I have a Synology with Docker on it, plus a bunch of community packages for assorted things and it’s … fine. But people have been talking about this Pikapods thing so I gave it a spin with Calibre-Web as my test case. Right now I’m at the “got ping” stage with it: It is up, configured, and sees my library, and I just figured out how to make it put a missing cover on a book. I have not yet turned to getting my Kobo to talk to it, but omg I cannot wait to get my Kobo talking to it, because I think e-ink readers are both the best and worst technology I ever adopted, and I have a tool now that will allow me to make right the parts of that adoption that bother me the worst.

Stake whatever territory you want on the copyright front. I am an inconsistent hypocrite. In this particular use case, I am a hypocrite who happens to pay:

I supported my family for years with my writing. The person you read on these pages probably doesn’t seem like it. I am no longer a craftsman or a stylist. I am just this guy who still finds an outlet and a release in writing, but who does not really edit himself, and who understands that time-shifted 20 years give or take I might be the proprietor of the world’s least listened to podcast or most unwatched YouTube channel. Writing is just the way I tell eight or nine people a day what I’m into right now, and I deeply believe text you can skim is more considerate than forcing you to scrub through a bunch of recorded rambling and ill-conceived attempts to force you into a parasocial connection.

But I pay. I pay for newspapers, I pay for newsletters, and I buy every single book I read (that I’m not getting from the library). When my team found an open NFS mount full of O’Reilly books on an old Solaris box in the back of a DC, it was an easy decision to say “failing disk, mount it ro and serve notice that it is leaving us” because I was never so entrepreneurial or talented that I could afford the vanity of just giving my shit away: I had to sell it to someone if I didn’t want to go back to soldiering or doing secretary work to eat. You go fight Big Content, and I get it, but I will also pay.

So this isn’t me cackling and chortling because “fuck paying for books and now I don’t have to.” Looking over what’s in my new Pikapod, I’m pretty sure I’ve even paid twice for a big chunk of what’s in there.

I’m cackling and chortling because I’m free of doing business with an entity I wish I hadn’t. I don’t care about the law, I care about what’s right, and I bought every one of those books, so my duty to “right” is discharged.

Work

I bit off more than I can chew today. If anyone writes my biography, this is gonna be a weird exception to a largely prosaic and staid track record of “safety first, move with deliberation.”

But I bit off more than I can chew because I picked a dumb industry to work in, and I occasionally feel the need to thwart expectations and try out the whole “break glass” thing before retreating to my home position.

Just putting it on the record so you know who you’re recommending when you see me asking for help with references: Occasionally I’ll surprise you. It is not my intent to also terrify you.

braus

I realized after pulling it down to my second machine that I didn’t actually push my QoL changes to my braus fork. Fixed that.

Okay. Done. Time to get the Pikapod talking to my Kobo.

I’m one of those people who has felt the glow of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) dim a little, but even if I’m not as into the product as I used to be I am pretty fascinated by Marvel Studios as a matter of operational excellence. MCU is a history of Marvel Studios that starts back in the pre-MCU ’90s and ends some time earlier this year.

It’s an interesting book!

I didn’t understand how toy-driven Marvel was in the early going, nor how far into the MCU era that toy-making imperative drove thinking, nor how much the sexism of the toy industry delayed the introduction of women characters. Similarly, the weird split between the movie and tv properties that never made any sense to me is laid bare as run-of-the-mill corporate foolishness. It ends up answering a lot of questions about why it is that an outfit so excellent at execution did so many weirdly non-excellent things.

The book ends on a hopeful note, suggesting that the overexposure, the sheer glut of product, and the downward creep in quality are all the result of overextending leader Kevin Feige, but that Marvel may be taking a step back and slowing things down enough to restore a little brand equity.

Doing nothing

It was a good weekend to do pretty much nothing. Rainy, chilly, dark. It made more sense to just button up and hide out. So I read, played a few games, and fiddled with a Linux PC in my office. It was all pretty aimless, and that felt pretty good.

There’s a part of me that is beginning to feel a little restless. Work has taken a lot of energy, but the very busy annual planning cycle is over and I made it a point to go pretty easy on my team this quarter: We need to move our endpoint management system out of self-hosted infra and into the vendor’s cloud, and I didn’t want much else cluttering up December and January.

So, things are slowing down and I’m getting some mental bandwidth back. I miss writing regularly, even if I wasn’t writing much. I don’t think about photography much these days. I feel due for a project or pastime.

People on the identity left will not like the observation that some of the most strident voices in their faction are performing something that manages to look like self-abrogation while preserving their economic privilege and social status. People on the socialist left will be resistant to any attempt to reclaim or redeem identity politics and standpoint epistemology. Jacobin has already published an uneasy review arguing, more or less, that identity politics have always been an elite preoccupation. It is also a pretty circumlocutious piece of writing that reminds me how much “political writing” is a vehicle for assorted cultural battles.

Táíwò tries to thread the needle between these two camps and I welcome the effort.

It’s a thin book that mostly serves to flesh out an earlier essay you can still find online. You can try the essay out and decide whether you want a bit more of the same thesis in the book.

Whether it’s the book or the essay, I recommend Táíwò’s writing. Between him, the Fields sister’s Racecraft, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Fear of Falling, Catherine Liu’s The Virtue Hoarders, and Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal!, I’ve spent the last year or so reading a lot of streams that could serve as tributaries to a river of left populism. These streams all exist in uneasy relationship to each other, sometimes making the contradictions of the several left tendencies uncomfortably obvious but all of them offering a piece of the puzzle.

Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò