Al and I went to our first Portland Thorns match last night. I think this is maybe the third soccer match I’ve ever been to. The two previous were Timbers games for company parties and one of them got rained on pretty hard.

Since this was my first “go sit in the regular seating, pay attention for 90 minutes” match I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was pretty fun. Our hosts are on their first season passes and newly energized about the sport, so their enthusiasm rubbed off. I think the other thing I kept coming back to was that watching requires patience similar to watching high-level jiu jitsu grapplers, but the other fans do a lot to contribute to your sense of the ebb, flow, rising and falling tension.

More Lemmy

I have three accounts on assorted Lemmy instances, with a fourth pending. I learned about wefwef yesterday, which is a PWA that provides a nice client you can save to your phone homescreen same as Elk for Mastodon. I also have the beta of memmy on my phone.

There’s not a ton of interaction on many of the communities I’ve subscribed to so far. There’s a portland one where people are swearing to be nicer, less hostile, and less censorious than /r/portland, which is a super low bar; and also less reactionary and goonish than /r/PortlandOR, which — again — low bar.

You can subscribe to communities in Mastodon by adding their address sans the ! lemmy convention. I added a few but there’s the usual “now your instance needs to start pulling their stuff in” lag.

Secret Invasion

I’m two episodes into the Skrull/Nick Fury espionage series Secret Invasion. Not sure. It feels like in terms of size, scale, and texture it’s maybe a step down from The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, which felt pretty slick; and maybe a step up from She-Hulk Attorney at Law, which felt like it was made on a shoestring budget. None of those three have the charm of Hawkeye.

The dialog’s sort of flat, there are “big scenes” that feel small. Samuel L. Jackson is doing something different and I’m not sure it always works. There’s a reason to not involve the Avengers that … it’s going to always be a problem when there are any issues going on of a sub-Thanos scale where you’re not just sending a group of second-string probationary Avengers to fix it.

But, you know, let’s see where it goes.

Emacs function for tagging posts in Hugo

I seem to be sticking to just blogging in Markdown, using the Ruby script I wrote. I didn’t realize how much I missed reference links, or Markdown link notation in general. Tags are a little different story. I like the way ox-hugo uses org-mode’s heading tags (:foo:bar:baz:) instead of Markdown/YAML’s key tags (tags: ["foo","bar","baz"]).

So I made mph/replace-tags-in-frontmatter and stuck it in my growing Hugo submenu. You just invoke it and enter a comma-delimited set of tags and it replaces that frontmatter key. My script asks for tags up front, which is fine for single-topic posts where I know the tags up front. Doesn’t work as well for daily posts, where it takes a day to know what’s going in.

(defun mph/replace-tags-in-frontmatter ()
  "Replace the 'tags' line in YAML frontmatter with user input."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((frontmatter-start-regexp "^---\n")
         (frontmatter-end-regexp "\n---\n")
         (tags-regexp "^\\s-*tags:\\s-*\\[.*\\]")
         (input (read-string "Enter new tags (comma-separated): "))
         (new-tags (mapcar (lambda (tag) (format "\"%s\"" (string-trim tag)))
                           (split-string input ","))))
    (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (re-search-forward frontmatter-end-regexp)
      (backward-char 1)
      (re-search-backward frontmatter-start-regexp)
      (forward-char 1)
      (re-search-forward tags-regexp)
      (replace-match (format "tags: [%s]" (mapconcat #'identity new-tags ","))))
    (message "Tags replaced successfully.")))

(map! :leader
      (:prefix ("H" . "Hugo")
       :desc "Set tags for Hugo post" "t" #'mph/replace-tags-in-frontmatter))

Ben in France

Ben watched the Apple store in Strasbourg get smashed and looted, avoided a tear-gassing, and was briefly separated from his bike. He finally made it to the train after missing the first one out of town. Now he’s on to the Netherlands.

When I was almost his exact age I went to Europe and then the then-Soviet Union as part of a student group. Our professor gave us a lot of advice on how to avoid local trouble, and since it was winter things were pretty much on rails anyhow: Cologne was mild, Copenhagen was wintry but okay, Stockholm was extremely cold, then Leningrad and Moscow were where I learned that -40 is the same on both the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. Hungary: Cold and snowbound. Zurich: Not so bad but we were staying near a park known for aggressive cop sweeps. So there were opportunities for a little bit of mischief, but the overall vibe was “travel in groups, don’t go off alone.” So we mostly didn’t except for one guy who made himself sort of the group pariah.

