When the world is wrong, you still gotta keep on

Work, man.

I hit the ground running and I haven't stopped since. Got a deadline for a new computer lab rollout that I need to finish -- I think it's going fine, actually, it's just a lot -- and with training in between April and now, everything has been A Lot. Also, Gemini's port being blocked at work hasn't helped at all.

Oh yeah, and I keep waking up with less rights than I had the day before. Which is good and cool.

Things that have helped:

going to pride for the first time since 2019, I think. Man I missed being around other queers, I almost cried. I was hoping there'd be more, like, groups, clubs, organizations that weren't Anheuser-Busch or whatever -- I think UAW was there though, so heck yeah. We did find a softball group that hopefully will get in touch with us for the fall season. I want to move around, dammit.
softball is of course because of Blaseball, may it come back to us soon. I never wanted to engage with recreational sports before. I had grown up playing baseball and soccer, of course, but I didn't like it. Sure, teach kids how to be competitive or whatever, it didn't work for me. And honestly, it'd be cooler to teach kids to work with a group towards a goal and seeing it to completion.
side note, this is where I wish people had taught me how to finish projects when I was a kid, because I am not good at that now. *gestures to this capsule*
that being said, I'm almost done with a book. It's nothing fancy, and I'll put it up on itch as pay what you want. I didn't write it to get famous, i wrote it for fun. Actually, did a few pieces like that, poked at my writing group's project, which may or may not get done, but it sure is fun to play in that sandbox with them.
my partner got into baseball, and we've been to a few games since! first game since 2019, back in May. I know we're being less cautious than we should be, because COVID is still around, despite everyone pretending it isn't, but it was outdoors, and I'm less worried about that.

Trying not go go full Luddite

I did buy a Framework laptop. I'm a Mac main user, but Apple has been pushing it with me lately, and Framework fits a lot of where I ended up with tech rights vis a vis Right to Repair. I bought it so I could write out in the living room with my partner, and edit, which I had been doing on the iPad, which was fine, but it wasn't a laptop. And the thing is, the Framework is fine. They had the gall to ship my model with Windows 10 Home which like, why even bother? The keyboard is great, but the trackpad is lacking. Everything else works as expected, and given that it's running Windows 11 (now), I'm not in an environment I want to be in, and I don't just endlessly surf on it when I could be not looking at a screen.

(I'm super not interested in the whole Mac vs Windows vs Linux thing. User the platform for the software you need, and use it if you enjoy it. I'm tired of this whole "my choice is the correct choice" attitude. Whatever.)

I can still remember clearly back to 2008, living in an apartment in Seattle on First Hill (paying what me and my then-partner thought was a ridiculous $900 a month. I don't even want to know what it goes for now), and putting the computer away at night, leaving it behind on the desk in the bedroom to hang out and draw and watch TV. I didn't even have a smart phone for most of 2008. And looking back at all of the features smartphones promised -- always on internet, mail and twitter in your pocket, check the web anywhere you need to, maps, download and listen to music -- the only things I really need are the maps. All of those other things have turned out to be kind of terrible. And i keep thinking about the before times, before social media and before smartphones. I'm not going to tell people it was better then, but man does it feel simpler.

I fell down a rabbit hole on archive.org, looking at old magazines, old Sears catalogs (they were selling Laser Computers Apple II clones at one point!), digging in their music section, and I found something I kind of laughed at at first, but now I cannot get enough of: BBS Magazine. A magazine about maintaining a BBS. The oldest issue goes back to a lone 1992 issue, and I want to go back further, I want to see more! I've used BBSes growing up, I was lucky to have a computer in the house, and friends with the same. I remember getting on to a local BBS from my friend's 286, downloading Brix and I think a single porn picture (looking at the ads in the magazine, so many of the BBSes advertised that they had Adult sections. I love how early digital porn showed up on the scene. That was pre-World Wide Web!). It was a pretty memorable experience.

There's also a pretty good amount of zines on archive.org that demand attention. I'm not going to go into "I was born at the wrong time", because I feel okay about when I was born -- got to see the world before 9/11 started America's downward spiral, saw the early world wide web, queer rights have never been more accepted or better (for now, goddammit), but I do wonder what it would have been like being in my 20s during the 90s, not that I'm in my 20s now. I feel like things might have been more open and lonelier at the same time. I do remember the 90s, just as a younger person, and the world felt so much smaller back then.

I need to reread Generation X by Douglas Coupland again. Formative book right there.

-donut

Links

BBS Magazine
Boardwatch Magazine

They started with BBS management, too, and then turned to ISP stuff. Feels a little more serious than BBS Mag.

Archive.org has a whole collection on zines too. Need to deep dive this more.

Zines Archive

Post title from Solar Eclipse, by the Garages, from their stellar performance on Desert Bus 2021.

Solar Eclipse

While I'm at it, the video of the performance

The Garages VS Desert Bus 2021

20 July 2022