Twelve years ago today, I sent an email to myself via FutureMe.org
I included a link to a YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yw1Tgj9-VU
That was the link to Linkin Park – In The End (Official Music Video) for a really long time. But when I try to visit it now, Google denies it, saying I must log in, first.
What is weird is that I can remain logged out and search for “Linkin Park – In The End (Official Music Video)” and YouTube does show it to me, but at a different URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVTXPUF4Oz4
The email I sent was about Edward Snowden and his (then) recent whistleblowing activity.
Edward Snowden was a part of the NSA, but his trust fell apart. He had to blow the whistle, but then flee to Russia, to escape USA persecution.
It should have been the ultimate shame of the USA government that they were not trustworthy enough for their own citizen to face an honest trial in the USA.
me, September 15, 2013
I, too, had seen the YouTube video of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress that every American wasn’t getting the terrorist treatment. Here’s another copy of the video – the spicy part begins at the six minute mark. Shortly after, Edward Snowden blew the whistle.
Nothing has really changed, though.
The government still surveils everyone without a warrant. They still subvert elections.1 They still use taxpayer dollars to astroturf Reddit to push narcissism like it is a good thing. C’mon, liberals: band together to fight your imagined (insane) oppression! Only your clicks can save our self-esteem!
Well, that and the occasional premeditated murder. Hooray for those murderers, though! Amiright?
Wikipedia couldn’t get Charlie Kirk’s assassination off their front page fast enough.
Almost all the major media vilified Charlie Kirk after his death. He was popular, talked sense, and held people’s attention (and they don’t). It wouldn’t be so angering if they weren’t flat-out lying about him. They happily pervert what he says to make it malicious, and then they hold him up as malicious to justify their vilification. It is the classic straw-man argument.
Not almost: all the major media suppressed the Iryna Zarutska story for two and half weeks, because it didn’t fit their narrative. And when they were forced to acknowledge it, they used it as a platform to decry the conservatives for getting uppity about wanting to not be murdered.
You don’t hate the media enough.
The only good news is that Banksy made a splash, with a recent painting. What sort of perverse world do we live in where this is good news?2
If I’d known then what we know now, I’d have started giving away “Make Orwell Fiction Again” hats twelve years ago.
I somewhat would like to send another email to myself via FutureMe.org for another twelve years in the future.
But with the state of the nation today and the direction it is going, I’d have to generate unimaginable horrors to temper what the future could look like.
As it turns out, Russiagate was fraudulent and an authorized government action. The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter and Facebook was done at the behest of government actors protecting their desired candidate. ↩︎
The good news is that with this, the UK government was confronted with their behavior. ↩︎
When I started this blog, I had three goals in mind:
Learn WordPress, and have content to play with for things like upgrades, migrations, and figuring out how WordPress works.
Provide technical tips, tricks, and recipes for doing computer things, primarily on Linux.
Writing content that expresses my opinions.
If I’m honestly looking at my own motivations, that last one holds the most appeal to me.
I’m old enough to be a grumpy old man, but I’m also old enough to know that opinions without solutions are terrible reading. No-one wants to listen to a whiner.
In fact, one of the defining moments of my life was when my dad was exasperated with me, and he exclaimed at me something I needed to hear at that time:
Anyone can whine about things; useful is providing a solution.
My dad, when I was about thirteen years old and whining about something big time
So, I’m up north with family for Christmas vacation. Dealing with family can be hard. I have two solutions: have another community I can escape to (my volunteer service community), and have my computer I can escape to.
Yesterday was day four of cabin fever with the whole family. My brothers and mother had exhausted watching all the movies and YouTube they could stand. They wanted to do something, anything, that wasn’t watching more television. YouTube is simply television without the cost overhead of paying writers, producers, and talent. My brother’s television set comes with YouTube, with embedded advertising. It sucks, mightily. YouTube also has the problem that it gives a platform to total con-men who are looking for marks to prey upon. This really isn’t any different from the television preachers who pitch salvation for dollars.
And I get it: if my life were that empty, I’d be easily preyed upon, too.
At this point in my blog, I’d like to do a 4,000-word essay on the problems of American life where our government and media conspire to drive us to be consumers of crap to fill the void in our life, instead of healthy and useful. But all that would really boil down to is this:
As an aside, I really like Stephan Pastis’ comic strip, and buy his page-a-day calendar every year. Most days are at least mildly amusing, and some days produce actual laugh-out-loud moments. Some days are profound. Not that I’m trying to convince you to buy stuff to fill the void in your life….
So, back to my family. We all suffer from a lack of purpose in life. I’ve got it the least bad: I’m still employed with a place that pays me well, and (although I hate my job) I’m working toward my retirement.
Mom never did take my step-sons in as her grandkids, and neither of my brothers got married and produced kids either. So my mom tends toward self-pity, having gone through the trouble of raising us boys, but not getting the benefit of grandchildren. She does take care of Frank, the man she partnered with after a year of being a widow. So that gives her purpose. She also had to specifically decide to go out and socialize. She has friends she visits to play Majong, and a club called Gadabouts, and Red Hat Society club.