When I think about my year in Korea, I’m surprised nothing happened. I was there during a summer with some violent anti-US protests thanks to high-profile brawls between soldiers and Korean civilians. We were locked down on post for several weekends straight because the risk of violent altercation was high. I was a little bit of a loner over there, so it wasn’t unusual for me to be out in the ville on my own, and a few times when I had to drive command staff up to Seoul for overnighters I just wandered around on my own after they cut me loose for the day. My KATUSA friend said my lonerish-ness made him nervous. I was in a weird frame of mind at that point — fresh out of jump school and hence invulnerable, more physically capable than I’d ever been — but he had a list of places I wasn’t supposed to ever go and said the stakes would be higher than a beating or a black eye, so I didn’t go to those places. I got followed a few times other places, did the whole “demonstrate situational awareness” thing, and nothing ever happened.

Ben’s over there with two other kids just roaming around, with the itinerary seeming to change as whims take them. It continues to make me incredibly happy for him. It took me a while to gain the confidence he has, his street savvy is a lot higher than mine was at his age, and his confidence comes from knowing how to get away from whatever it is, not steer into it.

typography

I saw a blog go by with a really nice serifed body type. I spent 30 minutes messing around with Google Fonts trying to dial in something similar and ended up not liking anything I saw, so I picked something completely different to freshen up headings and nav but otherwise left everything alone. I’m not sure how much of not liking things was not liking them and how much was not being sure of my own typographical taste. Part of me thought “oh! well! Go learn!” and the rest of me outvoted that part.

Anyhow, day two of a four-day weekend. Nothing on the agenda for the next two days besides visiting a friend for a walk through Oaks Bottom tomorrow, and having some friends over for dinner for the Fourth. The park across the street is going to go completely bananas with the usual impromptu fireworks show, and there’s a better-than-even chance of the show more or less ending with a drunken brawl, so we tend to stick close to the house every year to make sure nothing catches on fire. This will be the 14th year we’ve enjoyed this particular experience. This year I’m anticipating it with less dread than normal, and maybe even a little amusement.

Somehow our little park became the place a lot of people go to set off their illegal fireworks. People start showing up in the early afternoon to set up chairs and blankets at the edge of the treeline. Within an hour of sundown everything is parked in and there are two rows of picnic chairs around the perimeter of the park, which is a block square minus maybe 50 or 75 yards of treeline on our end of it.

On the one hand, wow it can be annoying, especially when people block your driveway, set fireworks off next to your car, or set things on fire. And nobody packs out their trash, so the park is strewn with trash and expended fireworks the next morning. But it’s also just … this thing that happens. People get a lot of joy from it. It’s not official or sanctioned. It’s seems to be a spontaneous thing and it happens every year. When we had a rescue dog who was terrorized by the whole thing it was the absolute worst. Now that we don’t, I feel bad for all the other dogs and people in the neighborhood who are suffering, but it doesn’t feel personal, and the cops and fire department have zero interest in doing anything to curtail something they come around and watch every year. So there’s not much to do but watch it unfold and people watch.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying out Golden Ratio, an Emacs package that dynamically resizes windows inside the frame as you switch between them. I saw a few warnings here and there that it had a few bugs, but for the past few weeks it seemed fine. I finally came across one a few days ago that I couldn’t quite isolate — it broke the way org-insert-structure-template worked — and finally took the time to narrow it down this morning.

Golden Ratio isn’t being maintained anymore, so I decided “not enough time in the day,” marked that part of my config :tangle no and installed Zoom,, which does much the same thing.

Minimum config:

(custom-set-variables
 '(zoom-mode t)
 '(zoom-size '(0.618 . 0.618)))

Post-reddit

Golden Ratio made me think about reddit for a bit. I learned about that package from one of the Emacs subreddits. I don’t recall a ton of discussion about it, so it must have been one of the quiet link aggregator subs, like /r/planetemacs. That was the other half of my reddit experience: Grazing steady feeds of interesting stuff. I’ve learned a lot about assorted interests — motorcycling, longboarding, Emacs, ruby — from watching a subreddit scroll by and just grabbing links.

That part of my experience is largely unaffected by the third-party app shutdown. I don’t follow or participate in discussions much, so I can do that from a browser or reddit’s own, terrible app.

