Angry Robot

The Trump Runs Strong in This One

Looks like I picked a bad week to quit thinking about Trump.

Discussed with a friend how the election results are a form of trauma and having thought about it a bit more, it’s totally true. Personally, I react by avoidance, but it’s not enough to keep the anger and sadness from seeping through. Avoidance is rarely the best play; it’s not a proper coping mechanism. You can’t avoid some things – like winter. It’s gonna get cold. All you can do is make sure your house is warm and don’t stay outside too long.

So I think that’s what I have to do. I don’t want to immerse myself in things I can’t change, leading only to frustration, anxiety, etc. So I’m not going to feel any sense of duty in terms of keeping up with Trump issues, getting pissed off at every awful thing he does, raging at every outrageous cabinet pick. But I will read the news like I normally do and when the news is wall-to-wall Trump, so be it.

I still want to find some way to focus my energy on something constructive. Perhaps this will simply be finding a charity that will help those victimized by his administration and supporters. But I assure you I will keep the Trumpus to a minimum on this blog.

Man, see? I need Trump therapy. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Personal Trumpendectomy, Day 1

I’m trying to cut Trump out of my life and the prognosis is bleak. The news sites have no headlines without the word “Trump” in them. My Twitter feed is all Trump-related hair-pulling (notable: not one Trump supporter). Random strangers are talking about him everywhere: streetcar, coffee shop. Everyone at work, obviously. Facebook: screwed. In retrospect, the timing was impulsive and just plain bad. I find myself sneaking looks at Twitter despite myself and loading up Trump linx and reading them and nodding. Why did people vote for him? What should be done now? Perhaps ignoring isn’t the best response and/or even feasible…. Aaaaargh!

It’s all an urban-rural divide. It’s all white people. They’re racist. Yet a lot of them must have voted for Obama? Or, the Democrats abandoned working class whites. Hillary’s a flawed candidate. She’s fine but she didn’t excite the base, so they didn’t turn out like Obama did. Trump got the same votes as Romney. Alternately, he got more votes out of Romney areas than Romney did.

Or, since HRC actually won the popular vote, we should really be talking about how well she did and how it was Trump who failed.

Is it wrong that the best take on Trump’s appeal is from Cracked? Did I already link to that? I don’t even know anymore.

I’m personally fond of those posts that say, “let’s get back to work and resist.” I admire the grit, the unwillingness to rend garments and wail and gnash teeth. Is my urge to turn away and ignore reality really that great a response? But what could I do anyway? I’m not some famous beret-clad rebel leader soul-searching from his secret jungle lair, I’m just another upset liberal white nerd typing on the internet. Not that helpful! Sad!, even! Is there some other way? To do something constructive from Canada? I don’t know. I still want to try and take a break from politics from a while, but I’m not very good at it.

Trumplandia

Words fail. But reading takes over. I see it happening, again – it goes in waves. The last one started with 911 and continued until Bush was re-elected, a situation I had convinced myself was not going to happen. Through that whole time I read reams of articles about US and world politics, and posted many of them on the blog. Then, with a crushing disappointment, I wanted to turn away from politics altogether. Bring on the video games! I think it was.

I have been posting lots of Trump links. I find him hilarious, almost irresistibly so. But that funniness was predicated on him not becoming president. I had convinced myself that it was impossible, that the nation that elected Obama wouldn’t turn around and elect a con artist, racist, misogynist, narcissist… you know all the character flaws.

It’s hard to laugh as you read this. The only way to even be hopeful is to hope that he won’t actually do the things he has said he’d do: he is a con man, after all. Repeal Obamacare? The Wall? Deportation squads? Torture? Encourage the FBI to harass Muslim-Americans? Turn a blind eye as Russia envelops its neighbours? Cut climate spending? Not hilarious, any of this stuff. Let’s hope he’s bullshitting as usual!

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be writing about my daily Trump-related outrages here – in fact, I plan to not have them. It’s bad for the health. I live in Canada, after all. In my house, with my great family! And I’m into all other sorts of things! I am going to focus on that for a while. I’m sure there will be plenty of coverage, and outrage, elsewhere on the net. You don’t need me for that, and neither do I!

Me, I’m going to write the boring, irrelevant shit that only I could write.

