I spent August walking in the rain, and swimming. As I walked my clothes and shoes soaked up water from nearby ferns, I would return home heavy with fern-water. The walk would have me cross a dry river bed populated with hundreds of tiny frogs, I kept my eyes on the ground, careful to avoid them. The day after a big rain, water would start to fill the river, rock-skipping did not always guarantee dry feet. When the sun came out, I would swim, although I did swim once under the rain and seeing the rain drops disturb the water around me was delightful in a Totoro-with-an-umbrella sort-of-way. I brought my swimming goggles and would swim on the surface, looking down below at an eerie scene, at all of the sunken algae-covered trees poking out of the darkness. For the first time in a long while I spent a lot of time playing in the water, doing backflips, trying to do hand-stands in shallow waters. I don't want to be the kind of adult that only lays on the surface of the water, or that comes to the water's edge only to sunbathe. I want to swim, dive, play. Adult Rek will do these things. In late August we moved the boat somewhere with better internet. Visits from friends had me erupt from my shell, it was nice. Then we began our sail back south. The wind was often blowing out of the southeast, slowing our progress, the short days of northerly wind had us make very long leaps. We sailed 38 NM from Smuggler's Cove to Clam Bay in the Gulf Islands on very light winds. We progressed at a slow 2.5-3 knots all day, we had to go slow anyway to ensure that we would arrive at Porlier Pass at slack tide(around 19h00 that day). A tug and barge kept us company for most of the passage, they too steamed onwards towards that same pass slowly. Having the same boat within sight for a long while on a long sail is nice, like walking with a friend.
COOKING. I've been milling legumes and grains into flour so they cook faster in my solar cooker. My favorite mixture is this one: curried lentil-rice loaf.
ART. I drew a new sequence for hakum named recharge, and re-drew some pages for night terror(the re-touched pages are dated as 2023/2026). It is great to be able to re-iterate like this, though I understand how destabilizing that can be for some people ^^. I also drew a new comic page for rabbit waves, as well as a page about Pen and Paper Ciphers. I've been a reading a ton about pen and paper ciphers and really love it, I hope to add a section about one-time pads too!
READING. I enjoyed Katherine Addison's the Goblin Emperor, but I don't think I'll be reading the other books from this same series, mainly because I'm not super fond of feudalism in books. The Goblin Emperor has a lot of redeeming qualities, Maya as king is just and good and keeps on being just and good throughout the book, although I do tire of seeing women put into forced marriages and being kept from learning, especially from a fantasy book that could have easily moved away from these medieval ideas. It was an enjoyable read, though. I am continuing to read Flaubert's Madame Bovary, it reminds me a lot of George Elliot's Middlemarch, in that both authors are able to describe the thought process of characters in a way that feels incredibly authentic. Madame Bovary is plagued with ennui, nothing satisfies her, she waits for something incredible to happen, she longs for an ideal that does not exist and is making herself and others around her miserable. It is sad to read, because a lot of people today too suffer from this and seek escape through activities that only offer short-term happiness. It is very human, very relatable, and very well written. I look forward to reading about the court case against Flaubert at the end, which talks about how people attacked him because they thought his book was too obscene, that it would give women bad ideas when in reality it seems to be doing the exact opposite.
She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Pleurococcus, ever wonder what that green stuff that grows when it's rainy is called? Me too!
Today I learned, since it is no longer possible to browse old.reddit without an account, I'm using Lemmy and found one of my favorite subs there(TIL). Although note that it's still possible to bypass the login screen with SafeReddit.
Mox aestat deb termin, ne ab die plus brev, ne ab tempor plus frigid, sed nam me in fin claud Ulysses, qui e es aestat intent de me. Id record me vehement de Mindgame de Masaaki Yuasa aut Everything Everywhere All At Once. Hoc liber es vald angust et intens, plus dificil que me e expect et quas relinq plur tempor!
Olim, juxt scen de hospit, dum Oxen Of The Sun, me e pens Fuck it! et jact id trans navis et reven ad Paradise Lost. Sed tand, me leg comentar de Adam Walker et tent de nov. In prim, Virginia Woolf od Ulysses sed in fin incip percip, idem pro me.
Me i retin exemplar de me, pot es un die, leg hoc liber caerul de nov. Si sol pro fin de Ulysses, forsan maxim bel opus.
Lately I feel that even an HTML journal has too much structure, all of it placed there upfront. Life is too freewheeling for that. Note to self: just write! You can figure out where it fits later.
It's the end of July, and I'm eating sour cherry jam with a teaspoon, right from the pot. It's hot outside again, and bots are hammering my website. My desktop struggles a little, but won't admit it.
August rolls in, and my bank lets me know how much harder it will be to use my debit card starting next year, in the name of "security" and "convenience". A few days later, the heatwave arrives in earnest. The government decrees energy-saving measures. Luckily not for the populace.
I'm reading about BBC Basic, not for the first time. Hardly my favorite dialect, but I keep thinking it could be useful for something... some day. Maybe. Still keeping up with the QBasic scene too. Also imagining uses for Yabasic. All of it looks increasingly pointless though. Too much computer, not enough real life.
Mid-month is marked by another heatwave, then a visit to the dentist. Starting to catch up on errands here for a change. Cricket season has started too. Makes waking up at night much more pleasant.
Finally got around to renewing this domain, by the way. More details in the site news.
Before summer is over, we finally get around to our first day trip to Sinaia since 2019. Suffice to say, it's my second-favorite place in Romania. Ought to spend longer there and learn the area. Bonus points for perfect weather and things going smoothly despite little preparation. Pics here.
I have three talks lined up, and coming up quite fast, about digital archival and esoteric computation models. I somehow lucked out this year, for I got myself presenting a full forty minutes on FRACTRAN of all things, in front of I swear non-imaginary people; and paid; and in Sweden! I must be the luckiest person alive. And if I can eloquently and captivatingly share my love for multiplication, rewriting, prime numbers, tropical arithmetic and fractions; doubly so.
In the hours of the day when I'm not trying to stitch together some 300 slides into a coherent story about dead programming languages and preservation, I've been reading the history of auxiliary languages(like Esperanto, that sort of thing). In Peano's desire to make a portable preservation medium, a kind of mathematical object to encode scientific ideas, I find something of a kindred curiosity. But more than that, I find places within his work that could be improved by elements that didn't exist in his time.
I read Sylvia Pankhurst's Delphos feeling like it was celebrating an unfinished monument, Peano stripped Latin down, sure, he did, but never formalized the grammar and left a whole lot of flexion in. His logical notation(⊃, ∈, ∩, ..) has not dissimilar issues, they're compressed and minimal but arbitrary. Compare that to Zellweger's Flipstick alphabet. Had Peano kept pushing, I like to imagine Formulario's margins filled with something closer to that, symbols that carry their own logic in a language that is truly transparent.
As for me, I think there is definitely something romantic to documenting a frozen system in a language without semantic drift, I'm just not sure how it all connects yet..
Spent a wonderful week in Spain with my Uncle and his family on my first proper holiday outside the UK in years. I have been wanting to travel more and this was a good first trip.
There was another purpose to the trip though, for years I’ve wanted to see a total solar eclipse, it’s been on my bucket list forever and today I finally checked it off.
