20210618

Fri Jun 18 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from eleven to seven. Cloudy with showers and chance of thunderstorms early in the morning, then mostly cloudy with chance of showers and thunderstorms in the late morning and afternoon. Highs in the mid 80s. Southwest winds up to 15 mph shifting to the west in the afternoon. Gusts up to 30 mph. Chance of precipitation 80 percent. Work ---------------------------------------- - build replacement LH router (and drive it over?) Done. - swap backup media? Done. - review Dell invoice Done. - order new cable modem from Bullseye for PW Done. - reevaluate all IT projects AGAIN No. - send work log to Jamie Received the "success bonus" offer letter. 5% of base salary if the sale closed by the end of the year and I'm still working for H&T. HA. Maybe if it was 50%. I actually called Jamie to make sure 5% wasn't a typo. No typo. Two turkeys crossed the intersection at Thirteen Mile and Southfield. They did pretty well negotiating traffic in the crosswalk. Thirty-minute walk at lunch. Sunny and warm. Saw a morning dove, a pair of crows, and a dragonfly. Heard a red-winged blackbird. One of the aspects I've always like best about system administration is tending systems like a garden — gradually making little changes and enhancements to improve the whole over time. It's depressing that H&T's impending sale effectively kills that aspect of the work (and that, due to the pandemic and staff changes and lack of budget, the garden will be somewhat dilapidated when I walk away). Home ---------------------------------------- - activate credit card Wow, I can hear what I assume is the Groves marching band pretty loudly from my apartment. Finished reading Masquerade in Lodi. This one was out of narrative chronology, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Lois_McMaster_Bujold#Penric_&_Desdemona Started Penric’s Mission. https://sarkos.tumblr.com/post/653977729571635200/fixyourwritinghabits-a-book-of-creatures > There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber > > English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog. https://tilde.wtf/~cyrus/blog/announcing-search-for-the-tildeverse.html https://if50.substack.com/p/1992-silverwolf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27482235 > It was an odd advert for a computer magazine. Next to a sketch of a provocatively posed, long-legged young woman in stockings—okay, maybe that part wasn’t so odd—its copy hyped not a new piece of hardware, but a house in Ireland: > > > the famous school where grown-up girls are transformed into schoolgirls. ...Now you can find out for yourself as you guide Trixie Trinian through the classrooms, corridors and secret places of the strangest school ever—to uncover > > “Not so much a programme more a way of life,” the text below helpfully clarified. While not entirely apparent, this was an ad for an adventure game. Sending £5.95 to “St. Bride’s School, Burtonport, County Donegal, Ireland” would get you a cassette tape for your Spectrum 48K containing a text adventure written, according to its label, by “the Games Mistresses.” > > At the address was “a white crumbling turn-of-the-century house overlooking the tiny fishing village of Burtonport,” where women could take a paid holiday that would immerse them in the life of a proper boarding school girl of an earlier time. “There were no electric lights in the place,” one game journalist wrote upon visiting: “the maid who answered the door was surely not of this decade.” The students wore bonnets and period clothes while attending lessons on mathematics, literature, and penmanship; plastic and other modern materials were forbidden; the headmistress was a severe woman in black who enforced strict discipline—stricter, at times, than some of the students might have preferred. “Quite where computers fit into this situation is difficult to understand,” another journalist wrote; and nobody could really put their finger on what the “situation” even was. Were the group “Victorian cultists?” Were they LARPers? Were they con artists preying on emotionally immature women? Were they a game studio with a very unusual front? Or was there, as one embarrassed Irish reporter asked, “almost a gay element to the activities here?” Answers were not then forthcoming. Few are even today. > > Oxford, 1971. Two years after Stonewall, a wave of student and activist groups are loosely uniting under the mantle of the Gay Liberation Front, accelerating queer and feminist conversations about equal rights and alternatives to hegemonic patriarchy. At women’s college Lady Margaret Hall, one student group bonds over a difference with most of their sisters-in-arms: they reject the crass, drug- and sex-fuel decadence of the 1960s, even while admitting it “left openings for a new feminist consciousness,” as one member would later write: “We welcome [the rock culture of the sixties] as we would welcome typhoid in the enemy’s water supply. But we do not drink it ourselves.” > > The women behind the school reveled in shifting identities. At least two dozen different names were used at various points across the eighties and nineties by people associated with the school: they may have belonged to as many as fourteen distinct women, or as few as two. > > “The Ladies of St. Brides are difficult to understand,” a journalist wrote in 1987. “How much is hype is difficult to assess. ...They say Jack the Ripper is serious but are they ever serious about anything?” The group’s former publisher suspects their primary motive was always financial: “I think, basically, St Bride’s were in business: they were doing it on a commercial basis, however un-commercial they may have looked!” But some of the school’s pupils in later years would come to characterize the group as dangerously earnest, with one describing it as a cult. “There was something sinister at the heart of it,” she wrote: “The founder was a remarkable person but was leading a fantasy life—we were living in someone else’s fantasy.” Ed is still making overtures. I could use a friend right now, but…. Am I in the wrong? Ed isn't any more racist that Tucker Carlson (which is to say: pretty racist). Like, I don't think he'd personally assault or cheat or intimidate a black person, but he's all-in on the rhetoric of race replacement, etc. Servings: grains 4/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 1/4, dairy 1/2, meat 1/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: banana, carrots, egg and tomato toco, coffee Afternoon snack: nectarine Dinner: cheese curls -27

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