2026-07-21 Droppings and spiders - a
Spending more time outside, I feel as though I am learning all the time. This year, in two separate anchorages, paper wasps came aboard to try and build nests in our folded mainsail. The mainsail is covered by a cover, providing plenty of shelter from the elements. I did not know that paper wasps liked to build little mud nests in such places, and was also shocked to find out they fill these nests with spiders. Yes. The paper wasps stun, or kill(I'm not sure) many spiders and stash them in our mainsail. Because we were able to deter them often enough before they could finish they never did make babies here, but on both occasions they had time to deposit 10-20 spiders. When raising the mainsail, the mud nests and spiders would all come falling out on deck. A terrible sight. I am not afraid of spiders, but it is difficult to not react to a pile of spiders. And so one lesson I learned this summer was that paper wasps are very persistent.
Another lesson, was that I learned to recognize wolf poop after seeing some for the first time on a trail on Cortes Island. There is a resident pack of black and brindled wolves there, but apparently transient packs swim in from neighbouring islands. Wolf poop has a lot of hair in it, as well as bone fragments. Since then, I've been reading up on wildlife poop in general to learn to recognize them when out on hikes. At one point I had 5 tabs open, all about animal poop. Bear poop, deer poop, wolf poop, cougar poop... poop poop poop.
WEBSITE. I added a page to describe how to make pixel art in Gimp.
COOKING. I've been making a lot of recipes with dry soybeans! I learned to roast them to make kinako(roasted soybean flour) to put into morning oatmeal. I also learned to roast soybeans to make a coffee alternative. Soy coffee is nutty and sweet, I am really impressive with the flavor.
ART. I completed 2 comics for hakum: water bloat and chase(new second half). I really liked the beginning of The Chase, but the rest did not work with the new direction I've taken with Dae so I decided to re-draw it. This comic serves to show what Dae can do.
I've also completed artwork for lepore express line, Dev & I's entry for Catjam 2026. The game is an hommage to our shared projects for the past 10 years.
READING. I am currently reading Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor aloud to Devine every night. It is very fun to read, although the names in the book are a bit difficult to manage, especially since titles of address further add to the confusion. I do love though that the author decided to go all in on this, to not compromise. This is not a very exciting book, but it is nice to dive into her world, to learn of its characters, politics, formalities of dress, etc. One point I especially love is the special attention given to the ears of the characters, used to describe their emotional state. Sometimes the characters have to make a conscious effort to control their ears positions to not let others know that they are fearful, or angry. I love it because it is one of the main reasons why the characters in hakum have such ears, it allows for a much larger range of expression.
Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.
From Mémoires d'Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar
GREAT FINDS OF THE MONTH
I don't have many finds to share this month, because having little to no internet connectivity doesn't allow for much browsing.
Hello humans! Today is the 10th Anniversary of this site! It's great to have been here on planet Earth with you all these years, thank you for being here with me!
I don't have any big words, but I made a lil animation of all the pages on Melon sites to celebrate! ~ See ya buckareno!
You have one of those morbid friends who wear only black, who write only in Forth
and that modern times have all but left to linger, undead among the
coaxial cables. They're inviting you. Dead languages, dead systems, aren't
they just infinitely precious, once you realize that the ideas that survive are
never the interesting ones, merely those with the most capital behind them.
Doesn't that just make the graveyard suddenly burst with life and reveal the
modern computing landscape for what it is. A mausoleum, a putrid stench, a crusty gold plaque to the memory of the rotting fascist who would entomb the world below highways of microplastics.
Won't you come instead? And delight among the living discarded ferment!
Everything is getting weirder and weirder: on the one hand,
my mental health is as fragile as it could be before I completely
break; on the other hand, I’m trying as hard as I can not to
let go of my current habits, although I know for a fact that, if
if those habits were any good, I wouldn’t feel like this
at all.
DEVINE LU LINVEGA PLOPPED DOWN WITH a copy of Ulysses. Slouching, only for a minute, waiting for the kettle, if it wasn't for that, pressure. Can never remember to piss before. Nookicky's on. Thoughing it out. Right, so Dedalus. Seven hundred pages of this, by Jov, what a thoughtful fellow. Nils in Dublin morelike. Chaps for geese. Window shopping. Pences, stones, fathom, bells? Ah, that ol' Tom Nook. The cockroaches that must have moved in. Gokiburi Hoi! Hoi! That greedy raccoon. Insatiable, insatia. Or, was it insatis. Hoc fosil por un blat, onegaishimas.
—What's it about? said Devine Lu Linvega trying to start a conversation. Mr. Bloom he. Nookicky's over, on goes Guniw Tools. Other Goose. What is it about. About to.
This journal entry is late because I completely forgot to post it on time. Kept waiting for one more thing to wrap up the month, and then the month passed.
In May I pulled my books out of an online store that wasn't worth the trouble anymore. This weekend I dealt with another one, which required removing more links from the site. Weather is solidly into summer territory by now, but life is kind of slow.
One week into June, I'm perusing the Permacomputing Wiki. It's thick with academic language and fairly high-level takes. Look, my main problem is lacking room at home to keep my old computers set up and plugged in long enough to find new uses for them. Almost all of them were bought second-hand anyway, and kept in working condition.
Before the mid-month point, there's a new toy to play with: the Wander Console, a wiki node reinvented for the small web, with in-browser autodiscovery. It's JavaScript-based, so you'll want a static link page to supplement it, but those with a mainstream browser can enjoy a very cool way to find new sites.
Near summer solstice, I'm reorganizing my too many links again. This time a few days of work resulted in considerable progress. Feels like being on top of things again. But damn! There has to be a better way.
Last but not least, towards the first of July I'm looking at BSD operating systems again (and updating my notes). NetBSD remains the lightest, but fussy; OpenBSD is no-nonsense and to the point, but barebones in some ways. FreeBSD... is becoming a Big, Serious OS; dunno if my patience holds to the point of giving it another try right now.
Alpine Linux on the other hand is more fun to play with than ever. Not that it changes much over time. That's one of its selling points in fact.
The last two days of June were extremely hot, followed by a huge storm in Bucharest.