One of my brothers was forced into retirement early, and hasn’t found the motivation to get a job. He’s actually a superb cook, and this last week he has been cooking all our meals. The meals have been delicious. But in his off-time, all he does is watch videos and sleep. Clearly, he is depressed. I hope he can find a purpose in life.
My other brother has always had a rough life. He works in a low-end job, and tends to get restless, irritable, and discontent with whatever job he has. The longest stretch where he was happy was in Death Valley, where he worked from 2003 to 2021. But the HR lady there went woke, and as soon as the trans asshole showed up and started their bullying, the HR lady sided with the trans asshole, and my brother quit. Now he’s up here in a cold, dismal town where it rains nine months out of the year. In his off-time, all he does is watch videos and listen to re-runs of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM. I hope he can find a purpose in life.
So how do I find purpose in life?
Volunteer service is the obvious win for me here. The particular people I spend time with consider ourselves a fellowship; this is a good name for our community. Although I had to go through hell to face the fact that I needed help, once I got into this fellowship of help, my life turned 180° around. I can help because I’ve been through the same hell that all newcomers are going through.
If I didn’t have this, I hope I would have found a church fellowship to be a part of.
I do have a circle of friends on the Internet. We met on Slashdot more than 22 years ago. Back in 2019, one of our friends died, and 21 of us went (most of us flew) to Seattle to attend his celebration of life. Although I still communicate with these friends, it isn’t daily like it used to be. Half of them came down with TDS, and the community split in two. But at one time, there were more than 80 of us. This digression brought to you by:
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
William Paley (1743-1805)
Half of my circle of friends on the Internet have contempt, prior to investigation, regarding God.
I thank God that I am not one of them. I have plenty of evidence that something out there, supernatural and surpassing understanding, is an active agent in my1 and other people’s life. Point being, that if I weren’t in the fellowship I’m in, I would hope I would become a part of a religious fellowship.
Volunteering down at a soup kitchen would be good for my soul.
Any sort of volunteering would be good for my soul.
I also have plans (or perhaps they are dreams) of writing a lot of code when I retire. Priority 1 is obviously more exercise. After that, I want to write some code to lay out Factorio blueprints, and build the software that manages the tree structures needed to lay out connected pieces in sensible ways. Ultimately, I intend to write a flow charting-based integrated development environment based on Nassi-Shneiderman flowcharts. I’d like to use the IDE to write a video game loosely based on the book of The Legacy of Heorot.
Back to my volunteer service: there are two different offices which are either directly related or tangentially related; I plan of volunteering at both after I retire2. They also need a newsletter editor, and I’d love to write a system in LaTeX to import the various documents and format them consistently. I’m not terrible with Perl, so I think I can work up a nice system of opening files with LibreOffice, converting them to plain text, formatting them the way I want, and then adding back in whatever italics, boldface, super- or sub-scripting elements were in the original. I already do the website for one of them.
So yesterday, everyone was frustrated that this time together had gotten so boring. But I’m not bored because I know “This too, shall pass.”, and, I have other outlets.
I hope, dear reader, that you too can find other outlets.
Volunteering my time and effort gives me a high-quality purpose in life. My self-worth goes up when I am helpful.
I hope you can find ways to grow your self-worth and purpose.
One of them is a 501(c)(3), and for the next five days, I am president of the board of directors. That, plus $5, will get me a coffee at Starbucks. Not that I’d ever go to Starbucks, they’ve gone woke. Anyway… the other is probably also a 501(c)(3) but I haven’t tried becoming a board member yet. Having a day job is not conducive to being of service there. ↩︎
Pro-tip you should have done a decade ago: add a second hard drive to your machine, and put /home on it. Then during the install of the fresh OS, do not format that disk, simply mount it as /home
In a previous post, I was whining that YouTube videos were not working. I also (rather mean-spiritedly) implied that maybe Google was screwing with the connection because I was looking for ad-blocking videos. That was wrong: this fresh install of OpenSuSE has fixed that problem.
Of course, never does a single thing change, and I happened to roll over into the new month, so T-Mobile doesn’t see me as over my “unlimited” transfer limit.
But for all that testing I did, what I hadn’t tried was Windows versus Linux. I saved off a problematic YouTube link to my NextCloud Tasks, and logged in to it on a Windows machine. It played perfectly.
Do I want to watch television? Or maybe check out YouTube for a Home Assistant tutorial? I decided to try YouTube on the television set. I do the search terms, I find a video with more than 1 million views, and I hit play.
First, Google wants to play an ad. It is so fucking stupid that I’m out.
Back to HBO for me.
I suppose someone thought that being outrageous was clever. Instead, they just confirmed my suspicions that YouTube, on the television, is simply a waste of time.
I chuckled at a recent observation by someone: Google gets paid to put ads on YouTube. Then they put unskippable ads on YouTube. Then they offer to let you pay to skip those ads. “Get paid to create the problem, get paid to solve the problem. Genius.”