A Great Disturbance in the Robot

Well I’ve started moving the site over to WordPress. The site currently runs Textpattern which is a little outdated and there are a bunch of things I’d like to be doing that I can’t do. Unfortunately, this blog was started about ten years ago, and I also imported most of the posts from my previous blog, so… there are something like 4,000 posts. A) It’s making me question my life choices, B) it seems to break every available import script, so there may be no way of doing this without some manner of schism, rupture, lacuna, or scene kinda like at the end of The Force Awakens where there’s a bigass earthquake and a huge rip in the ground and on the one side, this blog’s entire history, sweaty, overweight, insecure and broken, and on the other side, angrily waving its lightsaber, the svelte, cocky, and bug-eyed Future.

We’re not there yet, so bear with me. Blog rupture.

No Man's Blog Post

I don’t personally recall an indie game that received as much hype as No Man’s Sky, and I’ve been gamin’ since you were naught but a twinkle in your daddy’s ball sack. That it presents some aspect of Ultimate Nerd Fantasy has something to do with it. (I’m talking about space exploration, in case you thought I meant fussy inventory management.)

High expectations usually mean huge disappointment, and NMS didn’t disappoint in the disappointment department. By that I mean it was disappointing, to a lot of people. Just to clarify. Man what a disappointing paragraph.

I get the disappointment. I feel you, man. Here is a clear technical and artistic marvel of a game: a procedurally generated actual universe of unprecedented size, uncommon beauty, set to haunting music, and with such a frustrating initial gameplay loop that it seems to accidentally pose some deep questions about the pointlessness of existence. I can go anywhere in the fucking universe and I’m worried about how much iridium my ship can carry? What the fuck is wrong with me?

You get the sense that developer Hello Games struggled to find some gameplay that could be tacked on to the bundle of infinite beauty they had somehow dreamed up, and what they arrived at goes something like: Space Minecraft, but instead of collecting resources to build things, you collect ‘em to upgrade ship, suit and tools. It’s more complicated than that – there’s some plot, and yes you can fight pirates kinda. But that’s the base loop, and at the beginning it’s made much harder because you are randomly presented some subset of ALL the resources, depending on what random planet you spawn on. And you don’t know which resources you need to fuel this or that engine or improve this or that device. And your inventory is much too small.

As you upgrade your stuff, and learn what each resource is needed for, the gameplay becomes less frustrating. 25 slots of inventory means waaay fewer fussy decisions than 12 slots. The loop continues, though; you see pretty ships and they cost millions of space bucks. You start finding out which rarer, riskier resources might yield some real cheddar if systematically harvested. But is that really the point? It’s gameplay loop as existential crisis: a prettier ship, is that all I care about? It won’t get me to the finish line any faster. Is getting to the finish line faster even what I care about? It’s a real Conan, what is best in life? sort of situation. And I’m not sure that crushing your enemies is all that necessary.

In my opinion: the real joy of this game is exploring, discovering new worlds, seeing what strange beings have fluked into existence, and then speeding off for the horizon again. Zen Space Drifter should be the gameplay loop, not Soulless Min-maxing Resource Bandit. It’s odd to have a game’s own systems try to herd you away from that realization, but I suppose the original plan, open-world style, was to have a variety of activities that could constitute gameplay. Trading! Piracy! Taking pictures of rare space birds! Then most of them got stripped down to virtual non-existence in the rush to ship. Hopefully they also crib the continual updates from Minecraft, too, and this becomes a lot more fleshed out down the road.

I don’t mind it, though. After some light bingeing to start, I went a few days without playing it, and actually missed it. I’m a relaxed space tourist – I scan a lot of new lifeforms, take a lot of screenshots of cool animals and pretty sunsets n’ shit. It feels like getting high in your buddy’s van and looking at prog-rock album covers. Is it worth $80 CDN, the…. Eighty dollar question? I guess it depends on how many nights I hang out in the procedurally generated Imagination Van. Is it cheaper to just pay for some gas n’ grass and albums or… no wait, I’m min-maxing again.

OneNote Notes

It’s funny for me to be trying a Microsoft product willingly! I have been using a Mac since my parents got a Mac Plus in 1985, and back then Microsoft was the ENEMY. Then I was forced to use shitty busted up old Windows PCs at work for many years, which did not foster any love. But nowadays you could make a stronger case for Apple as Evil Empire of the tech world, and Microsoft in its post-Ballmer era is hustling hard in the corners. That OneNote is currently even a possibility for me shows how things have changed. A couple years ago OneNote would only have had apps for Windows and Windows Mobile, but now it’s got apps for macOS, iOS, Android and the web. And they’re really good.

