You can tell it was a long weekend because I was experimenting with alternative terminal emulators, starting with kitty because … I saw someone mention it? I don’t remember why, but here we are.

In the process of configuring it I came across something I’d just pushed to the background, which was that none of the terminal apps I was using were picking up on the Monaspace fonts as legit candidates. So I decided to run it down and learned that the font system doesn’t see those fonts as actually monospaced.

Here’s an incantation you can stick in ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/20-monaspace.conf, then run fc-cache -f.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
    <match target="scan">
        <test name="family" compare="contains">
            <string>Monaspace</string>
        </test>
        <edit name="spacing">
            <const>dual</const>
        </edit>
    </match>
</fontconfig>

Seemed to fix it.

Anyhow, what do I like about kitty?

• Quick access to launching URLs from a keyboard shortcut.
• The whole “kitten” extension system, which includes some good ones for theme selection, file transfers, and hyperlinked grep
• Its pared-down, simple vibe sitting on top of all the customization.

My first game of Cards Against Humanity

… was this weekend, with a room full of people I don’t know very well. How to approach this?

I guess I’ll say this:

I’ve got a particular sense of humor and I am okay with it, but it is not for everyone. Given what looked like a big box full of thousands of Cards Against Himanity cards, it is entirely reasonable to me that there would be something in there that would exceed my own capacity to shock or to be shocked. There were a few “ick” moments, and a few “lol” moments, but many, many more “I’d have to think this is funny for this to be funny” moments, but not because I found those things offensive so much as just … not funny?

The whole exercise was a little lost on me because there is a difference between “I am wound super tight and this is a transgressive thrill that allows me to occupy a space I do not ordinarily permit myself or permit for others” and “I find all sorts of shit funny and understand not everyone else does, so I am not going to communicate some of those things in some contexts.”

So I didn’t find the whole thing liberating or freeing or transgressive. It reminded me a lot of what David Graeber had to say about “play” vs. “games”:

“Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness. This suggests that the absolute pure form of play, one that really is absolutely untrammeled by rules of any sort (other than those it itself generates and can set aside at any instance) itself can exist only in our imagination, as an aspect of those divine powers that generate the cosmos. Here’s a quote from Indian philosopher of science Shiv Visvanathan:

“’A game is a bounded, specific way of problem solving. Play is more cosmic and open-ended. Gods play, but man unfortunately is a gaming individual. A game has a predictable resolution, play may not. Play allows for emergence, novelty, surprise.'

“All true. But there is also something potentially terrifying about play for just this reason. Because this open-ended creativity is also what allows it to be randomly destructive. Cats play with mice. Pulling the wings off flies is also a form of play. Playful gods are rarely ones any sane person would desire to encounter. Let me put forth a suggestion, then. What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.”

Cards Against Humanity is definitely a game. And it is not, as Dungeons and Dragons can be, a kind of game that allows you to poke at the edges of play very much.

Launching Emacs from systemd

It happened a few versions ago, when I was busy running it on a Mac, but Emacs ships with a systemd unit, so you can fire it up like a service and use it with emacsclient. That simplifies a few things. Bozhidar Batsov on how it all works. I came across this while I was busy trying to make my Hugo posting script work across Linux and macOS machines, and cursing the whole daemonized Emacs situation. His whole blog is a treasure trove.

I’m wondering, given the way I use Emacs these days, why I insist on running the GUI version. I should try not for a few days and see what comes up.

Less a big thing to write about and more a thing I learned that was helpful after pounding my head against this wall:

mixed-pitch-mode allows for both variable and fixed pitches. It’s nice for org-mode, where you’ve got a mix of prose and more code-looking stuff – headings and body text look nicely typeset, property drawers and tags continue to use a fixed face.

My Doom font setting is pretty basic:

(setq doom-font (font-spec :family "Fira Code Retina" :size 15 :weight 'regular)
      doom-variable-pitch-font (font-spec :family "SF Pro" :size 16))
(

… but for reasons that eluded me, when I entered mixed-pitch mode, my variable pitch font was way too small, except when it was way too big.

I did a lot of poking around, a lot of searching, and a lot of scrolling forums, then I broke down and asked ChatGPT, which told me to add this:

(setq mixed-pitch-set-height 16)

That did it. Combined with the doom-earl-grey theme, I’ve got a pleasant, low-contrast, paper-like display to work with.

A rare political link

I was braced to hate this column, but ended up appreciating it a lot:

No, You Absolutely Do Not Have to Hand It To Tucker Carlson (The Nation)

“… there’s every reason to view Carlson’s alleged anti-war politics and putative politics as a fraud. It’s true that Carlson worries about escalation in the Ukraine/Russia conflict and has pushed for diplomacy. But his position on that issue is based not on any aversion to militarism but a belief that the United States should focus its firepower on other enemies, notably Mexico and China. Rather like the late Gore Vidal (who, alas, made this argument in the pages of The Nation), Carlson wants an American-Russia alliance against the non-white hordes. International relations scholar Daniel Drezner observes, ‘It’s also hard to claim that Carlson was opposed to U.S. military adventurism; it’s more accurate to say Carlson preferred aggressive military adventurism closer to home. Carlson repeatedly called for using the military south of the border in Mexico.’”