But while I’m not, like, boycotting mad, I’m irritated. I don’t know how spez managed to press so many buttons at once with me — ordinarily tech dude stuff rolls off my back, and C-level tech dude stuff barely registers as language or thought, but the combination of smarm, Ralph-Wiggum-esqe “I’m a business man <eats paste>” posturing, deceit, and bizarre turn into trying to make the whole thing some sort of identity politics issue just … wow.

Like, look: Even at my most business-like — my most “jacked director” — I’m pretty much just one of those vintage-looking prints you see at mall restaurants of little kids dressed in adult clothing sitting at a desk on an old-timey phone or whatever. If I have a philosophy of business communication or governing principle for “how I show up,” it is probably “best to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool …” etc.

But when I read the clown-like attempts at businessing going on over the Apollo debacle — the appalling, weak blithered promises that everyone was gonna be cool here — I was sort of appalled and a little embarrassed for them. It was like when you ask one of your managers “so did you give them that feedback about promotion?” and they swear to God they laid down the law but their report took it like a champ, then you actually read the check-in and it’s, like, “Joe Grudd was stellar this year. Recommending for immediate promotion. Top notch ace contributor. Indispensable.”

And then, after dithering around and failing to just sit up straight and deliver the damn message, they let themselves get clowned. Nobody covered themselves in glory in whatever negotiations were going on, but table stakes for people who’re busy ruining the customer experience on a beloved website because They Are Serious Business People Who Get How This Works is pretty much “don’t look worse than the one-man cottage industrialists who’re hoping you’ll get them to go peacefully if you just buy them out ha ha only serious.”

But somehow they couldn’t even do that.

Anyhow.

It just sort of shades the whole experience now. Perfectly nice, sometimes emotionally violent shitposters just getting on with their days, the occasional incel breaking cover and going down in a hail of gunfire under the helicopter spotlights of the moderation team, no longer ad free, forcing you to remember that when someone says “have some gold, kind stranger” that gold was sold to them by the Ed Rooney of web publishing. There’s just this lingering fart smell wafting through it all. Where do you go from here?

Lemmy

Well, I decided to look around at Lemmy.

I get it, more or less, and am assuming that all the weirdness I’m seeing is down to the same thing that happened with Mastodon last fall: Lots of little instances struggling to keep up with the newbies, plus different configurations, plus the codebase itself. Most of the instances I skipped through were either slow or glitchy. The most solid Lemmy instance I’ve seen — sometimes slow but usable — is the unfederated hexbear.net, and I don’t think it counts.

So I signed up for a couple of more normal ones and will revisit as things calm down.

Himalayan Day

Today is “work on the Himalayan day.” My new Antigravity self-jumping battery is here, the mounting base and passenger back pad for our Givi topcase are here (which will make it easier for Al to ride pillion), and I did some reading about how to test for that parasitic drain. So I’m going to give it all a few hours out in the driveway with a wrench and a multimeter. It’s sunny and beautiful, so I’m looking forward to the ride after I’m done.

I’m kind of wondering if this small round of “get ready for sale, but also make it a little nicer” investment will change my mind about selling it.

My strong impression of Himalayans in general is that the user base is split between people who just drive them off the lot and love them, never really having much trouble that doesn’t get addressed during early service; and people like me, who get a badly QA’d one and more than their share of glitchy components.

I like riding the thing. It’s a manageable size for city riding, and it does really well anywhere you’d want to go in the Portland metro area. Holds its own on 205/84, fine for runs up to St. Johns or Sauvie Island, great down to Estacada. With the panniers and topcase it’s fine for groceries. There’s just enough power to two-up in town on date nights. I don’t think I’d ever take for a run down I5, but I could see running downstate on the back highways.

I’ve done so much to it at this point that there’s some sweat equity I don’t want to part with. If I could nail down the parasitic drain I’d have a bike that I feel more than a little attached to, because I’ve put a lot of time into getting it dialed in. Knowing there’s a dealership up in St. Johns that spends most of its time selling RE’s, vs. the sort of crappy “RE’s are a weird loss-leader for broke Harley wannabes” dealership out on the west side I had to get early service from, makes me a little more hopeful, too. It was frustrating having to go do my own research about assorted RE glitches then convince the service team to try fixes. I get the impression the St. Johns people are a little more into REs and would be a little more proactive.

We’ll see. If I get it into a place where it just feels good and I don’t have that “poorly shimmed table leg” feeling every time I turn the key, maybe we continue another season.

Anyhow, that’s the plan for today, so I’m gonna save and ship this.

Thorns game

Oh … going to a Thorns game tonight. Our first. Kathleen and Amy had extra tickets, so off we go.