OneNote has got got a rather forceful notebook interface metaphor: you open a notebook and then you have section tabs along the top, and lists of notebook pages along the side. To continue the paper metaphor, you can type anywhere on a note “page”, it will start a new text box. You can drag in whatever you want, and position it wherever. If you had a tablet and a stylus you could just start writing or drawing anywhere, too. I didn’t need that, but I do like it. Kinda fun!

If anything, the app seems to have more features than Evernote. It’s not what I was looking for, but at least they are gracefully hidden away when not in use. There are lots of formatting features, drawing, file embedding, note linking, video recording? OCR? Page versions? Page Templates? There’s a lot here.

The Windows app is actually ten years old and has that typical Microsoft thing where it’s absolutely rammed with features, and not very intuitive when it comes to discovering them, but you can customize almost everything in it. The Mac app is more recent and not quite as insanely customizable, but it is very nice. The iOS app, at least on iPhone, is much more stripped down, quite sensibly so.

There is a reasonably well-featured web clipper that works in Chrome and Safari, and saves either as “article”, “full page” or “section” (which means drag-for-a-screenshot). The separate iOS app Office Lens does your document scanning and sends stuff into OneNote. You can forward emails into OneNote, too.

The OneNote business model is interesting. The app is free, but storage is done through Microsoft’s online Dropbox-alike OneDrive, which gives you 5GB for free. After that it’s $2/mo for 50GB, and after that you go up to OneDrive + Office 365, which gives you 1TB for $7/mo, but also includes licenses for all the Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook). So OneNote isn’t really a product at all, but a way of upselling you to Office. There is a decent Evernote importer app for PC, and I imported everything from eight years of Evernote use and it takes up under 2 gigs, so I think this product is free for my purposes. For now anyway.

Downsides: inexplicably, there is no way to sort the list of notes other than manually. There were some goofups with the Evernote import, and now my notes are sorted in the right notebooks, but in random order. And all images are scaled up to wacky, scrollfest size. Another potential downside is that if you completely freak out with the “place anything ANYWHERE on the page maaaaan” attitude those notes are gonna be another scrollfest on your phone.

But these are minor gripes really, and for now, I have a winner. I’m surprisingly happy with OneNote, and if you’re looking to switch from Evernote, this is definitely the leading candidate.

NoteStation Notes

This is the third in a series of posts about note apps/services. In part 1 I explained why I was going to try to move from Evernote. In part 2 I tried Apple Notes.

So, here we are in “Note Station”, which is Synology’s built-in attempt at an Evernote competitor.

Let’s back up a bit – Synology makes Network Attached Storage computers, or NASes. That’s basically a bunch of hard drive bays wrapped in a server. They are known for the quality of their built-in software, and they market these things at both home multimedia enthusiast type users, and small- to medium-sized business. So they include apps for photo sharing, video collections and downloading stuff as well as a mail server, Exchange integration and stuff like this (relatively newly introduced) Evernote-alike. If you don’t have a Synology, sorry – this article won’t be much help for you. But if you do, read on! Because I have one (nyah nyah)

Some trepidation is warranted: so far, I don’t use too many of the Synology-made apps as I usually find them not quite up to their native competitors. Part of it is the web app thing. Synology builds iOS clients (and maybe Android?) which are usually good, but on the desktop your only option is a web app. They tend to be good web apps, but I’ll pick a good native desktop app over a web app every time, and in most of the categories Synology plays in, there are indeed good desktop apps already.

Anyway. Synology’s Note Station web app definitely does less than Evernote, but Evernote does too much, so that’s mostly good. It’s much simpler and less crufty than Evernote. Some features that are present: rich formatting, tags, lists, note encryption, tables and charts(!). A plus is the robust web clipper Chrome extension, which gives you options for full content, simplified content, screenshot and whole page screenshot.

Aaand here I am in the iOS DS Note app which is surprisingly full featured – possibly even more than the web app? You can insert files and even “note links” – an obscure wiki-like feature that Evernote has but keeps buried in its menus.

Not bad!

