now. I also like that I get to do a mix of science, math, test prep, and random other subjects that my students ask me about. And helping them grow as humans at the core of it all. I’m dipping my toes into coaching for adults because that might be a nice complement.
As mentioned in a comment upthread, we moved to my husband’s hometown about 15 months ago. It has been such a good change, especially along with the career change. I feel like I can finally put down roots, make friends, and have a well-rounded life here. I mentioned book club and trivia above. We have season tickets to our local pro women’s soccer team and also regularly watch Bayern Munich men at 6:30am on Saturday mornings. We’ve also been doing a D&D campaign with some college friends. I got extremely into Taylor Swift fandom (specifically the queer part) for about a year, and while my interest there has faded somewhat, I’m still looking forward to her new album tonight. I braved the wild Ticketmaster shenanigans to get tickets for last summer. I’m also getting back into Neopets, which is undergoing a revival.
I was diagnosed two months ago with idiopathic hypersomnia, which basically means I’m excessively sleepy during the day and science isn’t sure why, but at least we can try different medications now. It’s been an interesting journey to realize that my sleepiness and low energy wasn’t just due to job burnout, mental health, or habits within my control.
Life is pretty good, all in all.
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Piggy
in April 18th, 2024 @ 15:54A very merry ‘Blogiversary to you, Meow! I guess now you have to get permission for your MB life to continue using its pseudonym. Kidwise, the oldest is four and a half, and the other two are younger than that. It’s fascinating to watch a person grow into themselves. And thanks for the birthday wishes! I only have a few days left of my twenties, which it seems like I should care about. Oh well!
I’m glad you’ve found yourself in a place and a job that are working well for you! I hope that you’re supplementing your tutoring material with quirky comics, perhaps with characters like, I don’t know, maybe a mischievous prankster deity that plays a flute?
I’m glad you’ve been given a name for your tiredness, too, even if all it is is “You’re-Too-Sleepy-For-Some-Reason Syndrome”. I assume it’s distinct from chronic fatigue syndrome?
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