… and

As for economic populism, Carlson is far more likely to criticize big corporations for “wokeness” (in other words trying to keep up with changing social mores) than union busting. His populism is the kind that worries about gender ambiguity in M&Ms candy—not rampant inequality. He’s all too quick to revert to GOP business-class norms when there is a partisan battle. Business Insider reported on a telling moment in 2021 when Carlson “accused President Joe Biden of proposing a tax hike on wealthy Americans to ‘punish’ them.” This was a tax on people earning more than $400,000 per year—hardly a fitting target for proletarian outrage.

In sum:

His occasional populist and pacifist sentiments only exist in the context of a politics that aims to take justified anti-establishment outrage and harvest it for far-right ethnonationalism.

Why was I braced to hate it?

Because one of my core theses about What is Going on Right Now is that formerly cherished political categories are disintegrating, but we’re not doing a great job of understanding what that means, or allowing each other to explore what that means. So while it’s good to call out a charlatan like Tucker Carlson or assorted other faux populists (fauxpulists?), it’s not great when we just shoot on past that useful distinction-making and on into the territory of “therefore, nothing they’re saying should have any resonance with decent people.”

The danger of Tucker Carlson and others like him is not, to me, that they think bad or dangerous things. It’s that they are accomplished ideological entrepreneurs. They’re good at catching scent of shifts in the popular mood, understanding the language of those shifts, and then folding those shifts into whatever their real political commitments are. I’m not sure who you could name on the left that has shown the same acumen for that kind of political marketing. Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Katie Porter come to mind as politicians working the left populist beat. In terms of commentators? Not sure.

One bad side effect has been the rise of commentator who exist outside the mainstreams of conservative or liberal thought and engage in their own entrepreneurialism despite being badly confused about their own political commitments.

I’m thinking of people like Batya Sargon Unghar, who wrote a snarling takedown of student loan forgiveness as a populist issue because, she said, it wasn’t helping “enough classes of people,” implying that there couldn’t be any working people with student loan debt. She has made some good observations about the cultural and class proclivities of the professional media “class,” but that’s just it: She doesn’t see a working reporter as a “working class person.” The top one percent of households in the US control a third of the wealth, the bottom half of US households control 2.6 percent of it, but let’s pit the nurse (or reporter, or software developer, or corporate recruiter, or technical writer) paying off their student loans against the person working a job that didn’t require college.

And I’m also thinking of the contrarian class – people who probably have some sort of left political commitment but respond poorly to reflexive rejection of an idea because the wrong person coopted it, and who end up contributing to a feedback loop: They become impatient with the echo chamber, they resent the lazy dunks and thoughtless inconsistencies of politics built around cultural antagonisms, and they get lumped, in turn, with “the dark side,” tainting anything they’ve ever put forth regardless of its worthiness.

Anyhow, my point, I suppose, builds off this one:

The strategy of selectively borrowing left-wing ideas in order to bolster a program of nationalism, racism, and gender conformity is not new. As Meyerson and Mavuram rightly observe, this is a familiar tactic of fascism, which typically emerges in a time where establishment politics are in crisis and the public is open to multiple solutions.

I appreciate an article that can acknowledge that selective borrowing, and remind readers that Carlson and other fake populists like him are identifying “what works” about left political ideas. That doesn’t mean we should spend our time understanding how we could rehabilitate Tucker Carlson: He does not want to be rehabilitated. He is a cynic whose commitments are not mine. But we should spend some time understanding what in there both resonates with our own politics and speaks to people who are suffering.

Affiliate links and ethics

If you truly think a product is too bulky, pointlessly prods people toward buying a thing that replaces a shared good they probably already have, is hard to use, leaks water, takes forever, and is only worth a score of “5/10” even though you couldn’t even get your own spouse to try it out, I’d propose that you not put affiliate links in your review.

I think this cuts to the core of my issue with modern review sites. The only way to get the reviews is to accept that they need affiliate link revenue; but you end up in situations like this, where the product is a sustainability nightmare about which the only nice things you can say are “doesn’t smell,” “looks cute,” and “good if you don’t have an outlet” (even though you also note it is too big and heavy to actually carry anywhere there are no outlets). They still feel okay tossing up the affiliate links, even though their review nets out to “useless; do not buy.”

I’m just picking on this review because it went by in the news stream last week. There’s much worse.

But man it could also be better. There is so much electronic junk in the world – drop-shipped ripoffs, poorly thought out Kickstarters, parts-bin garbage. There should be less of it. It should not be okay to make something out of plastic and toxic battery components then render it useless in six months.

It’s fine for the Verge to do its journalistic duty by fairly reviewing a bad product and saying it’s bad. It’s correct for the Verge to disclose the existence of affiliate links to better educate people on how they’re incentivized. It would be awesome if the Verge, and sites like it, would go one step further and say “we’re not going to help you buy this thing” when they plainly don’t think the thing is worth buying, and when that thing is going to be turning up in a landfill.

Okay. That’s it for today. This afternoon is spoken for.