Now for the cons. First, yes, having to use a web app is a con. I hold out a dream that someday Evernote Mac client extraordinaire Alternote allows one to use other back ends, but until then, no dice. Secondly, the web clipper is only available on Chrome. Maybe that’s not a huuge problem? But I definitely prefer Safari on my macs. 

Third and most unfairly disqualifying: IT at my workplace really loves blocking ports, and I think that’s why I actually can’t connect at all anymore to my Synology from my main work computer. I can connect from the phone and from other computers, but not the one that is ergonomically most advantageous for me to use. Not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does mean I will keep trying out alternatives. Next time: Microsoft! OneNote!

Notes on Apple Notes

​So here I am using Apple Notes. It has some pros worth mentioning. It’s built in on Apple devices, and free. It syncs via iCloud. The web app means it can be accessed on Windows, although that’s mostly a con – more later. You can dictate notes via Siri. You can sketch stuff. I actually really like the sketch feature, but without an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil it’s more of a novelty.

Web clipping: you can save web links via share sheets in iOS and I assume macOS. This gives you a little rich preview thing but does not save the content, which I dislike. The one thing I do like is you can actually append links and other share sheet-selectable stuff to existing notes. (Siri can also append, which is cool.) Evernote couldn’t do this and it leads you to a bunch of separate atomized notes per unit of content, rather than, say, one note having to do with your web research into summoning demons.

Cons, besides no web archiving: no tags. The web app version is weak. It works, but only for referring to your notes, organizing and typing them. Because most other ways of inputting content are based on the share sheets in the OS, when you are on Windows you can’t use them. So no saving web pages, images, whatever else. I also realized there is no way to forward emails into Notes, which I do use with Evernote. Plus, you can’t actually get at the standard iOS share sheet from mail.app, which means you can’t get your emails into Notes at all. That sucks!

I had considered beforehand that other note services may not clip web page contents and so was prepared to think up other options. Using either Instapaper or Pinboard seemed possible as they are services I already use and could see adapting them to clipping web pages for notes. In practice, however, I really like having my saved web pages showing up as search results when I search my notes. But the inability to add content from Windows and email are enough reason for me to try another option, so next I will tackle the Synology solution: Note Station and DS Note.

Notes on Notes Apps

I use notes a lot and for the past eight years I have been using Evernote. For the last oh I dunno, four? of them, I have been putting up with Evernote. They went all business-focused, and suddenly were pimping “work chat” in all the apps which is essentially the opposite feature from what I want, they let most of the apps get bloated, confusing and slow, and now it sounds like they are raising the prices. Anyway. I have options! And I shall explore them, by kicking the wheels on a few competing apps while blogging about it here. Stay tuned. OMG what a complete THRILL FEST!!!!

Let’s lay out the criteria here, maybe? I use Evernote for:

• taking notes
• holding draft writings (blog posts, scripts, etc)
• journaling
• saving recipes
• saving receipts, other images
• clipping various web pages
• organizing by folder and tag
• summoning demons

I need something that works on iOS, macOS and either the web or windows.

The one thing I’m a little hung up on is clipping web pages. I don’t want just a link, I want the page archived in some form. Evernote has a few options for this – link, full page, quote or “article” (it does sort of an Instapaper-esque parsing of the content and strips out the design and crap). I’m not confident that any of the competitors will be able to do this. So I may have to explore new ways of doing it?

Things I don’t need: work chat. I don’t use any to-do list stuff, I use OmniFocus for that. I thought the OCR stuff would be handy but in practice I rarely use it.

Apps I think I will look at: OneNote, Apple Notes, and DS Note/NoteStation, the system offered by my Synology NAS. Am I missing anything?

Roderick Jaynes

The Coen Brothers edit all their films under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. Here is his bio, and here’s an interview.

Predictive Text Laffs

Not sure why, but there is a certain kind of comedy that always cracks me up: broken telephone, mistranslation, poor imitation. And also Markov chain stuff, like where an algorithm tries to guess the next word based on its analysis of previous words. It feels like a computer trying to bullshit you and failing. Here’s what I’m talkin aboot:

please try this recipe i made using a predictive text imitator and The American Woman's Cook Book (1938) pic.twitter.com/X0NgV6FOTb

— Jamie Brew (@jamieabrew) February 4, 2016

i fed a database of radio advertising copy into my predictive text imitator and wrote some new ads for food + drink pic.twitter.com/bkyKpPgu9a

— Jamie Brew (@jamieabrew) January 28, 2016

and then here is a secret chapter from a romantic book pic.twitter.com/5NdhzjOjNC

— Jamie Brew (@jamieabrew) January 28, 2016

predictive text transcript of the #GOPdebate pic.twitter.com/Cv9NuRDDuT

— Jamie Brew (@jamieabrew) January 15, 2016

Something Important Happened 6

[Continued from here. All articles in this series will be archived here]

After we saw you we went down to the hospital cafeteria and ate. It was strange – you feel like food is unimportant compared to everything that’s going on. But that’s not how your stomach sees it.

There’s this strange feeling of relief after the trauma of death. If the person you love had been suffering, there is this realization that you no longer have to worry about their suffering. But there also is this stampede of busywork that sweeps you up at the worst possible time vis-a-vis your ability to actually do anything: find a funeral home. Talk to the coroner. Sign paperwork. Wills, notices, invitations, phone calls, emails, everything.

My sisters were a godsend. Having them there to bring their massively superior organizational facilities to bear on directing the stampede was an enormous help. It didn’t hurt that in times of crisis, my mother is essentially a warhorse. So all the post-death arrangements were handled by a not-unanimous but certainly professional panel.

We disagreed mildly about how the funeral should be arranged. My sisters are both Unitarians. My mom is a Catholic-raised agnostic, and I’m pretty much a Buddhist at this point. But you were an atheist. I remember you telling me there was no such thing as god when I was a kid (“but lots of people think there is, and that’s okay”). So I tried to advocate for the atheist. We decided a Unitarian church was an ok location for the event. There aren’t a lot of non-church locations that are workable for a funeral, and the Unitarians are an open-minded lot that don’t insist on any particular dogma being included in the service.

The panel invited people, decided on speakers and performers. I made an invite and then a program. I looked through old pictures of you. I began to feel proud. Still sad, but as I had discovered there are many different kinds of sad.

You wanted to be cremated, so we had to go up to the funeral home to inspect the body before this was to happen. No one was invited but the funeral home fixes you up in your dressy clothes anyway. We went and saw you and they had combed your hair oddly – puffed out to the side. It made us laugh; you would have laughed too. Although I remember wishing I could have somehow just atomized your body as soon as you had left it. Better that than have strangers handling it and screwing up your hair.

We fought about the remembrance ceremony, as we were now calling it. We met with the officiant, a nice Unitarian minister (priest?) whose suggestions I nonetheless had to keep vetoing, because I felt I knew what you would want. There would be no prayers or invocations. There would be remembrances, and songs.

People started to arrive. My sisters’ families, my aunt and uncle. The house started to fill up. A neighbour lent us their house for the duration, and we put people up there. People told stories about you. We rehearsed the songs.

Then the memorial day came, and we put it on. We played songs from your album as people filed in. It was quite a crowd. We had few decorations, some flowers, some pictures of you. You were a handsome man, don’t you know? Friends of yours came, many who I hadn’t seen in years. Friends of mine came from work. Friends I hadn’t heard from in ages had heard about it and asked to come saying, “your dad was a good guy.”

People spoke. We heard your life story – in part, but well told, by the people who were there. And at the end we sang that song.

Afterwards it was a wake at your house. People filed in; it got crowded. Some said it was the best funeral they had ever been at. Some said, “he had quite a life”. I switched into associate host mode and didn’t have much of a chance to think about my own feelings, which was good. We poured Guinness, and food was served; people were hanging out in the garden. Stories were told. Your old friends told me how much I reminded them of you.

And in that way, on that day, the old, withered, wraith-Tom began to recede and a new, remembered and imperfect – but much more representative – Tom took form.

It’s been over five years now since that day. In the months following, things were hard to take. Many things that were important in my life – work, my interests, whether I got out of bed – seemed insignificant compared to what had happened to you. As time went on, I was able to put things back together again, and figure out what belonged, and what I should jettison, what I should work towards, and what I should just drop.

As with the memorial, I tried to think what you would do, and I still do that every day.

I wear your watch on my wrist; I think of you every time I look at it. Your picture sits next to our dining room table, which you made. My daughter knows your name and your face. She asks about you. I wish you two could have met, but that’s not how it happened. So I tell her stories; good stories. There are so many. So much wisdom. Thank you for all of it.